90th Birthday
Tribute to Ranajit Guha
Chris Gregory
Chris Gregory is Reader in
Anthropology at the Australian National University
I was postdoctoral student in anthropology in Cambridge when Ranajit
and his team launched their critique of elitist historiography in 1982. Ranajit
was based in Canberra. When I returned to Australia in 1984 to take up a junior
lecturing position in Anthropology at ANU I was looking forward to making his
acquaintance because, among other things, my area of interest had switched from
Melanesia to India. I knew little
of Indian history and I figured it was wise to swat up on his writings before I
made his acquaintance; after all, his reputation in Cambridge was formidable.
I
began with Elementary Aspects of Peasant
Insurgency (EAPI), a book that bowled me over in much the same way that
reading Marx’s Capital and
Lévi-Strauss Elementary Structures of
Kinship (ESK) had. Like Capital and ESK, not only did the richness of the concrete empirical detail
presented in EAPI reveal aspects of
the human condition hitherto hidden, I was struck by the skills of the artist
who created the work. EAPI, like Capital and ESK, is a work of great rhetorical beauty. If Marx is a sculptor and Levi-Strauss
a musical composer – Mythologiques is
consciously modelled on musical forms – then Ranajit is a painter. Look at the Epilogue to EAPI where the ‘common form’ and
‘general ideas’ of insurgency are likened to the ‘hues’ of a ‘visual pattern’
whose elements are in ‘agreement’ but which also ‘clash and contrast’. EAPI
is quite literally the work of an artist.
But
what struck me most forcibly about EAPI,
and the essays that followed soon after, is that Ranajit is as much an
anthropologist as an historian for his work contains a radical critique of anthropology
in general and Levi-Strauss’s theories of myth and kinship in particular. The first sentence of his article on
the myth of Rahu boldly declares that ‘Religion is the oldest of archives on
our subcontinent’. This leads him
to reformulate Lévi-Strauss’s proposition that ‘the purpose of myth is to
provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction’ concretely and
historically as ‘many a myth can be identified as ... a figure of some ancient
and unresolved antagonism’. When it comes to kinship Lévi-Strauss’s abstract
study of elementary structures becomes the concrete analysis of the pragmatics
of elementary forms. For example
his analysis of Chandra’s death gives new meaning to the notion a ‘joking’
relationship. Chandra as salhaj (WBW)
had a joking relationship with her nandai
(HZH) that went too far; he got her pregnant and made her pay for the
breach of morality of which he was equally guilty.
Ranajit’s
work also contains a fundamental critique of the anthropologist’s comparative
method. The ahistorical nature of
this method has long been critiqued but whereas the turn to history has seen
many anthropologists forsake the field for the archive to become narrative
historians, the paradox of Ranajit’s method is that he forsakes narrative
history for the comparative method but one that is historically-informed. Ranajit, in true Malinowskian
style, is concerned with the ‘native point of view’ on insurgency and he found
that many words from different languages and different places in India
expressed that idea: bidroha, dhing,
fituri, hool, ulgulan. His historically-informed comparative method
revealed the ‘common form’ and ‘general idea’ behind these regionally-specific
terms.
My
understanding of Ranajit’s work was half-baked in the mid-1980s when I wrote to
him to arrange a meeting. I remember well our first meeting. I found him to have an avuncular
tolerance for the raw naiveté of juniors but little time for cooked dogmatism
of his age-mates upon whom he would have no hesitation to pounce if provoked.
Our meeting was the first of many memorable meetings over the next fourteen
years. We developed the habit of
long lunches on Friday afternoons, usually at his favourite Tandoori restaurant
where Prem, the owner, would spoil Ranajit, treating him, Indian-style, as a
very special honoured guest.
