The field of postcolonial studies rose to prominence in the late 1970s and 1980s, and has remained an enduring influence across many humanities disciplines. Its origins are manifold, though the emergence of the field is normally identified with Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978. The lecture session for this week will cover the emergence of postcolonial thought, and go on to focus on one of its most important strands, Subaltern Studies.

 

Subaltern Studies is best known as a series of volumes of essays edited by a collective of scholars researching modern Indian history. This collective, initially centred around the historian Ranajit Guha, emerged out of discussions held at British and Indian universities in the 1970s and 1980s. 'Subalternists', as they came to be known colloquially, were strongly influenced by history ‘from below’, and initially sought to develop a similar perspective in the context of colonial Indian history. They initially relied heavily on the writings of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who had died in captivity during Mussolini's regime, and who had been a formative influence on 'New Left' forms of thinking (as well as on a range of later thinkers, including Edward Said and Stuart Hall).

 

One of the still-dynamic fields of research opened up by Subaltern Studies concerned the complexities of the relationship between peasant struggles in the colonial era in India and the politics of 'official', elite-led nationalism. Guha proposed that the 'subaltern' groups in colonial and post-colonial Indian society, notably the peasantry, operated through codes of meaning and consciousness which were 'autonomous', in the sense that neither colonialism nor elite-led nationalism was fully able to assert hegemony over them. Many subalternists followed this insight and used it to open up analysis of diverse forms of social struggle.

 

However, Subaltern Studies from its inception went beyond the Marxist parameters of history-from-below, and many key figures focused heavily on colonial discourses and forms of knowledge and representation. Their arguments increasingly aligned with structuralist, post-structuralist and 'postmodern' conceptions of culture, history and discourse. New social movements also left their trace, and questions of gender and caste inequality, initially marginal compared with the weight of questions of class, became increasingly important in subalternist debates from about the middle of the 1980s onwards.

 

Subaltern Studies is primarily significant as the most influential body of historical discourse to originate in the global South. By the 1990s, it had become a global presence—with a particularly powerful instantiation in Latin American studies. It remains an integral part of historical debates about modernity, colonialism, and the predicaments of decolonized societies.

Essential Readings

See Moodle for links to readings.

1. Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, Subaltern Studies I (1982): pp. 1-8.

2. Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'A Small History of Subaltern Studies', in Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (ed.), A Companion to Postcolonial Studies (2000), pp.467-482

3. Read any ONE of the following texts:

a) Ranajit Guha, 'The Prose of Counter-Insurgency', Subaltern Studies II (1983), pp.1-42

b) Partha Chatterjee, 'Gandhi And The Critique of Civil Society', Subaltern Studies III (1984), pp.153-195

c) David Arnold, 'Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague, 1896-1900', Subaltern Studies V (1987), pp.55-90

 

QUESTIONS

1. What similarities and what differences can you perceive between Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ and Subaltern Studies approaches?
2. What inspiration did Subaltern Studies scholars take from Marxist historical thinking, and from ‘history from below’?
3. How does Guha's use 'elite' and 'subaltern' in the inaugural essay of Subaltern Studies, and how you might use these cocnepts when analysing sources?
4. What shifts and transformations took place within the Subaltern Studies project during the 1980s and 1990s, and which Subalternist approaches do you might more compelling and useful?

 

TRUFFLE HUNT

Sources: There are multiple official sources produced during colonial rule which are open to 'postcolonial' or 'subalternist' readings. You can find relevant documents in Hansard's Parliamentary Debates and the British Parliamentary Papers online (both easily accessible online). You might also want to look at newspaper reports (e.g., from The Times or from other digitized newspaper collections available online). Another line of inquiry might be the private papers of individuals involved in the British Empire: there is, for instance, a large collection of these in the Cambridge South Asian Studies archive. (These texts are mostly not available online, but you can find fairly extensive summaries for some). You might also want to explore the websites of the British Library and the National Archives: these contain extensive relevant materials. You may also want to explore the Modern Records Centre, which contains the largest collection of labour movement-related material in Britain, and also contains interesting holdings on empire.

