8

Chapter 1

Subaltern in the Indian Context: An Overview

One of the most equivocal and dubious concepts in the history of

Postcolonialism is the concept of subaltern. The term, which

literally meaning „of lower status’, has been derived from two

Latin words: sub meaning „below‟ or „under‟, and alter/ alternus

meaning „alternate‟ or „other‟. The Oxford English dictionary

defines subaltern both as a noun and adjective. As a noun,

subaltern is “a lower rank British officer” while as an adjective,

subaltern stands for lower rank people in all respects. Most studies

have treated subaltern synonymous with the words like

subordinated, downtrodden, marginalized and oppressed.

Etymologically, the word has a long past. In the late-medieval

England, the term subaltern was confined to serfs i.e., peasants. By

1700, the soldiers of inferior rank in army were referred to as

subalterns. By 1800, novels and histories about military campaigns

in India and America were popularized by the authors writing from

the subaltern perspective. Among them the writers like G.R. Gleig

(1796-1888), who wrote biographies of Robert Clive, Warren

Hastings, and Thomas Munro, mastered this genre. The First

 9

World War further gave impetus to this tradition as we witnessed

popular accounts of subaltern life in published memoirs and

diaries. But it was the 1917 Russian Revolution that prompted the

Italian neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) to provide,

through his writings, the necessary intellectual impetus for

transforming the notion of subaltern into a new socio-political

concept.

The notion of the subaltern was first referred by Antonio

Gramsci in his article “Notes on Italian History” which appeared

later on as part of his most widely known book Prison Notebooks

written between 1929 and 1935. Gramsci‟s views are

fundamentally instrumental to any student who attempts to reach

an understanding about the origin of the notion of subaltern.

According to the political scientist Marcus E. Green, the

Gramscian concept of subaltern and subalternity are interrelated

with his philosophical, religious, economic, social, cultural and

political ideologies (3). Because of this complex ideological

interrelation and interdependence, Gramsci never mentioned a last

word but presented a fragmentary account of subalterns. Green

further highlights the dynamic notion of Gramscian subalterns. He

 10

states that in Notebook 1 (1929-30) Gramsci called

noncommissioned/junior military troops subalterns (1). In

Notebook 3 and 4, he used the word subaltern to identify the lower

class people of society. In Notebook 25, he further clarified this

notion by calling slaves, labourers, peasants and women as

subalterns (2-3). On the other hand, Kylie Smith sums up the

Gramscian subalterns as “those groups in society who are lacking

autonomous political power” (39), while the postcolonial feminist

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and others have argued that Gramsci

used the term as a synonym for the proletariat.

Notwithstanding these diverse views about the Gramscian

concept of subaltern, all have a common agreement that Gramsci

fundamentally used the word subaltern for any “low rank” person

or group of people in a particular society who persistently suffer

under hegemonic domination of the ruling elite class—the class

that denies them the basic right of active participation in the

making of national history and culture. A closer scrutiny reveals

that the only group Gramsci had in mind at that time were the

Italian workers and peasants who were oppressed and

discriminated by the leader of the National Fascist Party Benito

 11

Mussolini and his agents. There are mainly two reasons that

compelled him to use the term subaltern for the working class.

One, he found in the term subaltern a theoretical validity which

could represent various sections of society who have been

suppressed and subordinated by the hegemonic powers. Secondly,

he used it as a code-word to save his manuscripts from the prison

censorship. Gramsci noted that such subaltern or proletarian classes

could be exploited because they lack unity and common cause.

According to him, their marginalization would not end until they

develop a unifying ideology that would lead them to alter the

balance of power. Moreover, they need to form a new state or

governing institution that would embody and represent their wishes

and wills. Gramsci, elaborating on Karl Marx (1818-1883),

postulated that the working classes could and would under

condition of political coercion, economic exploitation and social

marginalization eventually develop a collective consciousness or

common philosophy. That collective philosophy would serve to

transform them by generating self-awareness of their subordinate

situations and galvanize them into resistance. And that would

ultimately relocate the agency of change from the elite classes to

the proletariat.
 12

When it comes to the representation of subalternity, Marcus E.

Green argues:

Gramsci was concerned with how literary representations of the

subaltern reinforced the subaltern‟s subordinated position…. In
historical or literary documents, the subaltern may be presented as
humble, passive or ignorant, but their actual lived experience may
prove the contrary. Hence, the integral historian has to analyze
critically the way in which intellectuals represent the conditions and
aspirations of the subaltern. (15)

Gramsci rejected the official historical narrative of the state

because of its bias towards the marginalized sections of society. He

contended that subaltern classes have as rich and complex history

as that of hegemonic classes, but they lack unity and invariably

submit to the authority of the ruling groups. According to him:

The subaltern classes by definition, are not unified and cannot unite
until they are able to become a "State”: their history, therefore, is
intertwined with that of civil society, and thereby with the history of
States and groups of States. (Selections from Prison Notebooks 202)

Because of this lack of unity, they neither have control over their

representation nor have access to the social and cultural institutions

of their state. The only possible way, according to Gramsci, is to

reach a state of freedom through a “permanent” victory which

necessarily guarantees a dismantling of the master/slave pattern.

