Re-visional Narrative:

Subaltern Studies

,

Schizophrenic Identity
And
The Rhetoric of Confronted Politics

This is an intensely tense time for South East Asia,
as violence has become the most unassailable item for news
headlines. The word ‘crisis’ has been so successfully launched
and repeated that the general gaze has unknowingly or over-
knowingly become hazy, ignorant and still-moving. The last word

might reflect paradoxical tension. But this equivocatory and
antithetical nuance, leading to turncoat-like position, is what has
become the acknowledged definition of ‘democracy’. The paper
does not wish to move towards making a pamphlet on democracy.
But the term haunts us, the moment we confront pages of
miscalculated justice. A country which has the tremendous
heritage of retaining so securely the stratifications of caste
dynamics seems to little understand this term. And lies herein the
problem in defining, manufacturing, inventing or subjectifying a
subaltern an agent of history. So, what begun with Ranajit Guha
as the most authentic try in exploring native voice and
reconstructing history has now quite outspokenly embraced
various established historical trends and devices. The course had
to change. But does that change retain the agency as before?
Does that have the power to analyze the positions of subjectivity?
Who are these subalterns now? What form of political intensity do
they have in confronting the State and maintaining an ‘essential’
identity? What role does State play if the subaltern power seems
to have equal political mobilization? And, lastly, does this form of
historiography allow us in justifying and recuperating a history of
the subaltern in the recent times? The essay seeks to explore in
three different parts the evolution of the term subaltern, its
immediacy in relation to the theoretical concerns, its politics of
change with the multi-dimensionality of its agency in the recent
times, and whether any particular intellectual positioning holds the
key to unlock and define various forms of resistance and
subordination that this category moves with.

Now, introspection: Why are these questions? Why
should we label these questions in analyzing the subaltern
agency today when Subaltern Studies started merely as a form of

historiography that could position and record the voice of the
peasants, woman, and the working class, whose plural identities,
polyphonic layers of agency deny them any ‘word’? Why would
we try to show discomfort with this challenging and celebratory
task of history writing and mapping of native voice, when Europe
was stealing everything away, and the colonized at the mercy of
Her Majesty? In that sense, definitely that politics of authentic
orientation adds a sensational direction in historiography. But the
problem lies in the changing ideology of this Collective, and the
difficulty in applying its form of subaltern agency in the recent
times, which leads us to questions of its incompetency with
application, and running the risk of becoming only a brilliant
intellectual outlook and research minus any practical value in the
world of so-called and well-maintained theoretical survival. Why is
it so? What change? What shortcomings? Let’s delve deep into
the source of these “counter-insurgencies”

1

?

I

Subaltern Studies begun with the rejection of
European master-narratives

2

that have only seen derivations, little

challenge or denial. The European supreme self-confidence made
it clear in the Hegelian proposition which declared India an
intellectually sterile land bereft of any history. Much later,
E.P.Thomson seemed to prove it when he said, “Indians are not
historians, and they rarely show any critical ability. Even their
most useful books…exasperate with repetitions and diffuseness.”

3

It was 1982 when historical narrative begun tasting a new side

under the editorship of Ranajit Guha, who gathered a bunch of
aspiring young historians and went to extract history out of the
“colonialist”, “elitist” and “bourgeoisie nationalist” discourse and
establish the “autonomous realm” of the “popular” or “subaltern
mobilization” in order to “rectify the elitist bias characteristic of
much research and academic work”.

4

The volumes saw various

cases of peasant uprisings, denominating the historiography. It
was a very difficult task because the South Asian working class
people had left little traces of their problems, unlike their
European counterpart who was conscious of the difficulties and
noted them down in diaries. So the 70s European movement of
“history from below”, had better acknowledgment of writing desk
history

than providing any “original” voice. So, any “new approach”

lies at the heart of reading things anew, and in introducing new
strategies. Thus, history became a textual study, as any effort at
exploring the “invisible” demands meticulously reading and
counter-reading of the archives that have been so boastfully
thrown at the colonized territories. The “Subaltern Studies
Collective” projected history at the heart of colonial teaching and
acquiring of knowledge- the colonial archives. The procedure was
“reading the text against the grain”, that is to point out the
significant ambivalences, paradoxes, contradictions in the
detailing out of history, which can alone single out the voice of the
subaltern that has been so calculatedly silenced by the
bourgeoisie narratives and claims. Thus, both semiotic and
textual (novels, biographies, essays written in the regional
language) notations were used so that the “difference” can be
shown. And the long meticulous researches in coming volumes
were enough evidence for its back-up.

But, what problematises its theoretical supremacy is
this changing outlook, where philosophy has become more
important than the effort at restoring ‘existential’ data. When one
talks of “pushing history to the limits” and “provincializing Europe”
in order to “make its unworking visible”

5

, the philosophical

sustenance becomes so important and sensitive to the question
of egalitarianism that one forgets one’s orientational claim: that is
the procedures through which the “people” showed resistance
against the penetrations of colonial agenda.

