SUBALTERN STUDIES: AN APPROACH TO

INDIAN HISTORY

THESIS SUBMITTED
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ARTS)
OF JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY

SUPRATIM DAS
2009
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SUBALTERN STUDIES: AN APPROACH TO INDIAN HISTORY

SYNOPSIS
of

Thesis submitted to the Jadavpur University for the Degree of

By

Supratim Das

Jadavpur University, Kolkata - 700032, India

2009
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In recent years, a significant change in the historiography of South Asia, and

particularly India, has been brought about by the Subaltern Studies project, which

began more than twenty-five years ago. As a perceptible intervention in modern

historiography, the first volume of the Subaltern Studies appeared in 1982 from

Oxford University Press, Delhi. The next two decades witnessed the coming out of a

series of similar other volumes. The latest one (Vol. XII) saw the light of day in 2005.

Ranajit Guha, once a Marxist and a full-time activist in the Communist Party of India,

was the intellectual driving force behind the concept of Subaltern Studies. He edited

the first six volumes of the project with the help of a core group of younger historians

whom he later remembered as an assortment of marginalized academics. The

editorial collective that originally comprised young scholars like Shahid Amin, David

Arnold and Partha Chatterjee among others was subsequently enlarged.

The central concern of the project was to produce an account of South Asian history

and society from the point of view of Europes periphery. In doing this, subaltern

historians rejected the neo-nationalist, neo-colonialist and economistic Marxist

modes of historiography. They contended that existing interpretations of Indian

history had robbed the common people of their agency. The issues further raised were

forms of power as well as ways of understanding the nature of resistance in a coercive

society.
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Subaltern Studies is in fact a critical history from the beginning. As Ranajit Guha

writes in the Introduction to Subaltern Studies I, The historiography of Indian

nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism -- colonialist elitism and

bourgeois-nationalist elitism. Subaltern historians primarily looked into the peasant

insurrections. Not surprisingly, in the first four volumes of the series, twenty essays

were published on peasant and tribal insurrections. It was argued that the peasant

uprisings in the colonial period formed a separate trend not much connected with the

Congress /nationalist politics. Hence, it was too much to say that the Congress helped

peasantry to stand on its feet. Elite historians claim, argue the subalternists, that the

subalterns joined the national movement under the aegis of Gandhiji is unfounded.

The truth is that subalterns are makers of their history. It is not possible to do justice

to such movements as the Quit India Movement of 1942 or the RIN Mutiny of 1946

without bringing to the fore the active role of the subaltern masses.

Subaltern Studies did not stand still as a project. It underwent considerable changes as

the subaltern scholars engaged with various contemporary problems and theoretical

formulations. Initially, they had been working on subaltern politics in the vein of

E.P.Thompson and Antonio Gramsci. After 1988, many of them came under the

influence of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In a word, in the last 15-20 years,

the temperament and orientation of the project have substantially changed. New

agendas have been set out. The social and political problematics of contemporary

India such as caste conflict, struggle between fundamentalism and secularism, gender
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studies, police, prison, bureaucracy and related issues now overwhelm subaltern

scholarship. Discursive deconstruction of cultural power has become compelling

project for scholars who discovered the failures and betrayals of modernity,

positivism, and Enlightenment. Old empirical certainties of modernization have been

challenged under the rubric of postmodern and postcolonial scholarship.

In the present work, some major thematic areas of the project have been highlighted

for locating the twists and turns in its journey. At the outset, the project was what may

be called ontological in nature. Finally, it became what we propose to call discursive.

The subalternists believed that through historical research on subaltern protest and

actions, it was possible to describe the pure, total and autonomous formation of the

subaltern being or consciousness. The question was: What is the true nature of the

subaltern? True, the Subaltern Studies, right from its inception, was already aware

that the notion of the subaltern was constructed as the other of the elite. But it was

believed then that the elitist construction would drop down if correctly analysed. The

true nature of the subaltern would at once be revealed.

