A historian is someone with enough shrewdness and common sense to understand how things work in her own country, in her own times, and thus a person who can make a good fist of understanding other periods and terrains.
India's two Guhas- Ranajit and Ram, though not actually a power-couple as I had surmised- lacked common sense. But they were brown monkeys and thus, as historians, could only fling about their own feces.
This is Ram Guha on Ranajit-
When the first volume of Subaltern Studies was published in 1982, I was studying for a doctorate in sociology at the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata.
Because even Sociology is considered less shitty than History as an academic subject.
My teacher, the late Anjan Ghosh,
who was extraordinarily stupid as we will soon discover
wrote an early review of the book in the weekly journal, Frontier. The review was positive; as I recall, it ended with a sentence expressing the hope that Subaltern Studies would stir up the “arid waters of Indian historiography”.
Waters of any type can't be arid. 'Arid wastes' is okay. 'Stagnant waters' is fine. 'Arid waters' is just stooooopid.
Anjan Ghosh’s enthusiasm for this new project stemmed from multiple sources.
He wasn't merely stupid. He was also ignorant and illiterate. In other words, Subaltern Studies was tailor-made for him.
He was a heterodox Marxist interested in culture.
i.e. a useless tosser. This was a time when Backward Caste, Dalit and ST leaders were rising up and shouldering aside the gerontocratic Leftist elite.
He was a sociologist interested in history; this, likewise, a rare commodity.
By the late Seventies, most V.Cs, if not all Sociology Professors, were history-sheeters. They were interested in extortion and rape and maybe kidnapping. This was because money is a rare commodity, not crime or stupidity- at least, on Indian campuses.
As a former student of literature he had a taste for good prose.
Boy, did he choose the wrong line of work!
These multiple interests were all satisfied to varying degrees by the appearance of Subaltern Studies.
Meanwhile, Lapierre & Collins had sold millions of copies of 'Freedom at Midnight'. Indians would soon turn to Britishers like John Keay, William Dalrymple & Patrick French who took the trouble to write in a readable manner about what is, after all, an interesting country.
On the other hand, any cretin could churn out illiterate Subaltern or PoCo shite.
My teacher could not but contrast this invigorating approach
it killed all interest in either India or any type of political activism. The fact is there may be some point to protesting the fact that we don't got a pot to piss in. There is no point protesting the existence of 'elite historiographers' who died centuries ago.
to the history of Indian nationalism with what he had witnessed as a student at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
Indians can't be expected to tell the truth about Indian nationalism. The Brits wanted to make their colonies self-garrisoning and self-administering. Westminster didn't want to sit through debates over 'taqavvi' or 'peshkash' which nobody understood. The Raj was about making money, not having to pretend to give a shite about the customs and practices of darkies in a distant land.
The JNU’s Centre for Historical Studies was dominated by
cretins. India had decided that it was not enough to just get poorer and poorer. Indians must also get stupider and stupider.
a group of mechanical Marxists who had no interest in sociology and anthropology,
or Marxism. These guys just wanted to achieve brain death some thirty or forty years before they popped their clogs.
who used a narrow range of sources, and who wrote a kind of wooden, ungrammatical, babu English which took the life out of even the most exciting historical events and processes.
It certainly took the life out of the Left. China could reform by discovering that what Marx said was 'to each according to his contribution'. The Indian Left had to go on pretending Markets were evil because Imperialism is the final stage of Capitalism.
Not long after the appearance of Subaltern Studies, Volume I, its editor came to Kolkata.
That's the problem with editing shit. You sometimes have to go to shitholes.
I made the trek across town from the Indian Institute of Management to the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, where he was due to speak. The hall was packed, for a considerable reputation preceded him. In the 1940s, Ranajit Guha had been an important leader of the Communist Party of India’s student union.
He spent five or six years in Europe between 1947 and 1953. He'd married a Polish woman. Perhaps he was a senior KGB agent. He wasn't. Sad.
After the Second World War ended he spent some years as an activist in Paris; after returning to Calcutta, he left the party in 1956 in protest at its support of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. He then went away again abroad, living as a radical and itinerant scholar in France, Eastern Europe, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Although he had published just one book and a handful of articles, even before the appearance of Subaltern Studies there was a certain mystique about him in left-wing circles in Kolkata.
