Ranajit Guha is 90 years old on 23 May 2013. We give below the first of several short birthday tributes to him.
90th
BIRTHDAY TRIBUTES TO RANAJIT GUHA
Richard
Price
Richard Price
is Ranajit Guha’s first PhD student. He is at the University of
Maryland, College Park, USA.
I
first encountered Ranajit Guha as a second year undergraduate at the University
of Sussex in 1964. I had always
been interested in the history of the British Empire, and when he offered a
class on “European Imperialism from 1870” I enrolled. He became my mentor; he served as my D.Phil. advisor, even though my topic
(British working class attitudes towards imperialism in the late nineteenth
century) was far from his main area of interest in Indian History.
From
the very start Ranajit held a charismatic attraction for me. Part of this, it must be admitted, lay
in the exotic aura that he projected.
He was the first person I had ever encountered who had been part of the
struggle for colonial freedom; he had been jailed by the British; and for many
years he was active in the Young Communists of India. More than this dramatic personal history, however, was the
scholarly intellect that he modeled.
There were five key qualities that Ranajit Guha the historian embodied
that were formative for my own thinking and for the way I try to practice
history.
The
first was how he treated history as something that could be thought about
conceptually, as a process, and not as just a narrative
progression. His undergraduate
course on European Imperialism,
for example, was not the usual course that began with the age of
explorations. It began instead
with the theorists of empire and then went on to study the British,
French and German cases within that context. Ranajit was the first person to teach me that the problems
of history could be conceptual, rather than being a problem of events,
Second,
was the suppleness and rigor of his intellect. Ranajit demonstrated how
theoretical conceptualization and rigorous archival investigation were not
separate activities, but necessarily intertwined. His own historical writings have provided elegant examples
of that lesson. A Rule of
Property for Bengal is thus both an intellectual history and a study in the
history of political economy. And
the rich social history of Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in
Colonial India provides the foundations for a typology of subaltern
rebellion.
Third,
there was a spare asceticism to Ranajit’s intellectual being. I remember how he told me that he had
spent one cold English Christmas shut away in his apartment grappling with
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. I was not surprised. Ranajit was perhaps the first person I
met who privileged the world of the mind over virtually everything else; who
demonstrated that being an historian was in itself a full-time profession.
Fourth,
and related to this, was an independence of mind and position that
Ranajit projected. He conveyed the
importance of following one’s own star and standing as much apart as was
possible from the seductions of professional pressures and fashions. Ranajit is one of the few people I know
whose stature in the world of professional history has been attained entirely
on his own terms. He has followed
his own path throughout his life.
And
finally the single most lasting lesson I took from Ranajit was both small and
large. It was the importance of
clarity and precision in writing.
The first essay I submitted to him was returned covered with red ink
corrections of grammar, syntax and style.
I had never experienced such criticism before, and it was a salutary
lesson in the significance of writing for thinking. Until very recently, whenever I picked up a pen
the memory of that experience come flooding back. It was as if Ranajit was there to remind me that the
business of writing history was no light or frivolous matter, but was a serious
duty and responsibility.
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