Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Critique: Deconstructing Eurocentrism in Historical Discourse

The Subaltern Studies collective’s reconceptualization of subalternity within dominant discourses necessitates a fundamental critique of the modern West. This arises from the understanding that the marginalization of alternative knowledges and agencies was inherent to colonialism and its offspring, nationalism. Consequently, intellectual critique must target Europe and the epistemological systems it authorized. This foundational stance creates a significant convergence with broader postcolonial critiques emerging from literary and cultural studies. A seminal example is Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which provided a framework for Partha Chatterjee’s analysis of Indian nationalism and to which Said himself later contributed a foreword for a Subaltern Studies volume.

This critique extends beyond colonialism’s material exploitation to interrogate the disciplinary knowledge it legitimized, particularly the academic discipline of history. In his influential work, Provincializing Europe (2000), Dipesh Chakrabarty presents a powerful analysis of history as a power-laden theoretical category. He argues that within university-produced discourse, "Europe" remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories. Non-Western histories, including "Indian" or "Chinese," thus risk becoming variations on a master narrative termed "the history of Europe," thereby occupying a position of subalternity.

This Eurocentric dominance operates through several mechanisms. Firstly, there exists an "asymmetric ignorance" where non-Western historians are expected to engage canonical Western scholars like E.P. Thompson or Carlo Ginzburg, while the reverse is rarely true. Innovation from non-Western scholars is often recognized only when applying methodologies derived from European history. Secondly, and more consequentially, is the installation of Europe as the universal theoretical subject, representing particular histories as universal History. This historicist framework even influences readings of Karl Marx, as Chakrabarty’s research on Bengali jute workers reveals.

Chakrabarty’s study confronted the Eurocentrism underpinning Marxist analysis of capital and class. He found that hierarchical caste and religious traditions fundamentally shaped working-class politics in Bengal, a reality problematic for orthodox Marxist historiography. This posed a dilemma: were Indian workers, lacking the specific cultural antecedents of the English working class, condemned to inferior class consciousness? The alternative—expecting them to eventually achieve a European model of emancipatory consciousness—presupposes a universal subject and assumes workers worldwide experience "capitalist production" identically.

This universalizing assumption, Chakrabarty suggests, exists within Marx’s own analysis, which relies on Enlightenment ideals of freedom and democracy for its emancipatory narrative. Consequently, workers resisting through pre-capitalist communal ideals are labeled "backward." This framework also positions the nation-state as the essential instrument for modernizing "backward" masses. Unsurprisingly, narratives of "failed transition" to modernity, capitalism, and development dominate non-Western historiography, reinforcing their subaltern status and Europe’s historiographic dominance.

Against this, Chakrabarty advocates "provincializing Europe"—dislodging it from its position as the silent referent of all historical experience. To do this, he re-examines Marx, noting that Marx’s critique of capital incorporates key European ideas: the abstract human of the Enlightenment and a specific idea of history. Chakrabarty identifies in Marx’s work two kinds of history: the past capital presupposes (like creating "free" laborers) and the history of capital’s encounter with heterogeneous, external social forms it must subjugate.

Historicism views this relationship as a temporal process where capital eventually assimilates difference. However, Chakrabarty offers a philosophical reading where difference is internal to capital’s being. He argues that capital’s existence includes so-called "pre-capitalist" forms; "tradition" is not alien to but part of "modernity." Thus, capital’s life-process does not entail a clean historical transition but incorporates what it deems other. The goal is to read transition as translation, analyzing the global spread of post-Enlightenment ideals from their margins.

This inspiration informs related scholarship within the Subaltern Studies paradigm. Research on bonded labour in British India examines the colonial history of the discourse of freedom, revealing how the language of "free labour" as natural was institutionally archived, suppressing alternative histories. Similarly, studying the cultural authority of Western science under colonialism exposes its particularistic origins, demonstrating how its translation was crucial to modern state formation. The inescapable conclusion is that "history" itself, authorized by European imperialism and the postcolonial nation-state, functions as a discipline that empowers certain knowledges while systematically disempowering others.