Historian Ranjit Guha passed away on April 28 at his house in Vienna Woods, Austria, where he had settled after his retirement from Australian National University in 1988.
Key points
- Guha was born on May 23, 1923, at Siddhakati village of Bakerganj upazila of Barishal in Bangladesh.
- The key contribution that Guha made was not just an individual contribution to historiography, but an original programme of historical study which he called Subaltern Studies.
- Subaltern Studies is the movement to mainstream the history of marginalised farmers and their suppressed voice in the Indian subcontinent
- Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983) is widely considered a classic example of this studies.
- Subaltern Studies of Latin America that included scholars like Walter Mignolo, inspired by Guha’s work, was started as an independent school in 1992.
- Indeed, so influential has been the work of Guha that the word “subaltern” has now become a familiar one in the media and in conversations of everyday life.
- The term “subaltern” was borrowed from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.
