Rumor and Religion

One of the most poignant critiques of Guha's work emerged from within Subaltern Studies itself in Dipesh Chakrabarty's discussion of Guha's treatment of religion and the supernatural in connection with the Santhal Rebellion of 1855.^[1055] Following their capture by the British, the Santhal leaders claimed that the rising had been instigated and fought by their deity, who had also promised to protect them from the bullets of their enemies.

In sum, it is not possible to speak of insurgency in this case except as a religious consciousness—except, that is, as a massive demonstration of self-estrangement (to borrow Marx's term for the very essence of religiosity) which made the rebels look upon their project as predicated on a will other than their own.^[1056]

Deeply committed to restoring the agency to subalterns, Guha could not accom­modate his historical interlocutors' denial of their own agency, and he blamed their invocation of supernatural beings or rumors of a messianic tenor as reflections of a “false consciousness.”^[1057] Chakrabarty takes Guha to task for abandoning his commit­ment to recovering a rebel consciousness, and accepting the words of the subaltern only insofar as they can be made compatible with the logic, never mind politics, of twentieth-century historiography. The important question Chakrabarty raises, but never answers, is whether there are “experiences of the past that cannot be captured by the methods of the discipline.”^[1058] Historians of European imperialism and colo­nial warfare in other parts of the world will be familiar with, or at least recognize, the promise made to the Santhals by their deity to protect them against bullets.

When we cannot get a proverb, or a joke, or a ritual, or a poem, we know we are on to something. By picking at the document where it is most opaque, we may be able to unravel an alien system of meaning. The thread might even lead into a strange and wonderful world view.^[1060]

The imagery of poorly armed “savages” charging headlong into the deadly fire of European machine guns, believing themselves to be impervious to the white man's bullets, encapsulates one of the most powerful tropes of colonial warfare during the high point of imperialism.^[1061] The same can be said of contemporary depictions of Muslim warriors whose seemingly suicidal attacks on colonial troops during conflicts in Sudan, Afghanistan, and the Philippines were similarly explained with reference to their intrinsic “fanaticism.”^[1062] The clash between magic and ma­chine guns embodied the wider conflict of tradition versus modernity, or fanati­cism versus reason, which constituted the basic framework through which most anti-colonial rebellions were regarded by contemporaries. Faced by the onslaught of European civilization, colonizers told themselves, uncivilized people could only react by taking succor in their superstitious beliefs and barbarous practices.

The so-called Boxers, or Yihequan (lit. “Militia United in Righteousness”) emerged from a range of local militias in late-nineteenth-century northern China, who practiced martial arts and various forms of spiritual rituals. From the regional power struggles between local elites and an increasingly weak imperial government seeking to contain the ever-expanding sphere of influence of European powers and Christian missionaries, the Boxers soon grew into a massive popular anti-foreign and anti-Christian movement. The spiritual beliefs of the Boxers involved the use of spells and charms, spirit possession, as well as rituals that conferred invulner­ability and protected them against bullets and other weapons. As an important political movement in their own right, the Boxers could not be controlled by the Qing government, and after escalating attacks on Christian missionaries and con­vert communities throughout the countryside, they moved on the capital of Beijing and laid siege to the foreign legations. An international relief expedition was soon launched, and following a bloody and destructive campaign, the Boxers were com­pletely crushed, while the Qing court had to settle for a humiliating peace and give in to the demands of the Western powers.^[1063]

A few years later, the colonial authorities in German East Africa were faced by a seemingly similar phenomenon, except that in this instance the “magical” aspect of resistance was even more pronounced. The Maji Maji Rebellion, which broke out in 1905, was named after the magic water, maji, prepared by a local prophet, or “witch doctor” in colonial parlance, who called on the local tribes to rise against the Germans, promising that the “war medicine” would make the white man's bullets turn to water. The rising unified a number of disparate tribes and clans, many of which had suffered under colonial rule, and was initially successful with attacks on smaller outposts and isolated missionary stations. The Germans eventually launched several punitive expeditions, though it still took more than a year to pacify the region, leaving tens of thousands dead, due in large part to famine as a result of the scorched earth policy pursued by the colonial forces.

A modern analysis, for which the implicit point of reference is post­Enlightenment rationality, invariably struggles to make sense of the role of magic and religious beliefs and practices—especially if we are to studiously avoid the rep­etition of colonial tropes of the naive and superstitious “savage.” Recent scholar­ship on these rebellions, however, has suggested a number of ways by which we can productively engage with the subject, in spite of the perennial problem of the sources available. First of all, we cannot understand these phenomena as singular and self-contained—we should not assume that the Boxers or Maji Maji believed themselves to be protected against the bullets of European troops and that this be­lief in the efficacy of “magic” in and of itself caused them to rise against colonial forces. These practices must be situated within a wider cultural context and with a keen awareness of the interplay between preexisting beliefs and practices, and the contingencies of the colonial encounter. Unknowingly, but no less importantly, Europeans played a crucially constitutive role in the mobilization of religion and “magic” as an indigenous response to imperialism.^[1065]

One of the historical specificities that sets China apart within the current con­text is the fact that it was never formally colonized and that the life of the ordi­nary Chinese peasant was in some ways far less affected by Western imperialism, compared to, say, that of an East African or Indian peasant. By the same token, however, it is indisputable that Christian missionaries had made far greater inroads than was the case even within most formal colonies, and had in some parts of northern China established themselves as a power to be reckoned with, including a substantive Chinese Christian population.

