Chapter - 1

A Biography of Subaltern Studies

In recent years, perhaps the most intriguing 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. Known to be a major epistemological
intervention in the modern discipline of history-writing, the Subaltern Studies is a
meaningful critique and a daring interrogation of the mainstream Indian historiography.
The first volume of 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 2005.1 The Bengali historian
Ranajit Guha (b.1923), once a Marxist and a whole timer in the Communist Party of
India 2, was ‘the intellectual driving force’ behind the project. He edited the first six
volumes of the project with the support of younger historians and scholars whom he
subsequently recalled as ‘an assortment of marginalized academics’.3 During 1979-80,
Guha and some junior scholars working in England joined several discussions on the
history and society in colonial India. This is how the idea of Subaltern Studies came into
being.4 Guha liked to call the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies a ‘team’. Its size
gradually increased. Today it includes the following members among others: Partha
Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Shahid Amin, David Hardiman, David Arnold, Gautam
Bhadra, Gyan Pandey, Gyan Prakash, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Sumit Sarkar
worked in the collective periodically in the 1980s and 1990s.5

The subaltern scholars initially planned to bring out a series of three volumes for
correcting the elitist approach of the colonialist and bourgeois-nationalist historians in
the historiography of Indian nationalism.6 Since its inception, Subaltern Studies was an
attempt to transform the writing of colonial Indian history. It drew on the ‘fluid concepts
of class and state’ expressed in the Prison Notebooks of the Italian Marxist thinker,
Antonio Gramsci.7

The publications of the Subaltern Studies group, comments Sumit Sarkar, helped to
rework significantly the historiography of anti-colonial nationalism through a key
emphasis on ‘pressures from below’. They contained both reinterpretations of
mainstream nationalism and major studies of tribal movements and cults. Attempts were

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also made to concentrate on such ‘difficult’ issues as mass communalism, or peasant
submission to landlords.8 We like to draw attention to the following essays: David
Arnold, ‘Rebellious Hillmen: The Gudem-Rampa Risings, 1839-1924’, Subaltern
Studies I (1982); David Hardiman, ‘Adivasi Assertion in South Gujarat: The Devi
Movement of 1922-23’, Subaltern Studies III (1984); Tanika Sarkar, ‘Jitu Santal’s
Movement in Malda, 1924-32: A Study in Tribal Protest’, Subaltern Studies IV (1985 );
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Conditions for Knowledge of Working-Class Conditions:
Employers, Government, and the Jute-Workers of Calcutta,1890-1940’, Subaltern
Studies II ( 1983 ) and, ‘Trade Unions in a Hierarchical Culture: The Jute-Workers of
Calcutta, 1920-50’, Subaltern Studies III; Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Rallying Round the Cow:
Sectarian Strife in the Bhojpur Region c 1888-1917’, Subaltern Studies II; Gautam
Bhadra, ‘The mentality of Subalternity: Kantanama or Rajdharma’, Subaltern Studies VI
( 1989 ).

In other words, the main purpose of the project was to inscribe a history from the
position of Europe’s periphery. In doing this, it discarded the neo-colonialist, neo-
nationalist and economistic Marxist forms of historiography and focused on the ejected
of that periphery.9 Subaltern historians contended that existing interpretations of Indian
history had robbed the common people of their agency. They also introduced discussions
on the forms of power as well as on the nature of resistance in a coercive social context.10
While the research agenda of Subaltern Studies during the early 1980s was primarily
limited to the history of colonial India, later contributions transcended both regional and
disciplinary boundaries.11 As Dipesh Chakrabarty points out, the intellectual attainment
of the project, which now moves well beyond India or South Asia as an area of academic
specialization, surpasses the limits of the discipline of history.12

Subaltern Studies was, then, to quote Chakrabarty, ‘an instance of politically motivated
historiography’. We find a view of the project in hindsight when we read the following
lines from Chakrabarty:
It came out of a Marxist tradition of history-writing in South Asia and was markedly
indebted to Mao and Gramsci in the initial formulations that guided the series. … Guha
and his colleagues drew inspiration from Mao (particularly his 1927 report on the
peasant movement in the Hunan district) and Gramsci (mainly his Prison Notebooks).
But their use of Mao and Gramsci speaks of the times when Subaltern Studies was born.

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 This was, after all, the 1970s: a period of global Maoism that Althusser and others made
respectable. … Both Gramsci and Mao were celebrated as a way out of Stalinist or
Soviet Marxism after Czechoslovakia of 1968. Many of the historians in subaltern
studies were participants in or sympathizers of the Maoist movement that shook parts of
India between 1969 and 1971.
Yet, significantly, neither Mao’s references to the need for ‘leadership of the Party’ nor
Gramsci’s strictures against ‘spontaneity’ featured with any degree of prominence in
Elementary Aspects of Subaltern Studies.13

It is worthy of note that different postcolonial theorists of diverse disciplines have taken
interest in Subaltern Studies in the recent years. Many issues have been problematized.
The methods that subaltern scholars apply in critiquing subjects such as history,
nationalism, Orientalism and Eurocentrism are some examples here. “Subaltern Studies”,
writes Chakrabarty, “which once denoted a series of Indian history, now stands as a
general designation for a field of studies often seen as a close cognate of
postcolonialism.”14 We can locate the trajectory of this project from the very inception to
its current “post-Marxist contours”. In this chapter, our attempt will be to trace the
historical origins of the school referring particularly to the national and global context.

Initial Phase:
Antonio Gramsci, the British Marxists, and
History from Below:

Gramsci: Backdrop
The word subaltern means many things. In late-medieval English, it used to denote
peasants and serfs. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the word was suggestive
of peasant origins of the army officers at the lower ranks. In the next century, G.R.Gleig
(1796-1888), the biographer of colonial administrators in India such as Robert Clive,
Warren Hastings, and Thomas Munroe, took to the new genre of writing about military
campaigns in India ‘from a subaltern perspective.’15 The First World War gave rise to
writings about subaltern life in Europe. Many memoirs and diaries came out. Then, soon
after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) started using the
concept of subaltern identity in the context of the theories of class struggle. However,
Gramsci remained an obscure thinker in the English-reading world for a long time.

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Raymond Williams popularized Gramsci’s theory in 1977. In the early 1980s, Gramsci’s
ideas spread extensively in Europe.16

Gramsci was the General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party. In November 1926,
he became a prisoner in Mussolini’s jail for twenty years. As Thomas R. Bates observes,
“His long and miserable confinement, which resulted in his death in 1937, also resulted
in one of the most significant contributions to twentieth-century Marxist thought, the
theory of “hegemony”.” 17 It was in the prison that a crippled Gramsci wrote his famous
Prison Notebooks. In this work, he put the word ‘subaltern’ in use. By ‘subaltern’,
Gramsci generally understood the peasants and workers standing opposite to the
dominant classes in contemporary Italy who had social power and hegemony. However,
as power was still confined in the land-owning classes in pre-industrial Italy, Gramsci
had particular concern for the peasants. For him the peasantry was a live force. He
recommended close examination of the subaltern consciousness of peasantry revealed in
popular belief and folklore. He held that it was not always right to consider the peasants
as coward and loyal who would submit with their identities lost amidst the crowd of the
proletariat. Instead, there was a latent form of will to struggle against the dominance of
the lord. Gramsci wanted to understand the nature of peasant culture and consciousness
to have an understanding of the binary of domination/subordination. For Gramsci, the
rebel peasant’s mentality was in most cases negative. But, at times it flashes out to result
into meaningful and effective action. Gramsci had a belief that if the historical method
were more complete, greater cohesion and political consciousness might be found in the
subaltern classes.18

As Perry Anderson notes, Gramsci is one of the most difficult Marxist writers ‘to read
accurately or systematically’.19 John Davis traces the reasons for this: the appalling
conditions and control under which he had to write; the characteristic economy of his
style having prompt combination of assertion and suggestion; the very richness and
complexity of his thoughts. 20 James Martin views Gramsci’s analysis mainly in terms of
a response to the social and political crisis of bourgeois rule that mass politics ushered in
Italy.21 Martin has explained the crisis in brief. In the late nineteenth century, the nation-
states in Europe were losing their prestige as a result of the coming out of new powers.
The dominance of the British Empire around the world and the settlements of the
European dynasties such as Tsarist Russia and the Austrian Habsburgs were challenged.
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Germany’s rise as an imperial power greatly enhanced international economic
competition. As James Joll has pointed out, the lofty idea of ‘rational progression’ to
historical evolution that had long been cherished by nineteenth-century liberals came to
be challenged by the fires of the Great War of 1914-1918.22 Indeed, liberalism itself was
losing its appeal as a political and economic doctrine. As a result of the growth of
European economies and markets, capital came to be concentrated in larger commercial
enterprises and the existence of small firms was at stake. It was a new age of cartels and
monopolies as well as of technological innovations in which the slogan was for large-
scale production. As monopoly capitalism became the order of the day, the nineteenth-
century liberal doctrine of free trade faded into insignificance.

Politically, too, liberalism seemed to be redundant as an ideology. A form of ‘mass

politics’ was growing up in Europe which was never heard of before and which clearly
threatened the traditional elite politics and diplomacy of the past. In the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century, new forces in the name of ‘democracy’ and ‘people’
challenged their supremacy. The workers’ movement, in particular, found expression in
the form of socialism and social democratic parties throughout Europe. Due to this crisis,
there was a transformation of the European states. They tended to be more
‘interventionist’ than classical liberal ideology had anticipated.23 The emergence of
‘mass’ societies provoked many of the innovations in social and political theory through-
out Europe between 1890 and 1930. H.S. Hughes has described this as the ‘reorientation
of European social thought’. He saw in it a reaction against the scientific positivism of
the late nineteenth century. Social scientists were looking eagerly to the subjective
motivations to human behaviour.24

It was asserted that human action was guided by consciousness and experience, which
could not be simply ‘read off’ from the former. Such ideas as the power of the
‘irrational’, ‘myths’, ‘intuition’, ‘collective consciousness’ or ‘repressed desires’ found
expression in the writings of the contemporary thinkers. In view of this context, it
appears that for Gramsci, political analysis was directly linked to changing it. Unlike the
earlier generation of intellectuals, Gramsci welcomed the new developments as an
opportunity for revolutionary action. He also believed that the social change was
powerful enough to create a new political order based on mass participation. For

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Gramsci, involving the masses into the state meant creating a qualitatively different form
of politics than before.25

Gramsci: Peasant Subalternity

As David Arnold has rightly put it, Western scholars in recent years have engaged in
Gramsci’s writings mainly in relation to the politics of contemporary Western industrial
societies. By contrast, the English-language writers, excepting a few, have given much
less attention to his discussion of the peasantry and rural society.26 But it is now clear
that Gramsci, as he was eager to explore the consciousness and the cultural and
ideological dimensions of hegemony and subordination, helped in the understanding of
the subaltern classes. Unlike the founders of Marxism, Gramsci did not overemphasize
the contrast between the ‘idiocy of rural life’ and peasant barbarism on the one hand and
the revolutionary, class-conscious industrial proletariat on the other. Instead, Gramsci
thought it necessary to look adequately to the popular beliefs and folklore since they
revealed subaltern consciousness. This is why, writes Arnold, peasants appeared
persistently in his political and polemical writings of the early and middle 1920s and got
a standing in the Prison Notebooks written between 1929 and 1935. 27

