Peasant Uprisings in Bengal

The history of the province of Bengal is marked by peasant uprisings during the second half of the 19th century. The surprising aspect of this phenomenon is that the political regime had been more oppressive during the Mughal era and during the rule of the British East India Company which ended in 1857. Using both mainstream and subaltern literature, this paper argues that the sudden rise of peasant revolutions in Bengal under the British crown can be explained by the theory of preference falsification on the part of the peasants before the period under discussion, which could help to explain such instances of social discontinuity in human behaviour.