16 SOCIAL SCIENTIST To push the point a little further, we could argue that it is always the spectre of an open rebellion by the peasantry which haunts the consciousness of the dominant classes in agrarian societies and shapes and modifies their forms of exercise of domination. This was true of the colonial State in the period of British rule in India, just as it is true today, notwithstanding the establishment of universal adult franchise. Of course, the nature and forms of domination of peasants have changed quite fundamentally in the last hundred years or so. The older forms of feudal extraction and ties of bondage have been replaced to a large extent by new forms of extraction mediated through the mechanisms of the market and of fiscal policies. These changes themselves have not come about solely through reforms at the top; a whole series of peasant struggles from the days of colonial rule have acted upon the structures of domination in order to change and modify them. Even the new political institutions of representative government, struggling to give political form to the material of social relations of a large agrarian country, are themselves being shaped into figures that would be unrecognisable in the liberal democracies of the West. To give one example, the phenomenon of massive and uniform swings in the vote across large regions, which has been a characteristic of several recent elections in India, is of a magnitude and geographical spread unknown in Western liberal democracies and inexplicable in terms of the normal criteria of voting behaviour. Do we see in this the form of an insurgent peasant consciousness which, having learnt in its own way the mechanisms of the new systems of power, is now expressing itself through entirely novel methods of political action? An Indian history of peasant struggle will tell us a great deal more than simply the story of medieval peasant rebellions. For it is a history which constitutes our living and active present. It is a history which will tell us why when peasants identified the colonial State as their enemy, as they did in 1857 or 1942, they could be so much more radical and thoroughgoing in their opposition than their more enlightened compatriots. It is a history which will educate those of us who claim to be their educators. Indeed, an Indian history of peasant struggle is a fundamental part of the real history of our people; the task is for the Indian historian to perceive in this a consciousness of his own self. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Michael Adas, 'From Avoidance to Confrontation: Peasant Politics in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23, 2, 1981, pp. 217-47. 2. Irfan Habib, 'The Peasant in Indian History', Social Scientist, 11, 3, March 1983, pp. 21-64. 3. David Hardiman, Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1984; Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh, 1926-34,