The significance of peasant movements began to interest historians in India from the sixties of the last century particularly after works like those of D.N. Dhangare opened up a whole new arena of research and analysis. The attempts to understand peasants and their negotiations with the colonial state in India provided historians a new window into the workings of the Indian society vis-à-vis the foreign state and its policies and administrations. In different parts of the country the peasants, in their various differentiated categories, had responded to the policies of the colonial state in ways which sought to protect their own interests. Although peasant studies as such had taken off late but the importance of the participation of peasants in various movements including the national movement has been an integral part of historical analysis for a long time. In fact even in the 1940s R.P.Dutt had drawn the attention of social scientists to the emerging role of peasants in social movements. It is in this context that focusing on peasants in different parts of the country, their organizations, their interface with the authorities, assumes great importance. In the light of this perspective, the present book on the peasantry of the Brahmaputra Valley of Assam who formed a popular organization called Ryot Sabha which stood for the interest of the presents in the preindependence period, have not received the attention that it should have received.