This dismantling is to be realized, within Gramsci‟s theoretical

 13

framework, by liberating the subordinated consciousness of non-

elite group from the cultural hegemony exercised by the ruling

class. These ground breaking ideas, which Gramsci had written

during his imprisonment about the subaltern and their

consciousness, inspired a group of several 20th century scholars of

Indian historiography to tread the path laid down by Gramsci.

This group known as the Subaltern Studies Group, and

influenced by the scholarship of Eric Stokes as well, was led by an

influential South Asian historian Ranajit Guha and is comprised of

a number of other south Asian historians, social critics and

scholars, mainly David Arnold, David Hardiman, Dipesh

Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Gyanendra Pandey, Gyan Prakash,

Shahid Amin, Gayatri Spivak, Gautam Bhadra, Sarojini Sahoo,

Susie Tharu and Sumit Sarkar who later dissented from the group

due to its „disappointing‟ turn to “Foucauldian studies of power-

knowledge that left behind many of the empiricist and Marxist

efforts of the first two volumes of Subaltern Studies” (“Subaltern

Studies” Wikipedia.org). Known for their anti-essentialist

approach, all the members attempt/attempted to formulate a new

narrative of history of India and South Asia, focusing more on

 14

what happens among the marginalized masses of the society than

among the elites.

With the emergence of the Subaltern Studies Group or

Subaltern Studies Collective, as it is also called, in India back in

the early 1980s, the subalternity as a concept gained a worldwide

currency. Dissatisfied with the interpretation of Indian Nationalist

Movement, the subalternist scholars aimed to highlight “the

politics of the people” i.e., the subaltern classes in the making of

Indian nation. For Guha, the Indian historiography had been

dominated by an elitism of colonialists, bourgeois nationalists, and

even orthodox Marxists. They, according to him, have signally

failed to take into account “the contributions made by the people

on their own, that is, “independently of the elite” (On Some Aspects

39). He termed this historiography as “un-historical”, “blinkered”,

and “one-sided”; because it primarily focused on the domain of

elite politics while silencing and refusing to interpret subaltern

pasts. He further explained that elitist historiography was narrow

and partial, and a direct consequence of a commitment by scholars

to that particular “class outlook” which privileged the ideas,

 15

activities and politics of the British colonizers and dominant groups

in Indian society.

Since its inception in 1980s, the group has published twelve

volumes of the series entitled Subaltern Studies: Writings on South

Asian History and Society with subaltern classes as the center of

history writing. In the “Preface” to the first volume of Subaltern

Studies, Guha redefined the term “subaltern” in these words:

The word „subaltern‟ in the title stands for the meaning as given in the
Concise Oxford Dictionary, that is, „of inferior rank‟. It will be used in
these pages as a name for the general attribute of subordination in
South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class caste,
age, gender and office or in any other way. (vii)

However, Guha was not simply interested in examining questions

of subordination in a classical Marxist framework defined by the

logic of capital. Instead, he argued that the subaltern condition

could be based on caste, age, gender, office, or any other way,

including, but not limited to class. The subaltern for him is that

clearly definite entity, which constitutes “the demographic

difference between the total Indian population and all those whom

we have described as the ‘elite’ (On Some Aspects 44). He further

stated that though he was mainly interested in interpreting the

 16

culture that informed subalternity, he would also address concerns

about history, politics, economics, and sociology.

Guided by the foundational views of Guha, the group

members are very critical of the traditional Marxist narrative of

Indian history that mainly focuses on the political consciousness of

elites. Instead, they focus on non-elites—subalterns— as agents of

political and social change. This shift in their focus originated from

the assumption that the writing of Indian national history has been

controlled by colonial elitism as well as nationalist-bourgeois

elitism which were both produced by the British colonialism in

different historical periods. Consequently, they affirmed that this

kind of historiography cannot acknowledge or interpret the kind of

changes or contributions brought by common people on their own,

i.e., independently of the elite groups. Thus, what is overlooked by

such elitist historiography is the „politics of the people‟, which,

according to the Subaltern Studies Group, continues to exist even

when the elite politics dissipates.

Though the critical theory of subalternity that the Subaltern

Studies Collective sought to construct was initially inspired by

Gramscian Marxism, the group did actually reconfigure it to

 17

interpret and analyze South Asian history and society beyond the

parameters which could have been anticipated by Gramsci himself.

In fact, Guha had argued that the politics of subaltern classes in

colonial India is/was altogether different from that of the rural

groups described by Gramsci. Specifically, he disagreed with one

of Gramsci‟s central claims that “subaltern groups are always

subject to the activity of ruling groups, even when they rebel and

rise up” (Selections from Subaltern 207). Guha instead stated that

the domain of subaltern politics was autonomous from elite

politics; that is, “it neither originated from elite politics nor did its

existence depend on the latter” (On Some Aspects 40). He further

claimed that subaltern politics tended to be violent because

subaltern classes were forced to resist the conditions of elite

domination and extra-economic coercion in their everyday lives.

But this class dynamics in Indian society was not the only factor

for the subaltern coercion and domination. In fact, it becomes

necessary to understand how different sections of Indian society

were affected by the British colonialism that has left an “uneven”

impact on its economic and social developments. Because in Indian

historiography, while attempting to understand the politics on the

basis of class structures, we often become obscure to the fact that

 18

one group which is dominant in one region or locality of India may

actually be dominated in another. This realization made Guha

argue for the need of not only moving away from analyzing Indian

politics from national level, but also understanding the

heterogeneity of the Indian society and analyzing it accordingly.

