Ajaya Bhadra KhanalTraveling Theory, Fall 2003Prof. Ivan Karp, Ant 585

Subaltern Studies: Bridging materialism and experience

In his essays “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” Ranajit

Guha lays out the Subaltern project. The essay reflects two dimensions of the Subaltern

project, much like the vertical and horizontal dimensions of Paul Willis outlined in

Learning to Labor. In this perspective, people are caught in a web of relationship along

two dimensions. The vertical dimension is one of power relations, organized by the state

and dominant political structures (“elite” in the case of Guha), and the horizontal is one

of cultural relations, organized by cultural forms specific to the structural class position.

This notion is partially reflected in Guha’s notion of vertical and horizontal

mobilizations in explaining anti-colonial movements in Indian history. Horizontal

mobilization is “derived directly from the paradigm of peasant insurgency,” (41).

However, Guha creates a dual category within the subaltern in their horizontal

mobilization. Horizontal mobilization did not only emerge from a class association, it

was also based on “traditional organization of kinship and territoriality” (40). This

distinction, of whether the mobilization was based on “traditional” or “class”

associations, depends on the nature of “the consciousness of the people involved” (40).

This duality between “class” consciousness and “traditional” forms of consciousness is

significant. Firstly, it relates to the “cultural” aspect of consciousness and experience of

the self, secondly it relates to possibility of political action.

Despite the multiplicity of interests within the subaltern, there are several

categories that bind the different groups as a single category of the subaltern. One

characteristic is resistance against the elite. Another common characteristic is

exploitation, notably, in relation to labor. Guha is aware that these and other distinctive

features did not always appear in a “pure state” and that “the impact of living

contradictions modified them in the course of their actualization in history” (41). What is

more important for Guha, however, is that despite their level of purity, such

characteristics created a “domain of subaltern politics” that is distinct from “elite politics”

(41). Guha’s distinction makes the subaltern as a form of the popular, constantly engaged

in a struggle with the dominant powers. In this sense, subaltern can be easily substituted

for the notion of the popular in Stuart Hall and E. P. Thompson.

The next step of his argument is that the co-existence of these two domains

(subaltern and the elite) indexed “the failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to speak for the

nation” (41). This statement is significant. Firstly, this leads to a notion of “structural

dichotomy” (42), which is seen to be a result of the failure of the “bourgeoisie” to

integrate experience (“life and consciousness”) of the people. Secondly, it leads to a

concept of articulation. When elements among the indigenous elite (“especially the

bourgeois”) were able integrate the experience of the people with struggles against

colonialism, it led to some “splendid” results. And when the efforts of the bourgeoisie to

integrate people’s experience were linked to hegemonic processes, they led to “retreats”

(42). This concept of articulation helps the Subaltern historians explain diverse and

contradictory moments in Indian history.

Articulation allows a form of solidarity to develop between the bourgeois and the

subalterns. This is especially important because “the working class was still not

sufficiently mature in the objective conditions of its social being and in its consciousness

as a class-for-itself, nor was it firmly allied yet with the peasantry,” (42). Thus the

failures and successes of Indian political movements are linked to these Marxian and

Gramscian notions of solidarity, now more understandable through Hall’s idea of

articulation. The problem of this analysis, however, is that the bourgeois class becomes,

in Indian historiography, a classic tragic hero, burdened with the possibility of

emancipation of the Indian peasants and workers, yet subject to hegemonic desires of

capitalism. As Guha argues, “the study of this historic failure of the nation to come to its

own… constitutes the central problematic of the historiography of colonial India,” (43).

But in the formulating the central problematic, Guha already seems to be offering an

answer. In the vein of British Cultural Studies, it is now only a question of finding more

examples from history.

Guha’s proximity to cultural studies emerges from his goal and method.

Historiography, for Guha, works at two levels of coding and decoding. Firstly, it is about

how historians have coded and decoded history, taking into account the ideological

context in which such activity takes place. At the second level, it is a thick description

(Geertz) or decoding (Thompson) of historical events, combined with historical analysis.

Guha is interested in the historical specificity of “rebel consciousness.” His essay, “The

Prose of Counter Insurgency” reflects how Guha’s account of history would relate events

to consciousness of agents living in both a material and a cultural world. His method

would, in the case of Santal rebellion, include such things as “the rich material of myths,

rituals, rumors, hopes for a Golden Age and fears of an imminent End of the World, all of

which speaks of the self-alienation of the rebel” (83). This type of thick-description takes

us very close to Geertz, who takes into account forms of cultural understanding and

representation that provide meaning and motivate people. Historical events, thus, are

always signifiers of the “consciousness” of the people who enact them, and it seems to be

Guha’s intention to make that link between events and consciousness that motivates such

action. Thus, we see in Guha, two aspects. First is an attempt to reach out to

“consciousness” of the people through a methodology similar to Geertz and E P

Thompson, the other is an aspect of a Marxian-Gramscian model, that situates such

consciousness within a structure of class relations and historical development.

There is, however, another side to Guha’s perspective. Subject to seemingly

“irrational” motivations like religion, sectarianism and militancy, he sees peasant

consciousness as always existing in tension with class consciousness. The movement

from one to another is bi-directional, and they also seem to have a dialectical relationship.

Guha does not view these two elements with neutrality. Like Gramsci, Guha seems to be

wary of the retreats peasant consciousness can take, and all his descriptions are tinged

with a certain sense of disapprobation. For example, “localism and territoriality” that

exist as traditional vestiges in the peasant life, puts brakes on success of revolutionary

movements (84). Behind the description, we find a certain element of modernity, one that

aspires to a certain form of nationalism. Chakravorty-Spivak also mentions there is “an

incipient evolutionism” in the Subaltern group, which “trying perhaps to avoid a vulgar

Marxist glorification of the peasant, lays the blame on the ‘existing level of peasant

consciousness’ for the fact ‘that peasant solidarity and peasant power were seldom

sufficient or sustained enough’” (Chakravarty-Spivak, 6).

In a similar vein, Partha Chatterjee’s essay “More on Modes of Power and the

Peasantry” explores different forms of solidarity, and their co-existence in the

“backward” countries. Chatterjee distinguishes between the communal mode of power,

the feudal mode of power, and the bourgeois mode of power. His purpose in tracing

development of primitive society is to find the typical situation of peasantry in history,

which is a result of “the internal development and external political intervention over

centuries” leading to the “breakdown of segmentary forms of social organization, the

evolution of more developed techno economic forms and more complex social

arrangements of production, the emergence of differentiated and institutionalized forms

of extraction and distribution of the surplus, and the creation of formal institutions of

coercive domination” (Chatterjee, 366). He thus seeks to find in Indian societies, residues

of both these modes of power, existing in “dialectical opposition” (366). In primitive

societies, he argues, the coexistence of contrary principles of political authority

sometimes means an oscillation between two modes (369-70). The implication of their

co-existence is that they “open up …an entirely new range of possibilities for the ruling

classes to exercise their domination” (390). Chatterjee’s model can also be used to relate

human actions to their motives, or the way in which people’s actions become possible

within a system of complex power relations.

Reference:

Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravarty-Spivak. Selected Subaltern Studies. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1988.