{"id":435,"date":"2023-11-03T16:05:25","date_gmt":"2023-11-03T16:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/decolonialmapsoflearning\/?p=435"},"modified":"2023-11-10T11:45:16","modified_gmt":"2023-11-10T11:45:16","slug":"re-collecting-ranajit-guha-through-a-counter-archival-lens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/decolonialmapsoflearning\/2023\/11\/03\/re-collecting-ranajit-guha-through-a-counter-archival-lens\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-collecting Ranajit Guha through a counter-archival lens"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A few weeks ago I received an email requesting an interview with me from two post-graduate students at Presidency University, Kolkata, Sohini Sengupta and Sourav Chattopadhyay, who convene Bhabuk Sabha <\/span><\/a><\/strong>(roughly translated to The Thinker’s Club<\/em>). They wanted to engage with me on the University of Sussex archival memory of globally-renowned historian and founder of Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha, who was a lecturer at Sussex between 1962-1981. They had come across my work via references to my archival research in an obituary for Guha written by Vinita Damodaran,<\/a> Professor of South Asian History at Sussex, which she wrote after Guha’s death in April this year, shortly before he would have turned one hundred years old. As Damodaran and others have noted, myself included, Guha’s passing went unacknowledged by the university leadership at Sussex until Damodaran’s obituary was released, yet his death was widely covered<\/a> by educational and cultural institutions and media around the world. Despite this global attention, little is known about Guha’s two decades at Sussex. This was remedied at a Remembering Guha<\/a> event I recently co-convened with Professor Gurminder Bhambra, Professor Vinita Damodaran, and Professor Ben Rogaly, colleagues in my new institutional home of Global Studies at Sussex. A joint publication on this event will be forthcoming in Discover Society<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sohini Sengupta and Sourav Chattopadhyay convene an academic forum at Presidency University called Bhabuk Sabha (roughly translatable to \u2018The Thinkers\u2019 Club\u2019) and are co-editing a publication that anthologises the proceedings of a December 2022 conference <\/a>dedicated to the centenary of Ranajit Guha’s birth, along with some previously un-collected essays and letters by Guha, as well as contributions by scholars who discuss lesser-known aspects of Guha’s life and career. The resulting volume, which will be largely written in Bengali will be published later this autumn by Alochana Chakra<\/a><\/em>. Their request for a written interview with me was to glean archival insights on Guha from his University of Sussex years, to help to shed critically reflective light on this formative period of his academic life. It also brought back memories from a chapter in my own research journey a decade ago, when I spent time in the libraries and archives of Kolkata during an AHRC international fellowship as a doctoral student, which you can read about here<\/a>.

The images illustrating the interview below are taken from my presentation at the 20th October Remembering Guha event at Sussex. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Interview with Alice Corble on Ranajit Guha’s archival memory at Sussex<\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Interview taken on 26th<\/sup> October 2023 by Sohini Sengupta (Convenor, Bhabuk Sabha, Presidency University), to be translated and published in the Ranajit Guha Commemoration Volume by Alochana Chakra, edited by Sourav Chattopadhyay (forthcoming).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Question 1: Ranajit Guha joined the University of Sussex in 1962. For Guha, this was the first occasion of staying and working at a foreign university: an experience that, he later stated, expanded his view of the world and also made him aware of its various injustices (especially racism). How do the University of Sussex archives remember Prof. Guha? Could you tell us about the documents connected to Guha that you have found here?<\/em><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The recorded memory of Guha in the Sussex\u2019s institutional archive is very small. There are only two documents written by him in the archive, and one school pamphlet which lists him as a member of the AFRAS (Sussex School of African and Asian Studies) faculty. There are almost 700 archival boxes in the University of Sussex (UoS) Collection[1]<\/a> so these two documents are like two little stars in a very large galaxy. In this sense, we might call this archival legacy an instance of what Guha himself dubbed a \u2018small voice of history\u2019[2]<\/a>, which is ironic given the power and legacy of his voice and the ways in which his work has impacted so many people across the world and shaped an entire field of Subaltern Studies scholarship and historiography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although archival traces of Guha\u2019s time at Sussex in its institutional archive may be scant, the records that do exist speak volumes about both Guha as a teacher and about what we might now call a scholar-activist[3]<\/a> (an identity I aspire to myself). Detailed below are the three documents I found. <\/p>\n\n\n\n