People as Natural Disaster

I was powerfully struck by Ranajit Guha's "The Prose of Counter Insurgency." In particular, I was fascinated his statement that peasant revolts have been likened to "natural phenomena: they break out like thunderstorms, heave like earthquakes, spread like wildfires, inflect like epidemics" (33).

I found two things striking about this. One, this seems like was fairly obvious way to denigrate the will and intelligence of the people who are engaged in revolt. The people become an unconscious force of destruction, with no real goals and no human face that must be considered. Instead, the revolts is simply an unfortunate event that must be weathered by the ruling class until "the seas calm" so to speak.

Second, this seems like a way for the ruling class to escape any responsibility for the rebellion itself. They would generally not blame themselves for a bad storm, an earthquake or a fire. Why then, would they be to blame for a peasant revolt? All of these are simply natural phenomenon that they have no true control over. This also serves to shift the revolt from an extraordinary social upheaval to the “normal” vagaries of the natural world.

I found a further connection later with "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India" when Guha says, "Mobilization in the domain of elite politics was achieved vertically whereas in that of the subaltern politics this was achieved horizontally" (4). The subaltern are mobilized by the elite in the same way any other resource might be mobilized. Like farm equipment or a weapons cache, the elite reach down from the perch and re-arrange the subaltern in a way that does them the most benefit. The subaltern are again cast as generally passive and mindless, a faceless mass that is to be exploited and feared only when their animal nature runs wild.

-Josh Zimmerman