topics: |  india | history | british-raj | postcolonial | rural

This text was revolutionary in its impact, founding the "subaltern" school, where the focus turns from the colonial rulers (and the native elite) - to the peasantry. Instead of viewing the Indian subject as an undifferentiated mass under British rulers and the landlord system, it views the 110 peasant insurgencies throughout the country - about one each year from 1783 to the end of the 19th c. - not as spontaneous leader-less hordes with no conscious plan, but as planned acts preceded in many cases by protracted consultations among the peasant representatives. The peasant had too much at stake to merely "drift" into rebellion. The peasant felt he had the right to act in this manner since he had been deprived.

as a result of this process, the insurgent, the subject, is often excluded from his own history.

patterns in the revolts

again and again, the uprisings analyzed here show up the same trends, and page after page details similar incidents across space and time underlying these patterns.

Thus the rebellion of 1857 in Allahabad extended soon beyond the barracks where it had originated and hurtled against everything which, like the army, represented the authority of the Raj. A prison, a chowkidar's post, a factory, a railway station, 'every house or factory belonging to Europeans and every building however large or however insignificant', in fact everything _'with which we are_ connected', became, according to the local magistrate, an object of pillage, destruction and arson in the city and the surrounding countryside.

The pattern occurs again and again in the course of all the major uprisings during our period. Whatever might have been the immediate cause of any particular outbreak, the rebels almost invariably enlarged the scope of their operations to include all British 'connections' -- all white military and civilian officials as well as non-official whites such as planters, missionaries, railwaymen, etc.; all seats of official power such as courts, jails, police stations, treasuries and so on as well as non-official buildings (e.g. factories, bungalows, churches, etc.) symbolizing British presence.

The chapters are organized by theme. "Negation" discusses the process by which the peasant gets his identity as the negation of the ruling classes.

1857 : Just a bigger jacquerie

a corollary of the arguments here would clearly suggest 1857 as just the largest of these peasant insurgencies. Guha underscores this point by repeatedly identifying similarities - especially in the reaction of the general populace whose uprising bears the same characteristics as many of these earlier insurgencies.

the view that 1857 was merely a scaled-up version of these earlier "disturbances" would have been rejected out of hand by early british historians of the mutiny. indeed, when s.b. chaudhuri first hinted at this possibility while analyzing a much smaller set of "civil disturbances" in his pioneering Civil disturbances during British Rule, (1955) his work was often deprecated as a nationalist history. however, over the years, this has today become mainstream, and we have C. A. Bayly observing in his Indian society and the making of Empire (1988): What distinguished the events of 1857 was their scale ... (p.170)

the peasant role in 1857 (as opposed to a mere mutiny by military units) is underscored by historians like Eric Stokes, who finds that the 1857 rebellion was fired less by economic causes (usurious rent etc) and more for political reasons [directed as much against the government as the local banias]. Rudrangshu Mukherjee too argues on the lines of peasant-rooted civil insurrection in his Awadh in Revolt 1857-1858: A Study of Popular Resistance.

See also Guha's essay classic - The prose of counter-insurgency from 1983 which has a beautiful barthesian analysis of the historiography of inusrgency in India. Distinguishes three styles of historiography, - primary (official, immediate), - secondary (later writing, largely by administrators, with goals to record history, with claims of "neutrality), and - tertiary (by third persons, often from the liberal to left, with views from the rebel's side, inverts the official language).

Perhaps we could add a fourth-class that we may call meta-history, to which this work belongs.

Context

Elementary Aspects is a classic in the emergence of alternative analyses of indian history. Here is how Guha places it in the context of the thinking of others:

My work on this book developed over the years concurrently wilh and as integral to the collective project designated now as Subaltern Studies. Indeed it constitutes the initial moment of my own participation in that project. As such, it has had the benefit of interacting at many levels with the work and ideas of my colleagues Shahid Amin, David Arnold, Gautam Bhadra, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, David Hardiman, Gyan Pandey and Sumit Sarkar. All have been kind enough to go through the final draft and offer their comments on it. I am immeasurably in debt to them for their help. Working with Ihem has been a privilege and a genuine education for me.

guha underscores the view of the writer of the original records of each of these insurgencies - the "official mind struggling to comprehend these unanticipated phenomena" - who turn to analogies and broad generalizations, as one who is learning a new language attempts to achieve, in the words of Saussure, an 'awareness and understanding of a relation between forms' contrasting unfamiliar sounds and meanings with familiar ones,

	so did the early administrators try to make sense
	of a peasant revolt in terms of what made it
	similar to or different from other incidents of
	the same kind.  Thus the Chota Nagpur uprisings of
	1801 and 1817 and the Barasat bidroha of 1831
	served as points of reference in some of the most
	authoritative policy statements on the Kol
	insurrection of 183[-2, the latter in its turn
	figured in official thinking at the highest level
	on the occasion of the Santal Hool of 1855.  This
	last was then cited by the 1875 Deccan Riots
	Commission as a historic
	parallel... 			p.3

Excerpts

The historiography of peasant insurgency in colonial India is as old as
colonialiam itself. It originated at the intersection of the East India
Company's political concerns and a characteristically eighteenth-century
view of history - a view of history as politics and of the past as a guide
to the future - which they brought with them.

