Ranajit Guha was known above all for Subaltern Studies, a series of edited volumes that sought to place the poor and oppressed at the centre of history. He himself edited the first six volumes between 1982 and 1989, after which he handed the duties over to his younger associates, who edited a further six between 1992 and 2005. He also authored important books on the permanent settlement in Bengal, peasant insurgency in nineteenth-century India, the forms that power took in colonial India, and subaltern historiography. Born in East Bengal on 23 May 1923, he moved during a long and eventful life from his village to Calcutta, to Europe, back to Calcutta, then settled in England, followed by Australia, before spending his final days in Vienna with his Austrian wife Mechthild. He died on 28 April 2023, just a few weeks before his centenary.
Ranajit Guha was raised in his earliest years in Siddhakati, a village in Bakarganj District, which lies on the west bank of the Pabna River as it flows towards the Bay of Bengal. It is now in Bangladesh. While almost the entire population of the village were Muslim, his family were Hindu zamindars, which meant that they were in a highly privileged position, and years later he recalled how other children in the village with whom he played treated him deferentially as the son of the munib, or master. When their tenants came to their house, they would touch the feet of the munib and his sons and never sit. Here, he saw in a particularly stark way the interplay of domination and subordination that he would later write about so lucidly. His father was a barrister who worked in the Calcutta High Court, and he was taught largely by his grandfather, who introduced him among other subjects to Sanskrit and Bengali literature. Being the brightest boy in the family, he was sent in 1934 to join his father in Calcutta to continue his education. In 1938, he was admitted to Presidency College to study history. He was very active politically, joining the Communist Party and became one of its most prominent student leaders. Soon, he was working for the party full-time. In 1940, he was arrested and threatened with torture, but was saved by an old friend of the family – a policeman who hoped by his kind treatment to wheedle information from Ranajit. He failed. His studies suffered in all this, with the result that he gained only a pass without honours in his final year. He nonetheless went on to study for an MA and was persuaded by the general secretary of the Communist Party, P.C. Joshi, to apply himself more wholeheartedly to his academic work. As a result, he gained a First in his MA in history in 1944. He registered for a Ph.D. under a leading historian, Narendra Krishna Sinha. Sinha was on a very different political and intellectual wavelength, and Guha struggled to complete his work on the economic history of colonial Bengal under his guidance. By contrast, he was enamoured by the leading Marxist historian Sushobhan Sarkar, to whom he later dedicated his first book with the words: “To my teacher Professor Sushobhan Sarkar who stoked so many of my first doubts.”
These were momentous years in Bengal, with the threat of Japanese invasion, the traumatic famine of 1943, and then the communal riots of 1946 that created a deadly momentum that led to the partition of India and its accompanying carnage in the following year. In 1947, Guha was appointed by the CPI as its representative to the World Federation of Democratic Youth in Paris. He stayed on in Europe, visiting different Eastern European countries for the most part, but also travelling across Russia to China. He lived for two years in Poland, where he met and married his first wife Marta, who was Hungarian. He returned to Calcutta in 1953 and besides working for the CPI as a union organiser earned a living from teaching in colleges – a backbreaking task which required him to teach eight hours a day for Rs. 258 a month. At this time, he was becoming disillusioned with Russia and the CPI. He did not like Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin – he knew that much of it was true but felt that it was done in a spiteful and opportunistic way. The final straw was the invasion of Hungary in 1956. He resigned from the CPI, ending his active political work. It was a painful decision, and he had his only nervous breakdown during this period.
