The Role of Rumour in History Writing

© 2008 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

History Compass 6/5 (2008): 1235–1243, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00552.x

The Role of Rumour in History Writing

Anjan Ghosh*Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta

AbstractAs anonymously generated, unverifiable speech that flourishes in contingentsituations, rumour can be a potent source of historical representation. Associatedwith subaltern historiography of South Asia, its ambiguity also makes it amenablefor misinformation and elite machinations.

Historians have not been very hospitable to the study of rumour, generally.It was in the context of unearthing the sources of popular mobilizationthat the ambiguous and polysemic mode of oral transmission known asrumour caught the historian’s attention. Georges Lefebvre’s classic studyof rumour during the French Revolution1 follows well after his work onthe agrarian basis of the Revolution and in the wake of his reading ofFrench sociologists like Le Bon, Durkheim and Maurice Halbachs, asGeorge Rudé informs us.2 Lefebvre’s quest to understand the particularpervasiveness of the Great Fear in France drew him to the study ofrumour, as an artefact in its creation. Similarly Ranajit Guha’s structuralanalysis of peasant insurgency in colonial India3 refocused attention onrumour as a subversive mode of communication of rebel will.

In this bibliographical article concerning historical writing on rumourI address several questions. Firstly what is a rumour? How is it transmittedand to what effect? What do rumours represent? What is their significance?Clearly there are problems in answering the above questions unequivocally.Yet these questions enable me to organise my account of rumour as aform of speech which has significant consequences in history. Further thefocus is primarily on South Asia, though other regions have not beenentirely ignored, because Indian ‘subaltern’ historiography in particularhas refocused attention on rumour as a genre of rebel communication.

What is Rumour?

Rumour is anonymously authored speech which conveys the collectivewill of a section of the people, often contrary to the dominant discourses.In their well-known study on rumour, Allport and Postman4 definerumour as ‘a specific (or topical) proposition for belief, passed along from

1236 The Role of Rumour in History Writing

© 2008 The Author History Compass 6/5 (2008): 1235–1243, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00552.xJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

person to person usually by word of mouth, without secure standards ofevidence being present’.4 Again Peterson and Gist5 consider rumour to be‘an unverified account or explanation of events circulating from person toperson and pertaining to an object event or issue of public concern’.5 Stoler6

in her study of the colonial East Indies locates rumour in a hierarchy ofcredibility and poses rumour as the commonly available cultural knowledgeor common sense. On the other hand Shibutani7 calls rumour ‘improvisednews’ which arise when significant but ambiguous events occur. Accordingto him a rumour comprises a ‘putting together of the group’s intellectualresources to arrive at a satisfactory interpretation of the event’.7 In thepreceding descriptions rumours fill up the informational vacuum duringcontingent situations. They however, comprise of unverified information.

On the other hand Kapferer maintains that rumours are not alwaysabout events but can often constitute events.8 In other words rumours canform their own realities for some in the wider society. Hence somebody’struth can be another’s rumour though they are unlikely to be discrete.Relations of power link them, though a rumour can prove to be a con-testatory form of speech, deriving from an unofficial source.

In sum rumours are anonymously generated, unverifiable speech whichflourish in situations where there is a lack of information. They explainambivalent circumstances, especially when these have ramifications uponmany and are considered significant. Rumours can be subversive of thesocial orders which spawn them. Rumour narratives are coded in theculture in which they are begot. They rarely have universal significanceas rumours uphold what people believe to be true.9

Guha10 has treated rumour as ‘insurgent communication’ for his studyof peasant insurgency in colonial India. As a subversive and parallel discourseof power, rumour serves as a ‘trigger and mobilizer’ of peasant insurgencies.Enumerating the role of rumour, Guha says,

It is precisely in this role of the trigger and moblizer that rumour becomes anecessary instrument of rebel transmission. The necessity derives of coursefrom the cultural conditions in which it operates. For the want of literacy ina pre-capitalist society makes its subaltern population depend almost exclusivelyon visual and non-graphic verbal signals for communication among themselves.11

Guha’s discussion is cast in an evolutionary frame as he seeks to under-stand the semiotics of subalternity. Rumour acts as a trigger and moblizerin pre-literate and pre-capitalist societies where orality has precedence.This then became the trend in research on subaltern social conditions.Research on peasant militancy and protest provided a momentum to thestudy of rumour as a mobiliser of rural rebellion in South Asia.12 In Europemuch of the literature on rumour continued to source pre-modern orearly modern events.13 But the efficacy of rumour is not diminished even inmodern industrial societies where traces of orality and oral communicationpersist and are even nurtured among minority communities.14