6

Thus, when we

confront the imperatives of “difference” for a way of new history
writing in an essay, moving against the Marxist categories, and
sense the precipitating appeal of Marxist notion of “real labor” in
the same discussion,

7

we feel that rather than pointing out

“ambivalences”, the philosophy at the bottom of this discourse is
suffering from that. And when another of its prominent spokesmen
declares that subaltern experience can no more be found in the
lived experience of peasants, woman or the working class of
South Asia but in the “recalcitrant difference that arises not
outside but inside the elite discourse to exert pressure on forces
and forms that subordinate it”, and thus, we need to have “a
complex and deep engagement with the elite and canonical texts”
to understand the “relocation of subalternity”

8

, we sense the

change- a change that has invited an obliteration of its orientation.
Ramachandra Guha shows how Partha Chatterjee’s discussion of
“agency”

9

underlies more of conjoining the “fragments” and

“shifts” of different archival knowledge than any field work, and
falls in the category of, what he terms, ‘post-Subaltern studies’ or
‘Bhadralok Studies’.

10

This recent stand has earned them, he

feels, the categorical position of writing-desk history instead of
history-as-craft.

11

Naturally, what seemed to be the most practical-
value oriented research method stoops to pointing out scores of
data and happy enough living there. This claim may seem one-
sided or over-simplification to one, but if one goes through the
entire oeuvre of this Collective after the 90s, scarcely does one
find the cases of the dalits or musalman, until the recent volume,
which also apart from Amin’s brilliant illustrations, seeks to walk
towards “The Making of Imagination” and other stuff. The case of
‘kotwal’ or ‘Kabir, caste and canonicity’ provides knowledge, but
does not satisfy the reader in showing its procedures of acquiring
knowledge and applying it to a highly stratified society of caste
hierarchy.

12

And what really affects us is the fact that this Group’s

work never goes beyond the 1930s or Independence. Their
purpose may be to write out or change the pre-Independence
Indian history, and the “subaltern” of that that time seems so more
in its initial days of formation, or the discussions so much lacking
in more complicated issues that the present change of power
dynamics calls for a re-vision.

It is of no use going to the etymology or
application of the word in its birth. Gramsci’s use of the term for a
group denied any political rights or claims irrespective of class,
caste, gender, language, or ethnicity had a significant motive, as it
readily showed how the growth of “contradictory common sense”
tallied with both working classes’ appropriation of bourgeoisie
values (consciousness) and subalterns’ inversion of bourgeoisie
positioning (structure). According to him,

“His (a worker’s) theoretical consciousness can indeed be historically in opposition to
his activity. One might almost say that he has almost two cases of theoretical
consciousnesses ( or one contradictory consciousness) one which is implicit in his
activity and which in reality unites him with all his fellow workers in the practical

transformation of the real world” and one, which is explicit or verbal, which he has

inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed.”

13

To simplify things, a worker’s spontaneous irruption is
his “common sense” or “original thought” that leads him to the
“revolutionary spirit”, only to be tied once again by the
“organization”, which is run by bourgeoisie values (ruling ideas) or
the exploitive social relations (dominant structures).

14

Thus,

though the working class is believed to be a potential
revolutionary force, but the vanguard of revolutionary organization
makes it a ‘being’, ready to be subordianated.

15

It is this

presentation of hegemony through the persuasion of cultural
space that allows, what Partha Chatterjee thinks, another
autonomous cultural space of the subalterns, distorting what the
process of subaltern collaboration takes place.

16

Thus, any

retention of subaltern identity broadly depends on the platform of
“difference”-- the “not-one-ness”, that derives from the unworking
of the public sphere

17

, i.e., exploring the “interruption,

fragmentation, and suspicion” of a closed study.

18

How is this difference retained? To Dipesh
Chakrabarty, that is a post-structuralist study in bringing out
fissures in the meta-narratives, or a complete disbelief towards it.
If the Subaltern Collective is so suspicious about meta-narratives,
why is it then embracing one such, which is nothing but an illusive
product by the western people for the western ones? Does a
completely “new approach” have to take course on to “deferral”
and such master discourses of historiography? Is this sense of
difference able to solve “structures of thought”?

19

What if the

subordination becomes domination? How much would that make
for recourse to transformation? And what sort of? Fragmentary.
Yes, this is what has become the favorable word of this collective.
True. How without being a fragment can one challenge the

whole? In that case, surely one thinks of, what Gayatri
Chakrabarty Spivak terms, catachresis, i.e., “reversing,
displacing, seizing the apparatus of value-coding”.

20

But, the

same reference can be found in Gyan Prakash’s essay,
“Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism” where he shows why
we should keep the “panoptical difference” with Foucault and
other west thinkers, and follow Derridean deconstruction and the
exploration of “the invisible design covered over the palimpsest”,
let alone his sympathy for the engagement with “dominant
discourses”, which he so gladly illustrates in his discussion.

21

What is this fragment? How does that work? How
stronger does a fragment prove it in front of the colonialist
narratives? What political mobilization does it carry within? In his
book, The Nation and Its Fragments, Partha Chatterjee points out
how the formation of nation has not only been through the
process of “derivation”

22

but mainly through the construct called

“ideological sieve”

23

, that is the contribution of native elites in

erasing or disallowing any subaltern agency. But while he goes on
to analyze the fragments (namely the peasants, woman or
outcasts) alongside nation, the agenda of subsuming categories
by the nation simultaneously calls for an independent existence of
these fragments as monolithic. Chatterjee thinks, the significance
of peasant rebellion does not only depend on socioeconomic
factors, but “on the contrary, the cultural apparatus of signs and
meanings-the language, in the broadest sense… (which) is
capable of a vast range of transformation to enable it to
understand, and to act within, varying contexts, both of
subordination and of resistance”.

