What is the Subaltern and why is it important in Literature?
Exploring Postcolonial terms
The Subaltern is a postcolonial term that denotes a certain type of marginalised people. It is a term coined by Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci , describing the non-elites as existing in a dominant hegemonic order but kept silent; those who are categorised as the Other, but without any voice or perspective portrayed in history. The Subaltern was the subjected underclass of society. It fits into the dyad of the oppressor and the oppressed. The subaltern is both spoken about and spoken for, but never speaks for itself. For example, in India, groups like rural women, devadasi or temple dancers, the headdress or third gender are all further marginalized by colonialism, remaining silent whilst discussions are made about them. The Orient is discussed, but even this does not approach nor consider certain native people. This leads to an erasure of native history, as the elite took liberties in their documentation of historical record. Critics of recent have been preoccupied with recovering these silenced voices, however, a problem encountered when attempting to retrieve the native from its marginalised absence in history is that rather than representing the subaltern, there is a strong risk of appropriation. This attempt can also be seen as a ploy for western visibility, more than aiding the native; befitting the modern definition of White Saviour. Yet if this recovery is not attempted, then the subaltern is likely to remain a lost voice in history. This makes representation of the subaltern an almost impossible task. One group that has been engaged with this is The Subaltern Studies Group.
The Subaltern Studies Group emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s amidst Marxist historians of colonial India, focusing on the history of the people rather than the elite. However, a problem they encountered was that history had been written by the elite, therefore, it is impossible to re-write a non-elitist perspective without the true record. In his preface to the first volume of the Subaltern Studies Ranajit Guha suggested that there were two political domains; the elite and the people. He established that the ‘central concern’ of his studies was the ‘thematizing of the structural split of politics’ between the elite and the subaltern. Thus, studying the subaltern becomes an attempt to re-write history from the people, for the people. Subaltern history gives agency to the victims of colonialism rather than keeping them as a passive element for European and Western countries. The subalterns tended to be mentioned only in relation to crime, trouble or disorder, and thus the liberties the elite took when writing history construed a biased and subjugated account of what happened; a false portrayal. Therefore, some critics have begun to engage in a post-structuralist approach, imposing that it is less a concern of giving the subaltern a voice, and more focused on finding new ways to listen.
In Gavtari Chakravortv Spivak’s 1983 essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? she defines the subaltern as something that can never be anything more than a rhetorical figure constructed by and within existing in certain elite societies; ‘For the ‘true’ subaltern group, whose identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself’. The focus of Spivak’s essay is that the subaltern cannot represent themselves stating that ‘there is no… subject that can know and speak itself’. Spivak further argues that there are two types of representation; political and discursive. The prior being when the subaltern is spoken for, and the latter being when they are spoken about. This evokes a paradox when attempting to represent the subaltern, as the subaltern either engages with a space that they have historically been silenced in, or they must approach unwelcome systems that view them through colonial stereotypes.
The concept of the subaltern is important and necessary in the study of literature, as it emphasises the need for a modern way of reading and interpreting. This being that reading literature that was written by the elite, for the elite, is fundamentally flawed and continues to uphold emphasis on colonial discourse. Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome parallels the critique that the Subaltern Studies Group makes, through the criticism of scientific knowledge he makes condemnation that put the Eurocentric anti-ideological accounts of scientific progress under enquiry. For example, this may be explored in a passage in which Murugan suggests to Antar that to know something is to change it. It is denoted here that Ghosh infers that it isn’t that the subaltern cannot speak at all, but rather that it cannot speak on its own terms, much like how science is not a knowledge that can be understood and known on its own terms; an undertone that imbued Ghosh’s writing.