Book Review – The Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha 1929–1942: A Study of an Indian Peasant Movement

Walter Hauser, The Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha 1929–1942: A Study of an Indian Peasant Movement, Manohar Publishers and Distributors, New Delhi, 2019, 265 pages, Rs 1295

Following the publication last year of an English translation of the memoirs of the charismatic Indian leader Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, Manohar Publishers has recently published another important book on the Kisan movement in Bihar. Titled The Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha 1929–1942, the book is the PhD dissertation submitted by Walter Hauser to the University of Chicago in 1960. Since then a lot of scholars and academicians who had been working on Swami Sahajanand or the peasant movement have consulted and used his thesis. Interestingly, although Hauser’s thesis became the reference point on this subject, that thesis itself had not been published. Now, after a gap of around sixty years, Walter Hauser’s dissertation, which was available to a select few, has been brought into the public domain.