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Marx from the Margins: A Collective Project, from A to Z

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References Subaltern Studies

Sudeep Dasgupta
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2017 Assembly. New York: Oxford University Press.

Marx, Karl. 1947. Poverty of Philosophy. The Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/ar-
chive/marx/works/1847/poverty- philosophy/.

Vogl, Joseph. 2009. “On Hesitation.” The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 55: 129-145.

The historiographical intervention of the Indian Subaltern Studies Group took as

their targets elite and nationalist accounts of the transition from colonialism to
nationhood. However, they also included in their interventions a corresponding
critique of Marxist analyses of the transition to nationalism. As Gyan Prakash
argues “When Marxists turned the spotlight on colonial exploitation, their
criticism was framed by a historicist scheme that universalized Europe’s historical
experience” (Prakash 1994, 1375). Subaltern Studies thus also found a place within
the field of Postcolonial Studies’ critique of Europe-centred analyses of history,
politics and identity. The critique of Marxism targeted the Marxist reliance on
“mode-of-production narratives” couched in terms of a “nation-state’s ideology of
modernity and progress” which resulted in an inability to take seriously “the
oppressed’s ‘lived experience’ of religion and social customs” (ibid., 1477).

At the same time, as the term “subaltern” indicates, the Group’s relation to Marx
and Marxist thought was also one of a critical engagement with Marx’s historical
and theoretical understandings of the political transformations in societies
undergoing colonial exploitation. The place of Antonio Gramsci is crucial here, in
particular his writings on Italian history during the complex political processes
which constituted the Risorgimento (Gramsci 1992). Thus read more generously
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and with nuance, Subaltern Studies could be seen as having a relation of critical transition from feudal to capitalist economies (Sen 1987, 207; see also Chaudhury).
intimacy with Marxist thought rather than an outright rejection of all of its A wholescale rejection of “Marxist” thought implied in some formulations, such as
analyses. This is clear in the Marxist and Leninist language employed by Ranajit by Prakash, seem thus unwarranted. Guha himself in his landmark essay
Guha, the Group’s founder, who argues that “the working class was still not “Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography” deploys Marx’s nuanced
sufficiently mature in the objective conditions of its social being and in its reading of the global expansion of capitalism in the Grundrisse to situate his own
consciousness as a class-for-itself” (Guha 1988, 42), and the “historic failure of the historiographical critique of elite histories of Indian nationalism (Guha 1992).
nation to come to its own (sic)” (ibid, emphasis in original) is evidenced in the failure
of a democratic revolution “under the hegemony of workers and peasants (ibid., The second issue of subaltern identity, and its recovery through historiographical
43). Similarly, Partha Chatterjee’s influential "More on Modes of Power and the research, came in for sharp critique from many quarters including a feminist and
Peasantry" offers a historical and comparative analysis of the complex power deconstructive analysis by Gayatri Spivak, and from a more broadly materialist and
relations set into motion among different classes (and class fractions) in which a Marxist perspective by Dipankar Gupta and Rosalind O’Hanlon (Spivak 1988;
Foucauldian analysis is combined with a reading of the Grundrisse to underscore Gupta 1985; O’Hanlon 1988). Guha’s understanding of subaltern resistance as “the
the “differential impact on pre-capitalist structures” including “destruction, politics of the people” occupying “an autonomous domain [which] neither
modifying them for surplus extraction, bolstering pre-existing social structures” originated from elite politics nor [whose] existence depend[ed] on the latter”
(Chatterjee 1988, 388). (Guha 1988, 40) was problematic, because it seemed to foreclose a relational
analysis of how subaltern politics operated through external constraints and
Two aspects of the relation between Marx and the Subaltern Studies group can be opportunities, as well as strategic linkages with other forms of social power. In fact,
identified here. First, the explanations of historical transformation from colonialism Chatterjee’s essay had foregrounded precisely this complex relational understanding
to the nation-state; and second, the peculiar form of identity of the subaltern classes of power which made claims of an autonomous subaltern identity problematic.
who are defined in opposition to the colonial and national elites. The first issue Dipankar Gupta’s critique of Guha underscored the dangers of ethnicized
involved the necessity of transforming the “mode-of-production narrative” to formulations of autonomous peasant identity which relied on the “independent
include the complexity of transformations in pre-capitalist structures such as caste, organizing principle of the insurgent’s mind” (emphasis added) as the motor of
religion and community which resulted in a sustained engagement with forms of historical change (Gupta 1985, 9). Developing Gupta’s critique, O’Hanlon argues
“pre-modern” mobilization including magic, religion, rumour, and caste. Here that such an idealist claim to autonomous subaltern identity “shuts off the whole
however, the presumed split between Marxism’s inadequacy with dealing with such field of external structural interaction and constraint” within which the politics of
issues, and the groups own interventions, must be nuanced by the fact that within the people operated (O’Hanlon 1988, 202). It is precisely here that a materialist
the pages of the volumes of Subaltern Studies Marxist historians were invited to and Marxist critique of identity becomes relevant since such a critique exposes the
articulate their own understandings of the relation between caste, class and humanist and liberal conception of human agency often implied in formulations of
community for example. Asok Sen’s reading of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire in subaltern identity. In O’Hanlon’s words: “we are left with the unfortunate, and I
Volume V of Subaltern Studies, for example, underscores that Marx’s historical think unintended, impression, that the historiographical issue at stake is that of
writings on the peasantry comprise a far more sophisticated understanding of the man’s freedom as against the determining power of his external world. But this
complex links between emergent power-blocs and strategic political alliances very juxtaposition, of the free man as against the man determined, is itself an
between the peasantry, the (petit-) bourgeoisie and owners of capital in the
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idealist conception, in which the mode of existence of the unitary subject-agent is Prakash, Gyan. 1994. “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism.” The American Historical Review
99 (5): 1475-1490.
never called into question” (ibid.).
Sen, Asok. 1987. “Subaltern Studies: Capital, Class and Community.” In Subaltern Studies Volume
The problematic question of subaltern identity, and the complex processes of V: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by Ranajit Guha, 203-235. Oxford/New York:
political transformation involved in the transition from colonialism to nationalism, Oxford University Press.
thus emerge less as points of fundamental divergence between Subaltern Studies
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” In Selected
and Marx. Rather, a productive form of critical intimacy best describes how the Subaltern Studies, 1-32.
limitations and opportunities of both strands of thought could contribute (and
interrupt) each other.

References

Chatterjee, Partha. 1988. “More on Modes of Power and the Peasantry.” In Selected Subaltern Stud-
ies, 351-390. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Chaudhury, Ajit K. 1987. “In Search of a Subaltern Lenin.” In Subaltern Studies Volume V: Writings
on South Asian History and Society, edited by Ranajit Guha. Oxford/New York: Oxford University
Press.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1992 [1971]. “Notes on Italian History.” In Selections from the Prison Notebooks
of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, 44-120.
New York: International Publishers.

Guha, Ranajit. 1988. “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India.” In Selected
Subaltern Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 37-44. Oxford/New
York: Oxford University Press.

Guha, Ranajit. 1992. “Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography.” In Subaltern Studies
Volume VI: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by Ranajit Guha, 210-309. Ox-
ford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Gupta, Dipankar. 1985. “On Altering the Ego in Peasant history: Paradoxes of the Ethnic Option.”
Peasant Studies 13 (1): 5-24.

O'Hanlon, Rosalind. 1988. “Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance
in Colonial South Asia.” Modern Asian Studies 22 (1): 189-224.