Quick Facts
Biography
Ranajit Guha (born Siddhakati, Backergunje, 23 May 1923) is a historian of South Asia who was very greatly 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 currently lives in Vienna, Austria. Guha rose to prominence at the University of Sussex and then moved to the Australian National University where he continued the work on subaltern studies.
His Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India is widely considered to be a classic. Aside from this, his founding statement in the first volume of Subaltern Studies set the agenda for the Subaltern Studies group, defining the "subaltern" as "the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the ‘elite’."
Works about Guha
- Sathyamurthy, T. V. "Indian Peasant Historiography: A Critical Perspective on Ranajit Guha's Work." In: Journal of Peasant Studies (October 1990) vol.18, no.1, pp. 93–143.
- Ranajit Guha's Biography written by Shahid Amin and Gautam Bhadra and the complete bibliography compiled by Gautam Bhadra are available in Subaltern Studies Volume VIII edited by David Arnold and David Hardiman, OUP, 1994.