ABSTRACT
‘The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism—colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism’. Guha claims that this historiographical elitism, and its interpretation of the Indian struggle for independence from British colonial rule, was in reality ‘an echo of imperialism’. The Subaltern Studies project was initially based theoretically on the intersection between British Marxist historiography, Antonio Gramsci’s perspectives on hegemony and popular resistance, and the study of peasant movements in the colonial world. And it is precisely this last element which also points to the contemporary Indian context within which Subaltern Studies developed. At the end of the 1960s, India was drawn into the vortex of the ‘global 1968’, which in the postcolonial states of the South found its expression in new social movements that took aim at the institutionalized elite politics practised in these states.
