 So we have gathered to take a retrospective view of subaltern studies and to discuss what that series and the ideas I'm allowing it may have equate to us. Thirty years have gone by since the first body of subaltern studies came out in 1981 granted to Guha the founding editor of the series having taken up in 1980 in his position in what was then the South Asian history section. In the research school of Pacific nation studies at this university. Anthony Lowe as you just heard had invited him to move to Canberra. Guha stopped by in Calcutta on his way to this country and I was in the city doing research for my A.A. and your doctoral thesis. Guha's visit created quite a stir among the left wing lecturers of the series. I had just been to England and spent a few days with Guha in Sussex discussing the project of subaltern studies in which David Hardiman, David Arnold two of Anthony and Ramajit's next students and Shahid Amin and Gyan Pandey from Oxford then they were Guha's acquaintances from Delhi from 1970 when he spent a year in medicine. They were already involved in this conversation which was to become subaltern studies. I had carried the exciting news of this new thing called subaltern studies to friends in Calcutta particularly Gautam Bhadra and Partha Chayadiji. Both of whom Guha spent much time with on his way to Australia and we used to joke amongst ourselves that Guha's ways of, he used to use the word inducting somebody in subaltern studies was always reminiscent of an old communist party boy who was going around recruiting future members for the party. So Bhadra and Gautam also became part of the collective and thus began the journey of the project that looked on itself at first mainly as an intervention in Indian, not even South Asia in those days. Of course others joined subaltern studies later, Sumit Sartar who also eventually registered strong public disagreement with subaltern studies, Guha's respect, Gyan Pratash, Suzy Tharyun, Shail Mayaram, Rajesh Karyya and MSS Pandya. 12 or 13 volumes, I forget exactly how many later, the group was formally disbanded in 2008 when we gifted our royalty incomes to the centre for the study of developing societies in Delhi from where Prothama is visiting. During its lifetime, the project garnered its share of praise and criticism. But whether or not one agrees with the stated aims of the project, it is perhaps undeniable that subaltern studies and scholarship coming out of it made waves in the world of the social sciences and the humanities generally. The current gathering is itself testimony to the many different anticipated ways in which the influence of subaltern studies travelled truly beyond the confines of South Asian studies. It also says something about the richness of the original project that members of the founding editorial collective, instead of forming anything like an intellectual monolith, have individually pursued diverse range of questions that both connect back to where we started from and also evolved towards very different futures. Thus, to speak of the original subalterns, Barth Chatterjee's work on nationalism has led him now to explore, in his forthcoming book, imperial histories. David Hardiman's recent work has ranged from Gandhian non-violence and the burn towards non-violence from subaltern studies and his survival have, might I say, to folk forms of healing and salvation. Shahid Amin has just completed a fascinating study of the legend of Ghazi Nia, the Islamic warrior in pre-colonial, the legendary and mythical Islamic warrior in pre-colonial and colonial India. Gyan Panthe has completed a manuscript comparing subaltern and African-American historiographies. Gotam Bhadra has recently been awarded a prestigious prize in Calcutta for his monumental study of the history of botany publications, the colonial Calcutta's equivalent of London's Grub Street. While Ranjit Guha, battling seriously serious health problems in old age in distant Vienna, has published a series of important and prize-winning books in Bengali, carrying forward both the thesis of old subaltern studies and the anti-history position he had advanced in one of his more recent books, History at the Limits of World History. There are thus many ways of counting time. One way to mark the passage of time is to historicize. And many today will claim that subaltern studies are an expression of its own times. And that recognition, and that recognition of the change historical circumstances of the present will no doubt form an element of the conversation we have over the next two days. The story of time's passing is also to ironically and somewhat unfortunate because this conference, in our two successively scheduled keynote speakers, Parthocharaji and Shaheerabin, not being able to travel for reasons of health. While I'm sure you'll join me, wishing them both robust, wishing them robust health for years to come, the disappointment itself was for me at least an interesting reminder, if such a reminder was needed, of how important being young was to the project of subaltern studies. And being young, at a very particular historical conjunction in the late 60s and early 70s of the last century, when students' movements breaking out all over the world brought into being a global Marxism, India's own version being called the Naxalite movement. When civil rights movements and movements for recognition of indigenous people's rights put the language of decolonization to new and creative uses, when the Vietnamese and the Chinese revolutions inspired spiritual debates and scholarships on the political and analytical vitality of the category peasant, when Western countries facing demographic problems of a shortage of skills opened up to highly skilled