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.