Subaltern History Research Articles

MULTIPLE, SHIFTING AND CONTESTED: DALIT WRITINGS AND DR. AMBEDKAR TODAY

Subaltern History is a very interesting mirror of the society and after being quiet for such a long time, when it speaks, it shatters many myths, many stereotypes, many positions, many perceptions, many established narratives, and viewpoints. The re-positioning of the Dalit- Buddhist equation and the role of New writings in Dalit Literature has provided a good platform to discuss the entire narrative of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar today. Dalits have been winning their battle against designator and gaining in form of reservation benefits from the days of British rule in India. By 1980s the Dalits included Sudras in their camp and began the united fight against Casteism with Bahujan identity and demanding a proportionate share in various fields. This, in turn, triggered sub-caste identity movements demanding respectable identity and equal share in fields of education employment and politics in India. Today identity politics is a special area of study attracting the attention of students, social scientists and social policy makers in India Identity politics can be defined as “the political arguments that focus upon the interest and perspectives of groups with which people identify”. This includes the ways in which people's politics may be shaped by aspects of their identity with the use of being a part of any social organizations like race, class, religion, gender, ethnicity, ideology, nation, sexual orientation, culture, information preference, history, musical or literary preference, medical conditions, professions or hobbies. Not all members of any given group are necessarily involved in identity politics.

Book review: John Solomon, A Subaltern History of the Indian Diaspora in Singapore: The Gradual Disappearance of Untouchability 1872–1965

John Solomon, A Subaltern History of the Indian Diaspora in Singapore: The Gradual Disappearance of Untouchability 1872–1965. London and New York: Routledge, 2016, 220 pp. (hardback). ISBN: 978-1-138-95589-9.

Managing Their Own Affairs: The Australian Deaf Community in the 1920s and 1930s by Breda Carty

Reviewed by: Managing Their Own Affairs: The Australian Deaf Community in the 1920s and 1930s by Breda Carty Robert Adam (bio) Managing Their Own Affairs: The Australian Deaf Community in the 1920s and 1930s, by Breda Carty (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2018, hardbound, 256 pages, $80.00, ISBN 978-1-944838-10-2) Previous publications on the history of the Australian deaf community have tended to be written by hearing people associated with schools for deaf children or deaf organizations, resulting in the subaltern history not being fully told. Burchett (1964), Flynn (1984, 2000), and Crickmore (2000) all wrote about organizations and services working with deaf people in Australian states, but their accounts have tended to feature hearing people as dominant figures and deaf people as a client and subaltern group. With the possible exception of Colefax (Colefax and Lawrence 1999), a deaf woman who published a biographical account of the establishment of the Australian Theatre of the Deaf, deaf women have also tended toward invisibility in the canon. This work deals with an almost-forgotten period in Australian deaf political history when deaf people, added by the leadership of strong and charismatic deaf and hearing individuals, rebelled against paternalism and charity in the form of deaf welfare organizations. However, these gains were temporary and disappeared during the wartime and postwar years. The first chapter sets the historical and social context of the work, including how the colonization of Australia by British and Irish settlers led to the establishment of missions or societies, staffed by both deaf and hearing people, and the beginnings of deaf education. In these organizations, some deaf people had leadership roles, such as caretakers, domestic staff, and collectors (a role that has not been fully [End Page 177] appreciated—society and mission newsletters were distributed by these deaf collectors who "found" isolated deaf children and directed them to the nearest school for deaf children). The second, third, and fourth chapters focus on events in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. Ernest Josiah Douglas Abraham is introduced in the second chapter and reappears throughout the book. Abraham worked as a missioner in Britain before emigrating to Australia to commence duties at the Adult Deaf and Dumb Society of Victoria in Melbourne. He soon set to work organizing the deaf community, and he established the Australasian Deaf and Dumb Association in 1904, modelling it after the British Deaf and Dumb Association and the National Association of Deaf Mutes in the United States. Carty also describes the fraught relationship between Abraham and J P Bourke, a late-deafened man who was at times an employee, at other times a critic of Abraham and his work (in chapter 5, we see Bourke banned from the Society). The third chapter focuses on events that led to the establishment of a breakaway organization in Sydney, New South Wales. This is the first conflict between benevolent organizations and independent-thinking deaf people that Carty narrates, and was characterized by larger movements of deaf people. Herbert V. S Hersee, who was a son of deaf parents and had worked as a missioner in Portsmouth, England, was the leader of this movement, which resulted in the establishment of the New South Wales Association of Deaf and Dumb Citizens. The following chapter focuses on events in Brisbane that were inspired by the events in Sydney. In this case, John M'Caig Paul, also a son of deaf parents who had worked as a missioner in Scotland, led the movement. The Queensland Mission had a paternalistic approach to deaf people, who were often referred to as "boys" and "girls." Consequently, deaf people in Brisbane formed the Queensland Deaf and Dumb Citizens Reformed Association as a breakaway organization. Chapter 5 discusses the personality cult that arose around Abraham, who was able to variously reward or punish deaf people. Carty notes that: It is possible to use language skill (especially minority language skill) as a way of infiltrating communities, accessing private information, and making those who use the language feel exposed and vulnerable. [End Page 178] Such privileged knowledge can, in the wrong hands, become a tool of oppression, a weapon—and Abraham provides a good case study of...

