12 - The return of the peasant to South Asian history

Summary

No platitude could be more trite than that the balance of destiny in South Asia rests in peasant hands, yet no platitude has been grasped with more laggardliness by political scientists and historians. Part of the explanation is perhaps the split level at which South Asian society appears to operate. Charles Metcalfe and Karl Marx long ago gave vivid formulation to the notion of an underlying discontinuity between the political superstructure and the agrarian base. No doubt this insulation of the peasant world from the state is in some measure typical of all pre-modern autocracies, but in the Indian subcontinent it seemed to receive particular reinforcement from the brittle foreign-conquest character of the larger political systems and from what appeared to be the peculiar economic and social self-sufficiency of a village society regulated by the institutions of caste. As a result even the periodic irruption of the peasantry into politics through rebellion looks strangely absent in Indian history, unless one follows Irfan Habib in regarding the rise of the Maratha, Sikh and Jat powers in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as essentially peasant movements, or believes with Kathleen Gough that constant peasant rebellion under colonial rule has been deliberately over-looked. It has, therefore, seemed natural to treat politics as a self-contained activity and relegate rural India to the role of a dim, shadowy backcloth to the political stage. This attitude survived the ending of colonial rule.