Subaltern Studies

The Subaltern in India The ground breaking text Orientalism written by Edward Said widened the arena for the post-colonial thinkers to consider the text with a new mechanism in Third World context. Orientalism has developed a purported approach of binary opposition to dismantling the East/West dualism in relation to Eurocentric edifice. The focal point of Said’s study is the ‘West’ and its observation of the ‘East’. The former having all positive traits: white, brave, dynamic, civilized, cultured, educated, rich of the ‘Empire’ identifies the ‘Eastern countries’ as the ‘Other’ with all the negative attributes: black, coward, static, barbaric, natural, uneducated poor people of the ‘Colony’-subjected to their contempt. The post –colonial intellectuals challenge the Eurocentric view by drawing the attention towards the ‘people’ of the ‘decolonized nation’ in which the ‘Other’ belonging to the elite or bourgeoisie sections of the society emerges as the neo-colonizers to exploit its other (the subaltern or other’s other) who are inferior to them in terms of caste, class, office and gender. Post- colonial India has taken a lead in probing the issue of subaltern in all the existent field of knowledge. It has promoted the interdisciplinary researches clubbing history, economics, politics, psychology and anthropology to re-read those dynamics of Indian civilization and history that caused and perpetuated the regime of an unequal society. Initially the term ‘subaltern’ was a military term used to refer to the officers under the rank of captain. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, in the Prison Notebooks used the term to refer to the unorganized groups of rural peasants based in Southern Italy, who had no social or political consciousness as a group and were therefore susceptible to the ruling ideas, culture and leadership of the state. (Morton 2007, p. 48) In its current usage drawn from Gramsci, Ranajit Guha with other Subaltern Historians have employed the term

Bibliography: Bahl, Vinay. Relevance or (Irrelevance)Of Subaltern Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, vol.32, Print.1997 Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Peasants, The Nation and Its Fragments. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Print.1994 Das, Veena. “Subaltern as Perspective” Subaltern Studies VI:Writing in South Asian History And Society, ed. Ranajit Guha New York Columbia University Press. print1988