![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Guha, Ranajit. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Main Argument: Guha argues that "insurgency…was the necessary antithesis of colonialism during the entire phase between its incipience and coming of age in India" (2). The British attempt to understand and deal with peasant insurgency required a written record that was a discourse of power, that attempted to understand violence in light of past experience. This colonial record was thus "rational in its representation of the past as linear and secular rather than cyclical and mythic" (3). This official historiography has been read as-is, rather than in reverse as it must be in order to recover the character of peasant insurgency and agency, and thus peasant consciousness.
Historiographical Engagement: Gramsci, Marx, Hobsbawm, Engels, Mao, Hegel, Durkheim, Saussure, Bakhtin. Sidebar: Guha is taking on at least five separate schools of historiography (British imperialist historiography out of Oxford; comprador collaborationist thesis out of Cambridge Marxist school which holds that colonialism is an effect of capitalism; Indian nationalist historiography; Indian Marxist historiography; and European Marxist historiography)
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This official historiography of insurgency had several important implications: "by making the security of the state into the central problematic of peasant insurgency, it assimilated the latter as merely an element in the career of colonialism. In other words, the peasant was denied recognition as a subject of history in his own right even for a project that was all his own" (3). Guha uses the term insurgency in order to restore agency and conscious will to these peasants, whose resistance has been characterized as "spontaneous" as part of the pattern of denying its significance: "as Antonio Gramsci…has said, there is no room for pure spontaneity in history. This is precisely where they err who fail to recognize the trace of consciousness in the apparently unstructured movements of the masses" (5). In other words, by defining "political action" as conscious leadership, well-defined aim, and "a programme specifying the components of the latter as particular objectives and the means of achieving them" (ibid) allows people to characterize many mass movements as "pre-political." Guha argues that all peasant action was political due to the nature of the peasant/landlord relationship, which thanks to the intrusion of the colonial state, which was one of its constitutive elements, resulted in "more intensive and systematic exploitation: the crude medieval type of oppression in the countryside emanating from the arbitrary will of local despots under the previous system was replaced now by the more regulated will of a foreign power which for a long time to come was to leave the landlords free to collect abwab and matzot from their tenants and rack-rent and evict them" (7). Under the colonial government, the landlord, the moneylender, and the official amalgamated to form "a composite apparatus of dominance over the peasant" (8). Guha attempts to track rebel consciousness, and finds in the peasants' desires for a different kind of raj less evidence of apolitics than of what the limitations of peasant politics were.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the formation of peasant identity in colonial India, which "was imposed on him by those who had power over him by virtue of their class, caste and official standing. … In other words, he learnt to recognize himself not by the properties and attributes of his own social being but by a diminution, if not negation, of those of his superiors" (18). Accordingly, "the power of ideas and the circumstances corresponding to them made the peasant sensitive to the distance which separated him from the pillars of that society, a distance regarded by him as almost the natural condition of his existence" (19). Thus, inversion was the principal modality of insurgency, because insurgency was a fight for prestige, "a political struggle in which the rebel appropriated and/or destroyed the insignia of his enemy's power and hoped thus to abolish the marks of his own subalternity" (75). Thus peasant insurgency was negatively constituted and framed in the language of elite authority, as the peasant knew no other political dialect.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Although inversion--the world turned upside down--is a feature of both crime and insurgency, Guha notes that "crime and insurgency derive from two very different codes of violence," and that "unlike crime peasant rebellions are necessarily and invariably public and communal events" (79). Moreover, in the official mindset, rebellion is often mistaken for crime in the form of a conspiracy theory, deceived by the frequent quantitative uptick in the incidences of violence that often presages a peasant revolt, which according to Guha "usually indicate a lowering threshold of the peasant's tolerance towards the conditions of his existence" (83). The difference between these two codes of violence–"the code of individualistic or small-group deviance from the law where it originates and that of collective social defiance which adopts it"–is often ambiguous at the time of transition between them, and "it is precisely this duplex character which permits it to be interpreted one way or the other depending on the interpreter's point of view" (108). Is this mere criminality or something new being born? That depends on your theory, at least until the evidence is unmistakable.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter argues that "insurgency, whatever its modality on any particular occasion, relies for its form and spirit on two closely related patterns of corporate behavior, namely, emulation and solidarity" (167). Guha argues that from the insurgent's point of view, solidarity is the most important aspect of the contagion, the insurgency itself, and that it is "a categorical imprint of peasant consciousness" (169). He also argues that the character of a rebellion will be determined by relative preponderance of various solidarities over the other (i.e. class versus other solidarities). Thus, the killing of informants was a regular part of insurgencies, since informants critically damaged peasant solidarity. Indeed, Guhar argues that "since rebellion stands for a positive rupture in the peasant's relation with his master, it follows that collaboration, child of insurgency and its antithesis, makes sense only as a geometry of transformation, that is, as a displacement displaced" (218). Thus, the particular hostility of the insurgent towards the collaborator is an expression of class consciousness, a sign that it "has learnt to identify the peasant's enemy not merely by the insignia of the latter's authority," because the collaborator is of the same class but the carrier of a corrupt consciousness that must be excised: thus, peasant consciousness "cannot afford to be sweet and forgiving" (219).
