Ranajit Guha suffered delusions of grandeur. Being too stupid to study anything useful at university he had to settle for History. This led him to the absurd proposition that Historians are very powerful. They actually create their own subject by, for example, colonizing distant countries. Consider the following extract from 'History at the limit of World History'-
The critique of elitism in South Asian historiography was central to my concern at the time.
But nobody gave a shit about 'South Asian historiography'. No doubt, some low IQ pedants said things like 'History books should not concentrate on the doings of Kings and conquerors. They should focus on the sex-lives of transvestite Assistant Librarians.' But most other Assistant Librarians disagreed. They thought History should be about the doings of their cat Mitzi.
In developing that critique I tried to show how the peculiarity, indeed the originality of Britain’s paramountcy in the subcontinent as a dominance without hegemony, required the appropriation of the Indian past and its use for the construction of a colonial state.
The East India Company was a commercial enterprise. What constructed the colonial state was military and commercial power. Historians had zero influence, impact or significance.
There was nothing in the structure or career of the Raj that was not fully involved in this statist enterprise.
No. There was nothing in it which was involved in what was published by enterprising authors or provided a way to pass the time for people with antiquarian interests.
All of governance ranging from tax collection and land legislation through the establishment of a judicial system and a colonial army to the propagation of a colonialist culture by Western-style education and the promotion of English as the official language—every aspect of “England’s Work in India” relied for its success on the reduction of Indian history to what James Mill was sagacious enough to claim as a “highly interesting portion of the British history.”
Fuck off! James Mill, like other enterprising Scotsmen of the period, wrote books on topical subjects so as to make a little money. The East India Company was quite an important enterprise back then and so his book sold well. He was given a clerical job by the Company and, being a diligent Scot, did quite well there. But he didn't get rich or gain much in the way of power and influence.
Which is why, I argued, it was up to the Indians themselves to try and recover their past by means of an Indian historiography of India
They had done that before Guha was born. But history books don't matter in the slightest. Only stupid people study or teach that shite. On the other hand, a smart journalist- like Dominique Lapierre- could make millions out of even a subject as boring as 'Freedom at Midnight'.
Somak Mukherjee is a PhD scholar in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Sadly, he confuses the word 'former' with 'latter'. This is from a Scroll article of his-
However, when Guha met Sen, the latter had already lost faith in the Stalinist vision of Communism after the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
Sen was not a Communist. Guha was. Somak should have written 'the former had already lost faith'- though, in fact, he hadn't. It was Kruschev he objected to.
Sen describes Guha as a “revolutionary in a quiet and non-violent way
thus not a revolutionary at all
working for the neglected underdogs of society”.
where? In Sussex? Australia? Vienna? Neglected underdogs are thick on the ground in India- not the places where Guha chose to reside.
He recounts in amusement how during Guha referring to the rumours of nepotism surrounding the former’s recruitment:
This is the correct use of 'former'. It seems it is only the word 'latter' which confuses our PhD candidate. Sen was too young to be Head of Department but Jadavpur had only recently been deemed a University. It needed 'pull' of a sort which Sen's dad had plenty of.
“I have constantly been hearing about your severe shortcomings and about the mistake made by the University in appointing you.
This was code for 'you, like me, are from East Bengal. The ghotis fucking hate us.'
So let’s get together straightaway – in fact let’s have dinner tonight”. The two would later develop a warm relationship, having frequent meetings in Guha’s small Panditiya Road flat in South Calcutta, which would also host other young intellectuals like Tapan Raychaudhuri
an East Bengali baidya, like Sen
and Dharma Kumar
Not then an academic.
In referring to Sen’s “shortcomings”, Guha might have been laughingly hinting at the prejudice against himself at that time.
Contempt, not prejudice, was the condign mot juste
Today, even as the right wing hold on our public academic institutions is becoming ever more potent,
there is little point tightening your hold on a turd
some still begrudgingly refer to the Progressive-Marxist influence on the humanities-social science academia in the preceding decades.
The Left's long march through the Institutions ended in irrelevance and imbecility.
The accusation is not without merit.
Which accusation? That Guha was as stupid as shit?
