Communism, Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory

The Left in South India

Nissim Mannathukkaren

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000422917
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica asiatica

This book is a thematic history of the communist movement in Kerala, the first major region (in terms of population) in the world to democratically elect a communist government. It analyzes the nature of the transformation brought about by the communist movement in Kerala, and what its implications could be for other postcolonial societies. The volume engages with the key theoretical concepts in postcolonial theory and Subaltern Studies, and contributes to the debate between Marxism and postcolonial theory, especially its recent articulations.

The volume presents a fresh empirical engagement with theoretical critiques of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory, in the context of their decades-long scholarship in India. It discusses important thematic moments in Kerala's communist history which include — the processes by which it established its hegemony, its cultural interventions, the institution of land reforms and workers' rights, and the democratic decentralization project, and, ultimately, communism's incomplete national-popular and its massive failures with regard to the caste question.

A significant contribution to scholarship on democracy and modernity in the Global South, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, specifically political theory, democracy and political participation, political sociology, development studies, postcolonial theory, Subaltern Studies, Global South Studies, and South Asia Studies.

1
SUBALTERN STUDIES, POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND COMMUNISM

The context of Subaltern Studies

In the next few sections, I will lay out some of the central inter-related ideas and themes of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory and their theoretical critiques. This reiteration is necessary for the purposes of the book’s main arguments and the empirical material that will be presented. It is also important to restate some of the critiques for the reason that the animated and elaborate discussion on Vivek Chibber’s critique seems to occlude the fact that some of the fundamental and cogent challenges to Subaltern Studies arose at the same time as the publication of the initial work. Marxist scholarship has also produced materialist critiques of postcolonial studies for a long time.¹ Therefore, it is surprising that Chibber ignores the vast body of critique, like that of Sumit Sarkar, David Ludden, Vinayak Chaturvedi, Vinay Bahl, etc., with regard to Subaltern Studies, and Aijaz Ahmad, Benita Parry, Arif Dirlik, San Juan Jr., Timothy Brennan, Neil Lazarus, Vasant Kaiwar and others, with regard to postcolonial theory. As Lazarus argues:

Chibber “ends up having to reinvent the wheel on quite a few occasions. He perversely chooses not to use the resources already available to him—those developed in the materialist critique of postcolonial studies over the course of the past three decades.”²

The Subaltern Studies project was founded in India toward the late 1970s by a group of historians who were disillusioned with existing trends of Indian historiography.³ Ranajit Guha, the founding father of the Subaltern Studies project, argued that a new form of history-writing was an absolute imperative as the historiography of Indian nationalism till then was dominated by “elitism—colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism.” If colonialist historiography reduced the history of Indian nationalism to the efforts of the “British colonial rulers, administrators, policies, institutions and culture,” in the nationalist version, it was “written up as a sort of spiritual biography of the Indian elite.” On the other hand, what Subaltern Studies was seeking to achieve was to write a history that brought to the fore “the contribution made by the people on their own, that is independently of the elite to the making and development of [Indian] nationalism.”⁴

Marxist historiography too came under scathing critique from the Subalternists for its alleged class-reductionism which fails to understand the unique modes of subaltern resistance under colonialism.⁵ While Marxism rejects bourgeois modernization, it still continues to work with the teleological assumptions of the former, seeing postcolonial history through the modes of production narrative and as a transition (or a failed transition) to capitalism.⁶ The Subaltern Studies, according to Spivak, theorizes “that the moment(s) of change be pluralized and plotted as confrontations rather than transition (they would thus be seen in relation to histories of domination and exploitation rather than within the great modes-of-production narrative).”⁷ Thus, the Subaltern Studies was seeking to write “people-centred histories” to rectify the “Indian Stalinist historians’ rigid and deterministic methods.”⁸

Who is a subaltern?