This broader framework which he outlined provided a new

direction to Indian historiography. Henceforth, the Subaltern

scholars started analyzing the diverge aspects of Indian history and

subaltern condition. Shahid Amin, for instance, analyzed the effect

of Mahatma Gandhi on the minds of the farmers who participated

in Non-cooperation Movement and expressed his thoughts about

the dangers and bad effects on history writing from the point of

view of any religious group. Similarly, Dr. Sumit Sarkar employs

the term subalterns for tribal and low-caste agricultural laborers

and share croppers, landholding peasants of intermediate caste

status and laborers in plantations mines and industries. Such

plurality of theories and methodologies was not only celebrated as

central to the project, but also thought to be necessary in

understanding the diverse nature of subaltern politics in India

which had thus far not been considered in the historiography.

Though the commitment of writing “history from below” certainly

 19

loomed large in the scholarship of several subalternists, some of

them were also focusing on cultural history where the ideas of

Gramsci and Marx were integrated with Foucault and Derrida.

A class analysis of agrarian society in western India helped

David Hardiman to explain the emergence and participation of

peasants in the Indian nationalist movement. He made a detailed

study of Kheda district in Gujarat which helped him to illustrate the

ways in which the „middle peasantry‟ was at the forefront of

agrarian nationalism. Influenced by the writings of Eric R. Wolf,

Hardiman asserted that it was the middle peasantry, not the

poor/rich peasants or the landed elite, that was politically the most

radical section of rural society. He was of a firm belief that the

middle peasants functioned autonomously—in the spirit argued by

Guha—and harnessed the support for the nationalist movement by

influencing others in the locality. This argument by Hardiman was

not in tandem with the historiography of the region, according to

which rich peasants or elites were responsible for directing the

ideas, sentiments and politics associated with nationalism in

Gujarat. According to him, besides the material conditions of the

subaltern “middle peasants”, the caste and kinship ties within the
 20

peasantry were equally important factors in understanding political

mobilization in the locality. This is validated by the fact that not all

but only those middle peasants became nationalists who belonged

to a particular caste in Kheda district. This convergence of class

and caste in Hardiman‟s writings served as an important

contribution to the understanding of nationalist politics, because it

was no longer necessary for scholars to choose between class or

caste analysis to understand Indian politics. This integrated and

alternate subaltern history further helped in understanding the

history of Indian dominance and subordination in all its diverse

forms.

Another perspective within Subaltern Studies was provided

by Partha Chatterjee. By linking Marxian social theory with

Foucauldian notion of power, he argued that “community” is the

primary organizing principle for political mobilization. To explain

the differential evolution of social relations in India‟s countryside,

Chatterjee provided a typology of three modes of power—

communal, feudal and bourgeois. All three modes of power,

according to him, could have coexisted within colonial India as a

direct result of British colonial policies, which impacted different

 21

parts of the agrarian economy differently. For Chatterjee, it was

necessary to move away from a strictly Marxian framework of

class analysis and focus on “community” as an organizing principle

for collective action within each mode of power. Though he

accepted that the term community is indeterminate and has

“contradictory and ambiguous aspects”, he considered it necessary

within his framework to navigate between the modes of power.

To understand the capitalist mode of power within the Indian

context, Chatterjee‟s engagement with the writings of Michel

Foucault was first of its kind among the subalternists. Chatterjee‟s

main interest lied in Foucault‟s analysis of the “capillary forms of

power” within modern society, which “reaches into the very grain

of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their

actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and

everyday lives” (qtd. in Chaturvedi 13). Yet, Chatterjee was

conscious of the fact that the characteristics of other modes of

power coexisted with the capitalist one, as was evident from the

indeterminacy of the transition of capitalist development. He

argued that such circumstances, besides allowing the ruling classes

to exercise their domination within a capitalist mode of power in

 22

the form described by Foucault, also favored in exploiting other

modes of power. Chatterjee‟s theoretical opus thus suggests that an

understanding of the modes of power in Indian history not only

helps in explaining how elites dominated, but also provides a

complex background to the diverse ways in which subaltern classes

contributed to the making and dismantling of the modes of power.

The concept of the subaltern moved to a further more

complex theoretical debate with the intervention of the Indian-

American post-colonial feminist critic, Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak. She critiqued the assumptions of the subaltern studies

group in her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988).This

question, according to her, is of perennial importance and thus

must be asked and explored especially by the subalternist scholars.