Turning to German East Africa, the use of magic can be seen to have constituted a set of widespread practices that had as much to do with internal mobilization and power dynamics as it did with anti-colonial resistance.

Specialists in medicine and divination offered solutions to crises of fertility and agrarian productivity, witchcraft accusations, social conflict, drought and other ills. Prophetic leadership intersected with or influenced military leadership when communities responded to crises that took the form of internal conflict, inter­group competition and colonial intervention. Medicines were therefore trans­formative substances that diminished vulnerabilities and enhanced resilience for those who sought assistance during a time of adversity.^[1067]

Crucially, the circulation of the maji was narrative as much as it was material, and the ritual was accompanied by stories about German defeats, supernatural in­tervention, and the efficacy of the “war medicine.” News of actual events merged with, and were reinforced by, prophesies that added to the cacophony of rumors, which served to both spread panic and empower the local clans and tribes. Colonial observers actually described the circulation of the maji as a form of propaganda, while a later writer compared it to a “chain-letter.”^[1068] This has obvious parallels in the case of the Boxers, whose stories of magical feats were widely circulated alongside rumors about the alleged wrongdoing of Christians and onslaught of foreigners.

The close relationship between magic, religious beliefs, and rumors emerging from these historical examples remind us of what is perhaps Guha’s strongest and most original intervention: namely, in regard to the role of rumors during peasant rebellions. It is noteworthy that Guha actually mentioned the Maji Maji rebellion when discussing the role of rumors, stating that “it was Kinjikitile’s prophecies and his eponymous medicine which helped as much as anything else to convert anti-German feelings into the Maji Maji uprising.”^[1069] Unfortunately, this mobiliza­tion was not, in Guha’s estimate, of the right kind, since it was “symptomatic of a consciousness that proved far too feeble to cope with its own project and left it to be completed by the intervention of a superior wisdom.”^[1070] In the very process of advancing a novel and highly promising argument, Guha could ultimately not es­cape the Gramscian framework.

Moving on from Guha’s work, however, we can begin to see how rumors his­torically constitute an important form of symbolic threat-assessment and mode of mobilization during subaltern insurgency—communicated through signs or coded language, they could cause panic or be empowering depending on the circumstances.^[1071] In India before the outbreak of 1857, widespread concerns about the manner in which British rule was endangering the ritual status of high-caste soldiers, and generally upending peoples’ way of life, found their expression in stories of how the British were deliberately polluting the food provided to Indian troops with ground animal bone or even blood. A vague concern about the manner in which the colonial state interfered in religious practices and tradition thus be­came crystallized through rumors of concrete threats, however improbable. Yet more than simply producing fear, such rumors would also be accompanied by prophesies about the imminent collapse of foreign rule, either through divine in­tervention or due to the emergence of a savior—in the Indian case this being the Shah of Persia or the Russian Czar intervening to defeat the British.^[1072] This sense of an imminent danger of attack, physically or symbolically, need not have any basis in objective facts in order for people to act as if it did: rumors owe their cred­ibility to the manner in which they effectively mobilize commonly accepted tropes and narratives.^[1073] The fact that religion was so consistently invoked in all of these culturally and geographically diverse cases reflects the fact that people perceived European imperialism as threatening much more than simply their livelihood and physical well-being or survival—their spiritual lives and religious beliefs were also endangered by foreign rule, which was often simply equated with Christian rule.

We do not have to either accept or reject the objective “reality” of the supernatural in order to acknowledge its significance in shaping subaltern resistance, or to make an effort to understand how religious beliefs, including magic, worked historically. As outlandish or implausible as many of the stories circulating in India in 1857, or during the Boxer and Maji Maji Rebellions, were, they reflect subaltern attempts to make sense of the colonial encounter. For the Santhal leaders to claim that they were doing the bidding of a deity need not, as Guha suggested, be a way for them to disown the initiative for the rebellion or concede their inherent subalternity— quite the contrary, in fact. By claiming that they were acting with divine guidance, they represented the rebellion as sanctioned by the highest authority, and that it constituted an implicitly just cause. People who are vulnerable do what they can to empower themselves and they do so in ways that are culturally specific, yet histor­ically contingent. The Ghost Dance movement among the Plains tribes of North America similarly comes to mind. In 1890 a Paiute shaman made a prophecy that the white man would be expelled from the land and that anyone who participated in the dance would be invulnerable to the soldiers' bullets. Although the Ghost Dance movement was restorative rather than openly rebellious, it was, as is well known, brutally suppressed and came to a violent end after the Wounded Knee Massacre the same year.^[1074] Another comparable set of events might be the putuan or massacres in Bali in 1906 and 1908, when the royal households and retinues committed a form of ritual suicide when confronted by Dutch colonial forces.^[1075] By reading the use of magic against Western imperialism within a broader set ofbeliefs and practices, and as a form of propaganda, a mobilizing narrative empowering indigenous people outgunned by modern weaponry, we can thus incorporate the supernatural within our analysis. To dismiss rumors simply as garbled facts without provenance, or re­ducing them to the inane utterings of naive and superstitious people laboring under a false consciousness, is to reject the possibility of writing history from more than one perspective. And it is this possibility, more than anything else, that informs the study of subaltern resistance as a productive, yet critical endeavor.