‘One has to Rule Oneself’

This chapter focuses on ‘peasant’ (including ‘tribal’) communities in twentieth-century India. They occupied ambiguous and shifting positions in ‘caste’ (varna-jati) hierarchies, and one of the ways in which their politics can be conceptualised is through the prism of ‘caste’ politics. I focus particularly on those peasant groups which claimed a ‘royal’ origin, describing themselves as belonging to the Kshatriya varna and as descendants and kinsmen of Kshatriya rulers. These assertions bolstered their claim to rule themselves, implying both mastery over their individual selves and a collectivised claim to social-political authority. Sometimes they asserted a divine identity and ancestry by deploying a Kshatriya theology. I argue that these peasant communities contributed significantly towards collectivising and democratising notions of rulership, divinity and sovereignty in twentieth-century India. They did this by flexibly combining precolonial South Asian ideas about collective rulership and godhood with Western-origin democratic and socialist ideas. Precolonial-origin community structures were linked by peasant politicians with Western-modern institutional forms to produce hybridised associations. Given that these peasant discourses were generally carried out in regional Indian languages and not in English, and in locally-circulated journals and pamphlets that seldom reached metropolitan elite audiences (and have often become difficult to locate today except in select and scattered public and private archives), the historiographic amnesia from which these discourses have suffered needs urgent remedy

Caste · Democracy · Elite · Peasant · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Sovereignty · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · Indian History and Philosophy · Law · Social and Economic Development in India