RANAJIT GUHA

The Small Voice of History

COLLECTED ESSAYS
Edited and with an Introduction by PARTHA CHATTERJEE

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Contents

Editors Acknowledgements Editors Introduction

PART I: RULES OF PROPERTY

ix 1
19

1 An Administrative Blueprint of 1785 2 Introduction to the Burdwan District Records 1788-1800 3 Report on an Investigation ofthe Gauripur Raj Estate Archives 4 Rent in Kind and Money Rent in Eastern India under Early British Rule 5 Graft, Greed, and Perfidy 6 The Agrarian History of Northern India
PART II: SUBALTERN HISTORIES

21 36 83 94 116 119
125

7 8 9

Neel Darpan The Image of a Peasant Revolt in a Liberal Mirror Five Villages

127 184 187 194 239 266

On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India 10 The Prose of Counter-Insurgency 11 The Career of an Anti-God in Heaven and on Earth 12 The Millenarian Space

vi 13 14 15 16 17

Contents 271 304 318 333 346 361

Chandra's Death The Small Voice of History Introduction to the Subaltern Studies Reader Writing the Past Where Generations Meet Subaltern Studies: Projects for Our Time and Their Convergence 18 Gramsci in India: Homage to a Teacher
PART III: T H E T W O HISTORIES OF EMPIRE

371

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

A Conquest Foretold The Advent of Punctuality A Colonial City and its Time(s) Sir William Jones Europe and the Exotic Not at Home in Empire Introducing an Anthropologist among the Historians The Authority of Vernacular Pasts A Construction of Humanism in Colonial India
PART IV: T H E PROMISE OF NATIONHOOD

373 391 409 435 438 441 455 474 479

493

28 29 30 31 32 33

The Mahatma and the Mob The Movement for National Freedom in India Nationalism Reduced to Official Nationalism' Nationalism and the Trials of Becoming Foreword to the 'Gita Coping with the Excess of History
PART V: DEMOCRACY BETRAYED

495 504 512 520 534 539

553

34 35

Teen-Age Wage Slavery in India On Torture and Culture

555 560

Contents 36 Indian Democracy: Long Dead, Now Buried 37 Knowing India by its Prisons 38 Calcutta Diary 39 Two Campaigns 40 On Naming a New Aspiration
PART VI: EXILE

vii

577 598 609 612 629

633
635 644 652 659

41 The Tartar's Cry 42 The Migrant's Time

43 The Turn
44 Translating between Cultures