ONE - A Small History of Subaltern Studies
In a wide-ranging critique of postcolonial studies, Arif Dirlik suggests that, while the historiographic innovations of Subaltern Studies are welcome, they are mere applications of methods pioneered by British Marxist historians, albeit modified by Third World sensibilities. Dirlik writes: Most of the generalizations that appear in the discourse of postcolonial intellectuals from India may appear novel in the historiography of India but are not discoveries from broader perspectives.. . . [T]he historical writings of Subaltern Studies historians . . . represent the application in Indian historiography of trends in historical writings that were quite widespread by the 1970s under the impact of social historians such as E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and a host of others.
Without wishing either to inflate the claims of Subaltern Studies scholars or to deny what Click to read more... ONE - A Small History of Subaltern Studies
In a wide-ranging critique of postcolonial studies, Arif Dirlik suggests that, while the historiographic innovations of Subaltern Studies are welcome, they are mere applications of methods pioneered by British Marxist historians, albeit modified by Third World sensibilities. Dirlik writes: Most of the generalizations that appear in the discourse of postcolonial intellectuals from India may appear novel in the historiography of India but are not discoveries from broader perspectives.. . . [T]he historical writings of Subaltern Studies historians . . . represent the application in Indian historiography of trends in historical writings that were quite widespread by the 1970s under the impact of social historians such as E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and a host of others.
Without wishing either to inflate the claims of Subaltern Studies scholars or to deny what they may, indeed, have learned from the British Marxist historians, I would like to demonstrate that Dirliks reading of Subaltern Studies seriously misjudges that which makes the series a postcolonial project. To that end, I provide here a small history of the series. I call this history small, not simply because of its brevity, but also because, following Benjamins small history of photography, the narrative here has a very particular end in focus. I argueagainst critics who have advised otherwisewhy subaltern studies could never be a mere reproduction in India of the English tradition of writing history from below.
SUBALTERN STUDIES AND DEBATES IN MODERN INDIAN HISTORY
The academic subject called modern Indian history is a relatively recent development, a result of research and discussion in various universities mainly in India, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia after the end of British imperial rule in August 1947. In its early phase, this area of scholarship bore all the signs of an ongoing struggle between tendencies affiliated with imperialist biases in Indian history and a nationalist desire on the part of historians in India to decolonize the past. Marxism was understandably mobilized in aid of the nationalist project of intellectual decolonization. Bipan Chandras The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India, Anil Seals The Emergence of Indian Nationalism, A. R. Desais Social Background of Indian Nationalism, D. A. Lows collection Soundings in Modern South Asian History, the many seminal articles published by Bernard Cohn (now collected in An Anthropologist among the Historians), debates around Morris David Morriss assessment of the results of British rule in India, and the work of other scholars in the 1960s raised new and controversial questions regarding the nature and results of colonial rule in India. Did the imperialist British deserve credit after all for making India a developing, modern, and united country? Were the Hindu-Muslim conflicts that resulted in the formation of the two states of Pakistan and India consequences of the divide-and-rule policies of the British, or were they reflections of divisions internal to South Asian society?
Official documents of the British government of Indiaand traditions of imperial history writingalways portrayed colonial rule as being beneficial to India and its people. They applauded the British for bringing to the subcontinent political unity, modern education institutions, modern industries, a sense of nationalism, the rule of law, and so on. Indian historians in the 1960smany of whom had English degrees and most of whom belonged to a generation that grew up in the final years of British rulechallenged that view. They argued instead that colonialism had had deleterious effects on economic and cultural developments. Modernity and the nationalist desire for political unity, they claimed, were not so much British gifts to India as fruits of struggles undertaken by the Indians themselves.
Nationalism and colonialism thus emerged, not surprisingly, as the two major areas of research and debate defining the field of modern Indian history in the 1960s and 1970s. At one extreme of this debate was the Cambridge historian Anil Seal, whose 1968 Emergence of Indian Nationalism described nationalism as the work of a tiny elite reared in the education institutions that the British set up in India. This elite, as Seal put it, both competed and collaborated with the British in their search for power and privilege.
