Give an account of Ranajit Guha’s approach in studying ‘subaltern class’. (2019)
Ranajit Guha founded the Subaltern Studies collective, whose first volume appeared in 1982, to write Indian history from the standpoint of those it had always been written about. Subaltern he took from Antonio Gramsci: the subordinated of a society, by class, caste, gender or office. His claim was that they made a politics of their own.
The quarrel with existing historiography
- Colonialist history and the Cambridge school read Indian politics as elite manoeuvring for place and patronage; bourgeois-nationalist history credited freedom to Congress idealism; orthodox Marxism treated peasant revolt as pre-political spasm or a reflex of elite mobilisation.
- All three are “history from above”, omitting an autonomous domain of subaltern politics — older than elite politics and parallel to it, drawing on kinship, locality and religion rather than constitutional forms.
Method: reading the archive against the grain
- The insurgent kept no records; what survives is the counter-insurgent’s prose — police reports, judicial depositions, settlement papers.
- Guha read that prose for what it must suppress: because the document exists to condemn the rebel, his reasoning appears in it inverted, recoverable by negation. The object is consciousness, not cause — insurgency as deliberate and self-aware, not the “blind” outburst officials recorded.
The elementary aspects
Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983) abstracts six recurring forms from over a hundred risings between 1783 and 1900 — Rangpur, Kol, the Santhal hool, Indigo, Birsa Munda’s ulgulan:
- Negation — the rebel inverts the signs of dominance: burning account books, seizing the landlord’s seat, dress or palanquin.
- Ambiguity — the same act is crime to the state and restitution to the rebel, so insurgency and dacoity are indistinguishable in official language.
- Modality — destruction is selective and coded, not random.
- Solidarity — ties of blood, locality and faith become a rebel “we”.
- Transmission — rumour, the circulated chapati or twig, spreads a rising faster than the administration can follow.
- Territoriality — the revolt maps its own space against the enemy’s.
Dominance without hegemony
In Dominance without Hegemony (1997) Guha argued that colonial rule was dominance without hegemony — coercion outweighing persuasion, power never won as consent — and that the Indian bourgeoisie inherited that failure, never wholly speaking for the nation it claimed.
Critiques
- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (“Can the Subaltern Speak?”, 1988) held that the subaltern retrieved from the archive remains the historian’s construction, most of all the gendered subaltern; her strategic essentialism defends such recovery as political necessity, not truth claim.
- The autonomy thesis overstates the separation of the domains, understates caste, gender and class structure within the peasantry, and risks culturalism. Sumit Sarkar, once of the group, charged in 1997 that it had drifted from agrarian history into discourse.
- Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty carried it into postcolonial theory: political society, and the provincialising of European categories.
Conclusion
Guha died in 2023, aged ninety-nine; his method has outlived the quarrels it provoked. When the Indian state observes Janjatiya Gaurav Divas on Birsa Munda’s birth anniversary, opening his 150th year in November 2024, it commemorates what the colonial record filed as a “disturbance”. That reversal is the achievement: the rebel had reasons, and reading the archive against its authors is still the way to reach them.