A Conspectus of Research Across Three Decades

He has instead stuck to the old groove of early Subaltern Studies, with a ‘history from below’ approach when this has long ceased to attract much attention amidst the vogue for postcoloniality and cultural studies. (An adherence which incidentally has not been helpful for Hardiman in the academic job market: to the best of my knowledge he still lacks a tenurial position). The volume should go far to remove this impression of theoretical naivete. The Introduction makes clear that Hardiman’s present views are connected to, but still significantly different from, his earlier positions. And certainly there has been a considerable advance in theoretical sophistication.

We need however to first take a brief look at the nine essays. They fall into three broad groups. Four of them are about specific popular movements (Chapters 1-4). These are followed by two dealing with key points of tension in rural society—liquor policies and usury, studied over the long-term. The last three analyse questions of environment and related protests, again over the long term.

Chapter 4 is about the Quit India movement in Gujarat. This was an indisputably ‘mainstream’, Congress-led, movement. One, further, which did not see the kind of radicalization through subaltern autonomous pressures that had been the main theme of early Subaltern Studies. Exceptionally for Hardiman, this is one essay based mainly on archival and other written material (contemporary pamphlets, newspapers, subsequent reminiscences), not oral sources. It reveals the author’s strengths in handling conventional sources, too. The paper highlights some of the paradoxes of ‘42 in this area, in particular the contrast between the old Gandhian base of Kheda, which this time was relatively quiet after an initial outburst, and a different but long-continued movement in Broach, Surat and Navsari districts. Here, though , the movement was marked not by a mass upheaval, but conspiratorial, terroristic violence. The activists were mainly middle-class young men, though with considerable, but tacit popular support—in sharp contrast to the standard image of Gujarat being the classic land of Gandhian nonviolent peasant movements. Bombay Presidency in fact reported 76% of the total number of bomb explosions in India as a whole. Ahmedabad, too, was exceptional, in its long strike of mill-workers under Gandhian leadership.

Hardiman seeks to explain the specifics of ‘42 in Gujarat by drawing attention to a correlation with differential class-cum-caste relationships. In Kheda, the Patidar superior peasant strata, everywhere the firmest base of Gandhian nationalism in Gujarat, now faced acute conflicts with the rural groups subordinated to them, some of whom had meanwhile developed a Kshatriya status movement of their own. In the southern districts there was still much greater rural unity, for the subordinate strata saw their principal oppressors not in Patidars, but in Parsi liquor-dealers and landlords, who in addition tended to be supporters of the British. The other basic point to which Hardiman draws our attention is the absence now of any no-tax movement. Again, the Ahmedabad strike was not about class demands, but with nationalist motivations, and for once the mill-owners did not seem worried, at least till the movement as a whole was declining . The potential for social, as distinct from anti-British, radicalism of ‘42 was thus actually lower than in the earlier peak-points of mass nationalism—something which I feel was more or less true for other regions, too. (I remember making this point in my Modern India many years back, but unlike Hardiman, not on the basis of personal primary research). There was a kind of all-in anti-British class unity this time in the regions that did become active—which helps us to understand the Ahmedabad strike. Probably the key reason was the widespread impression that British rule was collapsing, and Britain was losing the War. This had the corollary of toning down elements of autonomous popular actions with socially-radical implications, so characteristic above all of the 1919-1922 upsurge. The talk of an ‘August Revolution’, in other words, is perhaps a little exaggerated, unless violent methods and anti-British militancy are equated with ‘revolution’.

