DISCUSSION

september 29, 2012 vol xlviI no 39 EPW Economic & Political Weekly74

Subaltern StudiesTurning around the Perspective

Hiren Gohain

Hiren Gohain (hiren.gohain@gmail.com) is a distinguished Assamese literary and social critic.

While in Gramsci the term “subaltern” was never detached from the perspective of a struggle for social transformation, the Subaltern school of India gained a reputation for its determined endeavour to rescue history from the Marxist framework. Marxist orthodoxy in India had many limitations and it could straitjacket complex historical phenomena, but the Subaltern school abandoned Marxist premises instead of trying to enrich and expand its scope.

In an erudite and rich essay, “After Subaltern Studies” (EPW, 1 September 2012), Partha Chatterjee offers us a

comprehensive view of the rise, develop-ment and eventual dissolution of the Subaltern school of history over a time span of three decades. The present dis-cussion has been prompted not so much by an urge for theoretical polemics as by the irrepressible query: what has been the implication of “the fi ght within the academy”, on which Ranajit Guha, pioneer and leader of the school had insisted in his correspondence with other members, for the larger social struggle outside? It might be said, of course, that there is no struggle as such, only a multitude of struggles which may not be theorised by a general approach. Ironically, in the face of subaltern reservations about narrativising history, Chatterjee, himself a prominent exponent, provides a narrative that connects causal analysis, motivation, growth and expan-sion, and loss of momentum with elegant mastery of the material. This enables and encourages the reader to examine the contribution of the school more critically than Chatterjee in his candid reappraisal with the benefi t of hindsight does.

To begin with, the account obscures the primordial ties of the movement with

Marxism, which it later shrugged off. Ranajit Guha, a leader of the students’ wing of the Communist Party of India, had not disowned his links with Marxism when he authored the penetrating discursive study of the “Permanent Settlement” of land tenure imposed by the colonial autho-rities in the light of their notion of property, sanctioning two centuries of ruthless exploitation of the Indian peasantry. At that time, while communism was a power-ful political ideology, and with Kosambi’s Marxism it had begun to provide fruitful intellectual stimulus to the social sciences, it was hardly a force in the academy. There is hardly any doubt that the original im-pulse behind the school was a passionate identifi cation with the oppressed masses (see “Chandra’s Death” in A Subaltern Studies Reader, edited by Ranajit Guha, Macmillan India, Calcutta, 1997) from a leftist point of view, anchored in a general project of human liberation.

However, within a decade, perhaps already at odds with a domineering and blind party orthodoxy, the movement became known for its resistance to the Marxist viewpoint and it seemed keen to liberate the study of “subaltern classes” of India from the perspective of the educated, middle-class Marxist leadership. While in Gramsci the term “subaltern” was never detached from the perspective of a struggle for social transformation, the Subaltern school of India gained a reputation for its determined endeavour to rescue history from the Marxist framework. Marxist orthodoxy in India had many limit ations and it could straitjacket complex historical

DISCUSSION

Economic & Political Weekly EPW september 29, 2012 vol xlviI no 39 75

phenomena, but the Subaltern school abandoned Marxist premises instead of trying to enrich and expand its scope. The result has been, in our humble opinion, mutual loss. E P Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class remains a Marxist classic in spite of or rather because of its departure from the dogmatic party-line, and hence it continues to be a serious contribution to the project of emancipa-tion. What has been the function of this school in the broader class-struggle?

It appears to divert our attention from that historic struggle by overlooking or questioning the transformative impact of temporal development and focusing more on the spatial features of historical phenomena. Ranajit Guha’s pioneering study in the structure of insurgent peasant consciousness as manifest in the tribal hul (uprising) in Chhota Nagpur against colo-nial rule constructs it as a stable compo-sition of elements unaffected by time. There is no reference to the impact of the Church’s teaching on the leadership by giving their thinking a millennial orien-tation. It cannot be regarded as a cameo frozen in time. Neither is tribal expropria-tion conceived as a feature of an aggres-sive colonial programme of systematic plunder of natural resources and exten-sion of an alien idea of landownership to the Indian tribal territory. Emphasis on this angle would have helped bring tribal rebellion within the common struggle of the oppressed people of India against semi-feudal colonial rule with the latter as hegemonic force, and forced on the Communist leadership the necessity of addressing the tribal question as some-thing as important as rural semi-feudalism.

Instead, the book practically isolates the tribal (peasant?) question from the his-toric evolution of an agenda for national liberation. It blazed a trail for searching out other elements of peasant culture like folklore, role of rumour, local cults and traditions and so on, which turned the peasant rebellion into a unique amoeba-like phenomenon with defi nable if mer-curial shape under the microscope. The earlier crude but less exotic idea of tribal and peasant revolts as rudimentary beginnings of the struggle of the Indian masses for national liberation was dismissed as an alien imposition of an

educated middle-class outlook upon a struggle that had nothing to do with it.

