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question, his " Prose of Counter-Insurgency " offers a methodological tour de force and a perceptive reading of the historical writings on peasant insurgency in colonial India. Describing these writings as counter-insurgent texts, Guha begins by distinguishing three types of discourses-primary, secondary, and tertiary. These differ from one another in terms of the order of their appearance in time and the degree of their acknowledged or unacknowledged identification with the official point of view. Analyzing each in turn, Guha shows the presence, transformation, and redistribution of a " counter-insurgent code." This code, present in the immediate accounts of insurgency produced by officials( primary discourse), is processed into another time and narrative by official reports and memoirs( secondary discourse) and is then incorporated and redistributed by historians who have no official affiliation and are farthest removed from the time of the event( tertiary discourse). The " code of pacification," written into the " raw " data of primary texts and the narratives of secondary discourses, survives, and it shapes the tertiary discourse of historians when they fail to read in it the presence of the excluded other, the insurgent. Consequently, while historians produce accounts that differ from secondary discourses, their tertiary discourse also ends up appropriating the insurgent. Consider, for example, the treatment of peasant rebellions. When colonial officials, using on-the-spot accounts containing " the code of pacification," blamed wicked landlords and wily moneylenders for the occurrence of these events, they used causality as a counter-insurgent instrument: to identify the cause of the revolt was a step in the direction of control over it and constituted a denial of the insurgent ' s agency. In nationalist historiography, this denial took a different form, as British rule, rather than local oppression, became the cause of revolts and turned peasant rebellions into nationalist struggles. Radical historians, too, ended up incorporating the counter-insurgent code of the secondary discourse as they explained peasant revolts in relation to a revolutionary continuum leading to socialism. Each tertiary account failed to step outside the counter-insurgent paradigm, Guha argues, by refusing to acknowledge the subjectivity and agency of the insurgent.' 3
Clearly, the project to restore the insurgent ' s agency involved, as Rosalind O ' Hanlon pointed out in a thoughtful review essay, the notion of the " recovery of the subject."' 4 Thus, while reading records against their grain, these scholars have sought to uncover the subaltern ' s myths, cults, ideologies, and revolts that colonial and nationalist elites sought to appropriate and that conventional historiography has laid waste by the deadly weapon of cause and effect. Ranajit Guha ' s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India( 1983) is a powerful example of scholarship that seeks to recover the peasant from elite projects and positivist historiography. In this wide-ranging study full of brilliant insights and methodological innovation, Guha returns to nineteenth-century peasant insurrections in colonial India. Reading colonial records and historiographical representations with an uncanny eye, he offers a fascinating account of the peasant ' s insurgent consciousness, rumors, mythic visions, religiosity, and bonds of community. From
13 Guha, " Prose of Counter-Insurgency," 26-33.
14 Rosalind O ' Hanlon, " Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia," Modern Asian Studies, 22( 1988): 189-224.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1994