Because he'd had the sense to run away from a horrible shit-hole. Why be a Revolutionary in Ballygunge if you could pretend to be a Revolutionary in Birmingham?
On that day, Ranajit Guha spoke on how to write the history of peasant protest.
Ignore the fact that peasants want more land and lower rent or revenue demands. Sooner or later, like Charan Singh, they will demand the Prime Minister's seat. Tikait, not Guha, showed how peasant protest is done.
He advised Marxist historians – the only kind present in the audience – to pay more attention to culture, and explore the mentalities of peasant insurgents
by then Charan Singh had got a book of his on the Harvard Dev. Econ. reading list. The CIA knew everything there was to know about 'insurgent mentalities'. But mentalities don't matter. Only money does. Even peasants stop staving in each other's skulls with agricultural implements once it dawns on them that if a murder is worth committing, then somebody must be willing to pay for that murder. Only a fool would go around slaughtering people for free.
rather than merely judge whether, in some teleological sense, their actions represented class conflict or class collaboration.
By then the Left Front had secured its agricultural vote bank.
In this endeavour they could learn from what he termed the “more sophisticated social sciences”, namely, linguistics and anthropology.
By then, it was clear that both were ideographic, not nomothetic, and almost wholly useless.
At the conclusion of the talk, the first question was asked by an exact contemporary of the speaker, a Marxist economist historian who had stayed loyal to the party through Hungary, the 20th Congress of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union], the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the revelations of the Gulag, etc. The old Stalinist felt betrayed at this call to deviate from the catechism. The only way for a Marxist to assess the actions of an individual or a group, he said, was to determine whether they objectively represented class conflict or class collaboration.
This was a class which was perfectly happy to collaborate with the Dynasty or, in the case of the CPM, the RSS during the Janata interregnum.
Incidentally, Stalin had learned from long experience that both 'subjectively' and 'objectively' Indian Communists were all equally useless and shitty.
Ranajit Guha heard him out with an increasing impatience, and, when he ended, counterposed with a question of his own: “When Shivaji hugged Afzal Khan, with a pair of concealed tiger claws, did this represent conflict or collaboration?”
Shivaji was Hindu. Afzal was Muslim. Thus Shivaji was evil even though Afzal too was upper class.
The younger men in the hall – there were few, if any, women present – roared with approval.
Shiv Sena is very evil. Many of its members are Hindu.
The next year, Ranajit Guha published Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, a dazzlingly original study that eschewed the conventional chronological approach of the historian by assessing, in six thematic chapters, what he called the “modalities” of subaltern protest in 19th century India.
Like his previous 'A Rule for Property', the thing was an exercise in fantasy. Guha thought 'Physiocrats' mattered. They did not. The East India Company was about trade, not agriculture. The Permanent Settlement had to do with getting an assured source of Revenue and fostering the loyalty of the zamindar while creating opaque opportunities for enrichment for both the Brits and their compradors.
The insights of anthropology and sociology were married to those of history.
No insight was necessary. Insurgents made clear and explicit demands of a perfectly sensible type.
The linguistic registers of the oppressors, as manifest in the written sources of the Raj, and of the oppressed, as manifest in the oral transmissions of the peasantry, were analysed with subtlety and care.
No. Guha wrote stupid nonsense. Back then a few senile Leftists believed that some magical property was associated with 'popular uprisings'. Sadly, it was a type of magic which made the sons and daughters of the Dictator and his pals very very fucking rich while everybody else either starved or tried to run away.
The work was not without its deficiencies – thus, while Guha stressed what he called the “total and integrated violence of rebellion”, in fact in many cases tribal and peasant rebels had used violence with discrimination, and, quite often, as a last resort.
Because killing people is hard work. Who will pay us for it? That is the great question on which Revolution founders.
On the whole, however, Elementary Aspects was a triumph, a rich and evocative reconstruction of the world of the rebel that set new standards for the historian of the subaltern classes.
This was important because you could sit in Berkeley or the Sorbonne writing patronizing shite about wooly headed peasants just at a time when the descendants of those yokels were taking over State after State in India.
The book’s appeal was enhanced by its aesthetic values – for it had been produced by one of the world’s greatest typesetters, PK Ghosh of Eastend Printers in Kolkata.
