Abstract
A ‘people’s historian’ is how many would like to describe Ranajit Guha. The faces in the mob, facets of the insurgent’s subjectivity, the subaltern—embedded as they are in life/death worlds of pain—come alive in his work. It is this capacity which has moved many students, activists and researchers, and it is why Jim Scott referred to him as ‘Guha dock’. His vision was expansive, no less than producing a school of historiography, the Subaltern Studies School, with six Subaltern Studies volumes published under his editorship (along with an editorial team) from 1982 to 1989 (Guha 1982; 1983; 1984; 1985; 1987; 1989). Guha’s own forte was the essay, on each of which he would reportedly spend a year or so (for works which map the contribution of the Subaltern Studies School, see Chaturvedi 2000 and Ludden 2002). Any understanding of the enterprise, however, must go far beyond its ‘classical’ phase and examine both individual publications of members of the collective and the many other initiatives it spawned—such as the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, in 1993 (Rodríguez 2001). In this account, I focus on Guha’s perspective on issues of caste and gender in relation to subalternity (1987).
In his recent work, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021) makes the point that Subaltern Studies ignored questions of caste, specifically untouchability. However, at the time I joined, both caste and gender were becoming salient for the editorial collective. Susie Tharu had joined, and Gayatri Spivak and I were invited to join a couple of years later. With M.S.S. Pandian and Ajay Skaria coming on board, the issues of ‘caste’ and ‘tribe’ came to the fore (Ilaiah 1996; Tharu and Niranjana 1996; Mayaram et al. 2007). 1
My own work had been on a community of Muslims called the Meos but it was also concerned with the Mirasis, regarded as low-caste, including by Meo Muslims. My concern was not with the ‘untouchable’ body treated as an outcaste and polluting but with the creativity of this community of bards exemplified by a substantial corpus of narratives from the Mewati oral tradition, including a Mahabharata. Indeed, the Meos who regarded themselves as twice-born Kshatriyas belonging to the lineage of Krishna, Arjuna and Rama depended on the Mirasis for their histories, genealogies and myths—for their identity, in other words.
Guha critiqued the leadership of the Telangana rebellion (1946–1951), particularly Puchalapalli Sundarayya’s patriarchal understanding that viewed women as ‘tradition-bound’ rather than revolutionary (Guha 1996). 2 The ideology called statism constitutes historiography, Guha proclaimed; statism is that ‘ideology for which the life of the state is all that there is to history’—one which imbues colonial, nationalist and Marxist discourses. The historiographical archive records big events and institutions but not ‘small people’ or their dramas. Guha sought a methodological strategy that would restore agency to women and also to Adivasis, the aboriginal populations of the region. Guha had come a long way from earlier work in which Adivasis were subsumed, Maoist-fashion, under the category ‘peasant’, and the religious was overwritten by the political (Guha 1983). Indeed, in this essay, Guha uses the term ‘spirituality’ to bring out how colonial reason is challenged in relation to science and medicine (1996).
The quest for a critical historiography must ‘pick up the traces of a subaltern life in its passage through time’, Guha writes in ‘Chandra’s Death’ (1987). He reads the archive of a death in rural Bengal in 1842 to show the ‘disciplinary thrust made by the colonial regime into Indian rural society by the middle of the nineteenth century’. The broadsheet in a murder case opens up the distance between the quotidian and the historic, juridical discourse—removing both experience and affect from its living context—and so the event becomes a ‘case’, the death a ‘crime’, arrived at through eliciting ‘confessions’. Guha unravels sexual politics and the tragic denouement of an unmarried low-caste woman who seeks an abortion that leads her to bleed to death.
For days after I read ‘Chandra’s Death’, images of this young Bagdi woman kept troubling me—the jouissance of extramarital love (Vaishnava theology celebrates it as parakiya prem) and the fatal aftermath, in which ‘the lover of the night becomes the law giver of the morning’ (see Das 1992). Chandra’s transgression is in her affair, while her subalternity is produced by a cultural economy of landless labour and nomadism, drought and the moneylender who controls food and seed, caste and the patriarchy of samaj (societal, communitarian) law administered by priests, panchayats and the state apparatus of colonialism.
Guha reads the self-recognition of injustice by Chandra as a moment of resistance against samaj law, but one which was not counter-hegemonic. In the deposition by Chandra’s sister Brinda, Guha identifies the empathy of women’s solidarity and ‘the dignity of the women’s choice to terminate the pregnancy’ (1987: 161) in a social context created by a hybrid of Shastric (based on the Dharmashastra and customary law in which the unmarried woman is consigned to an akhra, a reservation for ‘deviant’ women, and subject to the sexual abuse of gurus. For the women who gathered around Chandra at this crisis the destruction of the foetus was a desperate but consciously adopted strategy to prevent the social destruction of another woman to fight for her right to a life with honour within her own society. It amounted to an act of resistance against a patriarchal tradition.
Upendra Baxi (1992) challenges Guha’s reading:
In excluding males from their activities of arranging an abortion for Chandra, the Bagdi women do not acquiesce in, much less internalize, the legitimacy of the samaj laws. But in acquiescing in the either/or alternative of samaj law and justice—abortion or bhek, the women take over the enforcement of samaj law on themselves. In choosing abortion, they preclude bhek. But the manner of Chandra’s death, interrogates even if for a moment, the legitimacy of the sanctions.
Peyman Vahabzadeh likewise comments:
Only when Chandra can speak, and by so doing put an end to her subalternity can we approximate her subaltern consciousness….We will unavoidably arrive at the realm of indeterminacy when we ask ourselves whether Chandra’s decision to go ahead with the abortion represented a mode of speaking and resistance or one of panoptic self-subjugation (2007: 256).
The silencing is not only of Chandra but of the women of her family who were tried and found guilty of murder. Gayatri Spivak’s argument that the subaltern cannot speak because she lacks the wherewithal of self-representation is only too well known (see Das 1992). But a careful listener can surely hear her in the very moment of the subaltern’s silencing. In this case, a woman is driven by the fear of social ostracism to the extent that she wants to rid her body of an act of love/desire and has a caring sister (and mother) who shares in her fear. Her sister is condemned to live with the continuing shame of the juridical sentence in which she is pronounced a murderer. In all likelihood, she bore the burden of guilt throughout her life. (What if we had not given her the medicine? She might have been alive.)
As the History Wars continue, orthodox Marxists continue to lambast Guha for reliance on the ‘economic capital’ of American academia and on the ‘cultural capital’ of French post-structuralism; for denying that the subaltern can speak, thereby collapsing Gayatri Spivak’s and Ranajit Guha’s respective positions; and, above all, for the ‘outright rejection of theory to inform and contour the politics of the marginalised’ (Gurumurthy n.d.). An Orientalism is said to have created the First and Third World without realising that many peoples of the latter regions were deemed by post-Enlightenment discourses to be primitives ‘without history’ while Europe saw itself as the fount of state, history and scientific reason—in short, civilisation. Indeed, Guha is neither anti-structuralist nor against theory, as has been alleged. Heidegger and Foucault, Saussure and Gramsci, Bhartrihari and Panini are enormous influences in shaping his thought. Guha’s courage lay in contesting the dominant paradigms of history—both nationalist and Marxist. Not only that, Guha honed the ‘hearing’ of an entire generation as the ‘subaltern’ became a category invoked across time and space.