Review of Subaltern Studies (2001)
Subaltern Studies
NB: This was written for the International Encyclopaedia of the Social and
Behavioural Sciences, 2001 edition. I had erroneously dated it in 2002). The review may also be read online here.
An Indian school of historiography whose inspiration lay in the Maoist movement of the 1970’s, and whose raison d’etre has been the critique of the perceived elitist bias of Indian nationalist discourse in history writing. Since 1983, when the first volume appeared, Subaltern Studies have produced ten volumes of collected research articles, which comprise the main corpus. After the appearance of SS 6, a collective has managed editorial work. Individual members of the collective have also written texts which exemplify the “subaltern” viewpoint.
The school was founded by Ranajit Guha, a Marxist
intellectual from Bengal . Once a
member of the Communist Party of India, Guha was influenced by the radicalism
of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the late 1960’s to align himself with
Indian Maoism, which characterized independent India
Subaltern Studies began with an attempt to apply the
approach known as “history from below” in the Indian context. The term subaltern was
inspired by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, and is used to indicate
powerlessness in a society wherein class differentiation, urbanization and
industrialization had proceeded very slowly. Gramsci is the source of the
subalternist respect for “culture” and the “fragment” in history writing. Subaltern
Studies was also influenced by the critical Marxism of the English historian
E.P. Thompson, who attempted to move beyond economistic definitions of class
interest, as well as by Foucauldian critiques of power/knowledge systems. Its
(earlier) Maoist orientation and polemical concern with the nationalism of
Indian colonial elites made for a slant toward the investigation of peasant
rebellion under colonial rule as well as peasant recalcitrance vis-à-vis
Gandhian nationalism and the Indian National Congress.
Initially overtly political
in its stance, Subaltern Studies was popular among young Indian historians and
scholars of modern India
abroad as a radical alternative to an uncritical academic celebration of Independence
It would be wrong to adduce a
uniformity of vision in the output of Subaltern Studies over the years. The
explicit, if unorthodox Marxian bent of its “history from below” phase has been
superseded by a recent preoccupation with community, rural innocence and
cultural authenticity. The epistemological
approval of the Leninist “outsider” as the bearer of “higher”
revolutionary consciousness (Choudhury, SS 5, 1987) sits in unresolved tension
with the oft-expressed critique of elitism and statism in historiography
(Pandey, SS 8, 1994), and the belief in the immanence of culturally mediated
forms of universal community (Partha Chatterjee, SS 6, 1989). A thematic that
persists however, is the opposition of two “domains” – that of the elite, meaning the colonial state
and its allies, and their forms of politics, knowledge and power; versus the
subaltern. The latter has been variously interpreted as the peasantry,
community, locality and traditional domesticity and distinguished by its resistance
to colonisation. The difficulty caused by the problem of mass complicity has
been dealt with by valorising the recalcitrance of “fragments”.
The subalternist stance of
giving voice to the repressed elements of South Asian history has engendered
valuable research. A prominent example is Shahid Amin’s meticulous and
thought-provoking investigation of the prolonged aftermath of the (in)famous
Chauri Chaura riot of 1922, which resulted in the death of 22 policemen, the
suspension of the first non-cooperation movement, and the subsequent punishment
by hanging of nineteen accused rioters. (SS 5, 1987, and OUP, 1995). This
unravelling of “an event which all Indians, when commemorating the nation, are
obliged to remember - only in order to forget”, relentlessly juxtaposes event
to nationalist metaphor and existential reality to ideological representation.
It will remain an outstanding text in the subalternist corpus. Pandey’s
intricate account of cow-protection movements in eastern India India
Guha’s own Chandra’s Death (SS 5, 1987) skilfully uses a legal
narrative from mid-nineteenth century Bengal
to analyse the workings of patriarchal culture and indigenous justice with
great sensitivity to the existential predicament of ‘low-caste’ women. In a
brilliant passage, Guha qualifies a description of conventional systems of
asylum thus, “this other dominance did not rely on the ideology of Brahmanical
Hinduism or the caste system for its articulation. It knew how to bend the
relatively liberal ideas of Vaishnavism and its loose institutional structure
for its own ends, demonstrating thereby that for each element in a religion
which responds to the sigh of the oppressed there is another to act as an
opiate” (SS 5, p. 159).