Perhaps Gramsci’s own background made him interested about peasantry. He was born
in Sardinia, one of Italy’s most backward regions, in a lower-middle-class family and
was a resident there for almost two decades. Naturally, he had first-hand experience of
peasant life. As A. Davidson writes, the young Gramsci was much concerned about the
peasants of the southern mainland and islands and their subordination he contrasted with
the hegemony of the industrialists, bankers and bureaucrats of the North. Gramsci
assumed this as the central problem not only in Italian national life but also in the
formation of the theory and strategy of the Italian Communist Party.28 “For an
understanding of Gramsci’s work” – rightly observes Marcia Landy – “it is necessary to
situate him in Italian culture and, more specifically, in the culture of the Mezzogiorno.
The “Southern Question” was and is a fundamental fact of Italian political/cultural life.
Gramsci’s place of birth, Sardinia, was the most underdeveloped and exploited area of
the Mezzogiorno, exemplifying all the ills of regionalism …. Gramsci’s emphasis on the
interrelatedness of politics and culture derives, in large measure, from his Sardinian
heritage. His analyses of the interrelationships between the state and civil society grew,
16
in part, from a recognition of the ways in which the organization of social life in the
South was due not only to overt political domination but to the specific strategies
developed by the people for coping with their oppression.” 29

Although an important authority on the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Gramsci was also
sure that the numerical predominance of the peasantry could be a crucial factor in the
overthrow of the bourgeois state in Italy. From his own experience of the unsuccessful
factory councils movement in industrial Turin in 1919-20, he concluded that communism
could not succeed in Italy on the strength of the proletariat alone. Thus, Gramsci’s
position was qualitatively different from that of many of his contemporary socialist and
communist thinkers in Italy in that he gave utmost emphasis on understanding and
analyzing the conditions and aspirations of the peasantry, especially those of the
neglected south.30 The issue of the peasantry’s position in the political order of Italy lay
central to his agenda and he frequently came back to it in the pages of his Prison
Notebooks. He was particularly anxious to find out the ways in which the peasantry
could become involved in a triumphant revolutionary movement. He thought it essential
for the political leadership to locate correctly the forms of consciousness and
subordination in a society but for which no revolutionary movement was possible.
Peasant culture and society deserved closer examination not owing to any emotion for
the past, but because they constituted a powerful element in the control the rulers
exercised over the ruled. Gramsci believed that class-consciousness could come from
within a social group; it could not be arbitrarily imposed from outside. So the
‘spontaneous’ and ‘elementary’ passions of the subalterns must be studied, not despised.

As David Arnold puts it, Gramsci did not ask for the study of subaltern beliefs and
consciousness for his conviction that they were independently right. Rather, he held that
they marked the forms and expressions of the life of the masses which no exponent of
the ‘philosophy of praxis’ (i.e. Marxism) could afford to ignore.31 It is true, as Alberto
Maria Cirese has pointed out, that Gramsci’s later writings hinted at many negative
elements that were latent in subaltern behaviour and actions. For example, as a political
force, as Gramsci observes, the peasants suffer from the problem of dispersion and
splitting up among themselves for which they find it increasingly difficult to build up
‘solid organisations’. Landlords always take advantage of the lack of unity between
peasants who have land and those who are landless. Gramsci also refers to what he calls
17
‘traditional apoliticism and passivity’ of the peasants which help the ruling classes in
establishing their hegemonic control because they are now able to maintain their position
32
through the consent of the peasantry without taking to open coercion. Gramsci even
described the southern peasants in 1926 as being ‘in perpetual ferment, but as a mass …
incapable of giving a centralised expression to their aspirations and needs’. Autonomous
peasant movements were exceptional. There were only such limited forms as banditry,
which he regarded as ‘a kind of primitive terrorism, with no lasting or effective results’.
Even in uprising, as Gramsci viewed, subaltern classes were ‘subject to the activity of
ruling groups’. Indeed, it was central to Gramsci’s notion of subalternity that such groups
did not have autonomy, which was the trademark of the hegemonic classes.33

In this context, we can make a quick glimpse at the six-point methodological criteria
chalked out by Gramsci for the history of the subaltern classes. Ranajit Guha refers to
them in Subaltern Studies I. They are as follows: 1. the objective formation of the
subaltern social groups, by the developments and transformations occurring in the sphere
of economic production; 2. their active or passive affiliation to the dominant political
formations, their attempts to influence the programmes of these formations in order to
press claims of their own; 3. the birth of new parties of the dominant groups, intended to
conserve the assent of the subaltern groups and to maintain control over them; 4. the
formations which the subaltern groups themselves produce, in order to press claims of a
limited and partial character; 5. those new formations which assert the autonomy of the
subaltern groups, but within the old framework; 6. those formations which assert the
integral autonomy …34

The term ‘hegemony’, used above for a number of times, deserves some attention here.
Raymond Williams points out that traditional definition of ‘hegemony’ is political rule or
domination, especially in relations between states. Marxism extended the definition of
rule or domination to relations between social classes, and especially to definitions of a
ruling class. ‘Hegemony’ then acquired a further significant sense in the work of Antonio
Gramsci. J. Femia, following Cramsci, defines it as ‘the predominance obtained by
consent rather than force of one class or group over other classes’. T.R.Bates defines it as
‘political leadership based on the consent of the led ; the consent which is secure by the
diffusion and popularisation of the world view of the ruling class’. Some commentators
prefer to use the term in the context of modern capitalist and predominantly industrial
18
societies only, but it is evident from Gramsci’s own discussion of Italian history that he
sees elements of hegemony existing in earlier times and in rural societies.35

The following passage from Bates merits our attention:

The term “hegemony” is certainly not new to Western political discourse, and has
traditionally signified domination of one sort or another. In Gramsci’s case, however, the
pedigree can be traced specifically to the political vocabulary of the Russian
revolutionaries in their turn-of-the-century polemics. The term was introduced by
Plekhanov, Axelrod, Lenin, and others in their dispute with the “Economists” over the
issue of “spontaneity.” In advocating the hegemony of the proletariat over the peasantry,
and of the party over the proletariat, Plekhanov’s group was in essence affirming the
necessity of elite leadership in a backward cultural situation. As carried forward by
Lenin in his frequent tirades against “tail-endism,” the term continued to signify little
more than the political leadership of a proletarian vanguard, whose mission was to
instruct the masses as to their true interests and divert them from the perilous path of
reformism. … The Italian scholar Norberto Bobbio has aptly observed that Gramsci’s
debt to Lenin for the concept of hegemony is less than Gramsci claims. According to
Bobbio, the term was used more by Stalin than by Lenin, who preferred the terms
“leadership” and “management” … and when he did use “hegemony” it was
synonymous with “leadership”. Gramsci also used the word in this sense while he was
General Secretary of the Party. It was not until his prison mediations focused on the role
of intellectuals in Italian history that he began to see the larger possibilities of the
Leninist concept. 36

Gramsci traced the positive qualities of subaltern classes mainly in their culture and
politics. According to Marcia Landy, the most significant aspect of Gramsci’s
contribution to critical thinking lies in the area of developing theories of mass culture.
Landy thinks that Gramsci proposed ‘a dynamic view of the importance and the
operations of mass culture not only as an agent of consent but also as an important factor
in the encouragement of counter-hegemonic practices’.37 Two such attributes are notable.
Gramsci believed that revolutions are possible through political action and through the
development of class-consciousness among the subaltern classes. Hence, despite their
political immaturity and negative qualities, the elementary passions and spontaneity in

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them should be taken up and brought ‘into line with modern theory’ i.e. Marxism.
Secondly, although Gramsci was critical of the internal inconsistencies and
contradictions of popular assumptions and popular culture, he considered them valuable
as they expressed subaltern consciousness. Moreover, religion, one of the principal forms
of subaltern ideology, was for the subalterns ‘a specific way of rationalising the world
and the real life’; it provided ‘the general framework for real political activity’ among
them. What is more, the possession of a shared subaltern culture could cut across the
hegemony of the ruling classes and provide a basis for collective action among the
subalterns.38

The usefulness of Gramsci’s instructions was evident in the fragmentary episodes that
show the autonomous politics of the people: ‘Every trace of independent initiative on the
part of subaltern groups should therefore be of incalculable value for the integral
historian.’39 Gramsci methodically discussed the character of such ideas as ‘common
sense’ that is, in his own words, “philosophy of the multitude” which, he writes, “spread
beyond the confines of intellectual groups.” According to Gramsci, every social stratum
had its own ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’ as a part of historical process. Common
sense formed the tradition of philosophy. It had always been intermediate between
folklore in the true sense and the thoughts of philosophers. Marx frequently referred in
his writings to common sense and the strength of its beliefs.40

Gramsci: The Indian Context

The subaltern scholars applied some Gramscian concepts to India in the colonial period.
Early contributors to Subaltern Studies including Ranajit Guha gave attention to the
perceptions and activities of the peasants themselves as well as the rift between their
aspirations and methods and those of the indigenous elite. They remained faithful to
Gramsci’s direction to study the subaltern classes and to seek out ‘every trace of
interdependent initiative on the part of subaltern groups’.41 Ranajit Guha, however,
partly disagrees with Gramsci’s theory of hegemony while differentiating politics of the
people from that of the indigenous elite in colonial India. Gramsci held that ‘subaltern
groups are always subject to the authority of ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise
up.’ Accepting this argument Guha comments that subordination can be understood only
as a constitutive term in a binary relationship of which the other is dominance. At the
same time, Guha’s position is partly different which he explains in his ‘Preface’ to the
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first volume of Subaltern Studies. For Gramsci, there was no evidence of autonomy in
peasant movements. The peasants failed not only to produce their own leadership and
organization, but also to overthrow the domination and hegemony of the ruling classes.
In visible contrast to this, Guha writes: “… parallel to the domain of elite politics there
existed throughout the colonial period another domain of Indian politics in which the
principal actors were not the dominant groups of the indigenous society or the colonial
authorities but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring
population and the intermediate strata in town and country--- that is, the people. This was
an autonomous domain, for it neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence
depend on the latter. … Mobilization in the domain of elite politics was achieved
vertically whereas in that of subaltern politics this was achieved horizontally….The
former was, on the whole, more cautious and controlled, the latter more spontaneous.” 42

Guha asserts that the ideology, which works in the domain of the people, is characterised
by a notion of resistance to elite domination. This ideological element, he admits, was of
course not consistent in quality or solidity in all instances. There were occasions when its
emphasis on sectional interests created sectarian splits undermining horizontal alliances.
Still, it helped to demarcate the domain of subaltern politics from that of elite politics.
The co-existence of these two domains, Guha concludes, was the index of an important
historical truth, that is, ‘the failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to speak for the nation’.
Large areas in the life and consciousness of the people were never integrated into their
hegemony. The masses that the elite mobilized to fight for their own objectives appeared
to have broken away from their control and put the characteristic imprint of popular
politics on nationalist campaigns that were launched by the upper classes.43

Guha makes his position clear elsewhere. As he explains, the politics of colonial India
has always been an expression of the reciprocity of two interacting yet autonomous
domains. It would no longer be sufficient to view politics simply as the
total of all transactions between the masters themselves. To appreciate the implications
of such transactions, there should henceforth be reference to the ‘other domain’. Thus,
the subaltern presence must be felt even in a situation where its name has been
unintentionally or purposely deleted from the list of actors. In Guha’s view, ‘on one
historic occasion after another and in region after region’ the elite leadership lost control
of such powerful political campaigns as the Noncooperation, Civil Disobedience, and
21
Quit India movements to the subaltern masses. The latter turned these movements into
their own struggles by disobeying the Congress top brass and by following precise codes
that were in consonance to traditions of popular resistance.44 To sum up Guha’s position,
the autonomous forms of thought and action that work in the domain of the subaltern
classes are particularly articulated through rebellions, riots and popular movements.
Subaltern peasant culture and worldview that finds expression in insurgency is
predominantly autonomous from that of the elite. Quoting Gramsci, Guha writes that
there is no room for pure spontaneity in history. Those who write from the point of view
of the elite “fail to recognize the trace of consciousness in the apparently unstructured
movements of the masses.” As leadership and organization seem to be lacking in the
activities of the masses, the elites characterize these as unconscious, hence pre-
political.45 David Arnold aptly points out that Guha, while “countering a deterministic
streak in Gramsci’s writing on hegemony”, “reasserted the historical, humanist and
dialectical nature of his basic political and philosophical position.” 46