The first essay in the volume in contrast is about an autonomous movement of Bhils under Motilal Tejawat in the winter of 1921-22, which culminated in a ‘forgotten massacre’ on 7 March 1922 when the armed forces of Mewar fired on a crowd of some two thousand Bhils and killed at least 22 of them. Popular memory, resurrected by some Congress politicians in the late 1990s to gain popularity among the adivasis, spoke of a much higher number of deaths, perhaps as many as 1200, considerably higher than in Jallianwala Bagh. The movement had been against the exactions of Rajput landlords and rulers of Mewar and a number of neighbouring princely state. Motilal was a shopkeeper who turned activist after experiencing first-hand the oppressive ways of a thakur. He developed a deep sympathy for the exploited tribals, and became the leader of what developed into a massive movement. Imagining himself to be a loyal follower of Gandhi, Tejawat combined agrarian demands with moral reform. He urged Bhils to give up liquor, abstain from violence against human beings and animals alike, and go in for more hygienic and pure habits. ‘Gandhi raj’, he promised, would involve a drastic reduction in payments to the state. Yet Gandhi when he heard about the movement promptly denounced Motilal in an article in Young India (2 February 1922), for the Bhil crowds that were moving about that region occasionally carried whatever primitive weapons they had, which was their standard practice. The Mahatma advised them to petition the princely authorities, “and never resort to arms”. A month later, the Mewar Bhil Corps opened fire with little or no provocation, leading to a massacre almost exactly contemporaneous with the Chauri Chauri incident which has been remembered so much more. Hardiman finds through research that the total number of the killed was probably considerably more than the 22 officially mentioned, though certainly much less than the rumours of 1200. Exceptionally, since the lapse in time in this case was 75 years, his favourite method of massive oral interviews was not possible here. He turned instead to a meticulous study of available written material: one big file in the National Archives about Tejawat, and contemporary writings and correspondence. The essay is striking in its ability to draw out nuances and slight shifts in attitudes, as for instance a slight change in Gandhi’s attitude revealed in a later comment on 26 February, which he correlates carefully with the diverse reports which the Mahatma was getting from his emissaries in that area. Official attitudes, too, were not invariably identical. Where the essay is a little less satisfactory, however, is in bringing out the background and contours of the movement, no doubt because so little has survived in the way of historical material in this case.

In significant contrast, Hardiman’s essay on another entirely forgotten episode, the Devi movement in South Gujarat around 1921-22, was reconstructed almost entirely through interviews collected while wandering through the region (Chapter 2 was first published in 1984, and later developed into a book). The commands of the Devi involved calls to adivasis and other smallholding peasants to give up liquor and meat, purify themselves, boycott Parsi liquor-dealers and landlords, and, towards the end, take vows in Gandhi’s name and start wearing khadi. The field-work involved was clearly prodigious: the book eventually listed 230 interviews. The movement, predictably for that period of Subaltern Studies, was seen primarily in class terms: the oppressive actions of Parsi liquor dealers, who benefited greatly from the ban imposed in 1878 on local toddy manufacture. There is some account, though, of the work of an educated adivasi social reformer advocating abstinence a few years before the outbreak of the Devi phenomenon. But one problem perhaps is that the oral data, collected some sixty years later, is taken perhaps a little at face value in tracing the routes of the spread of the cult. The interrelationships of Devi with existing patterns of adivasi religion also remain unexplored. The references to anti-Muslim and anti-Christian messages of the Devi are not probed any further. Instead, both in this essay and in the subsequent book, there is a long discussion of alternative sociological models, which one ‘fits’ the movement better: not perhaps the most helpful form of analysis.

