Peasant Pasts

Peasant Pastsis an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to writing histories of peasant politics, nationalism, and colonialism. Vinayak Chaturvedi's analysis, situated within the historical tradition of subaltern studies, provides an important intervention in the social and cultural history of India by examining the nature of peasant discourses and practices during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through rigorous archival study and fieldwork, Chaturvedi shows that the vast majority of peasants were opposed to nationalism in the early decades of the twentieth century. He argues that nationalists in Gujarat established power through the use of coercion and violence and suggests that this little-told story about violence is necessary to an understanding of not only anticolonial nationalism, but the direction of postcolonial nationalism as well.

Vinayak Chaturvedi is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine