Walter Hauser has been on the History Faculty of the University of Virginia for many years where he has taught both BA level and postgraduate students in the history of Modern India. He has also served as Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at Virginia. Professor Hauser's research interests have been directed primarily to understanding the politics of peasant activism in Gangetic north India, especially in twentieth-century Bihar. In more recent years he has turned his attention to electoral politics and begun to define the agrarian activism of the 198s and 199s in terms of its historical roots in the 193 and 194s of this century.