LSJG on Subaltern Studies

oudies at flash.net oudies at flash.net
Thu Oct 14 12:03:14 PDT 1999


for the remick's fo the list who think this stuff has nothing to do with real world politics...... tho i think rakesh had problems with this acct. i'm not a scholar/expert in this field, just stumbled over it once in my dilettante way....so perhaps others can comment

"the {subaltern studies} collective's project had an even more ambitious aim: they wished to reconstruct peasant consciousness itself, and to demonstrate its autonomy from elite nationalist thought. In order to do so, they sought out both new sources and attempted to reread the traditional archives 'against the grain', all with the aim of recreating the mental world of the peasant insurgent."


>From Newsletter,
London Socialist Historians Group, No. 4 Autumn 1998, p. 2-3.

Historiography

Subaltern Studies

by Neil Rogall

In India, as in Britain, 'History from Below' had a tremendous impact in the 1970s. In

particular, the visit of E. P. Thompson to the sub-continent in 1976-77 left a

widespread desire amongst radical historians to emulate his work in an Indian context.

This response reflected a number of factors. Just as elsewhere in the world the late

sixties saw a tremendous radicalisation, against a backdrop of economic and political

crisis. This had its echoes in the new and expanding universities of India. But the

specific attraction of 'History from Below' was its challenge to the prevailing

orthodoxy. An admixture of Stalinism and Nationalism dominated historical study,

particularly of the colonial period. Nationalists viewed the anti-colonial struggle in

terms of a 'unitary movement' under the leadership of the Gandhian Congress.

Communist historians, such as Bipan Chandra, widened the parameters of 'acceptable

nationalism' to include the 'revolutionary terrorists' and the left. Nevertheless both

nationalists and communists shared the assumption that the mass of Indians were

woken to political life by Gandhi and the rest of the Congress High Command.

However the impact of 'History from Below' collided in the Indian academy with

another import from the west - post-structuralism and post-modernism. This collision

produced a new and specifically Indian synthesis - the Subaltern Studies group. A

journal of that name first appeared in 1982, edited by Ranajit Guha. The term

Subaltern was taken from Gramsci's euphemism for the proletariat in his Prison

Notebooks. However the Subaltern Studies collective used it as a catch-all term for all

groups they viewed as oppressed - the proletariat, the peasantry, women, tribal

people.

As with Thompson et al they saw their aim as being to recover the struggles of the

poor and the outcast from the 'condescension of posterity' and the grip of 'official' left

intellectuals. The collective focussed on peasant and tribal struggles, little work being

done on urban movements with the exception of Dipesh Chakrabarty's 'Rethinking

Working Class History' on the jute mill workers of Calcutta. But what was distinctive

about their approach was the argument that these struggles, far from being creations of

what they termed 'elite nationalism', were independent of it and much more radical.

Gyan Pandy, for example, in the first issue of the journal demonstrated convincingly, in

a study of the 1921-22 peasant struggle in Awadh, how Congress, far from initiating

the struggle, had attempted to undermine it because the peasants were targeting Indian

landlords who Congress wished to incorporate in their pan-Indian alliance against the

British.

However the Subalterns weren't simply interested in illustrating the 'bourgeois' nature

of India nationalism. They argued that movements from below had been hijacked by

elite nationalism and subordinated to the nationalist project. When they wrote of

combating 'grand narratives, it was the 'grand narrative' of anti-colonial nationalism

they were targeting. Undoubtedly there was a very important core to their argument -

essentially the 'nationalist leadership' had attempted to use 'highly controlled' struggles

of the Indian masses in order to confront and then replace the colonial masters. But the

collective's project had an even more ambitious aim: they wished to reconstruct

peasant consciousness itself, and to demonstrate its autonomy from elite nationalist

thought. In order to do so, they sought out both new sources and attempted to reread

the traditional archives 'against the grain', all with the aim of recreating the mental world

of the peasant insurgent.

Over time however, the Subalterns began to shift their ground. The influence of

post-modernism and its offspring 'post-colonial studies' began to take its toll. Now the

central theme of the group's work became not the hijacking of popular struggles in the

interests of an aspiring Indian bourgeoisie nor the reconstruction of subaltern

consciousness, but the argument that the whole 'nationalist' project was fundamentally

flawed. In the name of 'progress' and 'modernity', the nationalists, [++Page 3] after

1947, had imposed an oppressive centralising state on the 'fragments' that comprise

Indian society. So Partha Chatterjee, a key figure in the group, argues in 'The Nation

and its Fragments' that secularism and enlightenment rationalism are simply weapons in

the armoury of the post-colonial state. Similarly Dipesh Chakrabarty insists that the

very notion of a good society or of universal progress are 'monomanias' that need to

be junked in the name of the 'episodic' and the 'fragment'. It is in this context that

'community' began to replace 'subaltern' as the focus of the collective's work.

'Community' was now privileged as the key source of resistance to the new hegemonic

power. This has led to a celebration of local traditions for their own sake. But of

course, in reality communities are not simply centres of resistance to an intrusive and

oppressive state, but also sources of oppression themselves - of class, gender and

caste.

Such a perspective treads very dangerous ground. The current BJP-led coalition

government trumpets an exclusivist 'Hindu' nationalism and targets all liberal,

democratic and socialist thought as alien imports. Clearly the members of 'the

collective' loathe this new majoritarianism, and many of them have spoken out and

campaigned against the Hindu right. Nonetheless their own championing of indigenous

discourse, irrelevant of its content, and their attacks on Enlightenment thought as

fundamentally oppressive, plays into the hands of those bigots that now govern India

and who wish to create an authoritarian state based on 'authentic Indian tradition'.



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