Literature and varieties of history

[Part 5]

Last week I discussed the significance of Marxian approaches to history with particular reference to British Marxist historians, most notably, E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill. Today I would like to examine the importance of the Subaltern Studies Group that began its life in India.

In fact there is a clear bridge between the work of historians such as Thompson and Hill and Hobsbawm and the subaltern group. That is because the subaltern historians were influenced by the history from below espoused by the British Marxist historians. However, we must be careful not to overdraw this similarity; plainly, there are significance differences as well.

The well-known historian and cultural critic Arif Dirlik ( I have worked closely with him) once remarked that, ‘most of the generalisations that appear in the discourse of postcolonial intellectuals from India may appear novel in the historiography of India but are not discoveries from broader perspectives.....the historical writings of subaltern studies historians.....represent the application of Indian historiography of trends in historical writing that were quite widespread by the 1970s under the impact of social historians such as E.P.Thompson, Eric Hobabawm, and a host of others.’

There is no doubt that the subaltern studies historians of Indian learned a great deal from their British predecessors; however, it is my contention that they also succeeded in introducing a new mode of inquiry.

The Subaltern Studies Group established itself as a formidable body of historians in the early 1980s under the able stewardship of the Bengali historian Ranajit Guha. (I have had the privilege of discussing various matters with him at the University of Santa Cruz and in Hawaii; the last time I met him was when I had dinner with him and his wife in Honolulu).

There were a number of other scholars associated with this movement such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Patha Chatterji, Gyanendra Pandey, Shahd Amin, Gautam Bhadra. Their primary aim was and is to examine Indian history from below paying careful attention to the activities, desires, triumphs and failures of the peasants whose voices are hardly heard in the official histories of India. Their preferred objective was to breathe life into the buried histories of the subalterns. In that sense, theirs was a redressive measure. Guha once remarked hat, ‘We are indeed opposed to much of the prevailing academic practice in historiography…..for its failure to acknowledge the subaltern as the maker of his own destiny, this critique lies at the very heart of our project.’

Subaltern

The term subaltern is derived from the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci. He used it as a synonym for the proletariat; in fact it was a code word. He wrote many of his essays in prison and in order to get past the prison officials, instead of deploying the term proletariat, he used the more military term subaltern.

In the military, the term subaltern references people in the lowest ranks. Guha and his colleagues used this term in a nuanced way to frame their own investigations into Indian history.

Clearly, the subaltern studies historians were reacting against the current dominant paradigms of Indian history which they thought were inadequate to comprehend the full complexity of the Indian historical situation.

The two most influential and consequential were the Cambridge school of historians the nationalist historians, Ranajit Guha and his colleagues felt that both were elitist in the sense that they were bent on exploring Indian history in terms of the triumphs and successes of the elite groups.

They totally a underplayed the role of peasants in social transformation. As Guha aptly remarked, these historians failed to take note of ‘the contributions made by people on their own, that is, independent of the elite to the making and development of nationalism. This is indeed a theme that runs through much of the writing of the Subaltern Studies Group.

Nationalism

Ranajit Guha opens his essay titled, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India with the following claim. ‘The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism – colonial elitism and bourgeois nationalist elitism.

Both originated as the ideological product of British rule in India, both have survived the transfer of power and been assimilated to neo-colonialist and neo-nationalist forms of elitist historiography of the colonialist or neo-colonialist type counts British writers and institutions among its principal protagonists, but has its imitators in India and other countries too.

Elitist historiography of the nationalist or neo-colonialist type is primarily and Indian practice but not without imitators in the ranks of liberal historians in Britain and elsewhere.’

Ranajit Guha then goes on to assert that, ‘what is clearly left out of this un-historical historiography is the politics of the people. For parallel to the domain of the elite politics, there existed throughout the colonial period another domain of Indian politics in which the principal actors were not the dominant groups of the Indian society or the colonial authorities but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of labouring population and the intermediate strata in town and country – that is, the people.

This was an autonomous domain for, it neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence depend on the latter. It was traditional only in the sense that its roots could be traced back to the pre-colonial times, but it was by no means archaic in the sense of being outmoded..’ He goes on to remark that far from being obliterated by colonialism, it continued to operate vigorously making the needful adjustments and revisions. At times, it was able to develop new strains to meet the exigencies of circumstances.

