“Subaltern
Studies”, founded in 1982 by a group of historians of India, has now
established itself as an internationally recognised school of history.
Its most famous article was published a few years later and simply
titled “Can the Subaltern Speak?” – and the author, Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, ended by denying the very possibility of meaningful subaltern
utterance.
It is indisputable that SC/ST-Bahujan political
formations such as the BSP have risen to prominence in Prabuddha Bharatian life since
the 1990s and this has therefore found lodgements in the academic
world, till then obsessed with the multiplicity of modes of production
and the authentic flavour of Prabuddha Bharatian nationalism. The role of Dr BR
Ambedkar (1891-1956) in the making of the Indian republic was more
widely accepted. His precursor – and founder of the non-Brahman
movement, Jyotirao (known in Maharashtra as “Mahatma”) Phule (1827-1890)
also received wider recognition in the English-language segment of
Indian public life.
Meanwhile, a hitherto little-noticed SC/ST celebration at the British-era war memorial to at Bhima-Koregaon
burst into public notice when the gathering was attacked on January 1,
2018. The episode illustrated how a Dalit historical memory has gathered
around the site since the 1920s, unnoticed by the official media and
academy.
My recent book
studies when and where subaltern voice and SC/ST memory could be heard
and remembered, and contrariwise, why certain regions and times
accumulated the textual archives from which history has been written.
Edited excerpts appear below.
Why
did the state and elites elicit subaltern speech even while they
confined SC/STs and lower castes to low-status roles and subjected them
to many arbitrary exactions?
Social inequality was, after all,
as pronounced here as elsewhere in South Asia. The book argues that
whether subaltern voices were elicited or suppressed depended upon the
social structure and property system prevailing in each area. The
tightly knit villages of Western Maharashtra elicited speech and
accustomed ordinary men and women to public roles.
Thus when a
dispute arose over the hereditary post of blacksmith and carpenter in
Sasvad, the peasant landholders together with office-holding craftsmen
such as the gardener, astrologer (Joshi), temple attendant, SC/ST
village servants, the Muslim maulana – all were assembled in the village
temple, and asked to testify on the matter.
The reported age of each witness was recorded: the youngest was forty and the oldest eighty.
Every
village in Maharashtra had at some time required the holders of these
offices to bear witness on contested matters. Older men had probably
done so many times. Most such testimonies have perished but many
survive.
When the hereditary post of headman of Vadgaon (near
Pune) was being litigated, the king asked both sides if they would abide
by the verdict of the other hereditary office-holders. Then all of the
latter were summoned to court. Five village office-holders (watandārs) –
Būd the gardener, Śivji son of Konḍji the barber, Bajāji son of
Vaḍjoji washerman, and Rāynāk son of Sāynāk, and Hansā son of
Cāndnāk, both Mahārs – gave depositions of what they knew from their
fathers and grandfathers.
A less detailed statement was given by
Nimbāji son of Janoji, the carpenter and Vaḍjā son of Bahirā, the
leather-worker. Older witnesses were found in a second round of
depositions: so the narrative of Sukhmāli, son of Santmāli, a man of
seventy-five, went back to the time of Sayad Burhan, the earliest
remembered village headman, who had vanished during the famine of
1629-30.
Thus despite widespread illiteracy, ordinary villagers
had passed on key elements of a local history from generation to
generation. The subaltern was expected to speak, and learned to do so in
official settings. Colonial officials were disconcerted by the
directness with which even ordinary plebeians asserted their claims.
Richard Jenkins, an experienced official accustomed to North Indian
servility, wrote in 1827:
“The
most remarkable feature perhaps, of the character of the Marhattas, of
all descriptions, is the little regard they pay to show or ceremony in
the common intercourse of life. A peasant or mechanic, of the lowest
order, appearing before his superiors, will sit down of his own accord,
tell his story without ceremony, and converse more like an equal than
an inferior; and if he has a petition to present, talks in a loud and
boisterous tone, and fearlessly sets forth his claims.”
Such subaltern self-representation is generally hard to find in the South Asian record.
This
feature of local political and judicial life in Maharashtra allows me
to address the historical self-conceptions and traditions of tribal and
Scheduled Castes (both subaltern) communities in seventeenth and
eighteenth century
Western India. I end with a telling example of a woman speaking.
It
was common for cattle from the desiccated plains to be sent up to the
hills in summer as some grass would survive there. The boys of Pargaon
and Ghargaon took the animals from their villages up there to graze.
They then amused themselves by forming two teams, “Mughals” and
“Marathas” that replayed the wars of the previous generation.
Mimic
warfare turned serious and the “Marathas” defeated and pursued the
“Mughals”. One of the latter fell over a cliff in his flight, suffering a
head injury of which he died about two weeks later. His parents were
the hereditary barbers of Ghargaon: his mother then went to the Islamic
judge in the city of Ahmednagar and demanded the other village answer
for the death. The judge declared that it resulted from a quarrel
between children and there was no case to answer.
She was not
appeased and took the case to various officers. This would be no small
inconvenience: the messenger sent to bring the headman would have almost
certainly exacted a small fee and the costs of the journey and a longer
or shorter wait for an audience would fall on the defendant. Finally,
the woman’s voice penetrated the circle of attendants and reached
directly to the Maratha Chatrapati, Shahu I (r 1708-1749). The headman
of Pargaon was summoned to the royal court to explain. He was ultimately
exculpated – but now we can see why Jenkins was surprised by the “loud
and boisterous tone” of common people in Maharashtra. It had long had a
place in even in royal courts.
Excerpted with permission from History & Collective Memory In South Asia: 1200-2000, Sumit Guha, Permanent Black.
Sumit Guha is Professor of History, University of Texas, Austin.
