Ranajit Guha
Ranajit Guha (* May 23, 1922 in a village near Barisal, Bangladesh today ) is a prominent Indian historian. In the West he was first known as the leading member of the Subaltern Studies Group. In the 1960's he emigrated from India to the UK, he currently lives in Vienna.
Guha has written several books on the history, historiography and politics. His book Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India is widely regarded as a classic.
Life
Guha's father was a landowner and lawyer. His grandfather, an educated tax official, Bengali, Sanskrit and English taught him. Guha studied at the prestigious Presidency College in Kolkata. There he became a Marxist and member of the Communist Party ( CPI). He was a student of Sushoban Sarkar; him, and N. Sinha, A Rule of Property for Bengal. An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement ( 1963) dedicated (archive work).
In 1946 he acquired a Master's degree at the University of Calcutta. The years 1946-1952 are characterized by intense political commitment. In the short term he is working on the party newspaper Swadhinata. In 1947, he traveled as a delegate at the meeting of the World Federation of Democratic Youth in Paris. It takes several years of traveling in Europe, returns in 1953 back to Kolkata, working in the short term Keshoram Cotton Mills, but then returns to the academic work, taught at several colleges, working in archives and continue for the party.
In 1956 he enters in protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary from the CPI. 1958/59 will Guha member of the newly established history department at Jadavpur University under the direction of Sushoban Sarkar. 1959-1980 Guha teaches in England, first at the University of Manchester, and later as a lecturer at the School of African and Asian Studies at Sussex University. 1970/71 he keeps on a sabbatical in India, has contacts with Maoist students and begins to explore peasant uprisings, instead of a previously commissioned to write book about Gandhi. First results will be published later in the radical magazine Frontier, in the Journal of Peasant Studies.
From intense discussions with younger historians about the colonial India in the late 1970s are shown the Subaltern Studies. 1982 appears instead of the originally planned magazine, the first volume in the Oxford University Press in Delhi. 1983 published his Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India in Delhi. Since the late 1980s, Guha Senior Research Fellow in Canberra.
Guha 1988 are out along with the Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Selected Subaltern Studies. The anthology with a foreword by Edward Said gained international attention. In 1989, Guha draws on grounds of age from the editorship of the Subaltern Studies back.
Dominance without Hegemony 1996 appears. History and Power in Colonial India at the Harvard University Press ( Cambridge, USA), a profound critique of the historiography of India during and after the colonial period. The book is based on three essays, which are connected with the project of Subaltern Studies and its " employees at the Subaltern Studies project 1974-1989 " dedicated.
1997 is Guha at the University of Minnesota Press ( Minneapolis ) a second choice strip out Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986-1995. In 2001 he was visiting professor at the Institute of Economic and Social History in Vienna. 2002 appears History at the Limit of World- History, another historiographical work at the University Presses of California, Columbia and Princeton.
Works
A Rule of Property for Bengal. An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement ( 1963)
Guha's first major book is the history of the Permanent Settlement, a comprehensive settlement of land taxation by the English, dedicated. Through its thoroughness, it established Guha's reputation among specialists in Indian history.
Subaltern Studies
Ranajit Guha's preface to the first volume of Subaltern Studies begins with the words:
" The aim of this collection of essays, the first of a planned series, is the impetus of a systematic and informed discussion on issues of subalternity within the framework of South Asian studies, and thus help to correct the elitist oriented nature of many research and academic work in this area. The word subaltern in the title stands for the importance, as they are the Concise Oxford Dictionary, that is, of low rank '. It is used on these pages as a name for the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society, whether they are expressed in terms of class, race, caste, age, gender, office or in any other way. "
Subaltern The word in its narrow military meaning a lower officer rank immediately below that of Hauptmann ( Captain ) says, seems used in a very general sense here. Subaltern is each and every one who is not part of or the elite. Thus, the society seems to be divided into two parts, an overly simple classification, the more so but speaks all Marxist efforts to differentiated class analysis, tried to differentiation descriptions of the layers and castes of India by the academic sociology mockery.
