Impact of Plautation Economy and Colonial Policy on Sri Lanka Peasantry-A Post-Script

factory workers, small peasants, agricultural labourers and migrant: workers is equally a political relationship, and for those concerned with Society as a whole it is a more important one, I have called this a relationship of classes, a term which seems to Infuriate Baviskar, but the fact that class struggle took an, open and even violent turn only after his research was completed (In the' cane-cutters' strikes and the farmers' agitations) does not mean that class struggle did not exist before, only that Baviskar was unwilling to Observe' its forms in a period in which the rural poor remained effectively suppressed and the rural elite was maintaining a fairly comfortable alliance with the urban bourgeoisie. Yet his methodological appendix makes it quite clear that his own relationship with the rural poor was highly defined in terms of power and influence.