[The empire of the Mughals had disintegrated under the impact of a series
of peasant insurrections.]

... agrarian disturbances in many forms and on scales ranging from local
riots to war-like campaigns spread over many districts were endemic
throughout the first three quarters of British rule until the very end of the
nineteenth century.   At a simple count there are no
fewer than 110 known instances even in the somewhat short period of 117
years - between the revolt against Deby Sinha in 1783 to the Birsaite
rising that ended in 1900.   (p.1-2), p.13

* some major events include:
    - Rangpur dhing 1783 [against Debi Sinha]
    - Birsaite ulgulan
    - Chota Nagpur uprisings of 1801 and 1817 [C]
    - Barasat bidroha, 1831 [B} [Titu Mir; against zamindars and british]
    - Kol inourrcction of 1831-2 [K]
    - Santal hool of 1855 [S]
    - Kunbi uprising of 1875 in Poona/Ahmadnagar [Kn]

[In the] very first accounts, known to the profession as 'primary
sources', one can see the official mind struggling to comprehend these
apparently unanticipated phenomena by means of analogy, that is, to say it
after Saussure, by an 'awareness and understanding of a relation between
forms'.  [C] and [B] helped codify policy on [K], which guided official
thinking on [S] which was referred to by a commission investigating [Kn]. - p.2

The discourse on peasant inaurgcncy thus made its debut quite clearly as a
discourse of power.  ... it did not even bother to conceal its partisan
character.  Indeed, it often merged into explicitly official
writing. ... almost turned into a convention in administrative practice
that a magistrale or a judge should construe his report on a local uprising
as a historical narrative... [as in many narratives by heads of districts
after the mutiny.]

what its practitioners believed to be the historical truth, served in
colonial historiography merely as an apology for law and order -- the truth
of the the force by which the British had annexed the subcontinent.  As the
judicial authorities in Calcutta put it in a statement soon after the
insurrection led by Titu Mir, it was 'an object of paramount importance' for
the government 'that the cause which gave rise to [those disturbances] would
be fully investigated in order that the motives which activaled the
insurgents [might] be rightly understood and such measures adopted as [were]
deemed expedient to prevent a recurrence".  Causality was harnessed thus to
counter insurgency and the sense of history converted into an element of
administrative concern.

Wahhabi uprising

also Wahabi uprising (founded Syed Ahmed Barelvi, d.1831, but continued till
1865 - and continues even now to inspire jihadist forces - see
 violent revolutions), faraizi movement - (see Ayesha Jalal's
Partisans of Allah]: Jihad in South Asia, 2008)
Fakir Maznu Shah, Balaki Shah of bakerganj, Aga Muhammad Reza Beg of sylhet,

[from
http://www.indianetzone.com/30/wahabi_movement_indian_freedom_movement.htm:

between 1863-65, witnessed a series of trials by which all the principal
leaders of the Wahabi movement were arrested. The Ambala trial of 1864 and
Patna trial of 1865 were
closely interlinked. Yahaya Ali along with Mohammed Jafar and Mohammed Shaft
was sentenced to death in the Ambala trial and the others were sentenced to
expatriation for life. The death sentences were later converted to
transportation for life. Yahaya Ali was sent to the Andamans to undergo his
sentence for life imprisonment. Ahmadullah was convicted in the Patna trial
(1865) along with Fayzeli, Yahaya Ali and Farhat Ali. He was convicted for
devising a conspiracy and initiating an orchestrated treason. The death
sentence of Ahmadullah awarded on 27th February 1865 was later on converted
to deportation for life by the high court and he was sent to the Andamans in
June 1865. Amiruddin was convicted to life imprisonment in the Malda trial
(1870) and was transported to the Andamans and his property was
confiscated. The most respected leader of the Wahabi Movement, Ibrahim Mandal
of Islampur, was convicted in Raj Mahal trial (1870) for organising movement
at Raj Shahi and was sentenced to transportation for life and was sent off to
the Andamans. He was, however, released in 1878 by Lord Lytton. Amir Khan and
Hashmat Khan sentenced to transportation for life were also sent to the
Andamans after they were arrested in July 1869 on the charge of raising funds
for crusade against the British rulers.
]

