| This dissertation is about stories and storytelling. It is an exploration of the role of oral narrative in the creation of local history. Oral narrative provides almost uniformly more specific and more sensitive data than written sources. As a result, it reveals a wider range of political opinion than reflected in the accumulated, collated, and combined written record. Particularly for local, village history, in which oral narratives are a primary form of communication, the oral record emerges in diverse and dynamic form.; Yet beyond the role of oral narrative in preserving a peasant past, it also defined the nature of peasant politics during the 1930s in villages around the Pandaul market in north Bihar. These narratives, as they themselves demonstrate, are part of the ongoing histories of the region that have also been portrayed in written form by the government, the local landlord, the press, and various other sources. Like all of these sources, narratives are shaped by the power structures of the countryside and the institutions that enforce them.; To demonstrate the forces and processes through which local history is articulated, this dissertation has three parts. Part one focuses specifically on the way politics and communication have determine local understandings of the past, particularly the past of rural conflict in the twentieth century. Caste, gender, physical force, nationalism, and other persisting structures of rural society influence both politics and the communication of it.; Part two focuses, in greater detail, on three important institutions that create, interpret, and remedy conflict: the land system of the Maharaja of Darbhanga, the district and provincial government, and the village-level pattern of designating mediators.; Finally, part three discusses a key feature of local narratives, the way in which they succeeded in constructing an image of impending revolution, even when no revolution was fulfilled. That prevailing image travelled from the local arena to powerful levels of Indian politics, changing and constructing the course of action of politicians and influencing official records. Ultimately, this dissertation, therefore, addresses the way oral and written record informed one another, competed with one another, and in the process created history. |