immigrants from the aspired colonies of the West, when movements were afoot that near home in Australia would help dismantle the white Australia policy and eventually foster debates on multiculturalism and cultural diversity. Clearly, many of these issues do not strike us today with the same force as they once did. Those sounds still come under tension. The cult of peasant-based modern and armed revolutions that the Chinese and Vietnamese experiences once inspired in the young has been replaced by talk of globalization, while migrants as item seekers, illegal workers and refugees have emerged perhaps as the new subvoltains of the present era. And my recent experience in Delhi looking for real estate for a center then in the University of Chicago was to build in Delhi, was that I suddenly looked at the buildings in Gurgaon, new buildings being built where the workers were still working. And some day I realized I could read the obscenities that were written on the walls, because they were all written in Bengali. And I said to people, how come Delhi workers are writing obscenities in Bengali? And of course they said they're all illegal Bangladeshi workers working for construction companies in Delhi. And they are the new subvoltains. Gramshi, a key theoretical influence on subvoltains studies is still respected, main in many quarters, but he does not seem to occupy the same pedestal as do debuts, baju, or even agamden. Mazudong, on the other hand, another key influence on subvoltains studies has suffered a decline in status both globally and within his own country. One could actually ask them, has time rendered subvoltains studies invalid? Was the vision of peasant revolution on which a project was based, romantic, and utopian? These are legitimate questions. And they've been asked not only by outside observers of subvoltains studies, but actually by subvoltains scholars themselves. I remember having an exchange of e-mail with Parthar Gyadarji about two years ago over the argument that the model of peasant insurgency that Guha Prayid tried to construct in his book was in elementary aspects, was valid for the colonial period, but was not helpful for deciphering the nature of peasant and tribal protest against land acquisition for industrial and urban development in contemporary areas. Should we then, as Shelly said famously in his letters from Italy, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies and experiencing the mistakes of our youth? Perhaps that advice holds true in the world of action where unlearning past follies makes but imminent sense. In the domain of ideas, however, it does long seem to me that something like the opposite holds true. We keep reading or Marx or Weber or Durkheim or Freud, not so much for what they may have been correct about for those contributions are possibly part of our common sense today, but to understand how and where they went wrong and how will we correct them if we want to for contemporary use. It is their mistakes, in other words, that have had a very long life, much longer life than their heritage is today. Not because the mistakes were silly and obvious mistakes, but precisely because they were fascinating and interesting mistakes. Committed because the questions behind them were of fundamental importance to the social science, even if the answers provided were at best controversial and at worst wrong, and I sometimes told my own PhD students I say aspire to make a very interesting mistake. That people keep coming back to me. So if I'm intended, but what I would call generative mistakes are committed in pursuit of questions that may be termed fundamental. What I would like to do then by the way of initiating a discussion on the global legacy of the Subaltern Studies is to ask what mistakes of the Subaltern Studies project could still be considered generative. The examples I'll give since I'm a historian will relate to problems encountered in historical thinking. In the interest of time, I will organize my examples of sample about the two sub-times, the archaic in the modern and the subject of history. But I could have expanded on the sub-times of generative mistakes. I could have picked others like the religious and the political, the problem of representing the Subaltern or the problem of the archives. Maybe we can touch on some of these so the archaic in the modern where I think Subaltern Studies made some very interesting mistakes, generative mistakes, which required us to go back to read Subaltern Studies. Let me say the problem here anecdotally and in South Asian terms and then move on to some general considerations. The subcontinent is one part of the world where everyday life is marked by cohabitation and intervening of practices and objects that look both ancient and modern at the same time. A latemachine being carried for delivery on a bullock cart or a push cart was not an uncommon sight in the kind that I grew up in. Or if technology has indeed made a difference to such sites, think of how ubiquitous the representation of Puranic or for that matter, Puranic themes are in everyday life. Puranas are these Indian mythical stories about gods and goddesses and with a very lively tradition actually still exists in the traditions. Again to use a very common Calcutta example simply for reasons of familiarity, think of getting into any public vehicle to actually bus or into what they call a minibus, which is a dangerous contraption. So I look at it and basically get into it. You will find pictures coming around the driver's seat that put historical figures such as the Saint Ramakrishna who lived from 1836, 1886. Him together with the image of the Puranic goddess like Kali or maybe the picture of a Sufi shrine and the folk