He could probably have written a better book. But then he had a useful skill.
Through the first half of the 1980s, volumes of Subaltern Studies appeared every other year.
This was an ambitious citation cartel intent on securing tenure because nobody wanted to return to an India ruled over by 'bahishkrit'- i.e. 'Educationally Backward'- politicians. One reason for this was that those with useful skills- plumbing, typesetting, IT- were getting rich.
Each volume contained half-a-dozen essays of high quality, dealing with different aspects of subaltern culture and politics. While an exceptionally gifted soloist, Ranajit Guha was a very accomplished conductor as well.
But what he was conducting was a Ponzi scheme. A promising young scholar could become a Subalternist as a way to get tenure. But then only cretins would enroll for PhDs in their Department. Still, on a Campus where darkies were doing very well in STEM subjects and going on to become millionaires, it was good that there was at least one Department which could exhibit brown monkeys flinging feces at each other.
He exercised an active editorial hand, identifying a range of individual talents and then shepherding them through this collective exercise. After the sixth volume of Subaltern Studies was published, he relinquished the editorship of the series, but by then the job was done. The waters of Indian historiography had been stirred up as never before – or since.
Nobody would now read a history book written by an Indian- unless the fellow, like Guha, hadn't studied the subject in Grad School.
The Small Voice of History brings together the collected essays, published over a period of six decades, of the originator and orchestrator of India’s most influential school of historical research. As such, it is a vital complement to the volumes of Subaltern Studies, and to the published books of Ranajit Guha himself. The collection begins with a set of essays on agrarian history, that anticipate or amplify the themes and arguments of A Rule of Property for Bengal, his study of the intellectual origins of the Permanent Settlement.
There were no 'intellectual origins'. The matter was wholly ideographic and empirical. The fact is the Permanent Settlement was only permanent because it worked and couldn't be replaced by anything else, because the cost of doing a new survey was too high, even though it was obvious by the 1870's that the thing was a millstone around the neck of the Raj.
These show a precocious awareness of the biases of historical sources,
Guha, being Kayastha, was hugely biased against Brahmins
Guha writing of a work by a bhadralok gentleman that it was “unfortunately too much influenced by a certain caste outlook to merit recognition as sound history”.
But Ramram Basu- because he was Kayastha and anti-Brahmin- was the veritable Bengali Gibbon!
They also provide early examples of his sharp, sardonic, style, as when he writes of colonial officials that they were “mediocrities who knew no magic”,
nobody knows magic because the thing doesn't exist. If it did, there would be plenty of mediocre magicians.
or, when speaking of the administration in general, he remarks that “the government’s ignorance of agrarian conditions increased in direct proportion to its distrust of its local officers”.
Nonsense! The ignorance was constant. The fact that local officers were getting very rich is the reason they were distrusted.
Part II, the heart of the book, contains some quite brilliant essays on social history.
No. The book is uniformly shit.
It begins with an extended analysis of Dinabandhu Mitra’s 1860 play, Neel Darpan.
Mitra was a postmaster who was describing an actual state of affairs. Michael Madhushudhan Dutt translated it into English so as to bring about a reform such that 'the European may be in the Mofussil the protecting Ægis of the peasants'.
Mitra was later appointed an Inspector of Railways and given the title of 'Rai Bahadur'. The 'Indigo revolt' did meet with sympathy from the 'Anglo-Indian' (i.e. ICS officer) who (in the words of Otto Trevelyan) looked down on the money-grubbing 'Anglo-Saxon' (Independent Settler) interlopers who were in cahoots with the aristocratic Indian Zamindars.
Guha provides a crisp “reception history” of the play
No. He rehashes the Bengali legend in this regard. He doesn't mention Otto Trevelyan whose book 'Competition-wallah' was widely read for its Oxonian style and facetious tone. At a later point, the 'settlers' came to be seen as 'carpet baggers'- like those Yankees who enriched themselves in the South during reconstruction.
before exploring the ambiguities and hesitancies of the author’s worldview. Mitra’s “aversion to the planters”, he writes, “is equalled by his reverence for the Raj. One is a measure of the other. The blacker the planters, the whiter the regime”.
Mitra was a Civil Servant. He needed to please his bosses- the 'Anglo-Indians'- who, for their own reasons, wanted countervailing power over the 'Independent Settlers' and the Zamindars who leased land to them.
