A Concise Encyclopaedia of North Indian Peasant Life

During the late 19th century British officials, often doubling as scholar-collectors, created a huge and variegated ‘colonial archive’, collecting, arranging and recasting information about ‘The Native of India’ into compendia for ready reference and administrative recall. Taking these neglected official materials on peasant and rural life, the distinguished historian Shahid Amin has fashioned a new synthesis, one that integrates the colonial understanding of rural Indians with an insider’s historical reflections. Amin’s Concise Encyclopaedia weaves an intricate tapestry of crops, seasons, products, beliefs, ceremonies, aphorisms and folk adages, showcasing all the while the multiple dimensions of rural life, and the unlikely but enduring threads that bind and sustain the peasant world.