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 feminismâa branch of Subaltern Studies that had remained nascent in the collectiveâs original work beyond the writings of Susie Tharu and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The title of our book, Subaltern Womenâs Narratives: Strident Voices, Dissenting Bodies, is capacious enough to enable scholars to engage in global feminist approaches to subaltern womenâs modes of subversion. We are interested in the ideological construction of subaltern womenâs resistance. Subaltern Studies developed from the premise of subaltern resistanceâfrom aspects of peasant insurgency to a philosophical resistance against being erased by elite historiography. Rosalind OâHanlon asks us to consider âwhat kind of practice, we would be justified in calling a resistant one.â2 This question becomes more critical when we aim it specifically at subaltern women, because as Chandra Talpade Mohanty reminds us, ânot all feminist struggles can be understood within the framework of âorganizedâ movements.â3 This volumeâs 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 âthe contributions made by people on their own, that is, independent of the elite to the making and development of this nationalism.â5 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 âoppose[d]â to the âprevailing 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.â6 The conception of the collective owed some inspiration to Gramsciâs âsix-point projectâ 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 Alamâs 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 ârelation,â there has to be a functional âopposition,â and therefore to dismiss the subaltern classes as âdeeply subjugatedâ not only denied them their âautonomy,â 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 âsporadicâ revolts or that they are ânot always manipulatedâ 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 âsubalternâ 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 âsubalternâ in the title stands for the meaning as given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, that is, âof inferior rank.â 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
âSubordinationâ in this passage is central to the conception of the âsubaltern,â 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 âsubordinationâ of the subaltern here is âone of the constitutive terms in a binary relationship of which the other is dominanceâ; 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 âemptinessâ; and Gyan Prakash noted that the term âsubalternâ signifies the âcentrality of dominant/dominated relationships in history.â13
However, the binary of domination and subjugation carries with it several pitfalls in the conception of the figure of the subalternâa 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 collectiveâs criticism of elite historiography, there lies an inherent discrepancy: when David Arnold notes that in the context of the Madras famine (1876â8), âpeasant solidarity and peasant power were seldom sufficient or sustained enough to do more than produce a limited response,â Spivak points out that Arnold âlays the blameâ on âpeasant consciousness,â thus contradicting the âgeneral politicsâ of the collective, which âsees the eliteâs hegemonic access to âconsciousnessâ as an interpretable constructâ and revealing an essentialism in their construct of subaltern consciousness, thus âinsidiously objectify[ing]â the subaltern.15 She argues that if the collective view Indian society as a âcontinuous sign-chainâ then it is imperative to disrupt this through âbreaking and relinking of the chain.â16 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 âsemiotic chain.â17 Lending this depth to the understanding of subaltern consciousness thus enables the figure of the subaltern to move beyond the collectiveâs 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 âCan the Subaltern Speak?,â Spivak returns to the discrepancy in the collectiveâs 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
Spivakâs intervention made room for a critical positioning in the understanding and employment of the term âsubalternâ and paved the way for a broader definition. As Margery Sabin notes: ââsubalternsâ now include women, ethnic a...