COLONIAL STATE/ REPRESSIVE STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY 93 and finally, the police and the bourgeois nationalist leadership. We are with Arnold, when he observes that 'at a time when the Congress ministry was deeply involved in the developing struggle with communism, ministers were only interested in strengthening and expanding the existing police apparatus. . .' (p. 216). In the Madras Presidency, the way C. Rajagopalachari 'defended and used the colonial police brought sharp criticism from the Congress ranks. E.M.S. Namboodripad, the then Organizing Secretary of the Kerala Provincial Congress Committee and the future Marxist leader, protested in October 1937 that 'genuine Corigressmen would feel sorry that the representatives of the Congress who were hitherto speaking the language of independence and struggle have begun to speak the language of 'law and order' of the old regime' (quoted in p. 218). The transition from colonialism to bourgeois rule had its own inevitable compromises and legacies. ATLURY MURALI Department of History, School of Correspondence Courses and Continuing Education, University of Delhi NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Smt. Vallabhaneni Seethamahalakshmamma, Ganuguntia Lakshminarasamma , Tripuraneni Kausalyamma and Arikipudi Ushamani. 2. Throwing coloured water on Hindu women was considered to be the ultimate humiliation which one could offer and it was more hurting to the women than getting beaten by the police. 3. Interview with Kosaraju Seshayya, Congress Worker, Ventrapragada village, Gudivada taluq, Krishna district. 4. The only detailed work available, which I am aware of, on the nature of the colonial state and its decisive effect on the evolving strategy of the national liberation struggle, is by Bhagwan Josh, The Life And The Indian National Movement, 1934-41, Unpublished Ph.D thesis, C.H.S., Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 1987. 5. For a theoretical elaboration, see Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology, Verso, London, 1984, p.p. 1-60. 6. No doubt Arnold quotes Michel Foucault's Discipline And Punish: The Birth of The Prison, Penguin Books, 1979, but fails to adopt his critical method of 'reading the text or a document.' 7. For a useful theoretical discussion on how capitalism transformed the life-world, see Jurgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews, edited and introduced by Peter Dews, Verso, London, 1986, especially Chapter 3. 8. See my review of Arnold's article in Subaltern Studies, IV, New Delhi, 1985, published in Social Scientist, No. 178, March 1988, p.p. 24-27.