She was fundamentally reserved about the Gramscian claim

regarding the autonomy of the subaltern group, which, she argued,

no amount of qualification by Guha—who conceded the diversity,

heterogeneity and overlapping nature of subaltern groups, can save

it from its fundamentally essentialist premise. The precautions

which Guha has taken against essentialism, in Spivak‟s opinion,

only seem to further complicate the problem of the subaltern. Guha

 23

had advised to investigate, identify and measure the specific nature

of the degree of deviation of the dominant indigenous groups at the

regional and local level from the subaltern and situate it

historically. But, asks Spivak, “What taxonomy can fix such a

space?” (“Can Subaltern Speak?”285). For the true subaltern

group, she says, whose identity is its difference, there is no un-

representable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself. She

warns against a random application of the term. According to her:

…subaltern is not just a classy word for “oppressed”, for [the] Other,
for somebody who‟s not getting a piece of pie… In post-colonial
terms, everything that has limited or no access to the cultural
imperialism is subaltern—a space of difference. Now, who would say
that‟s just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It‟s not
subaltern…. Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the
least interesting and the most dangerous. I mean, just by being
discriminated-against minority on the university campus; they don‟t
need the word „subaltern‟…. They should see what the mechanics of
the discrimination are. They‟re within the hegemonic discourse,
wanting a piece of pie, and not being allowed, so let them speak, use
the hegemonic discourse. They should not call themselves subaltern.
(Kock 45-46)

Thus as per Spivak “everything that has limited or no access to

cultural imperialism—A space of difference” is subaltern (Kock

46). In “Scatterd Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular”

(2005), she notes that to be a subaltern is “to be removed from all

 24

lines of social mobility” (475). To illustrate her point she gives an

example of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, a young Bengali girl who

committed suicide as a political response to her reservations about

killing someone she was directed to kill. However, the reason

constructed by the government and the media for her death was

that she had become pregnant and could not bear the grief. Bhaduri

perhaps had an inkling about the same, which made her delay her

suicide till the beginning of her menstrual cycle, so that her

narrative—the truth of her suicide—would be believed over the

fabricated narrative. Though she had tried her best to make her

voice heard, the story given by the elite group was the story

circulated and accepted by the general population. Spivak uses this

anecdote—one of many—to prove that subaltern does not have a

voice and cannot speak or be heard.

Though Spivak had reservations about the way the term

subaltern has been used/abused, she still adopts the term essentially

because according to her:

It is truly situational. Subaltern began as a description of a certain rank

in the military. The word was under censorship by Gramsci: he called
Marxism “monism”, and was obliged to call the proletarian
“subaltern”. That word, used under duress, has been transformed into
the description of everything that doesn‟t fall under a strict class
 25

analysis. I like that, because it has no theoretical rigor. (“Negotiating

the Structures” 141)

Confronted with this difficulty of specifying the realm of

subalternity, Spivak finally decided to reconsider the issues of the

subaltern groups by dealing with the problems of gender and

particularly Indian women during colonial times. After a

threadbare analysis of Indian Sati system, Spivak reflected on the

status of Indian women under the British colonial rule. According

to her, the voice of Sati women as a subaltern group was lost

between two polarities: while the Hindu representatives claimed

that they were voluntarily participating in the ritual, the British

humanists were doubtful about this claim and demanded ban on it.

These two antagonistic positions produced two different discourses

with no possible solution; one postulates that “White men [are]

saving brown women from brown men,” (“Can Subaltern Speak?”

296) the other maintains that “the woman actually wanted to die”

(“Can Subaltern Speak?” 297). Whatever the outcome, one thing

that is amply evident is the fact that the voice of the subaltern Sati

is nowhere to be heard as it has disappeared in the din created by

the two discursive groups who pretend to represent her. Thus the

apparent representation of Sati women has in reality deprived them

 26

of their subjectivity and a space to speak from. Finally, the Hindu

“woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a

violent shuttling, which is the displaced figuration of the “third-

world woman” caught between tradition and modernization” (“Can

Subaltern Speak?”306). This predicament of subaltern Sati women

made Spivak claim that the subaltern cannot speak.

This last declaration that she made in her essay courted a lot

of controversy. It was interpreted as a declaration of the

impossibility of voicing the oppressed groups‟ resistance because

of their representations by other dominant forces. By excavating

the history of deprived women, Spivak managed to elaborate on the

original demarcation of the notion of subaltern, as it was first

developed by Ranajit Guha and others, through her fundamental

exploration of the experiences and struggles of women in general.

She stands for women as a differentiated gender because of the

outrageous exclusion of their participation in anti-colonial history.

Spivak contends:

The question is not of female participation in insurgency, or the ground

rules of the sexual division of labor, for both of which there is
“evidence”; rather, both were used as object of colonialist
historiography and as a subject of insurgency, though the ideological
construction of gender keeps the male dominant. If in the context of
 27

colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the
subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow. (“Can Subaltern
Speak?” 287)

Spivak‟s theory of subalternity opened an unending debate.

Contemporary scholars and theorists are continuously busy in

debating and contesting the identity and true voice of subalterns. In

Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (2003), Robert Young

excavates a methodology which favors the voice of subalterns

under suitable socio-political scenarios. Further, Ching-Ying Hsu

in Love and the Ethics of Subaltern Subjectivity in James Joyce’s

Ulysses (2014) argues that “self-naming”, “self-invention” along

with “new symbolisms” are few processes that can empower

subalterns to speak. Scholars like Heither Plumridge Bedi, Uday

Chandra, Kaneth Bo Neilson, Alf Gunvald Nilsen, Indrajit Roy and

Judith Whitehead are actively working to rethink subaltern

resistance, with special reference to Indian based subalternity, for

the exploration of new critical perspectives about the idea of

resistance.

