UNDERSTANDING CONCEPT AND ORIGIN OF SUBALTERN STUDIES

What is all about Subaltern Studies?

In critical theory and post-colonialism, ‘subaltern’ refers to population who are socially, politically and geographically outside the hegemonic power structure of colony and colonial homeland. To describe ‘history told from below’ the tern subaltern is derived from Antonio Gramsci’s work ‘cultural hegemony’ which identifies the groups that are excluded from established structure of society for political representation; therefore there is denial of means to have their voice heard in society.

The term subaltern and subaltern studies come to exist in post-colonial era with the work of subaltern studies group, a collection of south Asian historians who play political actor role of men and women as mass population rather than political role of social and economic elites in history of south Asia.

Marxist historian were investigating colonial history as told from perspectives of proletariat, using the concept of social class to determine economic relation between bourgeois and proletariat. In 1970s there was start of subaltern perspective in which history is told from colonized people from Indian subcontinent rather than colonizers.

The ‘Subaltern’ concept is of problematic, because it originates from Eurocentric method of enquiry in the study of non-western people of Asian, Africa and Middle East. From its inception as historical research model of study of Colonial experience in south Asian peoples, it transformed from model of intellectual discourse into method of ‘vigorous post-colonial critique’.

The term ‘subaltern’ is used in the field of history, anthropology, sociology, human geography and literature criticism.

In Postcolonial theory, subaltern describes as lower classes and social groups who are at the margin of a society- a subaltern is a person rendered without agency due to his/her social status.

In Phenomenology the other and the constituting other each identity a cumulative, constituting factor in the self-image of a person –the acknowledge of being real.

Imperialism/colonialism in which imperialist world systems, political and economic affairs of empires were fragmented and empires ‘provide for most...........