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Ranajit Guha`s writings have had a formative impact on several disciplines: postcolonial studies, literature, anthropology, history cultural studies, art history. Guha first became known as the practitioner of a critical Marxism that ran parallel to the work of British and French Marxist historians of the 1960s and 1970s but which, instead of recreating a `history from below, sought active political engagement by deploying insights drawn from Gramsci and Mao. More recently, Cuba`s work has drawn attention to the phenomenological and the everyday, and been noticed for its critique of the disciplinary practices of history-writing. Guha`s reputation rests most famously on his role as the founder and guiding spirit of Subaltern Studies, which has critiqued colonialist and nationalist historiographies. In spawning new ways of thinking about history, this has created an intellectual ferment richer than anything else emerging out of modern South Asia. Guha`s historical and political writings, tucked away in obscure journals and collections, have been virtually inaccessible; they are brought together for the first time in the present volume by Partha Chatterjee, whose long association with Guha as a founder-member of the Subaltern Studies editorial board is complemented by his own international stature as a historian, political theorist, and public intellectual. Every serious student of South Asian history, politics, and anthropology will be enriched by the astonishing diversity of insights and scholarship within this book.

The role of markets in linking local communities to larger networks of commerce, culture, and political power is the central element in Anand A. Yang's provocative and original study. Yang uses bazaars in the northeast Indian state of Bihar during the colonial period as the site of his investigation. The bazaar provides a distinctive locale for posing fundamental questions regarding indigenous societies under colonialism and for highlighting less familiar aspects of colonial India. At one level, Yang reconstructs Bihar's marketing system, from its central place in the city of Patna down to the lowest rung of the periodic markets. But he also concentrates on the dynamics of exchanges and negotiations between different groups and on what can be learned through the "voices" of people in the bazaar: landholders, peasants, traders, and merchants. Along the way, Yang uncovers a wealth of details on the functioning of rural trade, markets, fairs, and pilgrimages in Bihar. A key contribution of Bazaar India is its many-stranded narrative history of some of South Asia's primary actors over the past two centuries. But Yang's approach is not that of a detached observer; rather, his own voice is engaged with the voices of the past and with present-day historians. By focusing on the world beyond the mud walls of the village, he widens the imaginative geography of South Asian history. Readers with an interest in markets, social history, culture, colonialism, British India, and historiographic methods will welcome his book.