But we forget how a scholar with a tag of communist belief or work could have been persecuted in the in the early 1950s.
Had the Communists not meekly surrendered, they would have been slaughtered.
Guha’s experience in the Bengal Educational Service was not very different. After his return from Europe, he started teaching at Vidyasagar College, was soon transferred to Chandannagore College, and then, finally, to Central Calcutta College (Now Maulana Azad College).
The guy wrote polemical nonsense. Nobody would give him a PhD.
However, Guha’s transnational activism as a Communist worker was soon brought to the attention of the “competent authority”, and he was promptly suspended from the Bengal Education Service.
He had only got into it because of his connections. The guy did badly in his BA and thus wasn't in the 'Honors' class.
In 1958, he found a place at Jadavpur University under the mentorship of his former teacher Susobhan Sarkar (1900-1982).
Also from Dacca where Guha's dad was a High Court Judge.
For Guha, the loss of faith coincided with a period of being an intellectual fugitive.
Failure, more like.
This is why the meeting of Sen’s and Guha’s ideas at Jadavpur was so significant.
Nehru was steering the country Leftward. Sen needed to suck up to Commies without coming across as capable enough to be worth recruiting.
Sen noticed how Guha’s political conviction continued to influence his intellectual evolution even at that early and unstable stage of his career.
Guha was an opinionated bigot. But he'd failed as a Trade Union organizer or guy who could connect to the revolting masses. Thus he was useless to the Party. Anybody could write paranoid shite for magazines.
The spirit of the organiser was still alive in the intellectual.
But the organizer couldn't organize shit and had no fucking intellect.
The obituaries
penned by the brain dead
have poured in after Guha’s death. The most moving tribute came from Umar Khalid, historian and political activist who is still unjustly incarcerated at Tihar Jail.
Meanwhile, his pal Kanhaiya has joined Congress. Umar's problem is that his dad was a SIMI member.
In a brilliantly incisive piece, Khalid pointed out how Guha’s methodology of reading archival texts
which involved not reading them and just making up stupid shit.
would benefit historians for years to come.
Particularly if they were in jail and couldn't access any type of archive.
For Khalid, Guha’s excellence lay in jettisoning the frame of neutrality in interpreting state records of Subaltern resistance in Colonial India.
Why be neutral to shite you haven't read? Just say that it proves that you aren't telling stupid lies.
Guha understood, Khalid reminds us, that it is important to treat sources as “being contaminated by bias and even complicity”.
These cunts are nothing save such contamination.
The political awareness that underlay Guha’s method also expanded the idiom of what can be considered political in historical texts.
Stuff that isn't in historical texts can be considered political by those who believe there is a conspiracy of silence to prevent the archives revealing that the sun actually shines out of their own arse.
Khalid writes, “In many ways, subaltern studies was as much the result of debates within academia as also of political movements and social churning over the previous two decades – student protests, peasant rebellions, environmentalist movements.”
Some Indians wanted to run away from India onto a nice safe Western Campus. This involved pretending to be 'Gramscian' or knowledgeable about Europe. Guha had a head start in that respect.
Indeed, one can look at the counterintuitive methodologies of the Subaltern Studies Group stemming from Guha’s experience as a political activist and organiser.
Fuck was he organizing in Sussex or Australia?
For Guha, more than two decades of academic exile,
An exile is a guy who can't return home. Guha simply didn't like India. He didn't want to return there. Vienna isn't exactly a suburb of Calcutta.
first in the United Kingdom and then in Australia, preceded the breakthrough of subaltern studies into the mainstream historical discourse. Y
i.e. a few of these nutters got tenure abroad. Big whoop.
et, Guha’s late fame as the wise mentor to a group of brilliant scholars
who wrote turgid nonsense
still somehow obscured his own, still strong, political convictions.
His strongest conviction was that it is better to live in Vienna than Bengal. He was stupid, not crazy.
What was the milieu of his early political work?
Some campus where he might be eligible for academic affirmative action.
How did it continue to shape his thinking in his scholarly incarnations, as seen in his public writings, and correspondences with political activists?
He was pretending to be a Lefty to make a little money. As a brown monkey he deserved affirmative action coz Whitey used to beat him and make him pick cotton on Southern plantations where the trees bear strange fruit.
