Author Description

A new printing of a volume which has influenced many scholars, and has often been adopted as a text for teaching, this book of essays delves deeply into specific cases, and questions the meanings of familiar terms and categories. The view of India which they contain is in many senses radical, but also reinforced by recent research. The central issue is how rural India related to the wider world under foreign rule. This raises matters of lively and continuing debate--such as colonial impact and possible continuities from pre-colonial times, the meanings of property, markets and "modernization," the extent of rural autonomy, and the degree of conceptual and practical equivalence between the local and the universal. Land and power are the major subjects of the book, but it also pursues issues of disease (the plague), politics and religion (Muslims in the Punjab), and literature (Tarashankar Banerjee).