In 1958 he was appointed to a post at Jadavpur University in Calcutta, where Sushobhan Sarkar was a Professor of History. In that same year, he met the distinguished British historian Asa Briggs, who was visiting Calcutta when working on his book Victorian Cities. Sushobhan Sarkar had hosted Briggs at his house for dinner and invited Guha to join them. Briggs was very taken by Guha’s brilliance, meeting him for breakfast next day at his hotel. Guha told him of the problems he was facing with his doctoral supervisor, and Briggs suggested that he apply for a fellowship at Manchester University to escape this situation. The application succeeded, and Guha moved to England in 1959. Briggs advised him to submit his thesis manuscript for a doctorate in a British university, but Guha then discovered that it would take at least two years registration before he could do this, so instead he sent it to Daniel Thorner, an American academic who had faced persecution for refusing to divulge the names of left-wing economists to the committee led by Joseph McCarthy. Thorner was now in exile in Paris. Thorner arranged for it to be published as a book by Mouton Co. This came out in 1963 as A Rule of Property for Bengal.
The focus of this study was the creation of the Permanent Settlement in Bengal. This measure had bestowed landed property rights on people who previously had been feudatories of indigenous rulers and their tax farmers. The existing understanding was that this was a pragmatic measure designed to placate locally dominant groups and gain their support for British rule. Guha argued, based on his close reading of archival texts, that the British in late eighteenth-century Bengal were in fact driven by ideological commitments. While the Governor-General, Warren Hastings, was an adherent of the Scottish Enlightenment, which held that property ownership was the essential basis for the betterment of society, Philip Francis, the leading member of the Supreme Council of Bengal and the chief rival to Hastings, adhered to the French Enlightenment philosophy of physiocracy, which considered agricultural production to be the basis for national wealth. From their clashes a policy emerged in which the local feudatories were given full rights of property in land with a belief that this would encourage them to become a class of enlightened and improving landlords, like their British counterparts. As it was, Guha argued, the measure produced merely a class of parasitical property-owners who typically used the proceeds to fund a leisurely life in Calcutta rather than put any effort into modernising or improving agricultural infrastructure and techniques.
Guha’s focus on ideas ran counter to the prevailing assumptions of many historians at that time, who adopted the a “post-ideology” stance popular during the Cold War, with an emphasis on history being largely “one-thing-after-the of India (CPI) other”, with people being driven mainly by self-interest and pragmatism rather than belief. Neither was this in the mould of the Marxian agrarian studies of the day, which focussed on relationships of production and proto-class struggles. As a result, he faced some indifference, even hostility. Nonetheless, quite independently to him, the British historian Eric Stokes had been working already on a history of how Utilitarian theory was central to policymaking in early nineteenth century India. His book, The English Utilitarians and India, was published in 1959 and was well received – and during the 1960s was better known than Guha’s. There was thus a climate for a different approach. Stoke’s book was not however particularly well-written, particularly when compared with the elegance and lucidity of Guha’s work, and the latter has stood the test of time rather better.
Meanwhile, Asa Briggs had in 1961 been appointed as Dean of Social Studies at the new University of Sussex, on the outskirts of in Brighton. He persuaded Guha to take up a post there in the School of African and Asian Studies (AFRAS), where he was based for the next two decades. With the support of Briggs, who in 1967 became the Vice Chancellor of Sussex, AFRAS built a reputation in modern South Asian studies, with Anthony Low as the Dean of AFRAS, and noted historians such as Peter Reeves also on the faculty. At that time, The Centre of South Asian Studies in Cambridge appeared to be taking the lead in the study of South Asian History in the UK, but the Sussex historians were not prepared to accept this and began creating a rival school of modern South Asian History. Guha himself was very scathing of the writings of the so-called “Cambridge School” on Indian nationalism that understood the movement in terms merely of a power struggle between the British and Indian elites. There was no engagement with Indian-language sources, and their grasp on Indian culture and the politics of the masses was in general shallow. He decided that as a start he would focus on writing a critical biography of Gandhi that would adopt a very different tone. In 1970–71 he took a sabbatical in India to research the project. By now, he had divorced his first wife, and in 1970 married Mechthild Jungwirth, an Austrian who was carrying out research in Sussex. She was to provide a huge support to Guha for the rest of his life both intellectually and in a multitude of practical ways. In 2014, she published a highly readable and sympathetic account of their life together: Danube, Ganges and Other Life Streams.
