I

Introducing Subaltern Studies in India

Ranajit Guha, the founder of the subaltern studies in South Asia, is considered as the practitioner of a critical Marxist historiography, who sought an active political engagement with the postcolonial present, inspired by Antonio Gramsci and Mao Zedong (Chatterjee, 2009). Guha, as founder and guiding spirit of subaltern studies, has provided a critic of both the colonialist and the nationalist historiographies of modern South Asia. He critically examined in the first volume of Subaltern Studies (1982) itself the two elitisms — the colonialist and the nationalist (Chatterjee, 2009). David Arnold, Shahid Amin and Gyanendra Pandey joined Guha in England on debates on the two elitisms and the new path of historiography. In 1980, in India, Gautam Bhadra, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee joined him in the ongoing initial discourse on subalternity.

Partha Chatterjee (2009) states that the early volumes of Subaltern Studies (1982–89) were mostly concerned with the studies of peasant agitations during the nationalist movement. Guha's emphasis in these volumes was on the autonomy of peasant consciousness. The nationalist politics of the peasantry was not the same as that of the elite. Guha published his essay on this theme under the title – Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (1997).