Abhijit Guha- M.Sc., M.Phil., Ph.D
- Former Professor at Vidyasagar University
Abhijit Guha
- M.Sc., M.Phil., Ph.D
- Former Professor at Vidyasagar University
Working on land grab and nation-building in Indian anthropology.
About
497
Publications
200,959
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518
Citations
Introduction
Major area of research is development caused displacement. Wrote two books and number of articles/comments in peer-reviewed journals on this topic. https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=GHm7l0sAAAAJ I also write popular articles in anthropological and other topics in Bengali. https://vidwan.inflibnet.ac.in/profile/209526
Acted as reviewer for Wenner-Grenn Foundation, USA for the period November 2020-May 2022.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abhijit_Guha_(anthropologist)
Current institution
Additional affiliations
January 2018 - January 2020
Position
- Senior Fellow
Description
- I worked for two years at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata on a monthly remuneration basis from ICSSR and an yearly contingency grant .My topic of research is "Nationalist Trends in Indian Anthropology: An Historical Exploration"
December 1985 - November 2016
December 1985 - August 2016
Education
September 1974 - September 1984
Publications
Publications (497)
This time, I write this letter as it were the cases with previous occasions. I would like to express my reactions on the meeting. The difference is, in all the previous four occasions my open letters were based on direct firsthand participation in your meeting, while this time my knowledge is based on listening to my colleagues who have attended th...
Prologue The image of criminality in a community has not only a present but it also has a past, a history and that history continued down to the present. My student Santanu, and I began from the 'ethnographic present' among the Lodhas, like field anthropologists and gradually realised that we got a link with the history. Pages of archive matched wi...
In this discourse, I narrate my experiences of doing an engaged research on land acquisition in West Bengal for the last 15 years.
I present my views here in the form of reflexive ethnographic encounters which took place in many sites and archives, viz. (i) in some peasant villages in Paschim Medinipur, (ii) district land acquisition office, (iii)...
Tarak Chandra Das is still known as one of the best ethnographers of the pioneering generation of anthropologists in India. His field based study on the Purum Kukis of Manipur (1945) had attracted the attention of quite a good number of anthropologists in India and abroad including Claude Levi-Strauss, Rodney Needham and Surajit Sinha. Under the in...
In this technical session 9 papers by the postgraduate students (M.Sc. 4th Semester) of
the Department of Anthropology, Vidyasagar University were presented which were
based on their recent fieldwork experiences among the Mundas in two villages of
Satjelia Island of the Sunderbans area of South 24 Parganas of West Bengal. The
papers deal with the (...
It is a critique of Amartya Sen's views on Singur land acquisition for Tata Nano car factory.
What is Anthropocene and how anthropologists are dealing with it? I have dealt with this question in the latest guest editorial published in the Journal of the Indian Anthropological Society.
This book deals with land acquisition in West Bengal during the left regime in West Bengal, India. It peeled off the various layers of land grab from an anthropological perspective by combining field observation and archival data.
This book tells the untold story of a pioneering anthropologist in India. It contains a Foreword by an eminent anthropologist and sociologist, Professor Hari Mohan Mathur.
This article is about the contributions of Nirmal Kumar Bose in Indian anthropology.
This chapter is about my journey through anthropological encounters of the people around the university campus.
This chapter deals with land acquisition during the rule of the left front government in West Bengal(1977-2011). The style of presentation is auto-ethnographic in which I traveled over time centering on a specific field site in erstwhile Medinipur district[now Paschim(west) Medinipur] under the framework of the book--- knowledge, power and ignoranc...
In this article I have discussed about the recent controversy over a comment made by an overseas Congress party leader, Sam Pitroda who in order to highlight the national unity of India mentioned about the human biological differences in the country. The leaders of the rightist Bharatiya Janata Party(in power) critiqued the Congress leader by confu...
Researches on the history of Anthropology in India unlike western countries have not yet become a formidable tradition despite the fact that courses on the growth and development of Anthropology in India had been recommended at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels in the Model Curriculum Development Report of the University Grants Commission a...
