'HISTORY. FROM BELOW 5 members of the grcmp (e g, Hilton, Hill, Rude, E P Thompson, Hobsbawm, Raphael Samuel). In particular the serious concern with plebeian ideology-»-the theory underlying the action of social movements—is still largely identified with historians of this provenance^ for the social history of ideas was always, (thanks largely to Hill) one of their main preoccupations."9 To chronicle the development of the 'history from below' in England will be an irrelevant exercise here. However, we should bear in mind the fact that 'history from below9, or 'people's history' in a broader sense, has deep roots^ going very far back in Europe. Raphael Samuel of the History Workshop at Oxford has recently tried to construct the genealogical tree of 'history from below'. "People's history is a term which might be retrospectively applied to those various attempts to write an archive-based 'history from below' which have played such a large part in the recent revival of English social history. ... Implicitly or explicitly it is oppositional, an alternative to dry as dust scholarship, and history as taught in the schools. But the terms of that opposition are necessarily different in .different epochs and for different modes of work."10 Thus the idea of 'people's history' has, Samuel shows, diverse types of proponents. One finds a liberal bourgeois like J R Green, author of A Short History of the English People (1877), one finds the late nineteenth century practitioners of ethnohistory of mass culture, one finds late nineteenth century East European nationalist historians promoting their people's consciousness in the incipient struggle against an alien government, one finds the 'social romantics' of the late eighteenth century France 'discovering the people* so as to write their history, and one also finds Marxists like A L Morton and E P Thompson and members of the Annales school. Therefore, 'people's history' is neither new nor Left necessarily. Likewise, in Indian historiography the term 'history of the people' is bandied about right, left and centre. Recall, for instance, Sir William Hunter's prefatory statement in his first (1868) historical work, "My business is with the people".11 He meant to underline the distinction, as he conceived it, between the conventional British Indian histories of his days from the kind of social history he proposed to write. In the writings of the nationali&t-minded intelligentsia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries 'history of the people' has a slightly different connotation. The aim was not merely tlie enlargement of the scope of history: the opposition that is posited is not the one Hunter had in mind but that between the rulers and the ruled. Thus, for example, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay writes of the need for the jatiya itihasa of the Bengali people as distinct from the history of the political rulers of Bengal; so does Rabindranath Tagore, except that he talks in terms of India as a whole, not just of the Bengali people.12 A third connotation is carried by the term 'people's history'