RANAJIT GUHA AND SUBALTERN STUDIES

A key movement in postcolonial studies in 1980 was the intervention of the subaltern
studies group. This historiographical project, Subaltern Studies is associated with the Indian
historian Ranajit Guha. This is the twelve anthologies of historical studies, mainly on the
history of colonial India, published between 1982 and 2005, the first six volumes edited by
Guha and the remaining volumes edited by other scholars associated with the project, many
of whom had been mentored or influenced by him. This proved to be one of the most
influential currents of historical thought in the last quarter of the twentieth century,
responding extremely quickly to changes in the prevailing intellectual climate. Within
‘subaltern studies’, the word ‘subaltern’ stands as “a designation for the general attribute of
subordination in South Asian society, whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age,
gender, and office or in some other way.” Subaltern Studies analyses the “binary
relationship” between the subaltern and ruling classes and thus examines the interplay of
dominance and subordination in colonial systems, particularly in India. Originally
associated with the ‘history from below’ it also adopted and developed insights from
structuralism, post-structuralism, and especially postcolonial theory.

Ranajit Guha was born in 1923 to a wealthy family of landowners in East Bengal. He
moved to Calcutta to study and became involved in the leftist student milieu of the 1940s.
After Independence in 1947, Guha was sent to Europe as a student representative by the
Communist Party of India. He travelled extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East
and took the Trans-Siberian railway to China, shortly after the Communist Revolution there.
He returned to India in 1953 and taught there until 1959. Between 1959 and 1980, he
worked in England, first at the University of Manchester and then at the University of
Sussex. In the 1970s, he began discussions on radical history at Sussex, with a group of
students and peers which eventually led to the Subaltern Studies project.

Edward Said was a well-known proponent of the project. Postcolonial theorist Gayatri
Spivak entered into a significant dialogue with him that was seen by many as a harbinger of
a broad turn toward postcolonial theory in the Subaltern Studies arsenal. The project can
also be seen as an ongoing dialogue with the powerful and influential Marxist legacy in
South Asian historical studies. The project itself has always claimed to be an internal
critique of both leftist scholarship and politics. Thus, the development and influence of
Subaltern Studies has been significant not only intellectually, but also politically.

Two processes-one intellectual and one political-were crucial to Guha's career during these
years. The intellectual process was the spread of radical historiography, associated in Britain
in the 1960s primarily with 'history from below' and the work of figures such as Eric
Hobsbawm, George Rude, Christopher Hill, and E.P. Thompson. It was a movement that
urged a study of poor people, especially workers and peasants, on their own terms and to
understand the inner logic of their experiences of oppression and resistance. An even more
profound influence was the work of Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, who had died as a
political prisoner in a Fascist jail in the 1930s. To understand the enormous impact Gramsci
had on Guha and other scholars from the formerly colonial world, it is important to consider
the large presence of the peasantry in countries like India. Radical activists and scholars like
Guha were often attracted to communist politics because it was seen as unique in its
commitment to the exploited, as opposed to the very obvious community of interest between
nationalist politics and big business.

Indian communists, who included some of the country's most influential historians,
struggled with the concept of a future revolution led by the industrial working class because
they lived in a country where the industrial proletariat, while large in absolute numbers, was
a small proportion of the population, which was predominantly rural. Gramsci provided
many leftist activists and scholars with the ammunition for their theories of a radical politics
that would not rely solely on the workers, but would seek to mobilize the peasants as
revolutionary actors in their own right. Gramsci, who had grown up in Sardinia, where there
was virtually no industrial working class, insisted on the importance of Marxist politics,
based not only on the modern working class, but on the common interests of all the
subordinate and oppressed factions of society. The term ‘subaltern’ used by Gramsci was
originally a military derivation referring to subordinate officers. Gramsci cast the term in a
new light; A bloc of subaltern classes, rather than a unified working class, formed the basis
of the revolution in his thought. This allowed for a more flexible interpretation of social
oppression and resistance, an interpretation that Guha found extremely attractive for
understanding Indian realities, where social relations and contradictions were far too
complex to be understood only in terms of a dominant bourgeoisie and a resistant proletariat
with advanced class consciousness. According to Ranajit Guha, subaltern studies
encroached on historical schools of thought that could not present the history of nationalism
in India without appreciating the role that elites played in bringing the larger nation into
discourse. This existing version of history, Guha argued, left out the contributions of the
subalterns, and so the subaltern studies group sought “to rectify the elitist bias” in an area
“dominated by elitism- colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism.”

The three decades following World War II saw a political and intellectual upheaval on the
left that forced many radicals to rethink positions they had previously taken for granted. The
post war landscape in the industrialized West seemed to have integrated large segments of
the working class quite successfully into the bargaining relationships of liberal democratic
capitalism. In contrast, revolts and revolutions broke out in much of the Third World, where
the modern industrial working class did not carry the weight it did in the West. This has
been a constant theme in contemporary Indian history. In the late 1960s, there was a
veritable cult of Mao-Tse-Tung among many radical groups, which led to crude political
rhetoric and a dogmatic advocacy and even glorification of revolutionary violence as a
liberating force. A radical revolutionary movement emerged in 1967 in Naxalbari, a village
in North Bengal, in solidarity with villagers who mounted armed resistance against their
oppressive landlords. The mainly student sympathizers of this struggle formed revolutionary
groups in the late 1960s and 1970s that opposed the Indian government and fuelled
revolution among peasants and agricultural workers. In the 1970s, the Indian state unleashed
a war of terror against the Maoist insurgents, using murder and torture on a scale that far
exceeded that of the rebels.

Ranajit Guha was in India for research in 1970-71 and met several young Maoist fighters
whose idealism deeply impressed him. As a historian, this political experience led him in the
direction of peasant studies. Agriculture had long interested him, and his first book, 'A Rule
of Property for Bengal', published in 1959, was a classic of its kind, a brilliant survey of the
intellectual history of land tax regimes in early colonial Bengal and a study of the evolution
of the idea of private property in land as it was imposed on Indian conditions.

This led Guha to research the peasant movements of the past, which he believed were used
by historians only to provide picturesque details for a historical narrative. In the 1970s, he
researched the forms of peasant protest in the nineteenth century. This study was published
in 1983, “Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India,” considered a
hallmark work of subaltern studies, which pluralizes discourses of power by refusing to
conflate capital and modernity in existing histories. The use of the word 'elementary' in the
title of has a specific meaning. Peasant protests here is broken down into certain formal
components or 'elements': Negation, Ambiguity, Solidarity, etc. He proposed a very original
approach to the history of peasant protest. He did not want to offer a sequential narrative of
events. Rather, he wanted to be able to make certain generalizations about the relationship
between colonialism and peasant protest. Guha sought to identify and isolate specific forms
of rural revolt and dissent and illustrate them with examples that moved freely between
different periods of colonial rule. From this emerged a fundamentally new picture of
colonialism itself. In contrast to earlier stereotypes of a passive peasantry easily manipulated
by elites, Guha showed a colonial state constantly struggling with and constrained by the
real and potential power of peasant revolts. All of this amounted to nothing less than a very
ambitious reinterpretation of the colonial period viewed through the lens of persistent
patterns of social conflict in the countryside.