Revisiting rebellion, peasantry and the limits of Gandhian historiography
A question that comes up quite frequently, sometimes at the drop of a hat, not only in historical discourse but also in popular discussions, from restaurants, cafeterias to coffee-table rendezvous, is how India got its independence: whether through a series of non-violent movements within the overarching conceptual construct of Satyagraha devised by Gandhi’s intellectual craftsmanship, or whether it was because the people of the Indian subcontinent rose against the British Raj and fought against the superstructure of imperialism violently.
A straightforward answer to this question is not always feasible. In fact, it is not possible at all, because the Indian National Movement (INM) against British (European) imperialism was a combination of both violent and non-violent means.
In this context, another issue that arises concerns the vast number of peasants or farmers on the Indian subcontinent; did they ever rise in unison, in violent insurrection against the anthropomorphic Company Bahadur or, for that matter, the British Raj?
Interestingly, if we go through the book, or rather the magnum opus, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, by Barrington Moore Jr., then perhaps we would be intellectually coerced into believing that Indian peasants comprised a docile group of individuals wrapped up in an age-old caste system and hence could never muster either the courage or the consciousness to break the shackles of the caste structure to rise against foreign colonial oppression.
As Moore opines, for the Indian peasantry, which is indubitably a large agricultural proletariat, foreign oppression was just a change at the top of the socio-economic superstructure, which hardly mattered to the peasantry, as the medieval Mughal taxation structure was replaced by the British system whereas the base at the village level remained almost unchanged, with the village headman or the Chaudhuri, and the concomitant caste system, ruling the roost.
This analysis of Barrington Moore Jr., however convincing it might appear on paper, has serious flaws and limitations. Nevertheless, going beyond Moore’s hypothesis that caste was the inhibiting, or rather suppressing, factor behind the lack of any popular peasant uprising in India, a plausible counter-argument, or antithesis, can always be found in the uprising of 1857 as a potent example. It is an irrefragable proposition that in the 1857 upheaval, the soldier-peasant combination rose in arms, and in fact, if we endorse the hypothesis of Eric Stokes, the soldier was none other than a peasant in arms, because a substantial part of the Bengal Army, which revolted against Company Bahadur, had its roots in the peasant households of Awadh.
Interestingly, in the Indian subcontinent, in the middle of the nineteenth century, there was hardly any Industrial Revolution of the kind that had already occurred in Europe. In fact, it is not just the Industrial Revolution that can be cited as the revolutionary fulcrum. Any sort of revolutionary progress along the lines of industrialisation could hardly have germinated in the Indian subcontinent without the requisite backdrop of Enlightenment thought, preceded by the Renaissance. The Bengal, or Indian, Renaissance, for that matter, ushered in from around the 1820s onwards, with Rammohun Roy et al. as pioneers, whereas the European Renaissance had sprouted much earlier in the Italian peninsula in the fourteenth century, when, astonishingly, around 1378, as sociologist Jack A. Goldstone notes, wool workers rose in revolt in Florence.
Since the seventeenth century, coupled with the thought processes of the Enlightenment, commencing with the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, gradually peaking with the ideas of the state propounded by the Englishman Thomas Hobbes, and finally culminating in the radicalised conception of the general will articulated by Geneva-born Jean-Jacques Rousseau—Europe had already encountered the revolutionary pangs of the French prototype, which not only thundered between 1789 and 1794, but repeatedly resurfaced in the 1830s and 1848, haunting the sceptres of Europe’s monarchs. These rulers, resting on the shoulders of the police state so craftily constructed by that “more than a diplomat”, Metternich, attempted to revert to a political equilibrium that was being vigorously disturbed by the people, both liberals and radicals alike, as suggested by Cambridge professor Christopher Clark in his Baillie Gifford Prize-shortlisted book Revolutionary Spring.
The Indian subcontinent hardly had a Newton or a Descartes in the seventeenth century, indeed, not even in the nineteenth century. The Mughal superstructure had ingurgitated excess wealth, a phenomenon correctly analysed by Moore—by extracting resources from the peasantry through the village ecosystem, yet this wealth was never meaningfully reinvested into the system for its improvement. Consequently, no significant innovation in agrarian practices occurred in the subcontinent between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Moreover, the arts and sciences of warfare, metallurgy and technology as a whole, were on the decline, to say the least. By contrast, European methodologies of warfare had been upping the ante since the fifteenth century—whether in small arms, artillery, or the concept of volley-firing—while simultaneously building robust military institutions.