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples While peasant insurgents regard rebellion as a form of collective enterprise, official discourse invariably figures it in terms of "contagion," a disease metaphor that clearly implies irrationality, particularly since officials were perpetually flummoxed as to why "gropus and grievances scarcely connected with what had triggered off these disturbances in the first place, entered the list as the situation developed" (223). But as Guha argues, "when a rural society is polarized so sharply as it appears to have been on this occasion, it often leads to generalization of violence making the individuality of other local conflicts merge in the overall confrontation between the subaltern classes and their enemies. No pre-existing tension or dispute remains outside the scope of the insurrection under such circumstances and all antagonisms start functioning as if in an altogether new context" (ibid). The disease metaphor also has irrationality as its tenor in that it evokes "the closely related notions of suddenness, speed and simultaneity," transforming what in fact has quite logical causes into what seems to be a force of nature, intention-less and beyond reason--if not the result of conspiracy (again) (224). [We might invoke here Gladwell's notion of the "tipping point" and emergent systems to understand why something that seems so sudden is in fact the result of a long process of gradual quantitative change having abrupt qualitative consequences.] Of course, what makes rebellion so widespread is the transcendental nature of official repression, "which enables the peasantry to rise above localism and unite in opposition to their common enemies" (225). In India specifically, one of the direct consequences of the British colonial unification of the "semi-feudalism" in the countryside (namely the unification of landlord/moneylender/colonial authority) "was what provided insurgency with the objective conditions of its development and transmission" (226). Guha reviews various methods of transmission in these peasant insurgencies, ending with prophecy, which he views as "symptomatic of self-estrangement on the part of the typical peasant rebel of our period: it testified to that false consciousness which made him look upon his own acts of resistance as a manifestation of another's [frequently a divinity's] will" (277). This of course gets into the fraught question of religious agency in history, for which see Chakrabarty 2000.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at localism and the inability of peasant insurgency to overcome it; Guha defines it as "a sense of belonging to a common lineage as well as to a common habitat," which he figures under the rubric "territoriality" (279). In Guha's judgment, in India at least, consanguinity and contiguity are in fact intertwined. With the exception of the "Mutiny" disturbances, the most common peasant insurgencies in this period were tribal revolts, and what was common to them all "was the manner in which the rebels' view of the enemy as an alien provided the domain of an uprising with its subjective determinations" made up of ethnic and physical space, each having both positive and negative dimensions (280). Guha concludes that territoriality helped peasant rebellions in India, "both enlarging and defining the domain of insurgency" both during and outside the colonial period (330). This is not to say that it did not have limits, and those were clear, but until those limits were reached it was a positive force--and when the limits were reached, it was in the form of territoriality's two components conflicting with each other: "territoriality was not indeed the stuff with which to build a revolutionary party, as Mao Tse-tung sady observed at his base in the Chingkang [sic] mountains. But not to recognize in it the elements of what made the broader and more generalized struggles of the Indian people possible in the twentieth century would be to foreshorten history" (331-32).
