:Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India

Abstract

This book is an innovative and imaginative account of popular politics, one that probes the predicaments and possibilities of the historical record concerning subaltern worlds. It is also an intriguing endeavor that falls short of articulating its own import. The story is set in the Kheda district of Gujarat province in western India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its protagonists are members of the mainly poor Dharala community, who were economically and socially subordinate to the agricultural caste of Patidars in the region. Both scholarly writing and political commentary have portrayed the Patidars as formidable, even exemplary, authors of peasant nationalism and allies of Mohandas K. Gandhi, while the Dharalas haunt both the academic and political realms as marginal figures, mentioned mainly for their “criminal” proclivities. The contrast offers a poignant edge to Vinayak Chaturvedi's empathetic, accessible narrative. In addition to the introduction, the account has three parts, each made up of crisscrossing pathways. The first draws on judicial proceedings—especially peasant testimonies in colonial courts—and other official records in order to unravel the tale of Ranchod Vira, a poor peasant and bhagat (religious figure) who challenged local superiors and colonial governance in 1897. The Ranchod movement and its politics are presented as part of popular religious beliefs and practices, entanglements between oral and written arenas, and shifts within the agrarian structure and imperial administration. Chaturvedi next turns to Dharala endeavors across the early twentieth century, from the initiative of a religious figure called Daduram to efforts involving caste conferences, labor strikes, and rural brigandage. These activities are understood in the context of imperial imperatives, such as the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, that targeted the Dharalas as well as nationalist expressions among the Patidar peasantry under Gandhian leadership. The final part traverses Chaturvedi's encounters in the archive and the field. It unravels his dogged pursuit—made up of chance finds and contingent discoveries—of the details and dramas that characterize the ongoing debates, contentious legacies, and the living presence of Ranchod's and Daduram's endeavors. At each step, Chaturvedi adroitly teases out from tattered archival registers and episodic field materials self-consciously fragmentary yet immensely telling tales of peasant worlds, past and present, a plenitude that my bare summary has been unable to capture.