24

Then, the fragment had the

possibility of transforming their condition in this dialogue of
subordination-domination. Why did that not happen? Is it only
because of “persuasion” of the elites? Does the immense role
caste played in generating a “visible discourse” of segregation
within the community mean a naught to engendering notions
behind nationalism? Chatterjee mentions the “signifying identity

and difference” that caste created within communities, but seems
to have forgotten to ask the question: how did peasants from
different communities share “gaze” at one another while
participating in a peasant rebellion against the bourgeoisie elite or
the British govt.? Caste was more of a “cultural system”

25

for the

subaltern against the hegemony of upper caste elites, and any
bringing of value within it brings alongside the notion of
“hierarchy”.

26

Bose rightly thinks that the word caste is a system in

which “rights and obligations are inextricably tied”.

27

Then, to

comment precisely, the caste consciousness provides the
fragment the knowledge, or “signs”, of power and rights. Does the
subaltern agency seem to be a muted category? True to
Chatterjee’s captions of the essays (i.e. the Nation and its
Peasants) in his book, these two categories seem to have
independent growth with dialogues of relative betterment of power
and justification of identity. The nation rather than subsuming its
fragments has transformed them into pockets of power whose
existence is only a successive covering by the bourgeoisie and
social system of relations, that is, “structure”. Then, can there be,
as Rosalind O’Hanlon thinks, any “recovery of the subject”, as any
recovery is antithetical to a construct that is always already in
process of growth?

28

What we get is a picture that tells a different

story-- that of a haunting future. Consider this story, scripted from
the other way round: Isn’t any celebration of fragments or
difference of subalterns permeable of providing the communities
within knowledge of respective betterment, and thus, the battle of
supremacy over power, what in recent times is termed as
ghettoization? Won’t that fragmentization lead us towards stories
of communal hatred and segregational or relativistic pride? Or, is
not this study an over emphasis on data collection and desk
writing, moving towards an enclosed aria of supervision and
repeated intellectual innovation, when one seems to overlook
socio economic factors that mould the identity of the subaltern so
much?

It is exactly these factors that call for a re-vision, and
push us to look into matters of close connection with our
surrounding “structures of thought”. The next part of the essay will
deal with some cases of recent times that pose the subaltern into
different pockets of power politics in confrontation with the State,
and show how these narratives of the Collective have more
validity up their sleeve when maters come close to talks of pre-
Independent India. If so, has the Collective’s search for a “new
approach” closed in the chronotope of nationalistic rhetoric? The
latter part will try to move into this schizophrenic existence.

II

In Volume I of The History of Sexuality, Foucault
states, “where there is power there is resistance”.

29

Power has

this ‘written in’ quality within to bring resistance. Scott points out
how both the powerful and the powerless are constrained within
the power relations:

“How do we power relations when the powerless are often obliged to adopt a strategic
pose in the presence of the powerful and when the powerful may have an interest in
overdramatizing their reputation and slavery

?”

And suggests that they develop a “hidden transcript” that is “a
critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant”.

30

power is always a social body of exercise. It may correlate to
different intra-institutional forms (like family), but this “ideological
apparatuses” have strong relations with state repression. These
are but ‘individual groups of statements’

31

that are regulated by

structures or rules of the State:

“Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any
more than silences are. We must make allowances for the complex and unstable
process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a

hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing
strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines
it and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it

.”

32

Thus, discourse is a figure of ambivalence that leads to
paradoxical positions and miscalculations in power relations and
control. The State, whose monolithic body of power is a
justification of its repressive status, cannot only work through
coercion; it, as we know from Gramsci, has also to take the
possibility of consensus. Herein lies the reductionist method. The
statements of the State are thus riddled with multivalences that
the repressed opposes, albeit itself being subjected to its
organization. But this subjectification is another story of
mobilization that the dominated decodes and throws against the
State. Discourse, an instrument of State power, ironically gives
out possibilities of its annihilation.

This is what forms the base of Bahujan Samaj Party.
When in 1983 Kashi Ram, with the inspiration from Ambedkar,
found this party led by subaltern people’s (bahujan) need and
advocacy for the retention of identity, an identity that forms quite a
majority in India, the main motive, as Ambedkar told, was gaining
power. According to ambedkar, “the key to all (trans) formation
lies in attaining power”

33

. Ambedkar knew the necessity of power

that can alone lead to any maintenance or performance of
“bahujan” identity. So when he withdrew from the Union Cabinet,
prior to the first General Election in India in 1951, it was a verbal
mismanagement of promise and necessity between him and the
political body. Though Gandhiji allied with him earlier in his
demands for a separate body of power for the oppressed, but he
knew how possible a threat he could be amidst any reconciliation:

“One has to be very careful indeed when dealing with a man who would become a
Christian, a Muslim or Sikh and then be reconverted according to his convenience.”

34

The introduction of Hindu Code Bill in Parliament by
Ambedkar in February 5, 1951aroused strong opposition in the

congress, and quite ironically Shyama Prasad Mookerjee
opposed it to the most. Dhananjay Keer records Mookerjee’s
words, “(it would) shatter the magnificent structure of Hindu
culture”.