Chapter 8: Argument, Sources, Examples Guha notes again that insurgency is framed through the discourse of counter-insurgency, and that the image in the mirror must be read backward; "the documentation on insurgency must itself be turned upside down in order to reconstitute the insurgent's project aimed at reversing his world" (333). Although this study considers peasant insurgency only until 1900, Guha argues that the insurgency he examined here acted as a paradigm for subaltern resistance in the form of Indian nationalism after 1900, because such action of mass action and mass violence "still continued to bear some of the distinctive traces of insurgency in its form–in the means and manner of mobilization, in signaling, in solidarity and so on–why is indeed why there was often such a confusing overlap between anti-landlord jacqueries and Hindu-Muslim riots" (335). And in the final analysis, "the rival paradigms of landlord authority and peasant rebellion canted to inspire and sustain each other, generating many patterns of elitist thought and practice with regard to the weak and the underprivileged in one case and those of subaltern resistance in the other" (336).
Critical assessment: This book is considered a classic, and it's not hard to see why; Guha masterfully flips the historical record the right way round (as Alexander Herzen might say in The Coast of Utopia) and reads an entirely new story there. The one remark I have is that as a fairly hardcore Marxist, Guha's writing is sometimes a bit terminology laden, but this is a minor quibble. For Guha, the project of Indian nationalism and nationalist historiography was a failure (because neither took account of the peasantry, i.e. 75% of the Indian population) and this is thus a counter-nationalist historiography, because the nation dominates the story. There's also the question of caste, which is discussed here though not necessarily very explicitly.
Further reading: James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Guha, "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency"; Joan Wallach Scott, "On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History"
Meta notes: "You’ve got Hegel’s Dialectical Spirit of History upside down and so has he. People don’t storm the Bastille because history proceeds by zigzags. History zigzags because when people have had enough, they storm the Bastille."
Main Argument: Guha argues that "insurgency…was the necessary antithesis of colonialism during the entire phase between its incipience and coming of age in India" (2). The British attempt to understand and deal with peasant insurgency required a written record that was a discourse of power, that attempted to understand violence in light of past experience. This colonial record was thus "rational in its representation of the past as linear and secular rather than cyclical and mythic" (3). This official historiography has been read as-is, rather than in reverse as it must be in order to recover the character of peasant insurgency and agency, and thus peasant consciousness.
Historiographical Engagement: Gramsci, Marx, Hobsbawm, Engels, Mao, Hegel, Durkheim, Saussure, Bakhtin. Sidebar: Guha is taking on at least five separate schools of historiography (British imperialist historiography out of Oxford; comprador collaborationist thesis out of Cambridge Marxist school which holds that colonialism is an effect of capitalism; Indian nationalist historiography; Indian Marxist historiography; and European Marxist historiography)
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This official historiography of insurgency had several important implications: "by making the security of the state into the central problematic of peasant insurgency, it assimilated the latter as merely an element in the career of colonialism. In other words, the peasant was denied recognition as a subject of history in his own right even for a project that was all his own" (3). Guha uses the term insurgency in order to restore agency and conscious will to these peasants, whose resistance has been characterized as "spontaneous" as part of the pattern of denying its significance: "as Antonio Gramsci…has said, there is no room for pure spontaneity in history. This is precisely where they err who fail to recognize the trace of consciousness in the apparently unstructured movements of the masses" (5). In other words, by defining "political action" as conscious leadership, well-defined aim, and "a programme specifying the components of the latter as particular objectives and the means of achieving them" (ibid) allows people to characterize many mass movements as "pre-political." Guha argues that all peasant action was political due to the nature of the peasant/landlord relationship, which thanks to the intrusion of the colonial state, which was one of its constitutive elements, resulted in "more intensive and systematic exploitation: the crude medieval type of oppression in the countryside emanating from the arbitrary will of local despots under the previous system was replaced now by the more regulated will of a foreign power which for a long time to come was to leave the landlords free to collect abwab and matzot from their tenants and rack-rent and evict them" (7). Under the colonial government, the landlord, the moneylender, and the official amalgamated to form "a composite apparatus of dominance over the peasant" (8). Guha attempts to track rebel consciousness, and finds in the peasants' desires for a different kind of raj less evidence of apolitics than of what the limitations of peasant politics were.