Ranajit Guha on the failure to grasp the political agency of peasants

“…[I]nsurgency is regarded as external to the peasant’s consciousness and Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate for Reason, the logic of that consciousness”.

- Ranajit Guha, The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

Are Those-Who-Do-Not-Count Capable of Reason? Thinking Political Subjectivity in the (Neo-)Colonial World and the Limits of History

By Michael Neocosmos, 2012

This article is concerned to show that the historical science of the (neo-)colonial world is unable to allow
for an analysis of the political subjectivities of ‘those-who-do-not-count’ or ‘subalterns’ as rational beings.
Rather, it can only think such subjectivities as the products of people who are merely bearers of their social
location, not thinking subjects. As a result, such history can only be a history of place, not a history of the
transcending of place; it therefore amounts to colonial or state history. Historical objectivity invariably
produces state history. The thought of the possibility of emancipatory politics, which always exceeds place,
is thus precluded. This is an unavoidable epistemic problem in history and the social sciences in their current
form. Following the work of Lazarus, I argue for an alternative historical methodology in Africa in terms of
an internal analysis of the idioms of politics as discontinuous subjective sequences.

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

by Ranajit Guha, 1983

When a peasant rose in revolt at any time or place under the Raj, he did so necessarily and explicitly in violation of a series of codes which defined his very existence as a member of that colonial, and still largely semi-feudal society. For his subalternity was materialized by the structure of property, institutionalized by law, sanctified by religion and made tolerable-and even desirable-by tradition. To rebel was indeed to destroy many of those familiar signs which he had learned to read and manipulate in order to extract a meaning out of the harsh world around him and live with it. The risk in 'turning things upside down' under these conditions was indeed so great that he could hardly afford to engage in such a project in a state of
absent-rnindedness.

The Small Voice of History

Permanent Black

Ranajit Guha is arguably the Indian historian whose writings have had a massive and formative impact on contemporary scholarship in several disciplines throughout the world: on postcolonial studies in literature, in anthropology, in history, in cultural studies, in art history.

Guha first became known as the practitioner of a critical Marxism that ran parallel to the work of British and French Marxist historians of the 1960s and 1970s but which, instead of re-creating a ‘history from below’, sought active political engagement with the present by deploying insights drawn from Gramsci and Mao. More recently, Guha’s writings have drawn attention to the phenomenological and the everyday, and been noticed for their sustained critique of the disciplinary practices of history-writing.

Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India

by Ranajit Guha

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.