What is the meaning of subaltern studies?
‘Subaltern studies’ refers to the study of social groups excluded from dominant power structures, be these (neo)colonial, socio-economic, patriarchal, linguistic, cultural and/or racial. The term subaltern has military origins, referring to a junior or subordinate officer.
What do we mean by subaltern?
A subaltern is someone with a low ranking in a social, political, or other hierarchy. It can also mean someone who has been marginalized or oppressed.
Who are the subaltern in India?
Since the 1970s, the term subaltern denoted the colonized peoples of the Indian subcontinent, imperial history told from below, from the perspective of the colonised peoples, rather than from the perspective of the colonisers from Western Europe.
Who first used the term subaltern?
Antonio Gramsci
Subaltern Studies. The final is subaltern. Historians who use this term take it from Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), an Italian Marxist and Communist who was imprisoned for a long time by Mussolini’s police (from 1926) until his death at age 46.
What are the characteristics of subaltern approach?
The word ‘subaltern’ as given in the Oxford Dictionary stands for the general attribute of subordination, which is expressed in terms of a caste, class, age, gender, office or any other way. It includes the characteristics of defiance and submission.
Who are the subaltern classes?
“Subaltern”, meaning “of inferior rank”, is a term adopted by Antonio Gramsci to refer to those working class people in Soviet Union who are subject to the hegemony of the ruling classes. Subaltern classes may include peasants, workers and other groups denied access to hegemonic power.
Why is subaltern studies important in understanding Indian society?
Subaltern studies analyzes the “binary relationship” of the subaltern and ruling classes, and thus studies the interplay of dominance and subordination in colonial systems, most notably India, though the methods of the movement have since been applied to other nations, spaces, and historical moments.
What does subaltern mean in logic?
Logic. denoting the relation of one proposition to another when the first proposition is implied by the second but the second is not implied by the first. (in Aristotelian logic) denoting the relation of a particular proposition to a universal proposition having the same subject, predicate, and quality.
Why is the study of subaltern important in India?
What is an example of subaltern?
His example of the subaltern is the Indian rural masses. Other examples of the subaltern are indigenous groups or lower-caste, lower-class women who are marginalized in such a way as to not have a voice. In my own work, the example I often come back to is the 19th century British raj and the construction of Hinduism.
What is the motive of subaltern studies?
The SSG arose in the 1980s, influenced by the scholarship of Eric Stokes and Ranajit Guha, to attempt to formulate a new narrative of the history of India and South Asia. The group started at the University of Sussex and then continued and traveled, mainly through Guha’s students.
What is the meaning of Altern?
Definition of altern archaic. : acting by turns : alternate.
Why do subaltern people have to adopt Western ways of knowing?
To be heard and to be known, the subaltern native must adopt Western ways of knowing (language, thought, reasoning); because of such Westernization, a subaltern people can never express their native ways of knowing, and, instead, must conform their native expression of knowledge to the Western,…
Where did the term subaltern studies come from?
The terms subaltern and subaltern studies entered the vocabulary of post-colonialism through the works of the Subaltern Studies Group of historians who explored the political-actor role of the men and women who constitute the mass population, rather than re-explore the political-actor roles of the social and economic elites in the history of India.
Why is the concept of the subaltern contentious?
As a method of intellectual discourse, the concept of the subaltern is contentious because it originated as a Eurocentric method of historical enquiry for studying the non-Western people of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
Who is the subaltern native in postcolonialism?
Subaltern (postcolonialism) The identity of the subaltern native is conceptually derived from the cultural-hegemony work of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist intellectual.