Before looking at Spivak’s
critique of the Subaltern Studies collective, and her own examples of
subalternity in more detail, it is important to situate the historical and
cultural meanings of the term subaltern. Antonio Gramsci’s account of the
subaltern provides a key theoretical resource for understanding the conditions
of the poor, the lower class and peasantry in India
partly because of the parallels he drew between the division of labour in
Mussolini’s Italy and the
colonial division of labour in India.
What is more, Gramsci emphasised that the oppression of the rural peasantry in Southern Italy could be subverted through an alliance
with the urban working class, or through the development of class-consciousness
among the peasants. To this extent, Gramsci’s account of the subaltern
resembled Karl Marx’s earlier proclamation in the nineteenth century that the
industrial working class in Europe carried the
future potential for collective social and political change. Unlike Marx’s
model of social and political change, however, Gramsci stressed that the social
and political practices of the rural peasantry were not systematic or coherent
in their opposition to the state. It is this lack of coherence that
distinguishes Gramsci’s notion of the subaltern from the traditional Marxist
perception of the industrial working class as unified and coherent.
Furthermore, this lack of a coherent political identity in Gramsci’s
description of the subaltern is also crucial to Spivak’s discussion of the
subaltern in the postcolonial world.
Spivak generally agrees with the
historical arguments of the Subaltern Studies collective, but adds that their
lingering classic Marxist approach to social and historical change effectively
privileges the male subaltern subject as the primary agent of change. This is
problematic for two reasons. First, the classic Marxist model overlooks the
lives and struggles of women, before, during and after India’s
independence. And second, the Marxist model of historical change, which
anti-colonial nationalist leaders had originally invoked to try to mobilise the
subaltern, had clearly failed in the end to change the subaltern’s social and
economic circumstances. In the place of this classic Marxist definition, Spivak
proposes a more nuanced, flexible, post-Marxist definition of the subaltern,
informed by deconstruction, which takes women’s lives and histories into account.
How does Spivak differ from traditional Marxist studies of subaltern?
The term subaltern is broad and
encompasses a range of different social locations. In the social context of India’s rigid
class and caste system, the location of the subaltern is further effaced by the
layered histories of European colonialism and national independence. In
response to these changing historical conditions, Spivak has, from the
beginning, sought to find an appropriate methodology for articulating the
histories and struggles of disempowered groups.
If Antonio Gramsci’s account of
the rural peasantry in Italian history provides a key theoretical resource for
Spivak’s ongoing discussions of subalternity, one of the most important historical
resources comes from the discussions of peasant insurgency and resistance
movements in India
by the Subaltern Studies historians, including Shahid Amin (1950–), David
Arnold (1946–), Partha Chatterjee (1947–), David Hardiman (1947–), Ranajit Guha (1923–),
and Gyanendra Pandey (1950–). In a multi-volume series of collected essays
entitled Subaltern Studies these historians have consistently attempted to
recover a history of subaltern agency and resistance from the perspective of
the people, rather than that of the state. Traditionally, the histories of the
rural peasantry and the urban working class had been recorded by elite social
groups. At first, these subaltern histories were documented in the archives of
British colonial administrators; they
were then later rewritten in the historical reports of the educated Indian,
middle-class elite, during and after the struggle for national independence. As
Ranajit Guha asserts in ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial
India’:
The historiography of Indian
nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism and bourgeois
nationalist elitism. Both originated as the ideological product of British rule
in India, but have survived
the transfer of power and have been assimilated to neo-colonialist and
neo-nationalist forms of discourse in Britain
and India
respectively. (Guha 1988: 37)
The historical representation of
the various lower-class subaltern groups was thus framed in the terms and
interests of the ruling power, or dominant social class. In the historical
archives of the British Empire, the lives and political agencies of the rural
peasantry in India
were subordinated to the larger project of imperial governance and social
control; in the elite narratives of bourgeois national independence, the
localised resistance movements of the
peasants were subordinated to the larger nationalist project of decolonisation.
In both cases, the complex social and political histories of particular
subaltern groups were not recognized or represented. The success of a rural
peasant rebellion against the Indian national government in the Naxalbari area
of West Bengal in 1967 prompted the Subaltern
Studies historians to rethink the national independence narrative from the
perspective of the subaltern. This in turn led the historians to reconstruct
the various histories of subaltern insurgency, which were autonomous of and
separate from the mainstream, bourgeois nationalist independence movement. This
has not been an easy task. For the Subaltern Studies historians, the attempt to
recover these histories of autonomous resistance and struggle was hampered by
the lack of any reliable historical sources or documents reflecting the social
conditions and practices of subaltern groups in their own terms.
