Subaltern Studies Evolution: From Autonomous Subject to Discursive Effect

The trajectory of Subaltern Studies reveals a deepening engagement with the constitutive power of discourse. While the initial tension between recovering an autonomous subaltern subject and analyzing subalternity as a discursive effect was present from the outset, later volumes amplified the latter perspective without abandoning agency entirely. This refined approach, prominent from Volume III onward, redefined subalternity as a position of critique—a recalcitrant difference produced within, not outside, elite discourses to exert pressure on the very forces that subordinate it. The project thus increasingly examined how dominance operates by confronting and appropriating subaltern forms of culture and politics.

This discursive turn is exemplified in Partha Chatterjee’s influential works. In Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, he employs Gramsci’s concept of "passive revolution" to analyze how Indian nationalism achieved dominance by appropriating mass agency, marginalizing elements incompatible with its modernizing goals. His later work, The Nation and Its Fragments, further sketches how the elite "normalized" subaltern aspirations to construct the modern nation-state. Similarly, scholars like David Hardiman and David Arnold examined the appropriation of peasant religion and the colonization of the body through Western medicine, respectively, highlighting processes of normalization.

This growing focus on elite discourses did not signify a departure from the subaltern but a methodological shift in locating them. Earlier textual analyses, like Guha’s "Prose of Counter-Insurgency," aimed to establish the subaltern as an independent historical subject. Later engagements, however, prioritized analyzing the operation of dominance itself. This is visible in studies of figures like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, and institutions like the Indian National Congress, showing how nationalist discourse rewrote history to both contest colonial rule and protect its flanks from subaltern pressures. Themes like the Partition of British India were re-examined to reveal the intertwined functioning of colonialism, nationalism, and communalism.

Critics argued this shift diminished economic history and abandoned the search for real subaltern groups. However, proponents continued to assert subalternity as a radical heterogeneity woven into the fabric of dominant structures. Scholars like Shahid Amin demonstrated this by analyzing how nationalists, confronted with millennial peasant politics in the early 1920s, claimed peasant actions as their own while representing them through the stereotypical saint-devotee relationship. In his study of the 1922 Chauri Chaura violence, Amin shows how the event was first criminalized by colonial discourse and then "nationalized" by elite nationalism through selective remembrance, admitting the event into national narrative while denying its autonomous agency.

Consequently, the subaltern no longer appears as a sovereign agent prior to discourse, but emerges in its paradoxes and failures. As Gyanendra Pandey argues, the nation-state's discourse pitted "good" nationalism against "evil" communalism, unable to recognize community as a legitimate political form. The actual subalterns and subalternity thus materialize in the silences, blindness, and overdetermined pronouncements of dominant discourses. This results in a fragmentary portrait, where the historian confronts the necessary failure of subalterns to achieve full presence, acknowledging both the pressure they exert and their subsequent suppression. The methodological imperative becomes, as Pandey's work suggests, a defense of the "scraps" and "fragments" that express this discontinuous subaltern experience.