Elementary aspects of peasant insurgency in colonial India

The historiography of peasant insurgency in India has hitherto been a record of the colonial administration's effort to deal with insurgency. The result has been a failure to understand the insurgent. The colonialist has commonly seen insurgency as crime, seldom understanding it as a fight for social justice. Guha's work adopts the peasant's viewpoint and studies 'the peasant rebel's awareness of his own world and his will to change it.' Covering the period 1783-1900, it identifies some of the common forms or general ideas in rebel consciousness over this stretch of Indian history.

The author deduces rebel consciousness largely through the discourse of counter-insurgency the reports, despatches, minutes, laws, letters, etc. in which the administration reported rebel activity and registered its hostility to insurgency. He shows that insurgency was discriminatingly destructive and therefore politically conscious. Using some of the analytical techniques made available by semiotics he goes on to analyse the symbols of oppression that were attacked by insurgents. A range of other important issues the distinction between the insurgent and the criminal, the modes by which insurgency expressed itself, the features characteristic of a rebel community, the methods by which the message of insurrection was transmitted and spread, the reasons for the territorially restricted nature of insurgency. -are also comprehensively discussed. These issues are seminal to the area of peasant studies and this book is an important contribution to the existing literature on the subject. It will interest historians, sociologists and political scientists.