A few years later, this idea was pushed to an extreme in the collection Locality, Province, and Nation, to which Seal, his colleague John Gallagher, and a posse of their doctoral students contributed. Their writings discounted the role of ideas and idealism in history and foregrounded an extremely narrow view of what constituted political and economic interest for historical actors. They argued that it was the penetration of the colonial state into the local structures of power in Indiaa move prompted by the financial self-interest of the raj rather than by any altruistic motivesthat eventually, and by degrees, drew Indian elites into the colonial governmental process. According to this argument, the involvement of Indians in colonial institutions set off a scramble among the indigenous elites, who combinedopportunistically and around factions formed along vertical lines of patronageto jockey for power and privilege within the limited opportunities for self-rule provided by the British. Such, the Cambridge historians claimed, was the real dynamic of that which outside observers or naive historians may have mistaken for an idealistic struggle for freedom. Nationalism and colonialism both came out in this history as interdependent phenomena. The history of Indian nationalism, said Seal, was the rivalry between Indian and Indian, its relationship with imperialism that of the mutual clinging of two unsteady men of straw.
At the other extreme of this debate was the Indian historian Bipan Chandra, in the 1970s a professor at the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. Chandra and his colleagues saw Indian history of the colonial period as an epic battle between the forces of nationalism and those of colonialism. Drawing on both Marxs writings and Latin American theories of dependency and underdevelopment, Chandra argued that colonialism was a regressive force that distorted all developments in Indias society and polity. The social, political, and economic ills of post-Independence Indiaincluding those of mass poverty and religious and caste conflictcould be blamed on the political economy of colonialism. However, he saw nationalism in a different, contrasting lightas a regenerative force, as the antithesis of colonialism, something that united and produced an Indian people by mobilizing them for struggle against the British. Nationalist leaders such as Gandhi and Nehru were the authors of such an anti-imperial movement for unity. Chandra claimed that the conflict of interest and ideology between the colonizers and the Indian people was the most important conflict of British India. All otherswhether of class or of castewere secondary to this principal contradiction and were to be treated as such in histories of nationalism.
Yet, as research progressed in the 1970s, there emerged a series of increasingly serious difficulties with both these narratives. It was clear that the Cambridge version of nationalist politics without ideas or idealism would never ring true to scholars in the subcontinent who had themselves experienced the desire for freedom from colonial rule. On the other hand, the nationalist historians story of there having been a moral war between colonialism and nationalism wore increasingly thin as research by younger scholars in India and elsewhere brought new material to light. New information on the mobilization of the poor (peasants, tribals, and workers) by elite nationalist leaders in the course of the Gandhian mass movements in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, suggested a strongly reactionary side to the principal nationalist party, the Indian National Congress. Gyanendra Pandey at Oxford, David Hardiman and David Arnold at Sussex (all of them later to become members of the Subaltern Studies collective), Majid Siddiqi and Kapil Kumar in Delhi, Histesranjan Sanyal in Calcutta, Brian Stoddart, Stephen Henningham, and Max Harcourt in Australia, and others elsewhere documented the way in which nationalist leaders would suppress with a heavy hand peasants or workers tendency to exceed the self-imposed limits of the nationalist political agenda by protesting the oppression meted out to them, not only by the British, but by the indigenous ruling groups as well.
