History at the Limit of World-History

by Ranajit Guha

The past is not just, as has been famously said, another country with foreign it is a contested and colonized terrain. Indigenous histories have been expropriated, eclipsed, sometimes even wholly eradicated, in the service of imperialist aims buttressed by a distinctly Western philosophy of history. Ranajit Guha, perhaps the most influential figure in postcolonial and subaltern studies at work today, offers a critique of such historiography by taking issue with the Hegelian concept of World-history. That concept, he contends, reduces the course of human history to the amoral record of states and empires, great men and clashing civilizations. It renders invisible the quotidian experience of ordinary people and casts off all that came before it into the nether-existence known as "Prehistory."On the Indian subcontinent, Guha believes, this Western way of looking at the past was so successfully insinuated by British colonization that few today can see clearly its ongoing and pernicious influence. He argues that to break out of this habit of mind and go beyond the Eurocentric and statist limit of World-history historians should learn from literature to make their narratives doubly to extend them in scope not only to make room for the pasts of the so-called peoples without history but to address the historicality of everyday life as well. Only then, as Guha demonstrates through an examination of Rabindranath Tagore's critique of historiography, can we recapture a more fully human past of "experience and wonder."

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Philosophy, World History, Sociology, Post Colonial

136 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Ranajit Guha was a historian of South Asia who was greatly influential in the Subaltern Studies group, and was the editor of several of the group's early anthologies. He migrated from India to the UK in 1959, and currently lives in Vienna, Austria.
His Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India is widely considered to be a classic. Aside from this, his founding statement in the first volume of Subaltern Studies set the agenda for the Subaltern Studies group, defining the "subaltern" as "the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the ‘elite’."

Reviews

[Gülüzar - Ertl · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Devlet, Tanrı’nın dünyadaki yürüyüşünden ibarettir.”(Hegel, Philosophy of Right) (Dünya-Tarihinin Sınırında Tarih, syf.59)

İnsanın, Tanrı'ya bile sitem ederken Devlet'i kutsamaya devam etmesini anlamaya çalıştığım günlerde, bu cümle ile karşılaşmam tesadüf olmasa gerek. Devletin tanrılaşması, tanrının vücuda gelmesi falan filan. Bir heyulanın içinde yuvarlanıp durduğumuz şu günlerde, “mülksüzleştirilenlerin mülksüzleştirme" hikayelerine ne çok ihtiyacımız var.

Her neyse, kitap tabii ki bunlardan bahsetmiyor ama benim aklım buralarda. Tarihyazımı bir sınıfın tekelinde olunca, tarih sahnesinde ezilenlerin aktör olması mümkün olmuyor. Koca koca imparatorlukların ve büyük adamların hikayesi geçiyor kayıtlara. Hikayeyi kim anlatıyorsa onun göstermek istedikleri görülüyor, onun mesajı duyuluyor. Mest olunsun diye anlatılan hikayelerde öznesi olduğumuz hayatın nesnesine dönüşüp üzerine bir de görünmez kılınıyoruz. Dünya-tarihi gibi geniş bir anlatı kurup, bazı halkların tarihsizliğe layık görülmesi ve bunun bu kadar kabullenilmiş olması hayret ettirmese de şaşırtıcı.

Sonuç olarak, okuyunuz :)

İyi okumalar.

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ranajit Guha's work is quite stunning – although a long way from easy going. In this short book (less than 100 pages), based on a series of lectures, he explores the terms and characteristics of the modern European notion of History as derived from work by Hegel by testing the limit of that history in colonial settings. If that sounds demanding – it is. Still, he clearly lays out the Hegelian notion of World-history as grounded in the (European) Renaissance notion of the nation-as-state and shows how this approach means that stateless peoples must live in a state of Prehistory because they have no state to write about. Guha's critique of this idea develops two strands. The first is an idea of creativity in writing and seeing – that there is a 'prose of the world' as he calls it that is about lived experience rather than states and nations. The second is that in colonial settings where there is dominance without hegemony (a recurring and powerful theme in Guha's work) this everyday history is grounded in civil society, not the state, and is therefore beyond the constraints of this state-based historiography. This summary makes it seem much more difficult than it is: Guha makes a clear, lucid and transparent case – these were lectures after all. The ideas are fantastically rich (as I find almost all of Guha's work). I'll keep on coming back to this time and time again.

[Greg Florez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great work of Indian philosophy, Hegelian scholarship and literary criticism. The sections on Indian philosophy are incredible and the commentary on Rabindranath Tagore and the inclusion on an essay of his were truly fantastic to read. The citation from the Upanisads is really beautiful;

“It is not for the sake of all, my dear, that all is loved, but for one’s own sake that it is loved. The self, my dear Maitreyī, should be realised - should be heard of, reflected on and mediated upon. By the realisation of the self, my dear, through hearing, reflection and mediation, all this is known.”

[Phạm N. · Rating 5 out of 5]

1st half = critique of Hegel! 2nd half = a rich opening up of other ways of remembering one's past/(re)telling stories... thoroughly enjoyed it!

[Vipul Vivek M-D · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Columbia University Press, the publisher of this set of lectures, lists the book under the following "subjects": "Asian Studies", "Asian Studies: South Asian History", "History", "History: South Asian History", "World History", "Philosophy", "Philosophy: Political Theory", "Political Science" and "Political Science: Political Theory". I guess the associations with philosophy are also supposed to classify it under philosophy of history or historiography; the categories related to political theory clearly make it an exercise in intellectual history. Therefore, I must presume that the publisher deems it fit to advertise the book also to those interested in history of ideas, intellectual history and philosophy of history. And I am confident from my reading of the book that the author/speaker would have also agreed with at least these 3 latter categorisations. Unfortunately, it delivers miserably in all the 3 categories. It might work much better as literary theory; surprisingly, the publisher does not list it under that even though it has a category called "Literary Theory and Criticism". At the moment I cannot attempt a more charitable review having spent a great part of the past year reading a lot of confused philosophy of history that wants to encourage the recovery of the phenomenal experience of past agents, despite the hard problem of consciousness. But I am not unsympathetic to such attempts---and fiction clearly has a great role to play in such recovery. Nor do I want to give the impression that there is nothing of value in this title: for instance, Guha raises a very good point in his criticism of Hegel's "philosophical history" that the latter fails to explain colonial states. Disappointingly, almost all of Guha's "critique" is by way of quotations and suggestiveness rather than by argument. Nevertheless, I would definitely recommend this book to someone interested in literary theory, especially Indian aesthetics.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

fun with hegel