Subaltern Communities Research Articles

Decolonizing New Testament Translation in the Indian Context: John 10.1–18 in the Satya Veda Pusthakam

This article analyses NT translation in the Indian context with a focus on John 10.1–18 in the Satya Veda Pusthakam (SVP), a Malayalam version of the Bible. The colonial context in which this translation was produced is first outlined, showing how this context and its accompanying ideology shaped approaches to translation. This led to a translation that does not reflect the culture or language of subaltern communities, but reinforces dominant class ideology in its adoption of English and Sanskritized style. These issues are illustrated through a closer analysis of John 10.1–18 in the SVP. Finally, the essay explores the ways in which translation can enable communication between cultures, and argues for a decolonized approach to biblical translation in the Indian context. The challenge of decolonization might continue to reshape NT studies in India as the indigenous and subaltern communities get involved in Bible translation and interpretation of the text.

Land‐based literacies in local naturecultures: Walking, reading, and storying the forests in rural Colombia

AbstractLand‐based literacies scholars have worked to expand understandings of literacies to include often marginalized cultures who understand literacy as resulting from human and more‐than‐human relations. In this article, we contribute to this broadening of literacies with an analysis of how nature influences the meaning‐making practices of rural, subaltern communities in the Global South. Our inspiration stems from indigenous scholars who have advanced indigenous and relational epistemologies, seeking to bridge the nature/culture divide that remains prevalent in Western thinking. The central question that guides this article is: How are Land‐based literacies produced through the felt and sensed relationships with nature, history and culture in the Callemar community? Drawing on micro‐analysis of participant‐generated video data from two walks with Colombian youth and adults from the Callemar community, we illustrate ways naturecultures, specifically the assemblages of Land, collective memory and cultural practices, produce Land‐based literacies. We describe Land‐ walking, including forest‐ and creek‐crossing practices, as literacies that require reading and meaning‐making with the Land, and that which allow individuals to relate to other beings and thrive in the changing landscape of their rural community. Our description and discussion of Land‐based literacies in this rural community poses important implications for informing pluriversal literacies pedagogies that draw on local knowledges and contexts to make literacy learning more relevant and equitable. Furthermore, we describe the relevance of Land‐based literacies for sustainable stewardship of the Land during times of drastic environmental change.

High-life in a high-rise: Governing urban marginality during COVID-19 in Colombo, Sri Lanka

This research study discusses urban regeneration projects and the impact of COVID-19 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The study population constitutes urban watta communities relocated to government owned, high-rise housing projects. This study investigates the state response during COVID-19 and the governance of marginality. The research methodology includes participant observation, a household survey, in-depth interviews, and community based participatory methods carried out between September 2019 to January 2021. The study examines formation and perpetuation of discourses regarding urban working-classes who are perceived as 'urban underclasses'. Despite relocation in high-rise housing projects and attempts to create modern, and upgraded living, the residents in high-rise housing projects constantly experienced marginality. Marginality stemmed from socio-historical, structural factors such as dehumanising discourses, the impact of urban development projects, differential determinants that characterised communities and methods of state control. This study uses difference as an important perspective through which urban subaltern communities and everyday life can be studied. Whereas this study demonstrates that the state exerts excessive control in governing subaltern classes, they were not passive victims resigning themselves to a marginal status. They also exerted agency and engaged in resistance against the state within the post-relocation setting.

Microhistory, Archaeological Record, and the Subaltern Debris

Abstract This article explores the challenges of translating the empirical data recorded in the microhistorical events documented in most archaeological sites into narratives that provide a deeper understanding of long-term historical processes. It specifically focuses on the importance of studying the history of subaltern communities through this microhistorical scale. Drawing on the concept of “subaltern debris,” the article proposes a new approach to analyzing archaeological deposits generated by the everyday life of subaltern communities. It argues that these deposits can offer valuable insights into the living conditions and agency of subaltern communities. The article presents two case studies from the late antique period in the Iberian Peninsula to illustrate the potential of this approach. It concludes by emphasizing the importance of recognizing the material agency of subaltern communities in reshaping historical narratives.

Unsettling Environmentalism

AbstractDecolonial ecological imaginations entail a critical interrogation of mainstream environmentalism to unmask and unsettle it. These reflections expose how mainstream environmentalism legitimizes and perpetuates the colonization of the Earth and subaltern and Indigenous communities. Mainstream environmentalism is a colonial project to perpetuate the interests of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. This calls for a new search for decolonial and alternative ecological reimagination, informed by the epistemologies and eco‐politics of the Indigenous and subaltern communities and other grassroots social movements. Decolonial ecological imaginations involve the task of contesting and unsettling settler colonialism, extractive/exploitative capitalism, white supremacy, and all ideologies and practices of domination and exclusion.