Besides, following Spivak‟s barrage, almost every volume of

the series after the volume IV incorporated the analyses of gender

and sexuality. In fact, the essays in Subaltern Studies vol. IX and

 28

XI were primarily devoted to understanding the relationship

between gender and the subaltern condition. The prominent

subalternist Susie Tharu took a lead in it and contributed articles on

the contemporary women‟s movements such as the politics of

contraceptive choice, the feminism of Hindu right and the anti-

arrack movement. According to Tharu, these movements represent

a turning point for the Indian feminism. Her articles convey a vivid

picture and problems of the contemporary Indian women

movements. The Subaltern Studies volume IX has two essays

dealing with gender which pinpoint to the difficulties of defining

the Indian feminism by using western theory. As Kamala

Visweswaren notes in her essay “Small speeches, subaltern gender:

Nationalist ideology and its historiography”: either gender is

subsumed under the categories of caste and class, or gender is seen

to make a social group apart from other subaltern. Highlighting the

theoretical problems in the second essay, Susie Tharu and

Tejaswini Niranjana note that gender analysis revealed how

humanist subject functioned in such a way as to legitimize

bourgeois and patriarchal interests. It is here that we see the

conflict between western theory and Indian reality. Eve teasing,

dowry, burning and mass rape of lower caste women are actions
 29

that need to be analyzed in Indian rather than western terms. While

the role of patriarchy and bourgeois interest has validity, they are

not enough to explain the coercion faced by Indian women today.

This turn towards the analysis of gendered subaltern

influenced even Ranajit Guha himself. Thenceforth, he dealt with

the existence of a woman‟s domain within subaltern patriarchy. He

made a general suggestion that those who are interested in the issue

of subalternity and want to challenge the dominant statist

discourses, should alter their methods of inquiry by “hearing the

small voices of history”. For the next stage of the project, he

advocated the exploration of oral traditions as a way to write about

women and their experiences in colonial and postcolonial India.

Such a methodological shift within Subaltern Studies, according to

him, would open new opportunities for further historiographical

study. Such a statement was an open acknowledgement of the

silences within the project and a claim for theoretical and

methodological openness on unwritten subaltern themes. On this

note, Guha argued for “the voice of a defiant subalternity

committed to writing its own history” (qtd. in Chaturvedi 21). It

 30

was Dalit activist writer Kancha Illaiah who provided such an

intervention in Subaltern Studies IX.

Illaiah began with a historiographical critique. The Subaltern

Studies project, according to him, failed to actively engage in the

political and cultural concerns of Dalits—literally meaning

oppressed—or the former “untouchables” in Indian society.

Mainstream historiography, he argued, “has done nothing to

incorporate the Dalitbahujan perspective in the writing of Indian

history: Subaltern Studies is no exception to this” (qtd. in

Chaturvedi 21). Since the project was mainly concerned with

understanding subordination in Indian society, its omission of the

ways in which caste power functioned to alienate Dalits was a

grave issue. No doubt the questions related to caste were analyzed

and explored throughout the pages of the Series, but for Ilaiah it

was the absence of any analysis on Dalits specifically which was a

fundamental problem. He argued that this was not surprising

considering that all traditions of Indian history writing had

neglected to include Dalits as subjects of history. So he made a

clarion call to his fellow Dalit writers to write their own history:

“Our history is a book of blank pages to fill with whatever letters—

 31

language—we wish to write…as we would wish to write” (Ilaiah

166). He wished to construct narratives that would highlight the

“productive labor” of Dalits in the making of Indian society over a

period of three millennia. The oppression and marginalization

faced by Dalits was considered by Illaiah as part of the larger

processes of racial, class-based, gender and other kinds of

discriminations that existed on an international scale. While

establishing a connection between caste and class, Illaiah primarily

focused on discussing the oppression and racial discrimination

that Dalits, like black Africans, have historically faced in the hands

of white, upper-caste, racist elites. Illaiah vociferously argued that

Dalit consciousness and identity had been formed by racial

oppression, which took the guise of caste discrimination.

Although class analysis was also dealt within Illaih‟s

argument, it did not occupy a central role in explaining Dalit

subordination or the subaltern condition. However, his introduction

of the racial theory of “Dalitbhaujan alternative” offered a fresh

direction to the concept of subalternity. Such fresh insights were

not only welcomed but also celebrated by the project.

Consequently, Subaltern Studies volume XII, published in 2005,

 32

focused on the analysis of Dalits and Muslims as part of the

subaltern condition—a first for the series.

Despite the great diversity, the one unchanging character that

unites the subaltern group members is the notion of resistance to

the imposed domination of the elite class. Since the Indian

bourgeoisie failed to faithfully speak for the collective nation, it

meant the failure of Indian nation to come into its own and

objectively exist without any representations formed and cherished

by the colonial regime. This failure, according to Guha, constitutes

the central problem of the Indian historiography. It is against this

failure that the subalternists work. Their motive is to cut across

myriad forms of political and cultural binaries, such as colonialism

vs. nationalism, or imperialism vs. indigenous cultural expression,

in favor of a more general but ignored distinction between

subaltern and elite.

