Chatterjee's work did not exist in isolation. It reflected a ferment in Indian historical studies from the late 1970s, generated by the Subaltern Studies group whose participants were historians both in India and in the West. Led by the distinguished radical scholar, Ranajit Guha, the Subaltern Studies group followed a basically Marxist historiographical model. However, its Marxism was one which sought to capture the difference between the orthodox Marxism of mature capitalist societies and the conditions of colonial society where the subject of history was not the fledgling working class of the modern industrial sector, but the vast majority and variety of the oppressed or subaltern classes. Drawing on Marxist innovators such as Mao Zedong and Antonio Gramsci, the subaltern historians of the early 1980s wrote creative counter-histories exploring silent tracks of subaltern resistance within what Guha described as “the prose of counter-insurgency.” As they increasingly encountered the ideas of cultural studies, particularly in their critique of bourgeois nationalism, certain methodological differences began to appear both within the group and from their earlier studies. This was perhaps dramatized by the question posed by the deconstructionist literary critic, Gayatri Spivak: Can the subaltern speak? Can the historian find the true voice of the oppressed in the language and texts of the Other? Even more, is the search for the subject of history – for the class or group that will make the historical future – not after all chimerical when the oppressed can also be the oppressor, the exploited worker also the petty patriarch?2 Faced with such intractable questions, some subaltern historians turned to question History itself as a problematic universalization of a recent European mode of dealing with the past. Putting it bluntly, Dipesh Chakrabarty stated, “in so far as the academic discourse of history – that is, ‘history’ as a discourse produced at the institutional site of the university – is concerned, ‘Europe’ remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call ‘Indian,’ ‘Chinese,’ ‘Kenyan,’ and so on. There is a peculiar way in which all these other histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called ‘the history of Europe.’” Hence Chakrabarty's call to provincialize the history of Europe