Health Beliefs and Practices Among Subaltern Women: An Ethnographic Account From Rural Telangana, India

Apart from biological factors, social determinants play a major role in shaping health beliefs and paving the way for various behaviours. Subaltern women, being the lowest strata of the caste hierarchy, have additional barriers to accessing modern healthcare and may be more likely to experience poor health outcomes due to a combination of social, economic and cultural factors. Structural violence represents a dynamic process that impedes an individual’s social, economic and biological potential, affecting both socially excluded, economically disadvantaged and historically marginalized subaltern communities. Social justice significantly influences individuals’ life prospects and health outcomes, with health disparities stemming from social disadvantage and inequality. Addressing disparities in health, the Health Gap underscores the importance of acknowledging the role of social determinants of health. Health equity entails enhancing the well-being of marginalized social groups and tackling the broader social determinants of health. The current qualitative study was conducted in three villages in the Nalgonda district of Telangana, India. In addition to focus group discussions and one-on-one interviews, the ethnography method was employed to capture subaltern women’s health beliefs and practices regarding food habits, puberty, menstruation, sexuality and sexual life, childbearing and childbirth, breastfeeding and the role of primary healthcare centres in promoting healthcare. Subaltern women experience double discrimination as members of a lower caste and a weaker gender, and access to healthcare, like other fundamental human rights, is a recurring issue. Many of them are impoverished and unable to afford contemporary medical care, forcing them to rely on the more cost-effective traditional model of healthcare. Despite being forbidden from accomplishing many things owing to a range of societal and age-old customary sanctions, modernization and state-owned institutional mechanisms are bringing about a good shift towards better health.

Iran’s water policy: Environmental injustice and peripheral marginalisation

Water exhibits various politico-economic dynamic. Water scarcity can lead to conflicts, and it lies at the core of Iran’s environmental crises. The literature on Iran’s water crisis indicates the effects of this issue in terms of multidimensional environmental degradation, community disintegration, and state-society and intercommunal conflict. Approximately 28 million of Iran’s 85 million residents reside in water-stressed areas, a situation identified as ‘water bankruptcy’. The water shortage is experienced differently across the country. The plateau’s central regions, home to Iran’s major industries, are where the worst water deficit is occurring. However, regions with abundant water resources have also been impacted. These regions – known as ‘donor basins’ – due to intensive and disproportional inter-basin water transfer and other engineering interventions deployed by the Government to deal with the water shortage of the central regions, suffer from a different form of water crisis. A condition of asymmetrical and conflictual power relations between the state and subaltern communities in Iran’s peripheral regions has been created. This paper argues that this constitutes environmental racism, characterised by multilayered impoverishment and unsustainable development among communities in the donor regions.

Queering history: palimpsestuous bodies and theirstories in Zen Cho’s The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water

ABSTRACT In her fantasy novella, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water (2020), transnational Malaysian writer Zen Cho agitates and disrupts Malaysia’s heteropatriarchal and ethnocentric history as well as Eurocentric LGBT discourses with the revisionary reinscriptions of gender and sexuality to give voice to decolonial theirstories, particularly those belonging to the minority and subaltern community of queer identities. Emphasising difference and heterogeneity, these reinscriptions not only critique and rewrite – effectively queering – Malaysia’s monolithic historical past and postcolonial present, but also reveal the palimpsestuousness of queer bodies as the discursive boundaries between history and fiction, real and fantasy, self and other, are deliberately blurred, even dismantled, in the intertwined narratives of masculinity and femininity, heterosexuality and homosexuality. Drawing on the intersections of queer and palimpsest, this essay moreover examines how the queering of history involves queer retrospection through the recuperation of forgotten or erased theirstories, notably the ‘queer’ religious discourse and history represented by the gender ambiguous and fluid Buddhist figure of Guanyin. By confronting a monolithic past, the novella ultimately illuminates the path for the speculation of queer futures.

Subaltern perspectives of developing communication campaigns: Re-examining the culture-centered approach in addressing health disparities

ABSTRACT A central component of the culture-centered approach is the co-development of communication infrastructures for health and wellbeing within subaltern communities. However, there is an absence in the representation of these infrastructures in esteemed journals. This is problematic for illuminating the tensions and complexities in bringing theory into practice from the perspective of community members. This study draws from two culture-centered projects to explore how communities make sense of the process of participating in building interventions, comprising 119 initial in-depth interviews with residents, 10 community advisory board focus groups, and 21 evaluative interviews. The residents’ narratives reveal a relationship between subalternity and distrust toward interventions delivered by providers outside of their community, emphasizing the need to create spaces of listening that anchor community relationships. The formation of relationships was crucial to the development of communication infrastructures, which continued beyond the study. The contributions to intercultural and international communication are discussed.

