The historiographic field that has developed over the past several decades, within a range of disciplines, converging around the study of subaltern resistance, broadly conceived, has both produced some of the most exciting and innovative studies and at the same time revealed a tendency to be frustratingly mired in the politics of the past.

The subalternist approach owes much to the work of British Marxist historians such as George Rude, E. P. Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm, and the focus on “history from below” as well as concepts such as the “moral economy of the crowd” that emerged from the 1950s onward.^[1017] This substantial body of scholar­ship demonstrated that where state authorities, and later Whig and conservative historians, saw nothing but irrational spontaneity behind riots, resistance, and re­bellion, there was in fact an alternative way of writing this history. The disorderly “mob” that engaged in urban riots became the “crowd,” whose actions reflected a so­cially sanctioned political legitimacy among the masses that challenged the existing order in early modern and modern Europe. One of the characteristics of this ap­proach, and one that arguably informs much of the later scholarship on resistance and rebellion, is that it was written squarely from the perspective of, and largely in sympathy with, the “oppressed”—be they peasants, workers, slaves, or simply the “people.” Hobsbawm's notion of the social bandit, the outlaw condemned by the state but supported by the peasants, in many ways embodied this challenge to es­tablished historiography.^[1018] Restoring agency to the very denizens of the past whose own voices were recorded only by the authorities who suppressed their resistance, or criminalized their protests, entailed the development of methodologically more versatile modes of interpreting the past.

Toward the end of the 1970s, the Subaltern Studies community emerged in South Asia from a group of historians who applied elements of the Annales School ap­proach from European social history to an explicitly colonial context.^[1021] What united the different strands of the project was, in the pithy description of Rosalyn O’Hanlon, “an effort to recover the experience, the distinctive cultures, traditions, identities and active historical practice of subaltern groups in a wide variety of settings—traditions, cultures and practice which have been lost or hidden by the action of elite historiography.”^[1022] Subalternity, in other words, is a relational con­cept that depending on the historical context might also be applied to women, slaves, convicts, indigenous people, and other “minorities,” as Dipesh Chakrabarty describes them.^[1023] Although not all subalternist scholarship is concerned with re­sistance and rebellion, this particular thematic focus was at the heart of the project in its original iteration.

In Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, Guha sought to recover the con­sciousness of peasant insurgencies as more than the prehistory of anti-nationalist revolutionary struggles. In other words, he attempted to describe the politics of what had hitherto been dismissed mainly as “pre-political” and spontaneous movements.

The Marxist- Gramscian framework adopted by Guha contains two central points of critique, one relating to the colonial archive, which few today would disagree with, and one relating to nationalist historiography, which few might perhaps find terribly relevant today. If the sole aim of Guha's work was to rehabilitate peasant insurgencies as an important mode of political mobilization prior to the emer­gence of anti-colonial nationalism, it must be considered hugely successful; as an account of rebellion in nineteenth-century India, however, it is, in many respects, inadequate. To the global historian of today, it does indeed seem more pertinent to engage with the circumscribed evidence in a theoretically and methodologically appropriate manner, rather than simply determining the extent to which this or that act of resistance did or did not reflect an emergent class consciousness. The very concept of the “subaltern,” which Guha equates with “peasant,” is not simply an analytical term, but one that comes with considerable ideological baggage.²⁰ In that sense, the early part of the subalternist approach is entirely a product of its time and one that furthermore has not aged well.

Similar to Hobsbawm's study of social banditry, which was based on an impres­sive synthesis of geographically diverse case studies, so too does Guha's argument reflect a globally comparative approach, the scope of which far exceeds most of the conventional histories in the context of which he wrote. The global compara­tive perspective is nevertheless misleading, since individual cases are taken simply as expressions of the very same typology—in this case, peasant insurgency or so­cial banditry. The comparative approach thus results in a strangely ahistorical and overly homogenous analysis, which reduces cultural and geographic specificities and differences to universal manifestations of what is essentially the same central focus: noble resistance by the oppressed against the iniquities of capitalism, i.e., class struggle.^[1025] Structurally deterministic, the reification of the subaltern leaves no room for the individual, who might not conform to the historian’s expectations, let alone spontaneity or the contingencies of history. In his discussion of peasant insurgency in Latin America, Steve Stern makes this point:

20

Gramsci 1971.

