Subaltern Studies emerged in the early 1980s as a collective project of South Asian historians, launched with the first volume of Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society edited by Ranajit Guha in 1982. Borrowing the term "subaltern" from Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, the group sought to write history "from below," challenging both colonial archives and the elite-nationalist historiography of the Indian independence movement, which they argued had treated peasants, workers, women, tribal communities, and other marginalized actors as objects rather than subjects of history.
Core members included Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gyanendra Pandey, Shahid Amin, David Arnold, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose 1988 essay Can the Subaltern Speak? became one of the most cited interventions in postcolonial theory. Spivak pressed a sharper question: whether the subaltern, especially the gendered subaltern, could be heard at all through the representational machinery of academic discourse.
Key contributions to IR theory and political research include:
- Critique of the nation-state as a universal category, particularly in Chatterjee's The Nation and Its Fragments (1993).
- Provincializing Europe, the title of Chakrabarty's 2000 book, which argues that European political categories (citizenship, civil society, modernity) are inadequate to non-Western histories.
- Recovery of peasant insurgency as politically conscious action, not pre-political "spontaneity," in Guha's Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983).
For IR students, Subaltern Studies matters because it challenges Westphalian and liberal-institutionalist assumptions, foregrounds questions of voice and representation in global governance, and informs critical, postcolonial, and decolonial approaches to international relations. Critics — including some former members — have argued the project drifted from social history into culturalist textual analysis, and that "subaltern" became too elastic to retain analytical bite. The original editorial collective formally disbanded in the 2000s, but its influence persists across history, anthropology, and IR.
Example
In her 1988 essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?", Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak used the case of sati and the silencing of the Rani of Sirmur in colonial archives to argue that subaltern women were doubly effaced by both imperial and patriarchal representation.
Frequently asked questions
Antonio Gramsci used it in his Prison Notebooks (written 1929–1935) to describe groups subordinated by hegemonic power, partly as a way to evade fascist prison censors who would have flagged 'proletariat.'
Keep learning