The discipline of history in India developed in colonial times. This is well known. But what is remarkable is the sheer richness of its flowering in the post-independence period. Ranajit Guha, who left us on April 28, less than a month short of turning 100, was among the first generation of post-independence historians who produced ground-breaking research, along with DD Kosambi, Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib and Sushoban Sarkar. It will be silly to compare the depth of their contribution but what distinguished Guha is that he, among them, had the greatest global impact on historical studies – and also on inter-disciplinary studies in general.
The key contribution that Guha made was not just an individual contribution to historiography, but an original programme of historical study which he called Subaltern Studies. Certainly, there is no other historian who transformed the way history was written and thought of in academic institutions in South Asia, North America, Africa, Europe and beyond. Subaltern Studies of Latin America that included scholars like Walter Mignolo, inspired by Guha’s work, was started as an independent school in 1992. Indeed, so influential has been the work of Guha that the word “subaltern” has now become a familiar one in the media and in conversations of everyday life.
The term “subaltern” was borrowed from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Struggling against the fascist state of Mussolini, Gramsci turned his attention to groups and persons of “low rank” whose voices and actions were silenced by the domination of ruling groups. Guha borrowed this term to make two central points. The first was that the history of modern India had been written from the viewpoint of elitist historiography. By elite, Guha indicated both colonial historians as well as nationalist ones, all of whom concentrated on the actions of leaders, political organisation and high-level negotiations and manipulations that were said to make our past. Instead he called for research on what the peasants, adivasis and workers (later expanded to women and other groups) did and thought.
The second important point he made was that the nation was not unitary but composed of multiple social constituencies with uneven access to power. Nationalist historians had concentrated on British colonial oppression alone. The task of subaltern historians was to also show the way landlords, moneylenders, capitalists and those with patriarchal values collaborated with colonial power to oppress the poor and marginal -- while highlighting the independent agency of the latter in shaping popular movements.
Many of these elements were amplified in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983) and related essays. Guha made a breakthrough in the reading of the archives. The problem: how could one unearth the voices of the subaltern if these were already silenced? Guha outlined a method of reading the adjectives of colonial administrators when they recorded the actions and speeches of subaltern classes in periods of protests and movements. Guha’s method was to reverse the valuations of colonial descriptions. When administrators described the action of peasants as “fanatical”, the historian had to re-code this deed as motivation through religious beliefs. Drawing on structural anthropology and semiotics, Guha dismissed the idea that popular peasant and tribal movements were un-thought. He parsed subaltern agency in terms of basic structures of their thought. But he also laid bare the doubleness of subaltern agency. While their capacity to independently carry out actions against both internal oppressors like landlords and moneylenders was privileged by Guha’s narrative, he also pointed out its limits. For instance, they experienced their own actions as being produced by a transcendental deity and this could lead to both a fight against oppression as well as sectarian conflict.
An important reason for the global impact of Subaltern Studies was the formation of a cross-continental collective of brilliant and dedicated young scholars. They included Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gyanendra Pandey, David Hardiman, Gautam Bhadra, all of whom made scholarly and conceptual breakthroughs independently. Like Guha they emerged from the post Naxalite (when this had not become a “seditious” word!) era in which Marxist intellectuals sought to reassess and rework the vision of social transformation, independent of political parties. The tone was set by Guha who outlined a programme of intensive research with a strong conceptual and intellectual agenda that covered various disciplines such as political thought, social anthropology, social theory and semiotics among other areas.
The Subaltern Collective held regular workshops, released thirteen volumes (of which the first eight were edited by Guha himself) and produced a widening repertoire of scholars from disciplines such as literary and cultural theory, anthropological and legal theory and so on. The impact of Subaltern Studies needs also to be assessed by the important debates it produced. Sometimes skirting the borders of polemical invective, these exchanges were rescued by serious deliberation. The debates ranged from initial objections made in the journal Social Scientist about the status of the subaltern-elite distinction to Gayatri Spivak’s intervention about the epistemic status of the Subaltern in her essay Can the Subaltern Speak?; and finally Sumit Sarkar who, from Guha’s initial premises, critiqued the later turn of Subaltern Studies to concentrated post-colonial enquiry in his essay expressively titled The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies.
In the second phase of his career, Guha moved towards more pronouncedly conceptual studies of history. It marked a sort of academic homecoming. His first major monograph, A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963), was actually an intellectual history of land settlements, while Dominance without Hegemony (1998) reflected on the categories of domination and resistance. But then Guha struck out an even more radical path. In History at the Limits of World History (2002), he denounced historiography as an invention of Western colonial reason. History writing was a prop of the state on the one hand and an intellectual propellant for the domination of the non-West by colonial powers. Against Western historiography, Guha used the double resources of Heidegger and Abhinavagupta to propose the corresponding ideas of wonder and adbhuta. He elaborated its implications through Tagore’s historical sense. Tagore acknowledged the march of history that was the domain of the state and public life; but he privileged acts of living in unmediated, sensuous and imaginative relationship with the world. The latter opened out what Guha calls historicality. By this he means Tagore’s stories of everyday solidarities and relationships, instead of public, factual histories.
But something else was involved in Guha’s relationship with Tagore. It involved a deep connection with Edward Said. It may be observed that Guha’s Elementary Aspects and the first few volumes of Subaltern Studies appeared a few years after Orientalism. These two bodies of work may be said to have shaped the intellectual culture of the non-West in the late 20th century. Said and Guha shared another link: they also had an analogous predicament. Said was exiled from his native Palestine by a colonial settler state, even as he was alienated from the Palestine liberation movement as well. In a few evocative pieces, Guha points out how Said used the fiction of Conrad to come to terms with both the problems of exile and the inevitability of his own impending death. Guha understood Said’s relationship with Conrad as one of confronting the wilderness of exile with hope; conversely, of Said facing his impending death (declared by doctors) to discover – through his reading of Conrad – the importance of self-knowledge–an act that marked a triumph over the vicissitudes of exile and the certainty of death.
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Like Said, Guha chose to stay most of his working life abroad. Both may have suffered from a similar, affective condition. Their condition was analogous too in that Guha had severed his ties to the organized communist movements and possibly his belief in Marxism itself. Writing in Bengali at the late phase of his life, his essays on Tagore’s poem-songs see these as opening up for the reader the sense of place, of nature and its associated emotions together with the haunting of otherness – all the while referencing the history of the poet and his compositions. Tagore appears to have provide a place for Guha’s displacement.
Guha’s legacy is obvious. By transforming the fundamental paradigms of the discipline, Subaltern Studies remains a testament to the vitality of Indian historical traditions and Guha’s immense contribution to its life. On the other hand, his later writing may be too suggestive to have a commensurate impact. But it does underline an unfinished – and unfinishable – project that Guha has left behind. This is the work of the historian -- to constantly gnaw away at the limits of the discipline itself.
(Pradip Kumar Datta is a former JNU Professor)