The Role of Rumour in History Writing 1237

Chandravarkar’s15 writing on plague panics in Bombay at the end of thenineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, offers a differentperspective on rumour. He considered rumours as misleading sources ofinformation, offering ‘distorting prisms’. Further, contrary to Arnold’s16

contention that rumours constituted the popular discourse, Chandravarkarmaintained that even the elites were susceptible to it. According to him‘rumours provided a magical idiom for discussing the most horrible andmenacing realities while sometimes providing a means of liberation fromthem’.17

Can rumour become a source for historical studies? Luise White whohas written on rumours of blood-sucking and vampire stories in colonialEast Africa argues that such narratives with all their ‘contested details’ and‘loose-ends’ can prove to be valuable sources of the victim’s cognitiveworld and perception.18 White provides an elaborate reasoning for delvinginto rumour and gossip for the inconsistencies and ambivalences of thenarratives, but for ‘the world rumor and gossip reveals’.19 What she saysin support of her reasons is instructive:

This book takes these stories at face value, as everyday descriptions of extra-ordinary occurrences. My analysis is located firmly in the stories: they are about firestations, injections, and overalls, and they record history with descriptions of firestations and injections. These are tools with which to write colonial history. Thepower and uncertainty of these stories – no one knew exactly what Europeansdid with African blood, but people were convinced that they took it – makesthem an especially rich historical sources, I think. They report the aggressivecarelessness of colonial extractions and ascribe potent and intimate meaningsto them. . . . The inaccuracies in these stories make them exceptionally reliablehistorical sources as well: they offer historians a way to see the world the waythe story-tellers did, as a world of vulnerability and unreasonable relationship.20

What White graphically demonstrates is that rumour narratives aresymptomatic of the cognitive world of the Africans. It provides access tothe categories and concepts they use to apprehend colonial domination.Their inaccuracies faithfully map the distance between the cognitive worldof the colonisers and the colonised.

While White sources the cognitive distance between the coloniser and thecolonised, Chandravarkar21 remarks on the difficulty of adducing rumours ashistorical sources. As rumours were sourced from official sources compiled bythe middle classes, their authenticity was in doubt. Chandravarkar says, ‘rumoursmay . . . be taken, therefore, as an elite discourse about popular attitudes’.22

By emphasising on the mediatory role of the transcriber, Chandravarkarsaps the utterance of its active function, transforming it into a record.

Transmission of Rumour

Rumour is usually conveyed through word of mouth. Oral transmissionis characteristic of rumour. Yet speech can also be embedded and embodied



in print or other mediums. For instance, newspaper reports often quoteonlookers or participants, this can lead to the dissemination of rumoursto a wider audience. Rumour is invariably related to riot or violentunrest. So much so that Allport and Postman posit an invariant rule that‘No riot ever occurs without rumours to incite, accompany and intensifythe violence’.23 This also underscores the universal and necessary natureof rumour in rebellious moments. As Guha points out in regard to peasantinsurgencies, rumour serves to trigger unrest through incitement and bygenerating panic sustain rebel mobilisation.24 Rumour confounds thedominant powers through its ambivalence and generation of uncertainty.It spreads panic among the elite and subaltern sections. While the formerfinds it difficult to construe its meaning through the lexicon of power, forthe latter it creates contiguity, bonding and adhesiveness. Rumour hasdifferential consequences for different sections of the people. Writingabout the ‘Deccan riots’ of 1875 in Western India, Guha notes from theDeccan Riots Commission Report that

in almost every case the riot is stated to have commenced on news arriving ofbonds having been extorted in some neighbouring village with the usual storythat the Government approved of the rioters’ action.25

The gaining of legitimacy for insurgent action through the supercessionof local authorities is also characteristic of peasant rebellions. This kind oftransgression is often prompted by the spread of rumours.

