Reflecting on Guha's Historiography of Colonial India

Guha’s essay on the historiography of colonial India was enlightening in that it brought to light how easily "truth" is a subjective construct. Of course, historians come to their writing armed with sources and information that supposedly support their propositions, and that information in itself sets the stage for acceptance of the information as fact. Guha clearly articulates how the historiography of Indian nationalism is an elitist endeavor by breaking it down into colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism, each with its own agendas.

As Guha explains, portraying peasant insurrections as “purely spontaneous and unpremeditated” only reinforces the notion that the subaltern groups were acting in a manner internal to their consciousness, but responding with reason to the “intolerable condition of existence.” I too found the metaphors for the peasant revolts to national phenomena: “break out like thunderstorms, heave like earthquakes, spread like wildfires, and infect like epidemics” quite fascinating, especially since I have been studying the theories and methods of the Landscape in art history as of late. In particular I have been studying the landscape as a metaphor for the human condition and for the social and cultural developments of the early to mid-nineteenth century where elements of the sublime reflected on the power and majesty of the untamed wilderness as it related to the need to establish a national identity in contrast to Europe (or conversely, as a way to use nature as a symbol of higher power over humankind). Similarly, to use examples of such extreme forces of nature to articulate the behavior of a people reduces them and their actions to irrationality. Just as artists used the landscape to describe the moral imperative to tame the wilderness and subject it to peaceful order in a blatant form of Manifest Destiny propaganda initiated by the elite to spur material wealth from their enterprises, so too have historiographers clouded their descriptions and formulations of the facts to follow the ideology of the time.

His simple breakdown of the three types of discourse makes it clear how different meaning can be obtained from the same basic information depending on the time, inflections, and details of the information provided: primary (official/immediacy of information/primary sources); secondary (marked by “processed product” and a distance of time); and tertiary (the work of non-official writers or former official who no longer operation under professional obligation or constraint to represent the standpoint of the government). But even the third form of discourse has its problems. While seen as a campaign for freedom and socialism, such tertiary discourse is an abstraction or ideal rather than the real historical personality of the insurgent. Ultimately, these varying perspectives are part of the complexity of language and perception and power. Guha admits that such distortions cannot be totally eliminated, but he at least calls for those engaged in this level to discourse to “stop pretending that it can fully grasp a past consciousness and reconstitute it.” This analysis can easily be applied to studies of American Indian history and has important implications for the micro and macro histories everywhere.
-Julie Sasse