Observations

Edward said, in his preface to the important collection of essays gathered in selected subaltern studies makes similar observations. It is his considered judgment that the significant achievement of the subaltern group was to inaugurate a movement to rewrite Indian history if colonial times from the distinct vantage points of the experiences, desires and interests of the masses, pressing into service unconventional or sidelined sources in popular memory, oral discourse as well as previously unstudied colonial administrative documents. The net result of this effort has been to underscore the importance of fashioning alternate histories of India that stand in sharp contrast to the official and mainstream works of colonial Indian historiography. The subaltern group of historians may have been interested primarily in India. However, increasingly it has become evident that their concept of history, understanding of the importance of the subalterns and the modes of investigation are finding a ready echo not only in other parts of Asia but also in Europe, North America and Latin America.

One of the central themes that the historians associated with the Subaltern Studies Group have explored with remarkable incisiveness is the nature, the dynamics and the impact of peasant revolts. As Ranajit Guha maintained, ‘when a peasant rose in revolt at any time or place under the Raj, he did so necessarily and explicitly in violation of a series of codes which defined his very existence as a member of the colonial, and still largely semi-feudal society.

For his subalternity was materialised by the structure of property, institutionalised by law, sanctified by religion and indeed to destroy many of those familiar signs which he had learned to read and manipulate to extract meaning out of the harsh world around him and live with. The risk in turning the world upside down under these conditions was indeed so great that he could hardly afford to engage in such a project in a state of absent-mindedness.’

Guha is adamant in his opinion that the peasant insurrections were hardly spontaneous and unpremeditated affairs. The generally widespread view that they arose spontaneously, as he has clearly demonstrated, is inconsistent with the historical facts. As he says,’ there is hardly any instance of the peasantry, whether the cautious and earthy villagers of the plains or the supposedly more volatile adivasis of the upland tracts, stumbling or drifting into rebellion. They had far too much at stake and would not launch into it except as a deliberate, even if desperate, way out of an intolerable condition of existence.

Insurgency, in other worlds, was a motivated and conscious undertaking on the part of the rural masses.’ here was a general tendency among established Indian historian to look at peasant rebellions through the glasses of the congress leaders. Gyanendra Pandey in a long essay titled, ‘Peasant Revolt in Indian Nationalism, 1919-1922, makes the following assessment.’ In this situation, a pronouncement of error, or ill-timing, of the peasant movement can come only out of an uncritical acceptance of the Congress leaders’ point of view. It does not flow from an analysis of the actual condition of anti-colonial struggles in the 1920s.’

Themes

When I read the writings of historians linked to the Subaltern Studies Group,I find that two important themes stand out. The first is the relentless emphasis that they placed on the idea of peasant consciousness. The second is the concept of modernity, which was markedly different from that disseminated by mainstream scholars that pervaded their writings. I wish to comment on these two themes, which incidentally intersect in interesting ways, as a way of gaining entry into the thought-ways of subaltern historians.

Let us consider first the idea of consciousness. This is indeed a concept that is pivotal to thinkers associated with phenomenology. For example, literary theorists who favored phenomenology placed great emphasis on the consciousness of the writer and the consciousness of the readers in analysis in literary texts. On the other hand, post-structuralists were less interested in the idea of consciousness. This distinction is important in that some of the post-structuralist critics of the subaltern group have called attention precisely to this fact – the misplaced centrality given to peasant consciousness.

The subaltern historians believe that the notion of the peasant consciousness has been given short shrift by modern Indian historians resulting in a lop-sided view of Indian history. They would like to accord it a place of centrality in their exegeses so as to understand better the desires, interests, agendas that motivated the peasants. So far they have remained the invisible majority and by exploring their consciousness, these historians contended, it would be possible to bring them back center stage which was highlighting the unfolding drama of Indian society. In this regard, the following observation by the leader of the Subaltern Studies Group, Ranajit Guha, enables us to grasp the full significance of the new move initiated by the subaltern historians.

