Research Note Manuel Callahan

Ranajit Guha, The Prose of Counter-Insurgency, in Nicholas Dirks, et. al., Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994): 336-371.

Summary: In The Prose of Counter-Insurgency, Ranajit Guha argues that the peasant rebel has been denied as the conscious subject of his own history; three discourses reveal how the historiography on the peasant rebel has acquired this particular blind spot. Exposition: Ranajit Guhas examination of peasant revolt begins with the assertion that any given revolt was necessarily and explicitly in violation of a series of codes which defined his very existence as a member of that colonial, and still largely semi-feudal society. The peasants subalternity, according to Guha, was made manifest by the structure of property, institutionalized by law, sanctified by religion and made tolerable and even desirableby tradition. Guha asserts that any rebellion was necessarily an effort to destroy many of those familiar signs which he had learned to read and manipulate in order to extract meaning out of a harsh world around him and live with it. Guha concludes that the peasant rebels efforts at turning things upside down were done in such oppressive and difficult conditions that he could hardly afford to engage in such a project in a state of absent-mindedness. Guha insists that insurgency was and always is a motivated and conscious undertaking on the part of the rural masses. Careless writing on the subject has been content to represent the peasant insurrection as purely spontaneous or unpremeditated affairs. Primary sources tell a different story. It would be difficult, Guha argues, to cite an uprising on any significant scale that was not in fact preceded either by less militant types of mobilization when other means had been tried and found wanting or by parley among its principals seriously to weigh the pros and cons of any recourse to arms. (p. 336) Unfortunately, scholarship on peasant revolt, and especially the historiography on the subject, has ignored the issue of consciousness when examining peasant rebellion, content to represent the peasant as stumbling or drifting into rebellion. Insurgency, Guha insists, was a motivated and conscious undertaking on the part of the rural masses. (pp. 336-337) Historiography, explains Guha, has denied peasant consciousness by treating the peasant as either an empirical person or a member of a class. On one hand, historiography tends to present the peasant revolt very much like a natural phenomenon: they break out like thunderstorms, heave like earthquakes, spread like wildfires, infect like epidemics. On the other hand, the peasant uprising might also be attributed to a number of key causes suggesting that the cause of insurgency is somehow external further depriving the peasant of any claims to consciousness. In this case, peasants react in a reflex sort of way to factors of economic or political deprivation as causes that trigger revolt.

Guha identifies three discourses that have determined how historical writing has managed to maintain this particular blind spot. These, explains Guha, may be described as primary, secondary, and tertiary according to the order of their appearance in time and their filiation. Primary discourse Primary discourseis almost without exception official in character official in the broad sense of the term. Guha explains that it is official since it was meant primarily for administrative use. Its production and circulation, he suggests, were both necessarily contingent on reasons of state. It is also distinguished by its immediacy. The material of this discourse was noted for having been written concurrently with or soon after the event in question and it was produced by participants concerned. Secondary discourse The secondary follows the primary at a distance and opens up a perspective to turn an event into history in the perception not only of those outside it but of the participants as well. According to Guha, the secondary is a processed product and very much what we recognize as history as opposed to the primary discourse that we often recognize as a primary source. In the secondary discourse we will observe that two types generally emerge, namely memoirs written by participants who later reflect on their experiences without fully acknowledging their own service to state interests. A second class of writing within this discursive formation is that undertaken by administrators somewhat closely related to the events in question. The conclusion that Guha draws is that historiography in many ways was not uncontaminated by bias, judgment and opinion and in every way was the voice of committed colonialism. Guha explores how these discourses served colonial interests by noting the indices in the discourse so constituted that for each of its signs we have an antonym, a counter message, in another code, achieving therefore a clash of codes. Guha concludes that these documents make no sense except in terms of a code of pacification which, under the Raj, was a complex of coercive intervention by the State and its protgs, the native elite, with arms and words. Thus historiography reveals its character as a form of colonialist knowledge. That is, it derives directly from that knowledge which the bourgeoisie had used in the period of their ascendancy to interpret the world in order to master it and establish their hegemony over Western societies, but turned into an instrument of national oppression as they began to acquire for themselves a place in the sun. Tertiary discourse Tertiary discourse is farthest removed from the events and tends not to be written by anyone previously connected to them. In addition, in the case of tertiary discourse from the Left, it is more than likely to take the insurgents point of view. However, tertiary

discourse does not differ so dramatically from secondary discourse since both can admire the insurgent. Tertiary discourses commitment to the insurgent, however, is undermined by its reliance on causes as an explanatory tool. Causes can help reveal the political interests present in the narrative structure of the text, coming from either a liberal or radical perspective. In either case, the peasant is not the subject of his own history, but merely a portion of a larger political force or subject such as, in the case of radical historiography, the working class. For once a peasant rebellion has been assimilated to the career of the Raj, the Nation, or the People, argues Guha, it becomes easy for the historian to abdicate the responsibility he has of exploring and describing the consciousness specific to that rebellion and be content to ascribe it to a transcendental consciousness. In operative terms, this means denying a will to the mass of the rebels themselves and representing them merely as instruments of some other will. (p. 364) In the case of colonialist historiography the historian emphasizes peasant spontaneity pitted against the will of the State. Radical historiography has been blind to rebel consciousness too, allowing the analysis to be impaled on a concept of peasant revolts as a succession of events ranged along a direct line of descent as a heritage, as it is often calledin which all the constituents have the same pedigree and replicate each other in their commitment to the highest ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. (p. 365) The result can be an ahistorical view of the history of insurgency unable to cope with the contradictions which are indeed the stuff history is made of. Terrible Insurgents Fanatic Daring and wanton atrocities on the inhabitants Defying the authority of the state Disturbing the public tranquility Intention to attack Key concepts: subaltern insurgency historiography discourse code colonialist knowledge hegemony transcendental consciousness Fine peasants Islamic puritan resistance to oppression revolt against struggle for a better order intention to punish oppressors