Origins of subaltern studies
Subaltern studies emerged in the 1980s as a way to challenge how history was being written about South Asia. The dominant historical accounts at the time were told almost entirely from the perspective of colonial administrators or nationalist elites. A group of scholars argued that this left out the vast majority of people who actually lived through colonialism: peasants, workers, women, and other marginalized communities.
The intellectual roots trace back to Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist theorist who coined the term "subaltern" to describe social groups excluded from the hegemonic power structure. South Asian historians adapted Gramsci's framework to analyze how colonized populations experienced and resisted domination in ways that elite-focused histories simply ignored.
Gramsci's concept of subaltern
Gramsci used "subaltern" while writing in an Italian prison in the 1930s, partly as a way to discuss subordinated classes without triggering fascist censors. The term refers to any group that is shut out of the dominant power structure and lacks the institutional means to represent itself politically.
Gramsci didn't see subaltern groups as permanently powerless. He emphasized their potential for resistance and the importance of understanding how domination and subordination actually work in practice. Subaltern studies scholars took this core idea and applied it to the colonial and postcolonial context of South Asia, asking: what did resistance look like for people who never appeared in official archives?
South Asian scholars
The Subaltern Studies Collective, founded by Ranajit Guha in 1982, brought together historians committed to writing "history from below." Key members included Partha Chatterjee, Shahid Amin, David Arnold, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others. Spivak and Chakrabarty were not founding members but became closely associated with the project and shaped its theoretical direction.
Their goal was to recover the voices and actions of groups that conventional historiography treated as background noise: peasants, laborers, women, and indigenous communities. The Collective published a series of volumes (Subaltern Studies I–XII) that became foundational texts in postcolonial scholarship.
Challenging dominant historical narratives
Subaltern studies took direct aim at the grand narratives that shaped South Asian historiography, particularly narratives of nationalism, modernization, and linear progress. These stories consistently centered elite actors and treated subaltern populations as either passive masses or footnotes.
By foregrounding subaltern agency and resistance, the field aimed to show that history was far messier and more contested than elite accounts suggested. Peasant rebellions, for instance, weren't random outbursts but reflected coherent political consciousness and organized action. The Santhal rebellion of 1855–56 or the Deccan riots of 1875 had their own internal logic, yet colonial records framed them as irrational disorder.
Key thinkers in subaltern studies
Ranajit Guha
Guha's foundational work, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983), reframed peasant rebellions in colonial India as genuine political acts rather than pre-political or spontaneous violence. He showed that these uprisings had their own internal logic, organization, and consciousness.
Guha also developed a sharp critique of both colonial and nationalist historiography. Colonial historians treated Indian peasants as objects to be governed; nationalist historians treated them as followers of elite leaders. Both approaches denied subaltern groups any independent political agency. Guha called this the elite-dominance model of historiography, and dismantling it was the Collective's central project.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Spivak's most influential contribution is her 1988 essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" The essay asks a deceptively simple question: when scholars or activists claim to represent the subaltern, are they actually recovering subaltern voices, or are they speaking over them?
Spivak's answer is sobering. She argues that the subaltern, particularly subaltern women, cannot "speak" in any meaningful political sense because the very structures of knowledge production distort or erase their perspectives. She calls this epistemic violence: the systematic exclusion of certain ways of knowing from what counts as legitimate knowledge. This doesn't mean subaltern people lack views or agency. It means the systems through which knowledge is created and circulated are built in ways that prevent those views from being heard on their own terms.
To illustrate, Spivak examines the case of sati (widow self-immolation) in colonial India. British colonial authorities framed their ban on sati as "white men saving brown women from brown men," while Hindu nationalists defended the practice as an expression of women's devotion. In neither discourse did the actual perspectives of the women themselves register. The subaltern woman was spoken about but never genuinely heard.
Her work pushed subaltern studies toward greater self-reflexivity, forcing scholars to ask hard questions about their own complicity in the power dynamics they study.
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Chakrabarty's major work, Provincializing Europe (2000), challenged the assumption that European history provides the universal template for understanding modernity everywhere. He argued that categories like "citizenship," "the state," and "civil society" carry specifically European histories that don't translate neatly to other contexts.
"Provincializing" Europe doesn't mean dismissing European thought entirely. It means recognizing that European frameworks are one tradition among many, not the default lens for analyzing all societies. For example, when scholars measure Indian democracy against an idealized European model of secular liberal citizenship, they miss how religion, caste, and kinship actually structure political life in South Asia. Chakrabarty called for situating subaltern experiences within global processes while still respecting their specificity.
Subaltern studies vs. traditional historiography
The core differences come down to three areas:
Focus on marginalized voices
Traditional historiography tends to center the actions of political leaders, military commanders, and institutional elites. Subaltern studies flips this by placing peasants, workers, women, and indigenous communities at the center of historical analysis. The goal isn't just to "add" these groups to existing narratives but to show how their experiences reveal fundamentally different histories.
Critique of elite-centric narratives
Subaltern studies scholars argue that elite-centric narratives don't just leave people out; they actively distort the historical record. A nationalist account of Indian independence might credit elite Congress Party leaders like Nehru and Gandhi while ignoring the mass peasant movements, such as the Tebhaga movement of 1946, that made independence politically possible. The critique targets the structure of these narratives, not just their omissions.