From the point of view of a younger generation of historians, whom Ranajit Guha, following Salman Rushdie, has called midnights children, neither the Cambridge thesis propounding a skeptical view of Indian nationalism nor the nationalist-Marxist thesis glossing overor assimilating to a nationalist historiographic agendareal conflicts of ideas and interests between the elite nationalists and their socially subordinate followers was an adequate response to the problems of postcolonial history writing in India. 13The persistence of religious and caste conflict in post-Independence India; the war between India and China in 1962, which made official nationalism sound hollow and eventually gave rise to a fascination with Maoism among many urban, educated young people in India; the outbreak of a violent Maoist political movement in India (known as the Naxalite movement), which drew many urban youths into the countryside in the late 1960s and early 1970sall these and many other factors combined to alienate younger historians from the shibboleths of nationalist historiography. This alienation was further strengthened by the rise in popularity of peasant studies among Anglo-American academics in the 1970s. All this historiographic discontent, however, was still floundering in the old liberal and positivist paradigms inherited from English traditions of history writing even as it was searching for a path toward decolonizing the field of Indian history.
SUBALTERN STUDIES AS PARADIGM SHIFT, 1982 87
Subaltern Studies intervened in this situation in 1982. Intellectually, it began on the very terrain that it was to contest: historiography that had its roots in the colonial education system. It started as a critique of two contending schools of history: the Cambridge school and that of the nationalist historians. Both these approaches, declared Guha in a statement that inaugurated the series Subaltern Studies, were elitist. They wrote up the history of nationalism as the story of an achievement by the elite classes, whether Indian or British. For all their merits, they could not explain the contributions made by people on their own, that is, independent of the elite to the making and development of this nationalism. It will be clear from this statement of Guhas that Subaltern Studies was part of an attempt to align historical reasoning with larger movements for democracy in India. It looked for an antielitist approach to history writing, and, in this, it had much in common with the history-from-below approaches pioneered in English historiography by Christopher Hill, E. P. Thompson, E. J. Hobsbawm, and others. Both Subaltern Studies and the history-from-below school were Marxist in inspiration; both owed a certain intellectual debt to the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci in trying to move away from deterministic, Stalinist readings of Marx. The declared aim of Subaltern Studies was to produce historical analyses in which the subaltern groups were viewed as the subjects of history. As Guha put it once in the course of introducing a volume of Subaltern Studies: We are indeed opposed to much of the prevailing academic practice in historiography . . . for its failure to acknowledge the subaltern as the maker of his own destiny. This critique lies at the very heart of our project.
But, at the same time, Guhas theorization of the project signaled certain key differences that would increasingly distinguish the project of Subaltern Studies from that of English Marxist historiography. With hindsight, it can be said that there were three broad areas in which Subaltern Studies differed from the history-from-below approach of Hobsbawm or Thompson (allowing for differences between these two eminent historians of England and Europe). Subaltern historiography necessarily entailed a relative separation of the history of power from any universalist histories of capital, a critique of the nation form, and an interrogation of the relation between power and knowledge (hence of the archive itself and of history as a form of knowledge). In these differences, I would argue, lay the beginnings of a new way of theorizing the intellectual agenda for postcolonial histories.
The critical theoretical break came with the way in which Guha sought to redefine the category the political with reference to colonial India. He argued that both the Cambridge and the nationalist historians conflated the political domain with the formal side of governmental and institutional processes. As he put it: In all writings of this kind [i.e., elitist historiography] the parameters of Indian politics are assumed to be or enunciated as those of the institutions introduced by the British for the government of the country. . . . [Elitist historians] can do no more than equate politics with the aggregation of activities and ideas of those who were directly involved in operating these institutions, that is, the colonial rulers and their elevesthe dominant groups in native society.
Using people and subaltern classes synonymously, and defining both as the demographic difference between the total Indian population and the dominant indigenous and foreign elite, Guha claimed that there was, in colonial India, an autonomous domain of the politics of the people that was organized differently than the domain of the politics of the elite. Elite politics involved vertical mobilization and a greater reliance on Indian adaptations of British parliamentary institutions and tended to be relatively more legalistic and constitutional in orientation. In the domain of subaltern politics, on the other hand, mobilization for political intervention depended on horizontal affiliations such as the traditional organization of kinship and territoriality or on class consciousness, depending on the level of the consciousness of the people involved. Subaltern politics tended to be more violent than elite politics. Central to subaltern mobilizations was a notion of resistance to elite domination. The experience of exploitation and labour endowed this politics with many idioms, norms and values which put it in a category apart from elite politics, wrote Guha. Peasant uprisings in colonial India, he argued, reflected this separate and autonomous grammar of mobilization in its most comprehensive form. Even in the case of resistance and protest by urban workers, the figure of mobilization was one that was derived directly from peasant insurgency.
