Subaltern Studies Project Research Articles

“Subaltern Studiesand the Transition in Indian History Writing”

AbstractUmesh Bagade’s historic critique of the caste blindness of the Subaltern Studies project retraces its emergence as a criticism of the Nationalist and Marxist schools of Indian history. He shows how the subaltern historians borrowed Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “subaltern” in order to retain a broadly Marxist framework without “class” but discarded the crucial Gramscian emphasis on oppression and economic exploitation. They grievously misread, confused, or omitted caste as a “system” when they constructed their model of the subaltern as subordinate but autonomous. The caste system functioned as a graded inequality with close links to patriarchy in which the lower castes were oppressed, exploited, and subordinated rather than autonomous. A homogenized “subaltern” status thus lumped the oppressed lower-caste peasants and the tribal peasantry with upper-caste peasantry. It was not acknowledged that the “solidarity” that expanded the base of subaltern revolt was achieved through coercion of the lower castes and women. The subaltern cultural “consciousness” of caste Panchayats, which was central to the project’s epistemology, was governed by Brahmanical religion and culture. The kinship relations that comprised peasant solidarities were built on endogamous caste practices. Predictably, the Subaltern Studies project found a close affinity with postmodernism and eschewed the question of emancipatory politics. The project therefore excluded anticaste mobilizations from the purview of “subaltern revolts” and simultaneously rejected the need for a comprehensive historical interpretation in which the caste system and patriarchy could be analyzed and opposed. In exposing the biases and lacunae of subaltern historiography, Bagade provides a clinical observation of history with an eye on history’s ability to influence reality. He shows the path that was not taken, which anticaste scholarship is now forging.

Guest Editor’s Introduction: Critical Philosophy of Caste and Race

Guest Editor’s Introduction: Critical Philosophy of Caste and Race

The Subaltern in the Ibis Trilogy

Are the stories of the subaltern just as important as those of our national heroes and leaders, who are considered architects of our nation? How does one define the subaltern? What is the Subaltern Studies project? Does the charge of elitism in the historiography of Indian nationalism hold water? How does the Ibis Trilogy by Amitav Ghosh tackle these issues surrounding the subaltern and their representation in our national history? How does he redefine the nation for us through a multidimensional perspective? What are the historical strategies employed by Ghosh, to this end?

‘Walking with the Subalterns’: Infrastructural imaginations and ways of dialogic interpretations and representations

This paper foregrounds the work of the labourer in infrastructural projects. It draws upon over 6 years of ethnographic study with road construction labourers in the upper Himalayas positioning them as subaltern subjects within discourses of national development. While the subaltern studies project of the 1980s emphasized the ‘writing back into history’ of the non-elite, primarily peasants, tribal populations and women who too contributed to the imagination of the nation; at the contemporary moment where infrastructure defines national development we need to revisit the subaltern project to draw attention to the forgotten labourers who literally construct the nation and its infrastructure. After arguing for recognition of the labour as intrinsic to infrastructural and national constructions, I discuss possibilities for a dialogic engagement with the subaltern. Pushing the debates within subaltern geographies on the politics of representation, I argue that perhaps the way forward is not about giving voice but about making space.

Dominacja bez hegemonii – pojęcie władzy w studiach postkolonialnych szkoły Subaltern Studies

Subaltern Studies is a research project that has been created in the early 80’s and is still active. It was formed around the Subaltern Studies publishing series, which has up until now ten volumes. It gained worldwide recognition with the entry into the American academic world by the publication of Selected Subaltern Studies in 1988 with the preface of the then world-renown post-colonial studies theorist, Edward Saïd. The selection was made jointly by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Guha is considered the “founding father” of the group, while Spivak is the most recognizable character whose essay Can the subordinates speak? gained the status of a canonical text. His representatives and representatives lecture in a number of world-renowned universities. In my article I analyze concept of power in Guha’s book Dominance without hegemony, recognizing it as a representative example of postcolonial theory of the Subaltern Studies project. I also present the criticism of Guha’s concept of power developed by American sociologist Vivek Chibber, according to which the thesis formulated by Guha about the “specifically Indian” road to capitalism (“domination without hegemony”), understood as an unsuccessful formation of democratic power, contrasted with this western successful road, is a typical form of power under capitalism. A typical form of democracy in capitalism is dominance based on the systematic exclusion of the working class from the power structures, this exclusion does not indicate the non-existence of the working class, but only that it is subjected to class domination.

