Rural Society and British Rule in Nineteenth Century India

Abstract

ne of the enduring themes in the history of India is the transformation of rural society under British colonial rule. The subject attracts the historian not only because of the vast extent of India's thickly settled agricultural lands, but because the patterns of landholding and the distribution of power in rural India have never fitted easily into the categories of Western thought. From the time of Charles Metcalfe and Henry Maine, colonial administrators-and academic scholars after them-have sought, with varying degrees of success, to comprehend the essential ties which bound Indians to the land and to each other. With the traditional social order so little understood, it is hardly surprising that the effects of British on this society during the nineteenth century have been a matter of continuing debate. The views of observers who perceived a revolution in property rights, as Holt Mackenzie did in i8 I9, have little in common with those of historians who find the underlying structures of power undisturbed after decades of colonial rule.' The mutiny of the sepoy army during I857, and the uprising in rural North India which accompanied it, reflect as well the dislocations associated with colonialism, and so compel the attention of historians of rural India. These central concerns of Indian historiography have shaped much of the scholarly career of Eric Stokes, Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge. In I959 he published The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Oxford University Press). This work, with its subtle analysis of the connections between the ideas of the early nineteenth century political economists and the formulation of revenue and judicial policy in India, set new standards for the study of the ideology of empire. Now, with the publication of The Peasant and the Raj, Professor Stokes has turned to an examination of the agrarian system itself, with the aim of exploring the extent to which rural society underwent fundamental alteration under colonial rule (p. i ). Though The Peasant and the Raj, as a collection of essays, is less well integrated than its predecessor, this volume too raises the study of Indian history to a new level of sophistication. The four central chapters that form the core of the book focus on the revolt in the countryside during I857. As recently as I957, when a great outpouring of articles