This essay, and the volume as a whole, show Guha to be a sort of anarcho-Marxism,
No. This is gesture-politics and virtue signaling merely.
whose attitude to the state is a mixture of dislike, distaste, and outright hostility.
The guy certainly felt great dislike and distaste for Bengal and Bengali women. He married only White women and settled amongst them. This does not mean he was Racist. He may just have been hostile to countries whose constitutions have been amended to make them 'Socialist' & 'Secular' .
In his world, there are no good or even ambivalent colonialists.
Being colonized is not a good thing. It only happens if you are relatively shit.
Law, considered neutral and even progressive by other liberal and left-wing historians, is through his prism seen merely as an instrument of coercion.
The Law is a public signal which provides focal solutions to coordination and discoordination games. This establishes 'uncorrelated asymmetries' which in turn create eusocial 'bourgeois strategies' which minimize coercion relative to the gains from cooperation. Ram Guha could have been taught this at D School. But Indian game theorists were Ranajit level stoooopid.
At one stage, mocking the pretensions of his own caste, and class, he writes that the opportunistic Bengali, exploiting the openings available to him under colonialism, made “law into the most lucrative of the liberal professions”.
Ranajit was wrong. The Brits made the law lucrative and some Indians followed their example. This was a case of 'monkey see, monkey do'. However, initially, civil administration was much much more lucrative than the law. It's how many bhadralok families got their start. Indeed, some had been part of the 'nizamat' before John Company took it over.
A second superb essay in Part II is “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency”, which shows how colonial records can be read against the grain to reveal the values and motivations of peasant rebels.
Fuck off! Peasants made their values and motivations very very fucking clear. 'Colonial records' didn't matter in the slightest.
Guha excoriates the use of naturalistic metaphors by colonial historians, and deftly lays bare the biases and prejudices in their language.
Why bother? 'Colonial historians' were doing hack work. Nobody gave a shit about them.
At the same time, he criticises left-nationalist historians for writing of the “abstraction called Worker-and-Peasant”, rather than of the “real historical personality of the insurgent”.
But a 'kisan-mazdoor' party had taken power in 1937 in Bengal. The thing wasn't an abstraction. It was the reason Ranajit's daddy was sucking up to Fazl ul Haq.
For Guha, “religosity is the central modality of peasant consciousness in colonial India”
it may be a Schelling focal solution to a coordination problem for a particular group of peasants. If so, it is a predicate, not a modality, of a type of consciousness specific to them. We are speaking of multiply realisable states in any possible world where there are peasants and religiosity can be ascribed to their consciousness.
One reason Bengal produced so many blathershites is because its own Navya-Nyaya tradition died out. 'Anuman' is 'Euler' not 'Venn' diagrammatic- i.e. intensionality is utilitarian. Instead of Logic, buddhijivis were taught bigotry and bombast. Yet, to this day, Indians like me love the noble people of Bengal and look to them for such Nobility as is also Beauty and Truth and- for worthless cunts like me- the assurance that all the good peeps I've known go to 'the Good Place'.
; the orthodox or narrow-minded Marxist, on the other hand, cannot “conceptualise insurgent consciousness except in terms of an unadulterated secularism”.
This is the notion that Tolstoy set off the 1905 uprising which paved the way for the Bolsheviks and that Communism would come to Beijing via Calcutta thanks to some Tagore or other such bore. But M.N Roy failed almost immediately. Bengalis simply lacked the brains or brawn to be the comprador of any new 'World Historical' idea or eventuality.
Guha’s command of sources, and his ability to blend different disciplines, are brought together to stunning effect in “Chandra’s Death”, a story of an illicit affair, an unwanted pregnancy, and an abortion that goes horribly wrong, resulting in the death of the woman concerned.
Fuck off! Chandra's death was judged an accident. Abortion wasn't a crime. We don't know why Chandra died. We do know that nobody acted improperly.
Penetrating beyond the “stentorian voice of the state”, Guha recovers for us the long suppressed voice of the peasant woman, even if we see her speaking only “in sobs and whispers”.
No. They spoke clearly and showed that their own sub-caste was respectable and observed proper protocols which did not conflict with the law in any way. The fact is 'the Crowners' (Coroner's) inquest, helps the grieving process and shows that nobody bears any guilt or acted maliciously or used 'black magic' or anything else to be feared. The mouth of gossip is stopped.
