In the Indian region of north Bihar during the 20th century a great potential for mass agrarian and national protest existed. The Bihar congress, an organization controlled by conservative, locally dominant peasants, harnessed and directed this potential to its own conservative ends. The success of the Bihar congress in doing so resulted from the guarded tolerance its activities received from the British government of the region and from British policies which sought to minimize disruption to

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... e existing social order. Under the direction of the Bihar congress mass protest eroded the externally imposed state structure without affecting the grossly unequal distribution of wealth and power within north Bihar society. early 20th century north Bihar harboured an impoverished, rigidly stratified population dependent for its livelihood on an inefficient system of agrarian production operating within a colonial economic framework. Conflicts within north Bihar society were contained by both formal and informal mechanisms of control. The British spent less on the governance of north Bihar than on any other region in British India and hence the 'formal1 (i.e. police and administrative) control apparatus was weak. Much was left to the 'informal' control of the great landlords, European planters and locally dominant peasants who comprised the landed interest in the region. in north Bihar between 1917 and 1922 mounting population pressure and the economic disruption caused by the first world war increased the potential for popular turbulence. this potential was variously channelled into a landlord/tenant conflict over tenants' rights; into a struggle by peasants against exploitation by European indigo planters ; and into an extensive campaign, led by the Bihar congress of non-cooperation with alien rule. mass protest in the 1917-1922 period strongly tested the formal apparatus of control and revealed its fragility. in the early 1930s the congress drew on nationalist sentiment and on popular antagonism to the police and admini [...]