Guhas separation of elite and subaltern domains within the political had some radical implications for social theory and historiography. The standard tendency in global Marxist historiography until the 1970s was to look on peasant revolts organized along the axes of kinship, religion, caste, etc. as movements exhibiting a backward consciousness, the kind that, in his work on social banditry and primitive rebellion, Hobsbawm had called prepolitical. This was seen as a consciousness that had not quite come to terms with the institutional logic of modernity or capitalism. As Hobsbawm put it with reference to his own material: They are pre-political people who have not yet found, or only begun to find, specific language in which to express their aspirations about the world. By explicitly rejecting the characterization of peasant consciousness as prepolitical, and by avoiding evolutionary models of consciousness, Guha was prepared to suggest that the nature of collective action against exploitation in colonial India was such that it effectively led to a new constellation of the political. To ignore the problems that peasants participation in the modern political sphere could cause for a Eurocentric Marxism would lead, according to Guha, only to elitist histories. For one would, then, not know how to analyze the consciousness of the peasantthe discourses of kinship, caste, religion, and ethnicity through which they expressed themselves in protestexcept as a backward consciousness trying to grapple with a changing world whose logic it could never fully comprehend.
Guha insisted that, instead of being an anachronism in a modernizing colonial world, the peasant was a real contemporary of colonialism and a fundamental part of the modernity to which colonial rule gave rise in India. The peasants was not a backward consciousnessa mentality left over from the pastbaffled by modern political and economic institutions yet resistant to them. Guha suggested that the (insurgent) peasant in colonial India did in fact read his contemporary world correctly. Examining, for instance, over a hundred known cases of peasant rebellions in British India between 1783 and 1900, Guha showed that these always involved the deployment by the peasants of codes of dress, speech, and behavior that tended to invert the codes through which their social superiors dominated them in everyday life. Inversion of the symbols of authority was almost inevitably the first act of rebellion by insurgent peasants.
Elitist histories of peasant uprisings missed the signification of this gesture by seeing it as prepolitical. Anil Seal, for example, dismissed all nineteenth-century peasant revolts in colonial India as having no specific political content, being uprisings of the traditional kind, the reaching for sticks and stones as the only way of protesting against distress. Marxists, on the other hand, explained these gestures as either expressing a false consciousness or performing a safety-valve function in the overall social system. What both these explanatory strategies missed, Guha contended, was the fact that, at the beginning of every peasant uprising, there was inevitably a struggle on the part of rebels to destroy all symbols of the social prestige and power of the ruling classes: It was this fight for prestige which was at the heart of insurgency. Inversion was its principal modality. It was a political struggle in which the rebel appropriated and/or destroyed the insignia of his enemys power and hoped thus to abolish the marks of his own subalternity.
I have emphasized the word political in this quotation in order to point up a creative tension between the Marxist lineage of Subaltern Studies and the more challenging questions that the series raised from the very beginning about the nature of power in non-Western colonial modernities. Guhas point was that the arrangements of power in which peasants and other subaltern classes found themselves in colonial India contained two very different logics of hierarchy and oppression. One was the logic of the quasi-liberal legal and institutional framework introduced by the British. Imbricated with this was another set of relationships in which hierarchy was based on the direct and explicit domination and subordination of the less powerful through both ideological-symbolic means and physical force. The semiotics of domination and subordination were what the subaltern classes sought to destroy every time they rose up in rebellion. The semiotics could not be separated in the Indian case from what in English we inaccurately refer to as either the religious or the supernatural.
