Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India

The historiography of peasant insurgency in India has hitherto been a record of the colonial administration's effort to deal with insurgency.  The result has been a failure to understand the insurgent.  The colonialist has commonly seen insurgency as crime, seldom understanding it as a fight for social justice.  Guha's work adopts the peasant's viewpoint and studies "the peasant rebel's awareness of his own world and his will to change it."  Guha deduces rebel consciousness largely through the discourse of counter-insurgency--the reports, dispatches, minutes, laws, and letters in which the administration reported rebel activity and registered its hostility to insurgency.  He shows that insurgency was discriminatingly destructive, and therefore politically conscious.

History

Guha, Ranajit

Asia

Oxford University Press

Subaltern Studies: v. 3: Writings on South Asian History and Society

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

OUP India

The historiography of peasant insurgency in India has hitherto been a record of the colonial administration's effort to deal with insurgency. The result has been a failure to understand the insurgent. The colonialist has commonly seen insurgency as crime, seldom understanding it as a fight for social justice. Guha's work adopts the peasant's viewpoint and studies "the peasant rebel's awareness of his own world and his will to change it." Guha deduces rebel consciousness largely through the discourse of counter-insurgency--the reports, dispatches, minutes, laws, and letters in which the administration reported rebel activity and registered its hostility to insurgency. He shows that insurgency was discriminatingly destructive, and therefore politically conscious.

Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Oxford India Paperbacks)

The historiography of peasant insurgency has hitherto been a record of the colonial administration's effort to deal with insurgents. Guha's work adopts the peasant's viewpoint and studies the peasant rebel's awareness of his own world and his will to change it.

Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (College & University Level Texts)

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

The essays in this volume chart the course of subaltern history from an early concentration on peasant revolts and popular insurgency.

Subaltern Studies Reader 1986-1995

South Asia Books

The past is not just, as has been famously said, another country with foreign customs: it is a contested and colonized terrain. Indigenous histories have been expropriated, eclipsed, sometimes even wholly eradicated, in the service of imperialist aims buttressed by a distinctly Western philosophy of history. Guha offers a critique of such historiography by taking issue with the Hegelian concept of World-history.

History at the Limit of World-History

Ancient Civilizations

Columbia University Press

The past is not just, as has been famously said, another country with foreign customs: it is a contested and colonized terrain. Indigenous histories have been expropriated, eclipsed, sometimes even wholly eradicated, in the service of imperialist aims buttressed by a distinctly Western philosophy of history. Ranajit Guha, perhaps the most influential figure in postcolonial and subaltern studies at work today, offers a critique of such historiography by taking issue with the Hegelian concept of World-history. That concept, he contends, reduces the course of human history to the amoral record of states and empires, great men and clashing civilizations. It renders invisible the quotidian experience of ordinary people and casts off all that came before it into the nether-existence known as "Prehistory." On the Indian subcontinent, Guha believes, this Western way of looking at the past was so successfully insinuated by British colonization that few today can see clearly its ongoing and pernicious influence. He argues that to break out of this habit of mind and go beyond the Eurocentric and statist limit of World-history historians should learn from literature to make their narratives doubly inclusive: to extend them in scope not only to make room for the pasts of the so-called peoples without history but to address the historicality of everyday life as well. Only then, as Guha demonstrates through an examination of Rabindranath Tagore's critique of historiography, can we recapture a more fully human past of "experience and wonder."

History at the Limit of World-History (Italian Academy Lectures)

What is colonialism and what is a colonial state? Ranajit Guha points out that the colonial state in South Asia was fundamentally different from the metropolitan bourgeois state which sired it. The metropolitan state was hegemonic in character, and its claim to dominance was based on a power relation in which persuasion outweighed coercion. Conversely, the colonial state was non-hegemonic, and in its structure of dominance coercion was paramount. Indeed, the originality of the South Asian colonial state lay precisely in this difference: a historical paradox, it was an autocracy set up and sustained in the East by the foremost democracy of the Western world. It was not possible for that non-hegemonic state to assimilate the civil society of the colonized to itself. Thus the colonial state, as Guha defines it in this closely argued work, was a paradox--a dominance without hegemony. 
 Dominance without Hegemony had a nationalist aspect as well. This arose from a structural split between the elite and subaltern domains of politics, and the consequent failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to integrate vast areas of the life and consciousness of the people into an alternative hegemony. That predicament is discussed in terms of the nationalist project of anticipating power by mobilizing the masses and producing an alternative historiography. In both endeavors the elite claimed to speak for the people constituted as a nation and sought to challenge the pretensions of an alien regime to represent the colonized. A rivalry between an aspirant to power and its incumbent, this was in essence a contest for hegemony.

Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Convergences)

Harvard University Press

What is colonialism and what is a colonial state? Ranajit Guha points out that the colonial state in South Asia was fundamentally different from the metropolitan bourgeois state which sired it. The metropolitan state was hegemonic in character, and its claim to dominance was based on a power relation in which persuasion outweighed coercion. Conversely, the colonial state was non-hegemonic, and in its structure of dominance coercion was paramount. Indeed, the originality of the South Asian colonial state lay precisely in this difference: a historical paradox, it was an autocracy set up and sustained in the East by the foremost democracy of the Western world. It was not possible for that non-hegemonic state to assimilate the civil society of the colonized to itself. Thus the colonial state, as Guha defines it in this closely argued work, was a paradox--a dominance without hegemony.
Dominance without Hegemony had a nationalist aspect as well. This arose from a structural split between the elite and subaltern domains of politics, and the consequent failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to integrate vast areas of the life and consciousness of the people into an alternative hegemony. That predicament is discussed in terms of the nationalist project of anticipating power by mobilizing the masses and producing an alternative historiography. In both endeavors the elite claimed to speak for the people constituted as a nation and sought to challenge the pretensions of an alien regime to represent the colonized. A rivalry between an aspirant to power and its incumbent, this was in essence a contest for hegemony.

Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Convergences: Inventories of the Present)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Guha, Ranajit. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Guha, Ranajit

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Guha, Ranajit. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India

Subaltern Studies: v. 3: Writings on South Asian History and Society

Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Oxford India Paperbacks)

Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (College & University Level Texts)

Subaltern Studies Reader 1986-1995

Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Oxford India Paperbacks)

History at the Limit of World-History

History at the Limit of World-History (Italian Academy Lectures)

Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Convergences)

Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Convergences: Inventories of the Present)