SUBALTERN STUDIES Arnab Roy Chowdhury PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology National University of Singapore E-mail: arnab.roy2007@gmail.

com Word Count (3190 words excluding abstract) Forthcoming in Postcolonial Studies Encyclopedia, Wiley and Blackwell Main Text Subaltern Studies began as a revisionist historiography of peasant movements in colonial India. The Subaltern Studies group was formed in 1979-80 under the tutelage of the historian Ranajit Guha at the University of Sussex in England. The first volume of subaltern studies was published in 1982. In the late 1980s Guha moved to the Australian National University and the project started a new life; since then, a series of twelve edited volumes have been published by the group (Amin & Bhadra 1994). The group consisted of heterodox historians of South Asia, who were dissentful of the nature of dominant historiography prevalent at that time. They expressed their distaste for the bourgeoisie-nationalist and colonial mode of history writing, which were riven with elitist bias. These forms of dominant history distorted the historical portrayal of the subalterns or the people and neglected the role played by them in the anti-colonial struggle. The Colonialist and the Nationalist history was already established as two major trends in history writing by the 1960s and 1970s.The colonialist school was led by Anil Seal and his coterie in the Cambridge University. They claimed that the Indian national struggle for independence was the handiwork of few elites, who were trained in the western educational institutions set up by the British in India. According to them, nationalist politics was a scramble for power in which the Indian elites competed and collaborated with their British counterparts to hoard power and resources. The Cambridge school blatantly discounted the role of ideas in history and promoted a narrow political economic theory of interests in the formation of the nationalist movement in India. For them the nationalist movement was an unintended consequence of the penetration of the state in the society and the resultant drawing up of the society to encounter it. Thus they grossly neglected the historical subjectivity and the desire of the Indian people to attain freedom. They promoted the theory of the great Indian faction, whereby the elites mobilized the underclasses along the lines of narrow communal and caste interests, in a vertical line of patron-client relationships (Chakrabarty 2002). On the other side of this debate were the nationalist historians led by Bipan Chandra and his collaborators, mainly located in Jawaharlal Nehru University
1

in Delhi. They saw the Indian history in black and white, as a heroic battle between the nationalist elites and the colonial intruders. They brought in various theoretical views from the writings of Marx and other variants of Marxism, such as the Latin American dependency and underdevelopment theory school. Chandra and his colleagues argued that the nationalist elites emerged as a rejuvenating force to unite the different strands of anticolonialism, against the evils perpetrated by the colonizers. It was Gandhis mobilization and Nehrus vision that gave birth to the imagination of the national-popular. Thus nationalist narrative gives a grossly paternalistic view of Indian history. The people were, this narrative claims, brought into the arena of politics from their pre-political state under the tutelage of colonialist and the nationalist elite (Ibid). Guhas approach was a radical break from both these schools of history writing. Guha brought in the role of subaltern subjectivity into the Indian history of anti-colonial struggle. He scathingly criticized both colonialist and nationalist historiographies. Guha claimed that both these schools had elitist biases and grossly neglected the role of the common people or the subalterns in the anti-colonial struggle. Guha contested the nationalist historiography which promoted the idea that nationalist leaders shepherded the Indian masses from pre-political past to nationalist present, from medievalist dark ages to altar of bourgeoisies modernity, transforming them from subject of oriental tyrants to the citizens of the modern state. On the contrary, it is evident from the postcolonial experiencing of the Indian state that, rather than being paternalist, the Indian elites were hugely oppressive to any kinds of peasant or tribe mobilizations that went off the limits of national civil society and its agenda. For instance, the Maoist movements that emerged in 1970s triggered heavy handed counterinsurgency measures from the Indian state. Subaltern studies have been variously influenced by global Marxist and left leaning scholarship. With an eclectic but creative conceptualization, Guha and his colleagues sharpened their analytical tools from various sources such as Louis Althussers Structuralist Marxism, Levi-Strausss structuralism, Michael Foucaults and Edward Saids notion of power and discourses. It was also considerably influenced by the anti-elitist history from below school, initiated by Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, George Rude and others (Dhanagare 1993). However the main inspiration was the Italian Marxist, theorist of the Third International, Antonio Gramsci. The Subaltern studies group drew its theoretical apparatuses mainly by reworking the concept of subaltern used by him. Gramsci wrote his prison notebooks from 1929-1935, during his period of incarceration in the gaols of Fascist Italy. He laid out a chart for studying the complex history of the subaltern people. Against the prevalent Marxist orthodoxy, Gramsci suggested that the rise of bourgeoisies was not only through coercion but through the creation of hegemonic consent, over the cultural and ideological institutions of the civil society. This hegemony was established over the people or the subalterns. In the context of southern
2