Ranajit loves to think aloud and has an extra-ordinary capacity to do so
in well-formed sentences. He had in
me a raw young scholar who was not only prepared to listen but felt incredibly
privileged to be able to do so. I
do not know how it happened but after some years it only seemed right to both
of us that a tape recorder be present at these sessions. (I
am now in the process of digitizing and transcribing these. When finished they will, as per
Ranajit’s wishes, be deposited with his other papers in the Austrian Academy of
Science in Vienna.) Our
conversations ranged over many topics: Gramsci, Marx, Heidegger, Levi-Strauss;
Rahu, Pather Panchali; fate, death, god, language; caste, class, power. I never had any prepared
questions. Indeed, I rarely asked
a question. The mere mention of
the name of a person, place or idea would begin a train of thought that might
go on for an hour or so.
I was
privileged, too, to be a frequent visitor to his home where I learned more
about his love of painting and anthropology, and where I met Mechthild, herself
a PhD in anthropology. The walls
of his house contained some of his abstract paintings, the product of a period
of his life when ‘he learned to see’, as he put it, and put down his pen and
picked up a brush. His interest in
anthropology was not just with the history of ideas but also with the
ethnographic nitty gritty. He is
keen student of Malinowski’s Coral
Gardens and their Magic and is the only anthropological colleague of mine I
know who is able to discourse for hours on how a Trobriand Islander uses a
digging stick.
Ranajit, it was
a sad day for me in 1999 when I took you and Mechthild to the Canberra
airport, but it makes me very
happy to see you reach 90 and to start writing and publishing in your beloved
Bengali language. I remember well
when you told me ‘I can’t explain the urge to want to write in Bengali’.
90th Birthday
Tribute to Ranajit Guha
Ustad Ranajit Guha
Shahid Amin
Shahid Amin is Professor, Department of
History,
University of Delhi
University of Delhi
I first met Ranajit Guha in Delhi in1970. I
was an undergraduate reading
History; on leave from the
University of Sussex, Ranajitda
was at Delhi School of Economics to research a book on Gandhi. I did not know
about A Rule of Property for Bengal
then. Dubbed a difficult text concerned with arcane matters, it was not much
talked about by our teachers. What really pulled us radical students to Ranajit
Guha was his iconoclastic Marxism. We
often gathered at his flat in
Riveria Apartments on Mall Road and subsequently at 24 Cavalry Lines, where we would parse an important article from Samar
Sen’s Frontier, the fearless
weekly published from Calcutta.
‘On Culture and Torture’, Frontier,
January 1971, was my first encounter with Ranajitda’s astringent prose.
As a Ph.D. student in England I met Ranajit Guha
frequently. Two conversations from the mid-1970s are still fresh in my mind. I was waxing expansively one
evening about my proposed thesis
on peasant economy and peasant
politics in colonial North India. Ranajitda waited for the clatter of the
Brighton-Lewis train that passed by his house on Egginton Road to die down. ‘But
aren’t you ignoring the ornaments worn
by the women of the region?’ he responded with mock seriousness. ‘Why do
you want to do a flabby thesis? Why not focus on one
important crop, and see where it takes you?’ Collecting a large amount of material at the India Office
Library and the provincial and district repositories was difficult enough;
writing a connected narrative seemed like an impossible task. Thesis-writer’s
cramp had set in. Ten pence coins on
the ready, I dialled Ranajit Guha
from a telephone booth. ‘Ranajitda, I have been trying very hard but I
just can’t write.’ ‘That’s good, it means you have something to say’, were
Ranajit Guha’s reassuring words.
I
converted the thesis into a book
manuscript and sent it to Ranajitda for his comments. Here are excerpts from a
three-page letter that I received
in the spring of 1981:
I
do think it is necessary to introduce in our work concepts … which can add rigour to the writing of history. In
fact I am sick of the cult of comfortable prose, the one that flows like
sugarcane juice, and makes up Indian historiography the feeding bottle on which
to suck infantile academic minds and put them gently to sleep … No, I am not
asking you to indulge in comfortable prose … We do need conceptual rigour … But
however rigorous the thinking, hence the writing, it can hardly dispense with
the need for lucidity.
In guru-shishya
tradition I pass on the same advice to my Ph.D. students at Delhi University.
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