The Peasant and the Raj
The Peasant and the Raj

Author: Eric Stokes

Publisher: CUP Archive

Published: 1978-03-23

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780521216845

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These twelve essays explore the nature of south Asian agrarian society and examine the extent to which it changed during the period of British rule. The central focus of the book is directed to peasant agitation and violence and four of the studies look at the agrarian explosion that formed the background to the 1857 Mutiny. The essays give a coherent historical treatment of the Indian peasant world, and the paperback edition of this successful book will be of interest to the student of peasant studies and to the sociologist as well as to development economists and agronomists generally.

A Century of Protests
A Century of Protests

Author: Arupjyoti Saikia

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-08-12

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 1317325591

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Addressing an important gap in the historiography of modern Assam, this book traces the relatively unexplored but profound transformations in the agrarian landscape of late- and post-colonial Assam that were instrumental in the making of modern Assamese peasantry and rural politics. It discusses the changing relations between various sections of peasantry, state, landed gentry, and politics of different ideological hues — nationalist, communist and socialist — and shows how a primarily agrarian question concerning peasantry came to occupy the centre stage in the nationalist politics of the state. It will especially interest scholars of history, agrarian and peasant studies, sociology, and contemporary politics, as also those concerned with Northeast India.

Hungry Nation
Hungry Nation

Author: Benjamin Robert Siegel

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-04-26

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1108695051

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This ambitious and engaging new account of independent India's struggle to overcome famine and malnutrition in the twentieth century traces Indian nation-building through the voices of politicians, planners, and citizens. Siegel explains the historical origins of contemporary India's hunger and malnutrition epidemic, showing how food and sustenance moved to the center of nationalist thought in the final years of colonial rule. Independent India's politicians made promises of sustenance and then qualified them by asking citizens to share the burden of feeding a new and hungry state. Foregrounding debates over land, markets, and new technologies, Hungry Nation interrogates how citizens and politicians contested the meanings of nation-building and citizenship through food, and how these contestations receded in the wake of the Green Revolution. Drawing upon meticulous archival research, this is the story of how Indians challenged meanings of welfare and citizenship across class, caste, region, and gender in a new nation-state.

Peasants' Movements in Post-Colonial India
Peasants' Movements in Post-Colonial India

Author: Debal K Singharoy

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2004-05-25

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780761998266

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This is an investigation of the anatomy and internal dynamics of peasant movements in India. It makes a comparative analysis of the Tebhaga (Bengal, 1946-47), Telengana (Andhra, 1948-52) and Naxalite (North Bengal, 1967-71) movements to study the ways in which grassroots mobilizations transform and institutionalize themselves, forge new collective identities and articulate new strategies for survival and resistance. The author uses empirical data and secondary research to argue that radicalism in peasant movements is in inverse proportion to institutionalization. As spontaneous expressions of discontent against oppression and marginalization become institutionalized movements, the space for radical challenge shrinks. Therefore, in Bengal, the co-option of the peasant movement by the ruling communist party and the state has largely killed the scope for radical action. In Andhra Pradesh on the other hand, the relative independence of the grassroots mobilization process (along with logistic and ideological inputs from NGOs and radical social and Naxalite groups) has allowed the peasantry to exercise multiple options for collective action. However, in both cases, the grassroots mobilization has led to a transformation of the social identity of the peasant, and created a social environment in which issues of dominance and resistance have an important place. The study of the Indian experience is placed in the context of theories of peasant identity and resistance to oppression. The first chapter of the book is devoted to the summing up of sociological perspectives on peasant societies, identities and movements. It includes references to the works of Marx and Lenin, Redfield, Chayanov, Wolf and Gramsci, and, in the Indian context, Beteille, Byres and several others. The book reexamines problems that have got relatively less importance in recent years. It seeks to understand issues that are of enduring relevance in the Indian countryside that continues to simmer with unrest even as it comes to grips with a new economic situation. The book will be of as much interest to researchers and policymakers as to the intelligent general reader.

The Great Agrarian Conquest
The Great Agrarian Conquest

Author: Neeladri Bhattacharya

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2019-09-01

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 1438477414

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This book examines how, over colonial times, the diverse practices and customs of an existing rural universe—with its many forms of livelihood—were reshaped to create a new agrarian world of settled farming. While focusing on Punjab, India, this pathbreaking analysis offers a broad argument about the workings of colonial power: the fantasy of imperialism, it says, is to make the universe afresh. Such radical change, Neeladri Bhattacharya shows, is as much conceptual as material. Agrarian colonization was a process of creating spaces that conformed to the demands of colonial rule. It entailed establishing a regime of categories—tenancies, tenures, properties, habitations—and a framework of laws that made the change possible. Agrarian colonization was in this sense a deep conquest. Colonialism, the book suggests, has the power to revisualize and reorder social relations and bonds of community. It alters the world radically, even when it seeks to preserve elements of the old. The changes it brings about are simultaneously cultural, discursive, legal, linguistic, spatial, social, and economic. Moving from intent to action, concepts to practices, legal enactments to court battles, official discourses to folklore, this book explores the conflicted and dialogic nature of a transformative process. By analyzing this great conquest, and the often silent ways in which it unfolds, the book asks every historian to rethink the practice of writing agrarian history and reflect on the larger issues of doing history.

An Agrarian History of South Asia
An Agrarian History of South Asia

Author: David Ludden

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-02-17

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1316025365

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Originally published in 1999, David Ludden's book offers a comprehensive historical framework for understanding the regional diversity of agrarian South Asia. Adopting a long-term view of history, it treats South Asia not as a single civilization territory, but rather as a patchwork of agrarian regions, each with their own social, cultural and political histories. The discussion begins during the first millennium, when farming communities displaced pastoral and tribal groups, and goes on to consider the development of territoriality from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Subsequent chapters consider the emergence of agrarian capitalism in village societies under the British, and demonstrate how economic development in contemporary South Asia continues to reflect the influence of agrarian localism. As a comparative synthesis of the literature on agrarian regimes in South Asia, the book promises to be a valuable resource for students of agrarian and regional history as well as of comparative world history.