The tension between a familiar narrative of capital and a more radical understanding of it can be seen in Guhas Elementary Aspects itself. There are times when Guha tends to read domination and subordination in terms of an opposition between feudal and capitalist modes of production. There is a respectable tendency in Marxist or liberal scholarship to read certain kinds of undemocratic relationshipspersonalized systems of authority and practices of deification, for instanceas survivals of a precapitalist era, as not quite modern. They are seen as indicative of the problems of the transition to capitalism, the assumption being that a full-blown capitalism would or should be logically incompatible with feudal-type relationships.
These statements repeat a familiar structure that is often given to the European story of the transition to capitalism. First, the peasants land is expropriated. Then the peasants join the ranks of the urban and industrial workers, whereupon they negotiate the disciplining process of the factory. Next, they engage in machine breaking and other forms of Luddite protest until trade unions arrive on the scene and certain formal freedomsindicative of a growing democratic consciousnessare put in place. In this fundamentally Eurocentric and stagist view of history, however modulated by theories of uneven development, the peasant is a figure of the past and must mutate into the industrial worker in order to emerge, eventually, as the citizen-subject of modern democracies. Where this mutation does not quite occur yet the peasant still becomes an actor in the modern political sphere, as in anticolonial nationalisms, the peasant remains, as we have seen, the bearer of what Hobsbawm calls a prepolitical consciousness.
Guhas Elementary Aspects does sometimes speak within this tradition of analysis. Direct domination, Guha tells us, is a feature of lingering feudalism:
Taking the subcontinent as a whole capitalist development in agriculture remained merely incipient . . . until 1900. Rents constituted the most substantial part of income yielded by property in land.. . . The element that was constant in this [landlord-peasant] relationship in all its variety was the extraction of the peasants surplus by means determined rather less by the free play of the forces of a market economy than by the extra-economic force of the land-lords standing in local society and in the colonial polity. In other words, it was a relationship of domination and subordinationa political relationship of the feudal type, or as it has been appropriately described, a semi-feudal relationship which derived its material sustenance from pre-capitalist conditions of production and its legitimacy from a traditional culture still paramount in the super-structure. This particular Marxist narrative, however, underrepresents the force and larger significance of Guhas critique of the category prepolitical. For, if one were to accept the Marxism of this quotation, one could, indeed, come back at Guha and argue that the sphere of the political hardly ever abstracted itself from other spheresthose of religion, kinship, culturein feudal relationships of domination and subordination and that, in that sense, feudal relationships of power could not properly be called political. The lingering existence of feudal-type relationships in the Indian scene could then be readas Guha indeed does at the beginning of the quotation just offeredas a mark of the incompleteness of the transition to capitalism. By this logic, the so-called semifeudal relationships and the peasants mentality could, indeed, be seen as leftovers from an earlier period, still active, no doubt, but under world-historical notice of extinction. All India needed was to institute more capitalist institutions, and the process of the conversion of the peasant into the cit-izenthe properly political figure of personhoodwould begin. This, indeed, was Hobsbawms logic. That is why his prepolitical characters even when they are broken into capitalism, and even when Hobsbawm acknowledges that the acquisition of political consciousness by these primitive rebels is what makes our century the most revolutionary in historyalways remain in the position of being classic outsiders to the logic of capitalism: It comes to them from outside, insidiously by the operation of economic forces which they do not understand and over which they have no control.
In rejecting the category prepolitical, however, Guha insists on the specific history of modern democracy in India and on differences in the histories of power in colonial India and in Europe. This gesture is radical in that it fundamentally pluralizes the history of power in global modernity and separates it from any universal history of capital. Hobsbawms material, Guha writes, is of course derived almost entirely from the European experience, and his generalizations are perhaps in accord with it.. . . Whatever its validity for other countries the notion of pre-political peasant insurgency helps little in understanding the experience of colonial India. If we see the colonial formation in India as a case of modernity in which the domain of the political, as Guha argues in introducing Subaltern Studies, is irreducibly split into two distinct logics that get braided together all the timethe logic of formal-legal and secular frameworks of governance and that of relationships of direct domination and subordination that derive their legitimacy from a different set of institutions and practices, including those of dharma (dharma is often translated as religion)then Guhas writings help open up a very interesting problem in the global history of modernity and citizenship.
