Vinay Bahl, associate professor of sociology at Pennsylvania College of Technology, has authored a book in which she suggests an alternative perspective on "history from below," as promoted by the Indian school of Subaltern Studies.
The book, titled "What Went Wrong With 'History From Below': Reinstating Human Agency As Human Creativity," was published in 2005 by K. P. Bagchi & Co., Calcutta, India.
The alternative perspective that Bahl explores examines the concepts of human creativity and humaneness and how considering these concepts can allow historians to treat each society with the same yardstick to help erase the binary approach of East/West, modern/traditional or core/periphery without undermining the colonial relationship between societies.
Bahl has taught sociology at Penn College since 1996. She earned her doctorate from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1991. In 2002-03, she was invited as a visiting scholar to the College de France, Paris. She was a visiting scholar at Amsterdam's International Institute of Asian Studies in 2004.
Bahl has published three books (one co-edited) and numerous articles on subjects that include industrialization, the working class, the caste system, the women's movement, music, South Asian women's clothes and Third World women.