A matter of names

To acknowledge the peasant as the maker of his own rebellion is to attribute,
as we have done in this work, a consciousness to him. Hence, the word
'insurgency' has been used in the title and the text as the name of that
consciousness which informs the activity of the rural masses known as
jacquerie, revolt, uprising, etc. or to use their Indian designations -
dhing, bidroha, u1gulan, hool, fituri and so on. p.4

Spontaneity and Consciousness in Insurgency

This amounts, of course, to a rejection of the idea of such activity as
purely spontaneous -- an idea that is elitist as well as erroneous.
[elitist because the subtext is that without an elite group like the Congress
or a charismatic leader like Gandhi, there could be no mobilization of the
peasantry]

An equally elitist view inclined to the left discerns in the same events a
pre-history of the socialist and communist movements in the
subcontinent. What both of these assimilative interpretations share is a
'scholastic and academic historico-political outlook which sees as real and
worthwhile only such movements of revolt as are one hundred per cent
conscious, i.e. movements that are governed by plans worked out in advaoce to
the last detail or in line with abstract theory (which comes to the same
thing}'. [Gramsci: Spontaneity and Conscious Leadership: 196-200]

The bandit : Hobsbawm

The image of the pre-political peasant rebel in societies still to
be fully industrialized owes a great deal to E. J, Hobsbawm's
piooeering work pub1ished over two decades ago.   He has
written there of 'pre-political people' and 'pre-political populations'.
He uses this term again and again to describe a state
of supposedly absolute or near absence of political consciousness
or organization which he believes to have been characteristic
of such people. Thus,

   the sodal brigand appears only before the poor have reached political
   consciousness or acquired more effective methods of social agitation

and what he means by such expressions is is made clear in the next sentence:
'The bandit is a pre-political phenomenon and his strength is in inverse
proportion to that of organized revolutionism and socialism or
communism.  He finds the 'traditional forms of peasant discontent' to have
been 'virtually devoid of any explicit ideology, organization or
programme.'   In general, pre-political people are those 'who have not
yet found, or only begun to find, a specific language in which to express
their aspirations about the world.'

Revitalization of landlordism under the Raj

under the Raj, the state assisted directly in the reproduction of
landlordism. Just as Murshid Quli Khan had reorganized the fiscal system of
Bengal in such a way as to substitute a solvent and relatively vigorous set
of landlolrds for a bankrupt and effete landed aristocracy, [J. Sarkar:
409-10] so did the British infuse new blood for old in the proprietary body
by the Permanent Settlement in the east, ryotwari in the south and some
permutations of the two in most other parts of the country. The outcome of
all this was to revitalize a quasi-feudal structure by transferring resources
from the older and less effective members of the landlord class to younger
and, for the regime politically and financially, more dependable ones.

For the peasant this meant not less but in many cases 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 mathot from their tenants and rack-rent and evict
them.

Obliged under pressure eventually to legislate against such abuses, it was
unable to eliminate them altogether because its law-enforcing agencies at the
local level served as instruments of landlord authority, and the law, so
right on paper, allowed itself to be manipulated by court officials and
lawyers in favour of landlordism. p. 7

More intense exploitation of peasants : Raj-landlord collusion

The authority of the colonial state, far from being neutral to this
relationship, was indeed one of its constitutive elements. For under the Raj
the state assisted directly in the reproduction of landlordism. Just as
Murshid Quli Khan had reorganized the fiscal system of Bengal in such a way
as to substitute a solvent and relatively vigorous set of landlords for a
bankrupt and effete landed aristocracy, [Sarkar, History of Bengal v.2,
1948), so did the British infuse new blood for old in the proprietary body
by the Permanent Settlement in the east, ryotwari in the south and some
permutations of the two in most other parts of the country.

The outcome of all this was to revitalize a quasi-feudal structure by
transferring resources from the older and less effective members of the
landlord class to younger and, for the regime politically and financially,
more dependable ones. For the peasant this meant not less but in many cases
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 mathot from their tenants and rack-rent and evict
them. Obliged under pressure eventually to legislate against such abuses, it
was unable to eliminate them altogether because its law-enforcing agencies at
the local level served as instruments of landlord authority, and the law, so
right on paper, allowed itself to be manipulated by court officials and
lawyers in favour of landlordism.

The rule of law : in the hand of the elite

The Raj even left the power of punishment, that ultimate power of the
state, to be shared to some extent by the rural elite in the name of
respect for indigenous tradition, which meant in effect turning a blind eye
to the gentry dispensing criminal justice either as members of the dominant
class operating from kachari and gadi or as those of dominant castes
entrenched in village panchayats. The collusion between sarkar and
zamindar was indeed a part of the common experience of the poor and the
subaltern at the local level nearly everywhere. p.6-7

One consequence of this revitalization of landlordism under British rule
a phenomenal growth of peasant indebtedness.

[Also, unlike in the previous regime, these new landlords, who often 
"bought up estates by the dozen at auctions from impoverished landlords"
did not hesitate to evict the land tenants.]
 
