[ad_1]
KOLKATA: Historian Ranajit Guha’s death at his Austria home on Saturday, a month before his 100th birthday, has left the academic community in India and across the world remembering the icon’s enormous influence in shaping post-colonial history in south Asia.
Guha’s influence was not limited to any school of history but revolutionised diverse streams of social sciences, with his approach to highlighting the lives of the marginalised.
As one of the founders of Subaltern Studies School, Guha and his colleagues looked at the cross-sections of caste, class, and gender-based subordination, the voices of which were under-represented by mainstream elitist history writers before his time.
Political scientist and member of the Subaltern Studies Group, Partha Chatterjee, recalled the last time he met Guha at his Vienna home for an interview in 2018. “Towards the end of his life, he increasingly withdrew from academics and did not like to do interviews. It was very unusual that he agreed to an interview at that time. While his speech was slower and he was forgetting recent incidents, it was remarkable how accurately he recalled anecdotes from 50 to 70 years ago,” Chatterjee says.
Born in Backerganj, East Bengal, on May 23, 1923, and having studied history at the University of Sussex from 1959, Guha’s work was exported across borders and applied to discussions of historically oppressed communities globally. Guha is perhaps most fondly remembered by students and faculty of his alma mater, Presidency University. To commemorate Guha’s centenary year, Presidency University organized a two-day symposium in December.
Guha’s influence was not limited to any school of history but revolutionised diverse streams of social sciences, with his approach to highlighting the lives of the marginalised.
As one of the founders of Subaltern Studies School, Guha and his colleagues looked at the cross-sections of caste, class, and gender-based subordination, the voices of which were under-represented by mainstream elitist history writers before his time.
Political scientist and member of the Subaltern Studies Group, Partha Chatterjee, recalled the last time he met Guha at his Vienna home for an interview in 2018. “Towards the end of his life, he increasingly withdrew from academics and did not like to do interviews. It was very unusual that he agreed to an interview at that time. While his speech was slower and he was forgetting recent incidents, it was remarkable how accurately he recalled anecdotes from 50 to 70 years ago,” Chatterjee says.
Born in Backerganj, East Bengal, on May 23, 1923, and having studied history at the University of Sussex from 1959, Guha’s work was exported across borders and applied to discussions of historically oppressed communities globally. Guha is perhaps most fondly remembered by students and faculty of his alma mater, Presidency University. To commemorate Guha’s centenary year, Presidency University organized a two-day symposium in December.
#Ranajit #Guha #historian #subaltern #passes #India #News
