What is History from Below? Discuss it with reference to the history writing in India

History from Below began as a reaction against the traditional histories which concerned themselves almost exclusively with the political, social and religious elites.

It has been variously termed as ‘grassroots history, history seen from below or the history of the common people’, ‘people’s history’, and even, ‘history of everyday life’. The conventional history about the great deeds of the ruling classes received further boost from the great tradition of political and administrative historiography developed by Ranke and his followers.

History from Below is a major trend in the twentieth century historiography that marks a reaction against the traditional histories almost exclusively concerned with the socio-political and religious elites. ‘Grassroots history’, ‘history seen from below’, ‘history of the common people ‘, ‘people’s history’, and ‘history of everyday life’ are some of the terms alternatively used for it.

In opposition to the ‘History from Above’ popularized by the likes of Ranke, the History from Below is an attempt to write the history of the common people. It is a history concerned with the activities and thoughts of those people and regions that were neglected by the earlier historians. Peasants and working classes, women and minority groups, unknown ‘faces in the crowd’, and the people lost in the past became the central concern of this historiographical tradition. It can be regarded as an attempt to make history-writing broad-based, to look into the lives of the marginalized groups and individuals, and to explore new sources and to reinterpret the old ones.

The main problem in writing the History from below in India, apart from the conceptual problems is the absence of relevant sources. The records pertaining to the lower classes were almost exclusively produced by those not belonging to that stratum of society.

The relevant sources are a big problem even in advanced countries where the working-class literacy was much higher. Even there the sources related to the peasants and other pre-industrial groups come to us through those in authority. In India, most of the members of the subordinate classes, including the industrial working classes, are not literate.

Therefore, direct sources coming from them are extremely rare, if not completely absent. Ranajit Guha, the founder of the Subaltern Studies, in his book, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983), talks about the elitist origin of most of the evidences which the historians use for understanding the mentalities behind the peasant rebellions. According to Sumit Sarkar, this non-availability of evidences might have been caused by the continued subalternity of the lower classes.

Peasant Movements:

A general history of peasant movements by Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1967), puts the Indian peasant movements in a comparative perspective. In Moore’s account, the Indian peasantry lacked revolutionary potential and were comparatively docile and passive in the face of poverty and oppression. Thus, peasant rebellions in India were ‘relatively rare and completely ineffective and where modernization impoverished the peasants at least as much as in China and over as long a period of time’.

This view of the Indian peasant was challenged by many historians. Kathleen Gough, in her article on ‘Indian Peasant Uprising’ (1974), counted peasant revolts during the colonial period. Her conclusion is that ‘the smallest of which probably engaged several thousand peasants in active support or combat’. And the largest of these ‘is the “Indian Mutiny” of 1857-58, in which vast bodies of peasants fought or otherwise worked to destroy British rule over an area of more than 500,000 square miles’.

There are many studies undertaken on Indian peasant movements. Apart from Kathleen Gough’s work, A.R. Desai’s (ed.) Peasant Struggles in India (1979) and Agrarian Struggles in India after Independence (1986), Sunil Sen.’s Peasant Movements in India-Mid-Nineteenth and Twentieth Century’s (1982), Ranajit Guha’s elementary Aspects of Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India (1978), and D.N. Dhanagare’s Peasant Movements in India, 1920-1950 (1983) are some of the all-India studies.

Tribal Movements:

Several scholars treat, tribal movements as part of the peasant movements. It is because over the years the tribal society and economy have started resembling those of the peasants and the agrarian problems of the tribal’s are same as those of the peasants. Kathleen Gough, A.R. Desai and Ranajit Guha have dealt with the tribal movements as such. Moreover, many scholars like Ghanshyam Shah, Ashoka Upadhyay and Jagannath Pathy have shown the changes in the tribal society and economy which have pushed them in the direction of the non-tribal peasants.

Working-class Movements:

Until about twenty-five year’s age, the history of Indian labour was almost synonymous with the history of trade unions. Writing in 1982, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya commented that ‘Till now in our labour history the Trade Union movement has been the subject of the largest number of published work’. Besides this, the focus was on the worker as an economic being, which did not take into account his/her social and cultural existence.

Since the 1980s, however,’ this situation began to change. Several studies have appeared which view the working class history from a broader perspective. The scholars who have taken into account these aspects of the changing scenario include E.D. Murphy, R.K. Newman, S. Bhattacharya, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Janaki Nair, Samita Sen, and Nandini Gooptu.