[Thus] the hitherto discrete powers of the landlord, the moneylender and the
official came to form, under colonial rule, a composite apparatus of
dominance over the peasant. His subjection to this triumvirate — sarkari,
sahukari and zamindari — was primarily political in character, economic
exploitation being only one, albeit the most obvious, of its several
instances. for the appropriation of his surplus was brought about by the
authority wielded over local societies and markets by the
landlord-moneylenders and a secondary capitalism working closely with them
and by the encapsulation of that authority in the power of the colonial
state. 

the element of coercion was explicit and ubiquitous in all their dealings
with the peasant.  he could hardly look upon his relationship with them as
anything but political. by the same token, in undertaking to destroy this
relationship, he engaged himself in what was essentially a political task --
a task in which the existing power nexus had to be turned on its head as a
necessary condition for the redress of any particular grievance.

there was no question of launching such a project in a fit of
absent-mindedness, for he risked not only the loss of his land and
possessions, but also that of his moral standing derived from an
unquestioning subordination to authority.  p.9

ch.2 : Negation

the peasant 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.

There were ancient [traditions] which fostered bhakti — 'the basic need in
feudal ideology', according to Kosambi1—to make total dedication to one's
superiors, divine as well as human, a matter of spiritual commitment.

Class consciousness?

In the course of the popular disturbances following the Mutiny in Aligarh,
the crowds plundered European properties with much thoroughness but did
relatively less damage to those of the natives.

Again, nothing illuminates more the character of the Kol and Santal
uprisings of 1832 and 1855 respectively than the well-known fact that in
both instances the peasants spared the tribal population and concentrated
their attack on the non-tribal 'outsiders' — suds and dikus, as they
called them.  'Throughout the whole of this devastation', wrote one
administrator to another about the first of these events, 'not a single
Cole's life was sacrificed nor a home belonging to them destroyed except by
accident, and self-interested motives induced the Insurgents to exempt
Blacksmiths Gwalas and occasionally the manufacturers of earthen vessels
(who were not Coles) from their indiscriminate slaughter.'  Indeed, as
grudgingly acknowledged in these words, the limits of solidarity and
antagonism were specified by the distinctions made between those elements
of the non-tribal population to whom the rebels were positively hostile,
e.g. landlords and moneylenders, and those subaltern classes and castes who
lived and worked with them in the same rural communities and were treated
as loyal allies. Such discrimination about which official notice was taken
to the effect that 'in many villages the houses of Mahajuns were burnt &
those of ryots spared' by the Santals, showed where ethnicity stopped and
an incipient form of class consciousness began. p.23

Causes of 1857: not usury and rent, but political

as Stokes has shown by a careful investigation of the rent-rates in Uttar
Pradesh, there was little in the incidence of usurious transactions to
justify the extent and intensity of the aggression against their protagonists
in the regions where this occurred most in 1857-8. The attack on mahajans and
auction-purchasers, he concludes, were motivated less by economic than
political considerations. 27

no matter which one of their three main oppressors - sarkar, sahukar of
zamindar - was the first to bear the initial brunt of a jacquerie in any
particular instance, the peasants often showed a remarkable propensity to
extend their operatiom widely enough to include among their targets the local
representatives of one or both of the other groups too.  Many of the more
powerful events of our period testify to this.  Titu Mir's bidroha in Barasat
and the series of Moplah rebellions in nineteenth-century Malabar started off
as anti-landlord struggles but culminated as campaigns against the Raj
itself. Conversely, the movements of the Farazis and the indigo ryots against
European planters often developed into resistance to rack-renting and other
forms of zamindari despotism. The Kol insurrect;on of 1832 in Chhota Nagpur
had landlords and moncylenders among the suds as its initial objects of
hostility but ended up as a war against the Company's government itself. And,
conversely again, the Birsaite ulgulan launched with the declared aim of
liberating the Mundas from British rule made no secret of its hatred for
banias and mahajans as it progressed. 26

atidesha

guha introduces the term atidesha - borrowed from pANiNi and from
Jaimini - to designate the transfer of ideas from specific to general among
the rebels - particularly to the rebel anger spreading to all forms of
colonial and class domination. 


---

[dress as symbol:
analysis of dress worn by various groups as characteristic of
subservience, insurgency etc.  a beautiful barthesian analysis - p. 63-66]

"Pnverty has a way of compelling recognition from all Indian governments - if
only as a law and order problem." - p.83

Contents

Foreword, Duke Edition ix
Preface xv
Abbreviations Xlii
1 Introouction I
2 Negation 18
3 Ambiguity 77
4 Modality 109
5 Solidarity 167
6 Transmission 220
7 Territoriality 278
8 Epilogue 333
Glossary 339
Bibliography 345
Index 355