Review Article A View of the Observable: a Positivist ‘Understanding’ of Agrarian Society and Political Protest in Colonial India* Gyan Pandey The great uprising of 1857 in India was once discussed predominantly in terms of the debate, military mutiny or war of independence. Twenty years ago S. B. Chaudhuri pointed to something of the complexity and range of the rising in his ‘Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies 1857-59 (1 957). Some recent writers have seen in the events of the period a classic example of a peasant war. Now, in a new book, ‘The Peasant and the Raj. Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India’ (Cambridge 1978), E. T. Stokes concludes that ‘1857, like 1848 in Europe, remains a date to conjure with’ (p. 139). Stokes’s judgements on the rebellion and its context bid fair to becoming the new orthodoxy. Like all orthodoxies they have a good deal of force in them. At the same time they are loaded with implications, some of them perhaps not fully foreseen, that bear careful examination. I The Peasant and the Raj is a collection of essays, most of which have already appeared in other places — the Introduction (18 pages) and paper 11 on Central India (21 pages) are the only exceptions. These essays provide a level-headed, informative and elegantly written account of aspects of rural India in the nineteenth century. It is an important account since well-researched historical studies of social conditions and peasant protest at the grass-roots level in India are still in short supply. In addition, the publication of these essays in one volume is useful because it reveals, in a way discrete pieces cannot, an approach to modern Indian history that is perhaps dominant in Britain today and widely prevalent in other places too. Stokes sets out to examine ‘the nature of the “traditional” agrarian order . . . and the extent to which rural society underwent fundamental alteration under colonial rule’. The discussion of reasons for rural revolt in 1857 forms one prong of this enquiry. But the enquiry is also pursued through a more direct examina- tion of land transfers, indebtedness, tenurial change and so on. There are interesting essays on privileged tenures, what Stokes calls the ‘uneven growth performance’ in the eastern and western portions of the Indo-Gangetic plain, the structure of land-holding in Uttar Pradesh in the last century of British rule and how it conformed to the revenue categories of zamindar, occupancy tenant, etc. The readers are given no quarter as they are bombarded with details about the complexity of the countryside — of how little meaning the different tenurial376 The Journal of Peasant Studies categories often had on the ground, of how physical conditions — the security or insecurity of agriculture — gave rise to different types of tenure, to landlordism or thebhaiachara community, and indeed affected the very structure of casteand local customs (pp. 7, 78, 82-3), and so on. On the question of rural indebted- ness, Stokes observes that it ‘masked a number of special situations’, indicating in some places ‘not so much distress as the absence of continuous growth in the agricultural economy and high consumer spending relative to productive investment and in others, where debt was interwoven with rents and other dues and the moneylender was often also the zamindar, the veritable strangehold of the latter (pp. 12-13); on Bernard Cohn’s suggestion that with the advent of British revenue settlements people lost superior land control rights without actual financial loss or physical displacement, that this was less true of areas where there were not such strong clan communities as in the Banaras region which Cohn studied (p. 82); on Richard Fox’s hypothesis ofa development cycle of tenures from zamindari through pattidari to the ‘end product’ of bhaiachara which itself could be reduced to raiyatwari by a really powerful state authority, that in fact no such cycle can be discerned, that some of these terms were employed to describe a variety of conditions, that the hallmark of true bhaiachara was that it was tribal and that this very fact made bhaiachara the greatest obstacle to the continuation of a (non-existent) development cycle (p. 76ff). There is in all this a good deal that is thought-provoking; and Stokes’s comments on the cohesiveness and resilience of the bhaiachara communities, for instance, are of much consequence. He has important suggestions to make regarding the areas of marked economic disturbance, heaviest debt and greatest potential discord (pp. 13, 288), or again the general circumstances of the uprising of 1857 ~‘a society moving into the early stages of modernisation when the state was powerful to disturb but not control, and before its security system had been brought up to date by railways, modern police and armed forces, and the general disarmament of the population’. (p. 139). Indeed, the detailed studies of the revolt of 1857 in different districts of western Uttar Pradesh provide perhaps the most significant account of the uprising to have appeared since 8. B. Chaudhuri’s Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies, 1857-59 (1957). Barring the comparatively general chapters on the subject in T. R. Metcalf’s Aftermath