The term Subaltern as an allusion to the works of Antonio Gramsci, a renowned Marxist who is more popularly known for his Prison Notebooks, refers to any person or group of inferior rank whether because of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity or religion. Gramsci used the term to question the received Marxist emphasis on the urban proletariat and economy arguing that the questions of culture and consciousness needed to taken seriously. Influenced by the works of Foucault, subalterns pursue a consistent interest in staging the violence and narrativising the construction of crime; moreover, using the tools of narratology, the new historiography has given attention to plot, character, authority, language, voice and in reconstructing on the basis of fragment available to him, a family ‘tragedy’ and ‘death’ out of what had been archived as ‘crime’ and ‘murder’. Drawing on the structuralist narratology, Barthesian semiology and Foucauldian discourse ananlysis, some early subaltern works interrogated the rhetorical and linguistic strategies employed by those in power, such as Ranajit Guha’s The Prose of Counter Insurgency.
Veering between the defensive and corrective, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Subaltern Studies: Deconsctructing Historiography makes the basic premise for subalterns:
- Subaltern studies breaks out of the standard Marxist modes of productive narrative changing the plot under the rubric of conflation and hence not of transition.
- Subaltern historians perceive their task as making a theory of consciousness.
- Their works show that society, like a text, is a continuous sign-chain and the very consciousness is a part of that semiotic chain.
Spivak cites the example of ‘sati burning’ in Can the Subaltern Speak? where we see, whereas British and the Hindu leaders give their account of representation, the women performing the very act of so called ‘ritual’ were never heard from; hence, the subaltern cannot speak and the larger problem of gender imparity was not articulated either by British or patriarchy. It seems clear that ideology is at play and subaltern position is effectively silenced and thereby the subaltern is yet to get the voice without being supplanted.
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Post Contributed By:
Soumyadip Ghosh
Indian Institute of Legal Studies
