Rethinking Subalterns, Archives and Histories in the Present: a roundtable

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Today, curious readers coming to this Roundtable might find in the mention of the subaltern a distant, ghostly echo resonant of bygone years.And so, too, Subaltern Studies as a collective endeavour-one that explored such subordinate subjects-can signal in the present something of a done-and-dusted doodah from the past.Yet, is it possible for the figure of the subaltern to intimate instead a salient presence-exactly in the here-and-now, amidst all our grave immediacies?Might we now be in the face of a spectral-substantive subaltern that acutely haunts and severally shapes our habitations at large?Can the Subaltern Studies project in turn be approached and understood as an "archival formation", one that sheds light on the unravelling of historiographical worlds-and the human sciences at large-over the last five decades?The particular tasks and wider horizons at stake are neither "presentist" nor "antiquarian."They point rather to careful histories and critical genealogies of the present, drawing in and turning on gender and race, indigeneity and indenture, age and sexuality, slavery and apartheid, the Ádivasi and the Dalit, 1 settler-colonialisms and nations, nature and environment, caste and tribe, diaspora and blackness, capital and property, science and technology, heteronormativity and queerness, and politics and justice.It is such questions and related issues that this Roundtable wishes to explore, focusing on The Routledge Handbook of Subalterns across History, 2 which was published recently.CA: Let us open with this question of methods.Perhaps some of the bestknown interventions of Subaltern Studies are critiques of the archives, especially their limitations and impossibilities.Ishita, as one of the editors of the Handbook, I wanted to ask for your reflections on how these have shaped the field's approach to historical writing and its larger influence.IB: Thanks Clare.I would like to redirect your question somewhat and comment on the productive possibilities of reading the "archives" imaginatively and critically that Subaltern Studies suggested.Indeed, the appearance of the peasant in colonial records only as insurgents enabled Ranajit Guha and other members of the collective to try and recover the peasant as the ideal representative of the collective "subaltern" subject in colonial India.Peasant (political) consciousness was captured in moments of crisis, i.e. of insurgency.Ranajit Guha's Elementary Aspects dwelt at length on the implications of the use of particular words such as insurgency by colonial [89.117.155.10]Project MUSE (2025-12-11 15:36 GMT) ©2025 Clare Anderson et al. and The Johns Hopkins University Pressadministrators and the language of official reports in general to offer an entirely new way of approaching and working one's way through the archives.3 The biases and silences in the articulations gave Guha access to the "official mind struggling to comprehend" such "apparently unanticipated phenomenon" (insurgency) by means of "analogy."The purpose was to "prevent such happenings in the future."Shahid Amin's classic Event, Metaphor, Memory put it succinctly: "In order not to write like the Judge, I have tried to find out how the Judge wrote." 4 Guha's indications of the struggles of the official mind to grasp unanticipated phenomenon and the serious transformations that comprehension through analogy entailed, and Amin's provocation to find out how the judge wrote provided instances of imaginatively astute engagements with the official archive that inspired several novice trainee historians of my cohort.The close and critical attention to language, the incitement to read the archives along the grain, against the grain and between the lines to make them do more than what they seemingly stand for and learn from their limitations, together with the emphasis on complementing the 'canonical archives' with non-canonical ones have made the archives come alive in distinct ways.In Gautam Bhadra's words, the archives are animate (sajeev in Bangla) and living: the simplest artefacts of everyday life-from old postcards to worn, yellowed family photographs, advertising handbills to signboards of shops-are components of archives that give researchers access to evolving social, political, economic lives of human subjects."5 More importantly, it was such productive approach toward the "archive" that made possible Subaltern Studies' critical intervention in historiography poised on its struggles to change the parameters (and content and bias) of history-writing.SD: Ishita's arguments regarding Subaltern Studies as articulating the acute limits and containments of the archive in order to turn these into key conditions of immense possibility toward archival reading/ revelation are crucial.Consider also how such procedures come alive in Ranajit Guha's essay "Chandra's Death," albeit in ways that yet raise further questions about authority and alterity, archival and otherwise.6 At the same, it is important to return to Clare's salient observation regarding Subaltern Studies as pointing to the impossibility of the archive.Here, it is worth recalling that from the second half of the 1980s, Subaltern Studies gained importance and notoriety, especially in the North American academy.This had wider echoes and key consequences.It meant that the more splashy reception of the project now turned on its being cast principally as a modality of "postcolonial criticism."Arguably, here were to be found rushed readings and impatient appraisals that brought into play aggrandizements of "theory" over "history."At stake also were renderings of the imperial archive as a means mainly of anti-colonial critique.7 Reduced to formulae, sublimated and overlooked were critical questions of the times-posed, for instance, by Gayatri Spivak and Rosalind O'Hanlon-regarding exactly what remained unsaid and under-thought within Subaltern Studies and postfoundational radical European thought, at large.8 (Several of these issues are discussed in the Introduction to the Handbook).9 At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that the very clamour around Subaltern Studies could have other archival affects and disciplinary effects, including unintended ones, in fields of history-writing as well as historical anthropology across Africa and the Antipodes,

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