ABSTRACT
Many scholars from the South are concerned that the discipline as it is practiced in Western universities recasts the anthropological literatures from these regions within the metropolitan protocols of reading, thereby reducing them to minor or merely regional traditions. While peasant rebellions were the dominant theme of Guha’s writings, the theme of sexual sovereignty and the symbolic organization of gender joined the subaltern writings more explicitly with postcolonial theory. The different trajectories of subaltern studies, as contemporary history in India and as postcolonial studies in the West, deserves close attention, as these problematize the role of location in the production and circulation of the social sciences. Subaltern historians were slow to address the question of Hindu–Muslim relations and the communal violence of the Partition, either because these events were too or because they were hard to fit within the subaltern framework.