 

If you wish to investigate specifically Indian sources, as Subaltern Studies did, here are some suggestions: archive.org (which contains massive holdings of official colonial-era documentation), the Times of India (a daily Indian newspaper dating back to the mid-19th century, available online through the library website), the Archives of Indian Labour (a massive online repository of open-access material relating to labour and labour movements, developed by the Association of Indian Labour Historians), the massive open-access online holdings of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics in Pune, and the People's Archive of Rural India (PARI, a contemporary archive which details rural and peasant life in India).

 

There are many interesting ways of conducting a 'subalternist' historical analysis. You could, for instance, search for documents relating to popular struggles in parts of the world you are interested in, and analyse the effects of these struggles upon politics and society. Colonial-era police and bureaucratic reports about popular 'unrest' are extremely useful in this light. You could also conduct a 'colonial discourse analysis', along the lines developed by scholars like Guha and Partha Chatterjee: this would involve scrutinizing 'elite' documents and the way they represent popular unrest and consciousness. You could also analyse literary texts in this light. No matter the source you choose to analyse, it would be useful, as a starting-point, to study the methods and styles of historical analysis in some of the landmark works written by subalternists. Following this, you can then consider how these approaches might be deployed or reworked to fit your chosen sources and research interests.

Further Readings

Amin, Shahid, 'Gandhi As Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern U.P. 1921-22', Subaltern Studies III (1983), pp.1-61

Ashcroft, Bill; Gareth Griffiths; & Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies: Key Concepts (London, 2013). See especially the entry on ‘discourse’ . 70-73) (Library Online Resources).

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Fiffin (eds.), The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. (In many ways this publication kicks off the postcolonial enthusiasm in history writing)

Baxi, Upendra "'The State's Emissary': The Place of Law in Subaltern Studies", in Subaltern Studies VII, pp. 247-264

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘Conditions for Knowledge of Working-Class Conditions: Employers, Government and the Jute Workers of Calcutta, 1890-1940’, in Selected Subaltern Studies.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference (Princeton, 2007).

Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?’ Representations, 37 (1992): 1-26.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘A Small History of Subaltern Studies, in ibid., Habitations of Modernity (Chicago, 2002), pp. 3-19.

Chatterjee, Partha , ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 233-253.

Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (1986)

Guha, Ranajit, ‘Discipline and Mobilize’, in Subaltern Studies VII, pp. 69-120.

Guha, Ranajit, 'Chandra's Death', Subaltern Studies V (1987), pp.135-165

Guha, Ranajit, ‘The prose of counter-insurgency’ , Subaltern Studies II (1983), pp. 159-220.

Guha, Ranajit, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1982)

Hardiman, David, 'Adivasi Assertion in South Gujarat: The Devi Movement of 1922-23', in R.Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies III (1984).

Hardiman, David, 'The Bhils and Shahukars of Eastern Gujarat', Subaltern Studies V (1987), pp.1-54

Huggan, Graham (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Iggers, Georg G., A Global History of Modern Historiography (London, 2008), pp. 284-90.

Majumdar, Rochona, Writing Postcolonial History (London, 2010).

Moore-Gilbert, Bart, ‘Postcolonial Theory Contexts, Practices, Politics’ (London, 1997), Chapter 2: Edward Said, Orientalism and Beyond, pp. 34-73.

Pandey, Gyanendra, ‘The Colonial Construction of 'Communalism': British Writings on Banaras in the Nineteenth Century’, in Subaltern Studies VI, pp. 132-68.

Pandey, Gyanendra, 'Rallying Around The Cow: Sectarian Strife in the Bhojpuri Region, c.1888-1917', Subaltern Studies II (1983), pp.60-129

Rodriguez, Iliana, The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader (2001)

Schwarz, Henry, and Ray,Sangeeta (eds.), A Companion to Postcolonial Studies (2000).

Sarkar, Sumit, 'The Kalki-Avatar of Bikrampur: A Village Scandal in Early Twentieth Century Bengal', Subaltern Studies VI (1989), pp.1-53

Spivak, Gayatri C., ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana & Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271-313.

Stephens, Julie, ‘Feminist Fictions: A Critique of the Category 'Non-Western Woman' in Feminist Writings on India", in Subaltern Studies VI, pp. 92-125; Tharu, Susie, ‘Response to Julie Stephens", in Subaltern Studies VI, pp. 126-31.

Young, Robert, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016) – BOTH chapter 1 (pp. 1-11) and chapter 5 (pp. 57-69). (e-book)