Guha and his staff but it is neither a sociological classification still primarily concerned with the description of the relationship of the actors to the means of production, although it always plays a role, of course, for them. Rather, it is first necessary to obtain the difference between two areas of political action in the view.
Only if we succeed, " the politics of the people" (p. 4) to be reported as a separate sphere of action, the voice of the subaltern is heard: "The voice, unnoticed by those who lived in the walled city of institutional policies and academic science long, rang out from the depths of an autonomous parallel world in which the elitist nationalism was only partially penetrated. " colonial and post-colonial Indian society is for the authors and (few) authors of the Subaltern Studies marked by a deep social and cultural divide, whose political and historical implications of the prevailing historiography were ignored.
According to Guha was the only way a part of the story is spent on the whole, the confrontation was between the entstamme ends of the Indian bourgeoisie and their interests are represented responsible leaders of the nationalists and the British as the freedom struggle. It does for the Subaltern Studies hardly matters whether the civic leaders of the nationalists are portrayed as glowing idealistic patriots or as frustrated careerist - in any case applies the elitist historiography, the mass as a mere material which is excited by the leaders, or - where it is independent of them - is prone to irrational outbursts of violence.
This Guha remains in many respects the Leninist understanding of the masses arrested after developing the workers of itself is not revolutionary consciousness and therefore require the guidance of a highly organized cadre party. What Lenin says about the workers, Guha claims similar to that of the peasants. Because the working class was still too weak, the peasants waited in vain: " As a result, many peasant uprisings were waiting at this time, although some certainly had a big scope and a strong anti-colonial consciousness, nothing on a leadership that they from the local limit national in a anti-imperialist campaign could have led. "
The Subaltern Studies it comes as little a mere additive historiography and feminist historiography. Whether they have remained faithful to their intentions, can therefore be measured by the number of essays on subaltern groups also not easy. As the feminist research has also provided the classical understanding of government and business in question, see the Subaltern Studies and the elites with different eyes.
Dominance without Hegemony. History and Power in Colonial India
Even in a chapter of his first book to Guha had dealt critically with the dominant historiography of India. The Big Book of the peasant uprisings and the Subaltern Studies attempting to oppose the elite -oriented historiography something that history was thus to write differently. In Dominance without Hegemony Guha calls his colleagues to account on how the writing of history is itself embroiled in the described conditions. The basic terms of a critique of the historiography of India had to start from the particular nature of the power of England. Guha approaches so that the Foucauldian theme of the intertwining of knowledge and power.
Guha's been last book is essentially an analysis of the concept of world history in Hegel, as well as a confrontation of the ordinary historiographical discourse with the cognitive possibilities of poetic discourse ( Rabindranath Tagore ).
Theoretical background
Guha has always remained a Marxist. Among all Marxist theoreticians has most influenced him Antonio Gramsci. Guha's teacher Sushoban Sarkar had very early - late 1950s - started to discuss with his students Gramsci. In the 1960s, Gramsci was then discussed intensively in the British journal New Left Review. Decisive for the reception in the English-speaking world have been Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Gramsci was widely discussed in the 1970s, especially, of course, Marxists who rejected a narrow economistic interpretation of history. Here you will find the "Notes on Italian History ," on the Guha 1 refers directly in the preface to Subaltern Studies: "Of course we are vain hope that the level of contributions to this series even remotely corresponds to the six-part project that Antonio Gramsci fast for his Notes on Italian History in the eye. "
Gramsci calls:
Generally speaking, Gramsci emphasizes stronger than Guha the ideological function of the subaltern groups of the dominant groups. Guha hegemony is similar to the " intellectual and moral leadership," speaks of Gramsci. However, the criteria of the definition are different: Guha it comes to the means of domination - if rather persuasion ( persuasion ) than open force ( coercion ) is applied, Guha speaks of hegemony. Gramsci, however, is particularly important on which group applies to the ruling group: A social group dominates antagonistic groups, Which It Tends to " liquidate ", or to subjugate Perhaps even by armed force; it leads kindred and allied groups.