Postcolonial Theory and Literature - Subaltern Studies

The connection between the discipline of history and colonial discourse/postcolonial studies can be traced also through the Subaltern Studies collective, established in the early 1980s at the University of Sussex under the leadership of Ranajit Guha. The term subaltern comes from the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). Guha had, however, published a monograph entitled A Rule of Property for Bengal in 1963, which anticipated colonial discourse studies by two decades. The collective initially concentrated on the study of peasant and tribal insurgency in South Asia. Their main thesis was that colonial, nationalist, and Marxist historiography of this region had ignored the importance of such insurgencies. In asserting this, they questioned the validity of the category of the "pre-political," as advanced by British historian Eric Hobsbawm. Dipesh Chakrabarty's Rethinking Working-Class History (1989) is a study that illustrates why a strict Marxist class analysis is not appropriate for the study of the subaltern in colonial discourse. Chakrabarty has moved to a more metropolitan approach in his later work Provincializing Europe (2000).

Indeed, by the turn of the twenty-first century, the entire Subaltern Studies group had moved to problems that are more specifically post-colonial. Important in this area are Partha Chatterjee's studies of nationalism and his idea of "political" rather than "civil" society in the postcolonial subaltern context.