The much later essay dealing with Raghu Bhangare, a ‘social bandit’ in the Sahyadri hills of western Maharashtra in the mid-nineteenth century, is much subtler, in methods and findings alike, and indicates the progress of Hardiman as a historian. I consider this paper the best in the volume. Raghu dates back to mid-nineteenth century Maharashtra, and yet oral tradition is very significant in the research underlying this paper. Hardiman found in the archives numerous references to attacks on Marwari moneylenders by robber bands of Mahadev Kolis evidently enjoying popular sympathy. They burnt account books and debt bonds, looted the houses of the Baniyas and sometimes cut off their noses. Yet none of these bandits seem to have survived in popular memory today. The people of that region in contrast were full of stories of a Raghu Bhangare, about whom Hardiman found some archival mention only later, when having drawn a blank in the Maharashtra Archives he turned to the India Office Collection. But songs about the heroic deeds of Raghu could still be heard among the Kolis, emphasizing his valour, how he had led a band (revolt, in Marathi ) against the oppressors of the poor, how his brave mother had helped him. Hardiman’s essay is a truly impressive bringing-together of elements drawn from close reading of oral material (in particular, a song he had heard from a village woman, and some stories still current in that region) with some archival data. The latter enabled the historian to fix some dates for Raghu’s raids, roughly from 1844 till his capture in 1848—but it is the skilful analysis of oral material that makes the essay remarkable. Quality-wise, I think it to be a major advance over the one on the Devi movement, even though the latter was based on a far greater quantum of oral sources . Through meticulous analysis, Hardiman locates Raghu as a point of transition in the evolution of the band. In pre-colonial and early British times, these had been directed against state or local authorities extracting revenue, and the petty chiefs or adventurers leading them were often ready to enter into compromise with their overlords on the basis of sharing the loot from the actual producers. The new kinds of bands emphasized much more the internal class tensions in rural society, particularly outsider moneylender exploitation. (The well-known Deccan disturbances of 1875, also turning around mahajan exploitation, is not mentioned in this paper, but then that was located in another part of Maharashtra). In parenthesis, I would like to add that such a transition was perhaps a general characteristic of the post-1850s era of South Asian rural history, when particularly after 1857, rebellions against the state (Mughal, their successors, the Company) turning around questions of revenue extraction, and often led by local zamindars, gave place to anti-landlord or anti-moneylender protests.

Returning to Raghu, Hardiman has been able to explore through songs and legends the question as to why he alone among the many social bandits of that time, has survived in popular memory, what specific features of his actions and personality make him still so attractive. In this context Hardiman enters upon an important discussion of where precisely oral evidence is valuable, and where in contrast it is bound to be very problematic (p.102). He points out that popular memory is often unreliable where the question is of precise details and dates of what had happened. They do not provide much in the way of ‘accurate’, ‘positivistic’ history: here official records are much more valuable. (It may be noted that in his early work, like his first book about peasant nationalists of Kheda, and even more the study of the Devi movement where oral testimony could not be cross-checked with much in the way of archival data, Hardiman had basically used his oral evidence in a more-or-less ‘positivistic’ manner to construct a factual narrative). The Raghu Bhangare case however is invaluable in the indications it gives of where popular memory is most valuable. It provides some indications about the kind of values underlying such movements. Hardiman thinks these to have been notions of family honour, associated with patriarchal-feudal assumptions. In a society divided into rival clans and families competing among themselves for greater prestige, honour was inextricably bound up with ‘proper’ behaviour of ‘their’ women. Here Hardiman finds the village song foregrounding Raghu’s mother, the “brave Ramayi”, very helpful. Archival sources indicate that Raghu had been embittered about the police because she had been tortured by them, and he had amply exacted vengeance for that insult. The mother, in her turn, is hailed as heroic in the song for smuggling into Raghu’s prison a knife hidden in a roti. The paramount value of defending the honour of women in the family or clan, however, has often involved—right up to contemporary times—avenging insults by brutal, assaults and rape of women belonging to the rival group. And women within the family held to have transgressed community norms would be treated with equal brutality. Women never became active members of the bands, but were often the worst victims of the state or landlord-moneylender terror which invariably followed every incident of protest by bandits like Raghu. Hardiman’s sensitive account of such gender dimensions represents a point of departure from the bulk of his other work, as well as that of his colleagues. Subaltern Studies, particularly in its earlier days, had not shown much awareness of such issues. But Raghu seems to have distinguished himself from other band leaders not only by his being the leader of the biggest band of all, but by following somewhat higher standards of chivalry and generosity. He also acquired an exceptional reputation for religious devotion. Raghu was eventually captured while going disguised as a holy man on a pilgrimage to Pandarpur. Such factors, Hardiman suggests, might help to explain why Raghu proved so much more memorable than other similar figures who have periodically appeared in the Sahyadri mountains down to the 1960s, for anti-moneylender bands remained an endemic feature among the Mahadev Kolis down to the 1960s.

