Ranajit Guha

Ranajit Guha (born May 23, 1923 in Siddhakati near Barishal , today Bangladesh ) is a prominent Indian historian . In the West he was first known as a leading member of the Subaltern Studies Group . In the 1960s he emigrated from India to Great Britain, he currently lives in Vienna .

Guha has written several books on 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 a lawyer. His grandfather, a trained tax officer, taught him Bengali , Sanskrit and English. Guha studied at the renowned Presidency College in Kolkata . There he became a Marxist and a member of the Communist Party ( CPI ). He was a student of Sushoban Sarkar ; Him and N. Sinha is A Rule of Property for Bengal. Dedicated to an Essay on the Idea of ​​Permanent Settlement (1963) (archive work).

In 1946 he earned a master's degree from the University of Calcutta . The years 1946–1952 were marked by intense political commitment. For a short time he works on the party newspaper Swadhinata . In 1947 he traveled to Paris as a delegate at the meeting of the World Federation of Democratic Youth . He traveled for several years in Europe, returned to Kolkata in 1953, worked briefly at the Keshoram Cotton Mills , but then returned to academic work, taught at various colleges, worked in archives and continued to work for the party.

In 1956 he resigned from the CPI in protest against the invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union. 1958/59 Guha becomes a member of the newly established historical department at Jadavpur University under the direction of Sushoban Sarkar . 1959–1980 Guha teaches in England, first at the University of Manchester , later as a lecturer at the School of African and Asian Studies at Sussex University . In 1970/71 he went on a research holiday in India, had contacts with Maoist students and began to research peasant revolts instead of writing a book about Gandhi that had already been commissioned . First results are published in the radical journal Frontier , later in the Journal of Peasant Studies .

Subaltern Studies emerged from intensive discussions with younger historians about colonial India in the late 1970s . In 1982, instead of the originally planned magazine, the first volume was published by Oxford University Press in Delhi. In 1983 his Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency appeared in Colonial India in Delhi. Since the late 1980s, Guha was a Senior Research Fellow in Canberra.

In 1988 Guha publishes Selected Subaltern Studies together with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak . The anthology with a foreword by Edward Said is attracting international attention. In 1989 Guha retired from editing Subaltern Studies for reasons of age.

In 1996, Dominance without Hegemony appears. History and Power in Colonial India at Harvard University Press (Cambridge, USA), a profound critique of the history of India during and after the colonial era. The book is based on three essays related to the Subaltern Studies project and is dedicated to its “collaborators in the Subaltern Studies project 1974–1989”.

1997 Guha publishes a second selection volume at the University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis), Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986-1995 . In 2001 he became visiting professor at the Institute for Economic and Social History in Vienna. In 2002, History at the Limit of World-History , another historiographical work, was published by 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 devoted to the history of permanent settlement , a comprehensive regulation of land taxation by the English. With 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 to initiate a systematic and informed discussion on topics of subalternity in the context of South Asian studies, and thus to help correct the elitist character of much research and academic work in this area. The word subaltern in the title stands for the meaning given by the Concise Oxford Dictionary , i.e. 'of low rank'. It is used on these pages as the name for the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society, whether it is expressed in terms of class, race, caste, age, gender, office or in any other way. "

The word subaltern , which has a lower officer rank below the captain immediately at its close military significance (Captain) says seems, used here in a very general sense. Anyone who does not belong to the elite is subaltern . Society seems to be divided into two parts, an all too simple division that scoffs at all Marxist efforts at a differentiated class analysis, but even more at the descriptions of the classes and castes of India by academic sociology, which endeavor to be differentiated.

Guha and his colleagues are not interested in a sociological classification, nor primarily in describing the relationship between the actors and the means of production, although this of course always plays a role for them. Rather, the first thing is to focus on the difference between two areas of political action.

Only when it is possible to identify “the politics of the people” (p. 4) as an independent area of ​​activity can the voice of the subaltern be heard: “The voice, long ignored by those who lived in the walled-up city of institutional politics and academic science , echoed from the depths of an autonomous parallel world into which elitist nationalism had only partially penetrated. ”For the authors of Subaltern Studies, the colonial and post-colonial society of India is characterized by a deep social and cultural divide, its political and historical implications have been ignored by prevailing historiography.

According to Guha, only in this way could part of the story be spent for the whole, could the dispute between the nationalist leaders of the Indian bourgeoisie and the British, who came from the Indian bourgeoisie , be portrayed as the freedom struggle . For Subaltern Studies it hardly matters whether the bourgeois leaders of the nationalists are portrayed as ardent idealistic patriots or as frustrated post-hunters - in any case, elitist historiography regards the masses as mere material that is enthusiastic about the leaders, or - where it acts independently of them - tends to outbreaks of irrational violence.

At the same time, Guha remains in some respects stuck to the Leninist understanding of the masses, according to which the workers do not develop any revolutionary consciousness of their own accord and therefore need to be led by a tightly organized cadre party. What Lenin says about the workers, Guha claims similarly about the peasants. Because the working class was still too weak, the peasants waited in vain: “As a result, many peasant uprisings at this time, although some were quite large in scope and had a strong anti-colonialist consciousness, waited in vain for a leadership that would move them from local limits to national ones anti-imperialist campaign could have waged. "

Subaltern Studies is no more concerned with a mere additive historiography than feminist historiography. Whether they have remained true to their intentions can therefore not simply be measured by the number of articles on subaltern groups. Just as feminist research has questioned the classic understanding of the state and the economy, Subaltern Studies also see the elites with different eyes.