of Revolt (1965) and R. C. Majumiar’s writings, the only detailed accounts published have been K. Srivastava’s Revolt of 1857 in Central India, Malwa, P. C. Roychoudhury’s Rebellion of 1857 in Chotanagpur and K. K. Datta’s Biography of Kunwar Singh and Amar Singh, and none of these compares with Stokes’s work in intricacy or subtlety of analysis. Yet, for all the excellence of the (author’s story-telling and his perseverance in getting behind the generalities expressed by contemporary observers and later historians, his account remains unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. IL First, Stokes has virtually nothing to say about the classes below what he calls ‘the village and supra-village élites’. The actors in his drama are simply thoseAgrarian Society and Political Protest 377 who figure in the British financial documents. It is almost as if he accepts the revenue official’s comment that ‘the common assamee who cultivates as a tenant-at-will under a putteedar can hardly be said to form a part of the community’ (quoted p.87). This may perhaps be justified in the context of particular questions regarding the loss of rights in land, on the ground that the common assamee had precious little in the way of such rights. Yet it will surely not do for an investigation into the general impact of British rule on rural Indias especially in view of the numbers of the rural poor, one needs to know how the commonassamee fared in the new conditions, whether rents were pitched higher than before, how much the proportion of landless labourers increased, and how these large masses of unprivileged people responded to their changing circum- stances. There is little to be found here directly relating to these issues. Having set aside the tenant-at-will, not to mention the landless labourer, as ‘hardly’ belonging to the community, Stokes goes on to argue that ‘rural revolt in 1857 was essentially elitist in character. . . . In the countryside the mass of the population appears to have played little part in the fighting or at most tamely followed the behests of its caste superiors’ (p. 185). The author’s general understanding of the pattern of the revolt is as follows. The big magnate determined whether an area joined the revolt or not. The magnate’s own decision depended very much on his economic (and to some extent political) losses or gains resulting from subjection to British rule. The peasant masses, dependants of the magnates, had no independence of mind to speak of. Only in areas where there were no major magnates did peasants, here meaning ‘village elites’ (often bhaiachara communities that had successfully resisted the estab- lishment of magnate power over them), have a say in the proceedings. The bhaiachara communities bulk large in these accounts of the rebellion in different parts of western U.P., but this is because they were present in some strength in this area. If we accept Stokes’s view that truebhaiachara wasa rare phenomen (Pp. 77), then the picture of a magnate-led revolt assumes still greater significance. The suggestion of a more or less uniform pattern of. revolt is itself somewhat surprising in a book that otherwise dwells so heavily on the complexities of colonial India. But it is the suggested pattern of revolt that is particularly questionable. What is missing here is any indication of the many different layers of rural society that were involved in the revolt, and the many different levels from which initiative and leadership came. Stokes’s material highlights the diversity of responses to rather similar condi- tions. This diversity is explained purely in terms of magnate or ‘village elite” leadership. There is no real attempt to understand the actions of the many thousands of ordinary, non-elite villagers who arose in such rage in 1857-59, only one passing reference to the ‘autonomous peasant jacquerie in the coun- tryside’ (p. 140) and no indication ofits considerable scale. This is partly because the author does not deal with the areas of the greatest rural revolts — Avadh, east U. P. and western Bihar, and the tribal tracts further east and south. In western U. P. and Delhi, by contrast with these areas, the uprising appears to have centred more on the gasbah and the town. Yet even in the districts which Stokes does examine there are indications of a massive peasant ‘uprising. From Budaun,378 The Journal of Peasant Studies Edwards reported that ‘the mass of the population rose in a body and the entire district became a scene of anarchy and confusion’. Further down the doab, the Allahabad Commissioner observed that ‘the revolt at once assumed the character of a Mahomedan religious war’ (quoted Metcalf, op. cit. p. 64). In Mathura, Mark Thornhill noted that ‘low castes and actual cultivators . . . the classes whom our rule and specially benefited’ were most markedly hostile to the British. (The Personal Adventures and Experience of a Magistrate during the Rise, Progress and Suppression of the Indian Mutiny, London 1884, Pp. 334). All this is not evidence that ‘in the countryside the mass of the population . . . played little part’. Nor can it be explained away simply by the assertion that they ‘tamely followed . . . (their) caste superiors’. This latter suggestion in any case