ГЛОБАЛЬНА ІСТОРІЯ, ВСЕСВІТНЯ ІСТОРІЯ І ГЛОБАЛІЗАЦІЯ

This paper is intended to describe and discuss the major concepts of global history, and to elucidate connections between global history, world history, and globalization. The research reveals that global history is a field of study and a methodology of historical research. These two concepts supplement each other. As a field of study global history is understood in two ways – a form of world history, based on some methodological principles, and a history of globalization. Global history appeared in 1980-1990s as a reaction on globalization, and it was influenced by its different concepts. Debates on globalization impacted world history, its themes and methods of research. Those world historians, who accepted the «global turn», began to practice global history. For the reason, the terms «global history» and «(new) world history» may be used as synonyms. A part of historians understand global history as a history of globalization. However, this definition is disputable because of numerous concepts of globalization and the absence of consensus on the issues. As a methodology global history consolidates different approaches, such as world systems theory, postcolonial history, transnational history, subaltern history, imperial history, and others. They share similar principles that include a rejection of Eurocentrism, an understanding of the past as an integrated unit, interdisciplinary approach, and a focus on connections, interactions and mutual influences that transcend borders (national, cultural, and others). Global history prefers some specific research topics that are trans-national and trans-cultural in nature, because in these cases it has the strongest explanatory power. However, as a methodology it can be applied to different scales of human experience, including events and processes at local, national, and regional levels by studying them from a wider, global perspective.

Not Isolated, Actively Isolationist: Towards a subaltern history of the Nilgiri hills before British imperialism

Not Isolated, Actively Isolationist: Towards a subaltern history of the Nilgiri hills before British imperialism

Odile Moreau and Stuart Schaar, editors. Subversives and Mavericks in the Muslim Mediterranean: A Subaltern History.

Odile Moreau and Stuart Schaar, editors. Subversives and Mavericks in the Muslim Mediterranean: A Subaltern History.

SOCIAL REFORM MOVEMENT FOR EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN IN 19TH AND 20TH CENTURY INDIA: A STUDY OF PANDITA RAMABAI

In recent times there has been a great interest in the history of women and gender relations in India. The rise of subaltern history has led to a renewed awareness of women’s role in history. Important women have played a very prominent role in the empowerment of women in India. Pandita Ramabai was one such woman. She was a pioneer in the field of women’s education and reform work for widows. The life and work of Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922) is immensely important today for understanding the social and religious reform movement in India. The research motivation was to study the mammoth contribution of strong women who have been relegated to the footnotes of history. The objective of this research is to glean details of the contribution of Pandita Ramabai in this regard. Another objective is to examine the magnitude of her work in the socio-religious milieu in which she operated. The methodology, which I have used, is both primary and secondary. I have referred to the books by eminent scholars and I have visited the Pandita Ramabai Mukti Mission at Kedgaon and had the privilege to access the works of Pandita Ramabai in the Archives of the Pandita Ramabai Mukti Mission. The findings of this paper reveal what a pioneer Pandita Ramabai was in the arena of women’s emancipation. The Research Outcome shows that Ramabai is a very important example of a woman’s voice, speaking fervently on the ways in which she saw men as having silenced and subdued Indian women

En transit ou à destination? Le Black Bazar des écrivains migrants africains

Abstract Black Bazaar is a real-life satire. Its narrator-author was called Fessologue, rendered ‘Buttologist’ in the English translation. He advanced polemical views about the lives of African immigrants in France. In the absence of an all persons fictitious disclaimer, since Fessologue hails like Mabanckou himself from the ‘little Congo’ and that many satirized characters are based on actual contemporary writers, this article analyses the ‘migritude writers’ through Black Bazaar, the identity novel. Drawing on Bhabha’s (2003, 2012), the paper focuses on the potential of African narratives to properly talk of the subaltern history of francophone African writers and the evolution of their identities across the margins of Paris.

