Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India

This historiography of peasant insurgency in India has frequently been a record of the efforts of the colonial administration to deal with mass uprisings in the countryside. The colonialist tended to see insurgency as a crime or pathology, seldom regarding it as a struggle for social justice, Guha seeks to correct this failure to understand the aims and motives of the insurgent. He adopts the peasant's viewpoint and examines the peasant rebel's awareness of his own world and his will to change it. The study covers the period 1783-1900 and identifies some of the elementary aspects that characterized peasant rebel consciousness in this period. This classic work deserves to form an indispensable part of the reading list of all serious students of South Asian history.