Peasant and the Raj : studies in agrarian society and peasant rebellion in colonial India

Most of the studies collected in this volume have already appeared in symposia or learned journals. Apart from the correction of the odd error and the addition of an occasional reference they have all been reproduced as they first appeared. Inevitably they exhibit some measure of intellectual progression. For example, the reader will observe that many of the studies of the 1857 uprising in the countryside were directed to criticising and amending Dr S. B. Chaudhuri's straightforward thesis that the rural areas rose as one man and that the principal cause was the loss of land rights to the urban moneylender and trader under the pressure of the British land revenue system. Instead my researches suggested that violence and rebellion were often fiercest and most protracted where land transfers were low and the hold of the moneylender weakest. Later studies acknowledge, however, that the mere trans fer of proprietary title tells us little about its political, social and economic effects, which could vary enormously according to the strength and homogeneity of the political and lineage organisation of the peasantry. Similarly while in earlier essays the action of local communities was analysed (as it was by contemporary British officials) in terms of local caste subdivisions, there is increasing awareness that in the crisis of 1857 rural society did not abandon traditional political organisation structured along vertical cross caste lines. Even among the Jats of the upper Ganges-Jumna Doab the got or maximal lineage was too dispersed to form a local territorial unit for political cooperation and action. Hence the importance of the local multicaste organisation of the tappa and khap as well as the still wider grouping of the dharra or faction. The Introduction seeks to put these matters in perspective.