Agrarian unrest in North India : the United Provinces, 1918-22
- New Delhi Vikas Publishing 1978
- 247 p.
Agrarian Unrest in North India is a historical study of peasant uprisings. It examines the background to the rise of the Kisan Sabha and Eka movements in modern Uttar Pradesh at the end of the First World War and the involvement of the peasantry and its leaders in the politics of Indian nationalism. The peasantry has been a subject of much discussion among political activists and academics for a century. The ideas regarding its place in the different modes of production and its importance as support for political movements have been formulated by Marx, Lenin, Mao Tse-tung and many others. Since the fifties of this century, the fact of a predominantly post-feudal section of the population in many societies all over the world existing as the primary producers contributing to the bulk of the produce of each society has compelled academics, notwithstanding their varying ideological disposition, to devote attention to questions relating to the peasantry. Not all participants in this intellectual quest have had even remotely similar ideas, though they may have been writ ing about the peasantry at the same time. Examples that spring to mind, of those whose intellectual traditions were widely different, are the obvious ones of Robert Redfield and Mao Tse-tung. How ever, on certain questions, a consensus among historians and social scientists is evident. One such subject is nationalism, parti cularly nationalism in colonial countries. It is widely acknowledged that the peasantry has had a part to play in the nationalisms of the Third World, as the "wretched of the earth," as rural idiots and elites, and as the partisans of peasant nationalisms. This study is an attempt to see how certain basic ideas regarding agrarian unrest in general and previously stated general propositions about the peasan try and nationalism square up with our empirical observations.