4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST task is to ground one's historical consciousness in the immanent forms of social development that run through Indian history and from that standpoint to engage our colonial experience in a process of struggle— negating and superseding that experience by appropriating it on one's own terms. This agenda implies the relegation of the universal categories of social formations into a temporary state of suspension, or rather a state of unresolved tension. But this again is a task that is fundamental to the historian's practice. The relation between history and the theoretical disciplines of the social sciences is necessarily one where the structural neatness of the latter is constantly disturbed and refashioned by the intransigent material of the former. My plea, then, is also' one which calls for the historian to take up his or her proper role as agent provocateur among social scientists. THE POTENTIAL RICHNESS OF AN INDIAN HISTORY OF PEASANT STRUGGLE A calumny was spread by European writers on India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the effect that because of the lack of a historical consciousness among Indians, there existed next to no material on Indian history, save a few court chronicles, hagiographies and genealogical tables of questionable veracity. This misrepresentation ought not to be attributed solely to the malicious intentions of the colonial mind to malign the character of a conquered people. There were more profound difficulties with the very conception of history as a form of knowledge in post-Enlightenment Europe. Judged from the European standpoint, the overwhelming mass of material out of which the institutions and practices of social relations among the Indian people were fashioned, and which survived as palpable evidence of a living past, was simply not recognised as valid historical material. All evidence which did not fit into the linear order of progression of State-forms defined by principalities, kingdoms and empires was relegated to the exotic, timeless domain of Indian ethnology, where history played only a marginal role. We now know that the situation is quite the opposite. The variety of structural forms of social relations in India, the intricacy of their interconnections, the multiple layers and degrees of differentiation, the ideological forms of identity and difference and the long course of the historical evolution of these forms through social struggle are stamped on the living beliefs and practices of the people. In its sheer vastness and intricacy, this material is incomparably richer than what is contained in the received histories of Europe, a fact which the efflorescence of modern anthropology in the period after World War II has brought home to the European consciousness. In fact, the recent attempt to exhume a 'popular history' of Europe from the rubble of a dead past has been provoked precisely by this challenge thrown by the new sciences of anthropology and linguistics, working on the material