Summary
Bengali political economist whose A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963) is one of the four texts of the Voyage in in Chapter Three, IV of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, and founder of Subaltern Studies (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.272 / printed p.245).
Details
- Guha’s book is an archaeological and deconstructive study of how the Act of Permanent Settlement for Bengal derived from Physiocratic and Ideological thought in Europe pressed into service in Bengal in the late eighteenth century by Philip Francis (PDF p.272 / printed p.245).
- Guha grew up in the shadow of the Permanent Settlement: his livelihood, like that of his family, was derived from remote estates they had never visited, and his education was orientated by the needs of a colonial bureaucracy recruiting its cadre from among the scions of Lord Cornwallis’s beneficiaries (PDF p.277 / printed p.250).
- By understanding that the ideology that produced Permanent Settlement derived historically from French and British sources, and that his own class heritage stemmed not from the land but from the structure of colonial power, Guha can detach himself intellectually; for Guha, history is critique (PDF p.278 / printed p.251).
- In the introductory essay to Subaltern Studies, launched under his aegis in 1982, Guha remarks that the “unhistorical historiography” of colonial India left out “the politics of the people” in favor of the nationalist elites created by the British (PDF p.278 / printed p.251).
- Guha’s theme is the way abstraction requires and appropriates not only people but geography: as imperialists the British felt their task in India was to solve “the problem of sovereignty in Bengal” in favor of the British crown (PDF p.281 / printed p.254).
- Guha emerges in the 1960s as an exile, profoundly at odds with Indian politics, controlled as they were by those whom Tariq Ali has called “the Nehrus and the Gandhis” (PDF p.285 / printed p.258).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, Voyage in, Syed Hussein Alatas, C. L. R. James, George Antonius