A
Re-reading of Paradigm Shifts in Subaltern Studies from the Present Perspective
Dr. Elham Hossain
Professor
Department of English
Dhaka City College
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Abstract:
Paradigm shift is an inevitable phenomenon of literatures. An author
cannot but respond to the changing course of realities around him. As a result,
theories and patterns of conceptual and observational apparatuses of the
society imperatively experience alterations, revisions and innovations. A
paradigm is both an ability and a constraint because epistemological aspects of
human realities are always in flux and fluidity. Hence, a paradigm is essential
for the structural framework of cognition and at the same time shifting of
paradigms is imperative for dynamism and onward advancement of knowledge. One
paradigm follows another in a regular succession. Subaltern studies which
emerged in 1970s in the subcontinent under the leadership of Ranajit Guha in
response to the politics suppression of colonial historiography for the
marginalization of the peasants requires now to challenge the domestic politics
of marginalizing the working class of people by the capitalists and the
corporates. This paper seeks to explore the paradigm shifts of subaltern
studies in the countries with colonial past from the perspective of modernity
and globalization.
Key words: subaltern; capitalism; corporatization;
centre; home place; historicity
Like many other incidents in different phases of human history COVID-19
Pandemic has brought about some radical changes in the perspective and
orientation of the present world literatures. Like the history of civilization
and culture, world literatures inevitably go through changes, transitions and
paradigm shifts which are of momentous importance. In response to the present
pandemic a huge bulk of literature is being produced world-wide. For example,
Peter Wuteh Vakunta, a poet, literary theorist and professor with Cameroonian
origin published a book of poetry in 2020 entitled Tragedy of the Commons; dedicated this book to the victims of
COVID-19 and the first poem of this book is ‘COVID-19’. In the Preface to this
book he writes, “The poet refuses to sit on the fence and watch the world go
by” (Vakunta viii).Vakunta writes in the last few lines of the poem:
Zillion interrogations
A propos this strange bedfellow-
Tragedy of the Commons.
Monster with convoluted nomenclature
Corona Virus, COVID-19 aka SARS-COV-2
COVID-19- Undesirable bedfellow. (3)
The humanist approach to the fluctuations of human history and
civilization and an author’s desire for enunciating his stentorian voice
against the social injustice, endemic of moral crisis and the voicelessness of
his fellow human beings mostly stimulates a paradigm shift in the existing
epistemology. Literatures cannot but respond to the time and context in which
it is produced and thus it goes through the historicity of text and the
textuality of history. As the premise of Marxist criticism claims that
literatures emerge out of the ideological apparatuses of the society, the
shifting of these apparatuses are basically responsible for the paradigm shifts
in it. Like different phases of human history, the present phase traumatized by
the world-wide pandemic caused by COVID-19 expedites a radical paradigm shift
of literature inevitably. On 17 May 2020 Indian prominent author Amitav Ghosh
in an interview with the Italian newspaper il
manifesto asserted, “I suspect there will be a huge wave of novels about
the pandemic.” In his opinion, literatures always make sense of the changing
world. As the rise of capitalism, imperialism, political oppression for
dehumanization, displacement and climate disruption have brought about
significant paradigm shifts in literatures, the present pandemic will of course
stimulate a paradigm shift in the world literatures.
In the same vein, during the post-colonial
period the study of subalternity, as pedagogy of the oppressed, emerged as an
inevitable consequence of the response to the process of silencing and
marzinalizing the natives in the colonial historiography and epistemology. Capturing
the very idea of ‘subaltern’ from Gramsci some historians in response to
Jakobson, Barthes, Michel Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard and many other Indian
historians among whom Ranajit Guha was the most remarkable, started subaltern
studies and paved the new way of reading history from below, not from the top,
challenging the theoretical trajectories set by the Western historiography.
Some historical incidents in this subcontinent vehemently worked behind the
rise of subaltern studies. After 1947 only a particular class, especially
bourgeois class very rapidly assumed an elitist status and began controlling
politics. Nation-state failed. Precariat class of people fell into the bog of
uncertainty of employment due to the wake of global capitalism and
cronycapitalism. Besides, “imperialism and postcolonial histories,” according
to Sumit Sarkar, “are equally beholden to the oppositions of East and West,
spiritual and material, and the like (qtd. in Vinay Lal139). These dichotomies
or binary oppositions, both in domestic and international spheres, gave an
impetus to the rise of the study of subalternism.
