The Subaltern Studies School: Voices from the Margins

For decades, the story of India’s freedom struggle was told as a tale of great leaders. We learned about Gandhi, Nehru, Bose, and the Congress sessions that shaped a nation. But who spoke for the millions of peasants, tribals, and labourers who also fought, resisted, and shaped history in their own way? In the early 1980s, a group of historians decided that mainstream history had a blind spot, and they set out to fix it. They called their project Subaltern Studies, and it would go on to transform how we understand power, resistance, and whose voice counts in the writing of the past.

What does “subaltern” actually mean? 🔗

The word “subaltern” has a military origin, referring to a junior officer of lower rank. But its meaning in political and historical theory comes from a very different source. The term was borrowed from the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, who used it in his famous Prison Notebooks, written while he was jailed by Mussolini’s fascist regime between 1929 and 1935.

For Gramsci, the subaltern classes were socially marginalised groups, like peasants and workers, who were dominated by a more powerful ruling class. The key to this domination was not just brute force but hegemony, a process of intellectual and moral leadership through which a ruling class embeds its worldview across society. In Gramsci’s analysis, the masses give a kind of “spontaneous” consent to the direction set by the dominant group, while the coercive power of the state remains in reserve for moments when that consent breaks down. The subaltern, in this framework, is anyone excluded from this hegemonic power structure, their historical activity repressed, neglected, or pushed to the margins.

This concept gave the Indian historians a powerful tool. Instead of seeing ordinary people as a passive backdrop to elite politics, they could ask a sharper question: what was the autonomous political world of the subordinated, and why had history ignored it?

The birth of a school 🔗

The Subaltern Studies collective emerged as a critical intervention in historiography in the early 1980s, spearheaded by the historian Ranajit Guha. Born in Bengal in 1923, Guha was a reader in history at the University of Sussex when he became convinced that the existing scholarship on South Asia was deeply inadequate for understanding the complexity of the past.

The first volume of Subaltern Studies appeared in 1982, defining the project’s mission. Guha described the subaltern as “a name for the general attribute of subordination” in South Asian society, whether expressed through class, caste, age, gender, or office. The series gathered a remarkable group of scholars around it, including Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gyanendra Pandey, David Hardiman, Shahid Amin, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. By the mid-1980s, what began as a set of essays had grown into a distinct school of research whose members came to be known as “subalternists.”

Why the existing histories were not enough 🔗

To understand why this school felt necessary, we need to look at what came before it. Guha argued that conventional histories of India fell into two camps, and both failed the ordinary person.

The first was colonial historiography, which viewed India through a Eurocentric lens. The classic example is James Mill’s division of Indian history into Hindu, Muslim, and British periods, a framework imported from the study of European history that flattened the diversity of Indian experience.

The second was nationalist historiography, which celebrated the role of Indian elites, the Congress leadership, and prominent personalities in winning independence. While this challenged colonial narratives, it still treated the freedom struggle as something achieved by educated elites on behalf of the masses, rather than something the masses created themselves.

Guha pointed out a third gap as well. Even left-wing and Marxist historians, despite their sympathy for the working class, struggled to escape European theoretical frameworks. They tended to fit Indian realities into categories drawn from Western Marxist orthodoxy, which often did not match the lived experience of Indian peasants and tribals. The Subaltern Studies school positioned itself against all three, launching what one scholar called “an act of rejection” of South Asia’s previous history-writing.

The autonomous domain of subaltern politics 🔗

The most striking claim of the early Subaltern Studies project was the idea of an autonomous domain of politics. Guha argued that the politics of the people was not simply a reaction to elite leadership. It was a separate sphere with its own logic, one that “neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence depend on the latter.”

This was a radical reframing. Where nationalist history saw a peasant uprising as a contribution to the larger freedom movement, Guha asked us to see the peasant as a political actor in their own right, with their own motivations, consciousness, and grievances. Importantly, the masses often reacted not only against British rule but also against the elitist brand of Indian nationalism that claimed to speak for them.

Reading rebellion from the rebel’s side 🔗

Guha’s most influential work, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983), put this principle into practice. The book studied peasant revolts of the colonial period and tried to recover the consciousness of the insurgent peasant, treating rebellion as a deliberate, conscious act rather than a spontaneous outburst.

