18 Minority/Subaltern Studies

Kavya Krishna K. R.

Introduction

Subaltern Studies is a field of academic enquiry closely associated with Cultural Studies and Postcolonial studies. Subaltern Studies began as a trend in history writing in the 1980s against Colonial, Nationalist and Marxist historiography. The Subaltern Studies project followed an anti-essentialist ‘history from the below model’. The project tried to research the life and resistance of the masses than what happens among the elites. The term subaltern has allusion to the writings of the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). It refers to any person who is subordinated due to their community, caste, class, race, ethnicity, physiology, gender, sexual orientation etc.

This chapter intends to delineate the origin and development of Subaltern Studies from the formation of Subaltern Studies Collective in 1980’s to its growth as a field of study. The module is divided into seven sections: Section I: Subaltern Studies Collective, Section II: Tracing the history of the term ‘Subaltern’, Section III: Subaltern vs. Elite, Section IV: Subaltern Historiography as a critique of Colonial, Nationalist and Marxist Historiography, Section V: Two phases of Subaltern Studies Project, Section VI: Critique of Subaltern Studies and Section VII: Towards a Conclusion.

Section I: Subaltern Studies Collective.

The term ‘Subaltern Studies’ in its present theoretical sense began to be in vogue in academics with the publication of a series of edited volumes on modern Indian history beginning with Subaltern Studies: Writings on Indian History and Society in 1982. Ranajit Guha (1923- ) an Indian historian then working at University of Sussex was the series editor of first six volumes and the most influential figure behind the project. Until volume IX, Guha and eight South Asian scholars (Shahid Amin, David Arnold, Partha Chatterjee, David Hardiman, Gyanendra Pandey, Gaudam Bhadra, Deepesh Chakravarthy, Sumit Sarkar [who later left the group]) based in India, United Kingdom and Australia formed the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies series. The series has produced twelve volumes till date excluding independent works by scholars associated with the project. Subaltern Studies series began as interventions on modern Indian history using an anti-essentialist approach following the western ‘history from the below’ model.

Subaltern Studies Collective began as a result of the initiative of a group of South Asian scholars who are interested in studying the post-colonial societies with special focus on the Indian sub-continent has now got a global presence that goes beyond India or South Asia as an academic specialization. ‘Subaltern Studies’ which was once the name of a series on Indian History has now become a general term for a field of study closely associated with Postcolonial and Cultural Studies (Chakrabarty, 2000). Influence of Subaltern Studies series has crossed the disciplinary boundary of History too. The series made noteworthy contributions to contemporary critique of nationalism and history, Orientalism and Eurocentrism and thereby provided new insights and critical edge to various disciplines within Social Sciences and Humanities.

Section II: Tracing the history of the term ‘Subaltern’.

In later medieval England the term subaltern meant a servant or peasant. In seventeenth and eighteenth century England the term subaltern was used to designate soldiers of inferior rank or foot soldiers. The term started acquiring political and theoretical significance after it being used in an innovative and radical manner by the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notes. Gramsci used the term as a substitute for class; to refer to working class and oppressed class. He accorded the word theoretical and conceptual validity and found it as a term which can stand for different oppressed and subordinated sections in the society. When the term Subaltern was used by Ranjith Guha and his collective in the Indian context they used it in a manner similar to that of Gramsci. But in a broader sense; it was not just limited the working class. For Guha and the Sublatern Studies Collective the term meant all the sections of society who are oppressed, subordinated and voiceless for different reasons. In other words Guha used the term subaltern as opposed to ‘elite’.

Section III: Subaltern vs. Elite.

The term elite was used by sociologists even before Ranjit Guha. Guha used the conceptual category of elite and counter posed it with subaltern. For Ranjit Guha all those who are not elite are subaltern. He may define the term subaltern as all Indians minus elites. It leads to the question, who are elites? With reference to Indian history during the colonial period the British colonial authorities are elites; along with them the allies of the British, the Indian land lords, dominant upper caste groups, the English educated upper middle class and middle class who could become part of the bureaucracy etc. can be considered as elites. Anybody who is in a hegemonic position, who has hold of power or has the privilege of access to power and authority, can be considered as elite. All those who are marginalized, voiceless, oppressed and without an ‘agency’ due to their class, caste, religious, physiological, gender or sexual identities are subalterns. In that sense the working class, Dalits, Minorities, Disabled, Women, LGBT groups etc. can be considered as subalterns. Guha while explaining the manifesto of the subaltern studies collective made it clear that elite is not just a social class but the very process of writing history or historiography which existed before subaltern studies project is elitist. He identified two kinds of elitist historiographies in the Indian context; colonial historiography and nationalist historiography and also problematised Marxist historiography.

