114 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Even in Stoke' s rigorous work, diversity of response is explained purely in terms of magnate or 'village elite'. In The Peasant and the Raj the leaders and the aristocracy seem to react to the political vacuum within broadly defined caste and communal groups. Though in The Peasant Armed (published after his death) Stokes seems to move away from caste as the basic unit of analysis to 'dharra' (multi-caste faction); even here the tendency to explain the Revolt remains in terms of the economic impact of British rule on the magnates and elites of the 'dharras' .5 There has been little attempt to understand the thoughts and actions of thousands of ordinary non-elite villagers who rose on such a considerable scale. Even in the works, for instance, that of S.B. Chaudhuri, where people do come into the picture, there is a tendency to treat them as automatic responders to the objective changes brought about by British rule, or as a passive or semi-passive mass that was activated by the mobilization efforts of the leaders. There was no real attempt to study the vital elements of popular perception of grievances and of the ways in which people worked out such perceptions and gave meanings to them in terms of their own cultural codes, symbols and value systems. Only in the last decade or so, as a part of the world wide trend of 'history from beloV , there has been a true shift in perspective and as a result aspects of autonomous popular consciousness and action during the Revolt of 1857 has started receiving greater attention. Rudrangshu Mukherjee in his work on 1857 in Awadh has shown howthe influx of colonialist policies upset the moral economy of the peasant world; how the complementarity of the taluqdar-presant relationships, where inequality was 'circumscribed by custom and mediated by various forms of beneficience' , was disrupted by alien colonialist operations with shocking repercussions on the ethical and normative visions of the peasants; and howthe Awadh issue acquired the status of an ideology in the eyes of the inhabitants of the region - all of this underlining his vital conclusion that the issue was 'created in the minds of various sections of population in terms of notions of traditional loyalty and prestige' .6 Ranajit Guha in his pathbreaking work on peasant insurgency has discussed 1857 in some detail to show how the peasants could often act as the subjects and makers of their own history, how they could exhibit an autonomy in perception and action divorced from the aims and interests of their leaders of the ruling class, and how they worked out their response in terms of their own language and ideas of solidarity, transmission and mobilization.7