The most illustrious representative of postcolonial studies in the scholarship on the Global South is undoubtedly the Subaltern Studies project. Initially the term was merely a name, a proper noun that referred to an annual series published in India starting in 1982. But what began as an annual volume of essays on modern Indian history, inspired by Gramscian theory and critical trends within historical scholarship, had, by the turn of the century, morphed into something more generic. “Subaltern” now became a marker of a theoretical orientation, an adjective that characterized an approach to the analysis of colonialism, or imperial history, or even politics in general. Leading proponents of the project having announced its affiliation with postcolonial studies, it was, by the end of the twentieth century, widely regarded as the face of postcolonial scholarship in area studies. To be sure, there were and are theorists within the postcolonial fold who are not directly affiliated with Subaltern Studies or its theoretical agenda, but there is no more conspicuous exemplar of postcolonial theory in the relevant disciplines than the “Subalternists” themselves.
The contours of this story are well known.8 When the annual series was launched in 1982, it was received in the scholarly world as the local avatar of “history from below” as developed by the New Left. It was conceived by Ranajit Guha, a historian of modern India then based at the University of Sussex, together with a small group of younger scholars.9 At the time they began meeting, in the late 1970s, most members of this group would have regarded themselves as Marxists. As with so many of their peers in the West, they were impressed by the achievements of the movement for a “history from below” and the turn toward popular consciousness as a research agenda. All of the sketches that group members have drawn up in later years recount the influence of E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and pioneers of popular history.10 A natural accompaniment to this agenda was an abiding interest in the work of Antonio Gramsci, whose influence among social historians was growing rapidly during this period. Gramsci’s scattered but powerful reflections on Marxist theory and Italian culture embodied, for this later generation, their dual concerns with popular history and matters of consciousness. The group that coalesced around Guha was no exception to this trend.
While the group internalized the turn toward popular movements and culture that was then pervading historical scholarship, it also took on board another set of concerns, of a more local character. These had to do with the trajectory of colonial and postcolonial India as set against the wider experience of global modernity. In initiating its project, the Subaltern Studies group proposed not just to ask new questions—about the history of subordinate groups, popular movements, peasant consciousness, and so forth – but also to provide new answers to old questions, especially questions about the Subcontinent’s political evolution since Independence. All these concerns are in evidence in the first volume’s prefatory document, which serves as a kind of manifesto. In it, the editors declared their intention not only to uncover the hidden history of the Subcontinent’s laboring classes but also to provide some explanation for the historic failure of Indian nationalism, whether as an elite project or a popular aspiration for a national liberation struggle.11 The editors thus committed themselves to developing an account of the broader political economy of the entire modern era in Indian history, a theme that had been at the center of debates in the Subcontinent in the preceding decades. The truly innovative dimension of Subaltern Studies, then, was to marry popular history to the analysis of colonial and postcolonial capitalism.
While the intellectual agenda mapped out was no doubt exciting, it did not by any means constitute a radical break from the milieu that produced it. As had been promised, the early volumes of Subaltern Studies pursued the twin themes of history from below and colonial political economy. While the resulting output was exciting and in many ways innovative, it fit rather easily into the cultural Marxism in vogue at the time, and although it raised the hackles of some Marxists in India, the criticisms were not easily distinguishable from the reactions that typically accompany any departure from familiar nostrums.12 Subaltern Studies was largely seen as an innovation within Marxist theory, not as a radical departure from it. This is not to downplay either the significance of the early work or the reactions—often hostile—that it elicited from more orthodox Marxists. But the flavor of these critiques, and of the Subalternists’ responses to them, was that of a dispute within an epistemic community rather than a rupture within it.13
The more portentous departures came some years into the project, perhaps most famously with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” in the fourth volume.14 This was the first sign that the project might be making a transition from cultural Marxism to a more decidedly poststructuralist agenda. This was, of course, a familiar turn. From the start, Subaltern Studies had been closely aligned with intellectual trends in the New Left. Within this generation, poststructuralist theory was gaining in popularity by leaps and bounds. If the Subalternists now turned to Foucault and Derrida for inspiration, it would simply be keeping pace with broader shifts. One of the first signs of a shift within the Subalternist collective came in 1986, with the publication of Partha Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. In this work, while deploying some standard Marxist arguments about Indian nationalism, Chatterjee also offered an initial glimpse of themes he would revisit and deepen over the years—themes that evinced a decidedly postmodern suspiciousness of scientific thought, rationalism, and the larger Enlightenment project. Chatterjee’s book was followed in 1989 by Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Rethinking Working-Class History, which reflected a growing ambivalence toward Marxist frames for labor history, in particular their materialist and rationalist assumptions.15 By the early 1990s, the traversal to a broadly postmodernist sensibility was more or less complete. While the annual volumes still published essays continuing the call for history from below, there was now an increasing preoccupation with textual analysis, with marginality rather than exploitation or domination as an axial concept, with the critique of “grand narratives,” and so on.16
The turn toward a recognizably poststructuralist orientation certainly ensured the project’s attractiveness outside the narrow circle of Marxist historians of South Asia. But perhaps equally important was the blue-ribbon reception that the series received in the West starting in the early nineties. The Subaltern series had attracted some attention in the West during its initial years, but this was largely confined to area specialists and a small circle of historians. To be sure, it was seen as a bracing development that Indian historians were taking up themes that had so enlivened scholarship in the West in the recent past. But this was happening across the spectrum in area studies—in African studies, especially in South Africa, among Latin Americanists, and also in some quarters of Middle Eastern studies.17 There was nothing especially exotic or singular about the turn in Indian historiography. What made the Subalternists stand out was the incorporation of their project into the most dynamic trend in post-Marxist theorizing in the West, within which they found some powerful patrons. The first was, as mentioned, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who parachuted into the project in 1985 with her essay in the fourth volume. Even more significant was the publication, in 1987, of Selected Subaltern Studies, which included a foreword, and hence endorsement, by Edward Said, an imposing presence on the intellectual scene by the late 1980s whose 1978 book Orientalism had already become a modern classic. As a result, the publication of Selected Subaltern Studies not only brought the project to Western academic circles, but delivered it with the imprimatur of two leading lights of cultural theory.
The marriage of Subaltern Studies to post-Marxian cultural theory was a dramatic success. It was from a reading of the early volumes that a leading American scholar of South Asia claimed, with no hint of irony or embarrassment, that “Indians are, for perhaps the first time since colonization, showing sustained signs of reappropriating the capacity to represent themselves.”18 The framework being developed by the collective soon became an object for more