Part of Orient BlackSwan’s Literary/Cultural Theory series, Gargi Talapatra’s Subaltern Studies: A Short Introduction provides a sweeping account of an influential theoretical framework, which has remained controversial since its inception in the 1980s. Written in a lucid and accessible language, the book promises its readers—which one assumes comprise undergraduate students and an academically inclined general readership—a panoramic discussion on subalternity and the Subaltern Studies project. The Editor, Krishna Sen in her Preface, calls the monograph “one of the very few comprehensive and critical studies of this major theoretical paradigm.” (p. ix) This claim puts the book in some serious competition, two particularly significant examples being Reading Subaltern Studies edited by David Ludden (2002) and Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial edited by Vinayak Chaturvedi (2000). A collective reading of the three texts, though varied in their objectives and style, will help one judge the veracity of the claim.

Sen’s categorisation of the Subaltern Studies as “a theory that was first conceptualised in India by Indian scholars and historians”  positions it as a sort of Indian nationalist project, which the Collective did not envision—at least initially. (p. ix) At another level, this assertion is factually inaccurate as even the founding members of the Collective were not exclusively Indian scholars, scholars of India perhaps. This requires particular attention since the assertion reappears, though more subtly, in Talapatra’s reading of the Subaltern Studies. In her Introduction, Talapatra provides quite a selective and spurious list of scholars and historians who led the “formation of the Subaltern Studies Collective in India”. (p. xvi)

Apart from the Introduction, the book is divided into nine thematic chapters and a glossary. The first three chapters focus on questions of theory and method, which I am more interested in. Talapatra begins her discussion on theoretical perspective by asserting that:

Alternative voices, marginalised and suppressed by dominant power structures in society have always found their expression in literature. Latent in the apparent historical progress of society, alternative voices have continued to exist since ancient times in the form of oral or folk literature. (p. 1)

This comes across as a personal and impressionistic view held by the author. One does not have to look far to contest this claim. While in certain instances there might be fragmentary records in literature, is it always the case as Talapatra presents it to be? Commenting on the nature of folk literature, both oral and written, Ranajit Guha, in his Introduction to Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983), underlines that “folklore relating to peasant militancy…can be elitist too.”

Talapatra’s understanding of subaltern and subalternity is more problematic. She sees a separate “European subaltern” and “Indian subaltern” which she deduces based on her reading of Gramsci and the Subaltern Studies Collective. At one point, Talapatra proceeds to situate Rani Lakshmibai and Jhalkaribai, two legendary figures of the Revolt of 1857, within the same layer of subalternity based on their gender position. (p. 16)

Talapatra fails to capture the intellectual trajectory of the Subaltern Studies project and locate it within a larger historiographical tradition. Instead, Talapatra presents her introduction to the Subaltern Studies as a contested ideological terrain between the West and India. She reads Eric Hobsbawm’s theorisation of social banditry and “pre-political” peasant movements as a “Western perception of the subaltern”. (p. 7) Alternately, Talapatra positions Guha’s critique of Hobsbawm as an Indian challenge to the European conceptualisation of subalternity.

The book also appears to be patchy and partial for the want of a discussion on the rich literature critical of the Subaltern Studies Collective in particular and postcolonial theory in general. Except for a brief discussion of Sumit Sarkar and Vivek Chibber in a section titled The Decline of the Collective in Late 1990s (p. 33), Talapatra overlooks substantial critiques of the project.

The book does provide some useful preliminary conceptual explanations and summaries of the works in the Subaltern Studies along with an interesting reading of representations of subalternity in post-colonial literature. However, its approach and methodological commentary seem confused and disoriented, perhaps due to generalisation and oversimplification which may have been required keeping in mind the nature of the task at hand for the author.

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Abhilash Chetia Wanniang is an independent researcher based in Delhi. His research interests include borderlands, legal history, political economy, imperialism, and identity politics in early modern and modern South Asia, particularly the Brahmaputra Valley. He has a postgraduate degree in Modern Indian History from the University of Delhi.