Ranajit Guha "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency"

The reading starts off by stating that there is a misconception that peasant revolts arise with a lack of consciousness on the part of that group of people. Or as Guha puts it "insurgency is regarded as external to the peasant's consciousness and Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate fro Reason" (47).  In fact, Guha wants to show that this is not so and that there is in fact a precursor to the revolt, that there is often an antecedent mobilization that does not include violence. 

This 'blind spot' in historiography is examined by use of colonial discourse, which is made up of three types: 1) primary, 2) secondary and 3) tertiary. The primary discourse is 'official' (although this is to be taken in a very broad sense). Here Guha gives some examples of official letters that were sent amongst army officials that spoke of uprisings which convey "the impact of a peasant revolt on its enemies in its first sanguine hours" (50). The secondary discourse constitutes things that were written well after the fact, that is sometime after the actual event and thus it is seen as history (for example, memoirs or the work of administrators). In secondary discourse, the readership is public and non-official.  Both 1) and 2) work together to create a narrative which introduces a particular code (the way we read the text). Therefore, the primary and secondary discourse in historiography of peasant revolts are the "specimens of the prose of counter-insurgency" (59).  Tertiary discourse is farther removed in time, often in third person and non-official. There is also some tertiary discourse which aims to break away from the code of counter-insurgency and to adopt the point of view of the insurgents. However, as Guha concludes, tertiary discourse (even the radical kind) has only distanced itself from the prose of counter-insurgency by declaration and not by action. This is for several reasons, one of which includes the fact that tertiary discourse is reluctant to accept the religious element in insurgents.

I found this text interesting because it proposes to look at historiography from a code based perspective and thus it allows for us to see how limited the discourse around historical events, such as uprises caused by insurgents, can be. Also, it is perhaps a good method to see the faults of historians and this can generate a discussion for how to represent and approach history but also what sources to use (and to what extent to use them) when attempting to portray a historical event.