ABSTRACT
In India public sociology has significantly engaged itself with the issues of immediate social concerns and brought these concerns for the scrutiny of the general public, policy planners and other non-academic audiences. One of such engagements has been in the area of social movements in general and peasant movements. This chapter focuses on the issues and concerns as raised in the peasant movements in India over a period. It has brought out the issues of sufferings, sustained marginality, plights, domination, discontents and resistance of the peasants in Indian society despite institutional, state and civil society interventions. It explicitly shows how the peasants as tribes, as Dalits and even as nationalists try to create pressures from below to make their voice heard in the wider world and try to carve out space for their life with dignity, justice and equality in this unequal world and how the public sociologists of India have played a big role to document the struggles and plights of the peasants and to generate public awareness on the issues of the peasants in India.