By 1970, the communist movement in India had undergone major changes. In 1964, the CPI had split, with a new more activist party breaking away – the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M). This was particularly popular in West Bengal and Kerala, winning elections in both states in subsequent years. In 1967 there was an uprising in rural West Bengal led by Maoists who championed the poor peasants and rural tenants. They formed a new Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), or CPI(ML). They were known more popularly as the Naxalites. Although the rising was crushed, many left-wing students were attracted to the group and went to rural areas to instigate further risings. There was such a group active in Delhi when Guha was there in 1970–71, and he joined in with their meetings. He felt that the most pressing task for him as a historian was to research the history of peasant insurgency in India. In this, he would reject the stereotype of the passive peasant who lacked political agency – and was thus “pre-political”. He abandoned his projected study of Gandhi and focussed instead on nineteenth-century rural revolts. His first major piece of writing on this was on the indigo revolt in Bengal in 1859–62, with a focus on the role of the Bengali intelligentsia in these events. His article titled “Neel-Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt in a Liberal Mirror” was published in 1974. In it, Guha showed how the grievances of the peasants were deployed by the Bengali elite to push their own demands. Largely from the zamindar class, they wanted to break the local political power of the white indigo planters and factory owners who had hitherto lorded it over large areas of East Bengal. Guha depicted the attitude of the intelligentsia as “a curious concoction of an inherited, Indian-style paternalism and an acquired western-style humanism”. In all this, the interests of the poor and oppressed were largely ignored. The article was notable for its rigorous textual analysis – always a hallmark of Guha’s work.
Already, Guha was thinking in terms of a project that would bring together under his guidance several younger historians who were committed to writing the history of the poor and oppressed. I became a part of this after meeting him in Delhi in late 1971. My experience throws light on the way that he was able to enthuse and inspire younger scholars. I had arrived in India to carry out research for my doctorate at Sussex University. Although Guha was based at Sussex, he had been away on sabbatical during my first postgraduate year there and I had not previously met him. I intended to study the nationalist movement in Gujarat – a topic that my doctoral supervisor, DA Low, had suggested. Guha told me very bluntly that almost everything written on modern Indian history to date lacked any authentic understanding of India, being produced by English-educated Indians or British or American academics. In this, it had little or no worth. These historians explained the actions of the masses in generally economistic terms; in his view, social pressures, beliefs, and myths were more important. Gandhi, he said, was as much myth as reality. I noted in my diary: “What he said seemed to me absolutely right- a culmination of all I had been working up to, and our ideas on the probable course of the national movement in Gujarat tallied remarkably.” He then said that I could, if I chose, stay in Delhi, and work in the archives and write up my findings in a couple of years. This would produce only a very turgid history. I was – he said – young and had plenty of time to try a new approach. My head was by now whirring, and above all I felt huge relief that I had now found someone who really understood the sort of research that I both wanted and needed to do. He would be back in Sussex when I returned from my year in India and could give me the right guidance. Guha then said that he wanted to establish a whole new school of history at Sussex to challenge the historians of Oxford and Cambridge. Clearly, he saw me as potentially a part of this project so long as I followed the path that he advised. I was fully on board. Guha insisted that I go straight to Gujarat and immerse myself in its culture and start learning the language. I did this as soon as I could. That day in late 1971 set the tone for my research and writing in my subsequent career as a historian. Moreover, Ranajit Guha’s vision of an alternative school of Indian history showed that I did not need to be alone in what I did, but part of a group striving towards the same ends.
I completed my doctorate in 1975, and after further research in India began writing it up as a book. It was at this juncture, in 1977, that Guha suggested to me and Gyan Pandey, who had just completed his Oxford doctorate on the nationalist movement in UP, that we start a series of meetings to discuss a new approach to writing modern Indian history. We discussed Guha’s evolving manuscript on peasant insurgency, with its focus on the deep structures of rural revolt, such as forms of solidarity, understanding of territoriality, and modes of transmission. We also considered his idea that there were two streams of nationalism – the elite and the popular – working out how each of them was expressed. Hitherto, Guha held, historians of the subcontinent had focussed largely on the affairs of the elites, whether imperial officials, indigenous rulers, or nationalist leaders, with the mass of the people appearing as little more than a backdrop. Now, Guha urged, we could make the people the subject of an alternative history. He called for new ways of writing this history. Although the poor and oppressed left almost no records of their own, they were described in often scornful and condescending ways in the official archives. In his work on peasant insurgency, Guha had found ways to use these accounts to understand their feelings, beliefs and forms of political organisation and action in more credible ways. In this, he read the texts generated by elite groups “against the grain”.