Emphasis on agency of subaltern groups
One of the field's most important moves is rejecting the idea that subaltern groups are passive victims. Subaltern studies documents how marginalized communities negotiate, subvert, and transform the conditions of their subordination through everyday practices, organized resistance, and cultural expression. This reframing treats subaltern populations as historical actors, not historical objects.
Subaltern studies and postcolonial theory
Influence on postcolonial scholarship
Subaltern studies became one of the major intellectual currents feeding into postcolonial theory more broadly. Its emphasis on recovering marginalized perspectives and critiquing Eurocentric knowledge production shaped how postcolonial scholars approach questions of power, representation, and colonial legacies. Figures like Spivak and Chakrabarty are now read as central to both fields.
Critique of Western hegemony
Together with postcolonial theory, subaltern studies developed a sustained critique of how Western intellectual traditions claim universality. The argument isn't that Western thought is worthless but that its dominance has crowded out non-Western ways of knowing and understanding the world. When European categories are treated as the default framework for all societies, non-Western experiences get measured against a standard that was never designed to account for them.
Recovering silenced histories
Both subaltern studies and postcolonial theory are committed to excavating histories that colonial and neo-colonial power structures suppressed or erased. This includes not just political histories but also knowledge systems, cultural practices, and forms of social organization that colonialism actively dismantled. The recovery project is as much about the present as the past, since these silences continue to shape contemporary power relations.
Subaltern studies in international relations
Challenging state-centric approaches
Traditional IR theory treats the state as the primary actor in world politics. Subaltern studies pushes back on this by showing that state-centric frameworks miss the experiences and agency of marginalized populations both within and across borders. A focus on states alone can't explain, for instance, how indigenous communities resist resource extraction by multinational corporations, or how migrant workers navigate multiple systems of exploitation simultaneously.
Highlighting transnational solidarities
Subaltern studies draws attention to the networks and alliances that marginalized communities build across national boundaries. These transnational connections challenge the assumption that the nation-state is the only meaningful unit of analysis in IR. The Bandung Conference of 1955, which brought together newly independent Asian and African nations, is one historical example. Contemporary indigenous rights networks coordinating across the Amazon basin, or transnational movements like La Vía Campesina (a global peasant movement), are more recent ones.
Subaltern resistance to global power structures
The field illuminates how subaltern groups resist global structures like capitalism, imperialism, and neoliberalism through a range of strategies: everyday practices of non-compliance, organized social movements, and cultural expressions that contest dominant narratives. James Scott's concept of "weapons of the weak" (foot-dragging, sabotage, false compliance) overlaps with subaltern studies here, though Scott's work developed somewhat independently. Recognizing these forms of resistance gives IR a more complete picture of how global power actually operates and where it meets friction.
Criticisms and limitations of subaltern studies
Risk of essentializing subaltern identities
Critics have pointed out that the category of "the subaltern" can become overly homogeneous, flattening the real differences among marginalized groups. A landless peasant woman and a low-caste urban worker face very different forms of subordination. If subaltern studies treats them as a single category, it risks reproducing the very simplifications it set out to challenge. Scholars within the field have responded by calling for more intersectional approaches that account for the diversity of subaltern experiences.
Neglect of internal power dynamics
Focusing on subaltern resistance against dominant structures can sometimes obscure the hierarchies and inequalities within subaltern communities. Gender oppression within peasant movements, caste discrimination among workers, or generational conflicts within indigenous groups are all examples of internal power dynamics that a purely outward-facing analysis might miss.
Challenges in accessing subaltern voices
This is perhaps the deepest methodological problem. If subaltern groups were systematically excluded from official record-keeping, how do you write their history? The archives that survive were mostly produced by colonial administrators and elites. Scholars have to read these sources "against the grain", looking for traces of subaltern action in documents that were never meant to represent subaltern perspectives. This approach yields important insights, but it also means that subaltern studies can never fully escape the mediation of elite-produced sources.
Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" is partly about this very problem: the structures of knowledge production may make full recovery of subaltern voices impossible. That doesn't mean the effort is pointless, but scholars need to be honest about the limits of what they can claim.
Legacy and impact of subaltern studies
Contributions to historiography
Subaltern studies fundamentally changed how historians think about whose stories count. It expanded the boundaries of historical inquiry beyond elite actors and institutional politics, and it pushed the discipline to confront its own biases and blind spots. The methods developed by the Subaltern Studies Collective, particularly reading archives against the grain, have become standard tools in critical historiography.
Influence on other disciplines
The field's influence extends well beyond history into anthropology, sociology, political science, cultural studies, and international relations. Wherever scholars analyze dynamics of power and marginalization, subaltern studies has provided conceptual tools and critical frameworks that remain widely used. In IR specifically, it has helped open space for critical security studies, feminist IR, and other approaches that question who counts as a relevant actor in world politics.
Ongoing relevance in decolonial thought
Subaltern studies continues to inform contemporary decolonial scholarship, which builds on its insights to analyze how colonial power relations persist in the present. Decolonial thinkers draw on the subaltern studies tradition when they argue for centering indigenous knowledge systems, challenging the dominance of Global North institutions, or reimagining global governance from the perspective of marginalized communities. The core commitment of subaltern studies, taking seriously the agency and knowledge of those excluded from power, remains directly relevant to ongoing debates about whose voices shape international order.