Drawing on perspectives from anthropology, history, geography, and the law,
i.e. stupid shit written by stupid shitheads
this essay brilliantly illuminates the oppressive codes and taboos of the patriarchal society of rural Bengal.
What it shows is that no such codes existed for Chandra's people. Some Bengali men- like Tamil or English or Chinese men- may be shitty little shitheads, but no Bengali woman is. Two 'Devi Chaudhranis'- Mamta & Hasina- rule Bengal. Fuck can 'Patriarchy' do? The answer is 'Patriarch' just means 'Daddy'. Daddies are tremendously proud of daughters. They tolerate sons because they are affectionate and simple and like giving hugs and getting treats like, in my case, a serving of butterscotch ice-cream. I like to think I'm not too dissimilar to a dog in this respect. I may be wrong.
Part II ends with a series of reflections on the trajectory of Subaltern Studies that, as such exercises tend to be, is somewhat self-congratulatory.
Worthless nutters displaced 'elite historiographers' coz History is a shit subject which only cretins study at Uni.
At one point, Guha writes that the project he directed was the handiwork of “an assortment of marginalised academics”.
Marginally literate monkeys who however were brown and thus deserving of affirmative action coz Whitey had forced them to pluck cotton in Southern Plantations whose trees bear strange fruit.
In fact, the founding collective included two Oxford-trained
brown monkeys
Rhodes Scholars who had taken their first degree at that bastion of desi privilege, St Stephen’s College in Delhi;
Lala Hardayal studied at St. Stephens. So did Zia ul Haq & Vikram Seth's dad who did well in the Bata Shoe business.
two members of the Calcutta bhadralok who had gone to the United States and Australia respectively for higher studies; and two middle-class whites with Ph D’s from a respectable British university. All were male, and all held tenured positions in the academy.
But their relative wages were falling. They had ceased to be objects of envy or emulation by the time I got to the LSE.
This is not, however, to discount the quality of their work, which was considerable, and which (to quote Guha himself) successfully “opened up the Indian past to admit women, dalits, peasants, and the rest of the subaltern populations as actors and protagonists in our history on a level with the elite”.
By then women had become Prime Ministers while Dalits had become Deputy Prime Ministers and 'subalterns' were Chief Ministers. All these guys ended up with at least half a billion dollars worth of assets- like Malikarjun Kharge. Guhas are fucking joke.
Until the early 1990s – when they unfortunately succumbed to the seductions of postmodernism and postcolonial theory – the young men mentored by Guha wrote sensitive and insightful histories of the oppressed and the marginalised.
Who had already taken power back home while these sensitive little snowflakes were writing turgid shite to please their senile supervisors.
However, it is somewhat fantastic to see them as being oppressed and marginalised themselves.
Fuck off! I knew some of these nutters. I recall a Mukherjee or Bannerjee, who taught Trade theory to us, complaining that the dogma of 'downward wage stickiness' had been violated in his case by the LSE. Supply and Demand had prevailed. The poor bastard had to move to some shitty cow-town in Amrika with his more talented wife. They have done well there. But not as well as a Chatterjee who quit Academia to first tutor A level students and then become a partner in an Accountancy Tutorial College. He sold out ten years later and lives a life of leisure with a super-hot Swedish wife who once offered me a cook/caretaker position at the Kensington mansion flat they infrequently visit. This was by way of doing something for the Arts- not to mention the subaltern.
Parts III and IV of the book contain shorter reviews and essays on different aspects of empire and nationalism respectively.
They are stupid shit. Empire is about 'internalizing externalities' such that Kings and their Subjects get a 'peace dividend'. Nationalism is a 'discoordination game' which can generate Tiebout 'Manorial Rents'. These nutters didn't know the basic economics of the things they vapored about.
These are not based on archival research, but contain some astute judgements nonetheless.
Fuck off! Guha's stock in trade was simulating outrage that Whitey fucked his peeps over. No doubt, this kept his White wives on side. The truth is wives still do most of the domestic work. They relish hearing about how a handful of their ancestors had held down and repeatedly sodomised larger, hairier, bleck males like their boring and stupid husbands.