Section IV: Subaltern Historiography as a critique of Colonial, Nationalist and Marxist Historiography.

Subaltern Studies project emerged as a counter narrative to Colonial and Nationalist historiography; it also critiqued Marxist historiography to a certain extend. Some scholars even define Subaltern Studies as a trend in history writing which emerged in the 1980s against Colonial, Nationalist and Marxist historiography. Subaltern Studies project identified a blind spot in all the above mentioned historiographies; none of the historiographies take into account the politics of the people. In other words those histories failed to take into account the masses as the makers of their own history.

Each of the historiographies has their own master narratives. The Colonial historiography has as its base the ‘civilizing mission’. For the colonizers’, the colonized are uncivilized masses and the colonizers’ mission was to civilize and enlighten them. The aim of this historiography was to legitimize the British/European authority over the Indian-subcontinent by producing knowledge which constructs the natives as the ‘other’. So the civilizing mission formed the master narrative of colonial historiography. All the happenings during the Indian anti-colonial struggle were seen from the perspective of this master narrative in colonial historiography. Nationalist historiography emerged as a tool which can be effectively used in the ant-colonial struggle. Their aim was the formation of a nation state. So they tried to construct an identity for Indians and also tried to invent a glorious past prior to colonialism for India. So for bourgeoisie nationalist historiographies the master narrative was that; all the mass movements that happened during the colonial period were a progression towards the formation of a nation state. In other words it was politically integrated to the making of the nation state. The Marxist historiography has as its master narrative the formation of a socialist state. For them all the movements eventually lead to revolution and creation of socialist state. Even though the Subaltern Studies Collective to a large extend was on the left and used left theoreticians they were critical of the Marxist historiography of India. According to Marxist historiography the semi-feudal India got colonized by British; thereby got politicized and achieved independence. Subaltern Studies is critical of the focus of such a historiography on the political consciousness of the elites who in turn inspired the masses to rebel against colonizers. Marxists also considered tribal and other unorganized protests as pre-political and thereby failed to identify the involvement of the masses in the Indian freedom movement.

Subaltern Studies project points out that the elitist historiographies considered the movements of the masses, the peasants, the tribal’s, the working class or the masses or the ordinary people in general as ‘pre-political’ in nature and did not take into consideration the politics of the people. Subaltern Studies wanted to take into account the politics of the people. By politics of the people they meant the agency of the people. They wanted to establish the agency of the people/masses as makers of their own history. The project wanted to pose a counter narrative to the existing historiographies which showcased ordinary people’s history as something made for them by somebody else and the masses are mere pawns in a game or master narrative planned by a few who are leaders or those who are in possession of power and authority.

The subaltern studies project proclaimed that the existing historiographies never understood the people’s movement as a thing in itself or as self-substantiating. They never take into consideration the people’s movement as having an agency or identity of its own. People’s rebellions were read as part of the larger colonial, nationalist or socialist project. Subaltern studies started as an attempt to read people’s rebellion in itself. It tried to see what initiatives/ambitions were involved in the making of a rebellion by people.

Section V: Two phases of Subaltern Studies Project.

The Subaltern Studies project has produced twelve volumes till date. From an analysis of these works we can delineate two phases in the project. i) The first phase which was roughly till the sixth volume was concerned with the question of subaltern vs. elite. The attempt at this phase was to identify an autonomous domain of subaltern action; it attempted to explore the agency of the subaltern in relation to the elite. The first phase in a sense established an autonomous domain for the subaltern and also dissociated the domain from the bourgeoisie congress nationalist activities during the Indian independence movement. The subaltern studies initiatives made it clear that the congress nationalism was not the only form of resistance or nationalism existed in colonial India. Congress nationalism was seen as the dominant nationalism which tried to subjugate and assimilate the masses into their fold for the formation of a nation state. It tried to unfold the existence of popular domains of people’s rebellions which were in contradiction with the dominant nationalist thoughts and many a times it showcased opposition to the dominant thought.

