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By 1986, the historical
materialism approach appeared too limited for a study that
sought to ‘contest Eurocentric, metropolitan and bureaucratic
systems of knowledge’. This was a postmodernist turn which
created two groups: one still loyal to the ‘history from below’
model and the other far more radical, exploring and debunking
the ‘myth of origins’ characteristic of the former. Many
would remember Gayatri Spivak’s collaboration with Ranajit
Guha for the Selected Subaltern Studies volume which
reflected the shift. Spivak’s seminal essay ‘Subaltern
Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’ was timely in not only
critiquing the purist aspect of peasant consciousness but also
in foregrounding issues of gender. Spivak also posed the very
valid question, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ This indicated
that the subaltern was a problematic category that occupied a
variety of speaking positions and thus could not be identified.
‘Subalternspeak’, in other words, is an amalgam of dominant
discourses as much as dissenting voices.
Ranajit Guha’s
early essay ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial
India’ from the first volume of Subaltern Studies sets
the tone for this collection of essays by tracing the roots of
Indian nationalism in the colonial enterprise. Guha states that
both of the above are elite movements, involving a collaborative
intent which leaves out the workers and the peasants from their
own history. Not all cases of ‘history’, however, witnessed
such rupture: the elite and the subaltern often worked together
to produce successful struggle but when devoid of elite
leadership, the subaltern initiatives were not powerful enough
to proceed unaided. Following Guha, Partha Chatterjee also seeks
to recover a ‘real history’ in order to give us ‘a glimpse
of that undominated region in peasant consciousness.’
The exaltation
of the peasantry which is part of much subaltern theorising and
from where it derives its stimulus is paradoxically based on the
ideology of the uncorrupted but voiceless native used by the
nationalist intelligentsia. By escaping modernity and
Enlightenment, the peasantry remain outside discourse-making,
thereby, quite justly, getting alloyed with unadulterated and
pristine reality. In fact, orientalist, nationalist, marxist,
subalternists, and poststructuralists, have all, in their own
celebratory or benevolent ways, used the disenfranchised
subproletariat in their works. Thus slogans like ‘garibi hatao’
may be a site of enunciation for both nationalist and subaltern
groups. What is useful in poststructuralist practices, however,
is that subaltern identities are imbued with heterogeneity, thus
splitting open an authoritarian and definitive nationalism, and
a continuing neo-colonialism.
The next few
essays are pretty basic but lucid—David Arnold links
subalternity to its Gramscian origins and also notes a
disengagement in terms of Indian politics; Raj Chandavarkar
traces the impact of E. P. Thompson on the Indian working class;
Rosalind O’Hanlon’s essay is also very much in the tradition
of interrogating an ongoing humanism. Chris Bayly’s
contribution is more critical. For him, simply to emphasise the
autonomy of the peasantry is not helpful in specifying the
nature of historical change, for ‘every subaltern (is) an
elite to someone lower than him.’ Excepting David Arnold, the
above are historians from Cambridge.
Then follows
the animated debate between Gyan Prakash and O’Hanlon/David
Washbrook which, to my mind, is the best part of the book. This
acerbic war of words took place a decade ago in the pages of the
journal Comparative Studies in History and Society. For
Prakash, any attempt at writing third-world history is
exceedingly naïve because of the inevitability of essentialist
traps. Our best hope for anti-foundational history, therefore,
is to use post-structuralism and postmodernist methodology that
would enable us to ‘treat the third world as a variety of
shifting principles’ and indicate the limits of historical
knowledge. O’Hanlon and Washbrook, as is usual with them,
polemically contend that Prakash relies too much on the
demolition-man Derrida, that totalising history does not mean
that difference and resistance have been overlooked, and that an
engagement with events is necessary before any conclusions can
be stated. It goes to Chaturvedi’s credit that he also
includes Prakash’s flippant rejoinder to the duo’s desire
for an untainted, contradiction-free ‘mastery over ambivalence’
by calling them ‘hasty, simplistic and even ill-informed’.
The other
essays by Sumit Sarkar, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gyanendra Pandey all
deserve a mention, but in terms of the transformative politics
of the Subaltern collective towards a post-Marxist stance. Their
essays show how new readings of postcolonial theory (under the
patronage of Edward Said and the US academy) have begun to
impinge upon the marxist critique that had informed the
Subaltern Studies project so far. The interview with Gayatri
Spivak seeks to define a ‘new’ subaltern but the ‘newness’
is lost in the obscurity of her prose.
One does have a question for
Chaturvedi: why did he leave out Shahid Amin whose ‘Gandhi as
Mahatma’ would have served as an excellent example of peasant
politics independent of elite manoeuvre. But the editor’s
rationale behind the selection has been to choose pieces which
represent the theoretical shift in the subaltern approach and
which could serve as a ‘companion collection’ for those
readers who are already familiar with the volumes of Subaltern
Studies.
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POSTCOLONIAL
Studies and the Subaltern are provocative subjects for many
reactionary traditionalist academics who pronounce death upon
it (and upon its practitioners!) while subterraneously delving
into it themselves and often engaging in the gutless act of
anonymous crusades against its adherents. That it, and we, are
far from dead is amply seen in the plethora of books written
in these areas. Verso has come out recently with several
edited volumes of the ‘Mapping’ series: Ideology, Nation,
Women’s movement to name a few. Vinayak Chaturvedi’s Mapping
Subaltern Studies is a desirable addition to the
collection. The word ‘subaltern’ emerged with Gramsci of
course, but its significance in the context of historiography
was initiated to counter an elite methodology. The Subaltern
Studies group of historians was instituted to check elite
records, in fact, all forms of patriarchy starting from
colonial history to the oppression of women. The word ‘subaltern’,
in turn, which originally had the connotations of lower rank
and inferiority began to underscore feminist politics,
postcolonialism and cultural studies. Subalternity became
synonymous with the ‘politics of the people’ who for the
first time got the feel of being active agents of their own
history—-on paper at least.
