Articles by Ashok Rudra

Ashok Rudra with the collaboration of Madan Mohan Mukhopadhya An interesting and important problem that arises in any attempt at working out a class division for the Indian peasantry is that the close association of smallness of holding and selling of labour power and largeness of holding and purchasing of labour power, postdated by the standard Marxist definition, which gives rise to the purchaser-seller relation between rich and poor peasants, does not hold in any clear fashion in many parts of India.

Ashok Rudra It is well known that land relations in West Bengal are characterised by tenancy and that such tenancy mostly takes the form of share-cropping. Not much more is, however, known about the terms and, conditions prevailing between landowners and tenants.

Pranab Bardhan Ashok Rudra IT would be difficult to deny that in this 'country's political thinking the left-right distinction has increasingly become less a scientifically valid classi- ficatory tool of politico-historical analysis and more a matter of attaching labels, of branding persons or parties on considerations which are of the nature of dogmas. The idea of left and right, of progress and reaction, has a history of more than two hundred '.years and if one'were to apply criteria derived from the tradition of thought of "Scientific Socialism" to present-day "India, one would perhaps classify as leftist economic policies or political programmes (or persons or parties working for them) that aim at a reorganisation of the society so as to lessen the political power of and finally eliminate classes that are at present dominating the society and deriving maximum advantage from its present organisation and to increase the political power of the exploited toiling masses, of which the organised industrial and white-collar working classes no doubt constitute; an important segment but also consist predominantly of poor peasants and landless labourers. If one were thinking, each time one made the left-right distinction, of those two opposed class interest groups, keeping in full view the internal contradictions that unavoidably exist within the two groups, one would probably be making the distinction meaningfully. But much too often that is not how it is done.

I knew what each of them would say and they all knew what I was going to say, but I had to go. Why? Because I am an academic call-girl." "Foundations have to spend their funds, sponsors must find projects to sponsor. Programme directors must have programmes to direct. It is a perpetuum mobile which circulates hot air." From Arthur Koestler's tragicomedy, "The Call-Girls''.

CULTURAL underdevelopment cannot but accompany general social and economic underdevelopment. Colonialism or neo-colonialism cannot but affect the worlds of research and teaching. As such, the 'comprador' character of the social sciences in India is a matter that may be taken for granted and its various manifestations in the academic world are all too familiar to us. Yet what I encountered this summer at some of the premier British Universities in the midst of research students from the Indian subcontinent was something that was quite unexpected by me. Maybe I would not have been so struck by what I saw had I had more prior contacts with the academic world in the West at the time I made my visit. It happens that I have had no dealings with any University or any research institution outside India during an unbroken stretch of 18 years preceding this summer. I had occasions during a visit to some British Universities this summer to meet and chat with about a dozen or so students from this subcontinent (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka) who have got themselves registered for the PhD degrees of different British Universities. Most of them have chosen topics of research concerned with different aspects of economic development of his home country and I was favourably impressed by the social orientation of the interests of the young scholars as was revealed by their choice of problems. I was, however, utterly puzzled when I discovered that most of them seemed to be working under distressingly adverse conditions. They seemed to receive no guidance at all from any senior members of the the respective Faculties. The puzzle dissolved when it was pointed out to me that there were no senior members of faculty in those universities who had specialised in Indian developmental problems; for that matter in one or two of the universities I visited there was not even one member of the faculty who specialised in what has come to be called Development Economics.