Everyday resistance beyond archives: Informal political practices in colonial rural India (1880–1947)

Colonial Indian historiography has largely privileged organized nationalist movements and elite political leadership, relying heavily on official colonial archives. This paper challenges such archive-centric narratives by examining everyday forms of resistance practiced by rural communities in India between 1880 and 1947. It argues that political opposition to colonial authority frequently occurred outside formal organizations and written documentation.

Using a qualitative historical approach, the study interprets district-level records, vernacular traditions, folk practices, and administrative silences to reconstruct informal political behavior. Practices such as selective tax compliance, agricultural non-cooperation, ritual modification, and control of information are analyzed as deliberate political actions. The paper demonstrates that everyday resistance constituted a sustained challenge to colonial power and calls for a broader conceptualization of political agency in colonial contexts.