The above analysis makes it amply clear that there are

several sections of Indian society that come under the rubric of

subaltern. The reason being India‟s multi-caste, multi-religion and

multi-region character. Here some claim subalternity on the basis

of caste, some on the basis of religion and some on the basis of

 33

region. But before accepting their claim we need to understand the

mechanics of subordination. Moreover, we need to keep in mind

that one group which is dominated in one region or locality of

India, may be actually dominant in another. Generalizing it on the

basis of caste, religion or any other factor would be a hasty

generalization fallacy. To reach a common consensus about the

subalterns in Indian context, the definition introduced by Julian

Wolfreys and others is appropriate and relevant:

Term, taken from the work of Antonio Gramsci and used initially to
define proletarian and other working-class groups, subaltern is
employed in postcolonial studies after Gayatri Spivak to address
dominated and marginalized groups. (Wolfreys, et al 94)

The above definition indicates that the notion of subaltern is, in

fact, relative, and is determined not by caste, religion or region, but

by power. And when we apply this definition in the Indian context,

we come across some fundamental sections of Indian society who,

irrespective of their caste, creed and religion, qualify as subalterns.

And their individual analysis is imperative for understanding the

notion of subaltern in the Indian context.

When we look at the Indian scenario through the prism of

postcolonial subaltern perspective, three sections of Indian society,

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who are outside the hegemonic power structure, qualify as

subalterns. These are: Dalits, Tribals/Adivasis and Women.

1. Dalits:

Dalit, meaning „oppressed‟ in Hindi and Marathi, is specifically

being used for the people, who are outside of the four-layer caste

structure of Indian society. Thus, having been considered outcastes,

they are virtually outside the hegemonic power structure of caste-

based Indian society.

Though the name Dalit has been in existence since the 19 th

century, it was the economist and reformer B R Ambedkar who

popularized the term. While scheduled castes is the legal term for

those who were formerly considered Dalits, the term also includes

other historically disadvantageous communities like landless

labourers, who were traditionally excluded from Indian social

order. It was perhaps first used by the 19th century Marathi

reformer and revolutionary Mahatma Jotirao Phule in the context

of the oppression faced by the erstwhile “untouchable” castes of

the Indian society. According to Victor Premsagar, the term

expresses the Dalits‟ “weakness, poverty and the humiliation at the

hands of the upper-castes in the Indian society” (Kundu 130). To

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bring them out of this humiliation and marginalization, several

Indian activists and writers like B. R. Ambedkar, Dr Narendra

Jadhav et al. have taken cudgels in their favour, and have been

representing their concerns and aspirations in their respective

writings. Such writings come under the rubric of Dalit literature.

Although Dalit literature has a long past and can be traced

from Madara Chennaiah, an 11th century Dalit writer, it began to be

mainstreamed in India with the appearance of the English

translations of a rich corpus of Marathi Dalit writing: An Anthology

of Dalit Literature (1992), edited by Mulk Raj Anand and Eleanor

Zelliot and Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi

Dalit Literature (1992), edited by Arjun Dangle. The number of

Dalit writers in the field of English based fiction from India has so

far been small, but there are some non-Dalit major practitioners of

the genre who have embraced Dalit sensibility against the grain of

their own caste and class, and have cast their gaze at the country‟s

grim underbelly. Prominent among those are Mulk Raj Anand,

Amitav Ghosh, Mahasweta Devi, Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry,

Vikas Swarup, Arundhatri Roy and Arvind Adiga.

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Anand‟s Untouchable (1935) is an eloquent testimony of Dalit life.

It is an impassioned plea for social justice and equality. It exposes

the evil effects of untouchability and analyses its various aspects:

social, moral, psychological, philosophical, historical and so on.

Similarly, S. Menon Merath‟s The Wound of Spring (1960),

Padmini Sengupta‟s The Red Hibiscus (1960) and Santa

Rameshwar Rao‟s Children of God (1976), Rohinton Mistry‟s The

Fine Balance (1995), Amitav Ghosh‟s The Hungry Tide (2004),

Vikas Swarup‟s Q&A (2005), Arundhati Roy‟s The God of Small

Things (1997) and Arvind Adiga‟s The White Tiger (2008)

highlight different kinds of aspirations, ordeals and issues

pertaining to Dalits. In fact, Arundhati Roy‟s The God of Small

Things has become the mouthpiece of Dalits in terms of its open

and defiant concern for the untouchables in the person of Velutha.

The novel highlights the various ways in which the rights and

privileges of Dalits are generally ignored even in the present-day

India.

Even after 70 years of Indian independence, Dalits are still

subjected to extreme forms of social and economic exclusion and

discrimination. According to official statistics, even today a crime

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against Dalits, motivated by hatred and caste-prejudice, happens

every 18 minutes in India. No doubt there are provisions in the

Indian Constitution for the social, political and economic

upliftment of the Dalits; these concessions, however, are limited to

Hindu Dalits only. The benefit of these provisions is not extended

to the Dalits who have converted to other religions. This is the

clear proof of Spivak‟s claim that the subaltern cannot speak. By

converting to other religions, the Dalits were/are trying to “speak”,

but ironically their speech is being taken as their defiance. There

has been no proper communication between the speaker and the

listener. This predicament of Dalits amply testifies Spivak‟s claim

that subalterns (here Dalits) cannot speak.

