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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
The assumption of the passive peasant in Indian history has been existent at least since the time of Max Weber, and continues to return, phoenix-like in its appearance, every few decades. Its importance, however, lies in the responses the generality spawns. Morris D. Morris refuted Max Weber's thesis, detailed in The Religions of India, in 1967, while Barrington Moore, Jr.'s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy was aptly rebutted by Kathleen Gough in 1974. Since then, the concept of the rational peasant, particularly during colonial times, has undergone a metamorphosis. Various modes of peasant dynamics have been amply demonstrated in recent works, stepping into the realms of peasant rebellion, desertion, banditry, and the like. Of particular import, in terms of peasant consciousness, has been the rise of the ‘Subaltern School’ of study. Beginning with Ranajit Guha's seminal work, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, and continuing with volumes of articles by a variety of authors, the Subaltern Studies group has attempted, in their own words, to offer an alternative to historical writing ‘that fails to acknowledge, far less interpret, the contributions made by the people on their own, that is independently of the elite.…’ These scholars thus use the term subaltern for those social groups which they believe have been ignored through the course of history.
2 The two most important works of this genre are Weber, Max, The Religions of India (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1958)Google Scholar; and Moore, Barrington Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).Google Scholar
3 Morris, Morris D., ‘Values as an Obstacle to Economic Growth in South Asia: An Historical Survey,’ The Journal of Economic History XXVII, 4 (12 1967), pp. 588–607.CrossRefGoogle ScholarGough, Kathleen, ‘Indian Peasant Uprisings,’ Economic and Political Weekly IX, 32–34 (08 1974), pp. 1391–412.Google Scholar
4 Guha, Ranajit, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).Google ScholarGuha, Ranajit (ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vols I-V (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982–1987).Google Scholar
5 Guha, Ranajit, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,’ Subaltern Studies 1, p. 3. Emphasis in the original.Google Scholar
6 Yang, Anand A., The Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India, Saran District 1793–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 181–224.Google ScholarHirschman's, original argument may be found in his Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).Google Scholar
7 Arnold, David, ‘Famine in Peasant Consciousness and Peasant Action: Madras, 1876–8,’ in Guha, Ranajit (ed.), Subaltern Studies III, 1984, pp. 62–115.Google Scholar
8 Hunter, W. W., A Statistical Account of Bengal: Vol. XV, Districts of Monghyr and Purneah (London: Trubner and Co., 1877), p. 33.Google Scholar
9 For more on this environmental phenomenon, see Hill, Christopher V., ‘Santhal Bataidars in Purnia District: The Evolution of the Sharecropping System,’ Economic and Political Weekly XXII, 34 (08 22, 1987), pp. 1450–4.Google Scholar
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11 Miller, Kerby A., Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). p. 18.Google Scholar
12 Miller, , Emigrants and Exiles, Part One. The quotation is from pp. 50–1.Google Scholar
13 Trevelyan, Charles, quoted in Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, p. 283.Google Scholar
14 Bennett, John W., The Ecological Transition: Cultural Anthropology and Human Adaptation (New York: Pergamon Press, 1976), p. 198.Google Scholar
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17 Beames, John, Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), p. 232.Google Scholar
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19 Yang, Anand A., ‘Peasants on the Move: A Study of Internal Migration in India,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History, X, 1 (Summer 1979), p. 39.Google Scholar
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21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Bengal Revenue Proceedings, vol. 2801,March-April 1886.Google Scholar
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25 Yang, Anand A., ‘An Institutional Shelter: The Court of Wards in Late Nineteenth-Century Bihar,’ Modern Asian Studies 13, 2 (1979), pp. 247–64. The direct quote is from p. 264.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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27 ‘Report on the Condition of the Lower Classes of Population in Bengal.’
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30 Somers, George E., The Dynamics of Santal Tradition in a Peasant Society (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1977), p. 42.Google Scholar
31 Somers, , Dynamics of Santal Tradition, p. 43.Google Scholar
32 Guha's, RanajitElementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency is the definitive study of peasant consciousness in the Santhal Rebellion.Google Scholar
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50 Ibid, pp. 112–13.
