ABSTRACT
In the late 1970s, a group of Indian historians in England launched a movement that first came to public light in 1982 with the publication of a volume called Subaltern Studies, Volume 1. “The declared aim of Subaltern Studies was to produce historical analyses in which the subaltern groups were viewed as the subjects of history” (Chakrabarty 2000a: 15). Writing in the early 1980s against the backdrop of South Asian states’ failure to live up to their promises thirty years after independence (and, indeed, the apparent failure of the postcolonial world)—“the historic failure of the nation to come into its own” (Guha 1982: 6)—subaltern historians sought explanations that lay outside of orthodox Marxist or developmentalist paradigms. They looked instead at the ways that postcolonial nations were imagined and understood, and at the failures of national elites to be genuinely inclusive of non-dominant groups that comprised most of their nations’ populations. Their work was marked by simultaneous attention to questions of power, culture, and the politics of the dispossessed. Today, twelve volumes later, the project has spilled out of the bounds of South Asia and history, into other areas of the world and other disciplines, but it has stopped short of sociology. In this essay we make the case for how the Subaltern Studies approach to Indian history can enrich sociological understandings of culture, specifically with regard to thinking about nations, colonialism, and the production of knowledge.
