ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the analysis of Dutt's reading of Marx's writings on India by way of understanding the effects of colonial rule. It also discusses the nationalist-Marxist writings during the late 1960s and 1970s. The chapter presents the analysis of intervention made by the collective, Subaltern Studies (SS). From the late 1960s, global historical debates on the question of transition from feudalism to capitalism, the simultaneous growth and development of the metropole and underdevelopment of the colony gave a particular charge to the analysis of colonialism. Partha Chatterjee made use of Brenner's research to argue against the economic determinism that characterized earlier Indian historical accounts of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Brenner's conclusions introduced for Chatterjee an element of indeterminacy into the question of transition. Postcolonial-leaning Marxist histories explore both the capacities and limitations of European social and political categories such as abstract labor, empty homogeneous time, even modernity itself, in the context of non-European lifeworlds.
