Social and Political Movements 1885–1905

Abstract

Our survey so far of the structure of colonial political and economic domination has indicated the roots of numerous conflicts—between imperialism and most sections of the Indian people, as well as between various groups or classes within Indian society itself. What must be explored now are the ways in which these contradictions surfaced in the life and thought and activities of our people, and here the already-mentioned major lag in social history in the proper sense of that term immediately creates a major problem. A good deal has been written about the Western-educated intelligentsia, a group undoubtedly crucial but still quantitatively minute, and there exists considerable anthropological and sociological literature in the form of studies of particular tribes, villages and castes. But there is very little so far in the way of rounded general studies of major social groups at even a regional level, no real history of zamindars or peasants, agricultural labourers or artisans, industrial workers or bourgeois elements, analysing the changes both in their conditions of living and in their consciousness. This crucial gap leaves the history of political movements and particularly of nationalism in something like a vacuum, and tends to make such history essentially a study from the top downwards.