Popular Movements & Middle Class Leadership in Late Colonial India

These lectures study the interrelationship between popular movements against British rule and the national movement under the leadership of the Indian National Congress. It analyses in depth and through a survey of the existing literature the resistance of peasantry and tribal people against oppression in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The dilemmas of a leadership at the helm of a mass and popular movement but also with linkages connexions with the emerging Indian bourgeoisie are seen to be connected with the final outcome in 1947 and with the post 1947 Indian state. The lectures also focus attention on movements in the twentieth century which were outside the domain of the Indian national movement.