Ranajit Guha was an Indian historian, who was one of the early pioneers of the Subaltern Studies group, a methodology of South Asian Studies focused on post-colonial and post-imperial societies, studying them from the perspective of the underclasses. He was the editor of several of the group's early anthologies and wrote extensively both in English and in Bengali.

Biography

Guha was born on 23 May 1923, in Siddhakatti, Backergunge District of British India, in present day Bangladesh. He was born into a family of Khas Taluqdars. His family moved to Calcutta in 1934, when his father started as an advocate at the Calcutta High Court. Guha completed his schooling from the Mitra Institution, and graduated from the Presidency University in Calcutta. He later completed his postgraduate studies in history from the Calcutta University. In his early academic days, he was influenced by the studies of Indian historian Susobhan Sarkar. In an interview to the Bengali Intellectuals Oral History Project, he acknowledged his affluent family background and upbringing in East Bengal, and some of his early influences including writers D. H. Lawrence, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt.

In the 1940s, Guha was a member of the Communist Party of India, and represented the group in the World Federation of Democratic Youth, based in London. He returned to India in 1953, and later quit political activism after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. He started his teaching career in 1953, teaching at the Chandernagore Government College, and moving on to teach at the Calcutta Central College. He was suspended from the Bengal Educational Services, when some of his past political work and affiliations with the communist ideologies were brought to administrative attention. He was later employed by the Jadavpur University, which was starting around the same period.

Guha migrated from India to the United Kingdom in 1959, where he started his career as a reader of history at the University of Sussex. During his career, Guha also taught at the Australian National University.

Research

Subaltern Studies Group

Starting in the 1980s, Guha was noted to have ushered an alternate way of studying South Asia and the Indian subcontinent, after observing that the then mainstream historical studies were not adequate to study the country and region's complex past. In doing so, he helped move away from what was then a dominantly elitist way of studying the history of the region and reducing the elitist biases in South Asian Studies. The resulting methodology, advanced in the 1980s, was called Subaltern Studies or the Subaltern Study Group, and is considered one of the influential post-colonial, and post-Marxist schools of history.

His Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India is widely considered by researchers to be a classic on the topic. 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'.” The term "subaltern" was used to draw attention to the voices of the underclasses and was borrowed from a term coined by Antonio Gramsci, Italian Marxist philosopher. In studying history from this lens, the group studied class, gender, and caste based subordination and how they shaped the history of the region, an approach that was until then missing from the mainstream studies.

Some of his students included sociologists and historians Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Dipesh Chakraborty. Guha wrote extensively in both English and his native Bengali language.

Personal life

Guha lived in Purkersdorf, Austria on the edge of the Vienna Woods, with his German-born wife Mechthild Guha, née Jungwirth, herself a leading scholar of subaltern studies, whom he met at the University of Sussex in the early 1960s, where Guha rose to prominence, and then moved to the Australian National University where both continued their work.

Guha died on 28 April 2023 at his Vienna Woods home in Austria, three and a half weeks shy of his 100th birthday.

Bibliography

Author
A rule of property for Bengal : an essay on the idea of permanent settlement, Paris [etc.] : Mouton & Co., 1963, New edition: Duke University Press, ISBN 0-8223-1761-3
Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1983, New edition: Duke Univ Press, 1999, ISBN 0-8223-2348-6 – 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), Selected Subaltern Studies, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988
A Subaltern Studies Reader,1986–1995, Univ of Minnesota Press, 1997, ISBN 0-8166-2758-4

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.