Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India Douglas E. Haynes Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India. By Vinayak Chaturvedi (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2007) Peasant movements once stood at the center of the historiography of colonial South Asia (and of many other parts of Asia and Africa) during the 1970s and 1980s. During the last twenty years, however, this area of study has receded in importance with the decline in research both on political economy and on nationalist politics and with the rise of historical approaches influenced by cultural studies. Scholars and graduate students have virtually abandoned working on the subject. In this stimulating new book on history and memory among the Dharalas in Kheda District in Gujarat, however, Vinayak Chaturvedi, has brought a completely fresh approach to peasant studies, one that reaches rich and original conclusions. Kheda district was the focus of an earlier major book by David Hardiman, Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat (1981). Hardiman’s major contribution in that study was to bring out the role of the Patidars, the dominant peasant community in the region, in the largely non-violent struggles associated with the Indian nationalist movement. Chaturvedi’s work turns his attention instead to the Dharalas, a set of actors (now referring to themselves as Kshatriyas) who either cultivated the most marginal agricultural lands in the district or who worked as laborers for the Patidars, and who were labelled as a “criminal tribe” by the colonial administration. Hardiman treated the Dharalas only briefly because of the relative paucity of the information about them. Chaturvedi, by contrast, tries to draw a picture of Dharala politics from the fragmentary archival evidence and from oral interviews he conducted in 1996 and 2004. The result is a book that is innovative both in interpretation and in method. As in previous studies of peasant movements, Chaturvedi certainly examines issues of state policy and political economy. He discusses, for instance, a range of colonial processes that bolstered Patidar dominance and that disadvantaged the Dharalas. But his most central concern is with appreciating Dharala political conceptions. Drawing upon the work of Carlo Ginzburg, Steven Feierman, Ranajit Guha and Shahid Amin, Chaturvedi seeks in effect to construct an intellectual history of peasants, but one that departs from the assumptions of Guha’s earlier work that there was anything “elementary” or “immature” in peasant understandings of the political world. Chaturvedi takes the ideas of individuals seriously, studies their origins, examines their circulation and development in a primarily nonliterate culture, and explores their evolution after the death of their original propagators. Based upon this evidence, he outlines the Dharalas’ conceptions of politics, which were anti-colonial, stood outside of Indian nationalism, were steeped in local notions of religiosity and kingship, and critiqued the position of the Patidars in agrarian society. Chaturvedi primarily reaches these findings out of information about three developments during the colonial period: 1) a short-lived uprising led by a peasant called Ranchod Vira, who proclaimed himself a king in 1898 and urged peasants in twenty-one villages to withhold the revenues they owed the government; 2) a movement for socio-religious reform in 1907-9 led by a figure named Daduram, who urged Dharalas to give up alcohol, meat-eating and stealing and to stop working (mainly for Patidars) in demeaning jobs; and 3) a miscellaneous set of activities, especially raids against Patidars and government employees, during the 1910s and 20s. In keeping with his focus on the fragment, Chaturvedi ‘s style of presentation departs sharply from most historical works. The book is not organized conventionally but instead consists of sixty four short segments, some no longer than a page or two. By escaping the tyranny of chapters, this framework allows Chaturvedi to analyze numerous pieces of evidence as far as they lead but without needing to fill the undocumented gaps that lie between them. A reference in the sources to “topiwallahs” (hat –wearers), a term indicating representatives of the state (who thus stood outside the local community), gives Chaturvedi the opportunity to examine Dharala conceptions of the boundaries of political relations. A discussion of why Ranchod, an illiterate figure, kept books...