To establish an autonomous domain of subaltern resistance through historiography was an extremely arduous task as it is difficult to locate sources about the subaltern in South Asian societies as the western notion of record keeping never existed here. There were no records which belonged to the people. If there were some materials available they were ‘fragmentary and episodic’. So they attempted to find sources and materials in popular, private and local sources. They took oral traditions as serious historical materials. They also tried to analyse the dominant records and to read them ‘against the grain’ and between the lines. The use of dominant official records and archives and reading them critically posed a theoretical and political problem. Many argued that tracing the voice of the subaltern through dominant narratives cannot bring out the subaltern voice to the forefront. The pre-discourse subalterns could not be located through the dominant narratives posed a theoretical problem in the first phase because the dominant narratives were of course either colonial or national historiography or archives. This constraint in a way paved way to a move towards discourse analysis which constitutes the second phase of subaltern studies project.

ii) The second phase of Subaltern Studies moved on to discourse analysis. Here the aim was not just unearthing the subaltern voices. It neither concentrated on subaltern action as such. Its aim was to critically engage and reread the dominant narratives. The initial phase was influenced by Gramsci, Marx and other Marxist theoreticians. In the second phase the readings were regulated by Post Structural, Post-Colonial and Post-Modernist theoreticians like Michel Foucault, Edward Said etc. If the first phase tried to show subalterns as makers of their own history second phase tried to bring to light the dominance which continues to be faced by subaltern sections in the society. So the later volumes discussed issues of caste, community, gender etc. For the same, the project has to move on to the realm of culture and politics and to the methodology of cultural analysis. It was a move towards interdisciplinarity rather than restricting the studies within the purview of History and Social Sciences. The essays on Hindu Muslim riots, Dalit Movements and gender issues bring to the forefront subject matters which were never seriously discussed by historians. These attempts coincided with the Dalit uprising of the 1990’s. And they have great significance while taking into consideration the rise in religious fundamentalism, atrocities against Dalits, women and sexual minorities. In a way the shift towards discourse analysis and the methodology of Cultural Studies reformulates the idea of the subaltern.

iii) Subaltern Studies and Minority Studies

The first volumes of Subaltern Studies focused on peasant and mass uprisings and rebellions and tried to prove the existence of an autonomous domain subaltern subjectivity. Within the second phase the last two volumes concentrated on the issues of minority categories whether in terms of gender, caste or community. The eleventh volume Community, Gender and Violence addresses a new range of issues related to community, gender and violence. The question of women and nation is explored especially in relation to minority communities in the volume. The twelfth volume Muslims Dalits and the Fabrication of History (2005) directly deals with the issue of minority communities in the subcontinent. It shows how the dominant histories of India have been constructed and how it dealt with the Muslim and Dalit subjects. The essays in the volume like Shahid Amin’s article “Representing the Musalman: Then and Now, Now and Then”, M.T Ansari’s article “Refiguring the Fanatic: Malabar 1836- 1922”, Milind Wakankar’s “The Anomaly of Kabir: Caste and Canonicity in Indian Modernity” etc. dealt with the Muslim and minority issue with proper material grounding and theoretical rigour. The eleventh and twelfth volume in a sense deals with minority issues.

Section VI: Critique of Subaltern Studies.

Subaltern Studies which radically brought to the forefront of academic and political debates the agency of the subaltern sections is not free from dissent and criticism about its methodology and aspirations. One such criticism is from Sumit Sarkar, a founding member of the collective who later on disconnected himself from the group. In his essay “Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies” he critiques the move of the project from social history to cultural history in the second phase. He criticizes the turn to Post Structuralist, Post- Modernist and Post Orientalist theories by abandoning the Marxist and empiricist foundation which was grounding the initial volumes. He points out that the Foucauldian way of ‘flight from the fact’ resulted in a movement away from the traditional material basis of history. Discourse is never free from hegemonic intervention is something not taken seriously is another critique he makes.

