Abstract
New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India brings together a series of papers arising from conference panels and workshops on the subject that took place between 2011 and 2013: the annual Association for South Asian Studies conference in Honolulu in 2011, a workshop entitled ‘Conceptualizing Subaltern Politics in India’ held at the University of Nottingham in 2012 and the ‘Reconceptualizing Subaltern Politics in Contemporary India’ workshop held at the University of Bergen in 2013. This collection examines subaltern politics from a variety of perspectives and in a multitude of contexts in contemporary India. Each article offers theoretical discussions of subaltern studies as a perspective grounded in case studies, grappling with the legacies of the original project and subsequent interventions in this. The papers speak to a recent proliferation of work that examines the applicability of subaltern studies as framework and concept to contemporary resistance, evidenced in special issues on the subject published in the Journal of South Asian Studies (Ganguly, 2015) and Journal of Contemporary Asia (Chandra, 2015). In their introduction, editors Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy assert their wider aims to contribute to this field of scholarship that considers ‘the prospects of politics from below across regions of the global south’ (p. 26), constructing a critical dialogue between the conceptual legacies of subaltern studies scholarship and resistance in contemporary neoliberal India.
The collection’s reconceptualization of some of the binary positions that have plagued the project’s legacies is a central aspect of its response to Partha Chatterjee and others’ suggestions that subaltern studies approaches may not be applicable to these contemporary forms resistance. Throughout it strives for an intersectional, relational understanding of hegemony, subaltern identity and manifestations of resistance. The first section ‘Engaging Gramsci’ comprises of three chapters by Alf Gunvald Nilsen, Manali Desai and Ajantha Subramanian, which revisit Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. As a collective, these authors offer a more nuanced understanding of state–society relations, situating hegemony as a continual process of reconstitution. These pieces answer David Arnold’s call, in the collection’s postscript, for a more complex understanding of the state than the monolith often conceived by the early work of Ranajit Guha and the subaltern studies collective (p. 267).
Perhaps the most innovative aspects of the collection, particularly in terms of methodologies, arise from the second selection of articles under the heading ‘Imagination, Faith, Affect’. Opening this, Rashmi Varma tackles Spivak’s notorious objection to the subaltern studies group’s claims to give voice or agency to the subaltern subject. Varma offers a critique of Spivak’s suggestion that this is never possible, examining representation and recovering the Adivasi as political subject in a number of literary texts. Engaging with postcolonial literary theory that posits representation as a potential act of violence, she makes a case for correcting dominant misreadings of three literary texts, including Mahasweta Devi’s Bengali short story ‘Pterodactyl’, published in 1995. Varma explores the way in which in this text, elite and subaltern characters grapple for meaning over the same event, forging a kind of solidarity through which the subaltern ‘does not remain mute, but speaks through his or her political voice and transforms into a proper political subject’ (p. 124). Varma not only demonstrates the validity of a literary perspective in contemporary applications of the subaltern studies project, but also creates a dialogue with Spivak’s claims, which remain one of the greatest points of contention in subaltern studies legacies.
Aparna Sundar’s contribution to this section provides the subheading ‘faith’. Highlighting the subaltern studies group’s complete failure to consider religion, she addresses this gap through her study of villagers’ negotiations of their Catholic faith and identity in fishing villages in the Kanyakumari district, Tamil Nadu. Sundar’s analysis of the villagers’ religious identity and the Church’s unstable hegemony demonstrates that subaltern religiosity is not a self-enclosed sphere; rather, it connects with various other factors, such as local economies, caste identity and national and geo-political shifts. Villagers in the Kanyakumari district persistently demonstrated this fluidity, drawing on religious resources and discourses to articulate secular demands, for example. Furthermore, Sundar demonstrates that the ideals and technologies of liberal democracy often influenced the villagers’ religious participation. In this reading, local religious structures and orders are restructured, and they emerge as a means and a key arena of subaltern contestation.
Srila Roy’s use of affect and emotion in her chapter on lesbian activism allows for an expansion of our understanding of political action and agency. She criticizes the prioritization of class in conceptualizations of subalternity and the Indian women’s movement, and calls for a more intersectional understanding of subaltern identity and politics. Situating the lesbian woman in India as a ‘paradigmatic subaltern subject who cannot speak or be heard’ (p. 155), Roy charts lesbian affective politics through a comparative analysis of emotional support group Sappho and its counterpart non-governmental organization (NGO) engaged in activism and outreach, Sappho for Equality. Through an ethnographic work, Roy assesses the division between these two parts of the organization, the private and political space—a division based not only on strategy, but also on the perceived division between emotion and activism, although the political struggle often remains a personalized and intimate one. Through this assessment, Roy achieves the intersectional and nuanced understanding that she advocates, highlighting that such subaltern mobilizations around sexuality can be both inventive and normative (p. 172). Through its embrace of affect, Roy’s case study offers a ‘significant site for the expansion and transformation of the political’; a central mandate of the original subaltern studies project and its legacies (p. 173).
Varma, Roy and Sundar’s contributions epitomize the collection’s emphasis on intersectionality, as all of their assessments demonstrate that subaltern identity and resistance are not self-enclosed, but fluid. This emphasis continues in the book’s third section entitled ‘Caste and Community in Civil and Political Society’, which questions Partha Chatterjee’s conception of the boundaries between civil and political societies. Luisa Steur’s examination of the Thervoy struggle over land in Chennai demonstrates that this binary division fails to stand in resistance on the ground. Surveying the various expressions of resistance to Binayak Sen’s imprisonment, Subir Sinha also stresses the inadequacy of this divide for its failure to account for the kind of multi-solidarity networks that emerge and straddle across civil society and state domains. Kenneth Bo Nilsen further foregrounds the fluidity of this boundary, as his discussion of the Singur movement in West Bengal demonstrates the fragility of the community’s identity and its relation to the state.
This collection is innovative in its employment of various methodologies, its expansion of subaltern politics and its spaces and in broadening our understanding of subaltern identity. In Simon During’s (2015, p. 19) contribution to the Journal of South Asian Studies’ special edition on ‘The Subaltern after Subaltern Studies’, he suggests that the term subaltern may be inadequate for exploring political subjectivities within contemporary India which often differ greatly from the originally conceived subaltern as the rural peasant. But Nilsen and Roy’s collection’s expansive and relational conceptualization of subaltern identity demonstrates its continuing validity as a term and framework within their critical interventions. In his postscript, David Arnold foregrounds the inadequacy of the original project’s limited conception of subaltern identity, located largely in the rural male peasant (p. 263). Nilsen and Roy’s collection expands this conception by considering various groups and identities under the umbrella term subaltern, and by arguing for a less rigid and more complex understanding of hegemony and state–society relations. The fact that only one of the collection’s nine papers focuses on women with an explicitly gendered approach remains a shortcoming. But Roy’s analysis and the collection’s other expansions of subalternity to different spaces (particularly urban) and identities (e.g., religious) undoubtedly provide a solid basis for further expansion.
This collection will appeal to a wide range of readers, including students, academics, activists and contemporary observers of political and social power relations in contemporary India. Grounded in specific case studies, the collection’s theoretical complexity remains an accessible read, making it an ideal text for students to acquaint themselves with the debates around subaltern studies. Its varied perspectives will appeal to academics from a wide range of disciplines including historians, as aspects of the collection’s innovative methodologies and theoretical perspectives will undoubtedly prove useful to the continuing application of the subaltern perspective to the past. Finally, this is a crucial read for activists in contemporary India. Not only does the collection, in multiple ways, reasserts agency in subaltern politics and resistance, but it also yields fascinating insights into the nature and limitations of oppositional mobilization.