35

So, one can understand very simply how power

singularity can threat the organic body of power. Foucault once
said that power works in a capillary formation, and that State itself
through the possibilities of discourse disseminates dialogues of
reciprocal functioning. Ambedkar’s resistance and ferociousness
against the whole cabinet of political body emanated the dais for
subaltern resistance, and the fragility of State maintenance.
Consider these words from Foucault on “Govermentality”:

“Overhauling the problem of the state is one which is paradoxical because apparently
reductionist: it is a form of analysis that consists in reducing the state to a certain
number of functions, such as the development of productive forces of the reproduction
of relations of production, and yet the reductionist vision of the relative importance of the
state’s role nevertheless invariably renders it absolutely essential as a target needing to
be attacked and privileged position needing to be occupied. But the state, no more
probably than at any other time in its history, does not have this unity, this individuality,
this rigorous functionality, not to speak frankly, this importance: may be after all the state
is no more than a composite reality and a mythicised abstraction, whose importance is a
lot more limited than many of us think

.”

36

So when Kashi Ram established this party, led by the

oppressed, he made his priority clear: working for “revolutionary
social and economic transformation”. Besides allowing all the
changes, working in consensus with the constitutional
prerequisites, the party needs to show its demands for an equal
and just distribution to those who do not have the platform to raise
their voice. Thus the objectives would be:

1. The Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes, the other Backward Castes, and the
minorities, are the most oppressed and exploited people in India. Keeping in mind
their large numbers, such a set of people in India is known as the Bahujan Samaj.
The Party shall organise these masses.

The party shall work for these down trodden masses to–
a. to remove their backwardness;
b. to fight against their oppression and exploitation;

c. to improve their status in society and public life;
d. to improve their living conditions in day to day life;

2. The social structure of India is based on inequalities created by caste system and the
movement of the Party shall be geared towards changing the social system and rebuild it on the
basis of equality and human values. All those who join the party with the commitment to co-
operate in this movement of social change shall be ingratiated into the fold of the Party.

Towards the furtherance of the above noted aims and objectives the organisational units of Party

as designated in this constitution, shall be empowered to:-

1. Purchase, take on lease or otherwise acquire, and maintain moveable or immovable property

for the Party and invest and deal with monies of Party in such a manner as may from time to time

be determined;

2. Raise money with or without security for carrying out any of the aims and objectives of the
Party;

3. To do all other lawful things and acts as are incidental or conducive to the attainment of any

of the aforesaid aims and objectives,

Provided that none of these activities will be undertaken without the express approval of the

National President.

37

Today, after 25 years of its foundation, what has it
achieved? This Bahujan Samaj party is now the ruling power in a
state which has the credit of being the most populous in India.
The Mayawati government has defeated the most prolific vote
bank-Yadavs in Uttar Pradesh- Samajwadi party led by Mulayam
Singh Yadav. The rise to power by the subaltern in a state which
had the privilege of supporting and being backed up strongly by
the NDA govt. that was in power that time shows the tenacity of
resistance and fragility of State maintenance that was discussed
earlier. Recently, when the Third Front

38

is throwing a strong

challenge on the two major Alliances in our country, everyone’s
(be it A.B. Bardhan’s or Chandrashekhar’s or Naidu’s) focus
remains whether this imminent threat to State joins the Front.
After scores of strategic discussion, Mayawati decides to contest

the election for Prime Ministerial position singularly, denying any
possibility of state-wise co-operation:

“If I could be chief minister of Uttar Pradesh four times, I could well be the Prime Minister of
the country.... Why can’t I be? Who will deprive me of the top post?” she told a rally organised
by her Bahujan Samaj Party in Lucknow to let her supporters hear from her mouth how
“casteist” forces had stopped a Dalit from heading the country…The chief minister ruled out any
tie-up with Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal. “My party will contest 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh,
which means Ajit is out, there is no pact with him.”

39

These confident words clearly illuminate on two things:
first, paradoxical though, India has a majority of minority groups;
second, the “organization” gives minority a voice or a platform to
talk with the State apparatuses and come to a compromise.
Grabbing power, following Ambedkar’s talk, is the main flank on
which the schizophrenia comes to a definiteness. It is not to say
that the Bahujan Party does not have internal systems of
hierarchy or difference. But their voice can only be heard through
the gamut of any monolithic organ, parallel with the State devices
of power. If there are “differences” only, then there is a risk of
generating different micro-political bodies, which may disturb the
functionality of State monopoly, but cannot unsettle on battles of
justice and need.

Now, one may question that the strong association with
the textual details by the Collective is reflective of the scarcity of
evidences. The abundance of electronic media was a far away
thing then. And media’s role in restoring data or giving the
subaltern a voice in front of State machinery of threat is
undeniable. If it is so, then should we think that the post-
Independent subaltern, whose existence is somewhere secured
by the electronic media, is a different study of power, able enough
to retain dialogue with the State via this? Do we need a different
discourse or outlook to understand that? Is the Collective’s
methods enclosed, limited, and temporally locked?

But, once again this is not a putative case for granted.
There are many cases we don’t know, many places where the
restoration of data tells another story. Still, no one can deny that
the existence of the subaltern or any question of it comes out the
moment one is diagnosed by the social system as subaltern. In
Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, the village had a strong consciousness of
caste pollution, and thus going to the Pariah quarters was a
matter of Excommunication.

40

Bhatta knew about it, but if one

reads minutely, one understands that he also accumulated money
mainly using and then buying lands from the pariahs. Thus, the
bourgeoisie tendency of economic production and territorial
occupation has to be covered by this cultural difference. It is a
form of threat to disallow any efforts of uprising in the name of
religion and caste, the two most sensitive factors to human
understanding. And the movement against the govt. was not
driven by any religious or cultural belief, but by the strong hatred
the subaltern had to face from the upper caste hegemony. The
collective memory of Gandhiji and other significant moments of
protest against the “gora” were but a course towards meeting with
the ethics of Murthy-a symbol of socioeconomic equality.

