THE PEASANT IN INDIAN HISTORY 63 Besides its undisputed peasant composition, the community admitted men of the low and menial castes as well; Banda would give high authority to ^the lowliest sweeper and tanner, filthier than whom there is no race in Hindustan".242 A later writer speaks of many of the great Sikh chiefs being "of low birth such as carpenters, shoemakers and Jats".243 As among the Satnamis, we see here a perceptible urge on the part of the lower classes to achieve social elevation through a casteless alternative to 'Sanskritisation'. This is an important social achievement; but while it lifted sections of the community from a lowly status it did not yet change the major elements of the social order. Even in Guru Gobind Singh's long Persian poem composed in criticism of Aurangzeb, there is no reference to the oppression of the peasants.244 There was little in the agrarian structure of the Sikh regimes of the 18th and 19th centuries to distinguish them from their predecessors.245 The Mughal Empire owed its collapse very largely to the agrarian crisis which engulfed it, and of which the uprisings with their varied record of failure and success were the consequence. Peasants, as we have seen, were deeply involved in these uprisings. Yet the goals of the uprising in each case were not those of the peasants; and for them the fundamental conditions remained unaltered, That peasant revolts before modern times have not generally succeeded is a matter that hardly needs to be debated. The specific features of Indian peasant uprisings hower deserve careful consideration. The basic one, it seems tome, is their comparatively backward level of class-consciousness. In China peasant revolts with specific demands for tax-reductions have caused dynastic changes. In the English rising of 1381 and the Peasant Wars in Germany in the 16th century, the peasants came forward with the objective of securing specific changes in their legal and economic status. In other words, the peasantry, in its own consciousness, stood forth as a class It is here pre-eminently that the Indian peasant revolts exhibit a remarkable deficiency. The peasants might fuel a zamindar's revolt (Marathas); they might rise in a locality (the Doab), or as a caste (Jats), or as a sect (Satnamis, Sikhs), but they fail to attain a recognition of any common objectives that transcended parochial limits. Much of what I have said aims at attempting at least a provisional (and partial) explanation of this historical failure. The caste divisions in our society, the immense gulf between the peasantry and the 'menial' proletariat, and the deeply rooted authority of the 242 Muhammad Shan Warid, Miratu-I Waridat, Br Mus Add 6579, f 117b. 243 'Imadus Satadat, op cit, p 71. 244 Zafarnama, composed AD 1706 (?), Nanak Chand Naz, Jalandhar, 1959. 245 One can see this even in Xndu Bang's otherwise sympathetic description, Agrarian System of the Sikhs, New Delhi, 1978.