religious saint framed together. In other words, putting humans and gods in the same field of vision is part of popular practices in India. The question is how should we think about this phenomenal analogy? The problem in turn poses many questions about religion, historical time, about belief and its relationship to practices about elite and folk religion and so on. Historians often deal with the problem by speaking of change and continuity, though we seldom know why certain things change while others just continue to. In Indian history the subject existed until the coming of some of the studies. We had parceled life out into a neat division of layer. We left matters religious or ancient to Indologists or historians of ancient India. Matters that needed the historian to know Persian and Arabic fell to the problems of the so-called modernists. And actually talking about periodization and medievalism, Catherine Davis, I'm pretty glad is here, she's written a wonderful book on the question of periodization as a medievalist. And things pertaining to British rule and after fell to the historian of modernity. And the three groups seldom spoke to each other. As a young Indian and a student of Indian history I was aware, as I could not be any better than sentiments, that they were part of my Indian life. But that was not something for which I could make any room in my work, except using thoughts like survival, residues, leftovers, that modernization literatures, both of right-wing and Marxist variety, had really made available. The mismatch between life as described and probed in history and life as remained was something that you actually saw as a historian. My first experience of meeting Guha was something that gave me a jolt on this very particular problem. He invited me to spend a weekend with him at Sussex in 1979. And as a way of introducing me to the incipient subordinates of his project he read out to me a draft of what later became chapter 2 of his book, Elementary Aspects of President's Incidence. I was amazed to find that he was relating oppressive ideologies of rural landlords in 19th century colonial India to infamous texts of the ancient sage Manu, the Manu Samhita, from the composer and the beginning of the Christian era. So as a historian I said how could we do together without showing connections? First scholars on colonial India sell them new Sanskrit texts. But more importantly how could a historian relate 19th century practices and ideologies to texts separated by thousands of years? On the other hand I had this strange feeling that these ideologies however separated they may have been in their historical origins were not at all unfamiliar to me that I was already aware that I had been brought up in a society in which they were valued so that even the 19th century of Guha's description melted away before my mind's eye and blended with the India I knew from experience. It left me wondering about this matter. More reading and a few conversations later I realized that what allowed Guha to connect texts separated by centuries and thus deliberately flout some fundamental rules of historical writing was his deep acceptance of French statuettes so that the underlying proposition was that certain cultural practices could continue to exist long beyond their historical origins by becoming codified through constant repetition and thus entering the structural aspects of a culture. The analyst's job in Guha's view was a semiotic one she or he needed to be able to decode the structure in order to see how the archaic could be alive and well inside the heart of the mountain. I was very excited by this discovery and remember that over the following three months of my stay in the British Isles while I spent the daytime working in archives and libraries for my thesis I spent most evenings and weekends giving myself a course on structuralism and reading a good bit of Levi Strauss, Bola Barth and Roman Jacobson. The discovery of structuralism was quite a heavy experience for us and Guha was the first scholar to introduce structuralism and the so-called linguistic term in Indian history but it caused us much problem later many problems later most historians of South Asia were unfamiliar with the literature Guha had arrived at it via his interest in painting and some well-known scholars mistook our structuralism for orientalism of the inside sense and accused us of recycling orientalist themes in a post-colonial way. I had a first-aid experience of how unfamiliar my Marxist historian friends that Anthony referred to in Delhi were of these continental streams of thought. I came straight to Delhi from the UK to do some more work at the National Archives and one day I got into a scooter rickshaw to visit some reputed historian friends at the Delhi University. On my way to the university neighbourhood as my scooter was winding its way through the crowded busy and bustling neighbourhood of Chandni Chowk literally the moonlit square of the walled city of Delhi as it was built by the Mughals in the 17th century my scooter rickshaw screeched to a halt as a man on a bicycle and something happened in a minute that worked for me almost like a structuralist revolution. The man on the bicycle had a bird of prey a very large falcon sitting on the back of his left hand and the driver and my driver of the jat peasant stock even as he pressed the brake could not but explain in admiration as if driven by an invisible cultural compulsion Shabash Right in the middle of Chandni Chowk that afternoon in 1979 the bicycle, the scooter the modern buildings around and anything and everything that was not 17th century melted away before my eyes and I felt transported to the cultural world of Mughal India where