Not Isolated, Actively Isolationist: Towards a subaltern history of the Nilgiri hills before British imperialism*

AbstractThe Nilgiri hill communities have for a long time been the focus of anthropological inquiry, though they have rarely been the focus of historical inquiry that delves more deeply into the past than the colonial period. And, while the fields of history and anthropology have moved beyond tropes of primitive and timeless, our studies of those formerly so-called ‘timeless primitives’ have remained stuck in time. I argue, therefore, for an interdisciplinary modified Subaltern Studies approach, integrating data from anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and genetics, to develop alongue duréesocial history of the Nilgiri hills. For the Nilgiri communities, as with other tribal communities, narratives about their past have tended to emphasize their isolation until the modern period. In this article, drawing together data from several disciplines, I argue that the communities of the Nilgiris, especially the Toda, so frequently held up as examples of cultural isolation, were not truly isolated, neither from neighbouring tribal communities, nor from the states and empires of the plains below. I argue that the maintenance of distinctive religious, subsistence, and linguistic practices, despite contact with a wider world, is evidence of an active process of isolationist group formation/maintenance and resistance to other ways of being.

Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and the Specter of Universalism

Following recent debates between Vivek Chibber and leading postcolonial theorists, I probe into what is missing in these exchanges. I focus on the figure of the ‘tribal’ in modern India in Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India and Alpa Shah’s In the Shadows of the State, both of which claim to offer emic perspectives on subaltern politics and history. Yet both works, despite their undeniable differences, display a striking universalism that puts them, paradoxically, in the company of Chibber. This universalism, which we may call the resisting subject, is about the Other and about us simultaneously, the former constituted by the latter as an abstract object of analysis and as a key symbol of intellectual vanguardism. Are we not better off abandoning such universalisms and searching for ways in which Marxist theories of culture can be melded with postcolonial theories of capitalism?

IRANIAN HERESIOGRAPHY

This essay is a review of The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (2014), the last book that Patricia Crone wrote before she died, as well as an overview of her career and a tribute to her as a great historian of Islam. In Crone's subaltern history of the Persian plateau, the “nativist prophets” are a series of Iranian divines, seers, and hooligans whose resentment against Arab domination was expressed in recourse to pre-Islamic Persian ideals and beliefs. Islamic orthodoxy was undefined in the early eighth century, Crone shows, and the law had not yet entered every corner of daily life. There was, moreover, no clerical class at the time to correct heresiarchs on the fringes of the empire. Hence, according to the reviewer, one can easily imagine the situation as Crone does, with the truths of the new faith, in the eastern extremities of the caliphate, mixing with the Zoroastrian, Christian, and Manichaean truths already rooted there. Crone bleeds the categories of “Islamic” and “pre-Islamic” into each other, and thus her history is composed less of blocks of time and well-defined identities than of mutable compounds of belief and usage. The reviewer argues that Crone's sense of an unruly proliferation of popular beliefs is confirmed by the latest archaeology, and then he closes with an extended meditation on the relevance of this early Arab-Persian divide to the contemporary political situation of Islam and the Middle East.

Rethinking national temporal orders: the subaltern presence and enactment of the political

AbstractHow the past is remembered is fundamental to the production and reproduction of postwar sovereign political power. However, Internation Relations’ (IR) explicit interest in the practices of remembrance, and particularly in time remains a relatively new one. This article seeks to show how Jacques Rancière’s discussion of temporality, subaltern history, and politics – which allows the study of parallel and enmeshing temporal universes – contributes to the IR literature on time. In this view, when speech is acquired by those whose right to speak is not recognised they can produce temporalities that disturb hegemonic representations of time constellations and reorganise the nation’s relationship to its past. The article analyses the moment of Kaisu Lehtimäki’s telling her war story in public, and understands it to be a material and symbolic event that shatters the hegemonic distribution of the Finnish postwar national history and truth.