The political voice and agency of
particular subaltern groups was often indistinguishable from the elite characterization
of peasant movements as spontaneous acts of violence, with no political content
or organisation. Faced with this absence of reliable historical material, the
Subaltern Studies historians attempted to recuperate the political voice, will
and agency of the subaltern through a critique of colonial and elite historical
representation.
It is this approach to dominant
historical writing or historiography in the work of the Subaltern Studies
historians that is crucial to Spivak’s early theoretical discussions of the
subaltern in the late 1980s. For Spivak, the critique of elite historical
representation has a clear and distinct political agenda. If the subaltern’s
political voice and agency could not be retrieved from the archive of colonial
or elite nationalist histories, then it could perhaps be gradually re-inscribed
through a critique of dominant historical
representation. In her discussion of the Subaltern Studies project,
Spivak initially contends that a classic Marxist notion of history informs the
theoretical approach of the group to the histories of subaltern insurgency and
protest in India.
As Spivak writes:
The work of the Subaltern Studies
group offers a theory of change. The insertion of India into colonialism is generally
defined as a change from semifeudalism into capitalist subjection. Such a
definition theorizes the change within the great narrative of the modes of
production, and by uneasy implication, within the narrative of the transition
from feudalism to capitalism. (Spivak 1987: 197)
In common with other Subaltern
Studies historians, Spivak’s discussion emphasizes how the histories of peasant
uprisings and social action present a crisis in the historical narrative of
Indian national independence. Yet Spivak also questions whether the Marxist
methodology informing the approach of the Subaltern Studies historians is
appropriate to describe the complex history of subaltern insurgency.
It is important to remember that
Spivak’s thought does not take place in a historical or intellectual vacuum. As
Robert Young (2001) emphasizes in a rigorous cultural history of Indian
postcolonial thought, Marxism had played a central role in the evolution of
Indian political thought since the early twentieth century (Young 2001: 312).
M.N. Roy, the leading figure in early twentieth-century Indian communism, had
famously disagreed ‘with Lenin on the latter’s idea that parties of the
proletariat should support bourgeois national liberation movements’ (Young
2001: 312). As Young goes on to point out, the subsequent refusal of the Indian
Communist Party to ‘put the colonial conflict above that of internal class
conflict’ (315) caused it to lose political support to the Congress Party,
which prioritized national liberation over the class struggle. Yet, despite
this electoral defeat of the Indian communist party, Marxism continued to
influence political thinking in India,
both in the 1967 Naxalbari peasant rebellion against the Congress Party, and in
the subsequent historical research of the Subaltern Studies collective. By
situating Spivak’s critique of the Marxist methodology that informs the
Subaltern Studies research in the context of these earlier political debates,
one can see that Spivak is not simply rejecting Marxist thought altogether. As
Robert Young emphasises, Spivak’s thought revises and adapts the categories of
Marxist thought beyond the narrow terms of class politics to include other
forms of liberation struggles, such as the women’s movement, the peasant
struggles or the rights of indigenous minorities (Young 2001: 351). Indeed, one
of the main reasons that Spivak criticizes the employment of a classic Marxist
methodology in the work of the Subaltern Studies historians is because it is
too rigid to describe the complexities of Indian social history.
In Karl Marx’s analysis of
capitalism in nineteenth-century Europe, the
transformation in economic and social relations between the property-owning
classes (or the bourgeoisie) and the working class (or the proletariat) formed
the basis for his model of social and historical change. As Spivak points out,
however, this historical shift from feudalism to capitalism in India may offer
a historical account of how middle-class colonised subjects became national
subjects after colonialism, but it does not account for the lives and struggles
of other disempowered groups, including peasants, women and indigenous groups.
Against the Marxist approach of
the Subaltern historians, Spivak reads the historical research of the Subaltern
Studies collective as tracing a series of political ‘confrontations’ between
dominant and exploited groups rather than simply noting the transition from
‘semi-feudalism into capitalist subjection’ (Spivak 1987: 197). Such
confrontations may not have any direct political or economic impact on the
state, but this does not mean that they are
devoid of political agency or meaning. By shifting the critical perspective
from India’s national liberation movement to a focus on the social movements
and agency of particular disempowered, subaltern groups, Spivak encourages us
to consider how ‘the agency of change is located in the insurgent or
“subaltern” ’ (Spivak 1987: 197). Such a shift in perspective also necessitates
a parallel shift in the methodology informing that perspective.