Taking Gandhi's statements about civil disobedience to heart, in February 1922 residents from the villages around the north Indian market town of Chauri Chaura attacked the local police station, burned it to the ground and murdered twenty-three constables. Appalled that his teachings were turned to violent ends, Gandhi called off his Noncooperation Movement and fasted to bring the people back to nonviolence. In the meantime, the British government denied that the riot reflected Indian resistance to its rule and tried the rioters as common criminals. These events have taken on great symbolic importance among Indians, both in the immediate region and nationally. Amin examines the event itself, but also, more significantly, he explores the ways it has been remembered, interpreted, and used as a metaphor for the Indian struggle for independence.

The author, who was born fifteen miles from Chauri Chaura, brings to his study an empathetic knowledge of the region and a keen ear for the nuances of the culture and language of its people. In an ingenious negotiation between written and oral evidence, he combines brilliant archival work in the judicial records of the period with field interviews with local informants.

In telling this intricate story of local memory and the making of official histories, Amin probes the silences and ambivalences that contribute to a nation's narrative. He extends his boundaries well beyond Chauri Chaura itself to explore the complex relationship between peasant politics and nationalist discourse and the interplay between memory and history.

Shahid Amin is Professor of History at Delhi University. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Stanford, Princeton, and Berlin. He has authored Sugarcane and Sugar in Gorakhpur (1984), as well as several seminal essays in Subaltern Studies—of which project he is one of the founding editors.

"In this interesting piece of historical fieldwork . . . Amin seeks to show how nationalist history changes over time, as it is sifted through memory."—Choice

"The book promises much: it delivers a great deal. In the earlier sections, Amin gives us a rich, earthy portrait of Chauri Chaura, going behind the omnibus label that outsiders gave to the area to reveal it in its constituent parts. . . . Amin manages to color his picture in ways which challenge existing perceptions about the colonial countryside. . . . But the book’s major achievement is to put flesh and blood on to the bones of the ‘rioters’. . . . Amin’s fieldwork for the project was exemplary."—Journal of the South Asian Studies

"Amin presents a fine-grained deconstruction of nationalist myth, while interrogating the grand narrative of nationalism through the lives and language of the Bhojpuri peasants and townsfolk who were heirs to this seismic yet polyseismic episode. . . . A remarkable book—one for which the history of modern India has had to wait a long time, but one that will prove well worth the wait."—Imperial and Commonwealth History

"This book is a brilliant contribution and is bound to interest students of Indian history in at east two ways: by raising questions about the ways of nationalist historiography and making a strong case for taking note of the internal face of popular nationalism."—Asian Affairs

Winner, Coomaraswamy Prize, South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies