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nationalist hagiography, but its elite-based analysis turned the common people into dupes of their superiors. Marxists contested both nationalist historiography and the " Cambridge School " interpretation, but their mode-of-production narratives merged imperceptibly with the nation-state ' s ideology of modernity and progress. This congruence meant that while championing the history of the oppressed classes and their emancipation through modern progress, the Marxists found it difficult to deal with the hold of " backward " ideologies of caste and religion. Unable to take into account the oppressed ' s " lived experience " of religion and social customs, Marxist accounts of peasant rebellions either overlooked the religious idiom of the rebels or viewed it as a mere form and a stage in the development of revolutionary consciousness. Thus, although Marxist historians produced impressive and pioneering studies, their claim to represent the history of the masses remained debatable.
Subaltern Studies plunged into this historiographical contest over the representation of the culture and politics of the people. Accusing colonialist, nationalist, and Marxist interpretations of robbing the common people of their agency, it announced a new approach to restore history to the subordinated. Started by an editorial collective consisting of six scholars of South Asia spread across Britain, India, and Australia, Subaltern Studies was inspired by Ranajit Guha. A distinguished historian whose most notable previous work was A Rule of Property for Bengal( 1963), Guha edited the first six Subaltern Studies volumes. 5 After he relinquished the editorship, Subaltern Studies was published by a rotating two-member editorial team drawn from the collective. Guha continues, however, to publish in Subaltern Studies, now under an expanded and reconstituted editorial collective.
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF SUBALTERN STUDIES was aimed to promote, as the preface by Guha to the first volume declared, the study and discussion of subalternist themes in South Asian studies. 6 The term " subaltern," drawn from Antonio Gramsci ' s writings, refers to subordination in terms of class, caste, gender, race, language, and culture and was used to signify the centrality of dominant / dominated relationships in history. Guha suggested that while Subaltern Studies would not ignore the dominant, because the subalterns are always subject to their activity, its aim was to " rectify the elitist bias characteristic of much research and academic work " in South Asian studies. 7 The act of rectification sprang from the conviction that the elites had exercised dominance, not hegemony, in Gramsci ' s sense, over the subalterns. A reflection of this belief was Guha ' s argument that
institutions. As the official institutions reached down to the locality and the province, the elites reached up to the central level to secure their local and regional dominance, finding nationalism a useful instrument for the articulation of their interests.
5 Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal( Paris, 1963). I should also mention his important
article, " Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt in a Liberal Mirror," Journal of Peasant Studies, 2( 1974): 1-46, which anticipates his fuller critique of elite historiography.
6 Ranajit Guha, Subaltern Studies I( Delhi, 1982), vii.
7 Guha, Subaltern Studies I, vii.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1994