The answer to these questions reveals the centrality of political commitment in Guha’s historical and literary work.
His shite could only attract a little attention if he was assumed to be a brown monkey from a part of the world where the Communists could win elections.
Beyond the ambit of mainstream electoral politics,
or any meaningful sort of politics
the excitable yet alienating,
i.e. crazy and in need of an alienist- as psychiatrists used to be called
collectivist yet constantly realigning
Collectivism like Individualism realigns itself as circumstances change
conditions of Indian political activism
which occurs in India, not Australia or Sussex or Vienna
continued to shape Guha’s life way beyond his early days as a Communist worker.
He was shit at that 'work'. That's why the Party let him go.
Was Guha also shit at speaking Bengali? Perhaps. Consider the following-
Political scientist and historian Partha Chatterjee points out how Guha in his adolescence “began to notice that the parents of some of his playmates would come to the house to work, would refer to his elders of munib (master),
Munib means 'repentant'. It is derived from Arabic. It does not mean 'master'.
never sit down in their presence, would touch the feet of even the youngest ‘master’, and stand in silence when scolded.
But they would kill and rape and loot those Hindu landlords when they got the opportunity. That's why Guhas ran the fuck away from East Bengal.
Was this how he and his young friends were destined to behave towards one another when they grew up? A question began to take shape in his mind”.
Tagore was smart enough to see that the Hindus would have their throats slit in Muslim majority areas. After 1937- when Guha was 14- this had become fucking obvious to everybody. The only question which remained was whether the Bengali bhadralok would also have to flee West Bengal. Guha showed shrewdness by emigrating in 1959.
Right when this awareness of his class and social status was taking hold in Guha,
Guha was a late developer. Rich kids know they are rich by the time they are 5- more especially in Bengal where the poor are visibly malnourished.
he was sent to Calcutta to complete his high school education at Mitra Institution. He joined Presidency College in 1938. One may assume that it is in Presidency that Guha’s political thinking took the sharpest turn, but his the contribution of his high school was not negligible either.
In high school he discovered that he was male not female. Sadly, at College, he became confused and decided he was from Austria not India.
In what is probably his last long interview in 2018 with Partha Chatterjee (later published in the Autumn 2019 issue of the Bengali journal Anushtup) Guha amusingly recounted his interactions with a group of Trotskyites led by much more senior Saumyendranath Tagore (1901-1974). Tagore, who was the first Bengali translator of the Communist Manifesto, founded the Communist League as a breakaway faction of the then CPI. Later, the party would be known as the Revolutionary Communist Party of India (RCPI), gradually inclining towards parliamentary participation.
Sadly this didn't stop their members getting slaughtered if they tried to kill people. Come to think of it, the Shiv Sena murdered an MLA of theirs.
Many student Communist League members were Guha’s classmates, despite being much older (they considered the idea of the exam-based class promotion “bourgeois”).
They were as thick as shit.
Guha referred to one of the young admirers of Tagore and Trotsky, Bishwanath “Bishu” Ghosh of Mechuabazar Street, as the person who first explained to him the concept of materialism. As Guha explains, Bishu Ghosh had a clear-cut metaphor for the material base of history: “As cars have engines, we humans also have engines inside us, so I am a materialist.”
In the Bhagvad Gita, Lord Krishna says all living beings are mounted on a machine- bhrāmayan sarva-bhūtāni yantrārūḍhāni māyayā
Yet, it was in the profoundly vital and intellectually stimulating atmosphere of the Presidency College that Guha became an intensely political thinker.
Those cretins hadn't learned the lesson of Partition. Bhadralok Bengalis were as weak as fuck. If they tried to kill people to gain power, they would be slaughtered.
This awakening came at the cost of relegating his academic work to the background. Despite not taking his studies too seriously, Guha considered the legendary Susobhan Sarkar (1900-1982) his guru,
Sarkar had studied in England but didn't understand its constitutional history. This is because it doesn't have a constitution except in the same sense that everything does.
and dedicated his first book to him. One of the many wonderful things about Sarkar, as attested by Guha and his contemporaries like Tapan Raychaudhuri, was that despite being a staunch Marxist himself, Sarkar kept his teaching free from any kind of ideological orthodoxy or dogma.
