FOR AN INDIAN HISTORY OF PEASANT STRUGGLE 5 of non-European societies, to the accepted dogmas of post-Enlightenment European knowledge. Now that there is a much greater eagerness to face up to this evidence as historical material, its very richness forces us to throw up our hands and declare that it is much too complex. Every practising social scientist of India will confess to this feeling of inadequacy and helplessness. For colonial ethnographers, this was only evidence of the orderless melange that was the mysterious Orient, and for colonial administrators additional proof of the historical necessity to impose linearity and order on an ungovernable society. For Indian nationalists, this was evidence of the greatness of the indigenous tradition which was capable, they said, of absorbing diverse social forms into a single unity without destroying the marks of difference. Needless to say, the colonial view tended to emphasise the inherent disorderliness of Indian society and its lack of a unified consciousness, while the nationalists glorified the absorptive capacity without taking notice of the considerable internal struggles which marked the process of absorption. For those of us who face up to this problem today, the feeling of unmanageable complexity is, if we care to think of it, nothing other than the result of the inadequacy of the theoretical apparatus with which we work. Those analytical instruments were fashioned primarily out of the process of understanding historical developments in Europe. When those instruments now meet with the resistance of an intractably complex material, the fault surely is not of the Indian material but of the imported instruments. When the day comes when the vast storehouse of Indian social history will become comprehensible to the scientific consciousness, we will have achieved along the way a fundamental restructuring of the edifice of European social philosophy as it exists today. That too is part of the already ambitious agenda which I have begun to propound. The second point of strength of the Indian material on peasant struggle arises, curiously enough, from an apparent weakness. There is a common tendency to regard the evidence of open revolts of the peasantry in India as insignificant when compared to the historical experience of medieval Europe or to that of neighbouring China. One must, however, be careful in judging the nature of this insufficiency. An American scholar, for instance, has recently declared that a history of peasant insurgency in India is a non-starter because, he says, there has never been a peasant revolt in India which was anything more than local and brief.1 The fact is, first of all, that the number of such 'local* revolts is quite considerable, and from about the seventeenth century right through the period of British rule the accounts of several hundred peasant revolts from all over the country exist in the historical records. Second, what appears to be bnly 'localised* in the context of a vast country like India may often be found to involve a territory and a rebel population larger than those in even the most