This is a certificate for reviewing paper
This is a certificate for reviewing paper
In this book chapter I have narrated my own multi-layered experience of conducting research on land acquisition in the state of West Bengal, India. It revealed how I got to know the various complex dimensions of land grab by the left government in West Bengal.
The name of Haran Chandra Chakladar (1874-1958) is not well known in the present day Indian anthropological circles. He was a brilliant anthropologist and not an ivory tower scholar. Chakladar was also a social activist with a very strong anti-colonial spirit, which guided his scholarship and activities. He was born in a village named Daskhinpara i...
Researches on the history of anthropological studies in India, unlike in western countries, have not yet been an established tradition. An attempt has been made in this book to write a history of nation building in India by the Indian anthropologists,
Sometime in the middle of 2019, we were casually discussing about a book named The Anthropology of Ignorance: An Ethnographic Approach edited by High, Casey, Ann H. Kelly and Jonathan Mair published in 2012 like many other books we had discussed over cups of tea at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata. Looking at the different chapters of t...
This is an excellent review by Dr.Suman Nath of my book "Encountering Land Grab:An Ethnographic Journey(2022) published by Manohar:New Delhi & Routledge:London.The book review has been published in the Journal of the Indian Anthropological Society edited by my Ph.D. supervisor and senior colleague Professor Rajat Kanti Das of Vidyasagar University.
In this paper, I have highlighted the relevance of anthropology for the needs of the people and the country, which I called 'Public Anthropology'. In India we have had a strong tradition of public anthropology, which we often miss while narrating the history of anthropology. This needs to be corrected and with the support of data and that is what I...
Visiting Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) collections for the first time in life was a thrilling experience for me and that happened on 29th December 2023. The legendary ornithologist Dr. Salim Ali who worked at BNHS not only studied birds in India but also had an interest in almost all the living animals of the Indian subcontinent. At present...
The Maoist struggle in West Bengal championed the ideology of ‘armed struggle against the state and the dominant ruling party’ and ‘the annihilation of the class enemies.’ An important omission in the Maoist agenda lies in its neglect towards the ground realities of development. The Maoists in Bengal have only been using the forest and the rural ar...
Ranajit Guha, the founder of the subaltern school in history not only emphasized the collaboration between history and anthropology but Guha also underlined the importance of fieldwork as practiced by the anthropologists.In this paper I have placed Guha and his subaltern school within the context of Indian anthropology.
These are the invitations, certificates and academic exchanges from 1985-2008
This was the Summer School Report on Anthropology organized by the Anthropological Survey of India published in 1966
The word mainstreaming apparently implies an agency. In geographical discourse it is nature which mainstreams the tributaries into the main course of the river. In case of human societies it is the populace, its elites, sometime the state and sometime the market, the economy, which do the task. In India, the idea of mainstreaming meant the assimila...
Why I question the famous theory of Hindu method of tribal absorption proposed by one of the doyens of Indian anthropology? The theory was proposed by Nirmal Kumar Bose in the early 1940s and was accepted in the anthropological circles almost without any question and was being taught to the students of anthropology and sociology in the colleges and...
Indian anthropology, though established under the British rule had developed its own tradition of anthropological study. Some of the notable Indian anthropologists however critiqued their own anthropology as being colonial. In this paper, I have argued that quite remarkable anthropological studies were done by outstanding Indian anthropologists aft...
B. R. Ambedkar’s original research on the caste system in India is an unexplored area. In this article, an attempt has been made to appreciate the views of Ambedkar on the origin of the caste system in India and the relationship of the anthropological milieu of the United States of America during the time of Franz Boas in shaping his thoughts. Ambe...
This is an issue published by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India of India on Scientific Temper in 1983
The recent narration of the history of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Calcutta (CU) by a world renowned social scientist, Partha Chatterjee in a lecture at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences misrepresented and suppressed historical records. Chattterjee’s contention that the Department of Anthropology at CU only practiced...
The summary of the lecture is available at https://twitter.com/CSSSCal. In the aforesaid lecture, Chatterjee, who was one of the major collaborators of Ranajit Guha and his subaltern school of history, depicted the works of the anthropologists of the University of Calcutta in a highly biased and partial manner. In Chatterjee's words: 'The Anthropol...