Which is why he was tolerated, indeed, promoted.
Communist politics consumed Guha’s years in college, and, later university. During that time he came in close contact with PC Joshi (1907-1980), the General Secretary of the CPI. Among his contemporaries, there was Santosh Bhattacharya (1924-2010) – later a staunch anti-communist who chronicled his harrowing experiences with West Bengal’s Left Front administration as Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University in the 1980s. Economist Amlan Datta (1924-2010) was part of Guha’s circle too, though he was much more inclined to Gandhian ideas.
Bengalis can't come up with ideas of their own. Even Gujarat can supply them with that commodity.
Staying in a commune-like domestic arrangement in North Calcutta, Guha was incredibly active as a party worker, organising relief in the city during the devastating famine of 1943 and the riots of 1946.
Pretending to do so.
At the same time, he continued to write (exclusively in Bengali) for the Communist Party organ Swadhinata (which was established as a weekly in 1942, and became a daily in 1945).
Bengali lends itself to 'uchvaas' bombast and bigotry.
During his work for the party organ, Guha was mentored by veteran Communist leaders like Nripen Chakraborty (1905-2004), who later became the Chief Minister of Tripura, and the redoubtable Pramode Dasgupta (1910-1982).
But these guys realized Guha was useless. He had no future in Indian politics because he was a crap organizer and wrote bombastic nonsense.
The transnational phase
The next, and transnational, phase of Guha’s political career came in the fateful year of 1947, when Guha was selected as the Indian representative to join the Secretariat of the international anti-imperialist youth organisation World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) in Paris.
He was useless. Stalin & Co. had once thought MN Roy showed promise. They were wrong. Indian Communists were utterly useless.
The founder Secretary of WFDY was young Alexander Shelepin (1918-1994), who later became the Chairman of KGB.
This is why people thought Guha might be a sleeper agent of some exalted sort.
Another key member was Enrico Berlinguer (1922-1984), who later become one of the most beloved Communist leaders of Italy.
That really isn't saying much. It's like 'cuddliest member of the Gestapo'.
The Bolshevik and Italian influence was profound in WFDY, but Guha’s sojourn in Paris also opened his eyes to post-war left politics in France as well. Contrary to the stereotype of being an upper-class and upper-caste “Bilet ferot” (someone who has been to the UK to study and/or work) Bengali, Guha found London to be parochial and conservative during one of his visits.
France didn't want to give up its colonies in India and elsewhere. Naturally, Guha preferred it.
In contrast, Paris was exciting and enriching: a continent of entangled ideas was opening up to him.
Stupid ideas.
He travelled extensively throughout these six years, including in Hungary, Poland (where he got married for the first time), the Soviet Union, China, and even the Middle East.
Had he even a modicum of literary talent, he could have written something interesting about this period of his life. But Guha was blind and deaf to anything that wasn't stupid boring shite.
However, when Guha returned to India with the prospect of an uncertain career, Khruschevian revisionism of the Communist ideals was already bothering him at a deeper political level.
Indian communists were shit at fighting. Also, the world was waking up to the fact that, without the Brits, India would starve. It wouldn't be able to defend itself. The Soviets didn't want to take over a basket case. Nobody did.
The Soviet Invasion of Hungary in 1956 was not necessarily the last straw
these guys had been cool with the Soviet invasion of Finland
(he was still actively involved in local and provincial organisations of the Communist Party in West Bengal), but it prompted a gradual retreat. Guha left his part-time job for Swadhinata, though his early scholarly writings would continue in left-leaning contemporary journals like Parichay.
Cretins writing for cretins.
Guha’s experience and gradual disillusionment with the Stalinist turn in world communism also became a seeding ground for Guha’s first book The Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (1963),
By which time he was 40. The 'idea of permanent settlement' is simply the notion that people will pay taxes on property if that property is heritable and can't be legitimately alienated save by due process of law. Otherwise, people only pay what can be extorted from them. Being a 'stationary bandit' involves providing the rule of Law. The alternative is to be a pillager constantly on the move. Communists like Guha may not get this idea. They think it is unnatural. The only reason Cornwallis had such an idea is because some French Physiocrat had brainwashed him.
