A Tribute to Ranajit Guha, the historian who pioneered ‘Subaltern Studies’

I was a young doctoral student with the department of anthropology at Rice University on the cusp of embarking on my own field research, tasked with keeping an invited guest company and ferrying him around Houston. The guest in question was none other than Ranajit Guha, the historian who had pioneered ‘Subaltern Studies’, a project to recover the largely neglected histories of the subordinated classes — peasants, tribes, labourers and other exploited groups — from the biases of elite historiography, whether colonial or Indian. They were but data points in the “life-story of Empire” which did nothing to “illuminate that consciousness which is called insurgency.” This profound irony of the rebel having “no place in history as the subject of rebellion” provided powerful impetus for a radical new approach to history: reading fragments as an archive in order to ‘dignify them as sites of struggle’ and to reclaim for history these experiences ‘buried in the forgotten crevices of our pasts.’ Intellectualism and insights Guha’s ideas carried a certain revolutionary air, undoubtedly drawn from his own long background as a political worker. Indeed, Guha’s visit to Rice University had been at the invitation of historian Patricia Seed to engage with a Latin American Subaltern Studies group, who would take significant inspiration from the South Asian collective in charting the course of their own subaltern engagements. It was just a little escapade, all of it — visiting Houston’s Rothko Chapel, whose starkly sombre environment surprised Ranajitda and brought forth a twinkling comparative analysis of how Hindu temples handled light and its absence; our returning so casually late for a scheduled student interaction after a long lunch; hearing Ranajitda speak dotingly of his wife Mechthild Guha all through ; eating fries at the Hilton café where he had, of course, to host us in between other official obligations.