Political Economy Discourses and the Historiography of Indigo Movement in Colonial Bengal

Abstract

The discourse on the peasant movements in the colonial period has been dominated by the political economy argument. The argument rests on the assumption that the peasant had been a rational actor. The paper seeks a historiographic analysis of the political economy argument in the context of the indigo movement in colonial Bengal. The entire historiography of the movement has been based on colonial official discourse, and as the colonial official discourse had primarily been an exercise in political economy so has been the historiography founded upon it. In this paper, the pattern, assumptions, coherence and contradictions of the historical discourse on indigo movement are being sought to be analysed.