A conqueror may not want to give property rights in land to his satraps and they in turn may want their lieutenants not to put down roots in the district. But these guys also spend a lot of time killing each other. Eventually, the smart ones get religion and retire to a monastery or khanqah.
Guha’s first major published work. The book is not just merely a historical investigation of the political economy of Bengal shaped by the agreement of “Permanent Settlement” instituted in 1793. Rather, it goes on to incisively study how the idea of the physiocratic development, taking its cues from European Enlightenment philosophy, gets deformed and destabilised in the colonial spheres of knowledge production.
This is nonsense. After the big famine of 1770, it was obvious that the Brits had to take over 'nizamat'- i.e. civil administration because Indians were shit. Bengal then remained famine free till Bengalis took over the administration.
Since there weren't enough Brits to go around, the tax-farmer had to take over the 'nizamat's' administrative tasks. Also, it was obvious that Indians overbid at auctions and also embezzled money and ran away. That's why the rent was fixed in perpetuity. One reason AO Hume set up the INC was so as to get rid of the Permanent Settlement and raise taxes to pay for public goods.
Guha’s reading is radical for two reasons. First, this deformation, which Guha calls an “epistemological paradox”, unravelled the original idea of creating an improvement and investment-oriented bunch of capitalist farmers, and ended up creating a group of indolent and sectarian “middlemen” landlords.
Like in Ireland. So what? Cornwallis & Co made lots of money and got to spend it back home in dear old Engyland. There is no 'epistemological paradox' involved in making money for very little effort.
Secondly, and much more broadly, he also questioned how the colonial violence implicit in the process of the settlement was not necessarily a deviance from the ideals of Enlightenment philosophy,
Enlightenment philosophers like Hume, Smith, Kant etc. thought that Indians and Africans and so forth should be enslaved and treated like shit. Romanticism may have had different ideas.
but an instance where “a typically bourgeois form of knowledge was bent backwards to adjust itself to the relations of power in a semi-feudal society”.
Bourgeois knowledge was about fucking over proles and peasants while trying to curtail the power of the Clergy and the Aristocracy.
In the 1981 preface to the second edition of the book, Guha wrote: “Capitalism which had built up its hegemony in Europe by
making money. Money is what pays for kick-ass armies. Armies is what create political hegemony. Gramsci had shit for brains. It is not the case that 'hegemony' prevents Commies taking power. It is the fact that killing Commies can be both profitable and a great source of entertainment.
using the sharp end of Reason found it convenient to subjugate the peoples of the East by wielding the blunt head.
No. The 'people of the East' just wanted a bit of money paid to them regularly to fight for whoever was supplying that money. If this involved beating or killing their own people- so much the better.
This helped the indigenous elite
i.e. guys who got rich by working for anybody who would pay them.
as well to perpetuate their own authority in collaboration with colonialism and independently after decolonisation. As the Indian experience shows, the formal termination of colonial ruin, taken by itself, does little to end the government of colonialist knowledge.”
Marxist shite emanated from London- the Capital of Capitalist Imperialism. Nutters like Guha were in thrall to Nineteenth Century nonsense of a deeply racist type. The fact is, non-bhadralok, non-buddhijivi Bengalis were just as smart as Europeans.
Through this reading, Guha was also building up his critique of Nationalist and Marxist schools of Indian history (no wonder Indian Marxists weren’t thrilled with the argument of the book), questioning its allegiance to statist and elitist spheres of knowledge production in their archival approach.
What knowledge did Guha produce? None at all. He wrote stilted shite which sought to convey the impression that he knew a lot about European thought. But Europeans had turned their backs on that type of stupidity.
The Naxalite movement
In 1959 Guha left for Manchester on a fellowship, and for the next two decades he would be teaching mostly in the University of Sussex. Guha’s political thinking took another sharp turn in the early 1970s when he came to India to conduct research on Gandhian Socialism.
Which everybody knew to be utter shit.
However, his interest soon turned to the Naxalite movement.
Which everybody knew to be utter shit.
