ABSTRACT
Given the time period when the study of protest and resistance in Third World societies first became a serious and sustained enterprise for social scientists with varying area studies orientations, it was inevitable that peasants and revolutions would dominate much of their research and scholarship. India is not mentioned in Eric Wolf’s 1969 study of the major ‘peasant wars’ of the twentieth century, which remains one of the best examples of the comparative protest genre. Comparativists and generalists, working on peasant protest in the 1960s and 1970s, who did bother to mention the peasants of South Asia usually characterized them in ways that simply reinforced the image of the passive, docile and intensely conservative cultivators, an image that had much to do with their neglect by non-Indianist area specialists. The near exclusion of South Asianists from the growth industry of peasant protest studies in the 1960s arid 1970s was to some extent self-inflicted.