Ultimately, this is the problem of how to think about the history of power in an age when capital and the governing institutions of modernity increasingly develop a global reach. Marxs discussion of capitalist discipline assumed that the rule of capital entailed the transition to capitalist power relationships: the overseers penalty book replacing the slave drivers lash. Foucaults work shows that, if we want to understand the key institutions of modernity that originated in the West, the juridical model of sovereignty celebrated in modern European political thought must be supplemented by the notions of discipline, bio-power, and governmentality. Guha claims that, in the colonial modernity of India, this supplementation must include an extra pair of terms: domination and subordination. Not because India is anything like a semimodern or semi-capitalist or semifeudal country. And not because capital in India rules merely by formal subsumption.
Guha goes beyond the argument that reduces questions of democracy and power in the subcontinent to propositions about an incomplete transition to capitalism. He does not deny the connections of colonial India to the global forces of capitalism. His point, however, is that the global history of capitalism need not reproduce everywhere the same history of power. In the calculus of modernity, power is not a dependent variable and capital an independent one. Capital and power can be treated as analytically separable categories. Traditional European-Marxist political thought that fuses the two is therefore always relevant but inadequate for theorizing power in colonial-modern histories. The history of colonial modernity in India created a domain of the political that was heteroglossic in its idioms and irreducibly plural in its structure, interlocking within itself strands of different types of relationships that did not make up a logical whole. One such strand critical to the functioning of authority in Indian institutions was that of direct domination and subordination of the subaltern by the elite. As Guha put it in his first contribution to Subaltern Studies, this strand of domination and subordination ubiquitous in power relationships in India was traditional only insofar as its roots could be traced back to pre-colonial times, but it was by no means archaic in the sense of being outmoded.
The social domination and subordination of the subaltern by the elite was, thus, an everyday feature of Indian capitalism itself. This was a capitalism of colonial origins. Reading critically some key texts of Marx, Guha argued that modern colonialism was quintessentially the historical condition in which an expansive and increasingly global capital came to dominate non-Western societies without effecting or requiring any thoroughgoing democratic transformation in social relationships of power and authority. The colonial statethe ultimate expression of the domain of the political in colonial Indiawas both a result and a condition of possibility of such domination. As Guha put it: Colonialism could continue as a relation of power in the subcontinent only on the condition that the colonizing bourgeoisie should fail to live up to its own universalizing project. The nature of the state it had created by the sword made this historically necessary. The result was a society that no doubt changed under the impact of colonial capitalism but one in which vast areas in the life and consciousness of the people escaped any kind of [bourgeois] hegemony. The Indian culture of the colonial era, Guha argued elsewhere, defied understanding either as a replication of the liberal-bourgeois culture of nineteenth-century Britain or as the mere survival of an antecedent pre-capitalist culture. This was capitalism, but a capitalism without capitalist hierarchies, a capitalist dominance without a hegemonic capitalist cultureor, in Guhas famous terms, dominance without hegemony.
SUBALTERN STUDIES AND THE REORIENTATION OF HISTORY
Guhas two formulationsthat both nationalism and colonialism were involved in instituting in India a rule of capital in which bourgeois ideologies exercised dominance without hegemony and that the resulting forms of power in India could not be termed prepoliticalhad several implications for historiography. Some of these were worked out in Gu-has own writings and some in those of his colleagues. It is important, however, that we clarify these implications, for they are what made Subaltern Studies an experiment in postcolonial historiography.
