Subaltern Studies

Subaltern studies is a broadly influential academic movement whose goal is to refocus history on the unique role of subaltern or marginalized people in bringing about large-scale transformations in society. The implications of subaltern studies for geography are especially apparent in the group's exploration of spatialized categories of class, ancestry, and religion.

Subaltern studies began in 1982, when a collective of South Asian scholars in Britain, including Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee, began publication of a book-length journal titled Subaltern Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha. Much of the collective's early work dealt with the politics of peasants who had been involved in the mass movements that ultimately led to India's independence. The journal's inauguration stemmed from a critique both of nationalist historians of India, who tended to focus on the local elites, and of orthodox Marxists, whose restriction of the concept of the working classes to industrial workers alone was, as the members of the subaltern studies collective argued, Eurocentric and badly suited to the varied economy of the Indian subcontinent.

Subaltern studies’ turn away from traditional methods of historical research was signaled by ongoing debates over the definition of the term subaltern. Although influenced by the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who used it to refer primarily to industrial laborers, in the work of the collective the word subaltern came to describe any group that is wholly left out of the elite. In this light, the collective's focus also developed in relation to long-standing populist debates in South Asia, from the nationalist writings of N. G. Ranga and L. Natarajan to the variegated Marxism of scholars like A. R. Desai.