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Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India Paperback – August 13, 1999

by Ranajit Guha (Author)
4.9 4.9 out of 5 stars 5 ratings
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Foreword by James Scott

This classic work in subaltern studies explores the common elements present in rebel consciousness during the Indian colonial period. Ranajit Guha—intellectual founder of the groundbreaking and influential Subaltern Studies Group—describes from the peasants’ viewpoint the relations of dominance and subordination in rural India from 1783 to 1900.
Challenging the idea that peasants were powerless agents who rebelled blindly against British imperialist oppression and local landlord exploitation, Guha emphasizes their awareness and will to effect political change. He suggests that the rebellions represented the birth of a theoretical consciousness and asserts that India’s long subaltern tradition lent power to the landmark insurgence led by Mahatma Gandhi. Yet as long as landlord authority remains dominant in a ruling culture, Guha claims, all mass struggles will tend to model themselves after the unfinished projects documented in this book.
Students and scholars will welcome this paperback edition of Guha’s 1983 original, which was distributed on a limited scale in the United States. It will influence new generations studying colonialism, postcolonialism, subaltern studies, historiography, anthropology, and Indian, Asian, and Latin American history.

Previous page
  1. Print length
    384 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Duke University Press Books
  4. Publication date
    August 13, 1999
  5. Dimensions
    5.79 x 1.15 x 8.52 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    9780822323488
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0822323488
  8. Lexile measure
    1700L
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A classic in subaltern studies as well as in postcolonial studies.”—José Rabasa, University of California, Berkeley

“A remarkable achievement.”—Patricia Seed, Rice University

“Full of sparkling ideas and written in vivid and compelling prose.”—Arjun Appadurai, University of Chicago

“Guha’s contributions to historiography are fundamental to colonial and postcolonial studies. By directing our focus to the question of consciousness or self-awareness in the making of peasant rebellions in colonial India, he corrects and redirects the writing of history.”—Sara Castro-Klarén, Johns Hopkins University

“The most significant—and potentially the most influential—work of social theory since Michel Foucault’s Dicipline and Punish.”—John Beverley, University of Pittsburgh

“Very unusual and original. Guha presents a new set of conceptual categories to understand the peasant situation in the postcolonial era. His work has transcended the local boundaries of India and has inspired the foundation of similar research projects in the Latin American field such as the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group.”—Ileana Rodriguez, Ohio State University

“Written in a concise, easy-to-read style and offering a wealth of examples to illustrate each point, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India is the kind of book that our students desperately crave.”—Marcia Stephenson, Purdue University

From the Back Cover

"Very unusual and original. Guha presents a new set of conceptual categories to understand the peasant situation in the postcolonial era. His work has transcended the local boundaries of India and has inspired the foundation of similar research projects in the Latin American field such as the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group."--Ileana Rodriguez, Ohio State University

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0822323486
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Duke University Press Books (August 13, 1999)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780822323488
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0822323488
  • Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1700L
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.18 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.79 x 1.15 x 8.52 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.9 4.9 out of 5 stars 5 ratings

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Ranajit Guha

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Customer reviews

4.9 out of 5 stars
4.9 out of 5
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Top reviews from the United States

