KOLKATA: Historian Ranajit Guha’s death at his Austria house on Saturday, a month earlier than his one hundredth birthday, has left the tutorial group in India and the world over remembering the icon’s monumental affect in shaping post-colonial historical past in south Asia.
Guha’s affect was not restricted to any college of historical past however revolutionised numerous streams of social sciences, along with his strategy to highlighting the lives of the marginalised.
As one of many founders of Subaltern Studies School, Guha and his colleagues regarded on the cross-sections of caste, class, and gender-based subordination, the voices of which have been under-represented by mainstream elitist historical past writers earlier than his time.
Political scientist and member of the Subaltern Studies Group, Partha Chatterjee, recalled the final time he met Guha at his Vienna house 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 historical past on the University of Sussex from 1959, Guha’s work was exported throughout borders and utilized to discussions of traditionally oppressed communities globally. Guha is probably most fondly remembered by college students and school of his alma mater, Presidency University. To commemorate Guha’s centenary yr, Presidency University organized a two-day symposium in December.