From 1745 to 1945 there was an amazing rise
of nationalism hand in hand with capitalism. “From long before World War Two
until the early 1970s, the main tradition of comparative literature studies in
Europe and the United States was heavily dominated by a style of scholarship
that has now almost disappeared” (Newton 281). Study of comparative literature
was hierarchical and the world maintained a notion that Europe and United
states together were at the centre of the world. The focus of this vanity lied
in their belief that they were powerful not only economically but also
epistemologically. But in the Post world War Two, Europe and the United States
were bound to think that the countries with colonial past were to be read and
heard. The structure of consciousness of the post-colonial nation showed its
incorporation with the root and history of their own because these elements
construct their identity. Only political independence does not construct the
identity of a nation. Their own ideologies and normative realities covering
culture, language, belief-system and psychology which are mostly and genuinely
cherished by the peripheral section of people of the society construct the
narratives of their identity. But subalternity is not an identity; it is rather
a position or location associated with the periphery or margin of the
power-structure. This margin locating the home place, marked for dehumanizing
scorn and devaluation, according to bell hooks, serves “as a site of resistance
and liberation struggle” (43). In this site the oppressed hear each other and
learn to respect each other. Consciousness about their home place gives them a
thought that they have a task and it is, according to Paulo Freire, “…the great
humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and
their oppressors as well” (21). The marginalized sections of people also realize
that the nexus between power and knowledge of the oppressors emerges out of the
weakness on their part. They feel an urge to liberate themselves from this
weakness and the oppressors from their prejudice. It also inspires them to
explore the root which was overtly neglected by the oppressive despotism. In
this subcontinent the historiography produced by the Orientalist historians
such as James Stuart Mill, Friederich Max Mueller constructed a version of
Indian history without the Indians. The Indians are not allowed to speak in
this irrational historiography as these orientalists keep speaking with a view
to falsifying the social, political, religious, cultural and economic
realities. Shashi Tharoor, in his book An
Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India has criticized the monolithic
construction of Indian history in James Mill’s book The History of British India, published between 1817 and 1826
(Tharoor 132). Borrowing the term ‘novelization’ from Bakhtin, as Ranajit Guha
in his book Dominance without Hegemony
asserts, it can be said that novelization of the deficiencies of the historical
discourses tends to portray the Indians, even educated Indians as caricatures
(Guha 180).Dr. Aziz in A Passage to India
is depicted with all possible crudeness and ludicrous abstracts. In Kipling’s Kim Indian native Huree Chander
Mukherjee is depicted as a caricature contributes to the fortification of the
deliberate orientalist discourse that the Indians are devoid of civilization
and culture.
But an extensive study of subalternity widely
began in 1970s and 1980s and a counter discourse in response to the
falsification of the history of the natives and the politics of silencing and
dispossessing them started its formation process. This attempt geared up a new
form of fictions, poems, dramas and short stories which dedicated themselves to
the portrayal of the subaltern people such as peasants, women, and oppressed
people in the centre of the readers’ interest. Ranajit Guha, Sumit Sarker,
Ashish Nandi and many historiographers and theorists extend the area of
subaltern study to a remarkable extent .Gayatri Chakraborti Spivak empirically
explores the cases of the marginalized women. A huge bulk of literary works has
emerged with intensive interest in the voice of the subalterns.
Neo-subalternism refers to the present
situation of compartmentalization of the society initiated by the economically
advanced class of people and the petty-bourgeois who control the economic base
and its inevitable element of the superstructure, that is, political power or
hegemony. So, now the reality invites all to think of the construction of
subalternity in the domestic socio-economic perspectives side by side with the
colonial perspective that many thinkers assume in relation with Gramsci’s
conception of ‘subaltern’ as incorporated into his Prison Notebooks. In the perspective of the colonial realities all
the natives were grossly defined as subaltrern as the binary opposition of the
colonial masters who occupied the centre of the power-structure and the natives
were forced to the margin. But in the Third World countries subalternity has
been constructed by the local bourgeoisie who possesses capital, enjoys
hegemonic status and compartmentalizes the society into posh areas and ghettos
and haves and precariat. People living in the ghettos serve the purpose of
these capitalists as, in Marxian conception, factory of labour. A female
garments worker works in a factory from dawn to dusk and does not get enough
time to spend with her children at home and enough money to send them to a good
school. In this way, discriminated economic dissemination perpetuates the
ironical production of the factory of labour who never dreams of sharing the
national cake. These working people are subalternized into indentured labourers
devoid of any voice for equal rights. They are forced to be silenced by the promulgation
of the capitalists that they create employments for many people all over the
world and if they had not done it the impoverished must have died of
starvation. Hence, their eyes are deliberately drawn to their hungry stomach,
not to their head because if they had exercised their consciousness of their
location they might have developed the capacity to intellectualize their
conditions and produce a counter narrative.
