Subaltern Women's Narratives

Strident Voices, Dissenting Bodies

Samraghni Bonnerjee, Samraghni Bonnerjee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000333558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Subaltern Women's Narratives brings together intersectional feminist scholarship from the Humanities and Social Sciences and explores subaltern women's narratives of resistance and subversion.

Interdisciplinary in nature, the collection focuses on fictional texts, archival records, and ethnographic research to explore the lived experiences of subaltern women in different marginalised communities across a wide geographical landscape, as they negotiate their way through modes of labour and activism. Thematically grouped, the focus of this book is two-fold: to look at the lived experiences of subaltern women as they negotiate their lives in a world of political flux and conflicts; and to examine subaltern women's dissenting practices as recorded in texts and archives. This collection will push the boundaries of scholarship on decolonial and postcolonial feminism and subaltern studies, reading women's subversive practices especially in the themes of epistemology and embodiment.

This book is aimed primarily at scholars, postgraduates, and undergraduates working in the fields of colonial and postcolonial studies. It will appeal to both historians and scholars of nineteenth century and contemporary literature. Specifically scholars working on subaltern theory, feminist theory, indigenous cultures, anticolonial resistance, and the Global South will find this book particularly relevant.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Subaltern women’s resistance

Samraghni Bonnerjee

In the domain of a specifically feminist politics, such Subaltern Studies would require an engagement with global feminism.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 2000¹

The scope of this edited collection springs from this statement, rooted in the engagement of global feminism with subaltern feminism—a branch of Subaltern Studies that had remained nascent in the collective’s original work beyond the writings of Susie Tharu and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The title of our book, Subaltern Women’s Narratives: Strident Voices, Dissenting Bodies, is capacious enough to enable scholars to engage in global feminist approaches to subaltern women’s modes of subversion. We are interested in the ideological construction of subaltern women’s resistance. Subaltern Studies developed from the premise of subaltern resistance—from aspects of peasant insurgency to a philosophical resistance against being erased by elite historiography. Rosalind O’Hanlon asks us to consider “what kind of practice, we would be justified in calling a resistant one.”² This question becomes more critical when we aim it specifically at subaltern women, because as Chandra Talpade Mohanty reminds us, “not all feminist struggles can be understood within the framework of ‘organized’ movements.”³ This volume’s aim is to highlight instances and methods of resistance that have developed outside of organised movements and practices, the forms of subversion enacted quietly over time, through quotidian activities, against hegemonic narratives.

Formed in South Asia in the early 1980s and initially conceived as a three-volume series of books, the Subaltern Studies collective published ten volumes in the decade, and achieved the status of a global academic institution, influencing numerous similar research groups across the globe. In his Preface to the first volume, Ranajit Guha, founder member of the collective, laid down the groundwork for its rationale:

to help rectify the elitist bias of much research and academic work in this particular area [South Asian studies]. [. . .] Indeed, it will be very much a part of our endeavour to make sure that our emphasis on the subaltern functions both as a measure of objective assessment of the role of the elite and as a critique of elitist interpretations of that role.⁴

Critiquing this elitism in history writing was central to the formation of the Subaltern Studies collective. In his essay in the first volume, Guha explained how the approaches of the Cambridge School and of the nationalist historians were inadequate as historical writing of Indian nationalism, noting that these approaches failed to include “the contributions made by people on their own, that is, independent of the elite to the making and development of this nationalism.”⁵ Returning again to this entrenched elitism in history writing in his Preface to the third volume, Guha asserts that the objective of Subaltern Studies is “oppose[d]” to the “prevailing academic practice in historiography and the social sciences for its failure to acknowledge the subaltern as the maker of his own destiny. This critique lies at the very heart of our project.”⁶ The conception of the collective owed some inspiration to Gramsci’s “six-point project” laid out in his Notes on Italian History, and in the early years other members continued to clarify their methodological approach to the subaltern project through publications in these volumes and elsewhere.⁷ One of the most prominent clarifications was set out by Partha Chatterjee in his response to Javeed Alam’s discussion of Subaltern Studies I in the journal Social Scientist.⁸ Chatterjee explored the binary of domination and subjugation and argued that for domination to function as a “relation,” there has to be a functional “opposition,” and therefore to dismiss the subaltern classes as “deeply subjugated” not only denied them their “autonomy,” but also offered an incomplete historical discourse.⁹ He offered a correction to this form of history writing, laying out at the same time the vision and methodology of the Subaltern Studies collective in the two volumes published until then:

