Peasant Uprisings in Colonial Assam (1861-189...

Peasant Uprisings in Colonial Assam (1861-1894): A Historical Analysis

Author Name : Uttarika Bhattacharya

INTRODUCTION

“Peasant Movements”, as distinct from the urban elitist movements, can be seen as an extremist critique of the colonial rule. Their continuous proletarianization and pauperisation compelled the suffering masses to take up the course of their fortune in their own hands. The first serious attempt in synthesizing the overall nature and causes of such movement goes to Man who put forward the concept of socialist/ proletariat revolution. Guided by this ideology, historians like D.D. Kosambi, R.S. Sharma and Daniel Thorner has attempted to reconstruct the peasant history in India for the first time.

The word “peasant” has been assigned an open-ended definition by the Cambridge English Dictionary. It states that a “peasant is a member of a low social class of farm workers and owners of small farms”. Gough attempts to define it as “people who engage in agriculture or related production with primitive means and who surrender part of their produce to landlords and agents of the state. Irfan Habib too puts forward a Marxist approach in defining the word peasant and states that “a peasant is a person who undertakes agriculture on his own, working with his own implements and using the labour of his family”Similarly several historians tends to define peasants in compliance with their own perspective while attempting to give us a glimpse of their class history and struggle.