Italy where there was the presence of a vibrant peasantry very much active in rebellions, Gramsci criticized the notion of the incapability of the peasantry expressed in the Marxian epithet sack of potatoes, which the European orthodox Marxist theory promoted. Conversely, he suggested that the subaltern consciousness of the peasantry, immersed in traditional religion and popular culture, should be nurtured by organic intellectuals to unleash the revolutionary potential in them (Chatterjee 2010). The South Asian subaltern studies project takes the cue from this. They transposed Gramsci on to the Indian context, albeit with a significant theoretical twist. The originality of the project was its reinvention and reconceptualization of subalternity, markedly different from its original Gramscian usage. They invented subalternity in the unique Indian historiographical context. Subalternity in Guhas term signified a dialectical and contextual relation of superordination and subordination in colonial India. He conceptually created a structural binary of relational hierarchy between the elite and the subalterns. Guha defines the elites as dominant indigenous and foreign groups in the colonial India who controlled the rest of the society. There were bigger national level elites and relatively smaller regional elites. Juxtaposing this, he defined the people or the subaltern classes as the demographic difference between the elites and the rest of the Indian population. Thus the subaltern classes were defined as a residual category. In these polarized social categories, a sense of antagonistic and oppositional mentality prevails. The subalterns are oppressed and subjugated by the elites in their mundane everyday life. However, there are moments of outburst when they rebel against their subjugation. The notion of subaltern politics was therefore centered on resistance to the domination of the elites (Guha 1988). Guha claimed, as opposed to the patron-client theory of mobilization promoted by the Cambridge school, the subalterns emerged independent of the elite interventions, to engage with the anti-colonial struggle on their own. He claimed that the subaltern political domain was autonomous form mediation of the elites. As opposed to vertical patron-client mobilizations, the subalterns formed horizontal alliances of solidarity based on kinship, caste, community and territoriality. The subalterns sometimes entered into the arena of nationalist politics. Even when they did so they maintained their difference with the elites in the modality of their action, goals, strategies and methods. The subaltern nationalism differed markedly from elite nationalism (Guha 1983). Colonial capitalism no doubt changed some aspects of the society with coercive force, but a larger space of life and consciousness remained untouched by it. This was a typical instance of dominance without hegemony. This signifies that the bourgeoisie dominated with the coercive state apparatus but were unable to gain ideological, political and cultural legitimacy of the society to construct a hegemonic national-popular. Hence much of the subaltern domain remained relatively autonomous from the elite politics. Autonomy also originates from the distinct structure of subaltern
3

consciousness that evolved from the experience of their subjugation and subservience. The evidence of this subaltern consciousness can only be found in the moments of peasant insurgencies. Thus the central focus of subaltern studies has been to unravel the rebel consciousness (Guha 1997). But the puzzle was to study consciousness historically. The paucity of historical sources and the inapplicability of positivist methods were the greatest hindrance for analyzing the historical configurations of subaltern consciousness. This mission led Guha into the terrain of excavating subaltern voices from history. However, that was a methodologically challenging task because the peasants dont leave their documents in the state archives, which are produced by the ruling classes. Therefore subaltern studies turned to other sister disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, literature, human geography etc. for their interpretive resources of experience, narrative, folklore, ethnography and oral-history. Moreover, the available state archives are repositories of counter-insurgency measure and reports written by administrators and lawmakers, which invariably keep the subalterns at the receiving end of history. To reveal the subjectivity of the rebel, a reading against the grain of the archival history was the imperative (Chakrabarty 2002). Guhas strategy was to reveal a collective imagination hidden in the consciousness of the rebel by studying his political practices. Guha distills a theory of peasant consciousness from the instances of peasant rebellions from the Indian colonial history. To delineate the configuration of such political consciousness, Guha formulated various attributes and characteristics of the subaltern mentality. These attributes primarily hover around the idea of negation or negativity of the subaltern political consciousness. Negation implied a purely oppositional counter discourse, devoid of any ideological moorings and characterized by a pure inversion of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic. The slave inverts the condition of his subordination through a sudden and spectacular rebellion, which is often associated with violence. The politicization of the subaltern consciousness usually transpires through religious, kinship and communitarian interactions. For Guha this is the domain of the political (Dhanagare 1993). The dominant histories have a narrow view of the arena of the political. Official and elite histories believe that politics resides in state institutions. Standard Marxist historiography treats the peasant movements as backward and atavistic in nature. Peasant movements based on traditional ties of caste, kinship and religion have been judged as pre-political by scholars such as Hobsbawm. In a typically Marxist periodization of history they are shown as people who will make the transition from the stage of being peasant to labour and in that process will learn the art of being political. The Indian realm cannot be theorized with this western notion of the political, which implies the emergence of sovereignty in a disenchanted universe. In colonial India religion and politics existed together and this needed a theoretical explanation different from Eurocentric genealogies of
4