In short, when peasants rebel, they are held to do so in reaction to changes deter­mined by all-powerful external forces or “systems.” Their modes of consciousness, even in rebellion, are generally seen as quite limited and predictable, and logically derivative from their “structural” position in society. These assumptions about peasants as political actors are not simple figments of intellectuals’ imagination. Enough evidence exists to demonstrate that the “parochial reactor” phenomenon is not only real, but that it also represents at least one powerful tendency in peasant political life. The problem [... ] is that a tendency which is partial and in many cases offset by other tendencies has been taken to represent the essential character of peasant political behavior and consciousness.^[1026]

While analytically innovative, and provocative in its day, Guha’s work on the use of colonial sources to reconstruct an indigenous peasant consciousness leaves no doubt as to where the sympathy of the historian may be located.

The phenomenon of “Thuggee” was initially sensationalized by the British in India during the 1830s and later became a standard Orientalist trope deployed to prove that India benefited from imperialism. Rather than the religious stranglers imagined by the British, however, Katherine Gough in the late 1970s argued that the “Thugs” should be classified as “social bandits” since they combined “a rather distant millenarian prospect with a certain Robin Hood gallantry and a genius for swift assassination.”^[1029] The “Thugs,” according to Gough, robbed and killed wealthy travelers and “in some cases at least must have shared [the loot] with their fellow villagers, for they had the peasants' loyalty in their own territories.”^[1030] Their social commitment was reflected in their selectivity of victims, Gough further argues, as they refrained from robbing “almost every productive or defenceless category in the population.”^[1031] The problem is that there is no evidence supporting this descrip­tion of the heterogeneous practice of “Thuggee.”^[1032] “Thugs,” which was just one of the various appellations under which these men went, served as a kind of bandit­retainers for local Indian landlords and went on annual expeditions to plunder travelers. Upon their return they did not simply share their spoils with their fellow villagers but paid most of it to the landlords in the form of a tax. The reason the “Thugs” claimed never to rob from certain social groups is that these groups were mainly untouchables and thus the poorest in society whom it would make little sense to rob.^[1033]

On a similar note, Felix Padel has suggested that the “Thugs” were a “Hindu re­action to alien domination”: “Is it not likely that they evolved during Mughal rule and increased under the British as a secret response to state violence and exploita­tion, since the victims were often merchants, and sepoys in British pay who were travelling on leave?”^[1034] The short answer is “no”; as a type of banditry, “Thuggee” was not aimed at the state, be it Indian or British, and the choice of victims related to the amount of wealth they could be expected to procure and the ease by which victims could be plundered. Merchants, money-carriers and newly paid soldiers on leave were all easy and obvious targets for any type of robbers, as they traveled through isolated areas far from their home. The “Thugs” scrupulously avoided attacking Europeans or any other potential victim whose disappearance might cause a stir— for very pragmatic reasons. The men who at times engaged in banditry as “Thugs” also served as strongmen for local landlords or even as mercenaries in the armies of Indian rulers—none of which can appropriately be labeled simply as social banditry or indeed anti-colonial.^[1035]

The mere fact that some practices were outlawed or criminalized by the authorities to some scholars immediately renders such practices as acts of “resist­ance” and implicitly noble or at least justifiable. That is not an analytically sound approach and one that obscures more than it clarifies. In a study of the varied and often contradictory involvement of Brazilian Indians against the Spanish rulers in the eighteenth century, Juan Pedro Viqueira makes the poignant argument that

we should not idealize popular struggles simply because they are popular. Condemning the hard living conditions suffered by the lower classes does not provide us with a motive for justifying all of their actions, and it is impossible to do this without contradicting ourselves as a result of the diversity of the political affiliations within this population group. Both their ends and their means, there­fore, must be subjected to a close critical scrutiny.^[1036]

'1 he implicit assumption concerning the intrinsic legitimacy of subaltern resist­ance poses a particular challenge when extreme brutality and violence has to be explained. Religion is another aspect of rebellion that sits uneasily with the “logic” of resistance—we can explain the actions of hungry peasants or exploited slaves, yet our attempts to make sense of popular religion or the actions of so-called fanatics often falter.^[1037] The real challenge facing scholars studying rebellion, resistance, and the subaltern, is, however, precisely to make sense of what appears to be senseless acts and not merely claim for themselves a sympathetic reading of those individuals and groups whom they find it easy to defend. We cannot disown those aspects of the past that are difficult to face simply because they do not tally with preconceived notions of how the dominated and oppressed ought to act or think. In the second part of this chapter we shall turn to these very considerations.

