Available From UC Press

Peasant Pasts is an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to writing histories of peasant politics, nationalism, and colonialism. Vinayak Chaturvedi's analysis 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 peasants in Gujarat were active in the production and circulation of political ideas, establishing critiques of the state and society while promoting complex understandings of political community. By turning to the heartland of M.K. Gandhi's support, 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, as they imagined a nation in which they could dominate social relations. Chaturvedi suggests that this littletold story is necessary to understand 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, and editor of Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial.

"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 of A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society

"Peasant Pasts bridges 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 of Explorations 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 of Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India