Ranajit Guha


Ranajit Guha is a historian of the Indian Subcontinent who has been vastly 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 Purkersdorf, Austria on the edge of the Vienna Woods, with his German-born wife Mechthild Guha, née Jungwirth, herself a leading scholar of subaltern studies, who he met at the University of Sussex in the early 1960s, where Guha rose to prominence, and then moved to the Australian National University where both continued their work.
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’."

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