Speaking of peasants : essays on Indian history and politics in honor of Walter Hauser

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Speaking of peasants : essays on Indian history and politics in honor of Walter Hauser

edited by William R. Pinch

Manohar, 2008

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Summary: Transcript of papers presented during the Hauserfest held in honor of Walter Hauser, b. 1927, professor of history at the University of Virginia; seminar held from May 23-25, 1997 at the Center for South Asian Studies, University of Virginia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [489]-495) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

The present volume springs out of a festschrift confernece to honor the career of Walter Hauser, professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia and pioneer scholar in the study of Indian peasant movements. Because Hausers work focuses on Bihar and the peasant leader, Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, some of the authors, such as the late Arvind Narayan Das, Christopher Hill, and Sho Kuwajima, are concerned directly with peasant politics in Bihar. Other authors, such as Harry Blair, Majid Siddiqi, Harold Gould, and the late James R. Hagen, constrast agrarian history and politics in Bihar to other parts of India. A third group, including Stuart Corbridge, Ron Herring, and Ruhi Grover, investigate related questions in agrarian history and politics from regions formally outside of Bihar. A fourth group of authors, including Peter Robb, Ajay Skaria, and William R. Pinch, examine culture, religion, and meaning that inform (and are informed by) peasant politics. A fifth set of authros, Frederick H. Damon, Peter Gottschalk, and Mathew Schmalz, provide ethnographic context. Damon takes readers from Bihar to Melanesia and many points in between, with a focus on ethno-botany over three millennia; Gottschalk and Schmalz provide a closely detailed examination of a Bihari village, focusing in particular on the problem of religion. Importantly, these authors structure their investigations around a reversal of the ethnographers gaze. In this spirit of reflexive reversal, the volume concludes with a reflection on the project of South Asian studies in the United States by Hauser himself, focusing on (but not limited to) his experiences at the University of Virginia.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction: Walter & Friends
  • From Law to Rights: The Impact of the Colonial State on Peasant Protest in Bihar
  • Power, Agrarian Structure, & Peasant Mobilization in Modern India
  • Gandhi, Marx, & Charan Singh: Class & Gemeinschaft in Peasant Mobilization
  • Bhakti & British Empire
  • The Raw & the Simmered: Environmental Contexts of Food & Agrarian Relations in the Gangetic Plain
  • Of Nature & Nurture: Sedentary Agriculture & the 'Wandering Tribes' of Jharkhand
  • Swami & Friends: Sahajanand Saraswati & Those Who Refuse to Let the Past of Bihar's Peasant Movements Become History
  • The Reora Satyagraha (1939): Its Contemporary Relevance
  • A Stranger's View of Bihar: Rethinking Religion' & Production'
  • From 'Fanaticism' to Power: The Deep Roots of Kerala's Agrarian Exceptionalism
  • Cultures of Resistance or Commerce? Re-examining Timber Use in the Himalayan Punjab, 1850-1925
  • Homeless in Gujarat & India: On the Curious Love of Indulal Yagnik
  • Competing Inequalities: The Scheduled Tribes & the Reservations System in Jharkhand
  • Success & Failure in Rural Development: Bihar, Bangladesh & Maharashtra in the Late 1980s
  • Bihar via 'A Virtual Village'
  • Bibliography of Walter Hauser
  • Index.

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