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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 UniversityPress, 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 givenrevolt 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 evendesirableby 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. Guhaconcludes 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 isa motivated and conscious undertaking on the part of the rural masses.

Careless writing on the subject has been content to represent the peasant insurrection aspurely 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 wasnot 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 ofconsciousness 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 likethunderstorms, 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 peasantof 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.

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Guha identifies three discourses that have determined how historical writing has managedto 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 discoursePrimary discourseis almost without exception official in character official in thebroad 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 orsoon after the event in question and it was produced by participants concerned.

Secondary discourseThe 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 werecognize 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 theevents 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 voiceof committed colonialism.

Guha explores how these discourses served colonial interests by noting the indices in thediscourse 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 ofcolonialist 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 hegemonyover 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 fromthe Left, it is more than likely to take the insurgents point of view. However, tertiary

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discourse does not differ so dramatically from secondary discourse since both can admirethe 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 orradical perspective.

In either case, the peasant is not the subject of his own history, but merely a portion ofa 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 thatrebellion 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 colonialisthistoriography 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 rangedalong 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 ahistoricalview of the history of insurgency unable to cope with the contradictions which are

indeed the stuff history is made of.

Terrible FineInsurgents peasants

Fanatic Islamic puritanDaring and wanton

atrocities on the inhabitants resistance to oppressionDefying theauthority of the state revolt against

Disturbing the public

tranquility struggle for a better order

Intention to attack intention to punish oppressors

Key concepts:

subaltern

insurgency

historiography

discoursecode

colonialist knowledge

hegemony

transcendental consciousness

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