Subaltern Studies’ concern
with issues of ideological hegemony elicits a questioning of the school’s own
theoretical tensions. The juxtaposition of statist versus subalternist history;
or the tyrannical march of Western-inspired universals versus the resistance/
occlusion of heroic subalterns expresses a view of a society divided into
discrete social zones – with a concomitant oversight regarding the osmosis
between these “domains”. The idea that contemporary history encompasses a grand
struggle between the narratives of Capital and Community; that the latter is the truly subversive
element in modern society - “community, which ideally should have been banished
from the kingdom of capital, continues to lead a subterranean, potentially
subversive life within it because it refuses to go away” - (Partha Chatterjee,
OUP, 1997, p. 236), raises the question of why ‘class’ has been demoted from
the estate of subalternity, even though it too refuses to go away. In an era
wherein the assertion of community is rapidly transiting from the realm of
peasant insurgency to that of mass-produced identity, might not “community”
actually function as the necessary metaphysic of Capital rather than its
unassimilable Other?
The tensions extend beyond
theory to that of discursive choice and indeed, silence. The political success
of the movement for Pakistan for example, the transformation in this case, of
“communalism” into “nationalism” has not been investigated despite Guha’s
pointers (SS 6, 1992, p. 304, and SS 7, 1994, p 99-100), and despite the urgent
need for reflection on the Indian communists’ transitory but significant
support in the 1940's for the two-nation theory and Partition. Nor has the
subsequent history of Pakistan
and the emergence of Bangladesh
been addressed – a rich field for those interested in the ever-shifting
paradigms of nationhood and identity in South Asia .
Has subalternist thinking confined itself ideologically within the fragmentary
remainder of 1947?
Similarly, the category of labour and the history of the working class is absent from the main corpus of research after Chakrabarty’s publications on the jute-mill workers ofCalcutta Dalton
Similarly, the category of labour and the history of the working class is absent from the main corpus of research after Chakrabarty’s publications on the jute-mill workers of
This lacuna co-exists with a
reluctance to tackle the history of the communist movement, within India Hungary in 1956, and to his association with
Maoist students in Delhi
University
These are
not mere matters of biographical detail. They are linked to vital historical
questions on Bolshevism and its impact on anti-colonial struggles in the 20th century, and not just in India USSR
As a discursive field
Subaltern Studies has produced provocative research on the history of colonial India
The inquisitive scholar will also find it worthwhile to read a critique of
the school written by an erstwhile member of the collective. Sarkar’s essay
“The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies” ( OUP, 1998) challenges
what he considers to be its valorisation of the indigenous, its “enshrinement
of sentimentality”, and the shift in its polemical target from capitalist and
colonial exploitation to Enlightenment rationality. A caveat might also be entered on the status of
any scholarly claim to “represent” the voice, interest or agency of a preferred
Subject - the historian’s discipline may indeed never be free of bias, but
surely it must be as committed to the ideal of truth-as-the-whole, and balance,
as to polemic.
Be that as it may, Subaltern Studies has raised the level of
debate in Indian historiography - the corpus may be critiqued, but certainly
not ignored. It has had an impact on the orientation of many scholars, within
and outside the discipline of history, and beyond the frontiers of India
Suggested Readings
Subaltern Studies, (ten volumes), published from1983 till 1999
Ranajit Guha, Elementary
Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India
David Hardiman, The Coming
of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India
(OUP, 1987)
Dipesh Chakravarty,
Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal ,
1890-1940 (OUP, 1989)
Gyanendra Pandey, The
Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India
(OUP, 1990)
Gyan Prakash, Genealogies
of Labour Servitude in Colonial India
Shahid Amin, Event,
Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922-1992, (OUP,1995)
Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist
Thought and the Colonial World - A Derivative Discourse (Zed/OUP 1986); and
The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post Colonial Histories (OUP,
1997)
Sumit Sarkar, Writing
Social History (OUP, 1998)
http://www.amanpanchayat.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=67:subaltern-studies&catid=28&Itemid=133
The law of killing: a brief history of Indian fascism
Also see:
Ranajit
Guha, India’s oldest living historian, starts his 100th year with a dazzling
legacy
An Open Letter to
the world on the Bangladesh crisis of 1971
Naxalites should lay down their arms and
challenge the ruling class to abide by the Constitution
Some
uncomfortable thoughts on 'urban naxals'
Maoism
and the philosophy of insurrection
Baldev Singh Mann: ‘My darling daughter!’
Dilip Simeon: Closing the Circle: On Revolution (Frontier, 2012)
B.R. Ambedkar's Pakistan or the Partition of India (Bombay, 1940,1945)
