Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty on the limits of History

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes [1] This is an expanded version of a review commissioned originally by Sporting Traditions and appears in the November 2004 edition of that journal. Permission to build on that review for this current version was supplied kindly by the editors of Sporting Traditions. [2] David Rowe and Antonio Gramsci, ‘Sport, Hegemony and the National-Popular’, in Richard Giulianotti (ed.), Sport And Modern Social Theorists (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). [3] Tim Parks, A Season With Verona: Travels Around Italy in Search of Illusion, National Character and Goals (London: Vintage, 2002). [4] This is obviously a truncated and generalized description of the line of thought inspired by Ranajit Guha. For the deeper view, see Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988); Ranajit Guha, A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Vinayak Chaturvedi (ed.), Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London: Verso, 2000); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays In The Wake Of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). There are many other sources for further illumination of the analysis. [5] For a recent summary, see Brian Stoddart, ‘Sport, Colonialism and Struggle: C.L.R. James And Cricket’, in Richard Giulianotti (ed.), Sport And Modern Social Theorists (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). [6] For some speculations here, see Brian Stoddart ‘Globalisation, Sport, Change and Meaning in the Contemporary World’, Tirra Lirra (forthcoming). [7] It might be pointed out here that for all the assertions about the swaying power of ‘the media’ (largely undefined), there has been little attention paid to some of the more sophisticated approaches to sports media analysis, best represented in David Rowe' excellent Sport, Culture and the Media (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999). [8] See Arjun Appadurai, ‘Playing With Modernity: Decolonization of Indian Cricket’, in his Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), and Manu Madan, ‘“It's Just Not Cricket”. World Series Cricket: Race, Nation and the Diasporic Indian Community’, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 24 (2000). [9] Gideon Haigh, The Vincibles: A Suburban Cricket Odyssey (Melbourne: Text, 2002). [1] Specialist Schools: An Evaluation of Progress (Office of the Chief Inspector of Schools, 2001), p.12. [2] See his Series Editor's Foreword to P. Dimeo and J. Mills (eds), Soccer in South Asia: Empire, Nation, Diaspora (London: Cass, 2001), pp.xii–xiii. [3] J.A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal, (London: Cass, 2000). [4] J.A. Mangan (ed.), The Cultural Bond: Sport, Empire, Society, (London: Cass, 1992), see pp.7–9. [1] N. Elias and E. Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p.5. [2] G. Mellor, ‘The Genesis of Manchester United as a National and International “Super-Club”, 1958–68’, Soccer and Society, 1, 2 (Summer 2000), 151–66.

A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995. Edited by Ranajit Guha. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. xxii, 302 pp. $57.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper). - Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Edited by Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. x 284 pp. $29.95 (cloth); $9.95 (paper).

Introduction - Elleke Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri Part 1 - Visual Cultures Introduction - Elleke Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri 1. Partha Chatterjee. `Nationalist Icon to Secular Image' 2. Tapati Guha Thakurta. `Religious Icon and Art: The Case of M.F. Hussain' 3. Robert Young, `Sanjayit Ray' 4. M. Madhava Prasad, `Fan Bhakti and Subaltern Sovereignty: Enthusiasm as a Political Factor' Part 2 - Translating Cultural Traditions Introduction - Elleke Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri 5. Aamir Mufti, `Auerbach in Istanbul' 6. Vinayak Chaturvedi, `Vinayak and Me' 7. Dipesh Chakrabarty, `Belatedness as Possibility: Subaltern Histories, once again' 8. Aniket Jaiware, `Of Demons and Angels' Part 3 - The Ethical Text Introduction - Elleke Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri 9. Gayatri Spivak, `Ethics and Politics in Tagore and Coetzee' 10. Udaya Kumar, `Self, Body and Inner Sense'. Studies in History' 11. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, `Gandhian Ethics' 12. Ashis Nandy, `Humiliation: The Politics and Cultural Psychology of the Limits of Human Degradation' Part 4 - Global/cosmopolitan worlds Introduction - Elleke Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri 13. Amit Chaudhuri, `The Alien Face of Cosmopolitanism' 14. Santanu Das, `India, Empire, and First World War writing' 15. Nivedita Menon, `Thinking through the Postnation' 16. Ranajit Guha, `A Colonial City and its Times'

