70 SOCIAL SCIENTIST entire collection is thus a useful aid for the reader to understand the nature of the renaissance in India generally and in Kerala particularly. RENAISSANCE A PRODUCT OF POPULAR REVOLTS In the preface to the collection, the author takes up cudgels against the theory that the 19th Century Renaissance was the prelude to modern nationalism. Says he: "Colonialism, by selectively appropriating and expropriating the past, tended to privilege the present and to fetishise the future. Overcoming the debilities of tradition and impediments of subjection therefore was a necessary prerequisite for ushering in a new order which, among other things, included the formation of a nation-state. The cultural and ideological struggles in colonial India, expressed through a variety of socio-cultural movements and individual initiatives, were directed towards its realisation. This process however was not a uni-linear and undistinguished progression; it was riven with contraditions, contentions and ruptures. The Cultural-Intellectual 'renaissance' did not necessarily merge with nationalism, nor was the latter a logical outcome of the former. Yet, the social consciousness generated by intellectual-cultural endeavours was integral to the process of the nation in the making." (Emphasis added.) While generally agreeing with this assessment, this reviewer is of the opinion that it is inadequate. It does not seize the link between the pre-renaissance popular resistance against British rule, pointing out its strong and weak points and explaining how the renaissance movement sought to and did remove the weaknesses in the earlier-popular resistance to imperialism. Coming to Kerala in particular, the nature of popular resistance to British imperialism and Jenmi Landlordism, the author himself in his writings on peasant protests and revolts in Malabar has brought out the fact that the widespread Malabar Rebellion in 1921 was the culmination of a series of militant actions resorted to by the Mopla peasants of Malabar against "lord and state." Such revolts had, in fact, taken place in all parts of the country which culminated in the most coordinated anti-British National Revolt of the Indian people in the latter .half of the 1850s. The evaluation of these revolts would show that the ideology which gave rise to the renaissance was preceded by—in fact based on—the earlier spontaneous revolt of the Indian people against British imperialism. Volumes written by a number of historians show that peasant revolts had broken out immediately after the British established their rule in one part of India after the other, and finally culminated in the Sepoy Mutiny and National Revolt of the 1850s. It would therefore be factually incorrect to say, as the author does, that it was the