Vivek Chibber in his book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of the Capital (2013) provides what many scholars reviewed as the most comprehensive response to postcolonial theory focusing on the Subaltern Studies project. He says that the foundational arguments of the project are based on a series of analytical and historical misconceptions. His critique mounted on part of the radical enlightenment tradition claims that it is possible to affirm a universalizing theory without yielding to Eurocentrism or reductionism. He points out the possibility and necessity to conceptualize the South Asia/non-western societies using the same analytical lens that is used to understand the developments and movements in the west. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak a scholar associated with the project in her work A Critique of Post colonialism: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999) calls herself a critic of ‘metropolitan post-colonialism’. Romila Thapar has critiqued the methodology and approach of Subaltern Studies project. Subaltern Studies in a way encourages research into the minor details of what goes into the making of a movement, an event, an intension etc. In that sense it challenges broad historical generalization. So for Subaltern Studies or Cultural Studies analysis in general, each study is self-contained. And at the end there will be large number of well documented research works with underpinning political connection but without any outwardly visible cross connection.

Romila Thapar in her article “Interpretations of Indian History: Colonial, Nationalist, Postcolonial”(2000)points out that the attitude against generalization is problematic as for her completely avoiding generalization will lead to missing the complete picture. She says that not having a frame work of explanation relating to a central point to refer to leads to missing the big picture. She also disagrees with the axiom of the project that all readings are equally significant and no need to prioritize readings. According to her this makes the approach similar to nineteenth century historiography which believed that all sources are equal. But she agrees that the project greatly impacted the historiography of the third world and positively influenced comparative studies in the field of history internationally.

Section VII: Towards a Conclusion.

To conclude we can think about what were the attempts at providing a theoretical binding for the overall project of Subaltern Studies. Ranjith Guha has tried to provide an overarching theoretical and political amalgamation for the project right in his preface to the first volume itself. He tried the same in “Prose of Counter Insurgency” in volume two and in his work Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency (1983). Partha Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986) and The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993) also tried to theorize the project. The general characteristics of the subaltern studies project which the editorial collective tried to figure out can be summarized as follows. Their aim was to find an autonomous domain of the subaltern. They wanted to show that people were not looking forward to or just blindly following charismatic leaders like Gandhi, but in a way they were putting on their ambitions on to their leaders which many a time was conflicting with each other and it is evident in incidents such as Chauri Chaura movement of 1922 where the masses thought their wish for rebellion was in accordance with Gandhi but it was not (see, Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District Eastern UP, 1921-1922).

The subaltern domain was rooted in the traditional, territorial, regional and religious domains, while the elite domain was based on modern notions of politics and it followed party politics or ambition towards democracy. Further the subaltern domain was prone to violence as its method and the elite domain was subject to legalism as its method. In the subaltern mode of mobilization the protest was always spontaneous and elite mode of mobilization was scripted, planned and guarded. Subaltern mobilizations were horizontal in nature while elite mobilizations followed top leadership to masses model. while the above mentioned attempts are trying to find a structure for the project and posits two domains of the subaltern and elite, scholars like Sumit Sarkar has posited an in between position when he pointed out that these two domains are actually not separate as they are posited. According to him they are intersecting and the concept of ‘passive revolution’ can support the same. The elite where actually trying to absorb or take over the subaltern energy towards their own aim of making a nation state. The later phase of discourse analysis moved forward from the elite- subaltern to the question of tradition and modernity. The focus was more on the knowledge –power nexus in a Foucauldian sense and how those who are in power creates and sustains subalternity for marginalized sections of the society.

Subaltern Studies emerged as a trend in history writing about the Indian Sub-continent and South Asia posited rigorous challenge to existing historical scholarship following a history from the below model. It has crossed the disciplinary boundary of history and the geographical boundary of South Asia. It influenced the formation of Latin American.

Subaltern Studies Association in North America and critically influenced history writing in many postcolonial societies. Subaltern Studies which was once the name of a series of studies on Indian history has now become the name of a field of study which deals with questions of different kinds of marginalization.

References

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