Subaltern Studies: Methodology, Gramscian Influence, and Recovering Agency

As declared by Ranajit Guha in the preface to its first volume, Subaltern Studies aimed to promote the examination of subalternist themes within South Asian studies. The project’s defining term, ‘subaltern’, was drawn from the writings of Antonio Gramsci, referring to subordination across axes of class, caste, gender, race, language, and culture, thus signifying the centrality of power relations in historical analysis. Guha clarified that while the project would not ignore dominant groups, its core aim was to rectify the pervasive elitist bias in academic research on South Asia. This rectification sprang from the conviction that elites had exercised dominance, but not hegemony in the Gramscian sense, over subordinated groups.

A foundational reflection of this belief was Guha’s argument for subaltern political autonomy. He asserted that the subalterns had acted in history independently of the elite, constituting an autonomous domain of politics that neither originated from nor depended upon elite initiatives. While this focus on subordination remained central, the specific conception of subalternity itself witnessed significant shifts and varied applications across the project’s lifespan. Contributors naturally differed in their orientations, and a clear evolution in interests, focus, and theoretical grounding is evident across the twelve volumes and associated monographs, yet the consistent effort to rethink history from the subaltern perspective remained the unifying thread.

Methodological Evolution and the "Prose of Counter-Insurgency". The initial volume, while containing excellent scholarship on agrarian history and peasant-nationalist relations, did not fully clarify how adopting the subaltern’s perspective would undo the "spurious primacy" assigned to elites. Its critiques of nationalist narratives and detailed socio-economic histories, though thorough, were not entirely unprecedented in Marxist historiography. The project’s novel insurgency became unmistakably clear with its second volume, which made forthright claims about the subaltern subject and demonstrated how colonialist, nationalist, and Marxist narratives had systematically denied subaltern agency.

In his seminal essay "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency," Guha provided a methodological breakthrough by analyzing historical writings on peasant insurgency as counter-insurgent texts. He distinguished three types of discourse—primary, secondary, and tertiary—differentiated by their temporal proximity to events and their identification with the official viewpoint. Guha meticulously traced a "counter-insurgent code" through these layers, showing how initial official accounts (primary) were processed into reports (secondary) and ultimately incorporated into the seemingly neutral narratives of historians (tertiary). This code functioned to appropriate the insurgent’s voice by explaining rebellion through external causality—whether colonial oppression or economic grievance—thereby denying the internal logic of consciousness and agency of the rebels themselves.

The Recovery of the Subject and Its Complications. The project’s drive to restore agency inherently involved, as scholar Rosalind O’Hanlon noted, the "recovery of the subject." This was exemplified in Guha’s landmark work, "Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India," which sought to recover the peasant from elite projects and positivist historiography through rigorous, against-the-grain readings of colonial records. Guha uncovered the insurgent consciousness manifest in rumors, mythic visions, religiosity, and community bonds, presenting forms of subaltern political community at odds with conventional models of nation and class.

However, this endeavor was fraught with complication. The subalternist search for an autonomous subject-agent frequently culminated in the discovery of the failure of that agency, as subalternity, by definition, signifies constrained autonomy. Furthermore, unlike Western "history from below," Subaltern Studies engaged deeply with antihumanist structuralist and post-structuralist theorists like Foucault, Barthes, and Lévi-Strauss. This theoretical reliance, partly necessitated by the absence of first-person subaltern sources, introduced an awareness that the colonial subaltern was not a universal category and that resistance was both opposed to and constituted by power. Consequently, the project could not be a simple application of Western social history methods; it had to conceptualize subalternity differently and write irreducibly different histories, a tension that fueled its critical innovation.