The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

Authors

  • Author

  • Ranajit Guha

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.12816/0040937

Keywords:

Historiography, Discourse, Consciousness, Peasant Uprisings, Religiosity

Abstract

In this renowned article, Ranajit Guha analyzes the historiography of peasant uprisings under the British Raj in India. His key thesis is that historians who have studied these movements did not take into account the peasants' own consciousness, and therefore described their insurrections as spontaneous affairs or were content with just studying the economic and social background of the uprisings. This was due, in his view, not just due to historians' uncritical use of official sources, but also to their projection of their own consciousness onto the subject they are investigating. Guha finds that there is a blind spot that marks the different kinds of historical discourse, which he terms primary, secondary, and tertiary. His exposure and critique of this blind spot lays the ground for a new method of historiography which rehabilitates the consciousness of the subaltern, including his religiosity, and allows him to speak and act as a subject in his own history.

غلاف العدد 6 من دورية أسطور

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Published

2017-07-01

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Issue

Vol. 3 No. 006 (2017): Issue 006

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Copyright (c) 2017 Ostour for Historical Studies

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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