Niradh Chaudhuri describes the Bengali Babu getting inflamed by Nationalist rhetoric and rushing home to pounce on his wife uttering the cry 'you slut!' But it was Indian women- not their useless husbands- who wanted the Brits to depart. Why? Look at Mamta. There's your answer.
Guha suggestively argues that the dominant experience of the coloniser was suffused with fear and anxiety;
whereas the truth is it was suffused with boredom and not wanting to die of fucking dysentery or typhoid before one qualified for a pension and a return ticket to dear old Blighty.
despite the power and apparatus of rule, the official and proconsul was never at home,
He was on a fixed term contract. Most Brits genuinely didn't want to live in India. The place was a shithole.
indeed never at ease, in a strange and forever foreign land. A review of a volume on the Rowlatt Act published in the early 1970s anticipates the key themes of Subaltern Studies, noting that the Act “was merely a peg on which it was found convenient to hang a multitude of local grievances”, and discerning a “healthy swing” in motion, “from the study of Indian political history in purely institutional terms to its study in sociological terms”.
The problem with Guhas is that they don't talk to 'ordinary' folk from their own sub-continent. 'Rowlatt' in Punjabi, means 'a period of ruffianism'. First under dyarchy and then under Provincial Autonomy, Punjab made progress precisely because its leaders would abruptly demand 'Dyerism' or 'the smack of firm government'.
The section on nationalism has an essay on Subhas Chandra Bose
whom Ranajit Guha liked coz he wanted to bring Bengal under the gangster regime of starvation and forced labor propagated by Tojo's Japan.
that sits oddly with the image and reputation of the author as a sceptic and anti-statist. Based on a lecture given at the Netaji Research Bureau in Kolkata, on the occasion of Bose’s 105th birth anniversary, this is an reverential “homage” to a “restless soul” whose “illustrious life” made “dignity and self-respect the very condition of Indian nationalism”.
Sucking up to Hitler and recruiting for the Waffen SS was stuff which Bose's Austrian wife probably liked. Guha himself settled in Austria.
It is curious, odd, even bizarre, how a scholar so relentlessly critical of elite nationalism can write so admiringly of an elite nationalist, how an activist generally so suspicious of the will to power can overlook Subhas Bose’s own fascination for a strong state with a stronger man at its head. Whether its origins lie in Bengali parochialism or in old-fashioned courtesy to his hosts, this essay should have remained uncollected. Whether the work of author, editor, or publisher, its inclusion here is a serious lapse of judgement.
No. It is par for the course. Ranajit was beaucoup stoopid.
Part V of The Small Voice of History explores the darker underside of Indian democracy.
There is no lighter upper-side to it. You can pretend India is 'secular' not Hindu but then you become a hysterical Huccha Venkat- as Ram Guha has in fact done.
Guha writes here of the treatment of child labour, the use of torture, the condition of our prisons, the arbitrariness of the law, and the degeneration of the formal party system.
Coz things were so much better before Lord Cornwallis- right?
The book ends with a few short meditations on the conditions of exile.
What prevented Guha from returning to India? Nothing, save the fact that the place is a shithole and he hadn't made a shedload of money.
This collection of Ranajit Guha’s essays showcases his various and considerable skills. On display is his linguistic dexterity, his fluency in Sanskrit, Bengali, English, and French.
He could have become a waiter and made real money.
He is rare among Indian historians in his sharply sceptical attitude towards his sources;
He is not an Indian historian. He is a shithead who fooled Whitey into thinking he knew about India.
in his knowledge of the work of sociologists and anthropologists; and in that his external influences tend to be sophisticated Continental theorists
mad cunts
rather than humdrum British empiricists.
guys who knew what they were talking about.
At several points in the book, Guha attacks the teleology of the standard nationalist narratives, whereby “all the popular struggles in rural India during the first 125 years of British rule [are seen] as the spiritual harbinger of the Indian National Congress”.
Which was, initially, a highly loyalist institution.
Gandhian nationalists tend to view these earlier protests as largely or even exclusively non-violent.
Sympathetic officials, missionaries, etc. highlighted the nonviolent aspect of such protests.