This story of caste consciousness takes us to another
example-the protest against Reservation. In 2006, India saw a
nationwide protest against the HRD ministry’s call for the
introduction of 27% reservation for the OBC people in centrally
funded universities, including IIMs, IITs or others. This call made
the whole of India protest. Now, whether that takes to the question
of more reservation in percentage (14% SC, 7% ST, 5% VC or
Sports along with this 27% makes it a 53% of reservation) than
general candidates, or India officially awarded to be a socially
backward country, or debacle of international prestige when
waving flags of “Shining India”, or an underlying demand for
international sympathy, is another story. What effected from it is a
new side of State exercise of power, when the State itself is
collaborating with the subaltern. And the recent news of officially

applying it in many universities proves the factor. Now, the
question is: who is subaltern here? Who dons the garb of
minority? What form of power politics arrives when the State gives
the subaltern a platform of power? And lastly, does not the official
denial of the majority and vested interest and application of that
for the minority prove that subaltern is but a conditional product
created and organized by the State?

If it is so, what about the 2008 Gujjar violence in
Rajasthan, when streets of Rajasthan saw carnage and blood on
the demand for ST status for the Gujjars

41

? Ultimately, the State

had to comply, and so had it in Nandigram or Singur. A subaltern
power, delimited for long, suddenly fires up and jumps in the
street warring with the State is a suggestion how well the State
manipulates them in a shrouded unconsciousness, and once
again the agenda of subaltern being a condition issued from State
hegemony. Reading from the other side, it is a power that can
overthrow that State machinery, and whose organized
mobilization reflects factors of need and grouping. How could we
know anything about Nandigram or Singur if the State Opposition
would not associate, campaign and plea for it? Thus, any
acquisition of knowledge is but a process of organized bodies of
power. Difference leads to the destabilization of it.

For the different existential positions of the subaltern in
dialogue with the state, let us consider another case that Nile
Green recorded in his essay “Tribes, Diaspora, and Sainthood in
Afghan History”. The essay points out how the different political
and social problems made inroads for consistent tribal diasporas
in Afghanistan, and how the Sufism became a collective notation
for the dispersal of tribe to a new order of sainthood memory. He
examines a book called Tarikh-e-khan Jahani, and restores a
counterclaim, which he feels, parallel to “The Interesting Narrative
of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”:

“What we see in Tarikh-e-khan-Jahani is a coalescing of Sufi and tribal terminology,
exploiting the semantic range of the term tayifa to blur the boundaries between Islam
and kinship as defined by a saint’s “tribe” and “Sufi order”.

42

Thus, this is an interesting case where the meta-
narrative of Islam is not challenged or threatened, but associated
with images of kinship and a possibility of restoring a higher divine
order. The dispersed Afghans, Liasa Malkki informs us, were
taken as “outside people” (berieo roye) or “strangers” (nagoni)
and associated with criminality when they hade to move towards
the north-western frontiers of Pakistan. It was later that their
cultural creativity caught attention, and so was the tribe, whose
Pashtu poets created soon a heart of religious sympathy and
Islamic restoration.

43

Thus, this interrelation gave space for a

“transnational realm where vernacular identities existed alongside
a more expansive set of Persianate values, sometimes unifying
and at other times divisive bonds of religion-somehow
hegemonised by state”.

44

One needs to understand that refugee

status is a conditional entity not in opposition with the State, but
seeking for an alliance or help from the State. These tribal
Afghans, who had an edge of existence earlier, enjoyed
collaboration via the religious sanctimonies. The Sufi men
became both brokers of power and culture

45

. But though the

relative importance of the tribes steered towards a gaze of
indifference or acceptance from the State, their collective status
or prestige, let alone a respectable identity, did not change. Najif
Shahrani shows how most of the anthropological researches in
Pakistan focus on “displaced persons living in camps”

46

.

Nonetheless, there was a steady assimilation going on with the
natives, a form that we often get in the societies, where white men
colonized or settled, though unlike the element of caste ignorance
of the white men. The picture seemed to be positive. But therein
lies the problem. Whereas stories of saint elevated the tribal
prestige and codes of acceptance from the State, and gave them
a “social expediency”

47

, the transregional ways of being Muslim

pointed to the significance of “identifications, hybrid identities,
diasporic existences, minorities, and marginal communities”

48

.

The different social and moral formations have not given these
tribals any edge over the basic needs, which also have been in
threats recently for the Taliban troops marshaling their power
making in the name of “internal divisions” and “external
rivalries”

49

. This is a different case study, as the subaltern has to

undergo a double-edged razor of identity. And what is interesting
is the paradoxical prestige it holds. While on the one hand, the
Sufism has given them a transnational prestige by absorbing the
politics of inter-mixing rather than challenging or including, the
socio-political identity of these people are in danger as they are
denominated as “deterritorialized Muslim identity” or a socially
culpable attribute-“radicalization of frontier Muslim”

50

. Thus, they

have retained the position of being a subaltern while they face the
state, but the religiosity demands a different name. Lastly, one
thing should be noted: in an article Muzaffir Alam informs us that
these tribals may have suffered complex “smooth over” but their
existence is threatened and balanced by their great religious
arrangements that have created “hierarchies of Culture”, which is
a sign of social expediency talked about earlier.

