Subaltern studies

This paper is dealing with history of the society and social concept with special focus of the class and equality concept from the West to East. Looking into the history says Western intellectual schools gave the name of this concept as Subaltern Studies, and first in the West the revolution started for the voiceless people. In Indian society also dominated by the same notion from the ancient tradition and following the West they also started raising voice for the poor and voiceless. It is a comparative study from the West to East with few intellectual's discussions and history of "Subaltern Study" in the progressive society.At the end also it will criticize the insufficiency of the concept and its impact in the Indian society and present society. Speaking for subalternity as subaltern could thus become a professional academic niche. We could expect Subaltern Studies to attain authority as an authentic voice of the postcolonial East in self-consciously Western academic localities which have been shaped intellectually by orientalism, area studies, and Cold War anti-communism, when scholars mobilize to oppose colonial forms of knowledge with post-orientalist critical theory, global cultural studies, and post-Marxist, post-colonial literary criticism.

Social Scientist, 1984

... Sanjay Prasad teaches History at Hindu College, Delhi University ... In fact, many insurgents, as indicated above, had written on peasant rebellions and movements, good examples being Sahajanand Saraswati's Kisan Sabha ke Sansmaran, Mera Jivan Sangharsh, and numerous ...

2005

ISSN: 1368-8790 (Print) 1466-1888 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cpcs20 Introduction: The subaltern and the popular Swati Chattopadhyay & Bhaskar Sarkar To cite this article: Swati Chattopadhyay & Bhaskar Sarkar (2005) Introduction: The subaltern and the popular , Postcolonial Studies, 8:4, 357-363, DOI: 10.1080/13688790500375066 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790500375066

The Subaltern Studies group re-visited historiography in an approach that sought to extend voices to the voiceless actors in South Asian history: the peasants, insurgents, women, and others seen as subjugated by elitist, colonialist discourses through the re-evaluation of texts, documents, and alternative sources. Although an alternative, theoretical framework has been adopted by the disciplines of history and anthropology, the political sciences tend to operate on a top-down approach and do not adequately incorporate subaltern voices. Using the secessionist movement in Kashmir as a case study, this essay aims to explore the concept of subalternity and how it may be incorporated as an alternative perspective in which to analyse, interpret, and find solutions to contemporary internecine conflicts, useful to academics and policymakers.

The subalterns refer to the masses—the peasants, fishermen, laborers, and the like. Ranajit Guha argues that the masses reacted not only against British rule but also against the Indian elitist brand of nationalism. Theirs was a “history from below,” a “postcolonial history,” and a “post-nationalist historiography.” Their consciousness was not “pre-political,” as what Marxists say, but a genuine immanent political consciousness during the moment of rebellion.

Journal Polingua : Scientific Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Education, 2020

This research is motivated by the colonial problem in the archipelago which still leaves a trail of oppression as well as the struggle of the natives to escape the impact of this ideology. The colonial trail that still lags behind creates an indigenous group that becomes a subaltern - an isolated, oppressed, and exiled group. In the postal colonial subaltern theory Gayatri Spivax stated that among the groups that were the most victims of colonialism were the subalterns. Relevant to the problem, this study aims to describe the forms of discrimination against subaltern groups, especially women who become subaltern groups, against colonial ideology. Data obtained from Saraswati : Gadis dalam Sunyi shortstory by A. A Navis that is analyzed qualitatively. Based on research data sources namely Saraswati : Gadis dalam Sunyi shortstory by A. A Navis. The results of this study indicate that the figure Saraswati became subaltern because she is marginalized, economically impoverished, labeled,...

journal of the dept of anthropology, 2018

The qualitative study is centered on the memories or their lived experiences per se of two generations of members of different tribal communities living in the adjacent neighbourhoods (para) in Sonarpur township which is situated at the southern outskirt of Kolkata metropolis in West Bengal. Considering the coalescing of the tribal families in certain close tracks of the township we purposively selected populace in order to trace out how they narrate their memories of their mobility across social spaces in terms of physical and symbolic contexts. Depth interviews of fourteen persons of two generations of Munda, Oraon and Bedia communities provided us some kind of saturation for deriving certain directions of continuing the study. The men of earlier generation could hardly forget how their parents and grandparents either were forcibly displaced by the British colonial Raj as labours for clearing the forests elsewhere or were driven out of their own land by Zamindar Raj or voluntarily quitted their aggressive confinements in the bonded services to the Zamindars. The themes emerging from their memory narratives are: (i) Always out of place, (ii) Mobility across spaces that never became their own, (iii) Forgetting how they lived off on their own, (iv) Their surname identity as assigned by others (v) Identification of what they keep on forgetting and what they practice, (vi) Their desperation in acquiring other-assigned educational (i.e. institutional) and performing (i.e. sports etc.) capitals that they discontinue due to the utter need of service at early age, (vii) They can continue sports if they play for others' teams.(viii) Till date their participation in the social spaces (including economy, education, politics, sports etc.) constructed and continued not by and for themselves, but others. This section of subaltern speaks of never becoming their own.

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 2022

The work of B. R. Ambedkar has spurred scholars and experts to rethink traditional assessments of both the secularisation process and the relationship between religious and secular domains. Two generations ago, Ambedkar evoked conversion to Navayana Buddhism as an alternative to the hierarchically ordered caste-based society. Through his landmark essay The Buddha and His Dhamma, he questioned studies on Dalit communities that saw them as trying to define their inner life solely as either a negative or mirror image of the standards set by the caste-based norms. In the effort to retrieve the autonomy of the Dalit subject, Ambedkar brought to the forefront of his work that conversion was not simply opposition to the power structure of caste society but also meant to overthrow the false ideals that had historically distorted and degraded the Dalit self. The paper addresses some of the methodological questions in political philosophy and historiography that arise in Ambedkar’s thought in the analytical categories related to conversion. It begins with a provocation in its juxtaposition of categories from two different discourses: ‘subalternity’ as a relational position in conceptualizing power and ‘post-secularism’ as persistence or resurgence of religious beliefs or practices in the present. It then turns to examine the concept of ‘subalternity’ to show whether it is a relevant lens to understand Dalit subjectivity and agency today. The paper argues that Ambedkar views conversion as a historical process from a status of subalternity, or practices of exclusions, to individuals with agency, potentially becoming full members of a political community. It also critically examines Ambedkar’s interpretation of Buddhist ethics that marks an intervention in the analysis of subalternity, showing that the religious ideology of dharma structures the caste order based on discrimination and exclusion. While displacing the explanatory principle of ritual hierarchy that unites Hindu society, Ambedkar addresses the egalitarian imaginary of modern politics that gives us an account of action based on democratic contest and resistance. The paper also argues why the move from Hinduism to Buddhist ethics by Ambedkar can be constitutive of a post-secular ethic. Emotion and knowledge are not separate in Ambedkar’s social epistemology, but they draw heavily on the social transformation and the importance of religion in people’s inner lives, which accompanied the conversion.

1 My intention in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (hereafter PTSC) was to assess the theoretical framework generated by the Subaltern Studies collective. To do so involved three distinct tasksfirst, to distill from the key writings what the projects' essential arguments were; since these arguments were in large measure a critique of Enlightenment and especially Marxist theories, it required, as a second task, to assess the validity of their critique on empirical and conceptual grounds; and lastly, I suggested that their own theoretical innovations were a failure, both as theory and as normative critique.