Usury and liquor policies were prominent in several of Hardiman’s case-studies of specific protest movements, and Chapters 5 and 6 follow up these themes through essays dealing with them over the long-term. They extend over the colonial era, and sometimes enter earlier times. Chapter 6, on usury, dearth and famine, was a curtain-riser to Hardiman’s book-length work, Feeding the Baniya (1996). It begins with the familiar dearth-debt vicious circle, and points out, following up a hint by Kosambi many years back, that usury has played a rather special part in Indian rural societies across the centuries. Usury was a major form of extraction of surplus, in the absence of widespread slavery or serfdom, and unlike medieval Christian or Islamic theory, interest-based money-lending was quite respectable—as indicated by the term ‘mahajan’, great or noble man. The familiar story follows of the many ways in which the problem worsened in colonial times, through new systems of land rights, law courts, and long-dominant assumptions of the superiority of the ‘free’ market. More original is the exploration, on the basis of western Indian data, of the ways in which the highly personalized nature of sahukar-peasant relations in India produced notions of reciprocity—which could be appropriated at times by peasants to pressurize the banias. Here Hardiman is clearly following in the tracks of E.P. Thompson’s classic studies of eighteenth-century England, but highlighting also the specificities. The complex blend of respect, fear, and hatred, for instance, at times led peasants to view the moneylenders as being sorcerers, having magical powers to bring on scarcities and stop rain. Hardiman concludes with some interesting evidence from Sirohi, a princely state in south Rajasthan, where a leading part in peasant protests was played by Anup Das, who had imbibed socialistic ideas while serving in the army during the 1914-18 War. But even this modernistic movement was shot through with notions of the magical powers of the moneylenders. As late as 1963, in Sirohi, and 1985, in Sabarkanthi (Gujarat), the hatred of usurers seen to be violating traditional norms of mutuality led to attacks on Jain temples—centers of the religion of the banias.

I found the essay on what might be called the political economy of drink more striking, since this is a surprisingly neglected theme. Yet excise in the late colonial era was second only to land revenue in the revenues of the state. Excessive land taxes clearly hit ‘honest’ agriculturists, while a growing Indian middle-class opinion felt that taxes on drink would check pernicious habits and improvidence. But Hardiman emphasizes that drink was often an essential ingredient of the community life of the rural poor. Considered indispensable in social and popular religious functions, it was an expression of solidarity, and provided some relief to poor and landless people when other forms of sustenance dried up during the lean season.

In South Gujarat till the 1870s, toddy, from coconut or other palm trees, and daru, from mahua, could be easily prepared in village homes. But there were already Parsi liquor-dealers trying to corner the production and sale of liquor. The big change, however, came in 1878 with the Abkari Act, which sought to enhance revenue by centralizing liquor production in central distilleries, with excise now collected at their exit-points. Parsi dealers and shopkeepers now flourished as never before, since distillation and sale rights were often farmed out to them, while peasant home production of liquor was sought to be stamped out. The new policy was extremely unpopular, numerous petitions were made pleading for a reversal of the Act, and even some subordinate British officials were critical of Pritchard, the man primarily responsible for strictly enforcing the new policy in Gujarat. But the policy could not be reversed, for settled peasants lacked the traditions of militancy of adivasi communities of Bhils and Kolis. Excise revenues mounted steadily, and by the 1930s sometimes was even surpassing the land tax proceeds from South Gujarat. Peasants could, and did, take recourse to illegal home production. But tapping toddy from palm trees could not be kept secret, while even preparing daru from mahua gave off a strong smell. Parsi liquor dealers generally lived in the villages, and so secret distillation was not much of a viable option. There was a fair amount of smuggling from Portuguese colonies and princely states, but the alternative which gathered strength over time was abstinence, which would immediately weaken the stranglehold of the Parsi liquor dealers as well as hurt the government. From around 1895, a series of popular temperance movements emerged in this area, followed by the Devi cult, while there was also of course the major impact of Gandhian ideology from the 1920s. Hardiman emphasizes, however, the somewhat surprising continued popularity of illicit drinking right down to contemporary times, despite complete legal prohibition in Gujarat from 1950. A fine and original essay—but with one limitation: possible gender differences in attitudes regarding drink are not explored at all. In Andhra and several other regions, autonomous and powerful women’s movements have developed in recent times attacking excessive male drinking for wrecking homes and livelihoods of the poor. It would have been interesting to know whether any such dimension has been noticeable in Gujarat.