But over time, the new question became: How is the subaltern represented? Many of

the subalternists felt that it would never be possible to land into the realization of a

hard reality transcending the limits of representation. In brief, a good intention of

writing a pure and unadulterated subaltern history became untenable. The most

important question now was the construction of the subaltern. As a result, the need for
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an entirely different approach was felt. Subsequently, the Subaltern Studies became

engaged in the study of such known fields as the expansion of the colonial apparatus,

English education, the so-called Bengal Renaissance, emergence of Indian

nationalism, etc. On the other hand, the attention was given to the different institutions

of modern states and social system and the modern regime of power. As pointed out

by Partha Chatterjee, it is now possible to see the whole world of society-institution-

ideology through the subaltern viewpoint.

To locate this ideological evolution, I have mainly focused on themes like

nationalism, colonial modernity, the problem of representation, and the questions of

community. These are some of the more important questions problematized by the

subalternists. In the early years of its career, the projects central argument was that

the nationalist leaders of India sought to mobilize the masses and thoroughly control

their movements with a view to challenging the authority of the British Raj. But

subsequently, the collectives aim had been to reconstruct peasant consciousness

itself, and to reveal its autonomy from elite nationalist thought. Subaltern Studies, it

may be noted, appeared as an overriding critique of the traditional concept of

nationalism and what Gyan Pandey calls the prejudiced way of history-writing.

Challenging what they see as the totalizing standpoint of a seamless nationalism, the

subaltern historians have argued that nationalism should not assert the cultural

homogeneity of communities.
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Scholars like Partha Chatterjee have shown that Gandhijis intervention in Indian

nationalist politics fundamentally changed the course of its history. His thought of

non-violence and Satyagraha strongly criticized modern Western political ideas and

the notions of civil society. There were several possibilities inherent in the Gandhian

political philosophy. But ultimately, they became the ideological weapons in the

hands of the nationalist elite. The peasantry was politically mobilized by Gandhian

politics. But this, according to the subaltern scholars, did not give them political

rights. Peasants became a part of a nation, but were perpetually detached from the

Indian nation-state.

Over time, I have tried to show, Subaltern Studies has moved away from its primary

objective of recovering the subaltern autonomy. In 1985, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

pointed out that the subaltern historian should make a probe into the processes

through the subaltern is constructed as the other of the elite. She thought that it was

pointless to try to set apart the subalterns autonomous out of a thousand of noises.

For whatever voices we hear in the documents of history are not the words of the

subaltern, but some construction by others. Hence, it was necessary to discover the

processes by which such construction takes place, and the institutions through which

it is done. Thus, gradually Subaltern Studies used the subaltern as a space from which

one could rethink the discipline of history.

The subaltern historians such as Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty have engaged in

the debate on colonial modernity. In recent Subaltern Studies, a key argument has

been built up about alternative or hybrid modernities. The focus has been centred on

the diffusion of the ideas, practices and institutions of colonial modernity in India. I

have highlighted this subalternist critique of modernity with special reference to how

they problematize the Bengal Renaissance as an instance of a limited and fragmented

episode in which the renaissances heroes failed to raise any basic questions on the

structure of power in colonial India. In the view of the subalternists, the renaissance

discourse was a derivative discourse that was over-influenced by the Western

paradigm of Enlightenment.

I have sought to show that as a historical project Subaltern Studies does not represent

any single intellectual lineage. It is in fact a summing up of various academic

developments over the last few decades in political theory, social history, and cultural

studies. The projects look out for self-impulsive disciplinary appraisal has created

inventiveness in the writings of the group and has affected other area studies scholars

in Latin America and Africa. Inevitably, Subaltern Studies has encountered scathing

criticism in India and abroad. I have discussed in some detail the critical literature on

the school, especially the recent phase considered by some critics as Late Subaltern

Studies. For example, historians like Sumit Sarkar have taken strong exception to the

tendency of what they call essentializing the categories of subaltern and autonomy

in the sense of assigning to them more or less absolute, fixed, decontextualized

meanings and qualities. According to the Marxist critics, the subaltern scholars

conveniently ignore the fact that an easy replacement of class by subaltern would not

solve the problems. Rather, dissociation from socio-economic contexts would

strengthen the liking for reification of a subaltern or community identity. It has also

been argued that the subaltern school lost its original track by falling into the bad

company of postcolonial theory. In a word, Subaltern Studies has invited infinite

debates and opened up a treasure house for both activists and academicians. In having

built up a commitment to the attempted combination of postmodern techniques and

radical politics, the collective has provided an important paradigm to discuss to the

Third World scholars.

Countersigned by Supervisors:

1.

2.

Candidate