Instead of responding meaningfully to the arguments in my book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, Partha Chatterjee ("Subaltern Studies and Capital", EPW, 14 September 2013) has chosen to throw up a smokescreen. He has ignored three tasks of the book - to distil from the key writings of Subaltern Studies the project's essential arguments, to assess the validity of their critique on empirical and conceptual grounds, and to offer an alternative theory, which succeeds where theirs fails. It seems he did not even recognise the reconstructed subalternists' arguments, including his own.
