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Book Review
Peasant politics and nationalism
SURANJAN DAS
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Recovery of memories and voices of Indian peasants weaving a complex interface in Indian political history
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PEASANT PASTS — History and Memory in Western India: Vinayak Chaturvedi, University of California Press, 2120 Berkeley Way Berkeley, CA 94704-1012. $ 21.95.
The Patidars — Gujarat’s village elites — emerge in established writings on Indian freedom struggle as “the most dynamic and creative peasant nationalists.” But Vinayak Chaturvedi questions this received wisdom by addressing the complex interface between peasant politics, nationalism and colonialism in Indian history. He shows that although the Patidars had been instrumental in organising the 1918 Kheda Satyagraha — the second of Gandhij
i’s first three Satyagrahas — yet the mainstream nationalist politics could not mobilise such subordinated social groups of central Gujarat as the Dharalas, who in 1911 numbered 250,000 and were categorised by colonial officials as “criminals”.
In 1908 the Dharalas had refused to join Tilak’s extremist politics, probably fearing it would strengthen conservative high caste dominance in the countryside. Subsequently, the Dharalas declined to be drawn into Gandhian nationalism, locally led by the Patidars, whose exploitative relations with the Dharalas were sharpened under colonialism.
Political identity
Gandhiji admitted the Patidar tyranny over the Dharalas, but urged the Dharalas to “forgive Patidars” for broader nationalist politics. But throughout the freedom movement most of the Dharalas refused to remain “silent on their past” and operated underground — raiding houses of mukhis (village headmen) and thanas (police-stations) with guns, bows, arrows and spears; non-cooperating with Patidar landowners; and questioning repressive colonial legislations.
Through a judicious use of colonial records and oral evidence, Chaturvedi uses an effective narrative style to recreate the political identity conceptualised by the Dharalas and the multiple ways in which they challenged both the local elites and the colonial regime. The author convincingly argues that such political activities were not necessarily prompted by anti-British politics of the Patidars, but were “reflection of the limited options that remained to the Dharala peasants.”
Even as citizens in independent India the Dharalas remain a marginalised community, continuing to be classified as a criminal tribe till 1952. The scholar’s field trips to rural Gujarat revealed that memories of conflicts with Patidars had not been erased from the Dharala psyche. Instead, this conflict “took on different political forms in the postcolonial India.”
Contesting power
Charurvedi shows how in imagining their political community the Dharalas remained aware of societal changes, but relied on “practices and discourses already sanctioned by local custom.” Dharala leaders as Ranchod Vira in the late 19th or Daduram in early 20th century, took recourse to religious idioms and rituals in contesting colonial power relations. Both sought to wield authority in their community as bhagats (village priests) and fell back on “discourses of kingship” to create a space outside the domain of either colonialism or nationalism. Ranchod thus declared in January 1898 the end of the British Raj and proclaimed himself the “king of a new polity.” Interestingly, although Ranchod was himself illiterate, he insisted on a written agreement with the police officer who had confronted him, thereby indicating his awareness of the power of the written word in colonial bureaucracy.
Others like Daduram, who won initial popularity as a bhagat trying to restrain his community from taking alcohol and meat and indulging in stealing, did not formally declare himself as a king “but functioned like one.” That the Dharala rebel leaders developed a critique of colonialism was evident from the patras (letters), which won wide circulation during an uprising. Their conscious bid to subvert colonial order got manifested in Ranchod’s directions for cutting down babul trees to violate colonial laws that infringed upon “local customary practices” and his injunction of cancelling peasant debts and fixing a revenue rate much lower than the colonial one.
Resistance
One wonders if the Dharala resistance shared features of primary resistance movement having “restorative aims.” Unlike the scholars associated with the subaltern studies, Chaturvedi does not subscribe to the notion of absolute subaltern autonomy. He thus contends that the ideological world of the Dharalas was not insulated from “the domain of elite ideas” but stresses the “circular relationship” between the two, characterised by “reciprocal influences.”
Chaturvedi’s work is an excellent example of the recent scholarship that demonstrates how nation and nationalism in India “meant different things to different people at different times.” It is another significant contribution to a recovery of memories and voices of Indian peasants that do not find adequate expression in the traditional mode of history writing.
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