Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India
"This book offers an imaginatively conceived new model of combining structural analysis, meticulous social history, and fine-grained attention to the dynamic unfolding of political narratives. Anyone interested in the dialectics of state formation and peasant resistance, whether in early modern and nineteenth-century Europe, South and Southeast Asia, or the Caribbean and Latin America, will find it richly illuminating."—Geoff Eley, author ofA Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society"Peasant Pastsbridges the supposedly unbridgeable gap between social history and postcolonial studies to provide a nuanced and highly readable account of peasant movements in colonial western India. It draws upon colonial archives, oral narrative accounts, and a whole host of other resources. Historians of not only India, but peasant political movements elsewhere in the 'Third World' will read it with pleasure and profit."—Sanjay Subrahmanyam, author ofExplorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges"Where there is of course a considerable and rich South Asian tradition of history from below, and while the importance of studying peasant religion has been repeatedly stressed in the last two decades, there is simply no equivalent to the kind of work that Chaturvedi has attempted here."—Ajay Skaria, author ofHybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.