‘This consciousness seems to have received little notice in the literature on the subject. Historiography has been content to deal with the peasant rebel merely as an empirical person or member of a class, but not an entity whose will and reason constituted the praxis called rebellion. The omission is indeed dyed into the most narratives by metaphors assimilating peasant revolts to natural phenomena; they break out like thunder storms, heave like earthquakes, spread like wildfire, infect like epidemics, in other words, when the historiography is pushed to the point of producing an explanation in rather more human terms it will do so by assuming an identity of nature and culture, a hallmark, presumably, of a very low state of civilisation….’

The subaltern historians also point out the fact that very often peasant rebellions were depicted as a reflexive action, that is to say, as an unpremeditated action to physical suffering including hunger, forced labor, torture and abuse. It has also being represented as a spontaneous reaction to certain actions initiated by a powerful enemy. In all these cases, the insurrections and rebellions are seen as external to the consciousness of the peasants. Subaltern historians like Ranajit Guha and Gyanendra Pandey sought to change this situation and focus on the inner dynamics of the peasant consciousness in promoting revolt.

Cultural critics

The focus on the peasant consciousness and its centrality in making revolutions has been much commented upon favourably by many historians and cultural critics. It has also, however, attracted a substantial measure of criticism. For example, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who is both sympathetic to and critical of the project undertaken by the Subaltern Studies Group makes the following observation. ‘they (subaltern historians) generally perceive their task as making a theory of consciousness or culture rather than specifically a theory of change.

It is because of this, I think, the force of crisis, although never far from their argument, is not systematically emphasised in their work and some times disarmingly alluded to as impingement, combination, getting caught up in a general wave….’ All these metaphors highlight the impact of force. It is her belief that the way subaltern historians approach questions of consciousness, power, change land them squarely in the earlier debates surrounding structure and history, spontaneity and consciousness.

Instead, what she would like to see is a focus on social change and the concomitant transformation of sign-systems. Here Spivak is clearly obeying her deconstructive impulses. This is, of course, hardly surprising in view of the fact that she has played a key role in popularising deconstruction in the United States and elsewhere.

In a number of essays such as Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography and Can the Subaltern Speak?, Gayatri Spivak has raised a number of important questions related to the peasant consciousness valorised by the Subaltern Studies Group. What is the nature of peasant consciousness? Is it unified? How can we get at it? Can the subalterns speak for themselves? Or should the elite speak on their behalf? What happens in the process? These and related questions figure prominently in her discussions. Because these essays are technical in nature, assuming a width of reference, and are studded with technical terms, philosophical and literary-cultural, the average reader is bound to find them difficult and demanding. However, the kind of issue raised by Spivak and others with regard to the idea of peasant consciousness, so much valorised by the subaltern historians, deserves closer scrutiny.

The second important theme, it seems to me, that Informs the writings of the Subaltern Studies Group is the concept of modernity. These historians are clearly bent on discarding the mainstream concept of modernism and promoting a new one that is in keeping with their outlook on social change and historiography. There is a very important connection that needs to be made between peasant consciousness and modernity. There is a widespread, although mistaken belief, that tradition and modernity are polar opposites; this is certainly not the case- as a matter of fact tradition and modernity are mutually constitutive. Most discerning social critics would agree that they are vitally linked.

What this means is that the way tradition inhabits modernity has to be carefully teased out and unambiguously interpreted. The eminent social thinker Max Weber remarked that a defining feature of modernity is the way the act of choice as an aspect of one’s individuality is heavily emphasized. What this line of thinking highlighted was the idea that pre-modern societies did not accord the idea that values are selected by people living in society because they are pre-selected for them by the culture and social order that they live in. while individuals in modern societies make choices based on their predilections, those in pre-modern societies do not. Plainly, this is too simplistic a view; it turns a blind eye to the diverse contexts in which choices are made.

Modernities

What has been clearly established by the writings of modern anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and so on that modernity is not unitary, and that there are diverse modernities depending on the cultures with which they are associated. Hence the idea of cultural modernity has gained recognition, quite justifiably in my view. Therefore, when we discuss modernity it is important to bear in mind that tradition and modernity are intertwined in complex ways and that that there are different modernities – alternate modernities if you like – depending on the cultures that they inhabit. These considerations loom in importance and compelling power when we seek to comprehend that approach to modernity and the significance of peasant consciousness advocated by the Subaltern Studies Group.

