Can The Subaltern Speak Analysis

Through ages, the patriarchal society has always referred to the woman as the weaker sex, the fairer sex, or the second sex. Simone de Beauvoir in the ‘Introduction’ to The Second Sex says, “…she is simply what men decree;… she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential.” (Beauvoir 16) In the Indian context, women as gendered subalterns have a very limited role to play within the society. They are mere objects of desire to men. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, originally published in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg's Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988) says, “As object of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps
Her grandmother worked as a servant with one such family where the Naicker woman used to give her leftover stale food from the previous day to eat. On being asked by Bama that she should not support such behavior, her grandmother replied: “These people are the mahajans who feed us our rice. Without them, how will we survive? haven’t they been upper-caste from generation to generation, haven’t we bear lower-caste? Can we change this?” (Karukku 14). Her grandmother used to consider the left-over rice and curry from the Naicker house as “nectar of the gods” (Karukku
She recounts an incident of her life when she was eleven years old. During that time, there were continuous skirmishes between Paraya and the Chaaliyar community. The police supported the Chaaliyar community and most of the males of Paraya community were arrested, while the rest disappeared into the mountain jungle. The police behaved deplorably towards the women of the Paraya community. They used obscene language and swore at them, told them that since their husbands were away they should entertain the police at night, winked at them and shoved their guns against their bodies. The women in Bama’s Karukku though marginalized, they have the courage to bounce back, to live and to earn their livelihood without the support of the males. The police authorities became furious when they found that the women were smart enough to continue working and taking care of their children even without the men, and so they rounded up all the women workers, forced them into their lorries and dropped them off on the other side in the village. Bama says that rules of the village ensured that none of the women from the community went to the cinema. She also cites the reason, “This was because the boys of the other communities who would pull our women about if they were seen in the cinema hall” (Karukku 58). This instance reveals the