A scholar who tirelessly documented the voices of the labouring and toiling women, men, and children. The viewpoint of “small voices”, of feminism, of borderland peoples, subaltern studies, and other critical histories in the postcolonial world, focussed this question of the meaning of history, politics, and self-representation through their investigations of the variations in the contexts, the course, and paradoxes …
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 …
British historian, GM Trevelyan, once wrote, “There is nothing that more divides civilised from semi-savage man than to be conscious of our forefathers as they really were, and bit by bit to reconstruct the mosaic of the long forgotten past… How far can we know the real life of men in each successive age of the past?” It is for …