ignores the many instances in which vacillating magnates (and the fact of their vacillation is attested to by Stokes himself, eg pp. 146, 151) were drawn into battle by their own dependants and followers — those lowly men for whom the great magnates were supposedly doing the deciding. Raja Hanumant Singh of Dharupur had this to say to Captain Barrow, Deputy Commissioner of Salon (the present-day Rae Bareli area), who had sought shelter in his fort: ‘Sahib, your countrymen came into this country and drove out our king. ... At one blow you took away from me lands which from time immemorial had been in my family. I submitted. Suddenly misfortune fell upon you. The people of the land rose against you. You came to me whom you had despoiled, Ihave saved you. But, now, — nowI march at the head of my retainers to Lakhnau (Lucknow) to try and drive you from the country’ (quoted, R. C. Majumdar: British Paramountcy and Indian Renaissance, Bombay 1963, pp. 545-6; emphasis added). Of Babu Kunwar Singh, the remarkable rebel leader from Shahabad, the local British officer H. C. Wake wrote: ‘I do not think he will ever openly oppose the Government as long as he thinks that Government ‘will stand, but I do think that, should these districts ever be the scene ofa Serious outbreak, he may take it into his head that it is time to strike a blow for his own interests, and his feudal influence is such as to render him exceedingly dangerous in such an event’ (Bengal District Gazetteers. Shahabad, Calcutta 1906, Appendix p. 165). Less than a week later the regiments at nearby Dinapur mutinied, many of the mutineers‘crossed the Sone into their home district of Shahabad and found considerable popular support, and in little more than a day after that Kunwar Singh appeared at the head of the rebellion in Arrah. Nishan Singh, a prominent lieutenant of ‘Kunwar Singh and his compan- ion throughout most of the subsequent campaign, reported later that he had heard that the sepoys at Arrah had threatened to loot Jagdishpur (Kunwar Singh’s home estate) if he did not come to lead them, and that this had brought him out. (Majumdar, op. cit. p. $51.) In addition, the author Tecognises, though he does not try to account for, the existence of a non-magnate ‘crisis’ leadership by ‘self-made leaders’ like Khairati Khan and Shah Mal (p. 274); or, to take an example that he does not use, by Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah, an important leader of the rebellion first in Avadh and then in Rohilkhand, yet one who was nota Jeading magnate in either of these areas — one who was indeed not a leading magnate at all, but a ‘religious’ manAgrarian Society and Political Protest 379 whose antecedents were quite unclear and who was described variously as fakir, fanatic and badmaash. Stokes is not concerned with the independent peasant uprisings of the period, or the unknown men who were accepted as leaders of rebellion, or the examples of great magnates who were Jed into revolt by their followers. The result is that his studies neglect whole areas of peasant life, lose in richness and in the end present an unduly simplified picture of political protest side by side with an emphatic statement of the society’s complexity. Ul A second major weakness in the work is the uncritical use of modern sociological terminology. We read of ‘the first phase (or age) of modernisation’ (pp. 90-1, 112, 117, 119), the siphoning off of agricultural surplus for ‘development purposes’ (pp. 92, 119) and ‘the promise of capitalist agriculture . . . inthe 1880s” (p. 261). The final adjective in the sub-title of the book not withstanding, there is no reference to the peculiar political and economic condition of India in the nineteenth century. The failure to take account of the particular context of this ‘modernisation’ and ‘development’ leads to some mysterious conclusions. In the Narmada Valley, for example, it is argued that the initial surge of commercial- ised agriculture was followed by the frustration of ‘hopes of constant dynamic growth’ because of ‘under-population rather than over-population’ (p. 263). Yet it is acknowledged that the sub-letting of sir and of rented land increased at the same time and rental income took on a new importance (p. 261), a fact that would suggest (as Stokes himself notes on p. 78 and elsewhere) a relatively secure agriculture and population pressure on the soil. Indeed, the author’s free use of certain fashionable ‘social science’ concepts tends to draw a blinker over many issues. Does the repeated statement that ‘relative was more important than absolute deprivation’ really mean anything? Is there any such thing as ‘absolute deprivation? And who exactly are the scholars whom Stokes accuses of ‘economic determinism’? The straw-man Marxist model that he so meticulously tears down is of his own creation. S. B. Chaudhuri, whose thesis of money-lender gains and consequently a primarily anti-money lender revolt in 1857 is Stokes’s béte noire, declares categorically in the preface to his work that it is ‘on perspectives, on emphasis and interpretation of a great subject (ie the civil rebellions of the period)’ (op. cit. p- xxii) - a very different exercise from that of Stokes. Chaudhuri observes, too, in a sentence that seems to