Environmental Burden in Everyday Lives of Dalits: A Case Study of Sanand, Gujarat

Under Buddhist philosophy, followed by Dalits and other marginalised groups, an organic relationship exists between environment, knowledge and society where natural resources are conceived as equal partners and their identity is enmeshed with these. However, this organic balance between environment, knowledge and society gets disrupted by certain kind of materialistic thinking which not only creates ecological imbalance but also social conflict, exposes people to a whole range of risks like dislocation, loss of livelihood, work burden for women, health issues, loss of culture to destruction of civil rights. Against this backdrop, this paper reflects on sustainable development and analyses environmental degradation caused by the proliferation of chemical and pharmaceutical industry by encapsulating how neoliberalism smartly appropriate caste system and its attendant inequality, resulting in pain and suffering of subaltern masses. Foregrounding the study in the four villages of Sanand Block, Ahmedabad district of Gujarat, this article discusses the politics of environmentalism, spells out ‘environmentalism of the poor’ and narrates the way subaltern communities manage to live with environmental burden.

The Subaltern Precincts of 'Kakkukali' by Francis Norona

This paper attempts to establish that Kakkukali' (Hop-Scotch) , a short fiction in Malayalam by Francis Norona is a proof of the existence of subaltern consciousness, praxis and agency. Mainstream historians and narrators have systematically submerged the social, political and cultural contributions of the subaltern communities into the larger rubrics like nationalism, freedom fight, feminism, marxism etc. Latin Catholic community ,a subaltern community in Kerala is represented in the story mapping the culture of a community through its language, life style and the way the main character constitutes the meaning of life.

“Our People Can’t Hold the Line!”

A protracted movement emerged in Kashipur in Southern Odisha in 1993 that stalled a bauxite mining project for over 18 years. It went through fragmentations and eventually petered out by the early 2010s. This paper aims to understand how and why the processes of capital accumulation through dispossession cause fragmentation of social movements and their eventual petering out. I analyse the collective strikes that the villagers engaged in during 2008–2010, paralyzing the company’s incipient construction work over a tumultuous nine months. Critically engaging with David Harvey’s concept of “accumulation by dispossession” (ABD) and Kalyan Sanyal’s concept of “jobless growth”, I argue that ABD processes entail protracted interaction of extractive capital, bureaucratic structures, ecology, and the movements of subaltern communities with existing divisions. Dispossession processes generate new fissures in which ownership of land or lack of it due to land acquisition becomes the central axis of cleavage, shaping the politics and outcomes of dispossession. I further reveal that ‘jobless growth’ is unachievable for a company that can push ahead only through the provision of precarious employment and such promises...

The Genocidal Trail of Agrarian Capitalism: Guarani–Kaiowa's Struggle for Survival

Although genocide is an expression commonly used today in relation to the dramatic challenges faces by indigenous peoples around the world, the significance of the Guarani–Kaiowa genocidal experience is not casual and cannot be merely sloganised. The indigenous genocide unfolding in the Brazilian State of Mato Grosso do Sul – Kaiowcide – is not just a case of hyperbolic violence or widespread murdering, but it is something qualitatively different from other serious crimes committed against marginalised, subaltern communities. Kaiowcide is actually the reincarnation of old genocidal practices of agrarian capitalism employed to extend and unify the national territory. In other words, Kaiowcide has become a necessity of mainstream development, whilst the sanctity of regional economic growth and private rural property are excuses invoked to justify the genocidal trail. The phenomenon combines strategies and procedures based on the competition and opposition between groups of people who dispute the same land and the relatively scarce social opportunities of an agribusiness-based economy. Many lessons must be learned and could directly contribute to improve democracy, justice and the rule of law in the country.

Lawyers as infrastructures: mediations, blockages, and new possibilities in grassroots movements

AbstractWhat roles do lawyers play when their own subaltern communities are mobilizing for justice? Drawing on the case of anti‐eviction mobilization on the island of Al‐Warraq in Egypt, this article investigates the infrastructural roles of community lawyers in grassroots movements. As their profession transformed into an underpaid and undervalued occupation, masses of lawyers became precarious professionals living subaltern lives. Living among the poor with the elite knowledge of the law enabled community lawyers to forge new relations between the grassroots and the elites, the streets and the courtroom, and farmers and the national media. Drawing on an ethnography of the movement, I posit that community lawyers operate as social infrastructures: liminal subjects in uncertain times, capable of generating new possibilities and social relations. As social infrastructures within their communities, they shape the opportunities for action, facilitating new modes of resistance while blocking others.