Reviewed by: Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital by Vivek Chibber Nicola Robinson (bio) Vivek Chibber. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso, 2013. Pp. xii, 306. US $29.95. The call of the Subaltern Studies Project, formed by Ranajit Guha in 1982 and influenced by Marxist historical practice, to recover a “bottom up” historiography or “history from below” has had an important influence on postcolonial studies. In his Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, Vivek Chibber recognises that “[t]he truly innovative dimension of Subaltern Studies, then, was to marry popular history to the analysis of colonial and postcolonial capitalism” (6). Indeed, the focus on how individuals and groups “on the ground” rather than their political and social elites have experienced capitalism has moved beyond India and other parts of South Asia to the postcolonial world more broadly. Chibber opens with the assertion that “my central concern in this book is to examine the framework that postcolonial studies has generated for historical analysis and, in particular, the analysis of what was once called the Third World” (5; emphasis in original). Taken as a whole, the study argues that “Subalternist theorists do not answer the very question they raise—namely, how the entry of capitalism into the colonial world affected the evolution of its cultural and political institutions” (25). The first chapter sets out the main argument of Postcolonial, which is that the non-West should be conceptualised and understood through an application of the same analysis and evaluation that is used to understand the [End Page 258] West. (I use the terms “the West” and “the non-West” throughout this review because they are the ones Chibber himself uses.) Chibber asserts: [i]nstead of being entirely different forms of society, the West and the non-West … turn out to be variants of the same species. Further, if they are indeed variations of the same basic form, the theories generated by the European experience would not have to be overhauled or jettisoned, but simply modified. (23) Chibber draws on and disputes the works of Subaltern Studies theorists, primarily Ranajit Guha’s Dominance without Hegemony (1997), Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000), and Partha Chaterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986). Although Subaltern Studies has been criticised since its establishment over thirty years ago, Postcolonial “departs from existing treatments” (20) of Subaltern Studies because “the claims for a fundamental difference with reference to capital, power, and agency are all irredeemably flawed. … The main thrust of the book, then, is to elucidate the failure of the arguments from difference, so central to postcolonial theory” (22). As such, Chibber challenges what he perceives to be the two principal claims of Subaltern Studies, claims widely accepted and deployed throughout postcolonial theory. First is the claim of difference, the idea that there are very profound disparities in the culture, politics, and sociology of the West and the non-West during the colonial and the postcolonial periods. Second is the critique of Eurocentrism, the claim that theories originating from the West complicate and confuse instead of illuminate the non-West by conveying onto it models that are inaccurate and misleading. Calling into question this “critique of Eurocentrism, nationalism, colonial ideology, and economic determinism” (4), Chibber argues that such a critique has led to the view that an unbridgeable difference separates the West from the non-West. Theorists of Subaltern Studies “take one form of consciousness to be peculiar to the West—the capacity to separate one’s own identity and interests from those of the social group to which one belongs” (176) and consequently insist on difference. Chibber concludes that this distrust of universalism means that “there is nothing to justify Subalternist historians’ seemingly endless fascination with religion, ritual, spirits, indigeneity, and so on. We are free to criticize it for what it seems to be—a revival and celebration of Orientalist discourse” (238). Chibber studies the social and economic characteristics of capitalist development from a theoretical framework that is widely applicable yet responsive to the diverse cultural and political practices of the non-West and the West. [End Page 259] But one of his book’s major drawbacks is...

This study undertakes to examine the cultural politics of the subaltern peasants in Mo Yan’s The Garlic Ballads (1995) in the light of the theoretical speculations of the subaltern study project espoused by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. Yan endeavors to give a voice to peasants who are underrepresented. The Garlic Ballads presents a dimension of peasant reality that is ignored in historiographic annals. They have been labeled ‘primitive’ and ‘anachronistic’ and thus, they have been muted, marginalized and confined to the peripheral zone of difference. In Mo Yan’s narrative, the bleak existence and the physical and psychological wounds do not subdue the peasants’ urge to resist, and their vitality remains enflamed. They forge stratagems and weapons derived from within peasant experience through which they counter the atrocious oppression and injustices of the officials. The weapons are diverse namely; docility, voluntary compliance, folktales, songs, rumors, and memories. Given their unrelenting insubordination and resistance through the resort to stratagems and maneuvers, they prove worthy of the status to represent China's sturdy backbone. Moreover, they demonstrate evidence of their capability to bear the responsibility to disrupt the burdensome legacy of the silence, inferiority and subalternity imposed upon them by the dominant culture.