But all living in the margin of the
power-structure cannot be sweepingly branded as subalterns. Different ways of
viewing the position of the subalterns in respect of the subtle nuances of the
realities in which they live bring about a paradigm shifts in the average way
of exploring the term from colonial backdrop only. Actually, “…a paradigm is
constituted by a set of belief which both enables and constrains research: a
framework or scaffold which can underpin or support further work but which of
necessity also excludes a range of possibilities” (Hawthorn 253). Hence, a
paradigm plays double roles. It provides an epistemological framework to a
particular community to define itself, and the discursive dialectics produced
in it are engendered and represented by it. It can also function as an
apparatus to ensure subjugation of the people outside and inside the community
and dissuade them about the aesthetics of innovation and representation in a
new light. A paradigm also tends to recognize a community in a structural
framework that stereotypes it with prejudice or superiority complex. The sets
of concepts, ideas and attitudes constituting the colonial paradigm manipulated
with colonial dominance and hegemony are challenged by the study of
subalternity in the Post-colonial literature through placing the marginalized
or the colonial others in the centre of the narrative in the form of ‘writing
back’. The literature of the colonizers excludes the natives from the centre
and leads them to the margin. But the Post-colonial cultures from the countries
with colonial past, especially in South Asia give “voices to those who have
been written out of history” (Hawly 425). Thus, subaltern studies in
post-colonial literature pose a challenge to the hermeneutics offered by the
Western canon of theories and patterns of thoughts. It is a shift of voice from
the centre to the margin, from the elites to the proletariat, from the
oppressors to the oppressed groups such as indigenous people, women, peasantry,
factory workers and the people living in the periphery wrestling for survival.
The metanarratives of Europe as the ‘Sovereign theoretical subject’ are
challenged by the rise of subaltern studies especially in the subcontinent.
Subalternity offers itself as a counter
discourse of an elitist construction of the history. Europe occupies the
sovereign subject of historiography and all national histories are the
extensions of the European metanarratives. This disposition denies the
‘strategic use of positivist essentialism’ that attributes to the identity of
the subaltern. In 1983 Ranajit Guha wrote Elementary
Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India in which he attempts to
recover the native suppressed voice. Spivak in her ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’
criticizes the focus on Eurocentric subjects and intellectual colonialism that
works coercively to silence the natives of the colonized and the imperialized
lands. Even after the end of political colonial enterprise many post-colonial
countries continue carrying the legacy of the former colonizers with the
construction of neo-colonial aura. Consequently, a portion of the local
epistemology is still apprehended to be entrapped by the elitist prejudices. It
is often found that even in post-colonial realities in many of the movements
and rebellions common people’s involvement and sacrifices are not recorded in
the local history with sincerity because of the political association of the
intellectuals which amplifies ‘the conviction in the nation states and
historians’ imbrications in elitist and neo-colonialist practices. But the
post-colonial historians and theorists such as Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, Ashis
Nandi, Salman Rushdie, SumitSarker, Dipesh Chakrabarti and Shahid Amin in
response to the discursive ideas of Micheal Foucault, Derrida and Gilles
Deleuze, produce a bulk of narratives that stimulates the thinking of the space
of the displaced. Post-colonial literature in Asia, Africa and Latin America
shows an intense interest in the subject of subalternity with an urge to write
back the orientalist historiography.
True, Gramsci’s Notes on ‘Italian History’ written between 1934 and 1935 throws
light on different classes of the subaltern. According to him, subalterns are
not homogeneous. The title of the first section of his Notes entitled ‘History of the Subaltern Classes: Methodology
Criteria’ refers to the heterogeneity of the state of subalterns and Gramsci
hopes the voice of all these classes can be ensured only when they have a
state. For this they need negotiation or dialogues among themselves and at the
same time with the hegemony of the society. Gramci also regrets that the voice
of the subalterns is muted since the history is written by the rulers and the
subalterns are overtly treated as an inferior subject. Spivak from the
perspective of praxis explores the dialogues between these two parties in her
seminal article, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ deriving impetus from Micheal
Foucault’s conception of the relationship between power and knowledge,
Derrida’s conception of deconstruction, Gilles Deleuze’s conception of
capitalism and Marx’s socialism. Spivak in her article suggests that the phased
development of the subaltern is complicated by the imperialist project” (Quoted
from Hawthorn 346). This question confronted by a cluster of intellectuals
whose task is to rethink and re-read Indian colonial historiography, serves as
a vehement paradigm shift of the intellectualization of post-colonial
literature. Not only Indian but also African and Latin American historiography
elapses the role of the peasants or the proletariat and constructs an elitist
narrative. So, subaltern studies draws the readers’ attention to the space
where these people are intentionally left out and silenced.
