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HIRA SINGH, Colonial Hegemony and Popular Resistance: Princes, Peasants, and Paramount Power. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press Inc., 1998. (Originally published by Sage Publications, New Delhi, India.)
This feisty book, written from a Marxist perspective, is a study of the state of Rajasthan in India both before and during British colonialism. It argues, contrary to much received wisdom, that the traditional Rajasthan society was feudal, that the British were unable to transform it to capitalism, and that it was class conflict stemming from its feudal relations of production that ultimately overthrew it. While covering a range of theoretical issues, the book is deeply empirically grounded, drawing for evidence on extensive archival records and on numerous extended interviews carried out by the author with former feudal landlords and with peasants and activists in the peasant movements that spread through Rajasthan from the 1920s to independence.
While the case of Rajasthan may seem a narrow subject, unimportant to most sociologists, in fact the book is well worth examining, since it bears, directly or indirectly, on several theoretical topics critical for our understanding of social change and societal functioning, and it does so self-consciously and rigorously. Among these are the nature of state and society in non-Western societies, the causes of economic development and underdevelopment, the impact of Western colonialism on the now poor countries, and the causes and role of peasant movements in social change.
The book takes its problematic in part from the partly Marxistderived question of where India was heading prior to British colonialism: was it entrained to capitalist economic development, or was the traditional social system stagnant, needing to be broken open by the external force of British colonialism before economic progress could occur, as Marx seemed to argue in two famous newspaper articles in the New York Daily Tribune? This question is intimately related, for Marxists, to the question of whether traditional India was...