Submitted by-

Vasudev Thakur(1-A)

Subaltern SCHOOL OF HISTORIOGRAPHY

The subaltern school of historiography is one of the most recent and

most modern school of historiography. To understand the idea of
Subaltern school we’d first have to understand the origin and
meaning of the word “Subaltern”.

The term “Subaltern” was coined by the Italian Marxist and

Communist Antonio Gramsci between the year 1929 to 1935. The
term mainly represents the cultural hegemony that excludes
particular social groups from its institutions in order to replace
them from the political order. This term later led to the origin of
Subaltern history.

In India the idea of Subaltern was first put forward around the
year 1982, when some Indian scholars who were trained in west
introduced the basic ideology of this school of historiography. The
primary leader of this school in India was Mr. Ranjit Guha, who is
also known as the father of subaltern history due to his prominent
role in propounding this theory.

The followers of this school wanted the history of the underclass

i.e. the ones that have been rarely heard, to be accounted for.Their
main argument was that history was mainly influenced and written by
the influential classes of the society or “the imperials”. People are
the central theme of this school, irrespective of their power and
influence in the society. Shahid Amin and Sumit Sarkar constituted
some of the other important followers and leaders of this school.

They hoped of breaking away from the history of the elites and
wanted to focus on subaltern in terms of class, caste, gender etc.
One of the important sources of writing subaltern history is
folklores. To conclude, this school of historiography wanted to write
history against the grain and give voice to the history of the
underprivileged.