Some Aspects of Labour History of Bengal in the Nineteenth Century

he brief, and sharply posed, exchange between Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ranajit Das Gupta on working class consciousness in Bengal. it posits that this consciousness is not a mechanical outcome of the capitalist mode of production, it is not a thing but a process; that even failure must be taken on board in order to flesh out that process; that not only was the working class present (and therefore conscious) of its own making, but drew from rich pre-capitalist cultural traditions of dissent, rebellion and republicanism.