William R. Pinch

Peasants and Monks in British India

In this compelling social history, William R. Pinch tackles one of the most important but most neglected fields of the colonial history of India: the relation between monasticism and caste. The highly original inquiry yields rich insights into the central structure and dynamics of Hindu society - insights that are not only of scholarly but also of great political significance. Perhaps no two images are more associated with rural India than the peasant who labors in an oppressive, inflexible social structure and the ascetic monk who denounces worldly concerns. Pinch argues that, contrary to these stereotypes, North Indias monks and peasants have not been passive observers of history; they have often been engaged with questions of identity, status, and hierarchy - particularly during the British period. Pinchs work is especially concerned with the ways each group manipulated the rhetoric of religious devotion and caste to further its own agenda for social reform. Although their aims may have been quite different - Ramanandi monastics worked for social equity, while peasants agitated for higher social status - the strategies employed by these two communities shaped the popular political culture of Gangetic north India during and after the struggle for independence from the British.

Same Difference in Indiaand Europe

Books reviewed in this article: Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, by Bernard S. Cohn Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and SocialCommunication in India, 1780–1870, by Christopher A. Bayly

Reinventing Ramanand: Caste and History in Gangetic India

According to Sir George Grierson, one of the pre-eminent Indologists of the early twentieth century, Ramanand led ‘one of the most momentous revolutions that have occurred in the religious history of North India.’Yet Ramanand, the fourteenth-century teacher of Banaras, has been conspicuous by his relative absence in the pages of English-language scholarship on recent Indian history, literature, and religion. The aims of this essay are to reflect on why this is so, and to urge historians to pay attention to Ramanand, more particularly to the reinvention of Ramanand by his early twentieth-century followers, because the contested traditions thereof bear on the vexed issue of caste and hierarchy in colonial India. The little that is known about Ramanand is doubly curious considering that Ramanandis, those who look to Ramanand for spiritual and community inspiration, are thought to comprise the largest and most important Vaishnava monastic order in north India. Ramanandis are to be found in temples and monasteries throughout and beyond the Hindi-speaking north, and they are largely responsible for the upsurge in Ram-centered devotion in the last two centuries. A fairly recent anthropological examination of Ayodhya, currently the most important Ramanand pilgrimage center in India, has revealed that Ramanandi sadhus, or monks, can be grouped under three basic headings: tyagi (ascetic), naga (fighting ascetic), and rasik (devotional aesthete).4 The increased popularity of the order in recent centuries is such that Ramanandis may today outnumber Dasnamis, the better-known Shaiva monks who look to the ninth-century teacher, Shankaracharya, for their organizational and philosophical moorings.

Who was Himmat Bahadur? Gosains, Rajputs and the British in Bundelkhand, ca. 1800

Acknowledgements: Research for this article was assisted by a grant from the Joint Committee on South Asia of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, and by a US Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad grant; I am grateful for their support. I would also like to thank Tom Pinch, Doug Peers and Richard Elphick for reading and commenting on drafts of this article, and Anand Yang of the University of Utah for organising the panel at the 1996 AAS for which it was originally written.