The Archive, the Subaltern, and the Archive of Subaltern History

The Archive, the Subaltern, and the Archive of Subaltern History

Amitav Ghosh and the Uses of Subaltern History

The interface between history and fiction has been an area of rich potential for the postcolonial novelist in South Asia and this is evident in the practice of many novelists from the region who have used historical material as backdrop but have also used fiction to comment on recent events in their countries. In this paper I examine the work of Amitav Ghosh as offering a fictional method that has evolved out of his immersion in subaltern historical practice and one that successfully bridges the gap between these two genres. I show this through his deployment of historical material in the three novels, The Shadow Lines (1988), The Glass Palace (2000) and The Hungry Tide (2004), where Ghosh is not simply ‘using’ the subaltern method but pointing to the possibilities of reparation. Ghosh adopts a complex inversion of the subaltern method that involves two processes: one, the selection of small, neglected events from the national story in a concession to subaltern practice –the little narrative against the grand; and two, the neglect by the narrative of some aspect of these stories. He does this by choosing his historical area carefully, keeping some part of it silent and invisible and then meditating on silence as it is revealed as a fictional and historical necessity. I suggest that Ghosh, by retrieving and giving place/voice to the historically repressed event in the fiction, achieves a swerve from simply ‘righting the record’ and releases the marginal as a referent in the present. Such fiction enters the realm of intervention in public discourse, or carries the potential, by introducing considerations that create public consciousness about historical injustices, successfully ‘using’ subaltern history.

Provincial Epic

Provincial Epic Supriya Chaudhuri (bio) The Tale of Hansuli Turn Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay Ben Conisbee Baer, Trans. Columbia University Press www.cup.columbia.edu 408 Pages; Print, $54.99 Historians of the novel (whether in the West or in India) emphasize the genre’s urban beginnings, and its links to the culture, of the emerging metropolis. And certainly the modern experience of city life, with its crowds, clamor, anonymity, and disruptive encounters—what Walter Benjamin called the Chockerlebni—appears to have shaped the sensibility of the novelist in most traditions. Paradoxically, however, the novel is not an urban form in terms of content. Almost as a reaction to the conditions of its emergence, it seeks to validate itself by putting down roots in the countryside, in provincial and village society, even in the experience of wilderness or desolation. This is as true of the European novel in the eighteenth century as it is of the American novel in the nineteenth, and, in its global travels, the genre continues to manifest the unresolved tension between city and country that characterizes the literature of our modernity. In India, the nineteenth-century novel is a product of the colonial encounter, but it develops a sustained critique of what Fredric Jameson described as “that immense process of transformation whereby populations whose life habits were formed by other, now archaic, modes of production are now reprogrammed for life and work in the new world of market capitalism.” This process, with its dangers, hardships, and tragic histories of loss and recuperation, is a central concern of the great novels written in Bengali and set in eastern India in the first half of the twentieth century by a trio of Bandyopadhyays (not related to each other): Bibhutibhushan, Tarashankar, and Manik. Together, with such contemporaries as Advaita Mallabarman and Satinath Bhaduri, they write of village, peasant or fisher communities in rural Bengal and Bihar at a time of transition and change: communities unsettled by migration to the city, wasted by poverty and exploitation, and racked by natural disasters. In so doing, they produce what might be regarded as variants on the “provincial epic,” drawing less upon master-narratives of the nation than on community memory, folk-narrative, and subaltern history, and combining a distinctively modernist social realism with the lyric and epic strains of their material. American readers may not be as familiar with these writers as the range, depth and complexity of their works merit. This is largely a failure of the enterprise of postcolonial translation, which has not done justice to the “immediate precursor,” that is, the great modernist literature produced in India in the 1930s and 1940s. That imbalance is now being redressed, and Ben Baer’s remarkable translation of Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s Hansuli Banker Upakatha (The Tale of Hansuli Turn, 2011) will introduce a new generation of readers to a writer whose major novels (with the exception of this one) have still not been adequately translated into English. Yet Tarashankar’s work has resonances with American fiction of the same period— Faulkner, Steinbeck, or Zora Neale Hurston— though this is not so much as a matter of cross-cultural influence as of the parallel developments of global modernism. If readers in the West have felt curious about Tarashankar or his contemporary Bibhutibhushan, this may be because they inspired the globally reputed modernist cinema of Satyajit Ray, whose “Apu” trilogy was based on novels by Bibhutibhushan, while his Jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958) and Abhijan (The Expedition, 1962) drew on short stories by Tarashankar. The Tale of Hansuli Turn first appeared in a much shorter form in 1946 and underwent revisions and expansions right up to 1951. Thus, as Ben Baer notes in his introduction, it straddles the critical phase of India’s accession to political independence in 1947, from the violence of its Partition to the adoption of its Constitution. Dedicating the book to his friend and mentor, the poet Kalidas Ray, Tarashankar presents it as a tale of “Rarh,” a region of western Bengal containing the writer’s own district of Birbhum through which the River Kopai of the novel flows. The novel’s opening pages, vividly describing the Kopai...