Limits of the Universal: The Promises and Pitfalls of Postcolonial Theory and Its Critique

AbstractThis article seeks to reassess the potential merits and weaknesses of the Subaltern Studies project through the prism of Vivek Chibber’s much-publicised and controversial bookPostcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. By critically examining Chibber’s work, the article aims to better pinpoint exactly what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ with the Subaltern Studies project, while drawing out some productive points of engagement between Marxism and postcolonial theory more generally. In particular, we argue that an understanding of the origins of capitalist modernity remains a relatively unexplored omission within postcolonial thought that problematises their broader project of ‘provincialising Europe’. Against this backdrop, the article explores the affinities between Leon Trotsky’s notion of uneven and combined development and postcolonialism, demonstrating how the former can provide a theoretical solution to the problem of Eurocentrism that the Subaltern Studies project correctly identifies but inadequately conceptualises.

The wageless life of the subaltern

ABSTRACTOne of the most striking legacies of the Subaltern Studies project has been the innovative methodologies and archives that it has mobilized to articulate the singular position of the subaltern outside the hegemonic terms of representation. Yet in its sweeping classification of non-hegemonic social groups and classes, Subaltern Studies has often tended to elide the precise economic determinants that define the subaltern as a class, and thereby foreclose the forms of agency that are available to people who occupy such singular positions of radical alterity that cannot be identified in hegemonic terms. Spivak’s deconstructive rethinking of the labour theory of value enables us to consider how the body of the gendered subaltern performs an important economic function in the contemporary global economy. But to what extent can such a theory account for the economic conditions of people dwelling in the slums and shantytowns of postcolonial cities, or what Michael Denning has aptly called the wageless life of the global poor? And how might we begin to address the gendered dynamics of wageless life? Through a reading of Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Bamako (2006), this essay considers how the film’s juxtaposition of a fictional courtroom narrative in which the World Bank is put on trial and the everyday lives of characters who populate the courtyard in which the courtroom is situated raise questions about the limitations of the law and civil society to alter the socio-economic conditions of wageless life. With reference to Gayatri Spivak’s reflections on the relationship between the subaltern and the economic policies of global financial institutions the essay suggests that the narrative structure and mise-en-scène of Bamako offer a means of addressing the global economic conditions as well as the power relations that circumscribe the agency and voice of the subaltern.

The Literary History of World‐Systems, I: Marxist Lineages

AbstractThis essay is the first of a two‐part series on the use of world‐systems theory in literary studies. It argues that the recent popularity of world‐systems theory among literary scholars has raised important questions about how we practice literary history. Appeals to a more “global” configuration of world literary space seem to promise a more inclusive literary history, but world‐systems theory's expansive focus also clashes with literary studies' traditional definitions of cultural activity. In order to investigate this tension, the essay begins by examining the birth of world‐systems theory. It shows how world‐systems theory grew out of a number of intersecting currents in academic scholarship, including Marxist economics, dependista theory, and Annales historiography. The essay then proceeds to trace literary studies' earliest engagements with world‐systems theory. As I show, these initial engagements took place within two distinct critical traditions: (1) in the Subaltern Studies project, which diagnosed intellectual production as an effect of the global division of labor; and (2) in Jamesonian Marxism, which attempted to map literature onto the world‐system under the aegis of a leftist Hegelianism. The essay concludes by analyzing how these projects have helped to redefine the nature of the relationship between literary production and economic systems.

Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital by Vivek Chibber (review)