Now if Dalits themselves cannot speak, then the question

that immediately strikes our mind is who is to be assigned the job

of representing Dalit aspirations. Should Dalits themselves write

about their pain, or should non-Dalits be given a free hand? Who is

best suited to speak for and speak to the subaltern Dalit? For

instance, there are critics like K.W. Christopher who consider Mulk

Raj Anand‟s representation of Dalits as paternalistic:

It is an irony of history that dalits who have been victims of

Brahmanical social structures are now victims of Brahmanical regimes
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of representation in various avatars like postcoloniality and subaltern

studies. Mulk Raj Anand‟s novel Untouchable illustrates these politics
of representation. (Christopher 64)

Some scholars are of the view that Dalits, given their socio-

economic and educational backwardness, are not in a position to

adequately and vehemently represent themselves. The best option,

according to the researcher, is to choose a middle path. While it is

important for Dalits to tell their painful stories themselves, the non-

Dalits, at the same time, should not shun their social

responsibilities and should, without patronizing, try to represent the

true voice of Dalits in their respective writings. Their aim, instead

of making Dalits the followers of their party, religion or ideology,

should be to rediscover their philosophy, history, religion and

values, and thereby assimilate them in the mainstream society.

2. Adivasis:

Adivasis, who make up around 8.6% of India‟s population, is an

umbrella term for a heterogeneous set of ethnic and tribal groups

considered the aboriginal population of India. Consisted of

scheduled tribes and the de-notified nomadic communities of India,

they are generally groups with a primitive lifestyle, with their own

beliefs, cultures, customs and sometimes with their own language.

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Their identity is determined not by their geography but by their

culture and lineage. Since they are largely self-sufficient and

dependent on their land for their livelihood, their integration into

the dominant mainstream national society is not total. The socio-

cultural and historical marginalization of the tribals that had begun

in pre-colonial periods has further been strengthened by the

colonial discourse on race and culture. Besides they have also been

victims of the Naxalite insurgency and Salwa Judam campaign by

Indian government.

The dominant historical discourse has, by and large,

remained silent about tribal history. And whatever marginal

representation they receive at the national level is mainly high

jacked by the personal/party biases of their so-called

representatives. We come across different agencies pretending to

speak on their behalf, but in reality their sole aim remains to

assimilate them into their fold. The conversion programme of the

Christian missionaries, the Hinduisation process of the right wing

political workers, and the radical Left‟s attempt to brainwash the

tribal youth into taking up arms are a few cases in point. No one

bothers to represent them and their aspirations in true sense. Driven

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by party politics, the tribals‟ point of view is largely ignored by

these agencies.

Even in the literary world, they have, by and large, remained

unrepresented. Tribal world seems to be an „other world‟ for the

mainstream writers; they neither write about them nor seem

interested in writing about them. That is why the representation of

tribals and their history in Indian English fiction is scarce.

Nevertheless, there are certain works in Indian English literature

like Arun Joshi‟s The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971), Kamala

Markandaya‟s The Coffer Dams (1969) Manohar Malgonkar‟s The

Princes (1963), Gita Mehta‟s A River Sutra (1993) and Ruskin

Bond‟s short stories that have attempted to represent the tribal

predicament and aspirations. Besides, in the area of Indian

literature in English translation, we have some significant writers

who have written some important works highlighting the plight and

problems of tribals. These include the Bengali writer Mahasweta

Devi and the Oriya novelist Gopinath Mohanty. In fact Devi‟s

fictional and non- fictional works are replete with tribal themes.

Her works like Imaginary Maps. Breast Stories, Chotti Munda and

His Arrow are true representations of tribal aspirations and issues.

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And the critical material written on them by Gaytri Spivak is also

very crucial in understanding the tribal perspective.

Spivak‟s article “Woman in Difference: Mahasweta Devi‟s

Doulati the Bountiful” (1993) and her introductory essays in

Imaginary Maps (1995) and Chotti Munda and His Arrow (2002)

are works that draw our attention. Similarly, Sitakant Mahapatra‟s

Reaching the Other Shore: The World of Gopinath Mohanty’s

Fiction (1992) help us in understanding Gopinath Mohanty‟s tribal

perspective in a better way.

Though the endeavor of these writers in representing this

unrepresented section of Indian society is appreciable, it is,

however, wrought with many problems. Like in the representation

of Dalits, several critics have shown reservations about the

representation of tribals by non-tribal writers; and are of the view

that the tribals cannot be made to speak through non-tribals. For

instance, Arun Joshi has been criticized for depicting tribals as a

quiet and peaceful lot without any indigenous resistance

movements. Similarly, Markandya has been criticized for her

patronizing attitude towards tribals and for reservations against the

tribal resistance movements. All this puts one in a tight spot while
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critiquing the representation of the subaltern in the literary world.

The need, however, is to give due attention and representation to

tribal cultures, customs, histories and aspirations in the mainstream

literature by the non-tribal writers, while at the same time empower

and educate this marginalized and deprived section so that it

becomes capable of self-representation.

3. Women:

Women, as Simon de Beauvour characterizes them, comprise

perhaps the most significant and inclusive of all subaltern groups

not only because of the ubiquitous nature of their oppression but

also because of the fact that all cultural, political, religious and

ideological institutions of our society are a major party in

validating and naturalizing their oppression. It was the Postcolonial

theorist Gayatri Spivak who categorically labeled them as

subaltern, because, according to her, women are being denied

access to both mimetic and political forms of representation.