have escaped Stokes altogether, that ‘the general condition of the Indians during the British rule was not, on the whole, particularly intolerable, but that was not the point at issue’ bid. p. 7-8). The use of the term ‘conjunctures’ in the book under review is equally meaningless. To advocate ‘a philosophy of historical conjuncture rather than of economic determinism’ (139, 280) is to do no more than restate the problem. If it is left at that, as sometimes in this work, it is at the same time to evade the task of providing a general historical explanation. For what is wanted, after all, is precisely an analysis of the particular conjunctures that gave rise to particular types of response.380 The Journal of Peasant Studies Stokes does attempt in a number of places to describe the ‘conjunctures’ that led to revolt in 1857 (pp. 130, 195, 204). As we have indicated earlier, this is mainly by way of emphasising that apart from economic fortunes or misfortunes, the traditional leadership played a crucial role in maintaining control or carrying anarea into rebellion. This, however, does not take us very far. We are still faced with the need to describe the conjuncture of discontent and opportunity. Examination of the reasons for the first is as important as analysis of the emergence of the second — not forgetting, moreover, that discontent existed at every level in rural society and opportunities, too, might be perceived at dif- ferent levels. All this is not to deny that the landlords played a very significant role in 1857: they obviously did. The point is to emphasise the fact that the initiative could and did come from many quarters. Thus ‘the masses’ mattered not only as the bulk of the fighting force, but often as independent actors with possibly (for this is precisely the kind of question Stokes fails to investigate and that surely needs investigation) their own interests at heart. Stokes does spend time analysing the motives — the material conditions, the deducible needs and aspirations — of his magnates and ‘village elites’. But in his story ‘the peasant masses’ would appear to have arisen without reason, blindly, ‘insensibly’ (a term the author uses with regard to the continuing individual protests in Hamirpur after the suppression of the popular uprising) — indistin- guishable sheep meekly following identifiable and aggrieved shepherds. Even the widespread attacks against mahajans, the general refusal to help the British, and the innumerable examples of open hostility and violent attacks upon them, apparently offer no guide to the motives and demands of the peasant rebels, Instead, we are informed in the course of an otherwise admirable summary Statement, that the rebellion of 1857 was ‘an uprising sans issue’ (p. 139). The author seems to have searched in vain for the rebels’ election manifesto. And finding no reference to it in the British revenue documents, he declares ‘issues’ to be irrelevant despite all the tedious talk of ‘conjunctures’.? _ Thus, with the ‘issues’ thrown out of court, a remarkably ‘deterministic’ interpretation of rural revolt — along the lines, economic pressure + ‘traditional’ leadership (or some outside substitute) = revolt — is expounded. To bring his material into line with this interpretation, the historian of the peasantry appro- Priates large Segments of the peasantry for the camp of the elites. ‘Even . where ‘village republics’ owned the land, as in the Jat bhaiachara settlements in northern Mathura or in the western Portions of Meerut and Muzaffarnagar districts, the Proprietary body was very much a rural elite. This fact deserves emphasis Since it isall too easy to view the peasantry asa rural proletariat’ (p. 185 and 187). As if, even for the semi-feudal conditions of nineteenth century India, that was the only choice. You are either an elite (like the landlords) or you are a proletarian. And it does not much matter whether peasant proprietors and other, non-proprietory cultivators live in similar conditions or not. Then, since the -aders of the rebellion are assuredly not down-and-out ‘proletarians’, we are led directly to the conclusion that ‘the mass of the peasantry’ played no part, or at least no part of any consequence. This view of rural revolt in India is further extended to the twentieth centuryAgrarian Society and Political Protest 381 (p. 18, 274). The extension sets the seal on the analysis of peasant movements in the country for all times and places; political parties may arise and take the place of the ‘local elites’ or the magnate as leader, but the pattern of revolt will be unchanged - and who cares about ‘issues’? Thereby it puts paid also to any suggestion that peasants in India ever took part in struggles against the landlords or other upper classes. The closest India came to class struggle, Stokes com- ments, was the campaign for zamindari abolition. However, even that ‘looked at more closely . . . represented an alliance of village leaders achieved through the political system to oust an alien or non-resident element from the village com- munity’ (p. 287). An alliance of village leaders, in the main rich peasants and small jandlords, aimed at ousting a non-resident rentier class, sounds in fact very much like a description of class struggle. Stokes’s