Florencia E. Mallon writes in this context, “As is the case in Gramsci’s work, then, the
Subaltern Studies’ commitment to the recovery of subaltern politics, culture, and
traditions of resistance is not simply empirical but also political. Gramsci hoped to
discover, in an understanding of subaltern practices and histories, a potential for building
the Jacobin party of the left: the hegemonic party that truly led, rather than simply
dominated, by channelling, understanding, and incorporating popular energies and
beliefs. The Subaltern Studies Group also leaves open the possibility for a future
reconstruction of an emancipatory and hegemonic postcolonial political order: if
subaltern traditions and practices are better understood, they can still serve as the basis
for building alternative political communities that will truly liberate “the people.” ” 47

The autonomy of the subaltern domain of politics had been a regular theme in the
writings of the subaltern historians. We can particularly refer to the contributions by
Partha Chatterjee, Gyanendra Pandey and Shahid Amin who dealt with the theme. As
Partha Chatterjee has shown, subaltern autonomy is compatible with the hegemony of
the elite and their relationship is dialectical in nature. He writes that domination must
exist within a relationship. The dominant groups in their exercise of domination do not
get through and wipe out the dominated classes because in that case, there would be no
relation of power, and hence, no domination. Without their autonomy, the subalterns
22
would have no identity of their own, no space from which they can challenge authority
while being dominated. The point is to theorise an entire aspect of human history as a
history, i.e. as a movement, which stems from the antagonism between two distinct
social forces. Denying autonomy to the subalterns would be denying this aspect of the
historical process and reducing it to inactivity. As Chatterjee concludes, this is exactly
what the elitist historiography has done.48

Gyanendra Pandey in his study of the peasant movement in Awadh in 1919-1922

(Subaltern Studies I) has also revealed that it began as an autonomous movement of the
peasantry in which the peasants had their own sense of grievance, initially against the
landlords, and subsequently against the British Raj. They had their own ideology and
methods unapproved by the middle-class nationalists led by Gandhiji and Jawaharlal
Nehru. Pandey begins by referring to the early writings of nationalist as well as
colonialist commentators who tended to treat the ‘masses’ as essentially static. When
peasant insurrection occurred and swelled the tide of anti-imperialist agitation in the
latter part of British rule in India, the colonialists took it as a sign of manipulation by
‘outside agitators’. Liberal nationalist and Marxist historians like Bipan Chandra have
suggested that the sectional struggles of peasants and workers and other exploited classes
were at that moment ‘out of step with the primary need of the ‘nation’ ’ i.e. to carry on
the struggle against imperialism. Bipan Chandra’s view was that Gandhiji and the
Congress in the post-World War I period ‘aroused [the masses] to political activity’.49
Following the same argument M. H. Siddiqi points out that the peasants were able to
stand on their feet only with the help of the Congress party and the Liberals.50

Challenging such assumptions Pandey has shown that in Awadh in 1919-22, the timing
of the peasants’ revolt and the violence of their actions proved that the congress or the
Liberals had no significant role in politicizing the peasantry and drawing them into the
wider campaign against the colonial regime. If anything, he goes on, the congressmen
helped, by their refusal of continued support, to bring the peasant movement to its knees.
As their struggle matured, the peasants of Awadh sensed more accurately than the urban
leaders did, the structure of the alliance that held up the colonial power in UP and the
range of forces that might combine to fight it.51

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Similarly, in an important article Shahid Amin (Subaltern Studies III, 1984) has analysed
popular rumours that swept Gorakhpur District in Eastern UP during 1921-22 to show
how the peasants there perceived Gandhi in terms of their own beliefs, expectations and
material culture. Hence, they were not very closely associated with the political
programme of Gandhi and his associates. As Amin argues, it was not Gandhi’s ideas or
the initiative of the Congress leaders that mobilized the peasants of Gorakhpur. Rather
Gandhi was associated with a variety of miraculous occurrences like his passage through
fire and eventually became a Mahatma in their imagination. Amin shows that the
peasants did not hold with any single ‘authorized version of the Mahatma’ in 1921.
Indeed, their ideas about Gandhi’s ‘orders’ and ‘powers’ were often at variance with
those of the local Congress-Khilafat leadership and clashed with the basic tenets of
Gandhism itself. 52

It would be fair to conclude this section after David Arnold. As he points out, in order to
challenge the assumptions of the existing historiography regarding peasant inertia and
irrationality, the early contributors to Subaltern Studies had necessarily to concentrate on
the movements, or aspects of movements, that clearly indicated subaltern initiative and
assertion. The negative and more familiar attributes in Gramsci’s observations on the
peasantry had been given less emphasis than the positive and more neglected elements of
subaltern ideology and organization. Hence, the autonomy and the strength of the
subaltern political domain were highlighted through peasant insurgencies and
movements. For, the very fact that a peasant rebellion occurs evidences the existence of a
separate political domain which elite domination and hegemony has been unable to
suppress. The subaltern historians were obviously aware that the peasantry could not
throw off its subordination on its own. But what is remarkable is that peasant politics
possessed substantial autonomy within the encompassing structure of subordination.53

In this sense, Gramsci is qualified in a large measure. As Guha points out at the very
outset, the enterprises which originated from the domain of subaltern politics were not
much powerful to expand the nationalist movement into a full-fledged struggle for
national liberation. The working class was still not sufficiently mature in the objective
conditions of its social being and in its ‘consciousness as a class- for- itself’. Nor was it
firmly allied yet with the peasantry. As a result, it could do nothing to take over and
complete the mission that the bourgeoisie had failed to realize. In consequence, several
24
peasant uprisings of the period waited uselessly for a leadership that could elevate them
above localism and other limitations. Only that could have generalized the peasant
movements into a nationwide anti- imperialist campaign.54

History from Below

Subaltern Studies took to an anti-elitist approach to history-writing which had much in
common with the ‘history from below’ approaches introduced in English historiography
by Marxist scholars like Christopher Hill, E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and
others.55 As pointed out by Sumit sarkar, the work of historians like Hobsbawm, George
Rude and Thompson have familiarized us with different types of pre-industrial popular
resistance in Europe. For example, crimes in various forms, conflicts over forest laws,
social banditry, millenarianism, food riots looking for a ‘just price’ etc. In Sarkar’s view,
it would be fascinating to consider how far such categories are related to movements of
the lowest level of rural society in colonial India.56 Like the British historians, Subaltern
Studies also promised to write histories from ‘below’ where subaltern classes were the
subjects in the making of their own history. Already by 1960, Eric Hobsbawm had
published Primitive Rebels (1959) and ‘For a History of Subaltern Classes’ in the Italian
journal Societa (1960). Both these works employed Gramscian concepts to analyse
peasant societies. In fact, Hobsbawm is exceptional in his discussion of peasant
consciousness and peasant politics because of his enthusiasm for Gramsci. Hobsbawm’s
Primitive Rebels had a profound influence on Ranajit Guha’s pioneering work
Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983). Guha in his book
emphasized the complete autonomy of lower class insurgency and located tribal revolts
inside a subaltern space disconnected from nationalism.57 This work is a powerful
intervention that seeks to recover the peasant from elite projects and positivist
historiography. As Gyan Prakash points out, from Guha’s account, the subaltern
‘emerges with forms of sociality and political community at odds with nation and class,
defying the models of rationality and social action that conventional historiography
uses’. According to Prakash, Guha argued convincingly that such models are elitist as
far as they disallow the subaltern’s autonomous consciousness and that they are drawn
from colonial and liberal-nationalist projects of appropriating the subaltern.58

25
Eric Hobsbawm was writing about the world of people who were usually illiterate,
mostly incoherent, and seldom understood even when they expressed themselves. As he
put it, they were pre-political people who had not yet found a specific language in which
to express their aspirations about the world. However, they were neither unimportant nor
marginal “and their acquisition of political consciousness has made our century the most
59
revolutionary in history.” Hobsbawm thinks that what Antonio Gramsci said of the
South Italian peasants in the 1920s applied to a great many groups and areas in the
modern world. They are in perpetual ferment, but as a mass, unable to provide a
centralized expression for their aspirations and their needs.60

Hobsbawm freed the study of ‘primitive rebellion’ from the categories of crime and
backwardness. In his view, the primitive social bandits ought to occupy the social
historian. For in one sense banditry was a rather primitive form of organized social
protest. In many societies, the poor regarded the bandit as their champion, idealized him,
and turned him into a myth. Some examples are Robin Hood in England, Janosik in
Poland and Slovakia, Diego Corrientes in Andalusia. Bandit-heroes were not expected to
make a world of equality. They could only correct wrongs and prove that sometimes
oppression turns upside down. Thus, Hobsbawm introduces us to “social bandits” who
earned Robin Hood reputations and popular respect. The masses accepted these so-called
bandits as heroes because they championed their interests against elite oppression.61

Apart from Hobsbawm, we can look to others also. As David Ludden has pointed out, by
the late 1970s, a rapid decline in state-centred historical research had already occurred
and social history ‘from below’ was flourishing. E. P. Thompson’s seminal work The
Making of the English Working Class (1963) is often said to have inspired a number of
grassroots studies of people whose history had so far been ignored.62 Thompson had a
significant impact on the younger historians of India when he visited this country in the
winter of 1976-77 and addressed a session of the Indian History Congress. Ranajit Guha
appears to have often used the word ‘subaltern’ in the manner Thompson employed the
term ‘plebeian’ in his writings on eighteenth-century England. Guha’s Elementary
Aspects frequently cited Thompson with approval. But the radical social history of the
1970s, of which Thompson was a pioneer, was never reputable in the Western academia.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the early Subaltern Studies volumes, along with
Guha’s Elementary Aspects, were mostly uncared for in the West, while they drew
26
extensive interest and debate in leftist intellectual circles in India. The Delhi-based
Marxist journal Social Scientist reviewed Subaltern Studies volumes II, III, and IV in the
period between 1984 and 1988. In contrast to this, Modern Asian Studies overlooked
Guha and his colleagues until 1988.63

In the United States, Eugene Genovese wrote Roll,Jordan,Roll: The World the Slaves
Made ( New York, 1974 ) ; and Dee Brown authored Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee :
An Indian History of the American West ( New York, 1972 ). By 1979, women’s history
was popular enough in the United States. Andrea Hinding had published a very
significant book on the sources of women’s history (Women’s History Sources: A Guide
to Archives and Manuscript Collections in the United States: New York, 1979). Three
years later came out Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History (Berkeley and
Los Angeles, 1982). Ludden has described this work as the first global history from
below. 64

In his Peasant Wars in the Twentieth Century (New York and London: Harper and Row,
1969), Wolf focussed his attention on the role of peasantry from a new angle. As an
anthropologist, Wolf attempted to ‘review the evidence of six cases of rebellion and
revolution in our time in which peasants have been the principal actors.’ He made a
comparative analysis of peasant involvement in the wars and revolutions of Mexico,
Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and Algeria. He was seeking, writes A.R.Desai, a more
refined understanding of the political involvement of peasant groups, a subject until then
neglected in the major focus of anthropology. Wolf distinguished himself from the entire
group of social and cultural anthropologists who adopted, in the words of Desai, “an
ahistorical approach to the study of peasants in the Third World” and who considered the
peasantry as “passive, unchanging, superstitious and traditional” and “as major obstacles
to the modernization of the Third World.” 65