Chauri Chaura

The gap between the nationalist middle-class ideology and the “authentic” peas-ant mind was documented with extra-ordinary strenuousness by Shahid Amin in his retrospective account of the confl ict-ed Chauri Chaura incident (see Guha, op. cit). He offers a detailed and pain staking description of his visit to Chauri Chaura, where the peasants had once turned violent in fl at contradiction to Gandhi’s motto of non-violent non- co-operation, locked up eight policemen in a room and burned them alive, forcing Gandhi to call off the movement which according to a British offi cial document quoted by Rajani Palme Dutt, had thrown the British gov-ernment into a panic. Amin fi nds the in-cident bizarrely commemorated by gov-ernment in a monument inscribed with the martyrology of the independence movement, whereas Gandhi had regard-ed it as a national disgrace.

Among the peasants he fi nds that the memory of the event had not retained any original lineaments but had been tainted by subsequent interests and atti-tudes brought about by the course of events. For example, there were com-plaints among descendants and survi-vors of not receiving due fi nancial com-pensation after independence from the government for the death by hanging to which several members of the rebel peasant bands had been sentenced. And a collaborating small landlord, who helped the British authorities hunt down the leading elements in the attack on the police station and the moneylenders, is remembered as a hero for having saved the peasants in his own zamindari from trouble with this service! Thus the al-leged “structure” of peasant conscious-ness, contrary to subaltern convictions, presumably shared by Amin, turns out to be dependent on ideas and values im-planted by both ruling-class infl uence and modern mercenary motives. Liber-ated history becomes black comedy.

Subaltern history thus becomes an amalgam of sheer empiricism and ab-stract theory. One does not know what E P Thompson would have made of it.

Chatterjee rightly calls it “eclectic”, but all the eclecticism is directed towards one goal, purging history of all traces of man’s endeavour to shape his own desti-ny in the light of his knowledge of the past and vision of the future, dialectically linked. Doubtless, subaltern “resistance” to domination is documented in prolifi c detail, but it never amounts to class struggle, as “class” is a peripheral concept in the events perceived and narrated by historians of the school. It is true that castes, ethnic groups and women do not constitute classes, and identity-politics has been the response of sections of such groups to domination. But to construct their history apart from objective class conditions is to push the latter to the margins and help prevent the emergence (or the “making”) of class-consciousness. At this point the Marxist distinction be-tween class-in-itself and class-for-itself may legitimately be invoked, for true lib-eration implies basic change in the over-all social structure and ideology. And, so far as I have seen, subaltern discursive practices cannot entirely eliminate ripples created by the groundswell of class con-fl ict. It is also arguable that such intellec-tual support to the exclusivism (difference) of identity politics has fortifi ed ideolo-gical barriers to class consciousness.

Guha, as quoted by Chatterjee, allu-des to the moment of the emergence of the school as that of “the explosive dis-content” triggered by both the disillu-sionment of the older generation (of the middle class?) and frustration of those born after Independence with the nation state succeeding the colonial rule in India. There is also a vague reference to overdetermination by “global temporali-ties” that acted as a midwife to its birth. If that actually includes the enthusiasm for Vietnam, at that time epitomising the strength of national liberation movements all over the world against imperialism under communist leadership, then a closer, more critical look at the character of the Indian nation state was quite in order. Presumably that is not what the founders did, or if they did, it was in the light of the new abstract opposition to the nation state tout court. Chatterjee uses the vocab-ulary of liberal democracy instead: “Fol-lowing Emergency we were thoroughly

DISCUSSION

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convinced that the political order in India lacked foundation in popular consent and that the façade of electoral democracy would be thrown aside once more should it become convenient again for the Rulers.” The proofs adduced were the insurgencies in Assam and Punjab and the responses of the state to them. Now who are these rulers? Whom do they represent? A class analysis was called for and ignored.

The state against which Chatterjee fulminates, which has such autocratic and irresistible power, is now supposed to be making inroads among the people at large, even among insurgency-infested regions, from the 1990s onwards, the time of dissolution of the school. At the same time corporate capital is perceived as penetrating and bringing under its power civil society. What is such a for-mulation supposed to suggest? That the state is separate from corporate capital, an evil powered by its own steam? That “civil society” in alliance with corporate capital opposes the autocratic state?