First of all, Guhas critique of the category prepolitical challenged historicism by rejecting all stagist theories of history. If, as has been discussed, the term prepolitical took its validity from categorizing certain kinds of power relationships as premodern, feudal, etc., Guhas discussion of power in colonial India resists such a clear distinction between the modern and the premodern. Relationships in India that looked feudal when seen through a stagist view of history were contemporaneous with all that looked modern to the same point of view. From Guhas perspective, however, the former could not be looked on through geologic or evolutionist metaphors of survival or remnant without such historicism becoming elitist in its interpretation of the past.
Subaltern Studies, then, was, in principle, opposed to nationalist histories that portrayed nationalist leaders as ushering India and its people out of some kind of precapitalist stage into a world-historical phase of bourgeois modernity, properly fitted out with the artifacts of democracy: the rights of citizenship, a market economy, freedom of the press, and the rule of law. There is no doubt that the Indian political elite internalized and used this language of political modernity, but this democratic tendency existed alongside and interlarded with undemocratic relationships of domination and subordination. This coexistence of two domains of politics, said Guha, was the index of an important historical truth, that is, the failure of the bourgeoisie to speak for the nation. There was, in fact, no unitary nation to speak for. Rather, the more important question was how and through what practices an official nationalism emerged that claimed to represent such a unitary nation. A critical stance toward official or statist nationalism and its attendant historiography marked Subaltern Studies from the beginning. Postcolonial history was, thus, also a postnationalist form of historiography.
Guhas quest for a history in which the subaltern was the maker of his own destiny brought into focus the question of the relation between texts and power. Historical archives are usually collections of documents, texts of various kinds. Historians of peasants and other subaltern social groups have long emphasized the fact that peasants do not leave behind their own documents. Historians concerned with recuperating the peasant experience in history have often turned for help to the resources of other disciplines: anthropology, demography, sociology, archaeology, human geography, etc. In his well-known study of nineteenth-century rural France, Peasants into Frenchmen, Eugen Weber provides a succinct formulation of this approach: The illiterate are not in fact inarticulate; they can and do express themselves in several ways. Sociologists, ethnologists, geographers, and most recently demographic historians have shown us new and different means of interpreting evidence. In the 1960s and 1970s, E. P. Thompson, Keith Thomas, and others turned to anthropology in search of the experiences of the subaltern classes.
Guhas approach is interestingly different from that of these historians. He begins his Elementary Aspects by recognizing the same problem as do Weber, Thomas, Thompson, and others: that peasants do not speak directly in archival documents, which are usually produced by the ruling classes. Like these historians, Guha too uses a diversity of disciplines in tracking the logic of peasant consciousness at the moment of rebellion. But he thinks of the category consciousness differently. In insisting on the autonomy of the consciousness of the insurgent peasant, he does not aim to produce generalizations that sum up what every empirical peasant participating in rebellions in colonial India must have thought, felt, or experienced.
Guhas critique of the term prepolitical legitimately barred this path of thinking, which, however well intentioned, ends up making peasants into relatively exotic objects of anthropology. Guha thought of con-sciousnessand therefore of peasant subjecthoodas something immanent in the very practices of peasant insurgency. Elementary Aspects is a study of the practices of insurgent peasants in colonial India, not of a reified category called consciousness. The aim of the book was to bring out the collective imagination inherent in the practices of peasant rebellion. Guha makes no claim that the insurgent consciousness that he discusses is indeed conscious, that it existed inside the heads of peasants. He does not equate consciousness with the subjects view of himself. Rather, he examines rebel practices to decipher the particular relation-shipsbetween elites and subalterns and among subalterns themselves that are acted out in them and then attempts to derive from these relationships the elementary structure, as it were, of the consciousness or imagination inherent in those relationships.