In the 1970s began the publication of The Peasant Studies and The Journal of Peasant
Studies in the United States and Britain respectively. Both these journals were concerned
with the studies of South Asian peasants. A large number of articles had appeared. In
1976, Eric Stokes spoke of ‘the return of the peasant’ to colonial history.66 In India,
uprisings became a major subject of study in the 1970s. Hamza Alavi pioneered the
academic research on insurrection (‘Peasant Classes and Primordial Loyalties’, Peasant
27
Studies, I, I, 1973). Many other scholars started writing on peasant resistance. Here are
some examples: B.B.Chaudhuri, ‘Agrarian Movements in Bihar and Bengal, 1919-1939’,
in B.R.Nanda, ed., Socialism in India (Delhi, 1972); K.K.Sengupta, Pabna Disturbances
and the Politics of Rent,1873-1885 (New Delhi, 1974); Sunil Kumar Sen, Agrarian
Struggle in Bengal, 1946-1947 (New Delhi, 1972); Kathleen Gough and Hari Sharma,
Imperialism and Revolution in South Asia (New York, 1973); A.R.Desai, Peasant
Struggles in India (Delhi, 1979); Sukhbir Choudhary, Moplah Uprising, 1921-1923
(Delhi, 1977) etc. As David Ludden aptly comments, Subaltern Studies ‘became an
original site for a new kind of history from below, a people’s history free of national
constraints, a post-nationalist reimagining of the Indian nation on the underside, at the
margins, outside nationalism’.67

E. P. Thompson identified the general problem of reconstructing the experience of the

‘ordinary’ people. But he knew that it was absolutely necessary to understand the
experience of the people as well as their reactions to it. In the preface to his masterly
work he writes: “I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the luddite cropper, the
‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded followers of
Joanna Southcoat, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and
traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been
backward-looking. Their communitarian ideal may have been fantasies. Their
insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these
times of acute social disturbance, and we did not.” 68

Thus, the English Marxist historians like Thompson, Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill
initiated a new trend of writing social history from below. Influenced by them, many
others were eager to unravel the irrational existence and fragmented experiences of the
subalterns --- the forgotten people --- to which European capitalism and modern
civilization never allowed any exposure. This new social history was able to locate many
incidents, ideologies and memories, which so far got no space in mainstream
historiography. Local incidents and movements which happened to be extremely
transitory in nature now attracted the attention of social historians, resulting in the
publication of countless ‘bottom up’ stories and accounts. As Partha Chatterjee points
out, the new genre of history-writing in Europe naturally had its influence on the
contributors to Subaltern Studies who learnt a lot from this radical social history.69
28
It has been alleged by some critics that it is surprising that a historian like Thompson, in
whose work the state occupied such an important place, should have spawned a vast
historiography ( i.e. Subaltern Studies ) in which the state was simply left out. Moreover,
it is ironical that while Thompson was perhaps best known, and most widely admired,
for having established how the history of a class might be written, his method and style
of argument may have contributed substantially to the deconstruction and termination of
the very concept of class.70

Actually, Subaltern Studies did not blindly follow the methods and notions of Edward
Thompson or Eric Hobsbawm. That was not possible either. In the West social historians
set out to locate and listen to the non-elite voices of history hitherto ignored or viewed as
incidental to the master narratives of the rise of modern capitalist society. As a corollary
to this radical attempt, the description of how the meta-narrative of history was made in
the West, no doubt, became more complete and authentic. But at the same time, it was
not possible in the Western world to raise any fundamental questions about the existence,
permanence and historical accuracy of that narrative. In most cases, the chronicles of the
‘history from below’ were written in a mood of tragedy. Stories of exploitation and
deception of the oppressed classes were tragic. All their brave resistance, however
colourfully painted, was destined to end in a fiasco. Defeat was inevitable. In the end
such stories could not in any way change or disrupt the main stream of history.71

But in countries like India, it was difficult to confine ‘history from below’ to any such
particular format. In writing a history of the evolution of capitalist modernity the end of
the story could not easily be imagined. Writers of Indian history from below were under
no binding to conform to the formula that what happened in other parts of the world
would necessarily take place in India also. Rather they were aware of the possibility of
asking many significant questions about the nature of mainstream history drawing on the
new material of research. Subaltern Studies historians had doubt in their minds regarding
both liberal nationalism and Marxism. In their engagement with radical social history
they were not willing to remain confined to any specific pattern or formula. They
repeatedly denied the referral point that the maturity of Indian history came through the

29
materialization of specific and familiar ideas of modern society. Thus, Subaltern Studies
as a form of ‘history from below’ problematized the field of historiography.72

As in the histories written by Thompson, Hobsbawm, Hill, and others, comments Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Subaltern Studies was also concerned about “rescuing from the
condescension of posterity” the pasts of the socially subordinate groups in India. But in
the opinion of Chakrabarty, Ranajit Guha’s theorization of the project at the same time
indicated certain key differences that would increasingly differentiate the project of
Subaltern Studies from that of English Marxist historiography. As Chakrabarty explains,
the difference between Subaltern Studies and the ‘history from below’ approach of
Hobsbawm or Thompson lies in three areas. Unlike ‘history from below’, Subaltern
Studies involved three things: First, it emphasized a qualified departure of the account of
power from any Universalist narration of capital. Secondly, it made a critique of the
model of nation. Finally, it questioned the relationship between power and knowledge.73

Guha separated the subaltern political domain from the domain of the elite. This was
definitely a break with the existing social theory and historiography. Until the 1970s, the
Marxist historians all over the world generally tended to characterize peasant revolts as
movements betraying a ‘backward’ consciousness. Hobsbawm had called this ‘pre-
political’ in his account of social banditry and primitive rebellion.74 This was seen as a
consciousness that had not somewhat come to terms with the institutional logic of
modernity and capitalism. As Hobsbawm candidly writes, the bandit is helpless before
the forces of the new society, which he cannot understand. At most, he can fight it and
seek to destroy it. That is why the bandit is often destructive and savage beyond the
range of his myth, which insists mainly on his justice and moderation in killing. To be
effective champions of their people, bandits had to stop being bandits. That is the
paradox of the modern Robin Hoods. Thus the romantic poets, as Hobsbawm observes,
who idealized the bandit, like Schiller in The Robbers, mistakenly took them to be the
real ‘rebels’.75

Hobsbawm, writes Dipesh Chakrabarty, recognized what was special to political

modernity in the third world. He readily admitted that it was the “acquisition of political
consciousness” by peasants that “made our century the most revolutionary in history.”
According to Chakrabarty, Hobsbawm still failed to notice the implications of this
30
observation for the ‘historicism’ that already lay behind his own analysis. Making a
critique of what he calls ‘historicism’, Chakrabarty states that Hobsbawm’s category of
‘prepolitical’ revealed the limits of historicist Marxist theory that moved on to deal with
the challenge posed to European political thought by the entry of the peasant into the
modern sphere of politics. Hence, Hobsbawm called peasants “pre-political people who
have not yet found, or only begun to find, a specific language in which to express
themselves. [Capitalism] comes to them from outside, insidiously by the operation of
economic forces which they do not understand.” No wonder, comments Chakrabarty, in
Hobsbawm’s historicist language, the social movements of the peasants of the twentieth
century remained “archaic”.76

Guha refuses to accept peasant consciousness as ‘pre-political’. He insists on analyzing

the discourses of kinship, caste, religion, and ethnicity through which peasants
themselves expressed their protest. As he writes, Hobsbawm’s material is of course
collected almost entirely from the European experience and his general statements are
possibly in harmony with it. But, whatever its legitimacy for other countries, the idea of
pre-political peasant insurgency does not help us much to know the experience of
colonial India. According to Guha, everything in the movements of rebel peasants in
colonial India was political. This could scarcely have been something else in the
situation in which they worked, lived and understood the world. Capitalist expansion in
agriculture remained simply embryonic and fragile throughout a long period from 1750
to 1900 in the whole of India. The most considerable part of income that was produced
by landed property came from rents. ‘Its incumbents related to the vast majority of
agricultural producers as landlords to tenant-cultivators, sharecroppers, agricultural
labourers and many intermediate types with features derived from each of these
categories’.77

One thing was invariable in this relationship: the pulling out of the peasant’s additional
production by means settled more by the ‘extra-economic force of the landlord’s
standing in local society and in the colonial polity’ than by the ‘free play of the forces of
a market economy’. To put it otherwise, the landlord and the peasant were engaged in ‘a
relationship of dominance and subordination’. Guha describes this as a political
relationship that was feudal in nature. What is more, this relationship was not
independent of the intervention of the colonial state that was far short of a position of
31
neutrality. If anything, the colonial state was one of the constituents of this relationship.
78
Naturally, the peasant was ready to risk all that he had for threatening or devastating
this relationship by rebellion. On many occasions, he initially tried to find justice from
the rulers by means of deputation (Guha cites the example of Titu Mir’s ‘bidroha’ of
1831), petition (Khandesh riots of 1852, as cited by Guha), and peaceful demonstration
(e.g. Indigo rebellion of 1860). The peasant, in fact, raised the banner of rebellion only as
a last resort when all other means had failed. Guha’s view is that the peasant obviously
knew what he was doing when he took up arms. True, the insurrection was primarily
designed to pull down the authority of the ‘superordinate elite’ and accepted no detailed
plan for its substitution. But this does not locate it outside the sphere of politics. The
Barasat peasantry led by Titu Mir, the Santals under Kanoo and Seedoo Manjee, and the
Mundas under Birsa − all declared their intentions to have power in one kind or another.
Their notion of power was no doubt coupled with things like ‘localism, sectarianism and
ethnicity’. It is also true that ‘the raj they wanted to substitute for the one they were out
to destroy did not quite conform to the model of a secular and national state’. As Guha
asserts, such limitations actually identify the class of their politics, thus validating the
‘essentially political character of their activity’.79

Guha concludes that instead of being a leftover in a modernizing colonial world, the
peasant was a real contemporary of colonialism and an indispensable part of the
modernity that colonial rule gave rise to in India. The peasants’ was not a backward
consciousness --- a mentality residual from the past. Guha’s argument implies that the
insurgent peasant in colonial India did infact read his contemporary world correctly.
Examining several cases of peasant uprisings in colonial India between 1783 and 1900,
he shows that the rebels always tried to invert the symbols of authority of the dominant
classes by exercising their own codes of dress, speech and behaviour. Elitist histories of
peasant uprisings missed the meaning of this gesture and saw it as “pre-political”.80 As
Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests, Guha’s critique of the category ‘prepolitical’
‘fundamentally pluralizes the history of power in global modernity and separates it from
any universalist narratives of capital’. Thus, Subaltern historiography questions the
assumption that capitalism necessarily brings bourgeois relations of power to a position
of hegemony.81

32
Subaltern Studies and Early Debates
Two major areas of research and discussion in India in the 1960s and 1970s were
nationalism and colonialism. A series of debates ensued between historians, mostly at
Cambridge University, who comprised the so-called Cambridge School of South Asian
history, and the Indian nationalist writers. The great Trinity scholar Jack Gallagher, who
co-authored with Ronald Robinson Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism
in the Dark Continent (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1961) was the founder of the
Cambridge School. Gallagher’s pupil and colleague Anil Seal soon joined it. In its early
years, the late 1960s and 1970s, the School included such stalwarts as Gordon Johnson,
Francis Robinson, Christopher Baker, B. R. Tomlinson, and David Washbrook. The
Cambridge historians asserted that imperialism built a system, which linked its rule with
locality, province and nation; nationalism came out as a corresponding structure in
politics. Thus, Indian nationalism was a mere succession from factors like local politics,
factionalism and ambition for power. The nationalist leaders, it was stressed, were
concerned less with the progress of society than with opportunities for office created by
the colonial government. They made no serious attempt to bring about changes in
society, which had been stagnating for years. In his celebrated work The Emergence of
Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century
(1968), Anil Seal portrayed nationalism as the work of English-educated regional elites
such as the Bengali bhadralok or the Chitpavan Brahmans of Maharashtra -- who
prospered in life by taking advantage of British institutional education in India.82
Addressing the question as to how modern politics emerged in India, Seal remarks,
“Education was one of the chief determinants of these politics, and their genesis is
clearly linked with those Indians who had been schooled by Western methods.”83
According to Seal, these tiny elites both ‘competed and collaborated’ with the British in
their search for power and privilege.84

