The Subaltern: Do they still exist in our midst? by Iwasepeletu Adenike

Introduction

The term ‘subaltern’ was first used in the civil sense by Gramsci Antonio in his work on cultural hegemony that identified groups of people excluded from society's established institutions who were denied a voice in their society. The term in the Marxian theory depicting someone with a low ranking in a socio-political hierarchy, often times representing the oppressed and/or marginalized sect within a society. It was coined from the Latin words ‘sub’ meaning ‘below’ and/or ‘beneath’ and ‘alternus’ signifying ‘all others’.

Subaltern could also mean a derogatory word describing someone of a low rank in the military or class in a caste system. They are mostly people occupying an entry level or a lower rung position within the corporate ladder. Also it could be used to define someone who has no economic and/or political power such as a poor person living under a dictatorship (of sorts).

A case in point, the islands that fell under Danish rule in the 14th Century BC became self governing in 1948 but the relationship between the two countries remains that of a resentful subaltern state and a condescending colonial power till date.

Symbolically, we might say that the colonizer is the ‘self’ while the colonized is the ‘other’ and all those who are invisible to both the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ are the subaltern who has no voice. Gayatri Spivak is the most theoretical voice on ‘the subaltern’ and her work is still the root text for a discussion of the subaltern. In her article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” the answer clearly is No because the instance the subaltern has a voice, they are technically no longer the subaltern, they merely become ‘altern’ so to speak the ‘other’.

Subaltern History

The South Asian history of colonialism told from the perspective of those who are not a part of the economic and/or political elite, in other words a non-white and a non-eurocentric historical narrative of colonialism is subaltern history. This overlaps into post-colonial and post-imperial studies, once again from the standpoint of the colonised. Marxist theory has its own interpretation of this concept. Therefore the concept of subaltern history is to lend voice to the colonised and the disenfranchised of the colonial era.

Usually the subaltern comprises of peasants, workers and other minority groups denied access to hegemony. Since the beginning of history, the ruling class has always been realized in the state, a country’s history being the history of states and dominant groups. This agelong fact struck a cord in Gramsci thus prompting his keen and avid interest in the historiography of the subaltern groups.

In his “Notes on Italian history”, Gramsci documented a six point plan for studying the history of any subaltern group, the first being their objective formation, then their active or passive affiliation to the dominant political formations, the birth of new parties and dominant groups, the formations that the subaltern groups produce to press their claims, new formations within the old framework that assert the autonomy of the subaltern groups and other points referring to trade unions and political parties.

According to Gramsci, the history of the subaltern groups was just as complex as the history of the dominant classes though the history of the latter is usually that which is accepted as the original and official history. He believed the history of these subaltern groups were necessarily episodic and fragmented since they were always subject to the activity of ruling groups even when they tried to rebel against the dominant groups.

This was largely due to the obvious fact that they had less access to the means by which they could control their own representation and even worse was that they had lesser access to socio-cultural institutions. Their only source cum avenue of permanent victory usually by a revolutionary class adjustment to break the pattern of subordination naturally did not occur easily and/or immediately.

The Subaltern Studies

Most recently, the term was adapted for postcolonial studies, largely from the works of the subaltern studies group of historians whose primary aim was to promote a systematic discussion of subaltern themes in South Asian Studies. The term was used in this studies “as a name for the general attribute of subordination in South Asian Society whether expressed in terms of age, class, caste, gender and/or office”1

The six man Subaltern Studies Group formed by Ranajit Guha had as its initial members David Arnold, Shahid Amin, Partha Chatterjee, David Hardiman and Gyan Pandey and have produced all in all five volumes of Subaltern Studies namely essays relating to the history, politics, sociology and economics of subalternity as well as the attitudes, ideologies and belief systems of the culture informing this conditions.

The purpose of the Subaltern Studies project was to redress the imbalance created in academic work which had a tendency to focus on the elites and their elitist culture in South Asian historiography. These group of men realised that subordination could not be understood except in a binary relationship with dominance therefore the group aimed to examine the subaltern “as an objective assessment of the role of the elite and as a critique of elitist interpretations of that role.”2

The goals of the group stemmed from the belief that the historiography of Indian nationalism had long been dominated by colonialist elitism and bourgeois nationalist elitism, both of which were consequences of British colonialism. Such historiography suggested that the development of a nationalist consciousness was an exclusive elitist achievement either of colonial administrators, or by policy or culture or through elite Indian ideas, personalities and institutions.

Guha claims therefore that such writings could not possibly interpret or acknowledge the contribution made by these people on their own independent of the elite class. What is clearly left out in the class outlook of such historiography is a ‘politics of the people’ which he maintains is an autonomous domain that continued to operate when the elite politics became outmoded.

A Classical Case of the Subaltern

From a theoretical insight, a subset of post colonial studies, the Subaltern Studies Group attempted to find the trace of the subaltern in Indian history. A case example would be Dipesh Chakrabarty’s description of the lives of the Indian rural masses. He argues that within the notion of the modern Indian state, citizenship requires certain subject positions that many rural, illiterate Indians do not have. What is often taken for granted in any idea of the citizen is a number of things including the positivist understanding of history.