As ‘insurgent communication’26 rumour engages in a dual task. On theone hand subverting the authority of the dominant powers and on theother enhancing the unity of the rebels by creating a community ofbelievers. In the mode of transmission of rumours lies its cohesiveness,connecting people and creating what anthropologists have called a speechcommunity. John Gumperz explains the notion of speech community:

Most groups of any permanence, be they small bands bounded by face-to-facecontact, modern nations divisible into smaller subregions, or even occupationalassociations or neighbourhood gangs, may be treated as speech communities,provided they show linguistic peculiarities that warrant special study.27

Here speech converges with the contours of subjective perception andcreates a moral consensus over their action. Georges Lefebvre puts thissuccinctly: ‘What matters in seeking an explanation for the Great Fear isnot so much the actual truth as what the people thought the aristocracycould and would do’.28 It is this cognitive mapping which rumour engagesin that imparts its universal significance. For as Rudé comments on Lefe-bvre’s exposition of the Great Fear says:

It is not so much what had happened as what the townsmen and peasantsbelieved to have happened that stirred them into feverish activity. The experi-ence of course has by no means been limited to revolutionary France in thesummer of 1789.29



As mentioned earlier, the transmission of rumour can take place inembedded or embodied forms. The rumours of Mahatma Gandhi’s mirac-ulous deeds which circulated through newspaper reports before his visitto Uttar Pradesh in 1920 as reported in Amin30 exemplifies the embeddedcirculation of rumour. The embodied form of circulation is also evidentin Amin’s31 later work on Chauri Chaura when he speaks of the patias(handwritten circulars stuck on trees) being used to convey informationof meetings and other events by the volunteers of the Non-Cooperationmovement (1922) in Gorakhpur. The ephemerality or transitiveness ofrumour does not detract from its impact and consequences.

Rumour was embodied in the chapatis (flat leavened wheat bread)circulated during the 1857 Uprising as the call to revolt.32 The passing ofcooked food signified the transcension of caste distinctions and the buildingof solidarity among the rebels. Recent research on the Mutiny suggeststhat rumours of grievous violence affected both the sepoys and the Britishto engage in retributory violence. At times rumours were deliberatelyplanted, as for instance by the Begum of Awadh to motivate the residentsto defend the city against the advancing British forces.33 On a differentregister the wearing of black overalls by firemen in East Africa made themanalogous to the medical functionaries engaged in blood collection. Hencethey were considered as part of the mumiani (blood sucking vampires) setin the colonial establishment.34

The circulation of rumours in different forms sets into effect differentconstructions of meaning. Deciphering the divergent significations requiresan understanding of the varied social worlds inhabited by people, and theapparatuses of power that different sections wielded which enabled themto construe the rumours in one way or another.

What do Rumours Represent?

Cultures are not unitary wholes but have different domains and subcul-tures. By disaggregating the multiple domains, rumours reveal the fissureswithin. One’s rumour is another’s truth! Such divergences destabilise theunitary notion of culture and promote a differential understanding.

Kate Brittlebank’s35 work on Tipu Sultan of Mysore, reveals the con-testatory history of the last independent monarch. Referring specificallyto the tales of treachery surrounding Tipu’s defeat by the British at Ser-ingapatam (1799), Kate Brittlebank seems to suggest that some nationalhistorians have relied more on rumour than documented evidence tobuttress their account of betrayal. Here Brittlebank distinguishes historyfrom rumour, as if the latter can never be a source for the former. EarlierWhite had argued the contrary.

Rumour commonly represents a plebeian discourse distinct from theelite’s, though it can be deployed at times by the elite for its own purposes.Studies of rumour have thus principally been associated with the peasantry.



In Europe they have dealt with the pre- or early modern context ofpeasant protest or rebellion.36 In the industrial context gossip as a consti-tutive mechanism of working class neighbourhoods has been explored inthe work of Tebbutt37 in northern England. In these instances rumour orgossip have not been considered as debased sources but as constitutive ofthe community. Similarly in the work of James C. Scott,38 rumour is notmerely a weapon of resistance, but an organic part of the constitutivedefences of the ‘moral economy’ of the peasantry.

Apart from its use in historical studies, rumour plays an extremely importantrole in our understanding of the present and the very recent past. In the ageof digital technology and electronic communication, the transmission ofrumour has been greatly facilitated, sometimes with devastating consequences.On 21 September 21 1995, the word spread ostensibly from Delhi, that idolsof the Indian deity, Ganesha was drinking the milk proffered by devotees.News of the miraculous act spread rapidly across the globe and within 24hours millions of devotees testified to the active grace of the elephant headedgod. Was this an orchestrated miracle to unify the Hindus devotionally, asa prelude to their political articulation? The question can hardly be answeredas the ‘news’ of the miracle was transmitted swiftly across the globe.39 Thespread of rumours especially in community conflict situations has not beenso innocuous. In 1984 during the Sikh riots in Delhi, the rumour thatthe Sikhs had celebrated the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhiwrought death and destruction on the community in an unprecedentedway.40 In a similar vein, when the Muslims were held responsible for theGodhra incident where 59 allegedly Hindu passengers were incineratedby a mob attack on a railway compartment, giving rise to the devastatingcommunal violence in Gujarat during February to March 2002. Here therepeated broadcast of TV footage of the charred bodies and the compart-ment, over local cable channels fuelled the violence against the Muslims.41