john R Beverley
5.0 out of 5 stars a classic
Reviewed in the United States on October 13, 2001
Guha's Elementary Aspects--originally published in the early 1980s and then for an audience mainly limited to South Asian studies--is perhaps the most interesting work of social theory since Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. It is also a model of a new way of writing history "from below." Its implications touch not only history, but also the broad field of postcolonial studies in both the humanities and social sciences.
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Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars A defining moment in social history
Reviewed in the United States on December 8, 2000
Guha's "Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India" takes the disturbance of the nexus between the elite and the subaltern as its focus. Employing instances of resistance from across India over the period between 1783 and 1900 - defined by a dearth of information preceding the former date and the subsumption of rebel consciousness by nationalist and socialist politics by the latter - Guha seeks to tease out the underlying structure of consciousness and action in 'peasant' rebellion in its 'pure' form (pp. 13 and 334 et passim). One hundred and ten rebellions are examined under the analytic rubric of the six categories that dictate the monograph's organization: the negatively defined consciousness of the peasantry; the spectrum between crime and rebellion; the mechanics and meanings of action in the latter; the creation of solidarity; the transmission of rebelliousness; and finally, the territorial limits thereto.
This framework is unlike that employed by other contemporary social historians on the count of its attention to a holistic context of power relations (as opposed to a lopsided, exclusive focus on the subaltern). However, it also blurs the vertical stratification within the subaltern classes, oscillating between treating 'the peasant' as an undifferentiated social entity and as a conglomerate body of distinct groups.
"Peasant Insurgency" critically engages Eric Hobsbawm's category of the 'pre-' or 'sub-political' spontaneous peasant rebellion in arguing that the evidence from colonial India points to the expression of a conscious collective will in the organized disruption of power relations between the subaltern and the triumvirate elite of sarkar, sahukar, and zamindar (colonial government, moneylender, and landlord respectively) (pp. 5-11, 333-34 et passim). Guha is, however, careful to urge caution against overestimating the 'rather hesitant, inchoate and disjointed' political consciousness of the peasantry which fell 'far short of conceptualizing the structure of authority' that shaped their conditions of existence (p. 24).
Other than decentering 'the spurious primacy of the elite' and restoring the agency of the subaltern in historical progression without eliding the former from its purview, "Peasant Insurgency" also strikes a neat balance between the 'material and spiritual' expressions of power. First, the synchronic snapshots of Indian society it presents show elite power as being expressed and derived in material difference - dress, housing, means of transportation, ownership of capital etc. - as much as it was predicated on cultural difference and encoded in consciousness - language, legend, scriptural sanction, monopoly over writing, regulation of bodily movement etc. - and this was *before* Foucault became fashionable. Second, when subaltern resistance systematically engaged this network of symbolic and material sites of power by inverting, desecrating, and destroying them (pp. 18 and 28-76), the same structural limitations to subaltern autonomy were illuminated in diachronic sequences. On the other hand, Guha also unearthed the autonomously articulated meanings with which peasant action was saturated. For instance, the modalities of the insurrection and the hunt or fishing expedition were juxtaposed to reveal the 'idiom' of 'corporate labor' common to both (pp. 126-30). Hence, it is noted that power is problematized in an amply revealing number of complex permutations in the earliest Subalternist historiography, the harbinger of which is "Peasant Insurgency."
Of course, "Peasant Insurgency"'s genius does have its limitations. First, the binary model of power relations it sets up conflating sublatern classes into one neat camp and the triumvirate of sarkar, sahukar, and zamindar in the other, simplifies the web of power relations existing therebetween to a significant degree. Second, though it self-consciously wrestles with the near-exclusive use of elite sources throughout, its straightforward reading of pseudo-canonical religious texts of Brahmanical Hinduism to tap the religious consciousness of the subaltern classes is unpersuasive. The argument that the semiotics of power embodied in the "Laws of Manu", for instance, 'congealed into naïve tradition' 'through centuries of recursive practice,' were subsequently formalized by the literati (p. 37), and were hence representative of subaltern consciousness is belied by the fact that it was colonialism that canonized such texts as "Hindu law." Asserting that they were pervasive in their influence, or that they coalesced upward, or even contradicting this position by claiming that they were Brahmanical in source and disseminated therefrom amounts to pure conjecture. This is not a mere hiccup for a project centered on recovering peasant consciousness: an overwhelmingly elitist (colonial) archive of evidence endemic to a largely illiterate society, while craftily surmounted by historians such as Barbara Hanawalt, has consistently plagued "Subaltern Studies." However, having been a major point of debate, it appears that the Subalternist scholars are now beginning to be inventive in their use of sources.
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Mountainous man
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 25, 2016
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