Subaltern Studies

The ongoing work of the Subaltern Studies group (Ranajit Guha, David Arnold, Partha Chatterjee and others) is an attempt to write a historiography that is different from the colonial one. The theories of nationalism, identity and ethnicity come in for special scrutiny here. Gyan Prakash explicitly links the subaltern studies project with postcolonial studies in its combination of poststructuralism, Marxism and archival research. Tejaswini Niranjana writes: "post-structuralism's questioning of universalism and essentialism as well as its critique of humanism not only aligns it with anti-colonial critique, but is also indebted to such a critique in ways that as yet remain largely unmapped." The focus is on "the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office ... along with the attitudes, ideologies and belief systems." It looks at "history from below," that is the history of those common people (tribals, lower classes/castes and women) that have been silenced in accepted histories of the nationalist movement. The oppressed people would finally find a voice here. As Guha puts it, the accepted history has always been of the elite, the "dominant groups, foreign as well as indigenous … the foreign industrialists, merchants, planters ... and the native recruits to the uppermost levels of the bureaucracy." Some sections have evidently been left out of such histories-these are the subalterns, the oppressed class. The entire project is premised upon the assumption that nationalism and anticolonial movements cannot be understood without analysing the role of the women and the tribal in it. Thus the focus is on small peasant uprisings and individual acts of rebellion that was not part of the larger nationalist movement (these were even considered criminal acts). Gyan Prakash's summing up in After Colonialism is adequate to understand the assumptions of the project: "The subalterns' social location defied the identities of nation and class, and their insurgent consciousness, religiosity, mythic visions, and notions of political community were at odds with the model of causality and rational action advanced by the nationalist elites." Local resistance to colonialism and the use of oral/local traditions rather than a pan-Indian agenda come in for analysis here. Other factors like the gender, class, region are also included in the analysis, which is seen as a counter to the homogenising discourse of the nation state which elides/erases these local variations in favour of a particular elite/religion/caste/class. The subaltern studies project thus provides rigorous reconstruction through empirical analysis and archival research to put together an alternative history.