Fans pick 100 books like Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India

Willem van Schendel is one of those first few names who are the authority on Bengal Borderland. Schendel's interest in the Bengal Borderland and Bangladesh has been persistent for decades.

This particular volume is significant because the author focused on the complex and intertwined relationship between border-making in the region and the historical perpetuation of 1947. The book helps one to see how the Partition, far from being an event from the past, has yet been unfolding in the lands and lives of people living there. I consider it to be an intervention of both Partition studies and Borderland studies.

A historian by training, Schendel has taken his methodological venture into the realm of anthropology, and his empirical research reciprocated the political history with a rich social corpus.

This book by Joya Chatterji is a path-breaking one, as it posed a challenge against the hegemonic narratives dominant in the 1947 Partition studies to date.

Before Chatterji's work, Partition studies largely agreed upon the fact that apart from the British, the only home-grown villain behind the communal plot of Partition was the Muslim League and its leadership. Scholars in the field also agreed that the Indian National Congress was a secular platform.

Chatterji, however, argues that in the case of Bengal, the upper-class Hindu Bhadraloks were against the Partition in 1905. However, this same section of people in 1947 went for Partition along the communal line. And Congress, besides Hindu Mahasabha, had taken up communal politics.

This book is probably among the first ones written by a Pakistani author on the history of the 1971 war, aka Liberation War of Bangladesh, which thrilled me as a reader. It challenges not only the statist-nationalist accounts of Pakistan but those from India and Bangladesh as well.

Anam, the author, accomplished commendable work by talking to people across the cartographies and bringing up diverse and contradictory perspectives about the pretexts and events of 1971-related politics. While after all these years, both the state and society of Pakistan and Bangladesh remained taboo to each other, such a venture appears to be the silver lining of knowledge sharing between the entities in the two territories.

Unsettling for the conformists, nationalists, and statists, this piece of work is a must-read for everyone interested in the region.

Delwar Hussein, an anthropologist, conducted his research along the north-eastern borderline of Bangladesh. He has been fascinating in depicting the transformation of the borderland from a site of evolving nation-states to the catchment area of cross-border neoliberal capitalism.

Hussein crafted the minute details of how the cement factory had changed the communities, lives, and livelihoods at that margin. The marginality of the Borderlanders is central in this work; however, as often, Borderland studies surprise us, this book also talks about opportunities and hopes. It would enable its readers to look into the postcolonial nation-states with an unorthodox approach.

McNamara’s wonderful account shows how communities in Oaxaca understood military service as both a duty to their region, to their people, and as a way to connect to the wider national project and specific presidents. Fighting for the National Guard created a different stake in Mexico and in political life, and the ways that Zapotec peasants remembered this gives new insights into participatory political culture. 

I really appreciate this book because it explains how medieval people thought about the grossly unequal society they inhabited and how they tried to reconcile its obvious injustices with Christian morality.

I particularly like how it shows peasants’ criticism of the medieval idea of society as being composed of Three Orders: those who fought (the knights and nobles), those who prayed (monks and priests), and those who worked (peasants).

The Three Orders idea supposedly justified the way that nobles and clerics profited from peasant labor, but peasants sometimes threw it back at them, arguing that if the nobles were defeated in war or the Church was full of hypocrites, then the peasants really didn’t owe them anything. It’s a fair argument.

Another beautifully written book recounting the first popular uprising in English history. Would the revolt even have occurred without the Black Death and the subsequent upheaval caused by labor shortages, rising wages, population migrations? The author subsequently draws similarities between 1381 and contemporary conditions, making a compelling case for the axiom: history often rhymes. (When promoting American Independence, Thomas Paine championed the rebels, as did supporters of the French Revolution.) I particularly enjoyed delving into the life of the radical priest, John Ball, whose (largely fictional) voice continues to inspire those who ask, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”

A tremendous piece of scholarship by American Ralph Thaxton, looking at a specific village during the late 1950s and early 1960s as it experienced the great famines. This shows the impact of that tragedy on everyday Chinese lives, and the ways in which the suffering of that period was to overshadow so much of what happened afterward. Beautifully written, with wonderful deployment of other scholarship, an exceptional work, and one that is part of a trilogy that takes the story forwards in the late 1960s.

Those who know the field of religious violence may find my choice of Ashis Nandy’s book of essays to be a peculiar one since it deals with a variety of issues besides religious violence. But one of his essays, “The Discrete Charms of Indian Terrorists,” is worth the price of the book. In it, Nandy describes the remarkably civil behavior of young Sikh activists who hijacked an Indian plane in the 1980s. He then goes on to disagree with Gandhi that terrorism necessarily absolutizes a conflict, and he rejects the common perspective, especially in the West, that terrorism is always evil. Though Nandy’s analysis does not fit all, or perhaps most, instances of religion-related terrorism it makes us reconsider our assumptions about the use of violence in certain situations.

Tagore’s novel, though set in the same time period as Forster’s, invited me into a very different India—the interior of a great, mysterious mansion and the minds and hearts of the women who live there, especially Bimala, the heroine. It helped me understand the freedom movement that was taking shape against the British, the desire of women to be part of this adventure, and the corruption and greed that crept in among the patriots. It’s a coming-of-age story and a love story, too.