In keeping with the structuralist tradition with which he affiliates his book by the very use of the word elementary in its title, Guha describes his hermeneutical strategy through the metaphor of reading. The available archives on peasant insurgencies are produced by the counterinsurgency measures of the ruling classes and their armies and police forces. Guha, therefore, emphasizes the need for the historian to develop a conscious strategy for reading the archives. The aim of this strategy is, not simply to discern and sift the biases of the elites, but to analyze the very textual properties of these documents in order to get at the history of power that produced them. Without such a scanning device, Guha argued, historians tend to reproduce the same logic of representation as that used by the elite classes in dominating the subaltern. The interventionist metaphor of reading resonates as the opposite of E. P. Thompsons usein the course of his polemic with Althusserof the passive metaphor of listening in describing the hermeneutical activity of the historian. This emphasis on reading also left Subaltern Studies historiography open to the influences of literary and narrative theory.
In thus critiquing historicism and Eurocentrism and using that critique to interrogate the idea of the nation, in emphasizing the textual properties of archival documents, in considering representation as an aspect of power relationships between the elite and the subaltern, Guha and his colleagues moved away from the guiding assumptions of the history-from-below approach of English Marxist historiography. With Guhas work, Indian history took, as it were, the proverbial linguistic turn. From its very beginning, Subaltern Studies positioned itself on the unorthodox territory of the Left. What it inherited from Marxism was already in conversation with other and more recent currents of European thought, particularly structuralism. And there was a discernible sympathy with early Foucault in the way in which Guhas writings posed the knowledge-power question by asking, What are the archives, and how are they produced?
SUBALTERN STUDIES SINCE 1988: MULTIPLE CIRCUITS
Ranajit Guha retired from the editorial team of Subaltern Studies in 1988. In the same year, an anthology entitled SelectedSubaltern Studies published from New York launched the global career of the project. Edward Said wrote a foreword to the volume describing Guhas statement regarding the aims of Subaltern Studies as intellectually insurrectionary. Gayatri Spivaks Deconstructing Historiography, which had first appeared in Subaltern StudiesVI (1986), served as the introduction to this collection. This essay and a review essay by Rosalind OHanlon first published in the journal Modern Asian Studies in 1988 offered two important criticisms of Subaltern Studies that had a serious effect on the later intellectual trajectory of the project. Both Spivak and OHanlon pointed to the absence of gender questions in Subaltern Studies. Both also made a more fundamental criticism of the theoretical orientation of the project, pointing out that, in effect, Subaltern Studies historiography operated with an idea of the subjectin Guhas words, to acknowledge the subaltern as the maker of his own destinythat had not wrestled at all with contemporary critiques of the very idea of the subject itself. Spivaks famous Can the Subaltern Speak?a critical and challenging reading of a conversation between Foucault and Deleuzeforcefully posed these and related questions by raising deconstructive and philosophical objections to any straightforward program of letting the subaltern speak.
Subaltern Studies scholars have since tried to take these criticisms into account in their work. The charge that they do not tackle gender issues or engage feminist scholarship has been met to some degree by Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, and Susie Tharu, among others. Partha Chat-terjees 1986 Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World creatively applied Saidian and postcolonial perspectives to the study of non-Western nationalisms, using India as an example. With this work, which extended Guhas criticisms of nationalist historiography into a full-blown, brilliant critique of nationalist thought, and Gyanendra Pandeys book on the history of the Partition of India in 1947, the postcolonial critique may truly be said to have become a postnationalist critique as well.
The influence of deconstructionist and postmodern thought in Subaltern Studies may be traced in the way in which the work of Gyanendra Pandey, Partha Chatterjee, and Shahid Amin has in the 1990s come to privilege the idea of the fragment over that of the whole or totality. Pandeys The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (1990) and his 1992 essay In Defense of the Fragment, Chatterjees 1994 The Nation and Its Fragments, and Amins experimental and widely acclaimed 1995 Event, Memory, Metaphor all question, on both archival and epistemological grounds, even the very possibility of constructing a totalizing national history in narrating the politics of subaltern lives. This move has also understandably given rise to a series of writings from Subaltern Studies scholars in which history itself as a European form of knowledge has come under critical investigation.
Continues...
Excerpted from Habitations of Modernityby Dipesh Chakrabarty Copyright © 2002 by Dipesh Chakrabarty. Excerpted by permission.
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