2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
running Social Scientist does have certain provisional views on the efforts of the 'subaltern* historians, as it has, and must have, on a host of other subjects. But these working ideas, which a team like ours must necessarily have on diverse subjects, do not ceratainly amount in any specific instance to a school of thought within any particular discipline; and inthe pages that follow it is not necessarily these ideas which are articulated. As readers will notice, each young scholar who has contributed to the current number has reacted to a specific article in the 'subaltern* volumes. We have brought these pieces together because we as a journal would like to see a good deal more of discussion on the issues being raised by the 'subaltern* historians, who incidentally, do not themselves constitute a homogenous set.
The article by K.K. Sharma, documenting the stance of the Congress in the context of the acute peasant distress and discontent in Biharin the early 1930s, shows how the Congress acted on the whole as a restraining influence on the peasantry, rather than as an instigator of peasant agitations, as contemporary official circles often charged. The effects of the DEpression, combined with those of natural calamities, brought acute distress to large sections of the Bihar peasantry during 1930-32. While the Congress on the one hand had to reckon with grass-root peasant militancy, and could not turn its back on peasant demands, on the other hand the strong links it had forged with the rural gentry, the fact that high-caste landlords were well represented in its provincial leadership,the desire on its part to "restore and maintain cordial relations between the landlords and the tenants", and its overall insistence on non-violence meant a curbing of peasant militancy, an attempt at subordinating the social and economic demands of the peasantry to the national cause as perceived by it. While an explanation of the fact that it "managed to get the support of this class without doing anything concrete for them" would continue to demand the historian's attention, the documentation of its manoeuvring should be of interest to the readers.