Chakrabarty argues that for the Indian peasant their historical conception is so different that they cannot infact be considered citizens of India. Their worldviews are so different that they are secluded cum excluded by the state apparatus. Other examples of the subaltern are the minority indigenous groups, lower caste, and/or lower class women who are marginalized in such a way as to not have a voice.

By the turn of the 19th century, the British ‘Self’ and its colonial epistemes the ‘Other’ comprising the elite indigenous population collaborated to establish ‘Raj’ a construction of Hinduism’, together they forged a Hinduism that fit their needs. No matter how the British, French and German set the terms for their collaboration under the auspices of religion, fact remains the imperialist British got an ‘essentialized’ Hinduism that could fit within their intended categories namely colonial domination and romantic resistance to modernity at home.

The elitist Indians got to impose their Hinduism as the authentic Hinduism in India and then use it to attain status within the new colonized space of India, and to fight for their colonization within this new Hinduism. The resultant effect is the subaltern who were already voiceless become doubly marginalized, in other words they became ‘Othered’ by both the British and the indigenous elites.

 A renowned scholar Rey Chow made some interesting points about the construction of the subaltern and the category of the natives. She argues that part of the problem of attempting to find the voice of the subaltern is that there may be some incommensurability between the subaltern and the rescuer.

It may be the case that the very act of trying to recover the voice of the subaltern may be the same act used by the rescuer to translate an image that they can make sense of (perhaps to their own advantage) in the end taking attention from the subaltern to rest on themselves. In other words, the rescuer is the one who gains acknowledgement as opposed to the voiceless it was intended for in the first instance.

It is just as Rey Chow aptly describes it,

“As we challenge a dominant discourse by ‘resurrecting’ the victimized voice/self of the native within our readings… this process, in which we become visible, also neutralizes the untranslatability of the the native’s experience… the hasty supply of original ‘contexts’ and ‘specificities’ easily become complicitous with the dominant discourse.”

That is, our attempt to retrieve the native from its absence in our imperial histories can easily become a kind of co-optation or appropriation that becomes more about our own visibility than that of the native.

Of course, this is the problem with any claims to pin down authenticity. What makes a subaltern or native relevant/authentic? How do we really determine who a subaltern is and what they are saying, if there is a necessarily impenetrable distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’?

The subaltern cannot speak, not because there are not activities in which we can locate a subaltern mode of life/culture/subjectivity, but because, as is indicated by the critique of thought and articulation given to us by Western intellectuals…‘speaking’ itself belongs to an already well-defined structure and history of domination. As Spivak says in an interview: ‘If the subaltern can speak then, thank God, the subaltern is not a subaltern any more’

Much of what passes for thinking about the ‘Other’ and the subaltern is often just a reflection of one’s own imagination Chow argues, so in this light she maintains the attempt to find a subaltern history or the voice of the subaltern is in some ways a romantic trope.

Therefore she asserts that once one has located identifiable traces of the subaltern, what narrative is made of these fleeting and inimitable traces is actually a construction of our own desires. That we do this with the According to Chow, the concept of the ‘Other’ is a standard critique of Orientals and with the subaltern it is a double plight where you have even the marginalized often ‘orientaliz-ing’ the subalterns themselves. Chow describes it as a ‘funhouse mirrors of discursive entrapment.’

She says, politically we strive to order the ‘Other’ to match our construction of it,

Our fascination with the native, the oppressed, the savage and all such figures is therefore a desire to hold onto an unchanging certainty somewhere outside our own ‘fake’ experience. It is a desire for being ‘non-duped’, which is a not-too-innocent desire to seize control.

Spivak’s Notion of Subaltern

The concept of the subaltern moved to a more complex theoretical debate with the intervention of the Indian post-colonial feminist critic, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who was criticized for her groundbreaking essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by the Subaltern Studies Group when she disapproved in the first instance of Gramsci’s assertion of the autonomy of the subaltern groups. The complexity of Spivak’s outlook might be attributed to her skillful yet sometimes unclear implementation of the structuralist cum post-structuralist theories, particularly decontructionist strategies of reading in colonial and post-colonial spaces of inversion and divergence.

In her article, Spivak reconsidered the problems of subalternity within new historical developments as brought by the capitalistic politics of undermining the revolutionary voice of the less priviledged and the idea of divisions of labor in a globalized society. Her justification for the rejection of the Gramscian view on the autonomy of the subaltern is based on her view that this autonomy results in the subaltern subjective identity and the homogeneity of the subaltern group at best. Spivak’s second criticism of the Subaltern Studies Group lies in her belief that no methodology, even the most ambitious Marxist one, can avoid a sort of ‘essentialism’ in its attempt to define who or what may constitute the subaltern group.

