The Subaltern
Political Subject or Protagonist of History
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7435367 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Prathama Banerjee (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 38 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 39-49 |
| Publication date | 2015-02-24 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | South Asia Journal of South Asian Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0085-6401 • E-ISSN: 1479-0270 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/00856401.2014.979906 |
| OpenAlex | W1965629114 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
The subaltern is a name that no one has claimed—it is neither identity nor ideality. That precisely has been the power of this invented category—giving it immense political flexibility, narrative agility and innate resistance to being reductively or instrumentally used. Is it this that makes the subaltern a purely political subject who is socially or culturally marked, but only contingently? But then, the subaltern has also leaned towards ‘being’ the peasant now, the poor then, the woman and the Dalit sometimes. Indeed, one asks today if she could be the refugee, the migrant, the post-humanist ‘human’, bare life. Is the subaltern then really the protagonist of history? Or is it history itself that is the subject here, setting up the subaltern as a front figure? This essay tries to think through these questions surrounding the subaltern as a category, caught as it is between being a political subject par excellence and being a historical character. In this essay, I revisit Subaltern Studies as a specific moment in the tradition of thinking about the political in South Asia.Keywords: Subjectivityhistoryphilosophyidentitythe politicalSouth Asiapower Notes1 Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (eds and trans.), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971).2 There was, of course, the memory of the mutiny of Indian sepoys in 1857 to fire the imagination of the militant anti-colonialists. Jatindranath Bandopadhyay, who became a renouncer later and called himself Swami Niralamba, travelled from Bengal to Baroda, met the future revolutionary leader, Aurobindo Ghosh, and got himself recruited into the Baroda army to spread the revolutionary message amongst common subalterns. See Jibantara Haldar, Bandemataram: Anushilan Samitir Itihas (Calcutta: Publisher unknown, 1977), pp. 67–8.3 James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).4 Mohit Sen, A Traveller and the Road: The Journey of an Indian Communist (Delhi: Rupa, 2003), pp. 74, 77; Shahid Amin and Gautam Bhadra, ‘Ranajit Guha: A Biographical Sketch’, in David Arnold and David Hardiman (eds), Subaltern Studies VIII: Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 222–5.5 See the essays by Ranajit Guha titled ‘Colonialism in South Asia: A Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography’, pp. 1–99; and ‘Discipline and Mobilise: Hegemony and Elite Control in Nationalist Campaigns’, pp. 100–50, in Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).6 Bernard Cohn, ‘The Command of Language and the Language of Command’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 276–329; Shahid Amin, ‘Approver's Testimony, Judicial Discourse’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies V: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 166–202; Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 1–42; and Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Larry Grossberg and Cary Nelson (eds), Marxist Interpretations of Literature and Culture (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 271–313.7 See the essays in David Ludden (ed.), Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning and the Globalization of South Asia (London: Anthem Press, 2002).8 This seems to partly share the imagination of the political posited by Jacques Rancière through his distinction between ‘police’ and ‘politics’, the former to indicate the existing arrangement of power in society and the latter to indicate the resurgence of subjectivities that challenge and rearrange the former at a given historical moment. Jacques Rancière, ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, in Steven Corcoran (ed. and trans.), Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics (London/New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 27–44.9 See Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, [1983] 1999), p. 11. Guha talked about the ‘theoretical consciousness’ of the subaltern subject, a consciousness that was able to generalise and abstract from particular experiences of subalternity; Spivak raised the question of whether subaltern ‘speech’ could be accessed unmediated by representation by others in her essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’; Dipesh Chakrabarty talked of intractable subaltern pasts and narratives that resist historicisation and, therefore, prove impossible to ‘include’ in rational-secular historiography, despite the best intentions of historians. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts’, in Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 1, no. 1 (1998), pp. 15–29.10 Sanal Mohan, ‘Subaltern in Kerala: Subaltern Studies in Translation’, paper shared by author in private correspondence in 2012.11 Gyanendra Pandey, ‘In Defence of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu–Muslim Riots in India Today’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 26, nos. 11/12 (Mar. 1991), pp. 559–72; and Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993).12 Hoare and Smith (eds and trans.), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, pp. 54–5.13 Prathama Banerjee, ‘Chanakya/Kautilya: History, Philosophy, Theatre, and the Twentieth-Century Political’, in History of the Present, Vol. 2, no. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 24–51.14 Partha Chatterjee shows how European normative theory established its universality by trying to manage ‘alien’ practices as ‘deviances’ and ‘exceptions’ to the norm. See Partha Chatterjee, Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 1–28.15 Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 1–4.16 For ways of how to braid the historian's narrative with subaltern narratives of pasts and other times, see Ajay Skaria, Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Vinayak Chaturvedi, Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).17 Partha Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).18 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, no. 2 (2009), pp. 197–222.19 Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency.20 See, for instance, Ranajit Guha, Kobir Naam o Sarbanaam (Kolkata: Talpaata, 2009). Also see interview with Ranajit Guha [http://www.sai.uniheidelberg.de/history/download/ranajit_guha_interview_2.2.11.pdf, accessed 10 Jan. 2014].21 Shahid Amin, Event, Memory, Metaphor: Chauri Chaura 1920–1990 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990).22 Shahid Amin, ‘On Retelling the Muslim Conquest of South Asia’, in Partha Chatterjee and Anjan Ghosh (eds), History and the Present (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002), pp. 19–32.23 Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).24 Partha Chatterjee's purely historical works include The Princely Impostor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); and The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).25 Partha Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).26 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (trans. Patricia Dailey) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).27 Introduction to the catalogue of the Iconoclash exhibition at ZKM Centre of Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Making Things Public—Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).28 Chakrabarty, ‘Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts’, pp. 15–29.29 Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1994
Subaltern · South Asian Cinema and Culture · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · South Asian Studies and Diaspora
| Citations per year | 0.73 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2015 - 2025 (11) |
| Highly cited | No |