Village Songs and the Building of Community Culture: A Talk

Village Songs and the Building of Community Culture: A Talk

State, scarcity, and survival: A minor history of people and place in the Lower Bari Doab, Punjab

The progressive materialization of the modern state and capitalist agrarian production in the interfluvial uplands of Punjab was enabled by colonial ideologies of control over nature as progress. The colonial project of the transformation of the people and place in Punjab was built upon the imperial aesthetics of waste that imagined the local landscape as hideous and pastoral communities as “semi-barbarous.” These imaginaries justified the colonial project of technological control over nature through installation of hydraulic infrastructure and the political control of native communities as investments in cultivation and culture. These statist narratives of progress are built upon an elision of the voices of subaltern communities and their interactions with the modern state. Based on my ethnographic and archival works on pastoral Baloch tribes of the Lower Bari Doab region of Punjab, I argue that a different history emerges if traced from the perspective of the communities located on the margins of this hydrosocial assemblage. This is a minor history that does not privilege state as the protagonist of progress rather traces the stories of survival in the face of eco-scarcity. As the current environmental crisis accentuates the inherent instabilities of the hydrosocial assemblage in the canal colonies, it also reveals limitation of the narratives of control over nature as progress. In a world threatened by the anthropogenic climate crisis, the possibilities of a better future might emerge in curating the stories of survival against the histories of control.

Manifestation of female subjugation and sexual exploitation: An analytical study of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

The study underscores the challenges faced by racial subalterns in America, with Maya Angelou's renowned autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, providing detailed insights into the hardships endured by this community. Born during the Jim Crow Laws Era, Maya faced severe racial segregation, particularly evident in the racial animosities prevailing in Stamps, Arkansas, between Americans and subalterns (Blacks). Maya became a victim of patriarchal oppression, a consequence of her status as a subaltern and African American in a society predominantly controlled by men. The subjugation experienced by subaltern women restricted their freedom to pursue their dreams, subjecting them to domination by their counterparts. The shared inferior and marginalized status of African Americans in society serves as a thematic backdrop. Maya, however, transcended these challenges, breaking the metaphorical glass ceiling to become the voice of her racial subaltern community. Notably, she achieved the historic milestone of becoming the first subaltern woman to ascend to a position of prominence.

Literary and religious history from the middle: Merchants and bhakti in early modern North India

This article examines the hagiographical writings of two religious communities, that is, the Dadu Panth and the Niranjani Sampraday, in what is now known as Rajasthan, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in order to illuminate how their monastic and lay members, particularly merchants and ‘scribal’ communities, imagined their religious, social and political worlds. The role of merchant and scribal groups in the origin and development of such so-called ‘nirguṇ sant’ bhakti movements has been largely overlooked, the assumption being that these movements drew their following primarily from members of subaltern communities. Yet a close reading of these hagiographical sources reveals that merchants and scribes played a central role in shaping the theological and literary character of these movements, and in turn these movements reorganised the social and financial relationships within these mercantile communities. By focusing on such ‘middle’ groups—that is, groups that mediated intellectual, literary and economic exchanges between different spaces and institutions such as the monastery, the court and the bazaar—historians, as well as scholars of literature and religion, can gain insight into how merchant and scribal groups helped to re-form notions of the individual, community and polity in early modern North India.

Codex: Entangled Histories, Relational Methodologies, and Worlding Imaginaries: A Collaborative Review of Amitav Ghosh's Historical Fictions

