A view of the observable: A positivist ‘understanding’ of Agrarian Society and political protest in colonial India1

Abstract

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’ (1957). 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.