Ranajit Guha’s passing was not untimely in a prosaic sense.
He would have turned a hundred in a few weeks and had been unwell for a while. But the fact that he was alive for almost a century and worked till very well into his nineties has a historical value.
All the events that took place in these hundred years, in varying degrees, greatly impacted his life and oeuvre, but more importantly, his political convictions and their emphatic articulations in his research.
His was a life which he kept examining and re-examining till the very end. It is another matter that this critical examination resulted in an overturning of the edifices that occluded creativity and empathy in history writing in South Asia.
Guha was born on 23 May 1923 in the Barisal district of present-day Bangladesh. His family owned some 50 acres of land in the region and hence was part of the landed gentry in pre-partitioned Bengal. He finished his schooling in Barisal and Calcutta in the forties and entered the Presidency College, Calcutta, where he was introduced to Marxism and left politics.
Between 1942 and 1956, he wrote for Swadhinata – the newspaper published by the Communist Party of India – and the journal People’s War in Bombay, went to Paris as a representative to the World Federation of Democratic Youth, and worked among the workers of the Keshoram Cotton Mill and with the dock workers of Metiabruz and Khidirpur.In 1956, he resigned from the Communist Party, protesting against the invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union.
The idea for his first book came while he was a student of history at the University of Calcutta. Growing up with the children of the peasants who used to work in the lands owned by his family, Guha became acutely aware of the hierarchies which existed between him and his playmates. The master-subject relationship explicitly drawn and practised within the zamindari system initiated by the Permanent Settlement started to fascinate him as the foundation of social and cultural hierarchies that coloured the experience of colonialism. Guha offered an intellectual history of Permanent Settlement to show that the contradictions in the ideology of the Empire were already at play in its early days. One of these contradictions had to do with the nature of modernity in South Asia, which came to us through our colonial masters with a lot of restrictions and modifications. This theme would return in many of his later writings.
Guha’s ideas were not well received among his leftist peers, and eventually he had to publish the book A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963) after he moved to Europe. In 1970-71, the ongoing political turmoil in India turned his attention to the figure of the peasant as the agent of history. In the existing scholarship on colonialism, he discovered a tendency to speak in the voice of the elitist groups, both the British and their Indian counterparts. Even the Marxist historians tended to look at the resistance against the British as conditioned by a ‘false consciousness’ on the part of the peasant rebels. In the late seventies, Guha gathered a group of young scholars, many without even PhD degrees, to form the Subaltern Studies collective for exploring the role of the political consciousness of the non-elite groups in the anticolonial struggle.
The term ‘subaltern’ was borrowed from the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci’s lexicon but thoroughly redefined in the Indian context as the demographic difference between the elites and the rest of the country. Between 1982 and 2005, the collective published twelve volumes with articles by some of the major historians of the country and abroad. Of the twelve, Guha edited the first six and set the tone of the research programme the collective would adopt in its early days. The works of the Subaltern Studies group inspired similar research projects in Latin America and other parts of the world.
In 1983, Guha published his seminal study on the structural organisation and continuity of the insurgencies that haunted the British Empire in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Titled Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, the book showed how various forms of inversion of the social, political and linguistic codes of the elite groups contributed to the making of a consciousness, which was decidedly antithetical to the socalled mainstream political mobilisations by the elite leaders. It also opened possibilities of research where reading against the logic of the colonial archives offered insights that challenged the accepted versions of history.
Guha’s interest in seeking narratives alternative to the official ones continued in his later writings. The ‘small voices of history’ from the fragments left behind by the colonial archives became his lifelong compatriots. His last English title, history at the Limit of World-History( 2002), has a quotation from T. S. Eliot: ‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness?’ We shall remember Ranajit Guha as an unforgiving speaker of truth to power whose quest for justice was extended beyond the living and recovered the prestige of the dead as well. (iman.mitra@snu.edu.in)
(Assistant Professor, Department of History and Archaeology, Shiv Nadar University)