The last three essays in the collection deal with themes of environmental history, and highlight tensions and protest movements around water and forest rights. Hardiman has deep sympathy for the very large numbers of adivasis and peasants hit by colonial and postcolonial state policies and the advance of capitalism. But he is able at the same time to avoid tendencies, fairly common among ‘Green’ movements, towards romanticizing the pre-modern. In Chapter 7, Hardiman tells us about how he had encountered numerous relicts of small dams in his wanderings in the Baglan region of the Sahyadri hills. He found some evidence of their construction and maintenance by combinations of aid from local rulers, and community efforts by villagers. Management of pre-colonial irrigation evidently varied across regions. Other scholars, for instance, have traced similar small irrigation works in South Bihar to small zamindar initiatives. Baglan attained through such small dams a considerable reputation for prosperity. But the small dam system began to decline in the time of troubles that accompanied the long transition from Maratha to stable British rule. Baglan came to be considered a backward region, with settled agriculture giving way to slash-and burn, and today it is a ‘tribal’ area. The British, after first neglecting irrigation, went in for bureaucratically-managed big dams, but not in Baglan. Their successors pushed ahead with a similar policy, of course on a vastly enhanced scale. The dire consequences, often, of big dams, for the livelihood of peoples and for environments alike, are becoming increasingly evident today. These have at last won some public recognition, largely through the Narmada Bachao Andolan, but state policies continue unchanged.

The history of well irrigation in Gujarat has been somewhat different. The proportion of that in Gujarat increased from late-colonial times onwards, but the result often has been a drying-up of sub-soil water through excessive construction and use of tubewells. Hardiman does not fully accept here the views of enviromentalists like Anil Agarwal, who have formulated a sharp dichotomy between precolonial construction by village communities free of internal tensions, and the growth of commercialization in colonial and postcolonial times disrupting such near-idyllic conditions. He points out that pre-colonial villages were hardly egalitarian, and some merchant capital penetration was not absent: but of course these were vastly aggravated by colonial policies. Differentiation stimulated the growth of rich peasants who went ahead with well construction, on a scale that has proved unsustainable in Gujarat.

The last chapter probes the question of forest rights, in the Dangs region—the home of Bhil, Varli, and Gamit adivasis as well as Konkani Kunbi settled peasants. Bhil chiefs, hunters and shifting cultivators, had ruled the region in pre-colonial times. British rule came to mean domination by forest officials, with the adivasis increasingly perceived as enemies of forest exploitation of timber (extracted for ship-building and then railway sleepers), as well as conservation. There were repeated Bhil protests and risings, outlined by Hardiman, and some Gandhian initatives to improve conditions through cooperatives and social reforms from the late-1940s (in part to counter a powerful Communist-led movement among the Varlis in nearby Thane district). But adivasi unrest remains endemic, and Hardiman begins this essay with the efforts of some adivasis to cultivate some areas in reserved forests in the Dangs in the early 1990s, which they claimed had been the sites of old villages.

