V. I.

Lenin

339

To:   BHUPENDRA NATH DATTA [1]

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 )

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Notes:
[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).