This chapter closely analyses two major texts, namely, Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe and Ranajit Guha's Domination without Hegemony, for the insights they provide into what has been called late Subaltern Studies, or perhaps more accurately the post-colonial turn of Subaltern Studies. To grasp the key contentions of Provincializing Europe, one almost has to turn to the end, where after over 250-odd pages Chakrabarty summarises his argument. A distinctive feature of Dominance without Hegemony is its emphasis on an 'Indian historiography of India', with a critique of 'colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism' as a necessary preamble. Provincializing Europe is not devoid of politics. The starting point for Chakrabarty's attack on historicism is, of course, to define the term itself. Historicism is what allowed European domination of the world, Chakrabarty asserts, thereby correcting one's naive assumption that it must have been the heavy artillery of imperialism.Keywords: Hegemony; imperialism; post-colonial; Provincialising Europe

Bu çalışmada postkolonyal teori içerisinde yer alan tartışmaların genel bir analizi çıkarılmıştır. Bu tartışmaların yoğun bir şekilde sürdürüldüğü “Maduniyet Çalışmaları”, postkolonyalizmin genel yapısını anlamlandırmak açısından verimli bir zemin sağlamıştır. Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Spivak, Partha Chatterjee gibi Maduniyet Çalışmaları’nın önemli yazarlarının siyasi tabanda ortaya koyduğu analizlerin, sinemasal temsil noktasında incelenmesi bu çalışmanın temel amacını oluşturmaktadır. Çalışmada bu tartışma zemininin sürdürüldüğü alan olarak, uzun yıllar Fransız kolonyalizmin uygulamalarına maruz kalmış Tunus ve Cezayir ülkesinden iki film seçilmiştir: “Chronique des Annes de Braise (Yönetmen: Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina/Cezayir)” ve “Samt El-Qusur (Yönetmen: Moufida Tlatli/Tunus)”. Seçilen filmler tematik analiz yöntemine tabi tutularak, filmlerin postkolonyal literatürde ortaya çıkan kavramlarla ilişkisi değerlendirilmiştir. Postkolonyal literaütürde ortaya çıkan yerli burjuvazi-batı ilişkisi, hibrit yapı, hafıza, resmi tarih, madun kadın gibi temaların film analizi esnasında da tartışılabildiği görülmüştür. Bu bağlamda seçilen filmler üzerinden, postkolonyal dönemde ortaya çıkan sinemanın, teoride tartışılan genel temalarla arasında bağlantı tespit edilmiştir.

Book Review| May 01 2001 Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial. Edited and introduced by Vinayak Chaturvedi. London and New York: Verso, 2000. xix, 364 pp. $20.00 (paper). Michael H. Fisher Michael H. Fisher Oberlin College Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Asian Studies (2001) 60 (2): 582–583. https://doi.org/10.2307/2659752 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michael H. Fisher; Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial. Journal of Asian Studies 1 May 2001; 60 (2): 582–583. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2659752 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsJournal of Asian Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 20012001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

On Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference and Ranajit Guha's Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India

Introduction Prakash Kumar (bio) The history of technology of South Asia should justifiably reflect the particularities of South Asian colonial pasts and the trends that became palpable at its postcolonial moment. In what historically specific ways has coloniality intersected with technology in South Asia? The particular questions of colonial power and exclusions, the autonomy of the subaltern voice, and the imagined futures as India at independence grappled with a new socio-economic order in the midst of colonial legacies call upon historians to make purposeful selection of archives and to deploy specific methods. These choices should determine the nature of South Asian technological history. In other words, a technological history of South Asia cannot simply be a history of technology "in South Asia," a one-sided imposition of historiography of technology on a new geographical site.1 The contributors to this volume agree that South Asia should not be treated simply as an empirical site to which the already existing analytics and methodologies of the broader field of history of technology can be "extended." Our implicit claim in writing these technological stories is that South Asia should be (and it already is) also a location to unravel new analytics and methods. The contributors thus aim to demonstrate how looking at the history of technology from South Asia changes what it means to do history of technology. Calling the approach followed by the contributors to this volume post-Marxist and post-nationalist would be eminently inadequate, if a safe label. Just as much as they are distanced from older Marxist and nationalist [End Page 933] approaches, the contributors are also heirs to standard critiques of modernity within a certain mode of analysis in South Asia. Readers will find in these articles a direct engagement with the question of the modern and the place of technology in the construction of the modern. Political modernity and its various institutions, Dipesh Chakrabarty told us, "all bear the burden of European thought and history."2 In a sign that such questioning of modernity's universal claims have become mainstream, all South Asianists proceed with the assumption that the metanarrative of modernity may after all be inadequate to assess all of the lived experiences in South Asia. This reflexivity to "modern" defines all of the contributors' technological histories, and perhaps sets them apart. While questioning modernity is a staple in the historiography of technology, the contributors in this volume will critique modernity from a position firmly within South Asian scholarly conventions. Approach and Themes The articles in this volume display a distinctive crossdisciplinarity that is not out of sync with trends in the field of South Asia, and reflects the way the field has evolved and honed its disciplinary practices over the years. A distinct porosity of the discipline of history in South Asia can be traced to its earliest incarnations. The 1960s works of Bernard Cohn, a pioneer in the field, are instructive. Cohn's work is distinctive, among other things, for exploring conjointly the methods, practices, and theories of two disciplines, what Cohn referred to as "Anthropologyland" and "Historyland." Later, writing a foreword in an omnibus to Cohn's work, Dipesh Chakrabarty celebrated the ease with which Cohn was known to navigate the disciplines of history and anthropology and to call them both "home."3 The 1960s trend was further consolidated with the emergence of the subaltern studies in the 1980s that emerged as a critique of historicism across several disciplines. The active crossdisciplinarity of the subaltern and postcolonial arms of South Asian historiography accelerated the field's spread into disciplines of social sciences and invited the involvement of postcolonial theorists from multiple disciplines.4 The same crossdisciplinarity marks the [End Page 934] approaches in South Asian technological history broadly, which have come to incorporate the practice of radical social history, a new political economy, historical and cultural anthropology, ethno-history, and literary and textual analysis. Historians of technology in South Asia marshal this crossdisciplinarity to address a number of questions that can be seen as central to the historiography of technology. To review every pertinent question would be a herculean task even for a start. But in trying to keep the review of...