As is obvious from the terminology used, Subaltern Studies, in the beginning, especially, drew inspiration from Gramsci, who grappled with the question of subaltern identity through a Marxist framework. Pandey argues that the term “subaltern” is “a relational position in conceptualisation of power” and in popular parlance is associated with “the down and out, the impoverished, oppressed, humiliated and scorned.”⁹ Ranajit Guha, conceptualized the subaltern as “the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the ‘elite’.”¹⁰ Pandey goes onto argue that although subalternity is most commonly associated with the most oppressed, “wretchedness and humiliation, attaches to individuals and groups … who are not obviously poor and downtrodden, and even to some who might be described as subaltern elites.”¹¹ These descriptions are indeed very broad and problematic. While Gramsci conceived of the subaltern, he meant the “proletariat and other exploited classes.”¹²

Ahmad calls the Subalternist vagueness in the terminology as a characteristic of bourgeois sociology.¹³ However, Spivak argues that it is precisely because capitalism could not subsume all parts of society under it that the term subalterns were used.¹⁴ She thus criticizes Chibber for reducing the subaltern to the proletariat making it a “mechanical Marxist utopian pronouncement.”¹⁵ Earlier, she had argued that the original usage by Gramsci (to evade censorship in jail) “transformed [in Subaltern Studies] into the description of everything that does not fall under strict class analysis. This is so, because it has no theoretical rigor.”¹⁶ This vagueness about the subaltern, as we will see, is seriously debilitating when analyzing actual empirical histories. Instead of the very broad formulation, I will use the term subaltern to refer mainly to marginal peasants, workers and other exploited sections, especially those who bore the brunt of the caste and class oppressions of the feudal system as well as the emerging capitalist system.¹⁷ The working class can be, especially in the present, further differentiated on the basis of categories like rural–urban, agricultural–non-agricultural, skilled–unskilled, etc., with different levels of surplus appropriated from their labor.¹⁸

Peasant as a political subject

It has been argued that after Gramsci, the more immediate influence on Subaltern Studies was the social history “from below” propounded by historians like E. P. Thompson.¹⁹ However, Subaltern historians themselves have not concurred. It was obvious from the beginning that the project of reclaiming the subaltern voice was not something that would be a mere inversion within the modernist discourse. Also, we have to take into account the cultural and linguistic turn that the project took from the late 1980s, placing it firmly in the “post” discourse camp.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, prominent Subalternist, argues that this comparison to “history-from-below” approach of Eric Hobsbawm and Thompson is not entirely right as Subaltern historiography differs from the former in three important respects: it “necessarily entailed a relative separation of the history of power from any universalist histories of capital, critique of the nation form, and an interrogation of the relation between power and knowledge.”²⁰ One of the main points raised by the Subalternists was the tendency among Marxist historians to term peasant revolts organized by the discourses of religion or caste as “backward” or “pre-political.” They, on the other hand, insisted that peasant’s consciousness was not a vestige of the past but a fundamental part of modernity and this consciousness was also able to read and relate to modernity correctly.²¹ The Marxists, according to them, believed in the Eurocentric and stagist notion of history in which the peasant has no future other than to “mutate into industrial worker in order to emerge, eventually, as the citizen-subject of modern democracies.”²² The main essence of Subaltern Studies could be summed up as “a democratic project meant to produce a genealogy of the peasant as citizen in contemporary political modernity.” The fundamental difference between political modernity in India and the West was that in the former it was not “founded on assumed death of the peasant.”²³ The peasant does not have to transform into an industrial worker to become a citizen-subject. As we will see, this understanding, which Subaltern Studies puts forward as a unique theoretical contribution, was already a central feature of the communist project (as well as many other communist movements in the world) despite its deep implication also in modernism with regard to some other aspects. Therefore, it is important to recover that.

Gyan Pandey argues that:

The task of subaltern historiography was to recover this underdeveloped figure for history, to restore the agency of the yokel, recognize that the peasant mass was contemporaneous with the modern, a part of modernity, and establish the peasant as (in substantial part) the maker of his/her own destiny.²⁴

Similarly, Chatterjee too reflects on the differences between Subaltern Studies and “History from Below” in Europe:

The recounting in the latter body of work of the struggles of peasants and artisans in the period of the ascendancy of capitalism in Europe was inevitably written as tragedy, since the ultimate dissolution of those classes was already scripted into their history. Should we assume the same trajectory for agrarian societies in other parts of the world?

Chatterjee argues that the “different sequencing of capitalist modernity” would mean that there would be different economic, political and cultural formations in the East. This also would result in historically unprecedented forms of primitive accumulation of capital.²⁵ Thus, the distinction of Subaltern Studies is that it challenges not only the “pre-political” characterization of the peasant, but also functionalist arguments based on moral economy of the peasant.²⁶

Moreover, the Western notion of the political as a “story of human sovereignty in a disenchanted world” does not apply to the Indian context where a strict separation between politics and religion is not sustainable.²⁷ The endeavor to read Indian modernity in its own terms would mean the critique of the tendency in existing historiographies to describe it using negative prefixes bor...