Includes bibliographical references.

David Hardiman, a founding member of ‘Subaltern Studies’ and the author of several monographs on the societies, cultures, and histories of Western India (Gujarat, Maharashtra, and parts of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan), is widely recognized as being among the foremost contemporary historians of the subcontinent. His prose is seen as being particularly accessible and jargon-free. Hardiman’s practice as a historian— both via his enormously rich empiricism, archival work, and fieldwork, as well as via his discursive lucidity—has been an inspiration to many, even as it has implicitly questioned some of the fashionably arcane modes of history-writing.