Ranajit Guha, a renowned historian who was set to celebrate his 100th birthday in May, died at his house in Vienna Woods, Austria.
Guha was instrumental in shifting the method used to studying South Asia, which had previously centred on the elite’s issues. Instead, he and his students founded the Subaltern School of Thought, a post-colonial and post-Marxist school of thought that is still widely utilised. The Subaltern School’s influence grew beyond the study of South Asian history throughout time. It has inspired academics all across the world, helping to improve understanding of numerous elements of life and society.
Ranajit Guha was born in Siddhakati, Backerganj (presently in Bangladesh), on May 23, 1923. He moved to the United Kingdom in 1959 and became a history lecturer at the University of Sussex. Guha, as a scholar of Indian history, recognised that conventional historical accounts of India were inadequate for comprehending the country’s complexities. He identified the absence of voices from marginalised communities, or the subaltern, in dominant narratives.
Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci coined the phrase “subaltern” to describe any community that was subjugated by a more dominant class, such as peasants and workers. Guha and his colleagues coined the term in the 1980s to combat the elitist prejudice prevalent in South Asian studies at the time. Their purpose was to correct this bias and create an inclusive method of understanding the history of the region.
Guha used the term “subaltern” as inferiority or being of lower rank in the initial issue of the Subaltern Studies journal. He stated in the journal that the phrase would be used to refer to the numerous forms of subjugation in South Asian society, such as caste, class, and gender. Guha also emphasised that subordination must be studied in relation to dominance. He felt that the acts of people in authority always have an impact on subaltern groups, even when they fight or rebel against them.
The study of peasant consciousness and resistance in colonial India was transformed by Ranajit Guha’s work titled Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983). Guha tackled peasant rebellion from the peasant’s point of view, giving them political agency rather than reading their history from an elite viewpoint. Guha’s methodological approach questioned widely implemented historical sources such as colonial papers, recognising the creators’ positionality as well as potential biases in the sources of data themselves.
The peasant was not recognised as a separate historical subject in colonial academia but was instead reduced to an administrative concern. On the other hand, Guha’s work emphasised the voices and experiences of subaltern communities and acknowledged their battles as part of a larger historical narrative. This approach resulted in a more sophisticated and advanced understanding of history and society, challenging conventional wisdom and establishing an example for historical research. His contributions to subaltern studies influenced research beyond South Asia, impacting studies on numerous aspects of life and culture around the world.
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