Swami Sahajanand & the Peasants of Jharkhand: A View from 1941 -- An Edited Translation of Jharkhand ke Kisan with the Original Hindi Text & an Introduction, Endnotes & Glossary

A distinguished historian of India recently described Swami Sahajanand as Indias foremost peasant leader. That Sahajanands role in the social and political history of the twentieth century is only now being defined in these terms suggests something of the personal and political complexity of the man and his mission. His role in the politics of the Freedom Movement was played out in Eastern U.P. where he was born and educated, and from the late 1920s in the neighbouring state of Bihar in the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha, and from 1936 on the national state in the All India Kisan Sabha. The Jharkhand ke Kisan tract presented here is an edited translation and in the original and unedited Hindi, provides textual access to yet another dimension of Sahajanands remarkable career. It was a career always on the leading edge of cultural, social and political change, which for Sahajanand had to be transformational in character. So it is not surprising that we find him here exploring the cultural and historical experience of the peasants of Jharkhand in the Chotanagpur plateau of Bihar. The richness of this tract, written in 1941, is revealed both in the vivid descriptions of the lived experience of the Adivasi kisans which Sahajanand provides and in the conceptual definitions he gives those lives in the fields, forests, and mountains of this remarkable cultural space. To use his words, the open loot and fraud must stop. Professor Hauser has rendered an easily readable English translation of Sahajanands tract while at the same time retaining the style and graphic images of the Swamis Hindi original. In a brief introduction and in the editors endnotes following each chapter, Professor Hauser places Sahajanands ideas in the personal and political context of the time and provides appropriate bibliographic references. While this is a view from 1941, in many ways Sahajanands argument bears an uncanny contemporary relevance. That too is part of the importance of this historical document.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; Sahajanand's Introduction; Jharkhand: The Geography & Culture of Place; The People & Their Languages; The Matter of Educaiton; The Peasant & the Zamindar; Peasant Landholding in Law & in Fact; Life in the Jungle, or Adivasi Kisans as Victims; The Kamiyas & Usury as Loot; The Tenancy Act & the Kisans of Jharkhand; Other Basic Needs of the Kisans; The True Behaviour of the Co-operative Societies; Some Noteworthy Qualities of Life in Jharkhand; The Tatas & Mr Homi; The Principal Demands of the Kisans; Glossary; Index.

About the Author :
Walter Hauser has been on the History Faculty of the University of Virginia for many years where he has taught both BA level and postgraduate students in the history of Modern India. He has also served as Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at Virginia. Professor Hausers research interests have been directed primarily to understanding the politics of peasant activism in Gangetic north India, especially in twentieth-century Bihar. In more recent years he has turned his attention to electoral politics and begun to define the agrarian activism of the 1980s and 1990s in terms of its historical roots in the 1930 and 1940s of this century.