Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism 1479
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