For too long, considerations of state formation in India have divided on the colonial threshold of history, and the British regime in the subcontinent has been treated as completely different from all prior states. The most important reason for this seems to be that the historiography of the British empire was created by those who ruled India; it was therefore a kind of trophy of domination. Other reasons include the vast and accessible corpus of records on the creation of the British colonial state, the recency of its emergence, and the foundational character of the colonial state for the independent states of the subcontinent. Continuity of the British colonial state with its predecessors is acknowledged only in the case of the Mughals owing, in part, to the prolonged process of separation of the Company's government from its Mughal imperial cover before the Mutiny. Thus, long after they had ceased as a governing regime, the Mughals were considered by contemporaries and subsequently by historians to be the old regime of India.

Peasant insurgency has been an awkward subject for the Indian scholar, and thus for comparativists -usually historical sociologists -who more often than South Asianists, have studied the matter.The awkwardness arises from the following paradoxes.India is one of the most ancient peasant societies in the world, and one in which it is possible to speak of a peasantry in many of its parts even when India is also one of the major industrial and advanced technical and scientific societies in the world.Yet, despite its provenance as an historical and contemporary peasant society, neither insurgency nor rebellion, much less 'wars' of the sort treated by Eric Wolf, have been events that have occupied the place in historiography that the subject has occupied in Europe (where the peasantry has passed from the scene for the most part) or in China where its peasantry ranks along with that of India as a major element of the present.Explanations of the absence of widespread peasant political mobilisations against established authority in India have seldom risen above those favourite residual explainers of all certainties (and most uncertainties), caste or religion.With Ranajit Guha's recent book, we are presented with a treatment of the subject which is both stimulating and ambitious.EZementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in ColoniaZ India, brings peasant political mobilisations during the nineteenth century into history for the first time, and his estimate of some 110 events of this sort -'ranging from local riots to warlike campaigns' -are merely some of the events which Guha asserts, rightly, deserve serious study.He is also right in arguing that though such events were systematically denigrated and buried by the imperial rulers of India, their records are often the only traces of these events and accordingly must be made to yield something other than (often, indeed, the opposite of) British interpretations.He finally rejects, again rightly for India at least, Eric Hobsbawm's characterisation of similar British protests during the early nineteenth century as &dquo;'prepolitical&dquo;' ; this was not true for Indian movements of this time nor later, even if true elsewhere. On the contrary, Guha claims, Indian peasant insurgencies were not only profoundly political, but also self-consciously and programmatically opposed to landlords' appropriations of wealth based upon extra-economic dominance and coercion.These are important assumptions in Guha's approach and argument which give both their cut and cogency.There are other elements -some entailed by his approach and argument, others less clearly so -which circumscribe his work and defeat some

The economic importance of Hindu temples in medieval South India has been commented upon by most students of South Indian history. Without exception, the temple is seen to have had a central place in the dominantly agrarian economy of South India prior to the extension of British control in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, beyond recognition of the significant economic functions of medieval South Indian temples, little attention has been given to the matter.

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