In the present situation of the world
economy, developing countries are still viewed as part of the neo-colonial
centre-periphery linkages. In the unequal power-structure of the world the
developing countries find it difficult, though not impossible, to be
self-reliant. Rich European countries are branding the literature of developing
countries as ‘Third World Literature’, ‘Commonwealth literature’ and ‘Diaspora
literature’. But by developing a new way of writing of their own subject-matter
these countries are producing literature which is running counter with European
literature. Now Indian English literature, African literature, Caribbean
literature and Latin American Literature are writing back with a new and huge
bulk of literary oeuvre and bringing about a huge paradigm shift in the present
world literatures.
Actually, the subalterns are not allowed to
have any political voice and participation in the hegemony or the power
structure. But in post-colonial situation subalternity has become a very
complicated term, fraught with ambiguity and confusion. Even in politically
independent countries subaltern’s voice is faintly echoed only on the day of
national election and then it is muted through various mechanisms set and controlled
by a group of political elites and these “controlling elites often engage in
activities that run counter to the well-being of the wider population and, in
some cases, may even lower levels of living and perpetuate under development”
(Hawly 140). Even in this subcontinent subalterns like peasants and workers
contributed immensely to the impetus behind the movement for freedom against
the British Raj. But the historiography influenced by the bourgeois disposition
revolves round only a few elitist political leaders who are idealized for the
freedom of India and Pakistan in 1947.
But in the present state of globalization the
relationship between the centre and periphery has rather been complicated by
the incursion of the mechanism for extracting labour from the oppressed class
of people or workers. So, they don’t find any scope to voice their demand.
Corporatization has bound the working class of people with such a dependency
thesis that the workers living from hand to mouth are not deliberately allowed
by the existing capitalistic framework of economy to voice their demand. With
the onset of the institutionalization and internationalization of capitalism
different multinational organizations are vigorously contributing to the
formation of unequal power-relationship. This mechanism creates a binary
opposition in the existing power-structure of post-colonial independent
countries. It creates centre and periphery and the groups in a developing
country such as landlords, Army, entrepreneurs and public officials hold
superior socio-economic status and political power. In his A Man of the People Chinua Achebe depicts the vulnerability of
political leadership when the elitist politicians fail power slides into the
pocket of the Army, not to the struggling voiceless people. Even Odili and Max
representing the burgeoning bourgeois class of people fail to go to the centre
of the power-structure due to a suppressed disposition of sharing the national
cake and fatal failure in negotiating properly with the periphery. Sometimes
power experiences paradigm shift. But this does never descend upon the
subalterns in true sense as the transformation of the subalternity into a
revolutionary power focusing fully on the normative values of the community is
difficult due to the lack of a philosophic leadership. The subalterns are
controlled by a publicity that they have their participation in power in the
form of voting right in a democratic country. But this participation is also
controlled in many ways through various mechanisms. The way of developing
vision and philosophy among the subalterns is also restrained and controlled by
the centre of power through, as one of the examples, insufficient funding for
the conservation of the fundamental rights of the marginalized people.
In the past, the peasants of this
subcontinent participated in various political movements. But now it is found
that agriculture-sector is subtly and deliberately lying in the grip of the
capitalists and the prices of the agricultural products are now controlled and
decided by the corporates. Banks are giving loans to the farmers in the name of
co-operation. They are ironically serving the purpose of the capitalists directly
or indirectly even if they work in their own land. Women in the Third World
countries are to wrestle against social and economic injustice. Not only that,
they are to fight against social, cultural and political ideologies, local
myths and rituals packed in the contour of modernization. In the name of
modernization machines are being introduced to the agricultural land. A machine
is now doing the job of dozens of farmers. Now these dozens of jobless farmers
come to the metropolitan cities and sell their labour at low prices in the
mills and factories of the capitalists who promote the use of machines in the
agricultural farms of the farmers. All these mechanisms are implemented under
the subterfuge of modernization, globalization and economic development.
Consequently, the poor are getting employments which enable them only to
survive, not to be well-equipped with sufficient fundamental rights to make
themselves capable of voicing their words.