Dipesh Chakrabarty (b. 1948) is widely recognized as a cultural historian and postcolonial theorist of immense acuity and formidable imagination. Known especially for his critical coinage of “provincializing Europe” and cross-disciplinary considerations of the Anthropocene, Chakrabarty has variously contributed to the rethinking of subaltern historiography and working-class culture, modernity and history, and climate change and planetary subjects. Dipesh was born and raised in the city of Calcutta. He received a BSc (honors) in physics from Presidency College, University of Calcutta, a master’s in business management from the Indian Institute of Management (Calcutta), and his PhD in history from the Australian National University, Canberra. Chakrabarty is currently the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College at the University of Chicago.

On December 22, 1997, forty-five unarmed members of the indigenous organization Las Abejas (The Bees) were massacred during a prayer meeting in the village of Acteal, Mexico. The members of Las Abejas, who are pacifists, pledged their support to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, a primarily indigenous group that has declared war on the state of Mexico. The massacre has been attributed to a paramilitary group composed of ordinary citizens acting on their own, although eyewitnesses claim the attack was planned ahead of time and that the Mexican government was complicit. In Without History, Jose Rabasa contrasts indigenous accounts of the Acteal massacre and other events with state attempts to frame the past, control subaltern populations, and legitimatize its own authority. Rabasa offers new interpretations of the meaning of history from indigenous perspectives and develops the concept of a communal temporality that is not limited by time, but rather exists within the individual, community, and culture as a living knowledge that links both past and present. Due to a disconnection between indigenous and state accounts as well as the lack of archival materials (many of which were destroyed by missionaries), the indigenous remain outside of, or without, history, according to most of Western discourse. The continued practice of redefining native history perpetuates the subalternization of that history, and maintains the specter of fabrication over reality. Rabasa recalls the works of Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci, as well as contemporary south Asian subalternists Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others. He incorporates their conceptions of communality, insurgency, resistance to hegemonic governments, and the creation of autonomous spaces as strategies employed by indigenous groups around the globe, but goes further in defining these strategies as millennial and deeply rooted in Mesoamerican antiquity. For Rabasa, these methods and the continuum of ancient indigenous consciousness are evidenced in present day events such as the Zapatista insurrection.

This entry tracks the “genealogy” and “archaeology” of subaltern studies, which has emerged as a subdisciplinary and alternative historical field over the last three decades. It broadly covers the work of Ranajit Guha, the chief proponent of the “school,” along with works by other eminent “members” like Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Starting with the social context and debates within which the idea of subaltern studies in the South Asian context was formed, it discusses the notion of subaltern historiography and its distinction from other “elite” historiographies. Various dimensions of the concept “subaltern” are also covered in depth and breadth, as well as the critical assessments that subaltern studies have been subjected to. The entry then traces the slow transformation of the field, as it merges into the tradition of postcolonial studies and postcolonial theory. Finally, it presents a glimpse of the current trends and future tendencies that are emerging in subaltern studies.

