Subaltern Citizens and their Histories
A Graduate - Faculty Seminar of the Institute for Comparative and International Studies (ICIS)
Fall 2006
Professor Gyan Pandey, Department of History
The theme of this seminar is 'Subaltern Citizens and their Histories.' Its aim is to open up fresh avenues of inquiry into questions of subalternity and marginalization, and the political conflicts that flow from these.
The seminar seeks to re-frame the discussion on these themes by recasting the subaltern – classically seen in the figure of the Third World peasant – as subaltern-citizen. Whatever its achievements, the attempt to recover the peasant subaltern for history has had to live with the enduring view of peasants as passive objects, or what one might call the inertia of three hundred years of modern political thought. The positing of citizenship, real or virtual, restores to the subaltern the position of being a two part subject-object, and recognizes the layered and intricate character of the political structures, institutions and opportunities within which subalternity has been located, reinforced and re-inscribed at different times and in different places.
In much of the world today, subaltern groups are commonly granted formal citizenship. Even where they are not – as in the case of illegal immigrants, refugees, 'guest' workers and floating assemblages of many other kinds – their existence as relatively stable populations is secured (not to say necessitated) by the essential character of many of the services they provide, and they are able consequently to make certain kinds of claims on state and quasi-state resources. How do these conditions of legal and quasi-legal residence, subaltern citizenship or simply the impossibility of doing without ill-paid and sometimes unregistered labor, affect the business of subaltern political mobilization on the one hand, and of governance on the other?
What are the resources available to different classes of citizens, to different constituencies and interest groups, in today's national societies, which are far more carefully monitored by the state than they were in earlier times, yet consist of populations that are far more summarily mixed, and often deracinated and baffled? What kinds of traditions and histories and senses of community do such dislocated and vulnerable populations invoke? Given new pressures and needs, and new opportunities, what kinds of accommodation and appropriation take place – on the part of the state and of subaltern groups – and what new histories of community and country, citizens and states do they give rise to?
We will take our examples from countries of both the south and the north – India, the USA and other societies being studied by participants in the seminar. The histories we wish to engage are the histories of the disfranchised in the broadest sense of that term: gays, lesbians and transsexuals; dispossessed indigenous communities; New York taxi drivers; Rajasthani laborers in Delhi; African-American and Dalit women; African-Americans, Dalits and women, to take some examples from India and the US alone. In one frame, these are histories of the homeless, the uninsured and the marginalized (and these are always relative terms, as we know very well); in another, of materially more comfortable citizens who are even so not allowed to be part of the polis or city, that is to say, citizens in the classic sense.
At one level, then, we seek to examine the history and politics of elite groups linked with historically subordinated populations, the African-American and the Dalit middle classes for example, the 'Black bourgeoisie' and 'Dalit Brahmins' as they have been called, 'white' but not quite, groups that are under pressure simultaneously to be citizens of the modern world (national, meritrocratic and middle class) and to speak for their still under-privileged communities (in other words, not to forget where they come from). At another, we are concerned with what Partha Chatterjee has called 'political', as distinct from 'civil', society – populations of slum dwellers, domestic servants, cheap labor in hotels and small businesses, construction workers, road builders, seasonal laborers on farms, whose legal standing remains uncertain, who may seek and obtain a degree of protection and support from the state and ancillary institutions, but who can still scarcely be counted as members of civil society.
The point of the seminar is not to cover the entire spectrum of subaltern conditions and histories in various parts of the world, but rather to recognize the variation and sophistication of inherited histories and cultures; religious, political and economic rituals; states and state policies; and to underline the highly differentiated character of subaltern groups and their politics, without losing sight of the undoubted facts of immiserization, oppression and marginalization.