refusal to see this fact, and his conclusions regarding rural revolt in general, betray the positivist streak that runs through and, in my opinion, flaws his entire study. IV ‘The positivist position is a paradoxical one. On the one hand, nineteenth century positivists searched, in the matter of economic development for example, for eternal (or ‘natural’) laws or law-like connections that were applicable to all societies — an idea that Marx forcefully opposed in his major economic writings, arguing that there were no general laws of economic life independent of given historical structures. On the other hand, in the positivist view, little is certain, since little is empirically verifiable. Knowledge can be had only of observable phenomena and the relations between them, and indeed, for some later positiv- ists, the observable must also be measurable for the satisfaction of ‘scientific’ standards, Thus it follows that in the study of socicties, which are invariably complex and where particular conditions differ so much from place to place, generalisations must be made with caution and all historical theories treated with scepticis: The positivist belief in ‘natural’ laws leads to the unstudied use of terms like ‘modernisation’ and ‘development’ for societies like colonial India with the consequent problems that have been mentioned above. Again, the law-like connection drawn up for this society, economic pressure + ‘traditional’ leader- ship (or a substitute) = rural revolt, proves to be not only inadequate but highly misleading. When the Mughal Jagirdar, intent on getting the maximum profit from his jagir in a limited time, adopted a practice of cruel rack-renting, his peasants voted with their feet — with little concern for a lead from the elite. ‘When the Avadh talugdar screwed up his demand for nazrana and other illegal cesses, and insisted on payment in the hardest of times in the 1920s and 1930s, his tenants joined Kisan Sabhas, resisted enhancement of their dues and burnt his crops — and frequently they were poor and middle peasants, by no means a village elite. But when the British or men from the plains encroached upon the long-standing political and economic rights of tribal peasants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, several tribes rebelled almost to a man for the preserva- tion of their independence, their religion or their forest rights — often under the382 The Journal of Peasant Studies leadership of members of the royal family or other ‘traditional’ heads. Obvi- ously, therefore, it is essential to consider the specific issues around which battles were fought and alliances forged, as Rodney Hilton does so usefully in his review of medieval European peasant movements (Bond Men Made Free, 1973). The one thing that an appreciation of complexity should do is underline the fact that men have competing loyalties, and one might be invoked at one time, one at another, while their relative importance might also alter over time. ‘The reverse side of the baffling positivist medal has the image of a man who shies away from structures and flees from theory. This creates its own prob- lems. The réluctance to generalise is also a refusal to commit oneself, and often leaves many important questions in the air. On the time-honoured issue of the change wrought in Indian agrarian society by British rule, Stokes reaches the careful conclusion that ‘the advent of British rule probably accelerated tenden- cies already at work’ (p.71). On the question of the ideological influences behind the revenue policies adopted by the British, he follows a similar ‘middle path’, saying that these influences made some difference even if local conditions set strict limits on the innovations that were possible (ch. 4), And if these are at least useful guidelines in the search for answers to such questions, there are other matters on which we are denied even that: “‘Chayanov’s argument of a cyclical mobility preventing any . . . permanent class formation continues to carry weight’, Stokes declares (p. 288); and the idea of factions as an important organising mechanism in Indian rural society is introduced (p. 17) but never discussed. The Positivist forgets that no model is a mirror image of society, but rather a guide to its study, a suggestive ordering of an otherwise incomprehensible mass of material. He looks for observable classes where a class theory posits a structure of class relationships, a clash of interests between people along class lines and a continuous change in and evolution of. classes — both in their being and their Consciousness, Unable to locate the concrete and constant phenomena of his desires, he is amazed to think that anyone can believe in their existence. ‘Mass movements and the marching cohorts of castes and social classes dissolve under Scruuny’, as a colleague of Eric Stokes puts it (C. A. Bayly: The Local Roots of Indian Politics, Allahabad 1880-1920, Oxford 1975, p. 266). The author of The Peasant and the Raj has about as little time for such generalities. He rejects class analysis (pp. 14-15, 18, 287-8). He finds explana- Uons in terms of caste insufficient and misleading (p. 15). Faction makes a shamefaced entry in his investigation. But take a closer look and this