A Subaltern studies reader, 1986-1995

The Subaltern Studies Collective, founded in 1982, was begun with the goal of developing a new critique of both colonialist and nationalist perspectives in the historiography of colonized countries. Its most famous members{u2014}Gayatri Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, and others{u2014}were instrumental in establishing the discipline best known as postcolonial studies. A selection of the definitive and most influential work from the collective{u2019}s eponymous journal, these essays chart the course of subaltern history from an early concentration on peasant revolts and popular insurgency to an engagement with the more complex processes of domination and subordination in a variety of the changing institutions and practices of evolving modernity.

Focusing on India, the authors examine institutions such as colonial law and colonial prisons, popular notions of kinship and disease, the position of women in colonial society, popular memories of anticolonial and sectarian violence, and the problems of postcolonial historiography. In his introduction, Ranajit Guha gives a valuable account of subaltern history{u2019}s genealogy and legacies, its purpose and accomplishments, the developments that have broadened its empirical and theoretical bases, and its importance to the scholarly community in general.

Includes index.

In defense of the fragment: writing about Hindu-Muslim riots in India today / Gyanendra Pandey -- Chandra's death / Ranajit Guha -- The mentality of subalternity: Kantanama or Rajdharma / Gautam Bhadra -- Origins and transformations of the Devi / David Hardiman -- The colonial prison: power, knowledge, and penology in nineteenth-century India / David Arnold -- Remembering Chauri Chaura: notes from historical fieldwork / Shahid Amin -- The nation and its women / Partha Chatterjee -- Postcoloniality and the artifice of history: who speaks for "Indian" pasts? / Dipesh Chakrabarty.