Subaltern Studies

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 and with nuance, Subaltern Studies could be seen as having a relation of critical intimacy with Marxist thought rather than an outright rejection of all of its analyses.