Subaltern Consciousness and Historiography of 1857
Subaltern Consciousness and Historiography of 1857
Subaltern Consciousness and Historiography of 1857
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Subaltern
of
Consciousnessand
Rebellion
Indian
His
of
toriography
1857
Darmhan Perusek
The subaltern historians' rewriting of history has twvoobjectives: (1) the dismantling of elitist historiography
by decoding biases and value judgments in records, testimonies, and narratives of the ruling-classes; and (2) the
restoration to subaltern groups of their 'agency' their role in history as 'subjects' with an ideology and a political
agenda of their own. While the first objective has yielded some interesting and important insights, the second
has led to results which have been, at best, problemati; and, at worst, tediously neo-antiquarian and remarkably
unremarkable in their banality. These problems derive from the cantradictions and confusions inherent in the
very concept of subaltetnity as a socio/political category.
MY interest in .jhe 1857 rebellion is more
than academic. It has partly to do with
the-story of how my great-grandfather
Baba Karak Singh was awarded a 'jagir'
(an estae and its revenues) by the British
for 'loyalty',in the midst of a 'contagion'
of betrayal and treachery by mutinous
-sepoys (soldiers) and disaffected
landlords, magnates and peasants.
Faithful to his masters, the old man, so
the family legend goes, rode like the wind
on a dark and moonless night to bring to
the officer in charge details of the secret
military plans of the rebels. My greatgrandfather's name does not appear in
any official roll-call of heroes or villains,
pre-independenceor post-independence;
he was too minor a figure, too insignificant to be deserving of such notice by
history. But he was rememberedvery well
by his children and their children for the
ill-gotten land that he left them, which
grewsugarcanethat sharecroppersplanted
and harvested and paid one-third as
revenue to him, and the freshness and
sweetness of which my mother could still
taste in her mouth years later when she
spoke of Baba KarakSingh and his family
jagir. So much for innocence.
But I tell this story less as a confession
of complicity by inheritance than as an
explanationof the initial enthusiasm with
which I read in the early 80s the first
essays in Indian social history by a group
of post-independence historians in
Subaltern Studies Writings on South
Asian History and Society, the first
volume of which appearedin 1982 under
the general editorship of RanajitGuha of
the Research lnstitut; of Pacific Studies
at the Australian National University,
Canberra. "The historiographyof Indian
nationalism". Guha stated in the first
essay in the volume, "has for a long time
been dominated by elitism-colonialist
-elitismand bourgeois-nationalist elitism"
['Historiography bf Colonial India',
Subaltern Studies, Vol 1, p I]-an elitism
which saw the making of the Indian
nation, predominantly,as the achievement
1931
1932
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1933
1934
actuality, far more complex than this simple dichotomy would suggest. At no time
in any historical conflict have the material
interestsof the entire spectrum of the ruling elite classes on the one hand, and of
the contending classes on the other, been
identical. Subaltern historians recognise
this, but in their actual analysis, 'subalternity' as a theoretical concept seems to lend
itself more as a description of identity as
an oppressed group rather than differences in degree in the kind of oppression suffered, or the divergenceof interest
within that group once a particularsource
of oppression is removed.
Gautam Bhadra once again provides a
telling example in his 'Four Rebels of
Eighteen-Fifty-Seven'[Selected Subaltem
Studies, 1857, pp 129-75],the objective of
which essay, in the author'swords,was "to
seek after and restore the specific subjectivity of the rebels" (p 175). He begins by
pointing out the 'curious complicity' of
colonialist, nationalist, and radical
historians, including Eric Stokes, in denying ordinary rebels an independent role in
the rebellion of 1857 ("Eric Stokes':
Bhadranotes, "in his otherwise admirable
work on the local background of the
popular upsurge, has also described the
rural insurgency of 1857 as essentially
elitist in character,for the nuss of population appeared to have played [in his
account] little or no part or at the most
tamely followed the behests of caste
superiors", pp 129-30). But who does he
then offer as representative of 'ordinary
people'? A wildly eclectic group, who
seem to have had nothing in common with
each other except their 'subalternity' in
relation to the colonial British: Shah Mal,
a 'malik' (owner, landlord) of a portion
of a village; Devi Singh, master of 14
villages; the tribal, Gonoo, an ordinary
cultivator; and finally, Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah, a member of 'a grandee family
of Carnatic. The rationale for grouping
them? Their 'ordinariness'; "It is the
'ordinariness' of these rebels which constitutes their distinction. Devi Singh could
hardlybe distinguishedfrom his followers,
Shah Mal was a small zamindar among
many and Gonoo was a common KoL
Even the Maulvi was hardlya learnedman
and knew only 'little Arabic and Persian"
(pp 174-75). This is surely naivete of the
most extraordinarysort. WasGonoo's interest in opposing the colonial order the
same as that of Devi Singh and Shah Mal?
