NEWSLETTER

In Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference,  Dipesh Chakrabarty, trying to explain the identity of the subaltern in the Subaltern Studies project, writes, “In their search for a mass base,  anticolonial nationalist movements introduced classes and groups into the sphere of the political that, by the standards of nineteenth-century  European liberalism, could only look ever so unprepared to assume the political responsibility of self-government. These were the peasants,  tribals, semi- or unskilled industrial workers in non-Western cities,  men and women from the subordinate social groups—in short, the subaltern classes of the third world.” I know this list almost by heart.  I’ve read it many times, not very differently from the way someone matches themselves to the “eligibility criteria” in a job advertisement,  to check whether provincials were subalterns. It seemed like a natural expectation for me—that a historian’s intellectual project, which had turned the provincial into a verb, would pay attention to those who were contained within these nouns. I didn’t stop searching for some likeness of a provincial-like figure in Chakrabarty’s subsets. The peasant was, in all likelihood, a provincial, but all provincials were not peasants, were they? “The ‘peasant’ acts here as a shorthand for all the seemingly nonmodern, rural, nonsecular relationships and life practices that constantly leave their imprint on the lives of even the elites in  India and on their institutions of government. The peasant stands for  all that is not bourgeois (in a European sense) in Indian capitalism  and modernity.” These two sentences are seemingly simple. I cannot exactly say why I find myself tiptoeing on them nervously: nonmodern,  rural, nonsecular. The provincial is not a nonmodern figure at all, I  tell myself, even as I try to understand what Chakrabarty means by  “modern.” Is the provincial “all that is not bourgeois”? It is not my inability to find answers in the pages of these books that annoys me— the author’s subject is not the provincial but the act of provincializing,  or so it seems—as much as the quiet hurt of feeling neglected once again. 

Soon, Chakrabarty invokes Ranajit Guha, the founder of the  Subaltern Studies project, and his book Elementary Aspects of Peasant  Insurgency in Colonial India. Guha criticizes the British historian Eric Hobsbawm for calling peasants “pre-political people who have not  yet found, or only begun to find, a specific language in which to  express themselves.” I pause there too, doing the match-the-column exercise again: Are provincials pre-political people? Have provincials not yet found a language in which to express themselves? Chakrabarty  supports Guha’s critique of Hobsbawm, and then he summarizes the  ambitions of the Subaltern Studies project: 

After the Second World War, the question has arisen in all democracies of whether to include in the history of the nation histories of previously excluded groups. In the 1960s, this list usually contained names of subaltern social groups and classes,  such as, former slaves, working classes, convicts, and women.  This mode of writing history came to be known in the seventies as history from below. Under pressure from growing demands for democratizing further the discipline of history, this list was expanded in the seventies and eighties to include the so-called ethnic groups, the indigenous peoples, children and the old, and gays, lesbians, and other minorities.

It’s a useful expository description, but it’s the exclusions I notice. I do not think of the provincial as a subaltern figure, but I am also surprised by the indifference of both Guha and Chakrabarty to the provincial.  Ranajit Guha was born in Barisal, and compared to the journeys he would make from there to the world, it was certainly a provincial place. Both Ranajit Guha and Jibanananda Das, one a historian, the other a poet, were seeking ignored and neglected histories through their own mediums—it is not hard to see that the cultural energy and freedom of a place like Barisal was part of the apparatus of their intellectual imagination. Chakrabarty, in explaining “minority  histories,” emphasizes that “democratically minded historians” aim to  fight “the exclusions and omissions of mainstream narratives of the  nation.” It is surprising—or perhaps it isn’t—that the Subaltern Studies project has been, for all purposes and in spite of its best intentions, a metropolitan project. The “peasant” is an abstraction for Guha and the subalterns after him—where is the subaltern in the Subaltern group? 

This theoretical imagining of the peasant or the subaltern, and an indifference to location and experience, forced most of the historians of this collective to turn to exegesis of literary texts. It did not seem to occur to these well-educated and well-meaning people that the sophistication and training necessary for such historiography was unavailable to those in the provinces. I’ve not found a single provincial historian in its volumes. “Democratically minded historians” have not bothered with the “minority histories” of provincial cultures. 

“An explicit aim of Subaltern Studies was…to combat all elitist biases in the writing of history,” writes Chakrabarty in an honest assessment of the limitations—and failure—of their project.181 “To  make the subaltern the sovereign subject of history, to listen to their  voices, to take their experiences and thought (and not just their material  circumstances) seriously—these were goals we had deliberately and  publicly set ourselves.”182 I suppose Chakrabarty was writing from the  retrospective realization of the failure of Subaltern Studies to “combat  [their own] elitist biases.” He is too self-aware and wise a historian to  not notice his own blind spots: his understanding of adda, for instance,  a form of meandering and aimless social discussion in Bengal, “is  restricted …to the world and culture of twentieth-century Bengali  literary modernism,” and his “focus [is] on developments in the city  of Calcutta.”183 For a moment, he allows himself the sideward glance,  aware of the limitations of his archive: “The custom of men gathering together—and women, too, gathering in separate social spaces—to talk informally about all kinds of things affecting their lives is an old tradition in rural Bengal. The word chandimandap—a permanent place for the worship of the goddess Chandi but used by village elders at other times as a meeting place—attests to that, and it is interesting  that self-conscious discussions of the institution of adda often remind  Bengali authors of this older feature of Bengali village life.” Only two sentences on a possible prehistory of the adda in the provinces, and he has to rush back to Calcutta like a tourist who’s taken a weekend break to “rural Bengal,” for such is the syntax of thought—the next sentence is about the rawk in the city, an elevated veranda attached to old Calcutta houses.

Democracy. I noticed the word, both noun and its adjectival form, all through his deliberation about the ambition of the Subaltern historians. At one point, something gives way. Democracy, I suddenly remember, was a creation of the Greek city-state. Is this why it has failed to accommodate the many ignored non-city spaces, forest dwellers,  “peasants,” and provincials in its apparatus? And I find myself thinking of a “peasant” movement against the metropolitan bias of democratic structures a few years before I was born, only a few kilometers away from where I have lived most of my life.

Excerpted with permission from Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries by Sumana Roy (Aleph Book Company, 2024)