Chaturvedi, Vinayak, ed. Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial. (London: Verso, 2000)How has the historiography of the late 20th century developed and been applied to the study of India? As its name implies, Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial is designed to provide the reader with a guide to the work of the Subaltern Studies projectscholars. The call of the group was to become a 'point of convergence for all who wish to study the politics of India' and who found elitist historiography oppressive, decidedly shortsighted, and incomplete. The work of the group took the form of a series of volumes.The articles in this collection provide a representative sample of that work as well as an excellent and traceable route through recent historiographical trends."The historiography of Indian Nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism. Both the colonialists and the bourgeoisie-nationalists who attempted to adapt and prosper under their rule shaped the written history of India." (p. 1) With this opening sentence Guha presents both the essence of the early subaltern studies group's work as well as the themes and theoretical framework that would form its early years. The traces of Marxism are clearly present in Guha's reaction to an elitist reading of Indian history, ashe frames his discussion in terms of struggle between elite colonials and Indian nationalists, while trying to define a role for the 'worker' or subaltern. It is equally clear that he is aware of those traces and finds Marxism an inadequate tool for the task.In The Nation and Its Peasant, Partha Chatterjee follows on the work of Gramsci, who is actually responsible for the substitution of the word subaltern for the previously used term proletariat, and explores peasants, peasant consciousness, and the nature of peasant resistance to colonial domination. Like Guha, Chatterjee describes peasants as acohesive group, a group that is the object of manipulation by elites, engaged in resistance against those elites. In order to explain why or how that resistance sometimes had limited success, he asks for a "critique of both colonialist and nationalist historiographies by bringing in the peasantry as a subject of history, endowed with its own distinctive forms of consciousness and making sense of and acting upon the world on its own terms." (p. 10) Discovering the 'peasant consciousness' seems a laudable goal, but as Rosalind O'Hanlon (Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia) makes clear, is a goal fraught with difficulties. Providing a general review of the state of subaltern studies to that date, O'Hanlon proposes to explore the limitations of the group's work and indicate areas for future development. She takes exception to definitions of 'the' peasant consciousness as one that assumes a singular, cohesive, even simplistic consciousness, and one that exists outside the influence of elitesor other groups in their society. By casting peasants in the role of resistors, one also assumes that their ultimate goal is one of independence as it is defined by Western standards. The irony of such a situation is obvious: "like the subaltern himself, those who set out to restore his presence end only by borrowing the tools of that discourse, tools which serve only to reduplicate the first subjection which they effect, in the realms of critical theory." (p. 105) She advocates a move away from the current definition of resistance, violent, deliberately political, and towards an examination of other more subtle forms. (p. 111) C. A. Bayley (Rallying Around the Subaltern) situates the early work of the group in the leftist radical academy and, like O'Hanlon, calls for a more complex view of peasant groups by addressing the question of historical change.In the center of the collection, both literally and theoretically, are a suite of point-counterpoint discussions by Gyan Prakash, O'Hanlon, and David Washbrook (respectively, Rallying Around the Subaltern and Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of theThird World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography, After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism and Politics in the Third World, and Can the 'Subaltern' Ride?) Prakash provides a brief look at past models of India's history and addresses the 'Orientalist' ideas of Said. He warns that saying 'the third world should write its own history' furthers the east/west, us/them, normal/abnormal dichotomies. In doing so he provides a fascinating point: The Orientalism of studying India may, ironically, be the best tool for studying "Westernism" not because they are essentialist differences but because "Western tradition was itself a peculiar configuration in the colonial world" (p. 186), that is, not a tradition but a historic construct developed and defined at a specific time.O'Hanlon and Washbrook are skeptical of Prakash's 'post-foundational' approach to Indian history. They take exception to what they see as the downplaying of class and material relation as a signifying identity, suggesting that what this means is that "the true underclasses of the world are only permitted to present themselves as victims of the particularistic kinds of gender, racial and national oppression which they share with preponderantly middle-class American scholars and critics, who would speak with or in their voices. What such underclasses are denied is the ability to present themselves as classes: as victims of the universalistic, systemic, and material deprivations of capitalism which clearly separate them off from their subaltern expostitors. In sum, the deeply unfortunate result of these radical postmodernist approaches in the minorities debate is thus to reinforce and to give new credence to the well-known hostility of Americanpolitical culture to any kind of materialist or class analysis." (p. 215) They contend that if one studies subalterns to emancipate them, to 'hear their voice,' one cannot use Foucaultian methods because he casts power in terms of relationships, not emancipation. To try to do so is to try and "ride two horses."Gyan Prakash takes the metaphor of the rider of two horses and uses it to frame a spirited reply to O'Hanlon and Washbrook in Can the Subaltern 'Ride'. He dismisses theircomplaints as a misrepresentation of both Foucault and Derrida, implies that their objections are merely an example of cross-Atlantic academic infighting, and asks the reader to consider that "it is