Ranajit Guha

Ranajit Guha (23 May 1923 – 28 April 2023) was a historian of the Indian Subcontinent who has been vastly influential in the Subaltern Studies group, and was the editor of several of the group's early anthologies. He migrated from India to the UK in 1959 and was a reader in history at the University of Sussex. He lived in Purkersdorf, Austria on the edge of the Vienna Woods, with his German-born wife Mechthild Guha, née Jungwirth, herself a leading scholar of subaltern studies, whom he met at the University of Sussex in the early 1960s, where Guha rose to prominence, and then moved to the Australian National University where both continued their work.

Quotes

• The past of the 'historyless' people they had conquered proved to be extremely useful in their attempt to convert conquest into rulership. The East India Company's fiscal system, judicial institutions, administrative apparatus – cardinal and formative aspects of the colonial state – relied heavily on that past as the primary source of information required to formulate rules and set up structures for governance. Prehistory was, in this case, the clay used by the regime to put itself in shape. But it also provided colonialism with space to install its own versions of the Indian past, converting the latter into material for its edifices of colonialist knowledge. It is thus that the 'peoples without history' in the subcontinent got history as their reward for subjugation to civilized Europe and World-history, just as elsewhere in realms un-redeemably sunken in Prehistory, the colonized lacking in footwear and faith, got shoes and the Bible.
  • quoted from Malhotra, R., & Infinity Foundation (Princeton, N.J.). (2018). Being different: An Indian challenge to western universalism.

• One of the most outstanding achievements of British power in the East was indeed the production and propagation of colonialist historiography. It was cultivated on Prehistory's vacant plots. What was sown for seed came directly out of post-Enlightenment European and particularly English historical literature packaged for use in Indian schools and universities. The product was history written by Indians themselves in faithful imitation of the Western statist model.
  • quoted from Malhotra, R., & Infinity Foundation (Princeton, N.J.). (2018). Being different: An Indian challenge to western universalism.

• The excluded are not ethnic or geographical abstractions. They make up the greater part of humanity with its cultures, literatures, religions, philosophies, and so forth. The philosopher goes through the lot systematically to dig them out one by one and tip them into the wastelands of Prehistory. What is discarded is not only the pasts these so-called historyless people live by in their everyday existence but also the modes adopted by their languages to integrate these pasts in the prose of their respective worlds. In this way World-history has promoted the dominance of one particular genre of historical narrative over all the others.
  • quoted from Malhotra, R., & Infinity Foundation (Princeton, N.J.). (2018). Being different: An Indian challenge to western universalism.