Speaking of
Peasants: Essays on Indian History and
Politics in Honor of Walter Hauser
By-
William R. Pinch (ed.)
The
present volume springs out of a festschrift conference 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
Hauser’s 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 authors, 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 ethnographer’s
‘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.
William
R. (Vijay) Pinch
is Professor of History of Wesleyan University.
ISBN 81-7304-746-4 2007 540p. Rs.1195/ Pounds 70
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