Political Mobilization and Identity in Western India, 1934-47 (review)

Analyzing the complexity of why and how diverse rural groups in India engaged in politics, Krishan unearths detailed evidence about the numerous protests and demands, both peaceful and violent, that marked popular activism in the countryside of the Bombay Presidency during the tumultuous fourteen years prior to Indian independence. He also evokes a wide array of linguistic, psychological, and historical models. Political Mobilization thus comprises a micro-study of one rural region that tests the assertions of numerous interdisciplinary macro-theories against his specific evidence.

Political Mobilization advances a progressive approach that takes seriously the diversity of political activism based not just on class but also on "kinship, ethnic, communal, and national identities," each shaped by specific historical contexts (251). Rural collectivities emerge through complex processes, not just through violence. Krishan argues, "The task of a historian is to delineate real historical collectivities or aggregates according to their real historical significance" (92). He therefore explicitly and extensively critiques the early work of the Subaltern Studies Collective for misreading both Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci and the later postmodernist work of this Collective in which "the distinction between the 'historical' and the 'fictional' has been vilified, berated, and censured" (181). In particular, Krishan refutes the works of Hardiman, as well as those of Breman and Omvedt, scholars who have also written extensively about this region during this time period.¹

Rather than synthesize a single historical narrative, Krishan deploys three concurrent central chapters, considering, respectively, peasants, tribals, and dalits (formerly called "untouchables"). Each chapter reveals complex congeries of incidents, protests, demonstrations, and acts of violence by diverse individuals and groups. To complicate the political context further, from 1937 to 1939, the Indian National Congress nominally governed the province, although the British Raj administered it. Hence, supporters of the Congress and rival leaders and activists had conflicting interests with respect to popular agitation. Krishan's final chapter studies "Crowd Vigour and Social Identity" during the Congress-initiated Quit India Movement (1942–1944) and subsequent rural activism. In this chapter, Krishan analyzes how crowds—in particular and in general—form, mobilize, and act. Throughout his book, he intersperses brief evocations of theoretical insights by numerous Euro-American and Indian thinkers.

Political Mobilization offers much to scholars interested in the rich details of popular politics in this region and period, in broad theoretical models drawn from several disciplines, or in the intersections among them. Krishan's deep research into official records, newspapers, transcribed oral accounts by prominent figures, and other sources in India enables him to read "against the grain" and so excavate the motivations and actions of a range of rural men and women. But to appreciate fully Krishan's assertions and conclusions may require some knowledge of the larger arguments of the many thinkers that he evokes as well as of the broader political, social, cultural, and economic contexts of India as a whole, and this region in particular, on the eve of Independence.