At the same time, there is a teleology lurking at the edges of Ranajit Guha’s own work — apparent in this volume and perhaps more so in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency — whereby the Santhal hool or the revolt of 1857 is seen as anticipating, in some vague but necessary fashion, the Maoist-revolution-of-the-future which the author seems to think is India’s manifest destiny.
A good enough reason to stay clear of the place.
A more serious weakness is Ranajit Guha‘s Bengal-centred-ness.
Nothing wrong in that. The problem is that he didn't know much about Bengal.
Guha often refers to himself as “Indian”, but it appears that the one province of India he has any real interest in is his own. Bengali ideas and individuals are often compared and contrasted to ideas and individuals in the West.
Bengal was interested in the West.
However, the name of [BR] Ambedkar does not, so far as I can tell, appear in the book (there is no index),
JN Mandal would have been more relevant. The fact is Ambedkar failed. The Brits fucked off and the Muslim League pumped and dumped the Dalits.
nor that of [anti-caste icon Jyotirao] Phule
a great loyalist who had zero impact outside his Province
or EV Ramaswami [also known as Periyar] either.
a worthless shithead
Surely they (and other thinkers) would have made an interesting counterpoint to the likes of Bankim and Rabindranath.
No. Only Bankim and Rabi had an impact on other parts of India.
Other parts of India mean nothing to Guha, nor more surprisingly, do other parts of Asia.
He wasn't even interested in his ancestral East Bengal. It was obvious that it wouldn't have a Maoist revolution. Its alternative,s in the late Seventies and early Eighties. were to either stick with Socialism and starve or let Ershad, etc., do privatization and get girls into factory dormitories.
In this he is representative of the radical Bengali intelligentsia in general.
It was shit which is why it no longer exists.
(Notably, no member of Subaltern Studies seems to be aware of the pioneering work of the Indonesian historian Sartono Kartodirdjo, who, a decade before them, had fused sociology with history in exploring the modalities of peasant resistance to European colonial rule.)
This is because no member of Subaltern Studies had any actual interest in history of any sort. Anyway, the Leftists didn't want to draw attention to the post 1870 'free enterprise' period in Indonesian history which put it on the path to Hindu-Muslim uniting to massacre Commies.
However, despite the occasional political posturing, and the perhaps excessively self-reflexive nature of the later essays, this is an immensely valuable volume.
If shit is valuable- sure.
It displays what Guha calls a “robust hedonism of the mind”,
masturbation
the ability to draw widely but never indiscriminately on a range of authors and materials.
because he was trying to pass himself off as an intellectual.
Which other historian could combine a deep knowledge of classical Sanskrit with a serious interest in peasant proverbs?
Hindu historians from the countryside. Sanskrit was a 'scoring subject'. Peasant proverbs were what were on the lips of Granny and Aunty and so forth.
Or provide alert and convincing readings of Bengali plays as well as of the works of German philosophers?
Convincing to a fucking halfwit like Ram Guha- maybe.
Reading Ranajit Guha reminds me of what a JNU professor once told some students about a work he was recommending to them — “Do not get confused by how well it is written. It is still saying important things.”
i.e. is as stupid as shit.
Admittedly, in India, as elsewhere, theoretical sophistication and literary quality have usually been at odds.
In shitty subjects taught by shitheads- sure.
The work of Ranajit Guha is a sterling exception. Consider, finally, these aphoristic statements from the book under review:
‘Reason is born spastic in a colony.’
No. Reason is reason. You don't have to be spastic to get the fuck out of shithole countries and pretend to be an intellectual elsewhere.
‘…[T]he colonialist mind managed to serve Clio and counter-insurgency at the same time….’'
Fuck off! Guys who did counter-insurgency may have written charming anacreontics. They didn't write history books.
‘Religion is the oldest of archives in our subcontinent..’
No. The oldest archives are commercial or fiscal in nature.
‘Discontent is, in essence, a condition of life.’
Life, in essence, is the condition of discontent. It is easy to write bombastic nonsense.
‘The historical discourse is the world’s oldest thriller.’
No. Epics could be thrilling. History needed to be informative.
The Small Voice of History is a work that occasionally provokes and irritates, but mostly moves and inspires
shitheads.
The Bose essay excepted, one always knows while reading this book that one is in the presence of an altogether superior mind.
That is the impression Ranajit wanted to create. Ram is certainly stupid enough to be impressed by meretricious tripe of that sort.
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