Learning to ‘see’: Lessons from scholar James C Scott (1936-2004)

Political science iconoclast James C Scott, who died on June 19 at 87, helped us understand subaltern silence or the ostensible passivity of the powerless. Peasant rebellions are evidence of class conflict. But Scott emphasised that the absence of protest does not mean the acceptance of oppression. There is, he noted, a richness to everyday ways in which peasants’ resist.

Scott’s famed contribution to the social sciences was bestowing agency to peasants, who Marxists worried were not becoming a “class for themselves” to organise and rise. His sociological analysis of why state schemes fail is another.

If I can borrow a word from Scott’s works that summarises his fascinating knowledge contributions, it is “seeing”. How the powerless see the state. How the state sees society. Scott helped me see my PhD field – Gudalur in Wayanad, in the Nilgiris.

As a PhD student at Madras University in the late 1990s, I first encountered Scott in Ramachandra Guha’s The Unquiet Woods. Guha’s historical sociology of the Chipko movement drew on Scott to explain prosaic forms that peasant protest and resistance assumed in Uttarakhand.

In his Weapons of the Weak, Scott suggested that the “emphasis on peasant rebellion” was misplaced. They are rare and usually crushed. Even when peasant revolutions succeed, a more coercive and hegemonic state follows.

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