Ebook: Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society: 007

Nation, community, religion, and language are the main themes which run through the writings in this volume of Subaltern Studies. Sudipta Kaviraj identifies some of the narrative modes though which the nationalist consciousness in India imagined a historical past for the nation. He then discusses how such an imaginary institution of India impoverished the earlier "fuzzy" sense of community and put in its place fixed and "enumerable" communities. Partha Chatterjee looks at the way the new middle class of Calcutta constructed the figure of Sri Ramakrishna. A glimpse at this zone of religious beliefs, straddling the domains of the public and the private in the nationalist consciousness, tells us a great deal, he says, about "the subalternity of an elite." Continuing his studies on the theme of "dominance without hegemony," Ranajit Guha discusses the use of caste sanctions in the Swadeshi and Non-cooperation movements. Analyzing the forms of disciplining the masses even as they are brought into nationalist politics, Guha pays particular attention to the writings of Tagore, Gandhi and Nehru on the techniques of mobilization. Saurabh Dube does a detailed reading of a twentieth-century text on the myths of Ghasidas and Balakdas, the gurus of the Satnami Sect. The result is a rich portrayal of the dynamics of dominance and subordination. Using a set of twelfth-century Judaeo-Arabic documents from Cairo, Amitav Ghosh does an imaginative reconstruction of the careers of a Jewish merchant in Mangalore and his Indian slave. In the process he makes several important comments on medieval trade, intercultural communication, and relations of bondage. Intervening in the Subaltern Studies discussions of community and religion, Terence Ranger offers a number of insights from the history of Zimbabwe into the dynamic connections between small and large solidarities. This has important implications for the role of religion in the construction of community from the local to the national level. Upendra Baxi takes up two earlier essays by Ranjit Guha and Shal Amin to make a critical analysis of the place of law in the study of subaltern activity and consciousness.