Violence

While subalternist scholarship has been criticized for emphasizing armed resist­ance, and ignoring less overt acts of resistance and other modes of negotiation, violence as a significant issue in and of itself is curiously absent from Guha’s anal­ysis.^[1038] Guha did not include killing “as a principal form or method of struggle,” and defending this analytical choice, he stated that “[i]n insisting on this omission we have paid heed to the many references to blood and sword in our evidence and convinced ourselves that these testify less to any considerable loss of life than to the terror which grips the peasant’s enemies on the outbreak of an uprising.”^[1039] Where Guha simply, and somewhat implausibly, denied the importance of violence in re­bellion, Rudrangshu Mukherjee addressed the matter more directly in his study of the infamous Cawnpore massacres of 1857.^[1040]

As the uprising against colonial rule spread across northern India in the summer of 1857, it was transformed from a military mutiny into a popular rising in which aggrieved peasants, dispossessed landowners, and local rulers joined. In the city of Cawnpore, the British garrison was besieged and as the position of the British quickly became untenable they accepted the offer of free passage, leaving their fortified position behind. As hundreds of men, women, and children boarded the boats that were to take them to safety down-river, the rebels opened up a deadly fire with artillery and attacked the survivors on the banks of the river, at a place known as Satichaura Ghat. Apart from a handful of fugitives who managed to escape, most of the British garrison was killed, while some 120 surviving women and children were taken to a small compound known as the Bibighar. As a British relief force approached, however, the (in)famous rebel leader Nana Sahib ordered his men to kill the prisoners, and their bodies were dumped in a nearby well. In the British im­agination, the Cawnpore massacres constituted the worst outrage imaginable and were subsequently invoked to legitimize the brutal suppression of the Uprising.^[1041]

Mukherjee has produced some of the most innovative research on 1857, but his attempt to examine rebel violence, his close adherence to Guha’s work, and the subalternist analytical framework stand in the way of a nuanced inquiry. In Mukherjee’s narrative of the Cawnpore massacres, historical events model them­selves closely on the blueprint for peasant insurgency as established by Guha; the moment they rise against the British, the Indian sepoys thus cast off their uniforms and revert to their original state of peasants and everything they do thereafter becomes a symbolic and collective action carried out by the “people.” At times, the very application of subalternist theory, with the ghost of Gramsci hovering in the background, produces a highly simplistic analysis: “The populace, seized by a rebel consciousness, set out to destroy, but not indiscriminately.”^[1042] The peasant-rebels are thus described as two-dimensional caricatures of ideal subalterns whom, we might imagine, consulted the relevant pages of Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency before deciding on the appropriate act and mode of resistance. In turning to the massacres, Mukherjee convincingly suggests that the restitution of the pre-colonial order required that the common enemy, the British, must be completely annihilated. However, in his attempt to unpack and, crucially, to differentiate between the mas­sacre at the Ghat and at the Bibighar, Mukherjee simply invokes Guha’s distinction between “crime” and “insurgency”:

It was indeed an irony that under pressure from British counter-insurgency meas­ures, in the space of a fortnight the power of the insurrection had transformed itself from the public to the secretive: from the communal to only the leader­ship: what had previously been seen as the work of God had become, one could say using the same terms, an act of Satan.^[1043]

The distinction between “open” and “secretive,” it should be clear, is not merely descriptive, but highly charged. Mukherjee, and Guha along with him, seek to re­cuperate criminalized practices as genuine and legitimate expressions of popular protest, while at the same time retaining the category of “criminal” as a conven­ient label for those actions ultimately deemed indefensible. The ambush at the river, Mukherjee claims, was characterized by the celebration of local villagers, thereby conforming to the scenario so favored by studies of early modern Europe—the carnivalesque mode of communal violence as a celebration of the inversion of the power hierarchy.^[1044] By contrast, Mukherjee argues, the massacre at Bibighar was a secretive act, carried out by a handful of henchmen and as such of an entirely dis­tinct mode of violence. The river ambush qualifies as an act of open defiance, and is accordingly deemed to be legitimate by the historian, while the latter was secre­tive and brutal and must as such be disowned—or, as Mukherjee implies, actually blamed on the advance of the British forces.

Historians of conflict and violence during other time periods and in different places will likely be puzzled by the insistence that violence was not a significant part of subaltern resistance, or that when it did occur it was qualitatively different from other types of violence and somehow ameliorated by the virtue of the rebels' cause.^[1045] The two events discussed by Mukherjee were clearly different, yet the val­orization of certain forms of violence is analytically troubling. The fact remains that historically, popular protest and open rebellion could be just as brutal and horrible as more secretive acts of killings—as anyone familiar with Alain Corbin's classic Village of Cannibals, or Natalie Zemon Davis's work on religious riots during the French Wars of Religion, will know.^[1046] Incidentally, Guha has much to say about the manner in which peasants target symbols of power and authority in the broadest sense, what he described as “expansion.” In addition to attacking obvious edifices of power, such as jails or police stations, insurgents thus also targeted other structures associated with the regime, including churches, schools, and private homes. The logical implication of this argument, from which Guha shirked, is that when Indians rebelled they would not simply attack and kill the local magistrate or other colonial officials but all Europeans, including women and children, because they too embodied the oppression of colonial rule.

