Tanroop’s Reviews > Modern Times: India 1880s-1950s > Status Update

Parallels In the less developed and/ colonial parts of the world... The absence of rootedness in a definitively formed social class has often been considered a source of weakness and inconsistency. But lack of such organicity has also enabled a degree of flexibility in attitudes, values, and aspirations in many parts of the world: educated sons and daughters of landed gentry origin have advocated and sometimes tried to initiate industrial capitalist development; they have attempted to mobilise peasants and, with industrial growth, workers, in the cause of socialist Revolution; and they have pioneered national movements against foreign rule which sought to and needed a multi-class appeal. 19th century Russia provides prototype for such phenomena, and the original Russian category for its agent, the intelligentia is perhaps a more appropriate term for the new literati of late colonial (and post colonial) South Asia as well."