“I broadly subscribe to the views of Divakar and Mandal. Sanjay Basu Mullick, director of Jharkhand Jungle Bachao Aandolan, agreed. I may be criticised by many but this is my gut feeling about Guha,” N Paul Divakar, convenor of The Global Forum of Communities discriminated on Work and Descent, said. Maybe the baggage of class studies was still a barrier that obstructed these perspectives to take hold.

(But) one underside I cannot fathom is how he missed the identity question and perspectives from Dalit or Adivasi communities. They were in agreement about the thrust of his argument. “As a result, historical accounts produced by the group may not include figures such as Phule, Savitri, Sahu, Ambedkar, Mangu Ram, Acchutananda, Ayannakali, Narayana Guru, Jogendra Nath Mandal, Justice Party, Periyar, and others, as these historians were mostly based in the Western academia and excluded all historians born in subaltern communities,” Mandal said.ĭown To Earth spoke to other domain experts about Mandal’s tweet. “It is worth noting that the Subaltern Studies gate-kept the field, shutting the doors for SC/ST/OBC academicians who wished to contribute to subaltern studies in universities in the Western world,” Mandal continued. In a tweet on April 29, he noted that Guha spearheaded a tradition of doing subaltern studies in South Asia, without considering caste and anti-caste struggles.

However, a section of experts Down To Earth (DTE) spoke to is of the opinion that Guha and other writers who wrote such historiography neglected the elephant in the room: Caste.Īuthor and journalist Dilip Mandal set the ball rolling. Guha is credited with starting the school of ‘Subaltern studies’ about the stories of groups who have historically been at the lowest rungs of society. It is over a week since renowned historian Ranajit Guha passed away in Vienna on April 28, 2023, just a month before turning 100.

Guha india after gandhi