Seal and some other Cambridge scholars, then, put forward the thesis that Britain’s rule
in South Asia was based on the collaboration of its subjects. As Seal puts it, there were
large parts of British India where autocracy was qualified by consent. Britain was an
offshore island in north-western Europe. Hence, the British Raj was under the
compulsion of having understandings with some of its subjects in India if it had to rule
hundreds of millions in South Asia. The supporters of the Raj ranged from the simple to
the sophisticated. During the 1870s and 1880s, however, came the beginnings of a
33
mutation in Indian politics, which was to convert many of the Western-educated from
collaborators into critics of the regime. However, the rivalry was strange. Two sides
were willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike. Hence many of the battles, writes Seal,
which the Raj and the Congress waged were mere tricks between two sides each held
back by the unreliable troops in its own front line. Non-co-operation, Civil Disobedience,
the new constitution of 1935, the clashes of 1942 -- all these were parts of this strange
struggle between impotent rivals.85

Seal’s was what we may call the early Cambridge version of interpreting Indian
nationalism in terms of regional elites. A few years later, this idea was partly revised by
Seal, Gallagher and Gordon Johnson in their book Locality, Province and Nation (1973).
Gallagher, Seal, and their doctoral student Gordon Johnson reduced the role of ideas and
idealism in history. They equated politics in India with factionalism and in so doing, they
took up the model of Louis Namier’s studies of mid-eighteenth century England. In
analysing eighteenth century British politics, Namier did not see any influence of noble
ideals. He only found the conflict of different interest groups, patron-client relationship,
and power play. Deeply influenced by the Italian sociologist Pereto’s theory of elitism
and Freud’s psychology of the irrational, Namier held that nationalism was illogical
impulsive and anarchic. In an age of Elliot’s wasteland, Namier’s sense of history was
inevitably elitist, conservative and anti-national.86 As Sumit Sarkar puts it, Namierism
tended to go around the periods of huge movements. Cambridge historians also had
reservations about the study of periods of mass upsurge. 87

Seal and others dismissed the tenability of an idealistic struggle for freedom by Indian
nationalist leaders. In their view, the real dynamic of the politics of nationalism was a
scramble for power and privilege among the Indian elites within the limited opportunities
for self rule provided by the British. In the words of Seal, what looked like an all-India
nationalist movement was more like a ramshackle coalition throughout its long career. Its
unity seems a figment. Its power appears as hollow as that of the imperial authority it
was supposedly challenging. Its history was the rivalry between Indian and Indian, its
relationship with imperialism that of the mutual clinging of two unsteady men of straw.88

34
It is clear that in 1973 the Cambridge School somewhat revised its earlier version of
Indian nationalism. For, now it announced with some elaboration that the elite approach
went wrong with the ‘trapdoor of historiography’ and that from province and elite one
must shift to locality and faction.89 The British imposed new burdens and simultaneously
sought new collaborators through constitutional reforms. Thus there were both
administrative pressures and opportunities. This made possible, allege the Cambridge
historians, the occasional coalescence of local patron-client groups into provincial or
even national platforms. Historians like David Washbrook, Chris Bayly, Gordon
Johnson, and Francis Robinson applied this approach quite effectively to different parts
of India.90

Yet certain connections continue, writes Sumit Sarkar, between the early and modified
Cambridge approach. With the exception of Bayly, perhaps, the penchant was still to
underplay the part of ideology and patriotic inspiration. But a consistent distinction was
to be made between the implication of a set of ideas and the ‘possibly selfish motives’
which might have guided particular individuals to invent or acknowledge them. ‘Job-
frustration may or may not have produced Bankimchandra’s patriotic novels, their total
impact remains an important historical fact’.91

As Ludden points out, Cambridge scholars had explored the agency of individuals,
formation of cliques, and power of specific class interests inside political parties and
factions and in doing this, they opened up the historical study of political institutions in
South Asia. The School developed at a critical time when there was profound
disillusionment in the country with the central government. The political culture of India
was in major transition giving rise to new interpretations of the national past. Nationality
had become a key subject of contention. Cambridge historians had drawn attention to
two important questions: First, what part did culture play in the history of nationalism?
Second, what was the correlation between states and popular politics? American
historians like Bernard S. Cohn criticized the inattentiveness of Cambridge scholars to
Indian culture.92

The nationalist historians of India, on the contrary, reprimanded the Cambridge

historians’ inattention to national ideals and popular forces. They contended that the
western scholars had failed to realize the meaning of our nationalism. The lofty ideals
35
and the tales of heroic struggle by the masses of this country cannot so easily be
dismissed. Bipan Chandra wrote Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India in 1979.
For him and many of his colleagues at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, Indian
history of the colonial period was an ‘epic struggle’ between the forces of nationalism
and colonialism. He labelled nationalism as a regenerative force, which constructed an
Indian people by bringing them together against the British for an extraordinary battle.
Nationalist leaders such as Gandhi and Nehru were authors of this unity. Bipan Chandra
argued that the clash of interest and ideology between the British and “the Indian people”
was the most significant conflict of British India. All other confrontations of class or
caste were secondary to this daring venture. In Chandra’s view, Indian freedom
movement was a ‘bourgeois democratic movement’.93

Both Nehru’s writings of the 1930s and Bipan Chandra’s of the 1970s took it for granted
that the nationalist movement was ‘essentially a bourgeois movement’ and that its
purpose was to establish “bourgeois ideological, political and organizational hegemony
… over the vast mass of peasants, workers and the lower middle classes.”94 But a
younger generation of historians writing in the 1970s and early 1980s --- whom Ranajit
Guha, following Salman Rushdie, has called the “Midnight’s Children” --- were not
happy with either of the narratives mentioned above. They more or less shared the view
that both the Cambridge thesis and the nationalist-Marxist theory utterly failed to locate
the “real conflicts of ideas and interests between the elite nationalists and their socially-
subordinate followers”.95 As Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, the perseverance of religious
and caste conflict in post-independence India, the war between India and China in 1962
which made ‘official nationalism’ sound hollow, the outburst of the Naxalite movement
in India --- all these and many other factors coalesced together to push away younger
historians from ‘the shibboleths of nationalist historiography’.96

Marxists disputed both nationalist historiography and the Cambridge School

interpretation, writes Gyan Prakash, but their mode-of-production narratives combined
indiscernibly with the nation state’s ideas of modernity and progress. This analogy meant
that while championing the history of the subjugated classes and their liberation through
modern progress, the Marxists found it tricky to contend with the hold of ‘backward’
ideologies of caste and religion. Incapable of taking into consideration the ‘lived
experience’ of religion and social customs of the exploited classes, Marxist accounts of
36
peasant rebellions either missed the religious idiom of the rebels or saw it as a sheer form
and a phase in the growth of revolutionary consciousness. Thus, concludes Prakash,
although Marxist historians made imposing and path breaking studies, their claim to
stand for the history of the masses remained unsettled.97

Subaltern Studies entered into this historiographical contest over the demonstration of
the culture and politics of the people. Accusing colonialist, nationalist, and Marxist
interpretations of robbing the common people of their agency, it announced a new
approach to bring back history to the subordinated. The academia had been taken aback
on the question of mass movement against state power following the Naxalbari
movement in West Bengal in 1968-69 and the nation-wide Emergency in 1975. Ranajit
Guha explains his own estrangement from nationalism by citing the late sixties’ ‘drama
of Naxalite clashes with the organs of the state and the violence of counterinsurgency
measures’.98 But more importantly for many others, notes Ludden, Indira Gandhi’s
Emergency in 1975 made the Indian state unashamedly authoritarian. As new popular
movements arose in India articulating radical ambitions among women, peasants,
workers, and tribal groups -- old nationalism lost authenticity and the Left and the Right
struggled for its legacy. Popular resistance to state power became a major academic
theme in the 1980s.99

The Naxalite revolt, writes Gail Omvedt, which was named after the Naxalbari region of
northern Bengal where it first broke out, was in some ways the first “new social
movement” of India, although under somewhat orthodox Marxist-Leninist outfits. It
brought the “spring thunder” of Maoism to India, confronted customary communist
practice and hurled a panic into the ruling class.100 As he goes on, there was in the mid-
1960s an obvious calamity in agricultural development in West Bengal, when drought
and rising food prices brought mass risings in both rural and urban areas. As a study by
John Roosa of the circuits of capital and crisis puts it, “The countryside saw increased
incidents of looting of warehouses, seizure of harvests, struggle over the workers’ share
at the threshing floor and the cities saw a rapid rise in strike activity.”101

Attending this in Bengal, with its left tradition, was a greater disclosure to Maoism and
to the impact of the worldwide “new left” uprisings of the period. It was a time when
India was in economic and political crisis, when revolution appeared to be imminent and
37
when the youth all over the world were swirling. In Bengal, as Ranabir Samaddar wrote
in the later post-Naxalite journal In the Wake of Marx, “the entire line of the ruling big
bourgeoisie of India seemed to hang in balance. Its fate was being challenged from all
quarters -- Right and Left, from masters above and masses below … Everywhere the
peasants were up in arms for food and land and starting revolt against a semi-feudal
countryside, which was already in the way of the phase of a change towards capitalism in
Indian agriculture”.102

The Naxalite revolt was an “agrarian Marxism par excellence” in which the peasants
appeared as a political force in the field. Their main concern was the question of political
power. Hence, all other issues such as their social and cultural identity, their demand for
higher wages, or insistence on having a share of actual land became irrelevant. With no
regard to their distinctiveness as ‘women and men, tribal or caste Hindu’, the angry
peasants fought against the state. “The struggle of the Terai peasants”, said the Naxal
leader Kanu Sanyal -- “is an armed struggle -- not for land but for state power. This is a
fundamental question.”103 Incidentally, in the 1960s, both the main communist parties,
i.e. CPI and CPI (M) believed that the “democratic revolution” in Indian conditions
could be achieved through parliamentary means of capturing state power, the CPI in
alliance with the “national bourgeoisie” in the Congress, the CPI (M) on its own. But a
section within the CPI (M) who continued to feel that this “democratic revolution” could
only be arrived at through armed struggle, came out of the party in 1967. This was CPI
(ML), which was formed out of the ‘vast conglomeration of militant youthful activists
known as the All India Coordinating Committee of Communist Revolutionaries by fiat
of Charu Mazumdar in 1969’.104

‘The elitist way in which Calcutta baboos manipulated the local rural struggles’ shocked
Charu Mazumdar, then a CPI (M) cadre in the district level.105 Reacting sharply to what
he thought to be the reformism of the CPI (M), Mazumdar started circulating his “six
documents”. He emphasized the following in these documents: i) India must pursue the
Chinese path of liberation; ii) workers and peasants must form a secret party organization
for spreading the politics of the agrarian revolution; and iii) only armed struggle could
finish such a revolution. According to reports, Mazumdar was not ready to make any
compromise. He did not think that mass organizations and mass movements were

38
essential, or inner party struggle inside the CPI (M) was indispensable.106 As Ranabir
Samaddar notes, “… the new burst of revolutionary upsurges, mostly peasant revolts,
found its true ideological expression in Charu Mazumdar’s writings.” “… they show a
constant harping that the present CPI (M) leadership is not comprehending the agrarian
question in a revolutionary way.”107
On such questions, some prevailing discussions ensued that focused on the power
structure in independent India. Ranajit Guha has made a graphic analysis of the times of
which Subaltern Studies was a product. Viewing the period between the Naxalbari
revolution and the end of the Emergency as a time of disillusionment, Guha has
described Subaltern Studies as one of its consequences. The issues that give rise to the
disappointment of the 1970s, in Guha’s view, ‘assume the significance of an ontological
divide between generations’. As he notes, two main questions of the time were as
follows:
“1. What was there in our colonial past and our engagement with nationalism to land us
in … the … aggravating and seemingly insoluble difficulties of the nation-state?
2. How are the unbearable difficulties of our current condition compatible with and
explained by what happened during colonial rule and our predecessors’ engagement with
the politics and culture of that period ?” 108