The biggest difference, or rather the greatest gulf, that emerged between Europe and the Indian subcontinent from the sixteenth century onwards was the fact that the latter lacked a Renaissance-backed Enlightenment era, unlike Europe. If we consider the 1857 uprising in this context, it becomes evident that the subcontinent lacked a preceding intellectual ambience of revolutionary fervour, which Europe undeniably possessed. Since the French Revolution of 1787-94, Europe had been immersed in war, revolution, constitution-writing, and sustained engagement with the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, national workshops, and much more. Europe witnessed a series of revolutions from 1789 onwards, most emanating from France, beginning with the fall of the Bastille in Paris on that fateful 14 July, followed by the indiscriminate rolling of heads under the guillotine during the Reign of Terror, whose chief architect was Robespierre—himself deeply influenced by Rousseauism and the idea of the general will.
Nonetheless, it was the Committee of Public Safety, led by Robespierre, Danton and Jean-Paul Marat, through its Reign of Terror in 1793-94, that not only unleashed proto-socialist mechanisms of rationing to rein in inflation, but also successfully navigated the war imposed on France by its conservative and monarchical neighbours, refusing to buckle under military pressure and instead galvanising the masses through conscription. This is what a farmer-turned-soldier, Joseph-Louis-Gabriel-Noël, had to say: “It is we who must attack to send shivers down the tyrants’ spines and free enslaved peoples.” [Linda Colley, The Gun, the Ship & the Pen, p. 164]
The upshot is that by the end of the eighteenth century in France and America, if not across Europe, the ideological moorings of liberty and freedom were firmly entrenched in the mental universe of the ordinary peasant. This is not to suggest that such a spirit was entirely absent from the Indian peasantry in the eighteenth century ascertaining that would require deeper archival research, but it is undeniable that the late eighteenth-century subcontinent did witness rebelliousness and uprisings, often articulated through princely states and the Marathas.
By the close of the eighteenth century, the concepts of national wars, if not total wars, had begun to emerge from Europe’s revolutionary epicentre, France, famously described by Clemens von Metternich that conservative champion of the political status quo adept at wielding the instruments of the police state as a place where “when France sneezes, the entire Europe catches cold”. Nirad C. Chaudhuri similarly recounts the euphoria and fascination with France, Paris and Napoleon that prevailed among Bengalis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The regime of Napoleon Bonaparte was not merely an arc bridging the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it was far more consequential. One of the most celebrated children of the Revolution of 1789-94, Napoleon carried the revolution’s outcomes across Europe and, in the process, transformed land warfare—though he faltered in naval strategy. The Indian subcontinent, however, lacked a ‘Napoleon’ at that critical juncture. Mahadaji Scindia or the Haidar–Tipu combination undoubtedly unsettled the British with their sophisticated military tactics at Wadgaon and Pollilur respectively, yet the decisive blow to the Raj remained elusive.
Post-Napoleonic Europe attempted to restore monarchy to its pre-1789 avatar, a historically anachronistic endeavour. The institution of monarchy was inevitably challenged, and this challenge increasingly emanated from the people themselves. After 1815, particularly in 1830 and culminating in the leftist, student-led intellectual uprisings of 1848, Europe was engulfed in popular revolts, even though these were eventually suppressed by the armed forces of monarchical and centralised autocratic regimes. Remarkably, nearly 50 European countries were affected by the upheavals of 1848.
Barely a decade later, the 1857 uprising in the Indian subcontinent erupted, a truly humongous upheaval marked by revolutionary fervour directed not only against Company rule but against foreign imperialism per se.