51

That was definitely a new look on the subaltern position
as it had antithetical examination of its state, where its
“statements” are crippled by a prestigious religious heritage while
attacked by a deterritorialized existence. But what if this
radicalized, fragmented tribal identity stands tall against the State
and war in the name of religion? Think of the Case of the Taliban.
A minority moves on in the name of Islamic law, creates zones of
brutalized terror and extreme gender discrimination, and occupies
territories of a national space. The war they refer to is that of
transnational space against not only the Americanization of life,
but the minimum retention of indepence is on debate as well. How
would one define this? A small group of oppressed power starts
fighting against the republicanization of administration in the

State, and the State feels completely puzzled in warring against it.
Even the European super-powers have been slow in tackling this
terror, let alone Bush’s the “War on Terror” which serialized
horrible results. The last news captures the Taliban’s occupation
of Swat valley, Buner and other districts of Pakistan and
application of Shariyat law there, just 100 km away from
Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, which is the next threat.

52

Now,

what process of evolution makes a subaltern power a power
stronger than the State? With the amount of support and provision
of ammunition the Taliban people are obtaining from multiple
states (take the 26/11 case in Mumbai for example), can one say
this power subaltern any more? What happens if a dominated
category challenges the state when its being dominated is
challenged by its vaunted display of power through terror? The
Gujjars can be called subaltern still because they have been
again manipulated by the State, because its territorial identity
remains within the state. But what if the threat is an external
power, supported by latent State powers, owing to its national
religious orientation? What if the subaltern does not have to think
about losing any territory as its is safe and secure? Can we
attribute it as dominated anymore? If not, what would be the
position of the State that undergoes pressure, submission,
change, restoration of prestige and international intervention?
Does it remind us of the Fragments? But on the other side
though! Isn’t it?

III

Examples galore, and so does the rapid synchronic
evolution of this term. But one thing becomes sure that the
existence called subaltern is a condition created and suffered by
the State itself. With the quickly increasing network of terror and
violence the State has been either a prompter of intolerable
violence (the Gujarat riot in 2002) or an organ of compromise (the
Singur case). The Subaltern studies collective has tried to prove
how the Santal, for example, becomes the agent of the rebellion

53

.

Do we, amidst all the sufficiency of internet and TV, have to work
so hard to find out who the agent is, or how it has been led to?
Isn’t the subaltern a process of power conditioned and executed
to application by media and the State? The recent news of West
Bengal tells the resistance of a minority group in Lalgarh,
attributed as Maoists, against any electoral process if the State
sends its repressive apparatus (the police force) there

54

. The

state, prior to the election, did not think of any damage of its
image, already in trouble for some alleged carnage in places for
forcible extortion of land and industrialization. The small minority
group resisted with such power that only 15% voting could be
possible in one of the most prolific centres for State voting. Isn’t it
then a condition organized, executed and manipulated by State
for its benefit, until miscalculation does not uncover the truth?
This comment can be attested by a condition recorded by
Byeong-Gwon Goh in his study of Korean mass. Goh points out
that in Korea migrant workers, who constitute a considerable
amount of the mass, “become automatically illegal”. While
exploring various meanings of the word “margin”, from periphery
to profit to blank space, the author finds the mass as an
“extraterritorial space”, staying to sacrifice themselves, “parts
excluded from the whole”

55

. Expelled to a limited area of

economic and social exploitation, the masses desperately cling to
the State and capital in order to survive, and the state and “capital
profit from their tears”

56

.

In a country like India which recently finds itself in a rapid
economic growth and, and simultaneously, quite paradoxically
though, the unchanging steady downfall of social structure owing
to its heritage of caste and class consciousness, any steady
indomitable movement from the subaltern is brief, enclosed and of
dire consequence for them. In an essay, Maya Kalyanpur finds
the most disastrous difficulty India has that constructs the
“Difference of Identity” in this democratic country:

“First, historically disadvantaged communities, such as the poor, children in rural areas,
and girls, form the numerical majority. Yet, the systematic exclusion of these majority
groups from the educational services has contributed to an inequitable
underrepresentation. Second, the question of equity of access is not so much about
quality, or whether the general or special education system is inferior, but at a more
basic level about quantity, or whether there are sufficient numbers of school to serve the
school-age population.”

57

Consider the Asian Development Bank report:

“India still (needs) to fulfill its foremost obligation of making investments in critical
infrastuctures such as rural electrification, the development of irrigation and water
management systems, state highways, district and rural roads and social sectors such
as education and health.”

58

(p.6)

Is there any sector of importance left? If a country suffers from
such a, to use Walter Benjamin’s phrase, “state of emergency”,
the making of the subaltern and its confrontation with the State
does not reflect cultural segregation, but a pressing
socioeconomic need. The confronted politics is only a part of it.
The condition of being a subaltern and confronting the state
where it issues from, is another of the multiplicity of voices that
ultimately lead to nowhere, let alone the shattering of the State
construction. Througfhout the essay, the exploration has been to
experience different positions of the term subaltern, its existence
being a condition, its succesgul resistance being a network of
external support, and its retention of identity maintained by the
State. Lastly, the exploration leads us to declare that its scope, as
the Collective over-emphasizingly justifies, is definitely a case of
domination and subordination, but not in such clear palimpsests.