Guha holds that both these issues were definitely a sign of disillusionment born of ‘failed
possibilities’. The temperament, Guha says, distinctive of this disillusionment was one of
anxiety hanging between frustration and hope. It was planned, as such, into the future.
‘The generations whose adolescence and youth’ had overlapped roughly with the last
two decades of British rule, felt betrayed when both independence and nationhood
materialized at last in the transfer of power. As Guha puts it, there was no way of
avoiding such dissatisfaction. It was because these expectations and thoughts, igniting
and swelling so befittingly in the heat of a tormented nationalism, vanished once power
was seized. What was in flame some time ago as an enormous possibility, thus came to
an abrupt end. ‘Indians who had already reached adulthood by that fateful year, 1947,
loss of illusion would come therefore as the remembrance of a gigantic promise that had
bitten but managed somehow to get away’.109

The post-independence generation in India, writes Guha, had a very different type of
disillusionment. These Midnight’s Children had not much to reminisce as a past before
39
independence. Born as citizens of a sovereign republic, they had before them the promise
of nationhood that counted on the nation-state for its completion. As this promise was
not fulfilled even after twenty years of India’s independence, the anguish that
overwhelmed the younger generation in the 1970s could justly be blamed on a
‘disillusionment of hope’. Only an intently statist view would discount such a
momentous despair merely as ‘youth’s impatience with those official agencies and
institutions that had failed to deliver the future to it’.110

It was not just the achievement of the Indian National Congress, the ruling party since
1947, that was questioned. Also brought under fire was the whole generation that had
voted it to power. Representatives of the new generation were keen to escape from what
that “history” signified to them as the inheritance of a past. This past was conjured of
what they looked upon as the ‘utopian dreams’, empty pledges, and unethical politics.
They strongly felt that a future that once appeared to be full of brilliant possibilities did
not come true. The confusion of the 1970s and its agony owed significantly to this
conflict of doubt and self-doubt, examination and reaction between generations. One of
its numerous disconcerting outcomes was to allow for a ‘settled understanding of the
colonial past’. A body of knowledge and explanation concerning that past, acknowledged
and approved academically as well as politically, now lost its confidence.111

In the words of Guha, from the very inception, Subaltern Studies entered into the
argument that got away. In his opinion, this became possible because of its freedom from
institutional limitations. The Subaltern Studies collective had no allegiance to any
section, discipline, institution, or power group. It had neither any specific programme of
study nor any canonical system or certified line to direct it. The project had simply the
keenness to take part in the debates that were developing in the space ‘beyond and
around the temples of learning’.112

As already pointed out, Subaltern Studies thematized the structural split of politics as its
central concern in the history of colonialism in South Asia. It argued that the domain of
politics in India was never united or homogeneous, as elite discourse -- in both its
colonialist and Indian nationalist versions – would have us believe. Elite understanding
of nationalist politics could neither locate nor interpret many of the most significant
aspects of our past because of its ‘monistic view’ of colonial power relations. Subaltern
40
Studies put forward a different mode of theorization by challenging the elitist agenda on
the study of power in colonial India. It drew attention to “the other domain” to which the
dominant discourse had given no importance so far. Emphasizing the mutuality of two
intermingled but independent domains in the politics of colonial India, Ranajit Guha
wrote in the preface to Subaltern Studies I: “We recognize of course that subordination
cannot be understood except as one of the constitutive terms in a binary relationship of
which the other is dominance, for “subaltern groups are always subject to the activity of
ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise up.” The dominant groups will therefore
receive in these volumes the consideration they deserve without, however, being
endowed with that spurious primacy assigned to them by the long standing tradition of
elitism in South Asian studies. Indeed, it will be very much a part of our endeavour to
make sure that our emphasis on the subaltern functions both as a measure of objective
assessment of the role of the elite and as a critique of elitist interpretations of that
role.”113

Hence, from now on, declared Guha, manifold diversities would open up in the study of
colonialism making it possible to reckon with the other protagonist in the story, that is,
the people. Privileging the masters would no longer do. All political transactions would
have to be discussed with reference to the domain of all the colonized. “…the presence
of the subaltern”, writes Guha, “would make itself felt even in a scenario where its name
has been dropped from the list of actors by oversight or design. … The invidious
hierarchization of South Asian culture into “higher” and “lower” levels or into degrees of
“backwardness”, according to a blinkered statist view that did not acknowledge, because
it could not see, the articulation of politics in areas and phenomena inaccessible to the
apparatus of the Raj, would cease henceforth to exercise the undisputed authority
invested in it by an academic tradition complicit to imperialism.” 114

Subaltern Studies historians made a sharp critique of the colonialist assumption that
‘colonial rule in South Asia was based on the consent of the colonized just as much as
the rule of the metropolitan bourgeoisie in a sovereign Western country is based on its
citizens’ consent’. They argued that the liberal-imperialist claim that the Raj was a “rule
of law” fell far short of the reality. Britain, the world’s most advanced democracy, was
fundamentally different from a colonial state such as India that was a state without
citizenship. What Britain actually set up in South Asia was autocracy and in that sense,
41
colonialism cannot be endowed with hegemony. The Cambridge historians’ argument
that British rule in India was based on consent and collaboration of its subjects does not
stand closer scrutiny. As Guha himself explains, no ruling power can ask for voluntary
cooperation from its subordinates without consenting to the latter a choice not to
cooperate, and such a choice was unable to coexist with the autocracy that was the very
essence of that rulership. Guha later on described the Raj as a “dominance without
hegemony” which implied that the colonial authority did not in general exclude the
movement of oppression, although they gave more importance to that of persuasion.
Hence, the colonialist claim to hegemony does not carry weight.115

The Indian nationalist discourse was also sharply criticized. This discourse assumed that
the people of colonial India had full consent to the rule of ‘their own’ bourgeoisie in the
anticolonial campaigns guided by the Indian National Congress  the all-India party of
the elites. Subaltern scholars challenged the notion of people’s consent on the basis of
new research. They pointed out that in several regions of India, subaltern masses
snatched from the elite leaders the initiative of such massive and historic incidents as the
Noncooperation, Civil Disobedience, and Quit India movements. Traditions of popular
protest and the communitarian experience of working and living together inspired the
people who made these struggles their own. But unfortunately such anti-imperialist
mobilization has never been taken into account by the nationalist historiography seeking
to ascertain bourgeois claims to hegemony. Subaltern Studies called our attention to the
futility of such hegemonic exaggerations by curtly stating that the rise of the Congress to
power in post-1947 India by no means involved the realization of a historic promise of
rulership by consent. It is the story of a dominance frantically struggling for
hegemony.116

Thus, a critique of both colonialist and nationalist history-writing comprised the

principal agenda of Subaltern Studies developing in consonance to the 1967 Naxalite
movement. True, the peasant struggle was shattered. But, the question of structure and
relations of power within the Indian nation-state that this political struggle stirred up,
was not. It remained as a rich legacy in the disciplines of social science, history, art and
literature. As Partha Chatterjee puts it, debates were going on among the Marxist
politicians and intellectuals on two issues. Firstly, how and when did capitalist mode of
production emerge in India’s agrarian economy? Secondly, how far progressive was the
42
so-called Bengal Renaissance of the nineteenth century? Subaltern Studies raised once
again the much-discussed question of power structure in the perspective of the
unfinished debates.117 It became a unique location for a new variety of people’s history 
“a post-nationalist reimagining of the Indian nation on the underside, at the margins,
118
outside nationalism.” In the writings of Gyanendra Pandey and Partha Chatterjee,
subaltern India emerged in fragments during the 1980s and 1990s.119

Global Political Context:

Decline of Marxism and
Emergence of Postcoloniality

Subaltern Studies also became involved in the efforts to reconstruct history itself. In
1982, Ranajit Guha spoke of the ‘historic failure of the Indian nation to come to its own’.
In his view, both the bourgeoisie and the working class in India completely failed to
overpower colonialism decisively and to usher in ‘a bourgeois-democratic revolution of
either the classic nineteenth-century type under the hegemony of the bourgeoisie or a
more modern type under the hegemony of workers and peasants’.120 By 1990, however,
Subaltern Studies had new implications. The world witnessed the breaking up of the
Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the Balkans in the 1990s. These incidents were widely
said to have indicated the failure of Marxism, communism and socialism. Eric
Hobsbawm called 1989 the end of ‘the age of extremes’ as Cold War came to an end
after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As Thomas Haskell remarked in a review
article “The bloody contest between capitalism and socialism unexpectedly came to an
end in 1989 after a struggle that gripped the world for a century and a half. Of course
appearances may prove deceiving; movements and institutions have been known to
survive defeat and prosper under new names. Still, the tides of geopolitical fortune have
undeniably shifted, giving us good reason to wonder where capitalism, giddy with self-
congratulation and unchecked by any formidable opposition, is taking us.”121 The failure
of the modern state spread through academic writing. New approaches to nationality
came forward. The Marxist historian Benedict Anderson was attempting to redress the
failure of communists and Marxists to understand nationalism. He sought to reinvent the
nation as “an imagined political community” in his seminal 1983 publication.122

As Hobsbawm points out, the twentieth century ended in problems. As the citizens of the
‘fin de siecle trapped their way through the global fog that surrounded them, into the

43
 third millennium, all they knew for certain was that an era of history had ended’. In
Hobsbawm’s words, ‘they knew very little else’.123 The collapse of the U.S.S.R., writes
Hobsbawm, naturally drew attention chiefly to the failure of Soviet communism, that is
to say, of the effort to found a whole economy on universal state-ownership of the
means of production and all-inclusive central planning, without any successful resort to
market or pricing systems. All other historic forms of the socialist model had taken to an
economy, which stood on the social ownership of all means of production, distribution
and exchange, and the abolition of private enterprise. Hence this failure, notes
Hobsbawm, also destabilized the ambitions of non-communist socialism, Marxist or
otherwise. Whether, or in which form, Marxism would go on remained an issue of
debate.124

On the other hand, points out Hobsbawm, ‘the counter-utopia’ to the Soviet one was also
patently insolvent. This was the blind trust in an economy, which allowed the free
market reign supreme under conditions of limitless competition. It was believed that such
a state of affairs would produce the maximum of happiness as well as the only kind of
society deserving the name of freedom. Such a purely laissez-faire society had never
existed. However, no attempt was made before the 1980s to introduce the ‘ultra-liberal
utopia’ in practice. The most consistent endeavour to do so in the West – Margaret
Thatcher’s regime in Britain  had to work with a definite gradualism. However, when
attempts were made to set up such laissez-faire economies to replace the former Soviet-
socialist economies at short notice, the consequences were economically terrible and
both socially and politically devastating. In Hobsbawm’s view, the premises on which
the ‘neo-liberal theology’ was based were too far from reality.125

After fall of the USSR, the Western commentators’ conclusion was that capitalism and
liberal democracy won an enduring victory. Soviet-type communism was indisputably
dead. But capitalism also was certainly not in the best of shape at this time. As Hobsbawm
writes, no serious observer in the early 1990s could be as confident about liberal
democracy as about capitalism. In his view, one essential aspect of the international
political landscape of the time was the dwindling of the nation-state, worn out both from
above and below. The nation-state was rapidly losing power and function to various
‘supra-national’ entities. It was also losing to various private agencies its ‘monopoly of
effective power and its historic privileges’ inside its boundaries. In a word, the nation-
44
state’s posture had changed. An indispensable aspect of “modernization” from the
eighteenth century until the second half of the twentieth was the non-stop empowerment of
the nation-state. The parameters of citizens’ lives in “modern” states were essentially
decided by the activities or inactivities of that state. However, by the end of the century,
the nation-state was on the defensive. It could control neither the new world economy nor
the institutions that it had once erected to deal with its own weakness, such as the
European Union.126

In this context, epistemologies and ways of knowing history came under study as social
theory took a linguistic, literary turn. Cultural studies became ever more prominent. As
Aijaz Ahmad has shown, cultural criticism became cultural politics.127 In the writings of
historians, social theory broke up into separate divisions. Society and culture, maintained
some scholars, had to be detached from state institutions and political economy. Rejecting
class analysis, Benedict Anderson observed that cultural forces, not state politics, did the
best of national identity and passion. Anderson fully corroborated Eric Hobsbawm’s view
that Marxist movements and states had tended to become national not only in form but in
substance. He believed that there was no indication that this trend would not continue.128
Tom Nairn, the celebrated social scientist and the author of The Break-up of Britain,
remarks that the theory of nationalism corresponds to Marxism’s great historical failure.
Referring to this admission, Anderson writes that it would be more precise to say that
nationalism has demonstrated a painful inconsistency in Marxist theory and, exactly for
that reason, has been mostly elided, rather than confronted.129 Anderson’s point of
departure is that nationality, or to put it otherwise, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are
cultural objects of a particular kind, which have provoked deep attachments over time.

