Indian Historiography After 1947: From Cambridge School Critiques to Subaltern and Feminist Perspectives

By the 1970s, internal political developments and new anthropological approaches generated a rich body of work analyzing broader social structures and their cultural expressions. This period also witnessed the nascent interest in women's history, gender studies, and environmental history. While the colonial period and nationalist movement remained central, established narratives faced fresh challenges. Marxist historians like Bipan Chandra had analyzed colonialism as a structure of international capitalism, emphasizing economic exploitation. Scholars now countered colonial stereotypes of a stagnant pre-colonial India with evidence of proto-capitalist forms, monetization, and technological innovation.

The dominant, idealized narrative of a unified freedom struggle led by figures like Gandhi and Nehru began to be rigorously questioned. The Cambridge School, notably through Anil Seal and John Gallagher, shifted focus to "indigenous politics" and local collaboration. They argued that British imperialism functioned through the collaboration or non-collaboration of local elites, portraying nationalist politics as a competition for status and resources within colonial institutions. This "animal politics" interpretation dismantled the image of a purely idealistic national movement, highlighting divisions, localities, and continuities between pre-colonial and colonial power structures.

Indian historians strongly criticized the Cambridge School for its cynical, neo-colonialist vision that seemingly reduced patriotism to mere opportunism. However, it successfully complicated the colonial/anti-colonial binary. Concurrently, younger scholars exposed the Indian National Congress's harsh suppression of worker and peasant militancy. This critique of both nationalist and Cambridge elitist historiography paved the way for the Subaltern Studies collective, founded in 1982 under Ranajit Guha.

Subaltern Studies aimed to establish a decolonized perspective by focusing on the autonomous politics of the masses—peasants, tribals, and lower castes—who acted "independently of the elite." It sought to recover subaltern consciousness and agency, viewing rebellion as a conscious political act against symbols of domination, not merely a pre-political reflex. This represented a significant shift from Marxist class analysis, redefining the political domain to include popular resistance rooted in community and tradition.

The project later engaged deeply with postcolonial theory and post-structuralism. Scholars like Gayatri Spivak raised critical questions about representing subaltern subjectivity and the paradox of intellectuals "speaking for" the subaltern. Internal critics, such as Sumit Sarkar, noted a problematic shift toward culturalism and postmodernism, which risked dehistoricizing the subaltern and valorizing the fragment over the wider social formation. This "later" Subaltern Studies critiqued the post-Enlightenment nation-state project itself, seeking authentic resistance in communities untouched by nationalist or Western hegemony.

This theoretical repudiation of Western models extended to critiques of historical consciousness itself. Thinkers like Ashis Nandy argued that the adoption of Western historical reason constituted a "second colonization," suppressing indigenous mythic and moral modes of self-knowledge. While most historians rejected this extreme position, it underscored intense debates about epistemology and the provincializing of European historical models.

A major lacuna in all these schools was the history of women. Prior to the 1970s, women's history was limited to celebratory narratives of exceptional figures or participation in the freedom struggle. The rise of the women's movement catalyzed a critical, systematic research agenda. This feminist historiography focused on recovering non-elite women's experiences and was explicitly aligned with activist causes, reflecting the deeply engaged political nature of Indian historical scholarship. Thus, by the late 20th century, Indian historiography had evolved into a vibrant, contested field, moving from nation-building narratives to complex explorations of power, agency, and identity from multiple, often conflicting, perspectives.