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the formation of peasant identity in colonial India, which "was imposed on him by those who had power over him by virtue of their class, caste and official standing. … In other words, he learnt to recognize himself not by the properties and attributes of his own social being but by a diminution, if not negation, of those of his superiors" (18). Accordingly, "the power of ideas and the circumstances corresponding to them made the peasant sensitive to the distance which separated him from the pillars of that society, a distance regarded by him as almost the natural condition of his existence" (19). Thus, inversion was the principal modality of insurgency, because insurgency was a fight for prestige, "a political struggle in which the rebel appropriated and/or destroyed the insignia of his enemy's power and hoped thus to abolish the marks of his own subalternity" (75). Thus peasant insurgency was negatively constituted and framed in the language of elite authority, as the peasant knew no other political dialect.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Although inversion--the world turned upside down--is a feature of both crime and insurgency, Guha notes that "crime and insurgency derive from two very different codes of violence," and that "unlike crime peasant rebellions are necessarily and invariably public and communal events" (79). Moreover, in the official mindset, rebellion is often mistaken for crime in the form of a conspiracy theory, deceived by the frequent quantitative uptick in the incidences of violence that often presages a peasant revolt, which according to Guha "usually indicate a lowering threshold of the peasant's tolerance towards the conditions of his existence" (83). The difference between these two codes of violence–"the code of individualistic or small-group deviance from the law where it originates and that of collective social defiance which adopts it"–is often ambiguous at the time of transition between them, and "it is precisely this duplex character which permits it to be interpreted one way or the other depending on the interpreter's point of view" (108). Is this mere criminality or something new being born? That depends on your theory, at least until the evidence is unmistakable.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples
But insurgency soon extricates itself from the placenta of common crime in which it may be initially enmeshed and establishes its own identity as a violence which is public, collective, destructive and total in its modalities. Each of these constitutes a distinctive feature in the sense that it has its antithesis in crime, so that the opposition between the two types of violence may be represented as a series of binary contrasts thus–public/secretive, collective/individualistic, destructive/appropriative and total/partial. (109)Although this violence was destructive and total, it is important to note that peasant violence actually kept murder at a very low incidence, despite the colonial record of frequent "massacres"–indeed, as Guha notes, "if anything, it was counter-insurgency rather than insurgency that made of killing a principal modality" (161). So despite their oppression, peasants generally did not engage in much retributive (rather than punitive, i.e. executing informers) violence, partly because they were still operating within the symbology of elite culture, which "imbued the peasant with a sense of reverence for the body of anyone ranked as his superior" (164). But it was also because "insurgency did not need it to achieve its general aim…its purpose was not so much to reconstitute the world as to reverse it. … In a land where the present could wreck his superordinate enemy's prestige simply by walking past his house with an umbrella on his head or by substituting tu for vows in an argument with him, why should insurgency need killing to make its point except in battle" (166)?
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter argues that "insurgency, whatever its modality on any particular occasion, relies for its form and spirit on two closely related patterns of corporate behavior, namely, emulation and solidarity" (167). Guha argues that from the insurgent's point of view, solidarity is the most important aspect of the contagion, the insurgency itself, and that it is "a categorical imprint of peasant consciousness" (169). He also argues that the character of a rebellion will be determined by relative preponderance of various solidarities over the other (i.e. class versus other solidarities). Thus, the killing of informants was a regular part of insurgencies, since informants critically damaged peasant solidarity. Indeed, Guhar argues that "since rebellion stands for a positive rupture in the peasant's relation with his master, it follows that collaboration, child of insurgency and its antithesis, makes sense only as a geometry of transformation, that is, as a displacement displaced" (218). Thus, the particular hostility of the insurgent towards the collaborator is an expression of class consciousness, a sign that it "has learnt to identify the peasant's enemy not merely by the insignia of the latter's authority," because the collaborator is of the same class but the carrier of a corrupt consciousness that must be excised: thus, peasant consciousness "cannot afford to be sweet and forgiving" (219).