What then is the significance of rumour in history writing? In terms of itsambivalence and transitivity, it may be argued that rumour seeks to representthe parallel world of the subaltern as its key discourse. The anonymousgeneration of rumour affords a protective cohesion to the masses who heedthem. Their popular will and common sense distinguishes them from theelite domain without severing ties with it. Rumour illuminates the worldview of the plebeian through its subversion and contestation of hegemonicdesigns. Notwithstanding it’s variety of other uses, rumour is powerfullyconstitutive of ‘rebel’ or subversive language and consciousness. It thus notonly accompanies but commonly anticipates the dramatic social, politicaland economic changes that are the core concern of every historian.

Short Biography

Anjan Ghosh’s research spans the anthropology and history of informalmodes of communication in South Asia. He is also interested in inequality



and violence and in issues of unequal development. Current research ison rumour and communal violence in South Asia as well as urban publicculture. He is presently a Fellow at the Centre for Studies in SocialSciences, Calcutta. He has published in Review, Journal of Southern AfricanStudies, Economic and Political Weekly, and edited with Partha Chatterjee:History and the Present (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002).

Notes

* Correspondence address: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, R-1, BaishnabghataPatuli Township, Kolkata: 700 094, India. E-mail: [email protected] G. Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789, Introduction by G. Rude, trans. Joan White (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982).2 Rudé in Lefebvre, Great Fear of 1789, ix–x.3 Ranajit, Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press, 1983).4 G. Allport and L. Postman, The Psychology of Rumor (New York, NY, 1965), ix.5 W. A. Peterson and N. P. Gist, ‘Rumor and Public Opinion’, American Journal of Sociology, 57(1951): 159.6 Ann Stoler, ‘In Cold Blood: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives’,Representations, 37 (Winter 1992): 151–89.7 Tamotsu Shibutani, Improvised News (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 17.8 J. N. Kapferer, Rumors: Users, Interpretations and Images, trans. Bruce Fink (New York, NY:Transaction Books, 1990).9 A. K. Ghosh, ‘Partial Truths: Rumor and Communal Violence in South Asia, 1946–92’,unpublished Ph.D. diss. (University of Michigan, 1998), 16–19.10 Guha, Elementary Aspects, 253.11 Ibid., 256.12 Arun Kumar, ‘Beyond Muffled Murmurs of Dissent? Kisan Rumour in Colonial Bihar’,Journal of Peasant Studies, 28 (2000): 95–125; K. Gopalankutty, ‘Rumour and Rebellion inSouth Malabar, a Preliminary Enquiry’, Advances in History, Essays in Memory of Professor M. P.Sridharan (Calicut: Professor M. P. Sridharan Memorial Trust, 2003), 277–89.13 Simon Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest in the Reign of Henry IV’, Past andPresent, 166 (2000): 31–65; Nick Cox, ‘Rumours and Risings: Plebeian Insurrection and theCirculation of Subversive Discourse around 1597’, in D. Cavanagh and T. Kirk (eds.), Subversionand Scurrility, Popular Discourse in Europe from 1500 to the Present (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000),43–57.14 Patricia A. Turner, I Heard it through the Grapevine Rumor in African American Culture (Berkeley,CA: University of California Press, 1993).15 Rajnarayan Chandravarkar, ‘Plague Panic and Epidemic Politics in India, 1896–1914’, inImperial Power and Power Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 234–65.16 David Arnold, ‘Touching the Body’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies V (Delhi:Oxford University Press, 1987), 55–90.17 Chandravarkar, ‘Plague Panic and Epidemic Politics in India’, 252.18 Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, CA:University of California Press, 2000).19 Ibid., 4.20 Ibid., 5.21 Chandravarkar, ‘Plague Panic and Epidemic Politics in India’, 251.22 Ibid.23 Allport and Postman., Psychology of Rumor, 159.24 Guha, Elementary Aspects, 256.25 Ibid.26 Ibid., 253.