Vivek Chibber. Postcolonial Theory and Specter of Capital. London; Verso, 2013. Pp. xii, 306. US $29.95. The call of Subaltern Studies Project, formed by Ranajit Guha in 1982 and influenced by Marxist historical practice, to recover a bottom up historiography or from below has had an important influence postcolonial studies. In his Postcolonial Theory and Specter of Capital, Vivek Chibber recognises that [t]he truly innovative dimension of Subaltern Studies, then, was to marry popular history to analysis of colonial and postcolonial (6). Indeed, focus how individuals and groups on ground rather than their political and social elites have experienced capitalism has moved beyond India and other parts of South Asia to postcolonial world more broadly. Chibber opens with assertion that my central concern in this book is to examine framework that postcolonial studies has generated for historical analysis and, in particular, analysis of what was once called Third (5; emphasis in original). Taken as a whole, study argues that Subalternist theorists do not answer very question they raise--namely, how entry of capitalism into colonial world affected evolution of its cultural and political institutions (25). The first chapter sets out main argument of Postcolonial, which is that non-West should be conceptualised and understood through an application of same analysis and evaluation that is used to understand West. (I use terms the and the nonWest throughout this review because they are ones Chibber himself uses.) Chibber asserts: [i]nstead of being entirely different forms of society, West and non-West ... turn out to be variants of same species. Further, if they are indeed variations of same basic form, theories generated by European experience would not have to be overhauled or jettisoned, but simply modified. (23) Chibber draws and disputes works of Subaltern Studies theorists, primarily Ranajit Guhas Dominance without Hegemony (1997), Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe (2000), and Partha Chaterjee's Nationalist Thought and Colonial World (1986). Although Subaltern Studies has been criticised since its establishment over thirty years ago, Postcolonial departs from existing treatments (20) of Subaltern Studies because the claims for a fundamental difference with reference to capital, power, and agency are all irredeemably flawed.... The main thrust of book, then, is to elucidate failure of arguments from difference, so central to postcolonial theory (22). As such, Chibber challenges what he perceives to be two principal claims of Subaltern Studies, claims widely accepted and deployed throughout postcolonial theory. First is claim of difference, idea that there are very profound disparities in culture, politics, and sociology of West and non-West during colonial and postcolonial periods. Second is critique of Eurocentrism, claim that theories originating from West complicate and confuse instead of illuminate non-West by conveying onto it models that are inaccurate and misleading. …

Subalternité et histoire globale

Sumit Sarkar, one of the leading Indian historians of his generation, participated in the Indian-British Subaltern Studies Collective that established new standards in the historiography of colonialism in the 1980’s. In this Interview, Deborah Cohen and Urs Lindner ask him about the achievements and oversights of the Subaltern Studies project, the prospects of global history, Marx’s eurocentrism and the problem of religion.

Redistribution and recognition: land reforms in Kerala and the limits of culturalism

The most important achievements of the Communist governments in Kerala, India were the implementation of the land reforms and the legislation of the Agricultural Workers' Act. Using ethnographic and archival research based on these events and the processes through which they became a reality, this paper will question some of the fundamental assumptions of the influential Subaltern Studies project and postcolonial theory like the positing of governmentality and passive revolution as the general characteristics of ‘Third World’ societies' experience with modernity. It will argue that, more importantly, their culturalist framework, with its gross ignorance of class and material concerns, is hardly adequate to understand the fusing of the aspirations of recognition and redistribution or the material and cultural that characterizes the struggles by the peasantry and agrarian labor, and their synthesis by the Communist Party. Despite their professed aim of inaugurating a democratic project with the peasant as citizen, Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory, unlike the Communist movement, do not envisage any material transformation of the agrarian classes that will actualize this objective.

From Maoism to postcolonialism? The Indian ‘Sixties’, and beyond

Critics of postcolonial theory have provided this theory with a genealogy in which it appears as the poisoned fruit of a period when revolutionary energies were ebbing and in retreat. This essay seeks to provide an alternative genealogy, suggesting that the Subaltern Studies project, and postcolonial theory more generally, were enabled and in important ways shaped by the Maoist upsurge in some parts of India in the latter 1960s and early 1970s. The critiques of modernity, of nationalism and the nation‐state, and of homogenizing narratives of progress which mark, and in the eyes of its critics, mar these intellectual currents, far from being reflections of their disassociation from radical politics, are here presented as the indirect outcome of a profound cultural and intellectual shift, which has been the consequence of the Naxalite movement of this period. This alternative genealogy proceeds through an alternative reading of the Naxalite movement. This essay asks why this movement was so important, given that its ideology was naïve, and its political successes short‐lived. The Naxalite strategy of ‘annihilating’ feudal landlords, and the urban ‘statue‐smashing’ campaign of Naxalite youth in 1970 – commonly regarded and condemned as juvenile and ultra‐leftist – are here instead interpreted as an incipient critique of aspects of Marxist theory, a critique subsequently given more explicit and elaborate exposition in the writings of the Subaltern Studies group, and in postcolonial theory.