politics. Guha redefined the concept of the political by pluralizing the history of power in global modernity. He suggests that peasant in colonial India interpreted the political cosmos in which they inhabited aptly. Guha, through a deployment of a Foucaultian notion of power, analytically separates the subaltern history from the history of state and capital. He depicted that political power not only emanates from state institutions and capitalism, but also from the social domain of the subjugated. He collected data from 1783 to 1900 on various peasant rebellions in colonial India and demonstrated that in moments of insurrection, the peasant invariably destroyed or appropriated all those symbols of political power that marked their subordination through the deployment of inversion. That is a structural role reversal in which the peasants dress, speak and behave in a manner to show symbolic defiance to the authority. He claims that this fight for notability and recognition cannot be anything but a political act (Chatterjee 2010). Thus, though from Marxist point of view Indian history looked stagiest and remnant of a feudal past, according to Guha it was contemporaneous to modernity. In societies where modernity arrived through colonial conquests there were dual modes of oppression, which the subaltern classes experienced. One was the under the frame of colonial legal institutional power. The other was under the local elites, who dominated them coercively as well as culturally. The existence of a dual mode of oppression for the subalterns indicated the fact of the failure of the bourgeoisie to speak for the nation. Thus there was no single unitary nation to emblematize. There lay sundry nations within the fiery womb of the unitary Indian nation, Guha points out. Therefore form the very onset the subaltern history project was a post-nationalist project or a criticism of the official and statist nationalism (Ibid). The Subaltern Studies project was initially accepted with great applause, but eventually some of its standpoints were critically evaluated. Many Marxist scholars opined that the rigid dichotomy between the elite and the subaltern domains, neglect class differentiation in the stratified social space. Additionally, the non-organised, self-limiting and non- transformative politics of the subalterns alienated many radical leftists. They were not inclined to celebrate the fragmented, cultural and carnivalesque politics of the subaltern. Moreover, the issue of subaltern autonomy was problematic and was criticized by many scholars (Ludden 2002). Another contested issue was of subaltern agency. Spivak (c1988), in her now famous paper, problematized the notion of subaltern agency. She pointed out that it is impossible for the subalterns to speak for themselves. They can only be represented through a historian in the text and through an external mediation in the political context. Dipesh Chakrabarty later explained that the problems of history and its canonically rational methods of narration and depiction are such that the subaltern past cannot be depicted without making it mythical. For example in case of the Santhal rebellion the agency of the leadership and purpose of the movement cannot be found for any
5

