Ranajit Guha and Subaltern Studies

Broad movements/shifts in historical studies after WW2 Intellectual currents: from Marxism to structuralism, post-structuralism Thematic shifts: from social history and ‘history from below’ to ‘cultural history’ The politics of knowledge: from Eurocentrism to ‘postcolonial’ perspectives and the critique of Eurocentrism SUBALTERN STUDIES: a major site where these shifts can be observed in a non-European historiographical context

Ranajit Guha and the emergence of the Subaltern Studies collective Ranajit Guha – politicized by left-wing, Communist-dominated student milieu of Calcutta in the 1940s; involved heavily in Communist Party of India (CPI) in 1940s and 1950s 1959-80: based in England. University of Sussex in 1970s: Guha, along with a group of like-minded colleagues and students, sets up Subaltern Studies – 12 volumes of essays published by Subaltern Studies collective between 1982 and 2005 Other major scholars associated with the project: David Hardiman, Shahid Amin, Gyanendra Pandey, David Arnold, Sumit Sarkar, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee.

Influences on Guha and Subaltern Studies Intellectual currents: a) History from below; b) Antonio Gramsci: concept of ‘subaltern’ – enrichment and revision of traditional Marxist concepts of class struggle Political processes: churning and shifts on the radical left. Growing importance of peasant movements, guerrilla uprisings. India and elsewhere: emergence of a distinctly Maoist current in revolutionary politics. Naxalbari movement: key influence on Ranajit Guha in the 1970s

Guha: Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983) Peasants, largely illiterate, leaving no direct traces about. How to ‘read’ them back into history: Guha: ‘reading against the grain’ – understanding the official codes through which colonial government addressed peasant uprisings. Colonial archive: an archive of ‘counter-insurgency’. Forms of peasant dissent and protest, Guha argued, could also be understood in terms of certain codes they followed. Modes of rural insurgency anatomized and itemized.

Early Subaltern Studies: early-mid 1980s Basic contention of early Subaltern Studies: relationship between 2 domains of politics – ‘elite’ and ‘subaltern’. Peasant protest in India seen to be driven by more than purely economic motives (in contrast to orthodox-Marxist understandings). Idioms of protest (often religious) studied seriously. Problematizing dominant nationalist and Marxist accounts of anti-colonial nationalism. Outstanding examples: a) Shahid Amin – ‘Gandhi as Mahatma’ – role of rumour in constructing Gandhi’s appeal; b) David Hardiman – tribal assertions against liquor dealers – intertwined with popular religious beliefs

Late 1980s: the ‘postcolonial shift’ in Subaltern Studies Warm endorsement by Edward Said – helped establish Subaltern Studies as a globally influential perspective from the ‘Third World’. Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak: ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Critiquing a) exaggeration of emancipatory potentials of peasant resistance; b) the politics of representation in Subaltern Studies – on what grounds does the radical historian ‘speak for’ the subaltern’?; c) lack of attention to gender. Late 1980s, 1990s: shift in Subaltern Studies from ‘history from below’ to deconstructions of ‘colonial discourse’, critiques of universalizing claims of Eurocentric history. Eg. Dipesh Chakrabarty: Europe as the ‘unavoidable’ subject-object of History: need to ‘provincialize’ Europe.