ABSTRACT
In the decades since the end of the Second World War, the study of peasant protest and agrarian revolution in Asia has been transformed from a peripheral sub-field, dominated by a handful of scholars and ex-colonial officials, comparativists, and area specialists in virtually every social science discipline. The growth of interest in peasant societies and movements has produced much that is positive. For decades the systems that colonial administrators created by incorporating pre-colonial elites, institutions, and symbols into an overarching bureaucratic grid staffed at the highest levels by Europeans, succeeded in limiting change and reducing rural unrest to a minimum. In terms of regular revenue extraction and internal repression on a day-to-day basis, the adherence of indigenous elites was essential to the maintenance of colonial rule. In Bihar, as in Java, flight was a major mode of peasant defense.