This was harder than it sounds, because of a basic problem of evidence. Almost all the surviving records about peasant revolts, the police reports, court documents, and official accounts, were written by the very people the peasants were rebelling against. Guha called the colonial discourse on peasant insurgency “a discourse of power.” Even folklore and ballads, he noted, were often produced by elites or in support of elite practices and could not be assumed to capture the peasant’s point of view. The challenge for the subaltern historian was to read these hostile sources “against the grain,” picking out the traces of subaltern consciousness hidden within documents designed to suppress it.

Can the subaltern speak? 🔗

If the project had a turning point, it came with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s 1988 essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” This essay became one of the foundational texts of postcolonial theory and has been cited tens of thousands of times since.

Spivak admired the project but raised an uncomfortable question. When intellectuals, even sympathetic ones, claim to recover the “voice” of the subaltern, are they truly letting the subaltern speak, or are they speaking for them and imposing their own framework? She argued that knowledge is never innocent and often reflects the interests of those who produce it. Western academic thinking, she suggested, frequently serves Western interests even when it sets out to help the oppressed.

Her central worry was about representation. The subaltern, she argued, is divided by gender, class, caste, religion, and region, which makes it impossible for them to speak with a single, unified voice. To illustrate, she analysed how the British justified banning sati, the practice of widow self-immolation, by presenting it as rescuing Indian women, without ever including the voices of those women themselves. Caught between colonial reformers and indigenous patriarchy, the subaltern woman in particular had no platform from which to be genuinely heard.

Spivak’s intervention pushed the project to confront its own limits. Guha himself took her criticism seriously, later writing a celebrated essay, “Chandra’s Death,” that examined the fate of an obscure lower-caste Bengali woman, shifting attention to how caste and gender together could render certain lives almost invisible to history.

From peasants to power-knowledge 🔗

Over time, the school evolved. The early volumes were rooted in social history and a broadly Marxist concern with class and resistance. The later volumes, influenced by Edward Said and the French philosopher Michel Foucault, turned increasingly towards questions of discourse, culture, and “power-knowledge.”

This shift is visible in the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, whose later writing questioned whether the categories of European thought, including ideas of reason, modernity, and the nation, could adequately capture non-Western experience. The framework also travelled far beyond India, inspiring studies of marginalised communities in Latin America, Africa, and among indigenous peoples worldwide, making it a valuable tool for comparative analysis.

The criticisms 🔗

No influential school escapes criticism, and Subaltern Studies attracted plenty, some of it from within its own ranks. Understanding these critiques is essential to evaluating the project fairly.

Romanticising resistance 🔗

Some scholars argued that the project idealised peasant rebellion, treating the subaltern as a heroic, unified actor while glossing over internal contradictions. Subaltern communities had their own hierarchies, including caste divisions, that complicated any neat picture of solidarity from below.

The decline into theory 🔗

The sharpest critique came from Sumit Sarkar, an early contributor who later wrote an essay pointedly titled “The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies.” Sarkar argued that the turn towards Foucauldian and postmodern theory abandoned the empirical and Marxist commitments that had made the first volumes so powerful. In his view, the early socialist inspiration gave the project real impact within India, while the later emphasis on Western discourse hardened the colonizer-subaltern divide and won fame mainly in Western universities. He warned against an “uncritical cult” of the popular and the subaltern that came bundled with a rejection of reason itself.

Neglecting the state 🔗

By focusing so heavily on autonomous resistance from below, critics argued, the school sometimes underplayed the role of modern state structures in actually shaping the lives of subaltern people. More recently, scholars such as Vivek Chibber have challenged the school’s claim that European theoretical categories simply cannot explain Indian society, arguing that peasants everywhere are perfectly capable of recognising and acting on their own material interests.

Why it still matters 🔗

Whatever its limitations, the Subaltern Studies school permanently changed the practice of history. It made the recovery of “the small voices of history” a respectable and central goal of scholarship. It taught a generation of historians to be suspicious of official archives and to ask who is being silenced in any account of the past.

The questions it raised remain urgent. In an era of deep inequality, caste tensions, and debates over who gets to represent whom, the core insight endures: history written only from the top down is incomplete, and the people at the margins are agents of their own story, not just objects in someone else’s. Whether we can ever fully hear them remains an open and difficult question, which is perhaps the most honest legacy the school left behind.

What do you think? If almost every surviving record of a peasant revolt was written by those in power, can a historian ever truly recover the rebel’s own voice, or only a careful guess about it? And in today’s society, who are the subalterns whose perspectives are still missing from the stories we tell about ourselves?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gramsci/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranajit_Guha
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaltern_Studies
4. https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2020/02/17/subaltern-studies/
5. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/can-the-subaltern-speak/9780231143851/
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumit_Sarkar