Although the project was inspired in part by “history from below”, as pioneered by Marxist historians in the post-Second World War period, there were significant differences in Guha’s approach. The Marxist historians had sought to show how a “modern” class consciousness had been forged through struggle over time. Pre-modern forms of popular belief and consciousness were seen as “backward”, “false”, or “primitive” (as with the “primitive rebels” of Eric Hobsbawm’s well-known study of banditry in Europe). Guha urged us to accept the consciousness of the poor and powerless as legitimate in its context, arguing that it was as valid a form of political understanding in the light of their lived experience as was the politics of an advanced working class. To escape the problem of having to try to delineate the degree of class consciousness in any popular social movement or act of resistance – which could be difficult when dealing with a predominantly peasant society such as India – Guha focussed on relationships of domination and subordination. By 1980, Guha had decided that the project would be titled Subaltern Studies. The term “subaltern” came from the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci who used it to mean people who were in a position of subordination. He had found it analytically useful when describing the predominantly peasant society of Italy of his time. Gramsci saw that while class struggle would be important in the industrialised cities, the predominant focus for socialist leaders in the much more extensive rural areas had to be that of the subordination of people who largely accepted the hegemony, or right to rule, of the elites. This hegemony had to be broken through struggle. Guha took this up, noting that this was indeed one of the existing meanings of “subaltern” in English (though in practice the word was used mainly to describe junior army officers).
Following this lead, we wrote up discussion papers, working towards a set of articles for an initial publication. We gradually expanded the group to others then working in Britain, namely David Arnold and Shahid Amin, and then bringing in Partha Chatterjee who was based in Calcutta. We six formed the team for the initial publication. We discussed whether we should start a journal or focus on a series of volumes that could appear at irregular intervals. We decided on the latter. Ravi Dayal, the manager of Oxford University Press in New Delhi, agreed to publish the series, with the first volume appearing in 1982 with Guha as the overall editor. In his introduction to this volume, Guha wrote of how the study of Indian nationalism had focussed largely on elites, whether British imperial rulers or middle-class nationalists. British-oriented histories had emphasised the achievements of the imperial rulers and the response by Indians, while Indian elite-oriented histories had valorised the role of those elites, who were depicted as “awakening”, educating, morally improving, and mobilising a passive majority and leading them firmly towards a golden future. The masses were not seen to have a valid political will of their own, being merely guided and led towards this “freedom” by the nationalist elite. The movement became “a sort of spiritual biography of the Indian elite”. Neither approach provided a convincing explanation for the phenomenon, for they failed to acknowledge “the contribution made by the people on their own, that is, independent of the elite to the making and development of this nationalism”. Hundreds of thousands, at times millions, of peasants and workers had participated in the movement, and they had done so on their own terms. Guha thus called for a focus on “the politics of the people”, whom he characterised as being marked by their subalternity. The subaltern domain of politics operated relatively independently of elite politics, with its own rules and trajectories. It could be characterised by, among other things, the way that the subaltern groups organised themselves along lines of community, territory, and workplace, and by its methods of protest and insurgency. It was infused with the experience of various forms of exploitation by both the imperial and Indian elites and represented a strong rejection of such oppression. Although the Indian elites led the nationalist movement, they spoke for the masses only partially, and often failed to either address or rectify their many grievances. While they managed to mobilise the subaltern in support of some of the great agitations, producing some “some splendid results”, they often ended by compromising with the British in ways that betrayed the interests of the masses. In this, the elites failed to “speak for the nation”.