In Sumit Sarkar’s view, as expectations of radical change through popular enterprise

became fragile, notions of ‘seamless, all-pervasive, virtually irresistible power-knowledge’
dislocated the sensation of the moments of resistance, which was central to the histories
from below of the 1960s and 1970s. Domination was very much explained in terms of
cultural discourse that focused on the power-knowledge of the post-Enlightenment West.
‘Enlightenment rationalism’ became the primary target of polemical attack; Marxism stood
damned as one more assortment of Eurocentrism. As Sarkar writes scornfully, ‘radical,
left-wing social history’ had been ‘collapsed into cultural studies and critiques of colonial
discourse’. Michel Foucault, and more emphatically, Edward Said became the new
45
inspiration rather than E. P. Thompson.130 As a historian who holds on to his faith in the
class analysis of traditional Marxism, Sarkar himself admits that there were insufficiencies
even in the best of Western Marxist or radical historiography. As he writes, such
insufficiencies came to be sensed more profoundly in the new age of ‘vastly intensified
globalization, socialist collapse, resurgent neo-colonialism and racism, and the rise to
unprecedented prominence of expatriate third-world intellectuals located, or seeking
location in, Western universities’.131

Edward Said’s notable work Orientalism was published in 1978. It is a key text for what
has come to be known as postcolonial theory.132 Said argued that Orientalism needed to be
understood as a discourse by which European culture was able to control – and even
construct – the Orient ‘politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically,
133
and imaginatively’ during the post-Enlightenment period. “Taking the late eighteenth
century as a very roughly defined starting point”, writes Said, “Orientalism can be
discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing
with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it,
settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism, as a Western style for dominating,
restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. … The relationship between Occident
and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex
hegemony, and is quite accurately indicated in the title of K. M. Panikkar’s classic Asia
and Western Dominance.” 134

Said’s purpose was not to locate a more ‘real’ Orient in the place of one that was created
by Orientalism. He was rather drawing attention to how Orientalism was caught up in the
very structures that shaped the historical conditions of European colonialism and
imperialism. Said looked at both the scope of Orientalism and the ways in which it
approved and thereby controlled the Orient. Orientalism directed the nature and shape of
knowledge. Providing very real material interests, the numerous texts of Orientalism – in
philology, ethnography, political science, art and literature – played a critical role in
putting up an Orient that agreed to the use of definite forms of control over it.135 Said’s
Orientalism strove to show that European culture expanded in strength and identity by
projecting itself against the Orient as a kind of substitute and even subversive self. In his
own words, “… because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of
thought or action. This is not to say that Orientalism unilaterally determines what can be
46
said about the Orient, but that it is the whole network of interests inevitably brought to
bear on … any occasion when that peculiar entity ‘the Orient’ is in question.” 136

Said incited an examination of literary and other texts. Under the influence of his work,
analysis of colonial discourse was becoming a legitimate area of inquiry in literary and
other studies. Under the aegis of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in
Birmingham, the powerful work The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1982.137 At the same
time, Western academia came to know of the first volume of Subaltern Studies. 138 Within
the field of cultural studies, point out Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, the
discussions that are most relevant turn round “colonial discourse”. This term has attracted
critical attention to the study of the language of the historical representation of colonized
peoples, and by extension, of oppressed others more generally. The discussion of otherness
has tended to imply that others are undifferentiated and that projects that focus on
difference  whether the difference of gender, race, class, or cultural otherness  have a
‘homologous relation one to the other: race can stand in for gender; gender can stand in for
class and class for the culturally distant’. Locating the third world at the side of race and
gender in discussions on otherness was meaningful, especially when it called attention to
the ‘legacies of domination and repression, the multiplicity of voices, and the complexity
of power that is culturally embedded in the everyday’.139

As Padmini Mongia puts it, “Concurrently, one witnessed fundamental reassessments of

modes of knowledge production in a whole range of academic disciplines such as
anthropology, history, literary studies and sociology … issues of race, colony, empire and
nationhood were becoming central intellectual concerns even as the very modes of
140
knowledge production and the politics of intellectual work were under scrutiny.”
Postcolonial theory, notes Mongia, had been shaped as a reaction to new socio-historic
forces even as it put forward a means of talking about them. The political ideas like
democracy and nationalism that had determined modern history did not appear to be
adequate any more for coping with contemporary realities. The advent of new social
movements around such issues as race, gender and ethnicity had exposed the perimeters of
older notions of community, individual and nation.

Significant changes such as decolonization or new sharing of global power resulted into
instabilities. It became clear that the old metanarratives of progress and reason were
47
inadequate for addressing contemporary realities and the numerous fractures that attended
them. Nationalism once replaced the grand narrative, of which Europe was the norm, and
imagined the modern nation-state as the new ideal. Postcolonial theory, conversely,
problematized the nation-state and its ideologies and, as noted above, disclosed the
difficulty of viewing the nation even as an ‘imagined community’. It discarded both the
‘Western imperium’ and the ‘nationalist project’.141 Gyan Prakash describes postcolonial
criticism as critiquing the ‘historicism that projected the West as History’.142 Europe is the
theoretical subject of this history. The Subaltern Studies collective interfered with the
production of academic history by conceiving of a historiography that restored agency to
the subaltern classes.

Postcolonial theory ‘foregrounded the legacy of the Enlightenment and modernity’ to trace
out the significance that this legacy had had for erecting the theoretical foundations of
Western thought. Attempting to challenge the Enlightenment certainties, postcolonial
theory recognized their systematic and enduring power. As a result, postcolonial theory
emphasized that it was always ‘after the empire of reason’, always after having been
worked over by colonialism.143

In different ways, Subaltern studies coincided with the advent of identity politics and
multiculturalism of the United States. Ronald Inden was one of the earliest to comment on
the project. He stated that Indians, possibly for the first time since they came under
colonialism, were demonstrating constant indications of reappropriating the ability to
represent themselves.144 Indeed, the American academy, as Vinay Lal rightly points out,
views Subaltern Studies as the form in which ‘cultural studies’ had originated in India,
while others distinguish it as amounting to the particular Indian variation of postcolonial
theory.145

48
Notes and References

1
Volumes I - VII, IX and X in the Subaltern Studies series appeared under the subtitle Writings
on South Asian History and Society. Volume VIII is subtitled Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha,
Volume XI, Community, Gender and Violence, and Volume XII, Muslims, Dalits, and the
Fabrications of History.
2
In 1956, Guha left the Party in protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
3
Ranajit Guha, ed., A Subaltern Studies Reader 1986-1995 (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1997, hereafter SSR), ‘Introduction’, p. xiv.
4
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, hereafter OUP), p. 224.
5
Ibid.
6
‘Preface’ in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies IV (Delhi: OUP, 1985).
7
David Arnold, ‘Gramsci and Peasant Subalternity in India’, in Vinayak Chaturvedi, ed.,
Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London: Verso, 2000, hereafter MSS), pp. 34-
36.
8
Sumit Sarkar, ‘The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies’, in Chaturvedi, MSS, op. cit.,
pp. 300-302.
9
Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in
Colonial South Asia’, in Ludden, RSS, op. cit., p.137.
10
Ibid., p.137.
11
Chaturvedi, MSS, ‘Introduction’, pp. x-xii.
12
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘A Small History of Subaltern Studies’, in Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta
Ray, eds., A Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Blackwell Publishing, 2000), pp. 467-68.
13
Chakrabarty, ‘Subaltern History as Political Thought’, in V. R. Mehta and Thomas Pantham,
eds., Political Ideas in Modern India: Thematic Explorations (New Delhi: Sage Publications,
2006), pp. 97-98. [This book originally came out as Vol. X, Part VII of the series titled History of
Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, ed., D. P. Chattopadhyay.]
14
Chakrabarty, ‘A Small History of Subaltern Studies’, op. cit., p.467.
15
David Ludden, ‘Introduction’, in David Ludden, ed., Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical
History, Contested Meaning, and the Globalisation of South Asia (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001,
hereafter RSS), p.4.
16
Ibid., p.5. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: OUP, 1977), pp. 121-128.
17
Thomas R. Bates, ‘Gramsci and the Theory of Hegemony’, Journal of the History of Ideas,
Vol. 36, No. 2. (April-June, 1975), p. 351.

49
18
Partha Chatterjee, ‘Introduction’ in Partha Chatterjee and Gautam Bhadra, eds., Nimnabarger
itihas [in Bengali] (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1998), pp. 4-5. See Antonio Gramsci,
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed., Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith (New York: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1971, hereafter SPN), pp. 197-200.
19
Perry Anderson, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review, 100. (November-
June, 1977), p.5.
20
John A Davis, ed., Gramsci and Italy’s Passive Revolution (London: Croom Helm, 1979), pp.
1-9.
21
James Martin, Gramsci’s Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction (Great Britain: Macmillan
Press, 1998), pp. 5-6.
22
James. Joll, Europe Since 1870: An International History, second edition. (Penguin Books,
1976), pp. 113-142.
23
Martin, op. cit., p.8.
24
See H.S. Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought
1890-1930 (Sussex, 1979).
25
Martin, op.cit., pp. 7-9.
26
David Arnold, ‘Gramsci and Peasant Subalternity in India’, in Chaturvedi, MSS, op. cit., p.24.
The discussion that follows is heavily indebted to the said article.
27
Ibid. p.25.
28
A. Davidson, Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography (London: Merlin Press,
1977), Chapter 2. Found in Arnold, op.cit., pp. 25-27.
29
Marcia Landy, ‘Culture and Politics in the Work of Antonio Gramsci’, boundary 2, Vol. 14,
No. 3. [‘The Legacy of Antonio Gramsci’] (Spring, 1986), p. 50.
30
J.M.Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1967), p.131.
31
Arnold, op.cit., p.28.
32
Gramsci, SPN, pp. 12 and 75-76.
33
Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings: 1921-1926 (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1978), pp. 454-55. Referred to in Arnold, op.cit., p.30.
34
Gramsci, ‘Notes on Italian History’, in SPN, op. cit., p. 52.
35
Raymond Williams, op.cit., p. 108. Joseph Femia, ‘Hegemony and Consciousness in the
Thought of Antonio Gramsci’, Political Studies, Vol. 23, Issue 1. (March, 1975), p. 31, found in
Arnold, op.cit. p. 48; Thomas R. Bates, ‘Gramsci and the Theory of Hegemony’, op. cit., pp.
351- 52.
36
Bates, ibid. p. 352. See also, E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, Vol. I
(Baltimore: Penguin Books; 3rd edition, 1969), pp. 29-31.