human endeavor or vision of emancipation. According to the Subalterns, they rebelled at the command of an esoteric tribal god (Chakrabarty 2002). In Guhas framework the image of the subaltern was created in a manner almost equivalent to the romantic, nave and untainted, noble savage of Rousseau. The subaltern is portrayed as a noble savage who possess pure rebel consciousness, which is immutable to any major transformation. History shows that though subalterns had a partially autonomous domain, they have occasionally entered the domain of elite political institutions, participated in them and thereby transmuted themselves. Therefore the subalterns that we see are not an ideal type, but a digression from it. Again there is no pure rebel consciousness that is waiting to be excavated. The subaltern consciousness is a bricolage of elements drawn from both dominant and subaltern class consciousness. Through experiences of resistance and rebellion, in interaction with the state and dominant elite classes, a sort of syntheticity develops in it. Thus, the bone of contention was regarding the historicity of the structure of such a resilient consciousness. If according to Guha, the subaltern consciousness is formed within specific historical configuration of power relations of domination and subordination, it should change with time. The theory needs a spatio-temporal narration of subaltern history whereby various historical trajectories and narratives will explain the mutating forms of subaltern consciousness (Ludden 2002, Chatterjee 2010). Guha retired from the editorial team on 1988. An anthology titled Selected Subaltern Studies was launched in the same year, which made its formal entry into the high echelons of western academia. The initial Subaltern studies group was later joined by about another thirty-six scholars, who contributed in the twelve volumes of the subaltern studies series. Through a new paradigmatic shift in 1987-89, Subaltern studies more staunchly moved towards the study of fragmentary and incomplete subaltern consciousness. The project took a discursive turn in when it moved away from its theorization of the subaltern politics in the vein of Antonio Gramsci and E.P. Thompson, towards the politics of discourses and representation of the subaltern subjectivity. It significantly embraced the theorization of power and domination as propounded by Michael Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Edward Said. One of the group members, the historian David Hardiman marks this break as a crossroad. Sumit Sarkar later marks this theoretical transition in subaltern studies, as the decline of the subaltern in subaltern studies. Dipesh Chakrabarty later defended this turn towards, subjectivity, discourse and representation as a necessary postcolonial turn, which has enriched subaltern studies. As these elements of change became incorporated into subaltern theory, a new vista of enquiry opened up where the subaltern studies scholars started focusing on all the processes of modern state, public institutions and the representation of subaltern classes in those loci. By encompassing these analyses, the Subaltern Studies came closer to the Postcolonial Studies practiced in the American academia. Scholars like Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh
6

Chakrabarty, David Arnold and others undertook many such studies, incorporating views from postcolonial theory. Recently some of the scholars have participated to unearth subaltern consciousness of various other marginalized groups like women, minorities and the so called lower castes. From 1990s onwards scholars like Gyanedra Pandey, Shahid Amin, Partha Chatterjee and others have provided post- nationalist critiques of the nation through their celebration of fragments and questioning of the very form of Eurocentric discourses. In the present scenario, Subaltern Studies has turned into a global field of scholarship. It has inspired the creation of various groups such as the Latin American Subaltern group established in 1992, which has widely disseminated its theoretical and methodological aspects throughout the world (Chakrabarty 2002, Chatterjee 2010). Recently Chatterjee has advocated an ethnographic turn in Subaltern Studies, which might set a future agenda for subaltern movements research (Chatterjee, 2012). SEE ALSO: Chatterjee, Partha; Gramsci, Antonio; Guha, Ranajit; Hegemony; Historiography; Indian Anti Colonialism; Marxism; Orientalism ; Postcolonial Studies; Postcolonial Theory ; Resistance ; Said, Edward; Social Movements (other); Spivak, Gayatri-Chakravorty References: Amin, Shahid and Gautam Bhadra. 1994. Ranajit Guha: a Biographical Sketch. In Subaltern Studies VIII, edited by David Arnold and David Hardiman, 222-225. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2002. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the wake of Subaltern Studies. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Chatterjee, Partha. 2010. A Brief History of Subaltern Studies. In Empire and Nation Selected Essays, edited by Partha Chatterjee, 289-301, New York: Columbia University Press. Chatterjee, Partha. 2012. After Subaltern Studies. Economic and Political Weekly, 47 (35), Dhanagare, D.N. 1993. Subaltern Consciousness and Populism: two approaches in the study of Social Movements in India. In Themes and Perspectives in Indian Sociology, edited by D.N. Dhanagare, 129-153. Jaipur & Delhi: Rawat Publications. Guha, Ranajit. 1983. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Guha, Ranajit. 1997. Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Guha, Ranajit and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 1988. Selected Subaltern studies. New York: Oxford University Press. Ludden, David, ed. 2002. Reading Subaltern Studies. London: Anthem Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakrabarty. 1988. Can the Subaltern speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271-313. London: Macmillan Further Readings: Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2007. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chaturvedi, Vinayak, ed. 2000. Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial. London: Verso.