This set the agenda for the volumes that followed. Each contained chapters on various aspects of subaltern life and struggle in South Asia written in many cases by core members of the group such as Gyan Pandey, David Arnold, Shahid Amin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Gautam Bhadra, Sumit Sarkar, and myself. At the same time, Guha published his own research as Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983). Guha himself edited a further five volumes of Subaltern Studies. He published a series of seminal articles in these volumes that added to the depth and complexity of his ideas. He developed several main themes. For example, he emphasised the different objectives of the elite and subaltern. The elite focussed on gaining constitutional power, and deployed agitation to this end. They were not committed to giving the subaltern any real authority, often withdrawing protests when they were seen to pose a challenge to the indigenous elites, such as landlords, the business classes, industrialists, and other vested interests. The elites wanted only limited social transformation. Campaigns were thus halted, even if many of the demands of the subaltern classes had not been conceded. A contrast was drawn up between this liberal-constitutional approach in which agitation was deployed to gain concessions from the state, and the more radical objectives of the masses, who were fighting above all for their own social and political self-determination. In this they sought to overturn oppressive structures of power and bring into being a very different type of society.
While the elites sought to link themselves with such subaltern mobilisation when it was in their interest, subaltern groups in turn sought elite support and leadership in their struggles, which gave rise to a series of temporary alliances between the two. Guha characterised this tendency as the “braiding” of the two streams. This coming-together was strongest during protests, tending to unravel thereafter. Subaltern groups that had supported elite-led campaigns at one juncture might become disillusioned by the failure of the elites to redress their grievances and refuse to join with them in future.
Guha also theorised on the forms that subaltern mobilisation took. In general, it was based on horizontal linkages, typically those of community. Community could be conceived in terms of class, caste, territory, or religion, and the boundaries could shift dramatically at different junctures. He also noted how the consciousness of the subaltern was rooted typically in a mindset that blended understanding of their material life with a belief in supernatural powers. During the early twentieth century, for example, Gandhi was often perceived to possess miraculous powers. While from one perspective this represented a form of “false consciousness”, their faith in such higher realities allowed the subaltern to resist with great courage.
The project raised the hackles of many historians in both India and the UK, who felt that their own work was being too easily dismissed as either “elitist” or “economistic”. Some of the criticism was based on misunderstandings. For example, it was often argued that Guha had sought to delineate an entirely autonomous domain of subaltern mentality and politics. In fact, he had constantly emphasised how the different political streams interacted – braiding and then unravelling. These exchanges left their mark on both streams, so that they were always evolving. By contrast, Subaltern Studies was received with an enthusiasm by many historians and social scientists in the USA, Latin America, and Australia. The emphasis on the hierarchy of power, with its interplay of domination and subordination and the way that this denied a voice to those in a subjugated position, as well as the analysis of its impact on popular politics and resistance, accorded with a common lived experience in areas such as Latin America. It allowed for an analysis of forms of exploitation based not just on economic class, but also on gender, race, and caste. Marxists and liberal thinkers had alike tended to emphasize the economic as the prime driver of popular action, while Subaltern Studies sought to highlight a range of social, political, economic, and cultural forms of oppression that braided together in different ways in different historical situations, and which provided the focus for action by subaltern groups. Many groups were subjected to multiple layers of oppression. This broad idea could be applied regardless of the specific cultures of oppression of a given society.
Guha was able to devote a lot more time to publishing his own research as well as editing the series after he moved in 1980 to take up a fellowship at the Australian National University. This was facilitated by DA Low, who had himself moved from Sussex to the ANU in 1973, first as Dean of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, and then from 1975 to 1982 as Vice Chancellor of that University. Like Asa Briggs, Low was always very supportive of Guha, even though the type of history they wrote differed considerably. With Low’s support and encouragement, Guha organised the first Subaltern Studies conference at the ANU in 1982. This allowed the core group to get together for a series of intense discussions before the conference began, at which they were joined by the distinguished American historian Bernard Cohn. These debates shaped in very constructive ways the papers that were given at the conference, and which formed the basis for volume three of the series. Cohn himself was very struck by the enthusiasm and drive of the group at that time, and how well its members bonded together.