The alien masters and the native, as far
as Gonoo was concerned, extracted
revenue equally ferociously from his
labour and that of his fellow tribals, did
they not? Bhadra does admit to differences in the social, economic, and
ideological backgroundand orientation of
his four rebels but, he asserts, "pitted as
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1935
they were against the s..me enemy at the seems to have little or no place in this
ed seeds of 'incipient' revolt. The primary
same historical morient, they shared, historiography is the institutions and
question, as the Genoveses insist, is, to
thanks to the logic of insurrection, some structures of power and economic exwhat extent did these revolts and deviacommon characteristics' (p 174). And ploitation which, in their very real and
tions pose a challenge to the ruling class?
wherein lies the source of this bloody exchanges with passive or inThe struggle of the powerless, if it is to
commonality? It lies in "their perception surgent masses, break bones and spirits
have any political significance, must be a
and day-to-day experience of the alien equally effectively.
struggle for changing the structureswhich
Of what political use is Partha Chaterstate in his [the rebel]immediate surrounreproduce relations of power. This redings.." (p 175).And what, finally, is their jees assertion that it would be totally conquires a clear-sighted and rigorous
histonrcalimportance?That they "asserted trary to the subaltern historians' prQject scrutiny by the rebellious forces and their
themselves through the act of insurgency "to go about as though only the dominant
well-wishers alike of the strengths and
and took the initiative denied-to them by culture has life in history and subaltern
weaknesses of their struggle. The
the dominant classes;and in doing so they consciousness eternally frozen in its strucpowerless cannot, just by virtue of their
put their stamp on the course of the ture of negation" ['Caste and Subaltern
indubitably heroic struggles, become subrebellion,therebybreakingthe long silence Consciousness Subaltern Studies VI, jects of uncritical admiration, nor can
imposed on them politically and culturally 1989, pp 206-071 when the only comfort
their cultural achievements, because they
are the achievementsof the oppressed, be
by the rulingclasses" (p 174). Bhadra fails he offers us in his 'own specific projectto ask how landlords and proprietors like the lessons of the failure of the religious
idealised without noting their inDevi Singh and Shah Mal, had they suc- movement of Balaram Hadi in the 1830s adequacies. The Genoveses observations
on Marx in this regard are to the point
ceeded, would have dealt with Gonoo's in- among the outcaste Hadis of Bengal-is
of the presence in Balaram's deviations
terests after the conclusion of the war.
Marx, concerned with political goals,
If a socialist sensibility, as the
from brahmanical orthodoxy of "an imnevermistook socialist demands for proGenoveses correctly observe, does not in plicit, barely stated search for a recogniletarian power for a celebration of
itself guarantee a break. from the tion whose signs lie not outside, but within
previousworking-classpatternsof life. He
could not afford to: as a great
hegemony of elitist historical practices, oneself"? ['Caste and Subaltern Conrevolutionary-committedto changingthe
neither, it seems, does a confused and sciousness'. p 206]. And what political
world and raising the working class to
romanticespousal of the 'people'shistory' significance can we possibly find in Sumit
power,one of his major projects had to
as a history of heroic resistanceby the opSarkar'sexcruciatinglydetailed analysisof
be precisely a ruthless criticism of all
pressed, regardless of their political and the Kalki-Avatar'scase, that for one night,
popularmovementsand classes,especially
materialinterests.Thus the only difference the Chandal (outcaste) Prasanna had not
the working class, in order to help steel
between the nationalist V D Savarkar's only "burst into and taken over a reit for battle. Hence, he had to view any
The irdian Warof Independence, 1857, enactment of the myth by a brahmin
attempt to cover the blemishesor exag(1909) and Bhadra's'Four Rebels' is that, sadhu and a bhadraloC[gentleman] discithe virtue not only as romantic
gerate
instead of the well known figures of Nana ple, he had appropriated bits of it, along
nonsense but as counter-revolutionary
Saheb, lTntia Tope, and Rani Jhansi, we with fragments from epics equally
politics [ElizabethFox-Genovese,Eugene
have those of 'ordinarypeople' like Shah deferential in intent, to terrorise the
Genovese, 'The Political Crisis of Social
Mal and Gonoo who, in terms of class, Doyhata bhadralok and make a wife kick
History' in The Fruits of Merchant
have little in common, but who,. as a husband on the forehead" [The KalkiCapital, p 203].
'subalterns presumably share a common Avatar Bikrampur',SubalternStudiesVI,
The subaltern historian, as a historian of
'mentality'derived from an 'autonomous 1989, pp 52-53].
the 'politics of the people', would do betculture'.
It is not enough for subalternhistorians ter justice to this politics, it seems, if
Subaltern social history, in the final to prove, by recounting 'people's
revolts', he/she were to keep Marx's purpose in
analysis, suffers from the same kind of
that the oppressed have never liked being mind.
'politically anesthetised idealism' that the oppressed, or to show that, when they did
(rhanks to my son Vivek Chibber, who
Genoveses note in the account of liberal not, their deviations from the rituals and
me articulatewhat I intuitively saw,
helped
history of slavery in the old south which,
symbols of the dominant culture contain- but lacked words to express.]
in its celebrationof black cultural achievement in slavery, "abstracts the slave experience almost completely from its
political conditions of incipient violence
and from that work experiencewhich consumed so many of the slaves' waking
hours..', and, in doing so "denies the
decisive importance of the master-slave
dialectic-of the specificity and historically ubiquitous form of class struggle"
Emeka Oliajunwa
[Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D
pp:viii+181
Rs. 180
Genovese, 'Pblitical Crisis of Social
History pp 196-97]. This retreat from
class strugglemakes every act of rebellion
An exhaustive treatment of the subject with adequately supportive facts
by the politically and socially disenfranand figures. Perceptive, illuminating, comprehensive.
chised in a particular historical context
evidenceof one aspect of subaltern 'menAvailable from all leading book distributors/sellers, or direct from:
tality':defiance. And it locates the failure
1936
Manager:
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