category also dissolves. For a wide range of inter- and intra-group conflicts in Indian villages and districts are called ‘factional conflicts’ and a whole variety of political alliances ‘factions’; Stokes himself uses the term in this book for different kinds of alliance (pp. 17-18, 283). And not only castes and classes, mass movements too disappear (as in the above quotation from Bayly). Struggle, too, disappears — if only one looks closely enough. Stokes writes of the 1875 Deccan riots as ‘the trifling distur- bances of 1875? (p, 115). The positivist in him forgets that the point of studying situations of sharpened conflict is not that they can be shown statistically to beAgrarian Society and Political Protest 383 more significant than ‘non-conflict’, but that such occasions tend to lay bare the bonds and tensions existing within a society. People are forced to make a choice and own up to it, Even revenue officials begin to write about the real nature of. tenurial conditions on the ground, and whether the assessment is particularly severe, and how substantially the alien moneylender has eroded the position of the ‘natural leaders’ of the people in the countryside — thus making possible the kind of studies that Stokes has undertaken. In Stokes’s view, however, the idea of struggle has been grossly exaggerated. ‘Even’ Marxists are forced to admit, he asserts, that there is ‘so little which augurs’ revolt in the Indian villages (p. 287). It is of course in large part a question of what one is looking for. If 1857 isan ‘essentially élitist’ rising, 1875 a ‘trifling’ disturbance and the campaign for zamindari abolition no real struggle at all, Stokes is talking a language very different from that generally understood. For those who are willing to see it, the evidence regarding resistance and insurrection in the Indian countryside is not slight. And if the continued influence of magnates and ‘traditional’ caste leaders is emphasised, it must also be pointed out that in one instance after another — in 1857, in what have come to be known as Gandhi’s campaigns in Champaran (1917) and Kheda (1918), in ‘Avadh at the beginning of the 1920s — local peasants have taken the initiative and raised the banner of revolt against their oppressors, only then drawing in (sometimes reluctant) ‘outside’ leaders. : . But, for the author of The Peasant and the Raj, the dominant impression ultimately remains one of peace and harmony; and he quotes a verse from Alfred Lyall as a comment on the calm that finally descends on ‘Malagarh, the scene of such troubles in the unusual years of 1857-59 (p. 158). Yet the ruins of Nawab Walidad Khan’s fort at Malagarh, and the gutted jungle of Jagdishpur, bear witness to another story which could easily have been the subject of Asi Ghazipuri’s couplet: Subah tak vah bhi na chodi tu ne ai baad-i-saba, Yaadgar-i-raunag-i-mahfil thi parvane ki khak. Generations pass through suffering and strife, and then the memory of their struggles is swept away by the elements. Among those elements is the ‘uncom- mitted’, empiricist, liberal historical tradition. NOTES 1. A slightly different version of this article has appeared in Frontier (Calcutta). 2. As fora common cause, the historian will be hard put to it to find any large-scale movement that has arisen on the basis of one issue, a single all-encompassing desire. The great campaigns and struggles in history have represented a variety of interests and endeavours, and often clashes have developed between diverse interests. All these aspects require investigation for a proper under- standing.ee The ‘Mi ft Middle Pessant ‘Thesis’ and the Roots Agitation in India, 1914-1947 f Neil Charl aus Go in Peasant Food Production and Develop upply in Relation to the Historical Pre-Cole of Commodity Production, in lonial and Colonial Tanganyike Aprar: Deborah Fahy Bryceso" Pei. an Contradictions and Resistance in istrict of Oudh (India) 1858-1979 Agricutturat Smita Jassal Co-operatives and Development Policy in Mozambique Laurence Harris Modernisati, REVIEW ARTICLES Developrusation, Underdevelopment, U : Prospects for a Theory of third- world formations oral Nicos Mot «/t View of the Observable. A Positivist Understanding” of Agrarian Society and Political Protest in Colonial India Gyan Pandey BOOK REVIEWS Frank Cass & Co. Ltd. Volume 7 | Number 3 April 1980The Journal of Peasant Studies EDITORS T. J. Byres, Lecturer in Economics, School of Oriental and African Studies, ‘University of London C, A, Curwen, Lecturer in the History of the Far East, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Hamza Alavi Clifford Geertz Henri Mendras F. G. Bailey Ernest Gellner Sidney W. Mintz Janos Bak Irfan Habib Andrew Pearse W. G. Beasley Rodney Hilton David Sabean Clive Bell Eric Hobsbawm ALK, Sen Henry Bernstein Paul T. K. Lin R. E, F, Smith André Béteille Michael Lipton Rodolfo Stavenhager Bernard S, Cohn A. L. Lloyd Joan Thirsk Jorge Dandler Juan Martinez-Alier Eric Wolf Basil Davidson Claude Meillassoux P. M. Worsley Boguslaw Galeski CORRESPONDENCE: Manuscripts, editorial correspondence, books for review, advertising enquiries and subscriptions should all be addressed to: The Journal of Peasant Studies, Frank Cass & Co. 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