Subaltern Studies

Through the subaltern studies group, Ranijat Guha and a collective of South Asian historians sought to explore the question of the possibilities of resistance to British imperialism that had been missing from the historiography of the Raj. The term subaltern has two rather different places of origin that intersect in their work. First, subaltern was the term used for minor functionaries of the British colonial regime in India, including Indian, Anglo-Indian, and Anglo officials of a low rank and having origins as a term for lower ranks in the British military forces. Second, and more tellingly, it is a term often associated with the work of Italian Marxist political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who used it to refer to the working class, peasants, and proletariat who were excluded from, and who stood in opposition to, the dominant historical bloc of a given social formation. At first, Guha and this collective built explicitly on Gramsci's approach to Italian history in an attempt to rewrite Indian history from below. Gradually, other influences, such as those of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, entered the picture. Besides Guha, Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak is the scholar who geographers are most likely to associate with the use of the term subaltern. Essentially, this is due to her essay titled “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, a staple of postcolonial studies and cultural studies readers for nearly two decades. Spivak cautioned against the easy acceptance of any possibility for rewriting history from below, asking whether subaltern voices can indeed be recognized given the degree of their marginalization. Her particular examples of illiterate rural Indian subaltern women complicated the task to which the subaltern studies group had assigned itself. Geographers analyzing imperialism and colonialism, or those concerned with questions of the power dynamics of highly unequal societies, have been captivated by the work of the subaltern studies group.