The multiple layers of its formation, the multi-dimensional
conditions of its performance, and the schizophrenic existence of
the dilemma of functionality in theoretical remarks make it a
complex study of “battered voices”, able to arouse “hermeneutical
suspicion”. It is not to say that the subaltern cannot equal the
State power or even, as Marxists predict, seize it (consider the
case of the Talibanism). But in a country like India where the
people are kept unaware of these issues due to a large rate of
nationwide illeteracy and a strong class division, a subaltern
agency in power is a temporary factor, the Bahujan Samaj Party is
a case study of inspiring future for the Subaltern

Studying all these change of power consequence and hope for
subaltern alternatives, the essays wants to sum up with its core
question: does the subaltern remain subaltern anymore when it
equals the State supremacy? What happens when the voice of
resistance take the medium of an organic State device, that is
party, and then confront the State? Does this confronted politics
retain the subalternity anymore? If it becomes a major power,
does not the term subaltern once again advocate for its
conditional or enclosed being?

This is a question to brood over. But the philosophizing of
an entity does not attribute or help to attribute agency to it. Being
subaltern is to remain in the binary opposition forever, and any
change is the cause of resistance. Rudolph. C. Heredia writes :

“Though the mainstream , hegemonic perspectives and ideologioes may have the
political capacity to assert dominance, they have neither the cultural credibility nor the
moral legitimacy to impose it on subaltern of diverse castes, religion and ethnic groups
for any prolonged period of time

.”

59

Thus, it demands a deep understanding of its multiple layers and
different production of meanings in different cases. In this
pressing time, when the State is showing its ample vulnerability to
various separatist groups, once again a study of changing

subaltern terrorizing to Power and displaying a confronted politics
with the State, the agency is a puzzling word:

“Agency is difficult to assign when fear and terror are made indistinguishable with
culture. But linking terror with culture not only begs questions of agency. It also conceals
the cultural resources that are drawn upon to respond to atrocities

.”

60

To end it, the “cultures of terror” in South Asia has
jettisoned us the question of the subaltern agency, its orientation,
relation with the State, ethical distances, and maneouvring of the
state device through power and violence. Thus, the essay does
not deny or seek to demean the importance of the Collective in
restoring the “blank spaces” of the subaltern existence and
agency, but considering the quick changes of the notion of power,
agency and subjecthood, it tries to throw the question that the
concept of agency has shown great transformation, as these
“invisible histories of movement”

61

seem to deviate from the model

devised by the Collective. The histeriography of the subaltern
agency, with the assistance of media, moves towards a politics of
engaging study of pluralism, better to be termed as “eclectic
methodology.”

62

Any writing of history on this should never

overlook its polysemic socioeconomic base, international
investment, and multidimensional methods of confrontation and
subsistence-to take from Bhabha, its hybrid position of practice
and negotiation

63

. The old narrative, losing relevance here, thus,

calls for a re-vision.

WORKS USED:

1.

This is the orientational term that defines the entire project of Subaltern Studies
Group. Ranajit Guha initiated it. For more understanding, see Ranajit Guha,
‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, Subaltern Studies II (Delhi, 1983).

2.

Meta-narratives are the projection of totalitarian, authoritative exemplars of
ethics , rules and regulation,i.e., Christianity, Enlightenment, etc. They purport
to explain and reassure the smothering of difference, opposition, and plurality.
But they are no longer tenable, and we can hope for a series of “local”
narratives or “mininarratives”, which Peter Barry says “provisional, contingent,
temporary, and relative”. For fuller discussion, see Jean-Francois Lyotard’s
essay, ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, The Postmodern
Condition: A report on Knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1979).

3.

Edward Thompson, The Other Side of the Medal (New York: Harcourt, Brace, &
Co., 1926), 27-28

4.

Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of Historiography in Colonial India’, Subaltern
Studies I, 1982

5.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Marx After marxism: A Subaltern Historian’s Perspective’,
Economic and Political Weekly, May 29, 1993

6.

Vinay Bahl, ‘Relevance (or Irrelevance) of Subaltern Studies’, Economic and
Political Weekly, 32 (June 13, 1997): 1333-1344

7. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ibid.

8.

Gyan Prakash, ‘Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism’, The American
Historical Review, 99 (Dec 1994): 1475-1490

9.

Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories (Princeton and New Delhi, 1993-94). The talk on ‘agency’ appears on
page 34.

10.Ramachandra Guha, ‘Subaltern and Bhadralok Studies’, Economic and Political

Weekly, 30 ( Aug. 19, 1995): 2056-2058

11. This is a concept derived from the social theorist Hans Medick.

12.

For fuller understanding of the caste hierarchy bin India, see A. Bateille, The
Backward Classes in Contemporary India, New Delhi, Oxford University press,
1992

13.

Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebook, International
Publishers, New York, 1971. These lines are cited in ‘Gramci’s concept of
Common Sense: Towards a Theory of Subaltern Conscousness in Hegemony
Processes’, Arun. K. Patnaik, Economic and Political Weekly, 23, (Jan. 30
1988): 2-10

14.

Chantal Mouffe, ‘Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci’, essayed in Gramsci and
Marxist Theory, RKp, london, 1979

15.

David Fernbach, Karl Marx: Survey from Exile, Vol.II, Penguin Books, London,
1981

16.

Partha Chatterjee, ‘Of Gramsci’s ‘Fundamental Mistake’’, Econimic and Political
Weelky, 23, (Jan. 30, 1988): 24-26

17.

Dopesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Difference- Differal of (A) Colonial Modernity: Public
Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal’, History Workshop, 36, Colonial and
Postcolonial Weekly (autumn. 1994): 1-34

18.

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Imoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, Minneapolis,
1991, p.31

19.For this term I am indebted to Walter Benjamin.