Subalternity is closely related to the idea of subjecthood, and therefore to the idea of power as well. Subalterns actively engage their assigned status in challenging, interrogating, under cutting the social order that they live in even as they are subject to its inexorable pressures. This act of defiance, as subaltern historians have amply demonstrated, is a mark of modernity. How the subalterns respond to modernity, how they assimilate some of its features into their lives while resisting others reflects their sense of agency.

These aspects demand sustained analytical attention of historians. The subaltern historians have clearly opened a pathway towards a better understanding of the agency of subalterns. It needs to be remembered that modernity is a contestation that takes place in definite geographical locations and historical conjunctures and cultural contexts of meaning; and as a result local and non-local forces interact in unanticipated ways.

With regard to the distinctive way in which the subaltern historians approached the idea of modernity in their investigations, I would like to underline three points. First, they did not subscribe to the standard Marxist approach to modernity with its definite stages of evolution. At the beginning of this column I said that the approach of the subaltern historians was, in certain respects, different from the British Marxist historians like Thompson, Hill and Hobsbawm. Unlike them, the Subaltern Study Group did not want to embed their understanding of modernity in the accepted narrative of Marxist thinking.

In other words, Guha and his colleagues sought to decouple the idea of history of power from the currently widespread understanding of the history of capital. Marxist historians in general saw the peasant consciousness as backward, retrogressive, a throwback to the past; that is why historians such Eric Hobsbawm termed that consciousness pre-political. Guha thought differently; he saw in the peasant consciousness certain important strands that can be productively engage modern society. Hence, this is a clear difference in their enunciation of modernity.

Identities

Second, the subaltern historians demonstrated the validity of depicting the power plays manifest in different societies in terms of their own specific identities, cultural imperatives and conventions of operation. There is a deeper theoretical argument embedded in this move, namely, that there is a compelling need to see the trajectory of global modernity not in terms one unified master narrative but rather in terms of a number of smaller narratives.

Third, subaltern historians sought to widen the discourse of modernity put in place by Indian policymakers as well as orthodox historians which was one that conformed to a form evolutionism. And this was the same paradigm that the colonial masters had put in place. The Subaltern Studies Group sought to take a different route by rejecting the easy characterisation of peasants as backward and docile and point to their actual historical experiences in terms agency and the consequent insurrections. Clearly, this was a mark of modernity.

One of the most distinguished subaltern historians, Dipesh Chakrabarty, makes the following helpful observation.’ What distinguishes the story of the political modernity in India from the usual and comparable narratives of the West was the fact that the modern politics in India was not founded on an on an assumed death of the peasant. The peasant did not have to undergo a historical mutation into the industrial worker in order to become the citizen-subject of the nation. The peasant who participated in forms of mass nationalist struggles against the British was not a pre-political subject.’ Guha’s following statement connects nicely with this remark.’ Insurgency, in other words, was a motivated and conscious undertaking on the part of the rural masses.’

Momentum

The Subaltern Studies Group effected a significant change in modern historiography. There object of interest was India. However, as the movement gathered in momentum it began to exercise a global appeal, and historians in many other parts of the world were keen to adopt this approach to investigate aspects of their own historical pasts. Consequently, a movement that was once strictly confined to India in terms of the subject matter and also in many ways the background of the investigators began to fine adherents and practitioners in other parts of the globe.

However, there are those who have been critical of the work of this group. One deficiency that some have pointed out is the absence of gender – the role of women in these subaltern enterprises. This is clearly a blind spot in the early writings; however, in more recent work there has been a growing awareness of the importance of this issue.

Another is the whole question of subjectivity. Ranajit Guha said that one of the aims of the subaltern historians was to show how Indian peasants were the makers of their destiny. This raises complex questions of the nature of subjectivity. Those who are of a post-structurarlist disposition are particularly concerned about this issue. What is ironical is that while some critics like the above mentioned criticise the subaltern historians for not being post-structural enough, some others who lean towards Marxism accuse them of being too much in the grip of post-structuarlist thinking. This brings me to what I think is the third main argument against Subaltern Studies.

Marxist historians maintain that by focusing on aspects such as fragments and discontinuities that are privileged by post-structuralist thinkers, these historians who started well quickly lost their way paying inadequate attention questions of totality, solidarity etc.. These, then, are some of the criticisms levied against the subaltern historians.

