| Summary/Abstract |
The subaltern is a name that no one has claimed—it is neither identity nor ideality. That precisely has been the power of this invented category—giving it immense political flexibility, narrative agility and innate resistance to being reductively or instrumentally used. Is it this that makes the subaltern a purely political subject who is socially or culturally marked, but only contingently? But then, the subaltern has also leaned towards ‘being’ the peasant now, the poor then, the woman and the Dalit sometimes. Indeed, one asks today if she could be the refugee, the migrant, the post-humanist ‘human’, bare life. Is the subaltern then really the protagonist of history? Or is it history itself that is the subject here, setting up the subaltern as a front figure? This essay tries to think through these questions surrounding the subaltern as a category, caught as it is between being a political subject par excellence and being a historical character. In this essay, I revisit Subaltern Studies as a specific moment in the tradition of thinking about the political in South Asia.
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