“The Prose of Counter-Insurgency”

On Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency” in Subaltern Studies II. Ed. Ranajit Guha. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 [1995].

Last week I was able to dip my toes into the vast literature on Subalternity[1] via Gyan Prakash’s American Historical Review forum piece, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism” (though after rereading my last post I’m not so sure it was clear where I got my inspiration). For this week’s post, I decided to engage with one of the seminal texts of Subaltern Studies group. In “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” Ranajit Guha criticizes historians of peasant uprisings in India for uncritically adopting the ideological claims of their sources, which are mostly British colonial records. First, Guha cuts down the prevalent view dismissing peasant uprisings in general as “purely spontaneous and unpremeditated affairs” (2). Instead he argues “Insurgency…was a motivated and conscious undertaking on the part of the rural masses” (2). Second, Guha brings in a temporal analysis to describe how discourses and documents perform legitimacy based on their chronological proximity to the events in question. In this regard, he distinguishes between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. What he calls primary sources are records produced by the colonial administration, colonial elite, and native collaborators as the event unfolds. The historical profession holds these in the highest regard, despite their often value-laden interpretations. Guha reminds us that such “texts are not the record of observations uncontaminated by bias, judgment and opinion” (15) and need to be considered critically. Primary documents most often consist of the “prose of counter-insurgency” that gives his article its title. After all, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. While this insight appears simple enough, Guha stresses the need to go beyond merely reversing the roles within a colonial document, but we will save that criticism for the discussion of tertiary sources to come. What he calls secondary sources are often produced by witnesses, participants, and onlookers, but after a significant period of time has passed. Colonial memoirs are the fixtures of this genre, and they often masquerade as objective despite being colored by years of deliberation. Finally, tertiary sources are written further still from the actual events, usually by supposedly ‘disinterested’ historians. Guha’s use of tertiary seems to be equivalent to the standard idea of a “secondary source,” and he spends much of his time analyzing the historiographical practices of these works.

Guha goes further than to merely indict scholars who sympathize with the colonialists over the peasants; his main targets of criticism seem to be the tertiary sources produced by Indian nationalist and radical authors on the subcontinent. For Guha, both nationalist and Marxist historiographies are anxious to attribute the author’s own desired ideological motivations as the impetus for the revolt, which “amounts to an act of appropriation which excludes the rebel as the conscious subject of his own history and incorporates the latter as only a contingent element in another history with another subject” (33). Bourgeois-nationalist historiography reads “an elite consciousness…into all peasant movements as their motive force” (38), while leftists tend to be “blinded by the glare of a perfect and immaculate consciousness” and they “[see] nothing, for instance, but solidarity in rebel behavior and fails to notice its Other, namely, betrayal” (40). While Guha clearly prefers leftist historiography that sympathizes with the peasants over their colonial and native overlords, too often the role of religiosity in the revolt is completely ignored, and the rebel is effectively turned into a secular European socialist. Guha ends by appealing for the insurgent “to recover his place in history,” basically through a more nuanced and sensitive scholarship (40) – an argument that recalls the great “agency” debate.

One can see why this essay has proven so influential in postcolonial literature and works of American historiography, such as A Nation Under Our Feet. Guha’s strength is his sensitive and creative analysis of sources as performances in order to make reliable conclusions about historical actors who did not produce and maintain their own archival records. Guha’s criticism of the ideological appropriation of past subjects by present historians also speaks to the literature of Middle Eastern Studies, as religiosity was similarly ignored in much of the historiography until the Iranian Revolution. To make matters worse, the rise of “Islamic fundamentalism” simply reversed the bias in the literature to a certain extent, and religiosity became the only thing many observers saw as the motivating social force in the Middle East.