Ranajit Guha
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Ranajit Guha (born 23 May 1923, in Siddhakati,
Backergunje Backergunge, Backergunje, Bakarganj, or Bakerganj was a former district of British India. It was the southernmost district of the Dacca Division. The district was located in the swampy lowlands of the vast delta of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra ...
) is a historian of the
Indian Subcontinent The Indian subcontinent is a physiographical region in Southern Asia. It is situated on the Indian Plate, projecting southwards into the Indian Ocean from the Himalayas. Geopolitically, it includes the countries of Bangladesh, Bhutan, In ...
who has been vastly influential in the Subaltern Studies group, and was the editor of several of the group's early
anthologies In book publishing, an anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler; it may be a collection of plays, poems, short stories, songs or excerpts by different authors. In genre fiction, the term ''anthology'' typically categ ...
. He migrated from
India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area, the List of countries and dependencies by population, second-most populous ...
to the UK in 1959, and was a reader in history at the
University of Sussex , mottoeng = Be Still and Know , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £14.4 million (2020) , budget = £319.6 million (2019–20) , chancellor = Sanjeev Bhaskar , vice_chancellor = Sasha Roseneil , ...
. He currently lives in
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,
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on the edge of the
Vienna Woods The Vienna Woods (german: Wienerwald) are forested highlands that form the northeastern foothills of the Northern Limestone Alps in the states of Lower Austria and Vienna. The and range of hills is heavily wooded and a popular recreation area ...
, with his
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-born wife Mechthild Guha, née Jungwirth, herself a leading scholar of subaltern studies, whom he met at the
University of Sussex , mottoeng = Be Still and Know , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £14.4 million (2020) , budget = £319.6 million (2019–20) , chancellor = Sanjeev Bhaskar , vice_chancellor = Sasha Roseneil , ...
in the early 1960s, where Guha rose to prominence, and then moved to the
Australian National University The Australian National University (ANU) is a public research university located in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Its main campus in Acton encompasses seven teaching and research colleges, in addition to several national academies an ...
where both continued their work. His ''Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India'' is widely considered to be a classic. Aside from this, his founding statement in the first volume of Subaltern Studies set the agenda for the Subaltern Studies group, defining the "subaltern" as "the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the ‘elite’."


Work

The main historiographical issues, addressed in Guha's work are (a) the colonial appropriation of the Indian past and its representation as a “highly interesting portion of British history,” which together with the force of colonial conquest added up in Guha’s terminology to a colonial expropriation of Indian history; (b) the complicity of all branches of colonialist knowledge in the fact or force of conquest; (c) British rule in India as a “dominance without hegemony,” in which the moment of coercion outweighed the moment of persuasion by contrast with western Europe; (d) an Indian historiography of India that attempts to redress the expropriation of Indian history and make “the Indian people, constituted as a nation, the subject of their own history”; (e) a subaltern historiography that identifies the limitations of the mainstream Indian historiography of India and the need to pay attention to the “neglected dimension of subaltern autonomy in action, consciousness and culture,” the “contribution made by the people on their own”; and (f) a historiography that goes beyond “statism” to the everyday being-in-the-world of ordinary people, countering the pretensions of the “prose of world-history” with the “prose of the world.” These issues recur in various forms and combinations in Guha’s books and essays, notably the ones he contributed to ''Subaltern Studies'', an edited series that he launched in 1982. The theoretical influences on Guha’s work are not limited to Marxism and its many offshoots. Guha used the concept of “subaltern” to signify anyone in India who did not belong to the “elite” and therefore included peasants, workers, impoverished landlords, and others whose behavior exhibited a combination of defiance and deference to the elite. It has many points of contact with Gramsci’s work. Guha drew freely on the philosophy of
Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (; ; 27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) was a German philosopher. He is one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy. His influence extends a ...
and
Heidegger Martin Heidegger (; ; 26 September 188926 May 1976) was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th centur ...
, Bengali literature, notably the works of
Rabindranath Tagore Rabindranath Tagore (; bn, রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর; 7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) was a Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He resh ...
, not to mention semiotics, linguistics, structuralism, and poststructuralism, the objective being not theoretical monism or purity but the mobilization of a wide range of references to shed light on history’s dark corners. The eclectic richness, if not elusiveness, of the concept of “subaltern” and Guha’s deployment of it in various forms to speak to caste, class, and gender issues has perhaps inspired its wider diffusion for rethinking the history of popular consciousness and mobilization in fields as far apart as Asian, African, and Latin American history.


Bibliography


Author

*''A rule of property for Bengal : an essay on the idea of permanent settlement'', Paris tc.: Mouton & Co., 1963, New edition: Duke University Press, *''Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India'', Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1983, New edition: Duke Univ Press, 1999, - a classic of Subaltern Studies *Guha, Ranajit,
History at the Limit of World-History
(Italian Academy Lectures), Columbia University Press 2002 *''An Indian Historiography of India: A Nineteenth Century Agenda & Its Implications''. Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi & Company. 1988. *''Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India'', Harvard University Press, 1998 *''The Small Voice of History'', Permanent Black, 2009


Editor

*(with
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (born 24 February 1942) is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Lit ...
), ''Selected Subaltern Studies'', New York: Oxford University Press, 1988 *''A Subaltern Studies Reader,1986-1995'', Univ of Minnesota Press, 1997,


Articles


The Prose of Counter-Insurgency


Works about Guha

* Sathyamurthy, T. V. "Indian Peasant Historiography: A Critical Perspective on Ranajit Guha's Work." In: ''Journal of Peasant Studies'' (October 1990) vol.18, no.1, pp. 93–143. * Ranajit Guha's Biography written by Shahid Amin and Gautam Bhadra and the complete bibliography compiled by Gautam Bhadra are available in ''Subaltern Studies Volume VIII'' edited by David Arnold and David Hardiman, OUP, 1994.


See also

* Subaltern Studies *
Partha Chatterjee Partha ( sa, pārtha) may refer to: * Partha, an epithet of Arjuna Arjuna (Sanskrit: अर्जुन, ), also known as Partha and Dhananjaya, is a character in several ancient Hindu texts, and specifically one of the major characters of t ...
*
Vivek Chibber Vivek Aslam Chibber (born 1965) is an American academic, social theorist, editor, and professor of sociology at New York University, who has published widely on development, social theory, and politics. Chibber is the author of three books, ''Th ...


References


External links


An Analysis of the essay "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India"
{{DEFAULTSORT:Guha, Ranajit 1923 births Bengali historians Historians of South Asia 20th-century Indian historians Living people Recipients of the Ananda Purashkar Indian Marxist historians People from Barisal