Subaltern Studies

The Difficult Task of Investigating Subalternity

Since their establishment in the 1980s, the intellectual purpose of the Subaltern Studies Group has been to ‘write history from below’: They have been critical of mainstream historiography (e.g. colonial, nationalist, Marxist), which they say has tended to represent history from the point of view of the colonizers or social and economic elites, thus discounting the agency of colonized and subaltern groups (e.g. subsistence farmers, informal-sector workers, indigenous communities, marginalized women, slum dwellers and racialized minorities). Their aim, therefore, has been to try to rectify what they see as the elitist bias of much academic research.

In the early writings of the group, edited by the historian Guha, the tendency was to valorize subaltern agency by trying to represent it as independent and autonomous of elite politics. But this task proved increasingly difficult. Partly, it was a conceptual problem, since by definition subalternity meant subordination to a dominant power, implying the impossibility of autonomy. Partly, it was an evidentiary problem, as documents written by subaltern groups (e.g. worker diaries, peasant testimonials) during colonial times proved difficult, if not impossible, to find. And partly, it was a political problem, with the discovery that so many subaltern acts of rebellion against the colonizer had failed. Many members of the group thus came to the realization that not only were subaltern attempts at political change often temporary and unsuccessful but the very project of investigating independent subaltern agency was doomed; far from ignoring or discounting elite powers, the project of retrieving the subaltern ‘voice’ could in fact only happen in relation to the dominant.

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