Author Description

Review "Oxford University Press, Delhi, has become the foremost scholarly publisher in India and one of the leading pubishers of serious works on India worldwide...This excellent volume edited by Gyan Prakash focuses on the issues, controversies, problems involved with rural laborers as historians havestudied them from the 1950s to the present."--Labor History Product Description The editor has selected the key essays which show major themes that have dominated the historiography of India's rural labor. A variety of perspectives--economic, cultural, demographic, taxonomic, political, colonial, nationalistic--are either presented or extensively commented on. In keepingwith the format of this series, a detailed introduction discusses how and why the study of agricultural laborers came into existence, examining shifts in perspective and changes in the questions asked. The volume shows how historical information on labor was gathered by British administrators andcensus operations, the uses to which this was put by nationalist writers, the revisions and additions to this by contemporary economic historians, and the various new perspectives from which we can now view peasants and their world.