Political science iconoclast James C Scott, who died on June 19 at 87, helped us understand subaltern silence or the ostensible passivity of the powerless. Peasant rebellions are evidence of class conflict. But Scott emphasised that the absence of protest does not mean the acceptance of oppression. There is, he noted, a richness to everyday ways in which peasants resist. Scott’s famed contribution to the social sciences was bestowing agency to peasants, who Marxists worried were not becoming a “class for themselves” to organise and rise. His sociological analysis of why state schemes fail is another.