'Hybridity' and 'globalization.' Magic words. They can generate academic con ferences. Salman Rushdie, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Arjun Appadurai, Gyan Prakash, Lata Mani, Gouri Vishwanathan, Akhil Gupta, Dipesh Chakra barty, Amitav Ghosh, Talal Asad, Pal Ahluwahlia. Magic names for the part. Draw cards for conferences. These names flag the world of Asian intellectuals of the diaspora and their cul tural productions. Whether empirical, theoretical or literary, their contributions have been striking. They have also gathered legitimacy because they espouse positions deemed politically correct within liberal quarters in the West. With out necessarily implicating every one of those named above, let me summarize some dominant strands of argument in the cultural productions around them. Collectivized in arbitrary fashion, the individuals named above stand as an illustrative sample for certain politics of identity in the contemporary world. For anti-essentialism and anti-nationalism. For cosmopolitan rationality and its secularism. For the itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny postmodern world of heterogeneity. For the celebration of borderlands, homelessness, decentered ambiguity, het erogeneity, and blurred genres. The birth of such journals as Diaspora, Public Culture, Social Identities, and Identity in and around the 1990s is testimony to the power of this strand of emphasis. But this work is marked too, on occasions, by positivistic constructions of Aunt Sallies, whether 'culture' as fixed and discrete entity or specific 'nation' as 'homogeneous,' that are then decimated by their powerful prose. As Daniel, also South Asian, recently notes in passing: most poststructuralists and post modernists are not only like their structuralist counterparts but paradoxically also like the positivists they shun: they are nominalists in the extreme (1998: 77). Take the early programmatic statements presented in such felicitous prose by Appadurai (1988 and 1991). He argues for a genuinely cosmopolitan ethno graphic in anthropology in contemporary times, practice that could cope with the transnational cultural flows and the deterritorialization of the

Reviewed by: History at the Limit of World-History Bernardo A. Michael History at the Limit of World-History. By Ranajit Guha. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 116 + ix pp. $24.50 (cloth). This slender book grew out of a series of lectures delivered by Ranajit Guha, one of the founding members of the Subaltern Studies Collective, at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. In this latest book he strives to show philosophy's complicity with colonialism and its forms of knowledge. For this reason he takes the German philosopher Georg Hegel and his conception of "World-History" (Weltgeschichte) to task for its elitist biases, prejudices, and complicity in European arrogance, imperialism, and colonial knowledge. For Hegel, World-History signified the teleological movement of Reason in History through a series of successive advances that culminated in God. This providential design was undoubtedly highly Eurocentric. Hegel also attributed an important role for the state in this progressive movement. Such a conception of World-History, according to Guha, became the justification for European expansion, the colonization of continents and the wholesale destruction of entire cultures. World-History became the amoral record of states and empires, great men, and clashing civilizations. This in turn rendered irrelevant and pushed to the margins the everyday experiences of ordinary people (or "historicality," as Guha terms it). Everything that lay outside the narrative of World-History was dismissed as "Prehistory." To remedy this situation, Guha endeavors to take the reader to the limit of World-History (as defined by Hegel) and give the reader a glimpse of what history practiced outside World-History would look like. This for Guha is "a creative engagement with [End Page 530] the past as a story of man's being in the everyday world. It is in short, a call for historicality to be rescued from its containment in World-History" (p. 6). After introducing his argument in the first chapter, Guha proceeds to elaborate on it in the remaining four chapters. In chapters 2 and 3 he examines the contents of historicality and World-History. Hegel's notion of world history denied large parts of the world any agency in human history. Thus, while Hegel admired India for its religious and spiritual qualities, he felt it did not have a history because it lacked a state. Obviously, there was plenty of evidence to the contrary, and Guha cites the instance of Ramram Basu, a petty official working for the East India Company, being commissioned to write a history of kings of the province of Bengal, in eastern India. Guha calls for broadening our prose of the world to include "all of man's being in time and his being with others to write itself into that prose and enter it with all the multiplicity and singularity, complexity, and simplicity, regularity and unpredictability of such being" (p. 46). He argues that historians should decenter statist concerns with public affairs in their writings and focus more attention to issues of historicality. In chapter 4 Guha examines indigenous southern Asian traditions of history (itihasa) that focus on the experience and circumstance of the narration versus the European novel, which privileges the firsthand experience of the narrator. He calls for rescuing historicality from marginalization by World-History and its emphasis on writing, the state, and notions of universal progress. He believes that this task remains to be accomplished as historians are still conceptually walled in by Hegelian notions of World-History. Our narratives need to be filled with a sense of wonder about human agency at the level of everyday life and be less concerned with the rigid formalities of representing the development of states. In the final chapter Guha turns to literature as a way out of the clutches of World-History. He finds sustenance in the concerns the Bengali poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore had for historicality—in the "weal and woe of human life which, with its everyday contentment and misery, has always been there in the peasants' fields and village festivals, manifesting their very simple and abiding humanity across all of history—sometimes under Mughal rule, sometimes under British rule" (Rabindranath Tagore cited...