Ranajit Guha was an influential historian of South Asia and a founding figure of the Subaltern Studies group. His work critically examined the position of subordinate groups within colonial India, aiming to give voice to the marginalized. Guha famously defined the 'subaltern' as the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those described as the elite. His foundational essay set the agenda for the Subaltern Studies collective, with his seminal work widely regarded as a classic.
These essays chart the course of subaltern history from an early concentration on peasant revolts and popular insurgency to an engagement with the more complex processes of domination and subordination, in a variety of the changing institutions and practices of evolving modernity.
Foreword by James Scott This classic work in subaltern studies explores the common elements present in rebel consciousness during the Indian colonial period. Ranajit Guha—intellectual founder of the groundbreaking and influential Subaltern Studies Group—describes from the peasants’ viewpoint the relations of dominance and subordination in rural India from 1783 to 1900. Challenging the idea that peasants were powerless agents who rebelled blindly against British imperialist oppression and local landlord exploitation, Guha emphasizes their awareness and will to effect political change. He suggests that the rebellions represented the birth of a theoretical consciousness and asserts that India’s long subaltern tradition lent power to the landmark insurgence led by Mahatma Gandhi. Yet as long as landlord authority remains dominant in a ruling culture, Guha claims, all mass struggles will tend to model themselves after the unfinished projects documented in this book. Students and scholars will welcome this paperback edition of Guha’s 1983 original, which was distributed on a limited scale in the United States. It will influence new generations studying colonialism, postcolonialism, subaltern studies, historiography, anthropology, and Indian, Asian, and Latin American history.
What is colonialism and what is a colonial state? In exploring these questions, Ranajit Guha points out that the South Asian colonial state was a historical paradox. Britain may have ruled India as a colony, but it never achieved hegemony over most of the population, collaborating with the nationalist elite but never persuading the masses. Thus the colonial state, as Guha defines it in this closely argued work, was a paradox--a dominance without hegemony. His work will be essential to an understanding of Indian history.
The past is not just, as has been famously said, another country with foreign customs: it is a contested and colonized terrain. This title offers a critique of such historiography by taking issue with the Hegelian concept of World- history. schovat popis