By

Editor, Shahid Amin, Tridip Suhrud, Megha Todi

Item Type

Paperback (Book)

Bound Volume

volume 1

Serial

15445

Publisher

National Archives of India, New Delhi; Navajivan Trust, Ahmedabad

Description

lxv, 307 p.; ill., 24 cm.

ISBN / ISSN No.

9788194921073

Subject

1. Politics and goverment; 2. Indigo industry; 3. Mahatma Gandhi; 4. Indian Peasants; 5. Champaran, Bihar; 6. Colonialism

Summay

Gandhi arrived in Champaran, Bihar, in April 1917, to inquire into the conditions of peasants growing indigo for European planters. For this, he required his local associates to go out and record what the peasants had to say about their plight. The enthusiasm generated by this novel move resulted in a vast storehouse of peasant-speak, untouched by scholars so far. Translated on the spot from local Bhojpuri into English, these remarkable first-person narratives, preserved in India's National Archives, have now been edited with explanatory notes by Shahid Amin, Tridip Suhrud and Megha Todi. ‘Thumb Printed’ is a rare collection of what ordinary peasants experienced, recalled, and authenticated, by affixing their thumb-impressions as a sign of veracity. When peasants speak, an entire world speaks. The fine weave of the stories in this volume enables us to visualize these peasants working the indigo fields in flesh and blood, tilling, weeding, watering, carting their indigo crop to factories, getting shortchanged, fined … literally pilloried and beaten into submission. An exemplary work of scholarship and editorial craft, this volume would be long regarded as opening a new window on to the world of peasants, not as an abstraction but through the articulation of their lived experience.

DDC Classification No.

954.123

Accession No.

15445

Shelving location

18

Status

Available

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