Ranajit Guha is a historian of South Asia who was greatly influential in the Subalterns Studies group, and edited several early numbers of the group's anthologies. He migrated from India to the USA in the 1960s, and currently lives in Austria.

Guha has written several books on history, historiography and politics. His Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India is widely considered to be a classic. Aside from this, his founding statement in Subaltern Studies, 1982's 'On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India', set the agenda for SSG, defining the "subaltern" as "the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the ‘elite’." His article in SS2, 'The Prose of Counter-Insurgency', has also been profoundly influential.