Reductio ad Absurdum

This weaves seamlessly with the declara-tion that the image of rebel peasant, so far propped up with so many qualifi cations and additions in the face of incessant criticism, is now obsolete. Colonialism has been replaced by the “postcolonial state”. Subsequent developments have given rise to “the contemporary Indian peasant” who “would have to be understood within a new framework of democratic citizenship”, however problematic both democracy and citizenship turn out to be today. This citizenship is different from both the in-dependent mass-subjectivity of the colo-nial peasantry and the bourgeois individu-alised citizen of western liberal democracy. There is to be a “paradigm shift”. Fine. But if mass struggle by peasantry is no longer an option, since the mass subjective con-sciousness has vanished, are the lakhs of peasants who had committed suicide in the last few years to be seen as engaged in some new type of civic struggle of which the western liberal citizen is incapable?

I am not happy to caricature the views of a scholar from whom we all have learnt quite a lot. Yet this reductio ad absurdum demonstrates the impossible mess of contradictions with which he has wrapped

himself up by resolutely turning away from familiar and despised formulations.

Our postcolonial fate is to suffer or en-joy “hybridity”, irrespective of class, ac-cording to Chatterjee. As far back as 1989, Dipesh Chakrabarty, another lead-ing light of the movement now on the ebb, had forcefully demonstrated “the truth that the time of colonial and postcolonial modernity was heterogeneous, that its practices were hybrid, and the archaic was in many signifi cant ways, constitutive of the modern”. Chakrabarty had shown that “in spite of strenuous efforts of or-ganisers (of Communist trade unions) to instil in them the modern habits of class consciousness, workers in the city ap-parently never quite stopped behaving and thinking like peasants”. One would have thought that the strength of semi-feudal social relations, reiterated by Marxists endlessly, would have ex-plained this adequately. The important thing to recognise is not the coexistence of two historical times incommensurate with each other but that many successful industrial strikes where workers over-came those traditions to show remarkable solidarity took place. But that will of course not be conceded by the votaries of the new creed.

Chatterjee fi nds convincing fresh evi-dence of persistence of hybridity in the fact that statuettes of Hindu gods and goddesses industrially mass-produced in China are reverently installed in trucks and buses by drivers and vehicle-owners in a striking confi rmation of commingling of archaic sensibility and modern technology. In a country where nuclear reactors are inaugurated with breaking of coconuts and bhumi-pujan, this is hardly sensational stuff. But is there any lack of evidence that modern working-class consciousness in the industrial west does not necessarily exclude adherence to traditional vestigial faith? Nor does it rule out, given proper leadership, industrial action of the highest class solidarity and commitment. Is it dif-fi cult to fi nd similar instances in the histo-ry of the Indian working class? Is it not also true that unless maintained by dedicated and vigilant leadership, proletarian con-sciousness and morale are subject to cor-ruption and decay? No amount of intel-lectual subtlety can be a substitute for it.

The theorisation of new space for political activity in the hybrid democracy has been brought about by a “paradigm shift”. Of course confl ict and contradiction have not been ruled out of this new ensem-ble. Perhaps because postmodernism does not allow an unclouded harmony while it frowns on any expectation of overcoming them through class struggle. Hence we would have the “sovereignty” of the state perpetually challenged by ethnic, regional and other kinds of insurgencies at the grass roots. On the other hand, and at the same time, the new farming citizens develop a stake in the state insofar as they expect from it supply of electricity to their houses and water to their fi elds, access to improved communications, public health, schooling, and employment in public works. The state, without shedding its autocratic coer-cive powers, demands allegiance to it in return. Thus the new ensemble turns out to be some sort of a Foucauldian construct with an interminable play of “Power and Resistance”, which learned scholars can observe and analyse in Olympian detach-ment. Since imperialism is also obsolete, the role of western states with their une-qual terms and conditions of freedom of capital and trade, enforced with indirect pressure as well as naked use of force and intimidation upon the rest of the world (a game some of their Asian playmates have learnt too well), ruthlessly sucking out the natural resources and labour power that could have sustained millions of lives in reasonable comfort now plunged in misery, disease and famine, remains a closed chap-ter, “the other” of this narrative.

It cannot be denied that the orthodox Marxist neglect of the relative autonomy of the state, which is as old as civilisation, with its proliferating bureaucracy and re-pressive forces and laws, had resulted most unfortunately in the corruption of so-cialism by excesses of its own unregulated state. It has got to plead guilty to a theo-retical default of grave dimension. But at least there is avowal in the canonical texts of a clear intention to eventually free man-kind of its shackles, provided conditions for that are purposefully created. The epi-logue to the subaltern story, for its adven-tures were not totally without signifi cance, might well be a sadder and wiser return to the beginnings.