During the late nineteenth-century British officials, often doubling as scholar-collectors, created a huge and variegated colonial archive, collecting, arranging and recasting information about The Natives of India into compendia for ready reference and administrative recall. Taking these neglected official materials on peasant and rural life, the distinguished historian Shahid Amin has fashioned a new synthesis, one that interrogates the colonial understanding of rural Indians with an insiders historical inflections. Amins Concise Encyclopaedia weaves an intricate tapestry of crops, seasons, products, beliefs, ceremonies, aphorisms and folk adages, showcasing all the while the multiple dimensions of rural life, and the unlikely but enduring threads that bind and sustain the peasant world. In this Encyclopaedia, Amin has reproduced and engaged with the text of Crookes Glossary, Reids famous description of the agricultural calendar and of his little known Compilation of a peasant dictionary. He also incorporates and works with selections from Griersons voluminous writings on language and literature to explore the issues of rusticity, simplicity and wisdom that characterize much of rural life. A marked feature of this work is the constant dialogue that the editor sets up between the late-nineteenth century colonial experts and the contemporary historian, one with a sure grasp both of the colonial archive as well as popular culture and idiom of contemporary north Indian peasant life. Amins scholarly, incisive and lucid introduction, coupled with his additions and explanatory footnotes are enriched by rare colour plates and line drawings. Together these enable the reader, both scholar and lay person, to understand better Both peasant life and culture, and the Ways of colonial ethnography.

Table of Contents:
Editors Preface to the Revised Edition; Editors Preface to the First Edition; Editors Introduction to the Revised Edition; Title Page of Materials (1879); William Crookes Preface to Materials; List of Illustrations; Notes on Illustrations; Illustrations; Part I: Being the Text of William Crookes Materials for a Rural and Agricultural Glossary of the North Western Provinces and Oudh: IX: Labour Advances, Wages and Perquisities; X: Land Tenures; XI: The Native House; XII: Food; XIII; Ceremonies of Rural Life; XIV; Trade and Moneylending; XV: Weights and Measures; Appendices; Bibliography; Index. Part II: Materials on Peasant Production from J.R. Reids Azamgarh Settlement Report: System of Agriculture; Methods of Irrigation; Gharra Irrigation; The Kinds of Produce and Methods of Raising Them; Early and Broadcaste Rice; Transplanted Rice; The Hot Weather Marsh Rice (Boro); Harjins; Kharif Harjins: Rabi Harjins: The Manufacture of Sugar From the Cane; Indigo; Poppy; The Preparation of Crude Opium; Poppy Oil; Produce Included under Vegetables; Tobacco; Betel Leaf; Total Produe; The Amout of Food Grains; The Amount of Fodder; The Value of the Produce; The Value of Produce per Acre; Soil Fertility; Comparative Prices of Produce; the Dealer in Produce or Mahajan; Village Servants; Part III: Selections from the Bhojpuri Dialect: Conversation; Fables; Bhojpuri Songs; Part IV: Rustic Speech and a Rural Glossary from Azamgarh: Notes on the Dialect Current in Azamgarh; Note [on the Azamgarh Glossary]; Azamgarh Glossary.