Among the dominant themes of modern history has been the social organization and political action of peasants and workers in the Third World. The changing relationship between the West and the Third World has been vitally affected by perceptions of their political attitudes and social aspirations. At the same time, assumptions about their social character and expectations about their political behaviour have informed the strategies of political leaders, activists and parties in the Third World. Yet these perceptions of the working classes and their political threat have been frequently generalized from a particular understanding of the historical experience of the West, either by contrasting it with Third World societies taken as a whole, suggesting thereby that they need their own culturally specific explanatory frameworks, or by positing it as a model towards which other societies are assumed to be moving.

The study of Indian society, conceptualized in these ways, has posed intractable problems. On the one hand, it is often treated as an exception in the discourse of social theory. Yet rules which require such gigantic exceptions to sustain themselves can only have the most limited power to explain. On the other hand, thus excluded from the dominant discourse of social theory, it is placed and examined with the category of ‘developing’ or ‘Third World’ societies.