Guha’s younger associates took over the editing of the series in 1989, with a first volume under the new team appearing in 1992. The project evolved and changed considerably over the years, with some members dropping out and new members joining the core group. This led to some dilution in the project. Guha had provided through the clarity of his thought a clear agenda and focus. The final volume came out in 2005. Guha’s last input was in volume nine, published in 1996, on “The Small Voice of History”. In this, he examined the way that much history was written as the biography of political states – an ideological approach that in his words: “authorises the dominant values of the state to determine the criteria of the historic”. He labelled this as “statism”. In such a light, any group that challenges or calls into question this agenda is described as “primitive”, “backward”, ignorant, “anti-national” and the like. Guha called for a radically different way of writing history so that it was able to validate the experience and emotions of the most oppressed groups in society. He did not claim to have any easy answers but suggested that it might mean abandoning many of the accepted ways of writing history in favour of very different notions of causality and time.
The success of Subaltern Studies saw Guha being invited to conferences and give lectures to an international audience. In the late 1990s, he and Mechthild left Australia and settled in Austria in the suburb of Purkersdorf on the edge of the Vienna Woods. He began to explore the fact that the experiences of subaltern groups were often better reflected in literature than in “statist” history. He developed this theme in a series of lectures that he gave at Columbia University, which were published in 2000 as as History at the Limit of World History. Here, he challenged the Hegelian concept of World-History. This statist approach saw the dismissal and even eradication of other alternative histories – those that reflected the lives and experiences of ordinary people. Often, this had been carried out through imperial domination – a process that was both violent and destructive. In this, he referred to Rabindranath Tagore’s critique of historiography, which lamented the fact that the British had done their best to wipe out the myriads of indigenous histories found in India, as well as the way that educated Indians themselves were endorsing such an agenda.
In Austria, Guha gave up writing in English and began writing and publishing prolifically in Bengali. Much of this involved an analysis of Indian literature, from the Mahabharata onwards. He reflected on the futility of hoping for easy political solutions to human problems, thus questioning the role of the state. I do not know Bengali, and to convey some of the flavour of this late writing, I shall quote Partha Chatterjee. In a reflection on the carnage of the battle of Kurukshetra in the Mahabharata, Guha noted that (in Chatterjee’s translation): “Moving between the corpses are the Kaurava women, looking for their husbands, brothers and sons, weeping and cursing those who had taken away their loved ones. ‘All wars come to an end,’ says Guha. ‘What doesn’t end is the cycle of mourning and recrimination.’ That scene from the Mahabharata reminds us that, despite episodes of indescribable cruelty, human beings can reclaim the sentiments of mercy and compassion to restore their faith in a mutually supportive social life.” Chatterjee goes on to state: “In these late writings, Ranajit Guha travelled far from his youthful convictions about a life given wholly to politics. But then, he had also shown, at several critical junctures in his career, a predilection to move away from a course that had turned conventional and sterile.”
Ranajit Guha always had the courage to stand out against injustice and oppression, whether it was by the class he had been brought up in, British imperialism, the complicity of a domineering Indian elite with this imperialism, the self-centred agendas of elite Indian nationalists, the violence and brutality of this class once it had wrested power from the British, and the tyranny of the Soviet Union. He also refused to regurgitate old and stale arguments once their shortcomings had been exposed. He was outspoken, often cutting in his remarks, a hard taskmaster, and not always an easy person to engage with. Nonetheless he was highly supportive of those younger scholars whom he took under his wing, pouring his brilliance into their lives with great generosity of spirit. He was deeply cultured, widely read in all the humanities, a lover of good music and food, and a font of insight and wisdom for all those who moved in his circle. He was a master of that Bengali institution – the adda – the intense discussion that can stretch for hours and hours refreshed with tea, coffee, and snacks. Although the addas that he led were generally rather one-sided affairs, nobody who participated in them ever forgot the experience.