"Guha thought of consciousness - and therefore of peasant subjecthood - as something immanent in the very practies of peasant insurgency. Elementary Aspects is a study of the practices of insurgent peasants in colonial India, not of a reified category called consciousness. The aim of the book was to bring out the collective imagination inherent in the practices of peasant rebellion. Guha makes no claim that the insurgent consciousness that he discusses is indeed conscious, that it existed inside the heasd of peasants. He does not equate consciousness with the subject's view of himself. Rather, he examines rebel practices to decipher the particular relationship - between elites and subalterns and among subalterns themselves - that are acted out in them and then attempts to derive from these relationships the elementary structure, as it were, of the consciousness or imagination inherent in those relationships."
- Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, pp.15-16
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