For Guha, the question of the Naxalite movement and the agrarian base of the Indian Republic was inseparable.
Because he was as stupid as shit. Once the Naxals started killing Judges and policemen, their fate was sealed. They were welcome to go off to some remote jungle and terrorize tribals.
In his 2018 interview with Chatterjee, he mentions how he saw the violent aspects of the Naxalite movement as a statement of revolt against “middle-class communism” entrenched in the leftist accommodation of parliamentary politics.
Then 'middle-class communists' got the police to kill the Naxals. Jyoti Basu was a barrister.
For Guha, the question of peasant revolts addresses the fundamentally undemocratic and violent bases of the postcolonial republic.
There were no peasant revolts. Peasant leaders took power through the ballot box.
Guha found the platform to critique these elements in Samar Sen’s (1916-1987) weekly, Frontier. Along with the Bengali journal Ekkhan, co-edited by Guha’s close friend Nirmalya Acharya (1935-1994), Frontier probably played the most crucial role in giving Guha’s thoughts a public-facing voice in the 1970s. On the pages of Frontier, Guha’s prose was not only deliberately polemical but also insurgent. In his long essay “Torture and Culture”, first published in January 1971 in Frontier, he describes the brutal methods of police torture as a cultural weapon of “ultimate persuasion” by state regimes, as their “official violence starts meeting with revolutionary violence.”
Official violence gets you a pension. Revolutionaries too want pensions as they begin to age. Still, if must be said, many Bengali NRIs do want to see their homeland become yet shittier.
Guha sees the emergence of torture as a cultural lesson because the higher educational institutions themselves have become obsolete and socially irrelevant for today’s youth, as their “refusing to have their minds bent and the old culture forced down their throat.” As a result, the space and mode of the “lesson” are transferred, as the “Central Reserve Police takes over Jadavpur University”. In essays like this, or “Two Campaigns”, or “Knowing India by its Prisons”, all published in Frontier, we see a distinctly evolving political voice emerge.
It was careful to emerge from Australia or Europe.
It was also a time for Guha to keep making new intellectual companionship.
Which was cool provided he didn't have to return to India to do it.
Distinguished writer and historian Sumanta Banerjee, who himself was underground with his political activities for much of the 1970s, recalls his enriching correspondence with Guha. When Banerjee was working in Delhi as a journalist with The Statesman in New Delhi in 1970-71, Guha came to visit and they had long discussions on the Naxalite movement and international politics. In an open letter to Guha for Frontier published late last year, Banerjee fondly remembers the discussion, writing: “You disagreed with me on my views about the activities of the Chinese Red Guards, whom I had criticised (in an article in Frontier) for their depredations during the Cultural Revolution. You were in favour of them. But both shared our common admiration of the peasant warriors and the student activists of the Naxalite movement.”
Both were as stupid as shit.
I wanted to end on this note of spirited companionship not bound by hierarchical logics of kinship, especially since I never personally knew Guha. Guha’s leading argument for Subaltern Studies, addressing the crisis of doing history, burst through the Indian and then the international historical scene in the early 1980s. Since then, he developed a range of devoted mentees and followers in India and abroad. Many of their tributes are understandably personal. Written from the position of addressing loving male elders in the Bengali family they often reveal the exclusivist and insulated networks of elitism
billionaires are the elite- not professors of worthless shite
in Bengali culture, and by extension, its academia. But to truly understand Guha’s global yet deeply rooted soul, it is important to understand the unstructured and non-hierarchical sense of kinships he developed, grounded in political commitment.
No. To truly understand Guha you need
a) to have escaped India
b) to be as stupid as shit but not want other people to know this fact about you.
He was an extraordinary thinker, historian, and prose stylist.
He was stupid and ignorant. Still, he was highly bigoted. In Bengali that makes you a buddhijivi.
But he was also a dedicated and idealistic political worker.
He was utterly useless.
He worked in academia always remembering this personal history.
He knew he was useless but pretended otherwise. When he was younger, some may have thought he was a KGB sleeper agent or a pal of Jyoti Basu or something of that sort. By the time he got old, everybody understood that pretending to be a Lefty was just a ploy to get a Green Card and tenure on some shitty campus teaching cretins.
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