Codex:Entangled Histories, Relational Methodologies, and Worlding Imaginaries: A Collaborative Review of Amitav Ghosh's Historical Fictions Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François, Turni Chakrabarti (bio), Abdur Rahoof Ottathingal (bio), Kirk B. Sides (bio), and Anuj Vaidya (bio) Entangled Histories, Relational Methodologies, and Worlding Imaginaries: A Collaborative Review of Amitav Ghosh’s Historical Fictions Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François to what extent does our approach to history and our definition of historical archives impact our understanding of the past and of its bearing on our present and future? How can we retrieve, imagine, or even chronicle the world's entangled histories—its infinite temporalities, porous geographies, and fluid ecologies—in opposition to the linear narratives and teleological historiographies forged by modern nations and communities? And how can writers, intellectuals, and scholars address the blind spots of prescribed methodologies, normative discourses, and established genres that largely circumscribe history, to think of the world in more inclusive terms? Considered by many as an Indian Ocean writer par excellence, Amitav Ghosh, in his literary works, historical fictions, and nonfictional texts, has long grappled with these questions, bringing to the fore the numerous commercial, cultural, or linguistic connections that have shaped the societies of this region. For that reason, the Codex feature of this special issue is dedicated to some of his prominent works, including In an Antique Land (1992), The Hungry Tide (2004), the Ibis trilogy (2008, 2011, 2015), and The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). Evincing the profoundly enmeshed, cosmopolitan, and creolized histories of the Indian Ocean world, Ghosh's works consistently challenge monolithic or unified accounts of history, making visible the material and immaterial traces of marginal and disenfranchised peoples—slaves, indentured servants, or low-caste communities—whose lives are still [End Page 24] excluded from the official archives. Stories of subaltern communities remain crucial to a more nuanced and expansive understanding of this oceanic region's cultural, political, economic, and ecological dynamics. By bringing to life such stories, Ghosh's novels, for instance, generate critical awareness about how the past itself is imagined, remembered, and told, by whom and for whom. By asking whose history counts as history and by challenging the very parameters that have confined the practice, telling, and recollecting of world histories, his works indeed invite us to reconsider the role of subjectivity and creativity in decolonizing historical accounts. In response to universalist discourses and approaches, his literary intervention thus reimagines the world we know through the decentering of perspectives and voices and the multiplication of worldviews and epistemologies. Ghosh's intellectual trajectory and his methodology as a historical fiction writer are themselves located at the crossroads of various disciplinary formations, including history, anthropology, and creative writing. Often characterized as unclassifiable or hybrid, his texts bring together oral traditions, myths and legends, written archives, works of fiction, and travelogues. As such, they reveal the dead zones of teleological reconstitutions of history; emphasize the limits of prescriptive methods and scientific rationalism; and underscore the critical importance of creativity and imagination in recovering the past, understanding the present, and envisioning the future. Because Ghosh's depiction of Indian Ocean relations, exchanges, and cosmopolitan expressions does not rely merely on the "hard" evidence of colonial, conventional, and written archives, it also sheds light on the long-silenced—albeit undeniable—contribution of unrecognized, marginal, or liminal communities and people who enhanced the cosmopolitan dynamics of this region. With its inventive take on the historical movements, circularities, and diasporic trajectories of the oceanic region, Ghosh's writing is profoundly relational, whether in its content, form, or approach. This collaborative review features discussions by scholars from various disciplines to emphasize better such relationalities, including comparative literature; South Asian studies; history; and arts, media, and performance studies. Through their original readings of Ghosh's oeuvre, these scholars illustrate how his works offer expansive ways of approaching the historical, cultural, and ecological entanglements of the Indian Ocean world. The feature begins with Turni Chakrabarti highlighting the writer's vision of "history from below" and Ghosh's "palimpsestic" approach to transnational movements and oceanic imaginaries. Then Abdur Rahoof Ottathingal examines Ghosh's creative engagement with archival and ethnographic material and [End Page 25] his...

Placement agencies for care-domestic labour: Everyday mediation, regimes of punishment, civilizing missions, and training in globalized India

AbstractSurvey data on Indian labour points to a rapid expansion of the care-domestic economy, currently the main employment avenue for urban women. Hitherto, studies on domestic service portray the unequal class structures of master–servant relationships and the escalating phenomenon of live-out and part-time hired help. This article shifts the focus to under-researched, yet increasingly visible, placement agencies, which regulate care-domestic markets and provide diverse services, from specialized ‘patient care’ to the training of subaltern communities. The article discusses how these service providers denote prominent shifts in skill sets, intra-household care arrangements, forms of medical assistance, and new (and old) mechanisms of authority. The ethnography expands our knowledge of everyday mediations around hiring and training between agencies, employers, and care-domestic workers in New Delhi. The article puts forward innovative conceptualizations of service provider approaches through juxtaposing the informal practices of local (or Indian) agencies with formalized and ‘civilizing’ agendas developed by Euro-American intermediaries. The formal–informal dichotomized framework of service provider relationships adds to critical scholarship that contrived dualisms which need historical scaffolding and nuanced engagement. I argue that, while informal and formal approaches appear markedly different for the care-domestic economy, they also overlap. Significantly, both approaches are unjustly weighted against the workers who lack the potential to democratize labour relations. Local agencies reinforce exploitative care-domestic relationships, while Euro-American intermediaries, who espouse modern values, formalization, and civilizing experiments, promulgate punitive regimes and stigmatized futures for their Indian subjects.