Subaltern Perspectives on South Asian History and Society

1
Subaltern Perspectives on South Asian History
and Society
2
Subaltern Studies

• A non-elite perspective on South Asian history
• An attempt to re-write, or retrieve subaltern
  histories
• This is sometimes attempted by looking for their
  trace (or even absence) in elite history

3
Who are the subaltern

• Subaltern as an inferior rank (i.e. the lowest
  strata in society). The term was used by Antonio
  Gramsci, and popularised in the subaltern
  studies literature
• The non-elite in colonial India. The elite being
  
• A) Foreign Elite (the colonial state and its
  officials)
• B) Indigenous Elite (feudal magnates, industrial
  and mercantile bourgeoisie, upper levels of the
  bureaucracy (from Guha 1988)

4
Example Guha The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

• Guha argues that there is agency for resistance
  and change within subaltern groups. But while
  elite forms of resistance are often legalistic
  (and peaceful) he argues that subaltern
  resistance is often violent
• He shows how the trace of organised resistance
  can be uncovered within the elite history but
  that the archive is not an accurate record it
  is ideologically distorting and partial.

5

• To the Deputy Adjunct General of the Army
• Sir,
• Authentic information having reached Government
  that a body of Fanatic Insurgents are now
  committing the most daring and wanton atrocities
  on the inhabitants of the country in the
  neighbourhood of Tippy in the Magistary of
  Baraset and have set a defiance and repulsed the
  utmost force that the local Civic Authority could
  assemble.. To request that you will without delay
  .. send one complete Battalion of Native
  Infantry to Barrackpore, and two Six Pounders
• (from Guha, The prose of counter-insurgency)

6

• Terrible Fine
• InsurgentsPeasants
• FanaticIslamic Puritan
• Daring and wanton atrocities.Resistance to
  oppression
• Defying authority of the StateRevolt against
  Zamindari
• Disturbing public tranquillity.struggle for a
  better order
• Intention to attack.Intention to punish
  oppressors
• Adapted from Guha The prose of
  counter-insurgency
• The records speak of total complicity

7
Spivak Can the Subaltern Speak?

• Spivak used the distinction in Marxs famous
  statement about the peasantry They cannot
  represent themselves, they must be represented,
  to examine the dynamics of subaltern voice and
  representation

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• Gayatri Spivak
• Let us now move to consider the margins (one
  can just as well say the silent, silenced centre)
  of the circuit marked out by this epistemological
  violence, men and women among the illiterate
  peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of the
  urban subproletariat (Can the Subaltern Speak?)

9

• Between patriarchy and imperialism,
  subject-constitution and object-formation, the
  figure of the woman disappears, not into pristine
  nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which
  is the displaced figure of the third world
  woman caught between tradition and
  modernisation
• (Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?)

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Spivak on Spivak..

• the subaltern cannot speak, means that even
  when the subaltern makes an effort to the death
  to speak, she is not heard, and speaking and
  hearing complete the speech act. That is what I
  meant, and anguish marked the spot
• From Subaltern talk, in Landry and Mclean The
  Spivak Reader (1996)