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.

"This book offers an imaginatively conceived new model of combining structural analysis, meticulous social history, and fine-grained attention to the dynamic unfolding of political narratives. Anyone interested in the dialectics of state formation and peasant resistance, whether in early modern and nineteenth-century Europe, South and Southeast Asia, or the Caribbean and Latin America, will find it richly illuminating."--Geoff Eley, author of "A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society"
""Peasant Pasts" bridges the supposedly unbridgeable gap between social history and postcolonial studies to provide a nuanced and highly readable account of peasant movements in colonial western India. It draws upon colonial archives, oral narrative accounts, and a whole host of other resources. Historians of not only India, but peasant political movements elsewhere in the 'Third World' will read it with pleasure and profit."--Sanjay Subrahmanyam, author of "Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges"
"Where there is of course a considerable and rich South Asian tradition of history from below, and while the importance of studying peasant religion has been repeatedly stressed in the last two decades, there is simply no equivalent to the kind of work that Chaturvedi has attempted here."--Ajay Skaria, author of "Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India"