Subaltern Studies VIII consists of essays in honour of Ranajit Guha, the founding father of Subaltern Studies, by five members of the original editorial group. The essays take up themes from Guha’s own work, linking subaltern experience and mentality with colonial knowledge / power and the cultural and political processes of Indian elites. The volume opens with Partha Chatterjee’s examination of history writing in Bengal, how the concept of a ‘national’ history of the Hindus was constructed during the nineteenth century as part of an ambivalent interaction with colonial knowledge. Dipesh Chakrabarty deals with ‘modernity’ as represented in Bengali bhadralok writings about domesticity and the ideal of the Bengali housewife. David Hardiman examines how, through changing patterns of western India, became a subaltern community. David Arnold studies the colonial prison in nineteenth-century India and gives a critical reading of Foucault’s Disciplline and Punish. In a further echo of Ranajit Guha’s work, Gyanendra Pandey investigates historical representations of Partition in 1947. The volume includes a complete bibliography of Ranajit Guha’s published work and a memoir on his work and career by Shahid Amin.
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