Written: Written on August 26, 1921
Published:
First published in 1952 in the book, Bhupendra Nath Datta, Dialectics of Land-Economics of India, Calcutta.
Printed from the text of the book.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1976,
Moscow,
Volume 45,
page 270b.
Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
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Dear Comrade Datta,
I have read your thesis. We should not discuss about the social classes. I think we should abide by my thesis on colonial question. Gather statistical facts about, Peasant leagues if they exist in India.
Yours...
V. Ulyanov (Lenin)
[1] Written by Lenin in reply to the thesis on the national liberation movement in India sent to him by the progressive Indian political leader Bhupendra Nath Datta, who later wrote that Lenin’s letter “came as a revelation to the writer. That the ‘peasant movement’ is of importance for the movement for national freedom has never struck a national-revolutionary. Sentimentalism is the backbone of nationalism. The middle class considers itself to be the representative of the nation and sees every movement in that perspective. Hence, the instruction of Lenin not to discuss the social classes but to get interested in peasant movement set the writer athinking. It changed his Anschauung regarding the means and methods of Indian fight for freedom” (Bhupendranath Datta, Dialectics of Land-Economics of India, Calcutta, p. III).
In his letter to Datta, Lenin mentioned his theses on the national and colonial questions for the Second Congress of the Communist International (see present edition, Vol. 31, pp. 144–51).
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