50
37
Marcia Landy, op. cit., p. 58.
38
Arnold, op. cit., pp.31-33.
39
Gramsci, SPN, p.52.
40
See Atis K Dasgupta, The Fakir and Sannyasi Uprisings (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi & Company,
1992), pp.116-121. Dasgupta has compared the role of the Fakirs and the Sannyasis of colonial
Bengal with that of the ‘traditional intellectuals’ as formulated by Gramsci in Prison Notebooks
(pp. 1-23).
41
SPN, p. 55. The point has been explained by Arnold, p.38.
42
Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in Ranajit Guha ed.,
Subaltern Studies I (Delhi: OUP, 1982), pp. 4-5.
43
Ibid. pp.5-6.
44
Guha, ‘Introduction’, SSR, op. cit., p. xviii.
45
Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: OUP,
1983), p. 5.
46
Arnold, op.cit. p. 36.
47
Florencia E. Mallon, ‘The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin
American History’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 99, No. 5. (December, 1994), p. 1496.
48
Partha Chatterjee, ‘Peasants, Politics and Historiography: A Response’, Social Scientist
No.120 (1983), p. 59.
49
Bipan Chandra, Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India (New Delhi: Orient Longman,
1979), pp. 127 and 347.
50
M. H. Siddiqi, Agrarian Unrest in North India: The United Provinces, 1918-22 (New Delhi:
Vikas, 1978), Chapter- 2.
51
Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism: The Peasant Movement in
Awadh, 1919-22’ in Subaltern Studies I, op. cit., pp.143-191.
52
Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921-2’, in Subaltern
Studies III (Delhi: OUP, 1984), pp.1-55.
53
Arnold, op. cit., pp. 40-41.
54
Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, p. 7.
55
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘A Small History of Subaltern Studies’, op.cit. p. 471.
56
Sumit Sarkar, ‘Popular’ Movements & ‘Middle Class’ Leadership in Late Colonial India:
Perspectives & Problems of a “History from Below” (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi, 1983), p.8. Also,
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, 'History from Below', Social Scientist, Vol. 11, No. 4. (April, 1983),
pp. 3-20.
57
E. J. Hobsbawm, Social Bandits and Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social
Movement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Illinois: The Free Press, 1960), pp. 7-33.

51
See Hobsbawm, ‘History From Below: Some Reflections’, in History From Below: Studies in
Popular Protest and Popular Ideology, ed., Frederick Krantz (Oxford: OUP, 1988), pp. 13-27.
Also, Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India , op. cit.,
Chapters 2-7, pp. 18-332. Guha points to six elementary aspects. These are ‘Negation’,
‘Ambiguity’, ‘Modality’, ‘Solidarity’, ‘Transmission’, and ‘Territoriality’.
58
Gyan Prakash, ‘Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism’, in The American Historical
Review, Volume 99, No. 1. (December, 1994), p. 1480.
59
Hobsbawm, Social Bandits and Primitive Rebels, op.cit., p. 2.
60
Ibid.
61
Hobsbawm, op. cit., pp. 131-42. See Richard W. Slatta, ‘Banditry’, in Peter N. Sterns, ed.,
Encyclopedia of Social History (New York: Garland, 1994), pp. 76-78. Several scholars have
criticized the way Hobsbawm defines the social bandit. See Pat O’Malley, ‘Social Bandits,
Modern Capitalism and the Traditional Peasantry: A Critique of Hobsbawm’, Journal of Peasant
Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4. (July, 1979), pp. 488-499. As Richard Slatta notes, “Owing to his
[Hobsbawm’s] reliance on folkloric and literary sources, he exaggerated the tie between peasant
and bandit that “makes social banditry interesting and significant. It is this special relation
between peasant and bandit which makes banditry ‘social.’” Other bandit attributes may be
disputed or open to various interpretations, but the existence of this relationship is essential to the
model’s credibility.” (Slatta, ‘Eric J. Hobsbawm’s Social Bandit: A Critique and Revision’, in A
Contracorriente, Vol. 1, No. 2. (Spring, 2004), p. 29.
62
Ludden, RSS, ‘Introduction’, p. 5.
63
Sumit Sarkar, ‘The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies’, in Chaturvedi, MSS, pp.
301 and 319.
64
Ludden, op cit., p. 5.
65
A.R.Desai, ‘Unconventional Anthropology of Traditional Peasantry’, in A.R.Desai ed.,
Peasant Struggles in India, (Delhi: OUP, 1979), Chapter - 39. Wolf’s quote is from this chapter.
See review article by David B. Ottaway on Eric R. Wolf’s Peasant Wars of the Twentieth
Century published in African Historical Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2. (1971), pp. 416-418
66
Ludden, op. cit., p. 5. See, Eric Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society
and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978),
Chapter 12 [‘The Return of the Peasant to South Asian History’.]
67
Ludden. op. cit., p. 12.
68
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Vintage 1963), pp. 12-
13.
69
Partha Chatterjee, op. cit., pp.15-16.

52
70
Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, ‘ ‘The Making of the Working Class’: E P .Thompson and Indian
History’, in Chaturvedi, op.cit., p.50.
71
Chatterjee, op.cit., p.16.
72
Ibid., p. 16.
73
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘A Small History of Subaltern Studies’, op. cit., p.472.
74
Hobsbawm, Social Bandits, op. cit., p.2.
75
Ibid., Chapter II.
76
Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and
20th Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978; first published 1959), pp. 2-3.
See, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference (New Delhi: OUP, 2001), pp. 11-12.
77
Guha, Elementary Aspects, p.6.
78
Ibid.
79
Ibid., pp. 9-10.
80
Ibid., Chapters I and II, pp. 1-76. Also, Chakrabarty, ‘A Small History of Subaltern Studies’,
p.473.
81
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p. 14. In this connection, see his Rethinking Working-
Class History: Bengal 1890-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 3-13, and
219-230.
82
Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 110-13.
83
Ibid., p. 16.
84
Ibid., pp 22-24.; See John Gallagher, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire: The
Ford Lectures and Other Essays, ed., Anil Seal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962),
‘Preface’, [‘John Andrew Gallagher, 1919-1980’], pp vii xxvii, and Chapter 3 [‘The Decline,
Revival and Fall of the British empire’], pp. 73-154.
85
Seal, The Emergence, pp. 341-46.
86
Amales Tripathi, Swadhinata Sangrame Bharater Jatiya Congress 1885-1947 [In Bengali]
(Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, BS 1397), pp. 17-20.
87
Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885-1947 (New Delhi: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 6-7. Also, see John
Gallagher, Gordon Johnson and Anil Seal, eds., Locality, Province and Nation: Essays on Indian
Politics 1870-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). pp. 1-27.
88
Seal, ‘Imperialism and Nationalism in India’, in ibid. p.2.
89
Gallagher, Johnson and Seal, op. cit., pp. 1-27.
90
Sumit Sarkar, op. cit., p. 7. Following publications deserve mention: David Washbrook, The
Emergence of Provincial Politics : Madras Presidency 1870-1920 ( Cambridge: Cambridge

53
University Press,1976 ) ; C. A. Bayly, Local Roots of Indian Politics -- Allahabad 1880-1920 (
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975 ) ; Gordon Johnson, Provincial Politics and Indian
Nationalism: Bombay and the Indian National Congress 1880-1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1973 ) ; Francis Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims : The Politics of
the United Provinces Muslims 1860-1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).
91
Sumit Sarkar , ibid., p.7
92
Ludden, RSS, p.7
93
Bipan Chandra, Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India, op. cit., pp. 130- 133, and 135.
Also, see Bipan Chandra, The Epic Struggle (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1992), pp. 1-13; and
Essays on Indian Nationalism (New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 1993), pp. 11-24.
94
Bipan Chandra, Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India, p. 135.
95
Chakrabarty, ‘A Small History of Subaltern Studies’, p. 471.
96
Ibid.
97
Gyan Prakash, ‘Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism’, American Historical Review,
Vol. 99, No. 5. (December, 1994), p. 1477.
98
Guha, SSR, p. xii.
99
Ludden, RSS, p. 11.
100
Gail Omvedt, Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements and the Socialist Tradition in
India (London: M.E. Sharpe, 1993), pp. 39-42. Also see, George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of
the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston: South End Press, 1987), p. 58.
101
John Roosa, ‘The Punjab Crisis: Fallout of the Green Revolution’. Quoted in Omvedt, p. 41.
102
Ranabir Samaddar, ‘Revolution Created or Revolution Destroyed?’, In the Wake of Marx 2,
3. (July, 1986), p.12. Quoted in Omvedt, op. cit., p. 42.
103
Partha Mukherjee, ‘Naxalbari Movement and the Peasant Revolt in North Bengal’, in M.S.A.
Rao, ed., Social Movements in India (New Delhi: Manohar, 1978), p. 49 ; quoted in Omvedt,
op. cit., p. 41.
104
Omvedt, ibid.
105
Samaddar, op. cit, p. 19.
106
Partha Mukherjee, op. cit., p. 43; found in Omvedt, p.42.
107
Samaddar, op. cit., p. 15.
108
Guha, SSR, p. xi.
109
Ibid., p. xii.
110
Ibid.
111
Ibid., p. xiii.
112
Ibid., p. xiv.
113
‘Preface’, Subaltern Studies I, p. vii.

54
114
Guha, SSR, p. xvii.
115
Ibid, p. xviii.
116
Ibid., pp. xviii – xix.
117
Partha Chatterjee, Nimnabarger Itihas, op. cit., p. 10.
118
Ludden, RSS, p. 20.
119
Gyanendra Pandey, ‘In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India
Today’, in SSR, pp. 1-33. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and
Postcolonial Histories [included in Partha Chatterjee Omnibus (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1999); first published by Princeton University Press in 1993), Chapters 6-9. pp. 116-199.
120
Subaltern Studies I, p. 7.
121
Thomas L. Haskell, ‘The New Aristocracy,’ New York Review of Books, Vol. 44, No. 19.
(December 4, 1997), p. 47.
122
Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983), pp. 1-82.
123
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York:
Vintage Books, 1996), pp. 558-559.
124
Ibid., p. 563.
125
Ibid., p. 564.
126
Ibid., pp. 574-576.
127
Aijaz Ahmad, Lineages of the Present: Political Essays (Philadelphia, 1993), [Chapter -
‘Culture, Nationalism and the Role of Intellectuals: An Interview’], pp. 396-428.
128
Hobsbawm, ‘Some Reflections on “The Break-up of Britain”’, New Left Review 105
(September-October 1977), p.13. See Anderson, op. cit., ‘Introduction’, pp. 1-8.
129
Anderson, op. cit., p. 13.
130
Sumit Sarkar, ‘The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies’, op. cit., pp. 300-302.
131
Ibid., p. 316.
132
Padmini Mongia, ‘Introduction’, in Padmini Mongia, ed., Contemporary Postcolonial
Theory: A Reader (New Delhi: OUP, 1997), pp. 3-5.
133
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), p. 3.
134
Ibid., pp. 3-4.
135
Mongia, op. cit., p. 4.
136
Said, op. cit., p.3.
137
The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70’s Britain (Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies, London: Routledge, 1982). Cited in Mongia, p. 4.
138
Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 3-426.

55
139
Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial
Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Delhi: OUP, 1994), p. 5.
140
Mongia, op. cit., p. 4.
141
Mongia, op. cit., pp.4-5. See Anthony Appiah ‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post-in
Postcolonial?’ in Critical Inquiry 17 (Winter, 1991), p. 353.
142
Gyan Prakash, ‘Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism’, op. cit., p. 1475, n. 1.
143
Mongia, op. cit., pp. 5-6.
144
Ronald Inden, ‘Orientalist Constructions of India’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3.
(1986), p. 45.
145
Vinay Lal, The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (New Delhi:
OUP, 2003), p. 191.

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