Indian nationalism

Those who are predisposed to post-structuralist and deconstructive reading of the situation would argue in the following manner. The avowed objective of the Subaltern Studies Group is to inquire into the role of the subalterns in the promotion of Indian nationalism as opposed to the role played by the colonial administrators and native elites. In order to write such histories the investigator has to rely on archival materials that were largely the products of colonial machine.

The deconstructive method, more than any other, permits the researchers to examine productively these texts; it encourages close attention to the contradictions, slippages, suppressions, silences in the fabric of writing so as to recover the authentic voice of the rebels. In other words the kind of reading strategy put into circulation by deconstructionists can be immensely helpful to historians. This is the message advanced by post-structuralist critics of the Subaltern Studies Group. To be sure, not everyone agrees with this predilection.

The work of the Subaltern Studies Group is of relevance to Sri Lankan writers primarily for two reasons. First, they focus on the silent majority, the voiceless, the dispossessed in order to invest them with a sense of agency and urgency. This is indeed an aspect that has deep relevance to, say, Sinhala writers of fiction. Second, they deal with experiences related to India, and culturally and socially there is much in common between the Indian and Sri Lankan experiences. Against this backdrop of thinking I wish to focus on one talented Sinahla novelist and short story writer Arawwala Nandimithra.

He has, I believe, won more national awards for his work than any other living Sinhala writer. There are a number of features that give Nandimithra’s work its distinctiveness and they are all intimately connected to some of the issues that we discussed about the work of the subaltern historians. First, Nandimithra, for the most part, has chosen to focus on the lives and loves, triumphs and defeats, hardships and predicaments of the subalterns. He deals with those unfortunate beings that have been rendered invisible. He is able to enter into their inner lives in a way, as few others have, and explore the nature of their consciousness. Indeed, he displays a kind of clairvoyant understanding of peasant life. Here we find an important parallel between the work of the subaltern historians and Arawwala Nandimithra’s fiction. Second, in his short stories, one sees his desire to transgress standardly accepted concepts of narration and move in a different direction. For example, he ignores the much-vaunted unity of impression advocated by modern theorists of the short story, and seeks to create multiple impressions. As he attained a firmer command of this narrative discourse, this predilection became more and more evident. Here he has been inspired by the Buddhist Jataka stories and local folk-tales. Once again we see an important connection with the agendas of the Subaltern Studies Group.

Intense situation

Third, Nandimithra, by and large, deals with emotionally charged situations. His characters are caught in a space of liminality, at a moment of self-transformation and emotionally intense situations are linked to a subaltern consciousness in interesting ways. Fourth, one discerns a certain elegiac quietude at the emotional center of his stories, and the author quite deftly has connected it with the workings of the peasant consciousness. Fifth, Arawwala Nandimithe displays a partiality for melodrama.

The idea of melodrama, which once carries negative connotations and pejorative associations, has now been rehabilitated into a term of neutral description, at times even into a term of approbation. There is an interesting move in the use of melodrama that one detects in Nandimithra’s work. While melodrama ordinarily enforces a rigid binary between good and evil, deploying the power of exaggeration to heighten the disparity, he complicates the situation by pointing out the existence of a blending of the good and the bad in both his heroes and villains. Once again, what is interesting is that he has made this into a manifestation of the subaltern consciousness of his characters.

Sixth, there is a moral imagination running through his fiction that is bound to find a ready echo in subaltern historians work. Nandimithra, in his novels and short stories, is keen to focus on the outworn conventions, self- protective prudery that can hold the peasants back while insisting on the rebellious energies that need to be harnessed more efficaciously for the gaining of total freedom.

One can, therefore, suggest with a great deal of assurance that Arawwala Nandimithra’s fiction illuminates in complex ways some of the interests and investments discernible in the work of the Subaltern Studies Group. A wounded self-esteem smolders beneath his neatly turned out sentences. The fiction of Nandimithra and the writings of the subaltern historians are continuous with one another. They refuse to accept the view that history had perched lightly on the subalterns; instead they see the welcome power of peasant consciousness animating the blood stream of history. The objective of both sets of writings is to compel shadows to speak.

(To be continued)