Dominance without hegemony. History and Power in Colonial India

Guha had already dealt critically with the prevailing historiography of India in one chapter of his first book. The big book on the peasant revolts and the subaltern studies was an attempt to counter the elite-oriented historiography, that is to say to write history differently. In Dominance without Hegemony , Guha calls his colleagues to account for how historiography itself is involved in the relationships described: The basic conditions for a criticism of historiography India have to start from the special character of the power of England. With this, Guha approaches Foucault's theme of the entanglement of knowledge and power.

History at the Limit of World-History (2002)

Guha's last book so far is essentially an examination of the concept of world history in Hegel and a confrontation of the usual historiographical discourse with the knowledge possibilities of a poetic discourse ( Rabindranath Thakur ).

Theoretical background

Guha has always remained a Marxist. Of all the Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci influenced him the most. Guha's teacher, Sushoban Sarkar, began discussing Gramsci with his students very early - in the late 1950s. In the 1960s, Gramsci was discussed extensively in the British magazine New Left Review . The Selections from the Prison Notebooks were decisive for the reception in the English-speaking world . Gramsci was widely discussed in the 1970s, mostly, of course, by Marxists who rejected a narrow economist interpretation of history. Here you will find the “Notes on Italian History”, to which Guha refers directly in the preface to Subaltern Studies 1 : “Of course we will hope in vain that the scope of the contributions to this series even remotely corresponds to the six-part project that Antonio Gramsci for his Notes on Italian History ”.

Gramsci states:

1. “The objective formation of the subaltern groups through developments and transformations that take place in the sphere of economic production; their quantitative distribution and their origins in previously existing social groups, whose mentality, ideology and goals they retain for some time,
2. their active or passive affiliation to the dominant political formation, their attempts to influence the programs of this formation in order to enforce their own claims and the consequences of these attempts, insofar as they concern the process of falling apart, renewal and reorganization of these formations,
3. the birth of new parties in the dominant groups designed to maintain the consent of the subordinate groups and control over them,
4. the formations which the subaltern groups themselves produce in order to enforce limited and partial demands,
5. the new formations that assert the autonomy of the subaltern groups - but this within the old order
6. The formations that claim their integral autonomy ... "

In general, Gramsci emphasizes more strongly than Guha the ideological dependence of the subordinate groups on the dominant groups. Guha's hegemony resembles the "intellectual and moral leadership" of which Gramsci speaks. However, the criteria of the definition are different: Guha is about the means of domination - if persuasion is used rather than open violence (coercion), Guha speaks of hegemony . Gramsci, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with which group the ruling group refers to: 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.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Nikolaus Halmer: "Voices from the Parallel World" Wiener Zeitung, May 2013. "Small Voice of History: Ranajit Guha collected essays". Partha Chatterjee (ed.) Permanent Black, Ranikhet 2009. David Arnold , David Hardiman (ed.): Essays in honor of Ranajit Guha (= Subaltern Studies. Vol. 8). Oxford University Press, Delhi 1994, p. 222.
2. ^ A Rule of Property for Bengal. An Essay on the Idea of ​​Permanent Settlement. 2nd Edition. Orient Longman, New Delhi 1982, ISBN 0-86131-289-9 .
3. ↑ "The aim of the present collection of essays, the first of a series, is to promote a systematic and informed discussion of subaltern themes in the field of South Asian studies, and thus to help to rectify the elitist bias characteristic of much research and academic work in this particular area. The word 'subaltern' in the title stands for the meaning as given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, that is, 'of inferior rank'. It will be used in these pages as a name for the general attribute of subordination in South asian scociety whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way. "(P. Vii)
4. ↑ "The voice, unheeded for a long time by those who lived within the walled city of institutional politics and academic scholarship, rang out of the depths of a parallel and autonomous domain which was only partially penetrated by the elite nationalism." - Ranajit Guha , Dominance without Hegemony . Cambridge (USA) 1997, p. 134.
5. ↑ “The outcome of it all was that the numerous peasant uprisings of the period, some of them massive in scope and rich in anticolonialist consciousness waited in vain for a leadership to raise them above localism and generalize them into a nationwide anti-imperialist campaign. ", P. 6.
6. ^ Antonio Gramsci : Selections from the Prison Notebooks , edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, London 1971.
7. ^ "It will be idle of us, of course, to hope that the range of contributions to this series my even remotely match the six-point project envisaged by Antonio Gramsci in his Notes on Italian History ".
8. ^ Antonio Gramsci : Selections from the Prison Notebooks , p. 52.
9. ^ "Intellectual and moral leadership", p. 57.
10. ^ Antonio Gramsci : Selections from the Prison Notebooks , p. 57.

Secondary literature

• David Ludden (Ed.): Reading Subaltern Studies. Critical History, Contested Meaning and the Globilization of South Asia. London 2001, ISBN 81-7824-025-4 .
• Vinayak Chaturvedi (Ed.): Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial. London / New York 2000, ISBN 1-85984-214-3 .

Web links

• Bibliography: "All Authors of Subaltern Studies"