No scholarly work can downplay the contribution of the 1857 uprising. Civilians, soldiers and peasants participated in large numbers, even though the revolt witnessed instances of unabashed violence and bloodshed. Yet such excesses are intrinsic to any major uprising or jacquerie. France itself takes pride in its peasant jacqueries from the mid-fourteenth century onwards and the later Fronde. Can we forget that approximately 50,000 people were guillotined in Paris during the less-than-one-year Reign of Terror? When combined with the more than one million deaths during the Napoleonic Wars between 1795 and 1815, the violence of 1857, whether at Satichaura Ghat in Kanpur or elsewhere, appears comparatively modest.
One need only recall Napoleon’s disastrous Russian expedition of 1812, in which nearly 700,000 soldiers from across Europe participated in the Grande Armée, of whom only a fraction survived the retreat.
At this juncture, my personal bias enters the discussion in my assessment of one of India’s most distinguished postcolonial historians, Ranajit Guha, who passed away in 2024 near Vienna. If there were a Nobel Prize for History, Guha would richly deserve it. He writes with conviction: “It is the study of this historic failure of the nation to come to its own… which constitutes the central problematic of the historiography of colonial India.” (Partha Chatterjee ed., The Small Voice of History [SVOH], p. 193)
The 1857 uprising stands in contrast to this failure: peasants and civilians fought shoulder to shoulder with soldiers who themselves were drawn from the peasantry. Beyond 1857, the subcontinent witnessed numerous peasant-tribal uprisings against British rule. To marginalise the contributions of Adivasis by reducing these movements to purely local disturbances constitutes a serious historiographical error.
As Guha observes: “Insurgency, in other words, was a motivated and conscious undertaking on the part of the rural masses.” (p. 195, SVOH) He sharply criticises historiography that portrays peasant revolts as spontaneous outbursts, instead emphasising their political consciousness. (pp. 194–196, SVOH)
Corroborating Guha’s thesis, Kathleen Gough, in her 1974 Economic & Political Weekly article, identifies 77 peasant revolts over a span of two centuries, ranging from the waning Mughal period through the entirety of British rule. Around 30 of these involved tens of thousands of peasants, while 12 mobilised hundreds of thousands. Barrington Moore Jr.’s thesis collapses under the weight of this empirical evidence.
The confrontations between Indians and Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries testify that violence was a crucial instrument in the struggle against imperial domination. Even after the de-weaponisation that followed 1857, violent resistance did not disappear; it was instead marginalised by nationalist and postcolonial historiography, which privileged Gandhian Satyagraha.
This marginalisation is evident in the ideological contest between Gandhi and Pulin Das, founder of the Dhaka-based Anushilan Samity. Gandhi urged Pulin Das to embrace non-violence, arguing that revolution would result in bloodshed and suffering. Pulin Das countered that colonial rule itself inflicted starvation, malnutrition and cruelty on millions. Violence, he argued, was a means to end systemic violence.
India attained independence two years after the Second World War and five years after Gandhi’s “Do or Die” call during the Quit India Movement, an agitation that soon lost its non-violent momentum and was overtaken by underground resistance led by Ram Manohar Lohia and others. Even Gandhi eventually refrained from condemning retaliatory violence against British repression.
The trials of the Indian National Army, initially led by Rashbehari Bose and later by Subhas Chandra Bose, ignited nationalist fervour across the subcontinent. Naval mutinies followed, with segments of the Air Force also rebelling. These developments profoundly shook British authority.
The Indian Independence Bill passed by the British Parliament was thus the cumulative outcome of centuries of resistance—from Tantiya Tope and Savarkar to Khudiram Bose, Benoy, Badal and Dinesh, Mahendra Pratap and Udham Singh, among countless others.
Historical narratives must therefore be reconfigured. The philosophy of violence and just war against colonial oppression deserves parity, if not prominence, alongside non-violence. The sustained privileging of non-violence has distorted historical understanding and obscured the legitimacy of armed resistance.
Every major liberation struggle of the modern world—American, French, Russian, Chinese or Vietnamese—was forged through violence. India, too, possessed a tradition of just violence. It is time historiography acknowledged this truth honestly.
It is high time that the ‘non-violence’ of violence is discarded altogether.
(Dr Uddipan Mukherjee is an Indian Ordnance Factories Service officer. He is presently posted in Gun and Shell Factory in Kolkata. He writes on insurgency, history, warfare and administration)
