ABSTRACT
The central theme of this chapter is how the Assamese peasants acted and reacted politically as the agrarian economy began to witness a transition. This chapter — against the backdrop of the discussion in the previous chapter — assumes that with the increasing pressure on land and the growing stratification within Assamese peasantry, the nature of rural politics underwent several layers of transformation. Rapid changes in agrarian relations led to a transition in rural politics, and the Assamese peasantry was soon to become highly politicized. The first few decades of the twentieth century was marked by intense rural political dissent staged both away from and within the spectacular nationalist political programme. Yet, the discontent of peasants rarely acquired the shape of a formal political dissent against the colonial state. Apparently, such protests appeared, as represented in the official accounts, more as individual initiatives of a few ‘discontented peasants’ than as acts of ‘formal’ resistance against the state policies. An important, but rather neglected, aspect that can give us insights into the making of Assamese rural politics is the petitions of peasants to the ruling elite.1 While petitioning emerged as a widely popular form of rural politics, the nationalist political programme tried to integrate these politicized rural masses into its own domain. This chapter begins with a discussion on this complex transition of rural politics.