Spivak chooses therefore to adopt the notion of the subaltern essentiality because, ‘it is truly situational.’ The word subaltern used under duress has been transformed into the description of everything that does not fall under strict class analysis. This is so, because it has no theoretical rigor.7 Spivak faced with this difficulty of specifying the realm of subalternity shifts to reconsider the issues of the subaltern groups by dealing with the problems of gender particularly amongst Indian women during colonial times.

She reflected on the status of the Hindi woman situated in the lower caste of India, case in point, the analysis of the ‘sati women’ and their practices under the British colonial rule. These women Spivak argued were caught between two polarities, the first was the British humanist discourse calling for individual freedom of these ‘sati women’ and the Hindu native policy calling for voluntary participation in the ritual of death.

The conflict between these two positions produced two differing views with no possible solution where one postulates that the “white man is saving brown women from brown men,” while the second claims that “the woman actually wanted to die.”8 Here, it becomes clear that the Hindu woman loses their voice in such a contradictory position between two antagonistic poles that constantly teases her to make a conscious decision.

The ‘voice’ of the Hindi woman herself disappeared while these two discursive groups tried to give her a voice, the representation of these ‘sati women’ contributed immensely to a certain degree to the misappropriation of their own free will to decide and deprive themselves of their own subjectivity and a forum from which to speak from. In other words, the Hindu woman “disappeared not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the third world woman caught between tradition and modernization.”9

In the end, Spivak came to the somewhat ‘controversial’ conclusion that ‘the subaltern cannot speak.’ Her conclusion was interpreted as a declaration of the impossibility of the possible ‘voicing’ of the oppressed groups’ resistance because of their representations by other dominant forces as the same as a statement which affirmed the fact that the subaltern as a distinctly conscious subjectivity only possessed a dominant voice or a dominant language to be heard. From this stance, one may go further to assume that the whole discourse of post-colonial theory itself is to be considered as a speaking for the ‘voiceless and politically marginalized groups’ by their intellectual representatives.

Through her examination of the history of deprived women, Spivak managed to elaborate on the original demarcation of the notion of the subaltern as it was first developed by Guha and the Subaltern Group through her fundamental exploration of the struggles and experiences of women in general be it in the upper middle class or the peasantry and/or sub-proletariat class. Spivak stood for women as a differentiated gender because of the outrageous exclusion of their participation in anti-colonial history.

Spivak reiterates, ‘the question is not of female participation in insurgency or the ground rules of the sexual division of labor, for both of which there is evidence, rather both were used as a subject of insurgency and as object of colonialist historiography, though the ideological construction of gender still keeps the male dominant.’ Therefore, she asserts “if in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, then the subaltern female is even more deeply in shadow than her male counterpart.”10

Conclusion

According to Baudrillard’s terms of the ‘disappearance of the real and the death of originality’, during these postmodern times, the subaltern becomes defined in a more descriptive term according to a ‘particular marginalized subject position’ in any given socio-cultural context. People in more recent times, would willingly like to occupy the position of a subaltern whose silence is possibly voiced through the advocating representation of an intellectual.

Spivak hoped to give a voice to the silenced, but then again she argues this act of giving voice itself is the very ‘saviour’ attitude that the imperialists had. She reiterated that by trying to give voice to the oppressed we are actually taking away their ability to speak in the sense that their speech would be affected by the very presence of those trying to give them voice.

Spivak cautions therefore that the intellectuals should be wary of ‘romanticising’ the subalterns, in other words, she was affirming that the task of any intellectual is to pave way for the subaltern groups while letting them speak unhindered for themselves. Consequently, she warns in advance the subalterns from such a position of accepting the condition of a permanent subordination.

In recent times, it has become quite difficult for all the changes taking place in a globalized post-modern world to define the term subaltern or the subaltern group as a distinct entity or category. Pandey in an attempt to trace the developments which took place in the politics of the subaltern, points to a drastic movement in the demands of the marginalized groups from “the struggles for recognition as equals” to “the demand for a recognition of difference.”11

When the Subaltern Studies historians did empirical work on peasant resistance, they discovered that all factors were indicative of the fact that the peasants in India were greatly influenced to a large extent by their contemporary Western peasants as a result of the economic imperatives to the extent that the peasant positions become intermingled in different settings while moving between rural and urban and spaces.

When they engage in collective action, they are more or less acting on the same drives and the same aspirations as their Western counterparts, what separates them from the West are the cultural forms in which these aspirations are expressed however the aspirations themselves tend to be pretty consistent.

The difficulty to encompass the realm of subaltern studies is more evident with the post-modern twist which cherishes everything that counters the values of European enlightenment rationalism. It is probable perhaps that the subaltern may not exist anymore in post-modern capitalistic world where everything seems to move freely in that space of ‘mimicry, liminality and ambivalence’ as Bhabha declares in his book “The Location of Culture”.

Based on Bhabha’s postulation that any discursive system is inescapably fragmented in a realm of enunciation, it becomes unavailingly legitimate to rationalize that the colonialist text already carried the native voice of the subaltern through its imperialistic ambivalence. Perhaps, according to Bhabha, the subaltern may have already spoken in that sphere of gap which characterize any system of representation.