in the middle of the city square it would have been entirely customary or appropriate for a peasant worker to express admiration for the valor and manhood of a man who was able to tame the falcon a royal symbol of the period. I suddenly felt as though I had watched a bit of Mughal India enacted for me not as a piece of commercial historical re-enactment you might play fight with the Red Fort or closer home in the former Goldfielder Ballarat but it's part of a busy unselfconscious everyday life I had just seen a cultural code I thought all that Goohar had been speaking to me about in Sussex, in action structuralism works I thought he excitedly the first thing I spoke to my historian friends about when I got to their place was this incident and very unexcited by my narration of this relatively experienced person in my path they immediately sought to calm my nerves down by telling me that Foucault had somehow gone to my head what could I say they could not even see it was not Foucault but Levi Strauss who was the man corrupting me here and that Foucault was a rebellion so all that the structuralist tradition might have stood for that's how unfamiliar historians in India were with anything that happened outside the British tradition in which they've been here just to verify that I've not been entirely delusional in my sense of being there, in my sense of having in a cultural code at play in the event in Chathnichok I related the incident the next day the friends I'm talking about were immigrants to Delhi from outside of Delhi original Delhi waters so next day I checked with my friend Nilalji Bhattacharya a historian from JNU from Bengali but who'd grown up in Delhi and I told the story to him, stopping at the point where my scooter rickshaw driver had halted to notice this man with a falcon sitting on his hand and I asked Nilalji, now what do you think my driver said when he saw this man and Nilalji correctly guessed Shabash and you can imagine how confirmed I felt in my structural discrimination well, structuralism may have been the wrong answer it at least had its own share of ecological problems but who's question was right and the problem of the RTA in the model is not just a problem for western other countries we face it in many interesting ways in Australia, a nation that often finds interesting substitutes for the medieval or the ancient past it tells itself it does not have but that's a different story my second subject is about the subject of Indian history as many of you would know the Subaltern Studies began with the aim of making the Subaltern the subject of their own history in the 1980s subject was a tricky territory in the 1980s Rosalie Rohanman first pointed out in print that the ostensible subject of Subaltern Studies seemed unambiguously maimed Gayatri Spivak who began to be active in the 1980s and 1980s not only repeated the charge she also made the point that our idea of the subject was somewhat naïve in the age of post structuralism and deconstruction some of us had made some use of Foucault in the spirit of updating Marx in fact it was Guha who introduced me to Foucault as well during those research months in British India but we had no idea of Gayrida or Lakshad or Duluth or Quatervir or Batay talking into Guha's office in the Coombs Building here in this university one day in the early 1980s and Guha pointing to a book on the top and the most unreachable part of his bookshelves it was there it as a gamatology in Spivak's translation Guha and Spivak had already met in Calhoun he said have you read this book I said no I have not he said I have not either but it's a very important subject said this the conversation did not proceed until Spivak entered the scene with a re-pocket question and the Savaltan speak deconstruction was not easy to observe it's linguistic acrobatics alienated many in the group David Hardingon wrote an important essay once on these divisions and Sumit Sarkar taking his departure from the group wrote a complaining essay entitled the decline of the Savaltan in Savaltan studies though he blamed it all on the deleterious effect in front of Edwin's side and many others of the Indian and international left saw this new term as giving ammunition to the Hindu right in India in retrospect however we can safely say that Spivak's question has had a long life the book was published from Columbia recently to celebrate 20 years of the essay again I'm not sure that I'm persuaded by the answer that Spivak gave to her question one has to remember again also that Spivak's answer itself has been a moving target because she keeps rewriting the essay but there is no doubt that whatever her errors were they were in my sense of the term generated but they were motivated by a question we cannot escape in whose voice does the Savaltan speak as Verida once famously said voice is no guarantor of presence but I do not want to pursue here Spivak's line of inquiry I want to return to the foundational moment of Savaltan studies and look for Guha's book and look at the Guha's book elementary aspects of peasant insurgency in colonial India 1983 for the way it posed the question of the subject of history and by implication the subject of Indian politics obviously Guha's expectation born of the 70's discussions of peasant jubilee development in his youth in the communist party so his expectation that the popular insurgencies of the 19th century could be seen as somehow presaging or anticipating a more political popular struggle for the wholesale transformation of Indian social structure in the direction of socialist equality will not seem valid today but I do think that with this careful study of the methods by which peasant crowds mobilized themselves both in the cities and in the countryside of 19th century India Guha gave us the most interesting and creative genealogy of crowd politics actually as it exists in India today at bottom Guha asked a question that had been asked in the English context by someone like AP Johnson what role did the people of England play in shaping the English institutions of democracy that for example was an animating question both in the making of English working class and in the weeks and hours Guha's question was similar how did popular politics develop and shape the democracy that India became after independence but Guha's approach to answering this question and I would say his answer itself often implicit in the pages of elementary aspects were different from what the leftist annual historians had divided whether it was AP Thompson or George Rude their analysis of rioters Thompson's analysis of Golden Rags and Rude's analysis of many riots were different their analysis of rioters and crowds went in the direction of humanizing the crowd by looking for individual faces in the crowd and Rude is of course famous for this pro-socographic approach to crowd studies there is no doubt about how historiography in general has been enriched by the efforts of these deservedly famous and gifted historians yet Guha's structure and stance was significantly different he did not look to delineate faces in the crowd for that method only dissolves the crowd into so many individuals whereas the agency of the crowd is affected and legitimized precisely by its facelessness and it is facelessness that makes a crowd into an effective political force or an effective force now how does all this relate to Indian democracy one of the most interesting ways in which Indian and some other emerging democracies such as the South African one liberal western democracies is in the use of public disorder and I am using that word provisionally as part of political bargaining within a constitutionally democratic structure a feature that for instance distinguishes Indian mainstream political parties from their counterparts in the west is then a successful Indian political party has to have the capacity to create mayhem on the streets as a way of publicizing and pushing their demands this is not required formally or informally of any political party in the west except very rightly or extremely likely but the mainstream parties don't even political movements fighting for rights of particular caste those of peasants against land acquisition today will try to acquire at least the capacity for public violence as a way of advancing their cause right as crowds are an old established pre-colonial feature of Indian politics the words we use in Hindi or Bengali are to describe crowd violence Khasad, Hangama, Ullman and so on are all figures of disorder which is opposite for the Mughals and the British rulers after them we treat the crowd we treat crowd action only as a problem of order and not as a political problem the emergence of the crowd is a mainstream political act that begins of course under Gandhi though he was always formally and morally opposed to the violence that often ensued from this in the earliest of the independence the Prime Minister of Nehru and the constitutionist leader of the formally untouchable groups often reminded the nation that even the Gandhi amendment of Sathya Pradesh was only suited for fighting the British and should not be deployed against the national government but all this fellow has fallen on deaf ears over the decades today one cannot write off crowd action or more broadly violent politics of the street as simply the disorder of Indian democracy it is an integral part of how democratic politics are understood and practiced in India and a new kind of political subject has emerged in India that is demotic and democratic in the sense in which the word democratic is used in India or the meanings, the multiple meanings it's come to have the present insurgencies Guha wrote about were the forerunners of this political subject and their modes of mobilization are still visible in many of the riots and insurgencies in India today Guha's hunch that peasants of colonial societies were not pre-political as Hobson had imagined them to be but rather political captured something of the spirit of his times but we did not know very clearly in what sense the word political was meant when we made the claim that the peasants were already political Guha's answer that these peasants could form the basis of a sustained move towards radical social transformation in India has proven wrong but again the error in my sense was a generator it was a question that you somehow perceived was right one day scholars will return to the India aspects not to read the book on Guha's terms but to find in it a way, a method of constructing a genealogy of the mass political subject in India today this would not be the only genealogy because the very logic of genealogy is multiple but would be one important way of figuring out how the history of Savaljan Dibellion has left its imprint on the way that democracy is being shaped in contemporary India so with those two examples I will finish to say that to return to the theme that really leading a legacy is I think about making interesting mistakes and really interesting mistakes are made when you pursue questions questions that are somehow fundamental and I think at least in my life the main legacy of Savaljan Dibellion was that it gave me the courage and I am very grateful to Guha for that aspect of his mentoring giving me the courage to not only ask fundamental questions in an impressive way which Indian historians do anyway but actually bring them to the surface of the discussion Thank you very much