Taken as a whole, the volume provides a fine conspectus of Hardiman’s research across three decades. One omission I find somewhat unfortunate, though. The Dangs region in recent years has been an area of sharp conflicts between Hindutva forces, and Christian communities and their missions. Hardiman has been working on this very contemporary and live issue, and has recently published a brief but illuminating paper, entitled ‘Christianity and the Adivasis of Gujarat’, in a volume honouring Jan Breman.2 Here he traces some of the origins of the current conflicts, and also probes the question why the sudden rise in the number of Christian converts in the Dangs from the 1980s has been due not to the work of the old missions in that region, but to new entrants, notably the Pentecostals. The emphasis on faith-healing, in place of going to expensive doctors, seems to have proved particularly attractive. The rise in Christian numbers provoked the recent VHP efforts at reconversion, quite often through terror and violence. The charges made against missions are somewhat contradictory: depicted always as agents of western imperialism, they are at the same time condemned for not being western enough, in so far as they are discouraging modern medicine. Hardiman here points to certain parallels between Pentecostal ideas, and those preached among adivasis earlier by Vaishnavite and Shaivite Bhagat movements that had at one time blocked Christian conversion. The essay thus deals with an issue very relevant today: but no doubt considerations of publication space precluded its inclusion.

I have left till the end discussion of the important Introduction, the one entirely new piece. It starts with a helpful account of the essays included in the volume, along with something of the academic and political contexts in which they had been written. Hardiman then embarks upon a brief but very important theoretical discussion, elucidating his current methodological approaches (pp.18-25). He has been, and remains, a loyal member of the Subaltern Studies editorial collective. The differences that have nevertheless emerged are conveyed in an entirely non-polemical and cautious manner, through implication and nuances rather than direct statements. There are also occasional formulations in the essays that still point towards some of the more problematic features of that enterprise. On page 100, in the Raghu Bhangare piece, for instance, there is the assertion that oral sources can “allow the historian to engage with the subaltern classes’ own understanding of their histories”. This presupposes both an undifferentiated ‘community’ or subaltern consciousness, as well as a claim that the Subaltern historian can fully represent that consciousness. I find the title of the book also rather troubling on this account. ‘Histories for the subaltern’ (my italics) assumes, with a certain naivete, that the vast majority of the subjects of Hardiman’s research can have access to his work . These are precisely the kinds of problems that Gayatri Spivak had detected in the project, many years ago, in her ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’

However the departures the Introduction and some of the essays indicate are much more important. There is for instance a reminder that Enlightenment values, often rejected in a blanket manner in some late Subaltern and much feminist writing, did have “the potential to liberate the subaltern to an important degree” (p.22)—by stimulating thinking about human rights, notably. More central to Hardiman’s present position are the doubts he has clearly developed about absolute polarities or disjunctions between neat, homogenized elites and subalterns. This is evident particularly in the more recent essays, like the one about Raghu (that one statement apart), or on small dams and wells. Such binary oppositions have been very common in South Asian history-writing in general. They remain evident, for instance, in the changing structures of Partha Chatterji’s successive formulations: elite / subaltern, derivative discourse of the colonized middle class / indigenous community consciousness, and then, most recently, civil / political society. A second major change in Hardiman is a move from his earlier total rejection of poststructuralist approaches towards a more nuanced understanding. He remains—rightly—very critical of the reification of linguistic analysis in much poststructuralist work, but now finds some elements particularly in Derrida helpful. From the critique of Levi-Strauss onwards, Derrida has been arguing against the essentializations inherent in the positing of binary opposites, and the need rather to foreground the play of differance within structures.

I have a special reason to welcome these changes in Hardiman. They happen to coincide repeatedly with the kind of positions towards which I have been moving in recent years, though so far only in thinking and one or two seminar presentations. We have had no chance to discuss these questions with each other, but it is nice to find that our thoughts are going on somewhat parallel lines.

Reference: 1 Unfortunately, though , the volume does not keep up to the promise Hardiman makes on p.25, about a full list at the end of the volume of all the writings of the author , which would have conveyed to interested readers information about original dates and places of publication. This is a serious and unexplained omission. 2 Ghanshyam Shah , Mario Rutten , and Hein Streefkerk, ed., Development and Deprivation in Gujarat ( Sage, New York etc, 2002) .

Sumit Sarkar was Professor of Modern Indian History in Delhi University for some thirty years till retirement in 2004. He has published a number of books and many articles on historical themes, and was for some years a member of the Subaltern Studies editorial group.