As the economic base in the capitalist
framework determines the nature and behavior of all the ideological state
apparatuses, the content of literature is mostly controlled by this economic
reality. Even a huge part of the main stream literature of the Third World
countries is dominated by the depiction of bourgeois life style. Many of the
popular TV serials, package dramas, cinemas and reality shows are now vibrant
with the thoroughfares of the upper middle class and upper class life style and
even wonderland which always dwells in the subalterns’ utopia. A considerably
smaller portion of literature of many of the countries with colonial past has
started bringing the subalterns into the centre of the canvas of the poems,
dramas, fictions and short stories. Modern Indian literature is, of course, now
producing a huge bulk of subaltern historiography and presenting a re-reading
of the historical realities of the subalterns. Mahashweta Devi, for example,
deserves special mention. Arundhati Roy is also a glaring name in this field.
Dalit literature is flourishing immensely. Manik
Badyopadhyay’s Padma Nadir Majhi (Fisherman
of the river Padma) depicts the picture of economic and political
oppression of the fishermen living on the banks of the Padma. In Bangladesh
Akhtaruzzaman Elias in his Khwabnama
(Interpretation of Dream) has
depicted the life of the oppressed fishermen. Syed Shamsul Haque, Hasan Azizul
Haque and a handful of authors are producing literature keeping the subalterns
in the centre of the canvas of their writings and thus, it is running counter
to the elitist literature produced by the colonial writers and the local
bourgeois litterateurs. But it is found that the quantity of interest of the
present day litterateurs in the life and realities of the subalterns is far
less than their interest in middle class bourgeois life style. Bourgeois
publishers are not much interested to publish books about the marginalized
people. Readers are now considered as market and profit is the precondition of
investment. Investment or money is at the hand of the corporates.Then it is
found that capitalism which worked once under the disguise of colonialism is
now working deliberately in the form of domestic power-structure to keep the
subalterns or oppressed people out of the canvas of literature. Capitalism
inherently never wants to be challenged by subalternity.
A lot of examples of such bourgeois
intolerance towards the authors showing interest in subaltern studies can be
mentioned from history. African authors like Chinua Achebe, Mia Cuoto, Ngugi
WaThiong’o, Ben Okri, Elechi Amadi and many others have produced a huge bulk of
literature focusing on the realities of the peripheral, indigenous section of
the people from the post-colonial perspective. For writing Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will
Marry When I Want) in Gikuyu language about the class struggle, poverty and
clash of the oppressed peasants with the rise of modernity patronized by the
capitalists, Ngugi had to undergo a lot of harassments from the bourgeois
government of Kenya. He had to go to the jail and ultimately he was forced to
leave his country only for letting the subaltern speak in their own language in
the canvass of his fictions and dramas. Ben Okri lets the hungry people living
in the unhealthy ghettoscreated by the colonial legacy bearers speak in his Femished Road. He is now living in
England in exile. Taslima Nasrin attempts to let the marginalized women speak.
But she is now living in exile in India. Then, can it be safely assumed that
even in post-colonial situations letting the subaltern speak and inviting
people to listen to the subalterns is not easy? So, subaltern cannot speak
because those who are controlling the, in Louis Althusser’s term, ideological
state apparatuses, do not intend to listen to them.
No intellectual fashion remains in the
limelight for at best more than thirty years due to the rapid change of the
contextual realities. It is almost impossible for any essentialist study or
philosophy to continue its appeal for several decades. Many of the questions raised by subaltern
studies are not yet resolved, neither dismissed. Capitalism is not now where it
was in the last century. The subaltern cannot speak easily because it is a
violent process not only of compelling the power-structure or the hegemony to
listen to them but also of freeing themselves from the mindset imposed upon
them by it. Besides, the subalterns are divided regarding the economic,
ideological and political realities in which they live. This division
disintegrates the integrated language of the subalterns. Urban subalterns are
not equal to the rural subalterns and the subalterns of the First World are not
equal to those of the Third World regarding the nuances in realities within
which they live. Besides, the intellectual who, according to Foucault, is
‘conscience, consciousness, and eloquence’ and who does not show his
subordination to the oppressive mechanism that he must not say that ‘the
emperor had no clothes’ are now the target of capitalism and as their bourgeois
mentality shows a sort of interest in being stereotyped by the capitalist
framework, they fail to speak in the language of praxis; they remain confined
to theory (Foucault in a conversation with Gilles Deleuze, 4). Deleuze says in
his conversation with Foucault, “We don’t revise a theory, but construct new
ones; we have no choice but to make others” (Delueze and Foucault 4). Hence, to
address the domestic and global changing trends of capitalism, imperialism,
crony capitalism and multiculturalism and to enable the subalterns to be
listened to by the power-structure, subaltern studies is to go through a
paradigm shift in its construction of a new way of approaching the problems of
the subalterns and exploring the dialogues and negotiations among themselves.
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