20.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcolonialism,
and Value’ in Lietrary Theory Today, Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan eds.,
London, 1990

21.Gyan Prakash, Ibid

22.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities; Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso, 1983

23.

Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and The Colonial World: A Derivative
Discourse?, London, 1986

24.

Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Nation and Its Peasants’ in The Nation and Its
Fragments

25.

Gail Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahmin
Movement in Western India, 1873-1930, Mumbai, Scientific and Socialist Trust,
1976

26.

Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Itsa Implications,
London, Granada, 1972

27.

Nirmal Kumar Bose, The Structure of Hindu Society, (revised edn.), New Delhi,
Orient Longman, 1994

28.

Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of
Resistance in Colonial South Asia’, Modern Asia Studies, 22 (1988), 189-224

29.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol.I: An Introduction, (trans. Robert
Harley), Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978

30.

J. Scot, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven
and London, Yale University Press, 1990

31.

H. Dreyfus and P. Robinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics, Harvester, Brighton, 1982

32.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality

33.

Courtsey to

http://bspindia.org

34.Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi; volume 85: page 102

35.Dhananjay Keer, Dr. Ambedkar: Life and Mission, 1962, page. 429

36.

Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in G.Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller
(eds.), The Foucault Effects: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, pp.85-103

37.

Courtsey to

http://bspindia.org

38.

For at length understanding, see,

http://www.pragoti.org/node/3366

39.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080810/jsp/nation/story_9672205.jsp

40.

Raja Rao, Kanthapura, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1974

41.

Courtesy to news.in.msn.com/national/article.aspx?cp-documentid=1414225

42.

Nile Green, ‘Tribe, Diaspora and Sainthood in Afghan History ’, The Journal of
Asian Studies, 67 (Feb. 2008): 171-211

43.

Liasa. H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology
in Hutu Refugees in Tanzania, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1995

44.

Kamran Asdar Ali, ‘Courtesans in the Living Room’, Institutes for thr Study of
Islam in the cMuslim World Review, 15 (2005): 32-33

45.

Neil Mchugh, Holymen of the Blue Nile: The Making of an Arab-Islamic
Community in the Nilotic Sudan 1500-1850, Evanston, Ill, Norwestern University
Press, 1994

46.

Najif.M. Shahrani, ‘politics of Mistrust and Distrust of Politics’ in Mistrusting
Refugees, E. Valentine Daniel and John Chr. Knudsen, Berkley and Los
Angeles, University of California Press, 1995, pp. 187-206

47.

Hafiz Rahmat Khan, The Summary of Geneology, Bodelian Library Ms, Onseley,
172

48.

Yael Navaro-Yasin, Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey,
Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2002

49.

Engseng Ho, ‘Names Beyond Nations: The Making of Local Cosmopolitans’,
Etudes rurales, 63-64 (2002): 215-232

50.

Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, London, I. B, Tauris, 2002

51.

Mujaffir alam and Sanjay Subhramanyam, ‘Comparative Studies of South Asia’,
Africa and the Middle East, 24 (2003): 61-72

52.

www.csmonitor.com/2009/0409/p99s01-duts.htm

53.

This Santal Rebellion in India against the British Govt. in 1855 was the
itroductory specimen for research and methodology for the establishment of
Subaltern Studies. Ranajit Guha makes the prose of Counter-Insurgency on The
basis of his analysis of this movement, where he tries to restore the subaltern
agency amidst concealing metanarratives of colonialist or bourgeoisie writings.
See his Prose for the ways and neans of methodology. Interestingly, his disciple
Dipesh Chakrabarty shows how Guha inserted marxist analogies without
recognition. Chakrabarty writes, “Guha’s position with respect to the santal’s

own understanding of the event becomes a combination of the anthropoligist’s
politeness and a marxist’s tendency to see ‘religion” in modern public liofe as a
form of alienated or displeced consciousness.” (Minority Histories and Subaltern
Pasts, in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought nad Historical Difference,
Princeton University Press, 2000)

54.

For a detailed description of this movement and the state manipulatiion, see the
updated version:

http://sanhati.com/excerpted/1336/

55.

Byeong-gwon Goh, ‘marginalization v/s Minoritization: Expulsion by the State
and Fight of the Masses’, Postcolonial Studies, 11 (March. 2008): 85-98

56.

Chris Wilbert, ‘Profit, Plague, and Poultry’, Radical Philosophy, Sept.- Oct., 2006

http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_id=22
192

57.

Maya Kalyanpur, ‘The Paradox of Majority Underrepresentation in Special
Education in India: Constructions of Difference in a Developing Country’, The
Journal of Special Education, 42, (Feb. 2008): 55-64

58.

Asian Development Bank, Identifying disability issues related to poverty
reduction: India country study, Manila, philippines: Author, 2002

59.

Rudolf. C. Heradia, Subaltern Alternatives on Caste, Class and Ethnicities,
Contribution to Indian Sociology, 34 (2000): 39-62

60.

Jane. A. Margold, ‘From “Cultures of Fear and Terror” to the Normalization of
Violence: An aethnographic review’, Critique of Anthropology, 19 (1999): 63-88

61.

This term is introduced by Vinay Kidwani and K. Shivaramakrishnan, ‘Circular
Migration and Rural Cosmopolitanism’, Contribution to Indian Sociology, 37
(2003): 339-367

62.

Patrick Chabal, Culture Troubles: Politics and Interpretation of Meaning,
Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006.

63.

Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London, 1994, 22-26

Sourit Bhattacharya