WHENEVER there is injustice and exploitation in any society, there is also response from the exploited and weaker section of society. Sometime, the expression of resistance is silent and suppressed, and sometime it is open and violent. Historians point out that how common people have used their power and energy against their oppressors. If they felt that they were not strong enough to rebel and fight, they wisely resorted to silent resistance and innovate such methods that baffled their overlords.
For example, in slave and feudal systems, where slaves and peasants were not powerful to challenge their masters, they adopted protracted but affective methods of resistance such as stealing, damaging or setting fire to property, feigning ignorance, breaking tools, lying, and delaying to complete the assigned task.
These modes of resistance suggest that how the weak might outwit, deceive, or manipulate the strong. These examples also show that human beings, in spite of the use of power and coercive methods, could not submit and fight for their survival by changing their tactics.
In a slave society, besides adopting usual modes of resistance, slave used flight from plantation as a means to protest against exploitation and get freedom at the risk of his life. Though it was an act of individual defiance or resistance, there were occasionally group escapes that challenged the very existence of the system. These runaway slaves formed ‘marooned communities’ to be away from the domain of law which was oppressive to them.
The community life provided them protection. On the attitude of slaves to resist, Lee Rose writes in Freedom and Slavery that, “There is certain kind of strength that goes with weakness, and a certain weakness that goes with strength. The slaves who learned to exploit these techniques for survival on the precarious raft of another man’s good will has been called “sambo”, an inglorious sobriquet indeed, with cowardly connotations. But it is presumptuous in posterity to dismiss contemptuously the methods that enabled generations of slaves to endure their harsh lot of life, and to snatch from it a few human satisfactions.”
We also find, this silent resistance in the factory and domestic workers that is mostly attributed to their base and mean character. There is an interesting advice that a father gives to his children: “I tell them (the youngsters): ‘Remember, you’re selling your labour and the one who buys it wants to see that he gets something for it, so work when he’s around, then you can relax when he goes away, but make sure you always look like you’re working when the inspectors are there”.
The main features of silent resistance are that it is not organized, it neither has any leader, nor is it started with any plan, nor it used to has any manifesto, banners or party name, therefore, it generally goes unnoticed and nothing appears sensational in media about it.
Commenting on the attitude of historians and social scientists on silent resistance, James C. Scot writes in his book Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Form of Peasant Resistant that “History and social science, because they are written by the intelligentsia using written records that are also created largely by literate officials, is simply not well-equipped to uncover the silent and anonymous forms of class struggles that typify the peasantry.”
On the other hand, open and armed rebellions of slaves and peasants were brutally crushed. They were dubbed as enemies of empire or community. They were dehumanized and tortured after their defeat. We have seen that how the famous slave rebellion of Spartacus was crushed by the Roman Empire and all rebels were crucified.
In America, the slave rebellion of South Carolina in 1739, and Nat Turner’s rebellion in Southampton Country Virginia in 1831 were mercilessly crushed. It happened to the peasant rebellions in Europe, China, and India.
No doubt these rebellions indicated the deep anger and mistrust and used open rebellion as the last resort but they failed to change the system and ended in sacrificing their lives for the cause.
As court and official historians wrote history, these rebellions are not treated sympathetically but condemned as creating chaos and disintegration in society. Keeping in view this aspect of rebellion, Marc Bloch, a French historian, writes: “Almost invariably doomed to defeat and eventual, massacre, the great insurrections were altogether too disorganized to achieve any lasting result. The patient, silent struggle stubbornly carried on by rural communities over years would accomplish more than flashes in the pan.”
Silent resistance and open rebellions show that individual, as well as, groups and communities want to have dignity and honour. If any system fails to provide this, unsatisfied elements make continuous and persistence efforts to subvert it.
For the privileged and ruling classes, it takes time to understand the feelings and anger of the subordinate classes. The result is that change comes at a high cost.
WHENEVER there is injustice and exploitation in any society, there is also response from the exploited and weaker section of society. Sometime, the expression of resistance is silent and suppressed, and sometime it is open and violent. Historians point out that how common people have used their power and energy against their oppressors. If they felt that they were not strong enough to rebel and fight, they wisely resorted to silent resistance and innovate such methods that baffled their overlords.
