Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society

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 through which the nationalist consciousness in India imagines a historical past for the nation. Partha Chatterjee looks at the way the new middle class of Calcutta constucted the figure of Sri Ramakrishna. 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. Saurabh Dube does a detailed reading of a twentieth-century text on the myths of Ghasidas and Balakdas, the gurus of the Satnami sect. Using a set of twelfth-centuryJudaeo-Arabic documents from Cairo, Amitav Ghosh does an imaginative reconstruction of the careers of a Jewish merchant in Mangalore and his Indian slave. Intervening in the Subaltern Studies discussion of community and religion, Terence Ranger offers a number of insights from the history ofZimbabwe into the dynamic connection between small and large solidarities.