Civil Disobedience in Indian Tradition, with Some Early Nineteenth Century Documents c4.1

c4.1

In 1965, during the course of a preliminary perusal of late eighteenth and nineteenth century British official material on India, I happened to read of a boycott and consequent organisational steps taken by some village communities during the ‘Deccan Riots’ of 1874 in the districts of Ahmednagar and Pune. The techniques employed by these village communities primarily against the money-lenders but also against all those who sided with the latter seemed essentially identical to those employed in the non-cooperation and civil disobedience movements of recent decades. Further research led me to several other apparently similar instances of nineteenth century non-cooperation and civil disobedience in different parts of India.