"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'.