Ranajit Guha

Ranajit Guha (born Siddhakati, Backergunje, 23 May 1923) is a historian of South Asia who was greatly influential in the Subaltern Studies group,^[1] and was the editor of several of the group's early anthologies. He migrated from India to the UK in 1959, and was a reader in history at the University of Sussex. He currently lives in Vienna, Austria.^[2]

His Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India is widely considered to be a classic.^[3] 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’."^[4]

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. 93–141.
• 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.

See also

• Subaltern Studies
• Partha Chatterjee
• Vivek Chibber

References

1. Guha, Ranajit (1993). Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986-1995. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-2759-2.
2. Milinda Banerjee. "In Search of Transcendence: An Interview with Ranajit Guha" (PDF). University of Heidelberg. Retrieved 26 February 2011.
3. Biswas, Amrita (2009). "Research Note on Subaltern Studies". Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies. p. 200.
4. Guha, Ranajit (1982). "On Some Apects of the Historiography of Colonial India". Subaltern Studies. pp. 1–8.

External links

• An Analysis of the essay "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India"