SUBALTERN CONSCIOUSNESS AND POPULISM 19
underrate the value of other studies. Most of them have brought to light enormous source material which otherwise would have remained unknown to the present generation of social scientists. Their accounts are the most authentic reconstructions of the peasant revolts in India in the 1920s and 1930s, but most of them belong basically to narrative history or ethnography. Some of them, like Siddiqi, Pandey and Kapil Kumar, do identify and probe the historical conditions that facilitated the progressive development of consciousness of the insurgent peasantry or tribals who were the main actors of those movements. However, barring exceptions, such studies seldom transcend specificity and are rarely inclined to get into questions of theory and generality as if they are irrelevant to the history and sociology of social movements.
Only one example of this tendency should suffice to stress the point. Suresh Singh's work16 on the Birsa Munda movement, which has produced abundant evidence of the strong millenarian elements in the Birsaite movement, makes no reference to the concept of 'millenium' at all.17 To a certain extent, Stephen Fuch's study on the Indian aboriginals has gone into the millenarian movements among Indian tribals under the influence of Christianity, but only superficially. Similarly, the notions of 'primitive rebels' and 'social banditry' introduced by Eric Hobsbawm,18 have not been used fruitfully by any researcher of tribal and peasant revolts or insurgencies until Ranajit Guha and his colleagues launched the 'subaltern studies' approach in a big way. Getting immersed in the depths of the micro-level reality and not rising above it in order to enter the realm of theorisation and conceptualisation was the tendency characteristic of the mainstream sociology and social anthropology as well as of history and ethnography that we in India received as a part of the imperialist legacy for the social sciences. The need to identify and evaluate the relevance of such paradigms, at least the neglected ones, is therefore an urgent task that cannot be overemphasised.
The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to only two of the potentially useful analytical paradigms for studying tribal/ethnic movements or peasant revolts in India. These approaches have unfortunately remained neglected at least by the mainstream sociology and social anthropology in India. It is high time we took cognizance of them and entered into paradigmatic dialogue.
SUBALTERN STUDIES
An important approach to the study of tribal/peasant movements has been enunciated by Ranajit Guha and his historian colleagues in India and abroad. Broadly designated as 'subaltern historiography', this approach seeks to restore a balance by highlighting the role of the politics of the people as against elite politics played in Indian history. Thus, 'elite* and 'people' are viewed as binary domains to constitute a structural dichotomy. Adherents to this approach argue that the elitist historiography, whether of the neo-colonialist or of the neo-