Subalterns did not merely rebel in order to turn the world upside down, as Guha maintains, but might as well be said to rebel precisely to prevent their world from being turned upside down. It was the perceived threat that colonial rule posed to their way of life, their beliefs and practices, which imbued the violence of rebel­lion with such retributive ferocity.^[1047] This is also where modern studies of sectarian and communal violence have much to offer scholars of violence, resistance, and rebellion in the more distant past.^[1048] As has so often been the case during deadly riots in the twentieth century, the initial violence of the aggressors was a preemptive act in defense against an imminent threat (real or imagined), as local grievances converged with bigger conflicts and personal antagonisms were subsumed under more general sentiments. Whether it be a pogrom or a peasant uprising, momen­tous events in the past could be invoked to provide clarity out of confusion and as­cribe primary identities to friend and foe alike—often with deadly results. During times of crisis and uncertainty, the trigger-event of an outbreak might thus bear little relation to preexisting grievances, and the scope of violence unleashed may be entirely disproportionate to its immediate cause. As far as riots and rebellions are concerned, the dynamics of escalation have followed a remarkably consistent pat­tern over time and in different places.

It may be noted that this chapter has not accorded much attention to the forms of everyday resistance that James Scott famously brought into focus, nor to the acts of non-resistance or cooperation that in many instances constituted the most common accommodation to imperialism. The emphasis on active resistance, how­ever, should not make us blind to the ambiguity and ambivalence of resistance that Sherry Ortner has pointed to and which is explicitly excluded from Guha’s analysis where informers, for instance, are seen simply as “rotten apples” who undermined the solidarity that underpinned insurgency.^[1049] In her intervention, Ortner thus warns against homogenizing the multiplicity of subaltern identities and experiences, and thereby downplaying the internal divisions and conflicts within such groups.^[1050] During the Indian Uprising, large parts of the subcontinent were unaffected by the insurgency and the British only managed to regain control by mobilizing those parts of the Indian population that remained loyal to the East India Company. The thousands of Punjabi troops who joined the British in laying siege to Delhi during the summer of 1857 were no less subaltern than the rebels defending the Mughal capital—and the range of motivations that determined which side one fought on certainly cannot be summarized with reference to an idealized and essential con­sciousness, be it “false” or not. The fact remains that most empires could not have been so successfully extended and maintained without local support, and this cannot simply be reduced to self-serving elites or capitalist interests benefiting from the exploitation of the “people.” Peasants too would join the forces of invading and occupying forces, i.e., the “oppressors,” and the opprobrium linked to concepts such as “collaborator” oversimplifies the range of motivation shaping peoples’ choices.

The reality of the Indian Uprising, which continued as small-scale guerrilla war­fare long after 1857, was far more complex than either Guha or Mukherjee allows for.^[1051] The insistence that sepoys were at heart no more than peasants ignores the many other instances where they not only kept their uniforms but even went into battle with their regimental flags—thus retaining a regimental cohesion and

military identity even while rebelling against their former officers and colonial rule.^[1052] Similarly, sepoys would regularly plunder their compatriots, rich and poor, while the pastoralist Gujars, for instance, whose solidarity and spontaneous mobi­lization Guha exalts, were well known for plundering the rebels in the environs of the Mughal capital.^[1053] There were certainly remarkable examples of communal unity and cooperation between the many diverse communities and political interests that were mobilized across northern India during the Uprising. But there were also instances when entirely different priorities took precedence, as one would expect from any historical event. The rebels did seek to establish a government in Delhi which reflected their diverse backgrounds, yet Muslim butchers were promptly executed, by being blown from cannon, for slaughtering cows, which offended the Hindu sepoys.^[1054] The point is that historical reality, to the extent that it can be reconstructed, does not match the neatness of theory, and to force the empirical ev­idence into a preconceived theoretical framework is to put the cart before the horse. The infliction of pain and suffering was never the prerogative of the elite alone, and a notion of just and heroic struggle cannot constitute the implicit backbone of studies of subaltern resistance.