Subaltern Studies as a History of Social Movements in India

Abstract

Subaltern Studies (hereafter SS, 1978–2008), a research collective and series of publications, is not typically associated with history writing on social movements in India. The stated aim of the group was to document the politics of the people during the era of British colonial rule in the subcontinent. Ranajit Guha, the founder of the collective underscored the importance of popular mobilizations to the project when he wrote ‘parallel to the domain of elite politics there existed throughout the colonial period another domain of Indian politics in which the principal actors were not the dominant groups of the indigenous society or the colonial authorities but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and the intermediate strata in town and country—that is the people’.