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples While peasant insurgents regard rebellion as a form of collective enterprise, official discourse invariably figures it in terms of "contagion," a disease metaphor that clearly implies irrationality, particularly since officials were perpetually flummoxed as to why "gropus and grievances scarcely connected with what had triggered off these disturbances in the first place, entered the list as the situation developed" (223). But as Guha argues, "when a rural society is polarized so sharply as it appears to have been on this occasion, it often leads to generalization of violence making the individuality of other local conflicts merge in the overall confrontation between the subaltern classes and their enemies. No pre-existing tension or dispute remains outside the scope of the insurrection under such circumstances and all antagonisms start functioning as if in an altogether new context" (ibid). The disease metaphor also has irrationality as its tenor in that it evokes "the closely related notions of suddenness, speed and simultaneity," transforming what in fact has quite logical causes into what seems to be a force of nature, intention-less and beyond reason--if not the result of conspiracy (again) (224). [We might invoke here Gladwell's notion of the "tipping point" and emergent systems to understand why something that seems so sudden is in fact the result of a long process of gradual quantitative change having abrupt qualitative consequences.] Of course, what makes rebellion so widespread is the transcendental nature of official repression, "which enables the peasantry to rise above localism and unite in opposition to their common enemies" (225). In India specifically, one of the direct consequences of the British colonial unification of the "semi-feudalism" in the countryside (namely the unification of landlord/moneylender/colonial authority) "was what provided insurgency with the objective conditions of its development and transmission" (226). Guha reviews various methods of transmission in these peasant insurgencies, ending with prophecy, which he views as "symptomatic of self-estrangement on the part of the typical peasant rebel of our period: it testified to that false consciousness which made him look upon his own acts of resistance as a manifestation of another's [frequently a divinity's] will" (277). This of course gets into the fraught question of religious agency in history, for which see Chakrabarty 2000.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at localism and the inability of peasant insurgency to overcome it; Guha defines it as "a sense of belonging to a common lineage as well as to a common habitat," which he figures under the rubric "territoriality" (279). In Guha's judgment, in India at least, consanguinity and contiguity are in fact intertwined. With the exception of the "Mutiny" disturbances, the most common peasant insurgencies in this period were tribal revolts, and what was common to them all "was the manner in which the rebels' view of the enemy as an alien provided the domain of an uprising with its subjective determinations" made up of ethnic and physical space, each having both positive and negative dimensions (280). Guha concludes that territoriality helped peasant rebellions in India, "both enlarging and defining the domain of insurgency" both during and outside the colonial period (330). This is not to say that it did not have limits, and those were clear, but until those limits were reached it was a positive force--and when the limits were reached, it was in the form of territoriality's two components conflicting with each other: "territoriality was not indeed the stuff with which to build a revolutionary party, as Mao Tse-tung sady observed at his base in the Chingkang [sic] mountains. But not to recognize in it the elements of what made the broader and more generalized struggles of the Indian people possible in the twentieth century would be to foreshorten history" (331-32).
Chapter 8: Argument, Sources, Examples Guha notes again that insurgency is framed through the discourse of counter-insurgency, and that the image in the mirror must be read backward; "the documentation on insurgency must itself be turned upside down in order to reconstitute the insurgent's project aimed at reversing his world" (333). Although this study considers peasant insurgency only until 1900, Guha argues that the insurgency he examined here acted as a paradigm for subaltern resistance in the form of Indian nationalism after 1900, because such action of mass action and mass violence "still continued to bear some of the distinctive traces of insurgency in its form–in the means and manner of mobilization, in signaling, in solidarity and so on–why is indeed why there was often such a confusing overlap between anti-landlord jacqueries and Hindu-Muslim riots" (335). And in the final analysis, "the rival paradigms of landlord authority and peasant rebellion canted to inspire and sustain each other, generating many patterns of elitist thought and practice with regard to the weak and the underprivileged in one case and those of subaltern resistance in the other" (336).
Critical assessment: This book is considered a classic, and it's not hard to see why; Guha masterfully flips the historical record the right way round (as Alexander Herzen might say in The Coast of Utopia) and reads an entirely new story there. The one remark I have is that as a fairly hardcore Marxist, Guha's writing is sometimes a bit terminology laden, but this is a minor quibble. For Guha, the project of Indian nationalism and nationalist historiography was a failure (because neither took account of the peasantry, i.e. 75% of the Indian population) and this is thus a counter-nationalist historiography, because the nation dominates the story. There's also the question of caste, which is discussed here though not necessarily very explicitly.
Further reading: James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Guha, "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency"; Joan Wallach Scott, "On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History"
Meta notes: "You’ve got Hegel’s Dialectical Spirit of History upside down and so has he. People don’t storm the Bastille because history proceeds by zigzags. History zigzags because when people have had enough, they storm the Bastille."