“The democratic intelligentsia was well aware of the achievements of the advanced capitalist civilization in Britain – the British themselves took care to advertise them – and through its own experience saw how backward its own country was in all economic spheres. It felt and saw the hardships inflicted on its people, delivered into the hands of money-lenders and revenue officials to be plundered and outraged, fettered in chains of feudal survivals and colonial slavery, defenceless against the horrors of famine and epidemics. Of course the intelligentsia was unable to comprehend the class essence of the resistance the masses started to put up to the authorities and the landlords; but together with them, and directly on its own, it felt the cold arrogance and the contemptuous indifference of the country’s alien masters to the elementary needs of the masses as well as to the intelligentsia itself – the guardian of India’s great cultural heritage. “Minds are always connected by invisible threads with the body of the people” (Karl Marx Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, p. 311) – this idea expressed by Marx in 1871 in regard to the intellectual movement in Russia is, of course, perfectly true of any other country where fermentation goes on deep below the surface. The fermentation that began in the 1870’s among the Indian masses brought forward from among the intelligentsia a whole galaxy of dedicated men who led the struggle for India’s liberation. Among them we see the name of young Tilak.” [N.N. Goldberg, ‘Leader of the Democratic Wing in Maharashtra’] [in ‘Tilak. And the struggle for Indian Freedom’, a cura di I.M. Reisner e N.M. Goldberg, 1966]