Subaltern resistance and the (‘bad’) politics of culture: A response to John Beverley

In his reply to my critique of the Latin American subaltern studies project, John Beverley insists there can be no normative model of modernity. Because of this, resistance by (undifferentiated) peasants in defence of individual proprietorship, indigenous culture and agrarian tradition is now a legitimate part of the struggle against capitalism, a result being that rural movements are no longer about class but identity politics and thus the national question. Against this it is argued that the recuperation by the subaltern studies project both of an essentialist peasant culture/economy and of indigenous nationalist agency stems from the idealized concept of popular culture held by the new left in the 1960s and 1970s. Not only does the subaltern framework leave intact the existing class structure, and reproduce the populist mobilizing discourse of the 1930s political right, but it also (and therefore) undermines international working class solidarity. It is, in short, a conservative form of anti-capitalism. As such, it corresponds to a discourse which more accurately merits the label ‘bad politics’ that Beverley wishes to affix to Marxist criticism of the South Asian and Latin American subaltern studies project.

Princely states, peasant protests, and nation building in India: the colonial mode of historiography and subaltern studies

The postcolonial unity of India as a single nation state incorporating the princely states covering two-fifth of the territory and a quarter of the population that remained outside the direct jurisdiction of the colonial state has not been problematized in the colonial and postcolonial historiography of India. This problematization is nonetheless essential in order to understand the internal dynamics of the colonial social formation in India, especially the agency of peasant movements in princely states in the dissolution of tbe colonial state and in preparing the ground for the postcolonial unity of the Indian state. The tendency to ignore the agency of peasant movements in princely India during the colonial rule is what I have characterized as the colonial mode of historiography. Subaltern Studies project which claims to distinguish itself for its role in restoring the agency of peasant insurgency in colonial India is indeed a continuation of the colonial mode of historiography.

Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial. Edited and introduced by Vinayak Chaturvedi. London and New York: Verso, 2000. xix, 364 pp. $20.00 (paper).

Initially inspired by Antonio Gramsci's writings on the of subaltern classes, the Subaltern Studies authors adopted a history from below paradigm to contest elite writing of Indian nationalists. Later the Project shifted away from its social origins by drawing upon eclectic thinkers such as Edward Said, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. This volume is the first comprehensive balance-sheet of the project, presenting a collection of the most important writing from the last two decades and focusing the key debates between the main scholars in the field. The collection begins with the original manifesto of the Subaltern Studies project, by Ranajit Guha. In the following contributions Partha Catterjee and David Arnold, two of the founding members of the Subaltern Studies collective, examine concepts from Marx to Gramsci embedded in the writing of Indian peasant history. Critiques of the Subaltern project from C. A. Bayly, Rajnarayan Chandavarka, Rosalind O'Hanlon and Tom Brass set the terms for the controversies around which the book is organized. Marxist and deconstructionist tendencies cross and clash in the exchange between O'Hanlon, David Washbrook and the Subalternist Gyan Prakash. Sumit Sarkar charts the contemporary direction of Subaltern Studies in its movement away from a set of Marxist concerns, and Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gyanendra Pandey respond with a spirited defence of these new directions, criticizing not only Marxism but the whole idea of as Eurocentric. The volume concludes with an interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the future of the Subaltern Studies project and its vexed relationship with Marxism and Feminism

The Indian Hierarchy: Culture, Ideology and Consciousness in Bengali Village Politics

The Subaltern studies project has been a major contribution towards rethinking the role of groups such as peasants, lower castes, labourers or women in forming the course of Indian history. The project has also brought the issues of culture, ideology and consciousness to the forefront of Indian history writing. Although the importance of non-elite action on the historical developments of the Indian independence movement has already been noted by more mainstream historians, the concertedness of the project has created a whole new situation in which the subalternist perspective has become a new paradigm for Indian history writing, indeed, the subalternist perspective has increasingly come to dominate the formation of perspectives and concepts. As Masselos points out, the Subaltern studies has become the establishment.

Middle East Studies & Subaltern Studies

Despite the physical proximity of the birthplace of Subaltern Studies, South Asia, to the Middle East and despite the convergent, colliding histories of these two regions, scholars of the Middle East attend very little to the Subaltern Studies project or to the work of Subaltern Studies groups. Although certain stances of Fanon and Said, with their focus on cultural strategies of domination and resistance, have a currency in Middle Eastern studies, no literary theorist, folklorist, anthropologist, political scientist or historian in the field of Middle Eastern Studies, so far as I am aware, explicitly draws upon Subaltern Studies with any consistency as an organizing principle for his or her studies. It is the Latin Americanists (and to a lesser degree Africanists) who have been most eager to build on South Asian Subaltern Studies to respond to Latin American (or subsanaran African) circumstances. Perhaps it is time to take a closer look at what Subaltern Studies might contribute to Middle Eastern studies if we were to make a sustained effort to apply and critique that body of literature.