It would not do merely to add as a caveat that the oppressed too sometimes rise in “sporadic” revolts or that they are “not always manipulated” by dominant groups. The point is to conceptualise a whole aspect of human history as a history, i.e., as a movement which flows from the opposition between two distinct social forces. Here to deny autonomy to the subaltern classes is to petrify this aspect of the historical process, to reduce it to an immobility, indeed to destroy its history. This precisely is what is done in elitist historiography, for there history moves either in terms of a unique bourgeois-feudal opposition or, in countries like ours, a unique national-colonial contradiction. Nothing else matters.¹⁰

At this juncture, it is important to dwell on the term “subaltern” as it was initially conceived by the collective, and to consider how the definition has evolved over the years, and how we have defined it in this book.¹¹ In his Preface, Guha clearly sets out the scope encompassed by the term as:

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.¹²

“Subordination” in this passage is central to the conception of the “subaltern,” and here he and subsequently other members of the collective drew from a Gramscian concept of the dichotomous relation between subordination and domination. Guha clarified later that the “subordination” of the subaltern here is “one of the constitutive terms in a binary relationship of which the other is dominance”; Partha Chatterjee too, as discussed above, viewed subordination and dominance as active dichotomies, one leading to the other, instead of one (subjugation) existing in an “emptiness”; and Gyan Prakash noted that the term “subaltern” signifies the “centrality of dominant/dominated relationships in history.”¹³

However, the binary of domination and subjugation carries with it several pitfalls in the conception of the figure of the subaltern—a critique formulated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose deconstructivist readings of Indian society and criticism of the classic Marxist models employed by the Subaltern Studies collective provided a nuanced formulation of the figure of the subaltern.¹⁴ Spivak argues that in the collective’s criticism of elite historiography, there lies an inherent discrepancy: when David Arnold notes that in the context of the Madras famine (1876–8), “peasant solidarity and peasant power were seldom sufficient or sustained enough to do more than produce a limited response,” Spivak points out that Arnold “lays the blame” on “peasant consciousness,” thus contradicting the “general politics” of the collective, which “sees the elite’s hegemonic access to “consciousness” as an interpretable construct” and revealing an essentialism in their construct of subaltern consciousness, thus “insidiously objectify[ing]” the subaltern.¹⁵ She argues that if the collective view Indian society as a “continuous sign-chain” then it is imperative to disrupt this through “breaking and relinking of the chain.”¹⁶ Spivak emphasises that subaltern consciousness does not exist outside of the dominant (elite) power structure, and is wary of defining it as a positive and pure state, and instead stresses that subaltern consciousness is part of a discursive framework, a “semiotic chain.”¹⁷ Lending this depth to the understanding of subaltern consciousness thus enables the figure of the subaltern to move beyond the collective’s initial conception of it as a male subject of nationalism, to include the lives of women, rural peasantry and indigenous minorities before, during and after Indian independence.¹⁸

In an interview about her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Spivak returns to the discrepancy in the collective’s definition of subalternity and her conception of subaltern consciousness:

In the essay I made it clear that I was talking about the space as defined by Ranajit Guha, the space that is cut off from the lines of mobility in a colonized country. You have the foreign elite and the indigenous elite. Below that you will have the vectors of upward, downward, sideward, backward mobility. But then there is a space which is for all practical purposes outside those lines.¹⁹

Spivak’s intervention made room for a critical positioning in the understanding and employment of the term “subaltern” and paved the way for a broader definition. As Margery Sabin notes: “‘subalterns’ now include women, ethnic a...