From Crime to Insurgency

A switch from Africa to India brings us into a different world of colonialism, the British Raj in the nineteenth century, a world dominated by relations between landlords and peasants and marked by fears of peasant insurgents. In this regard it is a colonial world that bears direct comparison with Britain's presence in Ireland during the same period, marked by the same sorts of problems of excessive rent and evictions, followed by uprisings. Guha, in his classic study of peasant movements in India (1994 [1983]), points out that British colonial historiography at this time was much concerned with the phenomenon of insurgency and attempted to study it and subsume it under a kind of “science of colonialism.” Guha is at pains to point out some of the deficiencies of that “science,” noting that it tended to underestimate the forms of political and historical consciousness that these movements exhibited (cf. Bayly 1996: 97–141 and 315).

Common sufferings such as the increase in peasant indebtedness to landlords produced a common set of attitudes among the peasants and led them to seek ways to alleviate their situation. In addition, new landlords bought up impoverished estates at auctions and spread their influence as moneylenders to their own tenants, relying on the support of the colonial administration to enforce their coercive practices. Insurgency was the only possible remedy for any grievance, since the power of the state supported the landlords so directly, Guha argues (1994 [1983]: 8).