3 DEC FS Q.48

Read the passage carefully and answer question.
The pre-first world war era is really in a way well suited for an in-depth evaluation of popular movements, as they were spontaneous and no more than, marginally affected intelligentsia ideologies, objectives or techniques. The limitations of such spontaneity is fairly clear. Popular movements were directed usually against the immediate Indian oppressor rather than the distant white superior, and so were often not consciously or subjectively anti-imperialist. They tended to be fairly widely scattered in both space and time, and were extremely volatile with different social forms of articulation interpenetrating and passing over each other with bewildering ease. All this makes it rather difficult to accept without some qualification the concept of ‘Peasant nationalism’ as a coherent alternative to the elite patriotic ideologies and movements. Popular initiative and autonomy was undoubted, even remarkable at times, but, unlike middle-class nationalism which does have certain continuity, at the level of ideology at least, from the formulation of the drain of wealth theory in the 1870s onwards, the movement that has been considered were clearly fragmented. Yet despite such limitations and crudities, popular unrest did anticipate much of middle-class nationalism in terms of issues and forms of struggle, while it’s specific gains were at times not inconsiderable. Forest rights, the burdens of rent, usury and land revenue, planter exploitation and labor grievances were all themes taken over by middle-class nationalism later.