ABSTRACT
The study of nationalist politics in Indian history has been primarily concerned with the program and ideology of the Congress, and to a lesser extent of the Socialists and Communists, as subsidiary political groups. By contrast, the role of the mass organization as an element of nationalism has been treated only as an incidental aspect of these broader interests; the movements of students, trade unionists and peasants are viewed essentially as facets of policy and action of the larger political groups. The peasant movement, characterized in its organizational form as the Kisan Sabha, was undoubtedly the most important of the mass organizations and Bihar was the place of its greatest strength. Its beginnings lay in the political and economic climate of the 1920s and 1930s. The movements of non-cooperation and civil disobedience of those years projected India’s rural masses into the maelstrom of nationalist politics for the first time.