Subaltern Studies in Retrospect and Reminiscence

This essay aims to provide a context for the intellectual project of ‘subaltern history’ and the associated series, Subaltern Studies, by undertaking a retrospective description and evaluation of the project and by drawing on the history of Dipesh Chakrabarty's personal involvement in it. It also attempts to outline some of the limitations of the original conception of the project as well as highlight some of its more enduring legacies.

Hearing the inaudible experimental subject: Echoes of Inaudi, Binet's calculating prodigy.

Historians of psychology have traditionally focused on ideas (intellectual history), the "great men" who produced them (an older style of biography sometimes called "hagiography"), or-more recently-the influence of the contexts that shaped them (social and cultural history). A still more recent approach is to bring in those invisible subjects whose experiences have previously been ignored, most often through histories focusing on the discipline's forgotten women or minority contributors: "history from below" (subaltern history). A variation on this was popularized in the history of psychiatry (viz., "patient voices") and has since been carried into the history of psychology (e.g., "feminist voices"). The latest innovation is to focus on what Jill Morawski has referred to as "the discipline's experimental subjects." (These are the collective done-to, rather than the doers, of psychological research.) This history is one of those: an attempt to look behind Alfred Binet to find an influence that shaped his work. The purpose is thus to "give voice" to this unheard-from subject-the until-now inaudible Jacques Inaudi (including excerpts from newspaper interviews and translations from his recently discovered autobiography)-and at the same time advance Morawski's historiographical project. We then get a glimpse of what it was like to be a child prodigy in France in the 1880s, as well as what securing scientific patrons could do for one's prospects. By focusing specifically on Binet's unheard-from experimental subject, we are also afforded new perspectives of the history of late-19th century French psychology (reflecting another emerging interest, "international history"), and we gain new insights into the prehistory of contemporary Binet-style intelligence testing.

The Emergence of Islamic Liberation Theology in South Africa

AbstractThere is a growing interest in Islamic liberation theology today, and seminal authors such as Ali Shariati, Alighar Ali Engineer (1984, 1990), Farid Esack (1984, 1997), and Hamid Dabashi (2008) have developed its central commitments. In South Africa the earliest representative text was the ‘Review of Faith’ (1984) by Farid Esack, used by the Call of Islam (est. 1984) for cultivating personal piety and conscientization (critical consciousness) against apartheid. Based on recent interviews, unpublished manuscripts, and published works, this article demonstrates how Islamic liberation theology emerged in the political praxis of Muslims against settler colonialism and apartheid. In this subaltern history, political Islam as political praxis and not state building generated a unique discursive space for an Islamic liberation theology to emerge within the confluence of two ideological paths: those of humanism and Islamism.

The Age of Revolution in the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal, and South China Sea: A Maritime Perspective

AbstractThis essay explores the history of empire and rebellion from a seaborne perspective, through a focus on convict-ship mutiny in the Indian Ocean. It will show that the age of revolution did not necessarily spread outward from Europe and North America into colonies and empires, but rather complex sets of interconnected phenomena circulated regionally and globally in all directions. Convict transportation and mutiny formed a circuit that connected together imperial expansion and native resistance. As unfree labour, convicts might be positioned in global histories of the Industrial Revolution. And, as mutinous or insurgent colonial subjects, they bring together the history of peasant unrest and rebellion in south Asia with piracy in south-east Asia and the Pearl River delta. A subaltern history of convict transportation in the Indian Ocean thus has much to offer for an understanding of the maritime dimensions of the age of revolution.

In Midnight's Children, the Subalterns Speak!

My main point in this article is to suggest that even though the subalterns “do not speak directly in archival documents which are usually produced by the ruling classes” (Chakrabarty, “Small History” 478), they speak nonetheless in bits and traces within the elite discourses. Wherever the elite speak, the subaltern speaks as well because “supplementarity” is the condition of their possibility.1 “Man is aristocratic,” Antonio Gramsci argues, “because he is the servant of the soil” (80). Just like other structural opposites, the subaltern constitutes the elite not by being outside the domains of modern knowledge production but by inhabiting them. It is, therefore, hard to imagine the one without imagining the “other.” I do not at all mean to suggest, however, that the subalterns are able to speak for themselves or to suggest that the intellectuals’ role is now over, but to submit that there is a more complicated nexus between the rulers and the subalterns than it is often thought. In his article “The Impossibility of Subaltern History,” the critic Gyan Prakash argues that the subaltern refuses to be outside modernity, and the discourse that puts him or her outside history is indicative of the will of those who practice such exclusionary discourse. He further contends,