27 J. J. Gumperz, ‘The Speech Community’, in A. Duranti (ed.), Linguistic Anthropology: AReader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 43.28 Lefebvre, Great Fear of 1789.29 Rudé in Lefebvre, Great Fear of 1789, xiii.30 Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies III (Delhi:Oxford University Press, 1984), 1–61.31 Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–92 (Delhi: Oxford UniversityPress, 1995).32 Guha, Elementary Aspects.33 Kaushik Roy, ‘The Beginning of “People’s War” in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 42(2007): 1724.34 White, Speaking with Vampires.35 Kate Brittlebank, ‘Tales of Treachery: Rumour as the Source of Claims that Tipu Sultan wasBetrayed’, Modern Asian Studies, 37 (1989): 195–211.36 Cox, ‘Rumours and Risings’; Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest’.37 Melanie Tebbutt, Women’s Talk, a Social History of Gossip in Working Class Neighbourhoods,1880–1960 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995).38 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1985).39 Denis Vidal, ‘When the Gods Drink Milk: Empiricism and Belief in Contemporary Hinduism’,South Asia Research, 18 (1998): 149–71.40 Veena Das, Life and Words (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006).41 A. K. Ghosh, ‘ “Will To Hate”, Gujarat and the Violence of Identity’, in M. N. Karna (ed.),Democracy, Plurality and Conflict (Jaipur: Rawat, 2006), 197–211.

Bibliography

Allport, G., and Postman, L. The Psychology of Rumor (New York, NY: Russel and Russel,1965), ix.

Amin, Shahid, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies III (Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press, 1983), 1–61.

Amin, Shahid, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–92 (Delhi: Oxford UniversityPress, 1995).

Arnold, David, ‘Touching the Body’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies V (Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press, 1987), 55–90.

Brittlebank, Kate, ‘Tales of Treachery: Rumour as the Source of Claims that Tipu Sultan wasBetrayed’, Modern Asian Studies, 37 (1989): 195–211.

Chandravarkar, Rajnarayan, ‘Plague Panic and Epidemic Politics in India, 1896–1914’, in ImperialPower and Power Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 234–65.

Cox, Nick, ‘Rumours and Risings: Plebeian Insurrection and the Circulation of SubversiveDiscourse around 1597’, in D. Cavanagh and T. Kirk (eds.), Subversion and Scurrility, PopularDiscourse in Europe from 1500 to the Present (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 43–57.

Das, Veena, Life and Words (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006).Ghosh, A. K., ‘Partial Truths: Rumor and Communal Violence in South Asia, 1946–92’,

unpublished Ph.D. diss. (University of Michigan, 1998).Ghosh, A. K., ‘ “Will To Hate”, Gujarat and the Violence of Identity’, in M. N. Karna (ed.),

Democracy, Plurality and Conflict ( Jaipur: Rawat, 2006), 197–211.Gopalankutty, K., ‘Rumour and Rebellion in South Malabar, a Preliminary Enquiry’, Advances

in History, Essays in Memory of Professor M. P. Sridharan (Calicut: Professor M. P. SridharanMemorial Trust, 2003), 277–89.

Guha, Ranajit, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford UniversityPress, 1983).

Gumperz, J. J., ‘The Speech Community’, in A. Duranti (ed.), Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 43–52.

Kapferer, J. N., Rumors: Users, Interpretations and Images, trans. Bruce Fink (New York, NY:Transaction Books, 1990).



Kumar, Arun, ‘Beyond Muffled Murmurs of Dissent? Kisan Rumour in Colonial Bihar’, Journalof Peasant Studies, 28 (2000): 95–125.

Lefebvre, G., The Great Fear of 1789, Introduction by G. Rude, trans. Joan White (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982).

Peterson, W. A., and Gist, N. P., ‘Rumor and Public Opinion’, American Journal of Sociology, 57(1951): 159–67.

Roy, Kaushik, ‘The Beginning of “People’s War” in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 42(2007): 1720–8.

Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1985).

Shibutani, Tamotsu, Improvised News (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 17.Stoler, Ann, ‘In Cold Blood: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives’,

Representations, 37 (Winter 1992): 151–89.Tebbutt, Melanie, Women’s Talk, a Social History of Gossip in Working Class Neighbourhoods, 1880–1960

(Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995).Turner, Patricia A., I Heard it through the Grapevine Rumor in African American Culture (Berkeley,

CA: University of California Press, 1993).Vidal, Denis, ‘When the Gods Drink Milk: Empiricism and Belief in Contemporary Hinduism’,

South Asia Research, 18 (1998): 149–71.Walker, Simon, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest in the Reign of Henry IV’, Past and

Present, 166 (2000): 31–65.White, Luise, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press, 2000).

The Role of Rumour in History Writing

Documents

Transcript of The Role of Rumour in History Writing