In this book I have published my popular articles in Bengali on a variety of topics in anthropology ranging from the basic objectives of anthropology to film criticisms and studies on development in the Indian context. The book is an attempt towards the practice of public anthropology in the vernacular.
This article is about the growth of anthropology in India, I have particularly searched the nationalist trends of anthropological research in India.
This article is about public anthropology in India.
In this article, Bhupendranath Datta had elaborately shown how the ‘diverse reports’, ‘opposing opinions’ and ‘new nomenclatures’ used by different authors as regards the nature of human populations in India only ‘confused the students and frightened the layman’. It is interesting to note that Datta concluded the paper by saying that different ‘bio...
Marginality of anthropological subjects and Sustainable development Goals: Do they ever meet?
Anthropologists are justly famous for their complete immersion into the lives of the underprivileged and the marginalized groups of people all over the world. We write ethnographies (sometime multisited) of marginalization caused by large scale land grab,...
This chapter analyses a case study of an ‘a-literal’ border within the boundaries of a district against the wider background of anthropological studies on borders and borderlands. The case study reveals how people at the grassroots deal with situations that arise from the shortcomings of the legal and policy frameworks of the State.
Trans
In this draft paper, I have narrated my experiences of writing two books on land grab. The first book "Land, Law, and the Left..." was based on my doctoral thesis at Vidyasagar University, West Bengal, india and the second book was written in the form of a multi-site ethnography with new data and theoretical insights into the problem.
This is the Foreword of my book Land, Law and the Left by Michael Cernea.
This is the review of my book Land, Law and the Left in The Statesman.
In this book chapter, I have made a critical review of the social impact assessment module of the Anthropological Survey of India under the context of the new land acquisition, rehabilitation and resettlement law 2013.
The article is about governmental land grab under the global scenario
The departmental reunions, organised by the students provide opportune occasions not only for the union of the old and new hearts and minds for the exchange of ideas which once inspired the old but it also challenges the old to encounter the ones that is shaking the young minds at present. For a veteran anthropologist reunion in the department is a...
I passed Higher Secondary from a Bengali medium school named JagadbandhuInstitution(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadbandhu_Institution) in 1974. We were taught by brilliant teachers, who were lovable human beings. Almost after 47 years, two of our bench mates accidentally met at Kolkata and rediscovered themselves. The rediscovery led to a What'...
Questions
Questions (21)
When I looked at the controversy around holding or not holding the World Congress of Anthropology 2023 at the venue of Kalinga Institute of Social Science (KISS) in the Odisha state of India, I found stranger fictions, which often betrayed the facts. Thus, the venue of the Congress became more important than the factuality of the discipline, opinion of the few masqueraded as many, the same individual abstaining from voting indulged in wanton verbose and took a committed position on a particular side while writing letters and memoranda.
I constructed a fact sheet, which seemed to me like writing ethnography of the present for looking at ourselves, here in this case, anthropologists in India. My presence in this narrative was like an interlocutor who not only participated in the dialogues but also tried to understand the events from an ethnographic standpoint with the aim of writing an interpretative account of the crisis.
The foregoing narrative revealed not only the chronology and succession of events leading to a crisis around the organization of the World Congress 2023 in India but also exposed the attitude of the Indian anthropologists towards the discipline as well as in handling a crisis situation. By and large, the Indian anthropologists have failed to generate real academic debate in the public domain around the anthropology and sociology of factory schools and their relationship with the large-scale displacement and socio-economic deprivation of the Adivasis (Indigenous communities designated as ‘Tribe’ in the governmental and anthropological terminology) caused by mining, deforestation and industrialisation in the context of their Hinduaisation in India. This is a tragic outcome of public anthropology in the country.
My research on R&R is well known to you and you ave written Foreword for my book Land, Law and the Left in 2007.
I have recently written my fifth open letter to the Vice-Chancellor of my university.Should one write open letters to the Vice-Chancellors?
