The loss of Kathleen Gough has created an irreparable void in anthropology and diminished humanity as a whole. A distinguished scholar, great humanist, true internationalist, valiant crusader for the rights of the oppressed and the dispossessed, visionary with abiding faith in the creative potential of humans to build a more humane and caring social order, she was also a very warmhearted friend to a large number of people across several continents. It was the critical - humanist and emancipatory motif underlying her scholarly praxis that made her creatively unconventional. In her early work on kinship, she was a structural - functionalist who, nevertheless, made extensive use of history and systematically investigated changes in relations of production. It is remarkable that she initially learnt much of her Marxism from the field, first in Kerala and then in Thanjavur and still later from activists in America. Her field work in Kerala and Thanjavur, both strongholds of the communist movement, convinced her that the communists held out the best hope for the poor and the oppressed. As she plunged into more rigorous and systematic studies of the Marxist literature she continued to test her theoretical understandings through an extensive dialogue with a variety of colleagues and, even more significantly, with grass - roots leaders and theoreticians in the field. To Kathleen Gough anthropology was always a praxis, a lived experience and an engagement with and commitment to the people she studied; a detached, value - free and disinterested anthropology held no attraction for her. Her love affair with the people of Vietnam is well known; it is less well known that she maintained life - long relationships and correspondence with many in the villages she studied in India as well (including one of her first cooks) and even more with a network of students and colleagues all over the world. I was one of those who had the privilege of enjoying her friendship and periodic correspondence. Kathleen Gough's Work on India During the past four decades Kathleen Gough made important contributions to Indian studies in the areas of kinship, political economy and peasant studies. These have appeared in four books (two of them co - edited with others) and over 40 papers published in a variety of journals, conventional and unconventional. Seventeen of these papers are now chapters inbooks. Leaving aside her ground - breaking work on Nayar kinship which is discussed by other writers in this volume, I suggest that her most significant contribution has been toward creating a Marxist anthropology of India. The masterly synthesis of anthropology and Marxism that she created was rooted in an implicit critique of the prevalent neo - orientalist metropolitan constructions of Indian and other non - Western societies -- a critique that was fully developed later in her seminal work on Anthropology and Imperialism (1968). She integrated into her work the best of anthropology both at the level of ethnography and at the level of theory. Her Marxism was itself a synthesis of the works of the great masters, modern political economists such as Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, and the ideas of Marxists in India, China, Vietnam and other Third World countries. I wish to offer below a brief and preliminary discussion of Kathleen Gough's contribution in two related critical areas within a Marxist anthropology. These are: (1) class, caste and colonialism, and (2) peasant movements. Class, Caste and Colonialism Conventional anthropological and sociological discourse, whether evolutionary, structural - functionalist or indological, placed caste at the centre of Indian social structure. Ideology was given a certain primacy, and the different castes were seen as essentially complementary and non - antagonistic, maintaining the functional unity of the village community. Kathleen was one of the first anthropologists who attempted to understand Indian social structure in terms of class relations and class struggles that she came to see as endemic to Indian society. …