The roots of Feminism in Asia, particularly in India are

ingrained in the discrimination which the women folk has been

facing in the form of Personal laws, religious fundamentalism and

hackneyed socio-cultural taboos and beliefs since times

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immemorial. And it is only our complacent attitude towards the

plight of women that the violence on women in the form of rape in

police custody, domestic violence and sexual-harassment at

workplaces are increasing at an alarming rate. Hence the need and

origin of more and more women movements, like the recent “Me-

too movement”, in India.

It was in late 1980s that within the broad identity of

women‟s movement in India, differences among women and their

nature of oppression based on class, caste, community and rural-

urban divide became manifest. The women movements which were

mainly urban centric were accused of being homogenous and

western in their approach. Once the women from different

backgrounds and with different moorings felt unrepresented in the

broader framework of feminist movement in India, they started

their own separate and specific movements. This led to the rise of

new feminist movements like Tribal Feminism, Dalit Feminism,

and Ecological Feminism etc. But the significance of the ground-

breaking Subaltern project which was undertaken by a group of

Indian historians in 1990s with respect to Indian feminism is very

crucial and of historic importance. The group members became

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conscious regarding the indifference and neglect of the

contributions made by diverse marginal groups including women

in the project of nationalism and national mainstream history. This

prompted them to deconstruct and reconstruct the official

narratives in which due space was given to the contribution made

by women. These studies were further enriched by the detailed

analysis of all the socio-cultural and religious hierarchies that

were/are prevailing in our society.

Although the sensitive portrayal of women and their

predicament by the male writers like Tagore, Ram Mohan Roy,

etc., is still a hallmark in Indian feminism, the authentic and

genuine voice of a woman was deemed unrepresented and unheard

till the time women had not themselves started expressing and

writing about their plight. And once the women began wielding

their pens to express their concerns, it tremendously enhanced their

socio-cultural existence and expedited their journey from the

margins of the society to the center. Prominent among them are

Toru Dutt, Kamala Das, Nayantara Sahgal, Sarojini Naidu,

Mahasweta Devi, Arundhati Roy, Shashi Deshpande, Shoba De

etc. Their writings are, by and large, based on current events and
 45

social issues. These women writers usually explore the old Indian

womanhood concept, condemn exploitations, try making sense of

the fast changing world and the need for safeguarding women‟s

human rights.

A cursory look at Indian women writers reveals the fact that

all those major phases of literary subculture that were posited by

Elaine Showalter in 1977 are present in them. Whether it is the

phase of Imitation, Protest or Self-discovery, the representation of

every phase can be found in Indian women writers. If the novels of

Shashi Despande oscillate between the imitation and protest stage

and reach finally to the self-discovery, the novels of Nayantara

Sahgal exclusively exemplify the third phase.

In Shashi Despande we have a female protagonist like Sarita

(The Dark Holds No Terrors) on the one hand and a protagonist

like Manjari (Moving On) on the other hand. While Sarita, who

suffers both as a sister and as a wife, is at great pains to free herself

from the stultifying and hackneyed traditional constraints; Manjari

emerges as an independent women who not only breaks all the

stultifying relationships but also refuses to take crutches of

remarriage that raja offers.

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Nayantara Sahgal‟s protagonists become the proponent of the third

phase. Whether it is Simrit of The Day in Shadow, Devi in A

Situation in New Delhi or Sonali in Rich Like Us, all are self-

assertive and strive to carve a niche, a respectable place for them,

within the social order. Anita Desai‟s major characters are in the

phase of self-analysis and perception which leads to a kind of

ennui. Whether it is Sita in Where Shall We Go This Summer,

Nanda Kaul in Fire on the Mountain, or Maya in Cry the Peacock,

their initial will to move on is counteracted upon by their passivity

to patriarchal construction of space for women.

It is in Arundhati Roy that the final phase of self-discovery

reaches its culmination. In her debut novel The God of Small

Things Roy raised some fundamental feministic questions and

slapped them on the patriarchal society to explore their answers.

While breaking the social boundaries that determine who should be

loved, how and how much, she not only defies the phallocentric

discourse but also heralds a new era wherein women, without

caring for the consequences, make their own choices.

The above survey makes it amply clear that, irrespective of

their diverse ideological leanings, all women writers have been

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openly striving to place women at the center of their narratives.

And instead of projecting them as merely weak, submissive and

docile, they have also projected a new avatar of a woman who is

not only strong-willed and defiant but also capable of self-

representation. These women writers have been attempting to erase

the scourge of subalternity that has been haunting the women

psyche for a long time. These writers have made the society believe

that conjugal understanding does not necessarily mean

subservience and that entering into wedlock represents the love and

not the dependency of a woman.

There is no denying the fact that womanhood has taken a

long leap ever since it won the battle of suffrage in 1920 and that

Indian women are now making their presence felt in every walk of

life. We do have a section of Indian women who are as empowered

as any male counterpart anywhere in the world, and thus have

reached a position wherefrom they can be heard. But unfortunately

it is true only about a very small and selected section of Indian

women—the elites. The majority is still suffering under the

oppressive and discriminatory patriarchal socio-political structure

of our society. And it is this section of society that needs attention,

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empowerment, emancipation and above all faithful representation.

Herein comes the role of socially and politically conscious writers

like Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy.