Books by Vinayak Chaturvedi

Inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the history of subaltern classes, the authors in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial sought to contest the elite histories of Indian nationalists by adopting the paradigm of ‘history from below’. Later on, the project shifted from its social history origins by drawing upon an eclectic group of thinkers that included Edward Said, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. This book provides a comprehensive balance sheet of the project and its developments, including Ranajit Guha’s original subaltern studies manifesto, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gayatri Spivak.

Peasant pasts is an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to writing histories of peasant politics, nationalism and colonialism vinayak chaturvedis analysis provides an important intervention in the social and cultural history of india by examining the nature of peasant discourses and practices during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through rigorous archival study and fieldwork, chaturvedi shows that peasants in gujarat were active in the production and circulation of political ideas, establishing critiques of the state and society while promoting complex understandings of political community by turning to the heartland of mk gandhis support, chaturvedi shows that the vast majority of peasants were opposed to nationalism in the early decades of the twentieth century he argues that nationalists in gujarat established power through the use of coercion and violence, as they imagined a nation in which they could dominate social relations chaturvedi suggests that this little told story is necessary to understand not only anticolonial nationalism but the direction of postcolonial nationalism as well