Subaltern Citizens and their Histories: Investigations from India and the USA

241 Pages·2009·1.735 MB·English

by  Gyanendra Pandey

Subaltern Citizens and
their Histories
‘How fitting to bring together two vastly different locations around the question of status, of
subalternity. Seeing in and seeing through traditions of inequality and of freedom, these
authors make sense of regimes of class and gender, of privilege and oppression, always keep-
ing relative position in view. Altogether a study of eye-opening sophistication.’
Nell Irvin Painter
Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, Princeton University, USA
‘The marginal and the excluded in today’s democracies are represented neither by the clas-
sical, Gramscian category of the subaltern, nor by figure of the citizen elaborated by the the-
orists of liberalism. This wide-ranging collection of essays focusing on India and the US
goes beyond this neither/nor statement by bringing into productive tension the two ideas of
the subaltern and the citizen. The resulting work is rich in illustrative detail and illuminating
in its intellectual orientation.’
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History,
South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College, University of Chicago, USA
Deploying the provocative idea of the ‘subaltern citizen’, this book raises fundamental ques-
tions about subalternity and difference, dominance and subordination, in India and the
United States. In contrast to other writings on subordinated and marginalized people, the
essays presented here devote deliberate attention to diverse locations of subalternity: in the
conditions and histories of slaves, dalits, peasants, illegal immigrants, homosexuals, school-
teachers, women of noble lineage; in the Third World and the First; in pre-colonial, colonial
and postcolonial times.
With contributions from a diverse group of distinguished scholars, the anthology explores
issues of gender and sexuality, migration, race, caste and class, education and law, culture and
politics. The very juxtaposition of different bodies of scholarship serves to challenge common
perceptions of inherited histories – claims to American and Indian ‘exceptionalism’ – and pro-
motes a new awareness, not only of shared histories and shared struggles in the making of the
modern world, but of particularities and facets of our different histories and societal conditions
that are assumed as being well understood, and hence often taken for granted.
Subaltern Citizens and Their Historieswill be essential reading for scholars of colonial, post-
colonial and subaltern studies, American studies, US and South Asian social science and history.
Gyanendra Pandey is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor in the Department of
History, Emory University. A founding member of the Subaltern Studies collective and edi-
tor of the Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial Historiesbook series at Routledge, he is
one of the leading theorists and originators of the subaltern studies approach and has pub-
lished widely in the field of colonial and postcolonial studies.
Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories
Edited by Gyanendra Pandey
Emory University, USA
Editorial Advisory Board: Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University/Calcutta;
Steven Hahn, University of Pennsylvania; David Hardiman, University of
Warwick; Bruce Knauft, Emory University; Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, New York
University /Bangalore; and Ann Stoler, New School of Social Research
This series is concerned with three kinds of intersections or conversations: first,
across cultures and regions, an interaction that postcolonial studies have empha-
sised in their foregrounding of the multiple sites and multi-directional traffic
involved in the making of the modern; second, across time, the conversation
between a mutually constitutive pastand presentthat occurs in different times and
places; and third, between colonialand postcolonialhistories, which as theoretical
positions have very different perspectives on the first two ‘intersections’ and the
questions of intellectual enquiry and expression implied in them. These three kinds
of conversations are critical to the making of any present and any history. Thus the
new series provides a forum for extending our understanding of core issues of
human society and its self-representation over the centuries.
While focusing on Asia, the series is open to studies of other parts of the world
that are sensitive to cross-cultural, cross-chronological and cross-colonial perspec-
tives. The series invites submissions for single-authored and edited books by young
as well as established scholars that challenge the limits of inherited disciplinary,
chronological and geographical boundaries, even when they focus on a single,
well-bounded territory or period.
1 Subaltern Citizens and their Histories
Investigations from India and the USA
Edited by Gyanendra Pandey
Subaltern Citizens and
their Histories
Investigations from India and
the USA
Edited by Gyanendra Pandey
First published 2010
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.
© 2010 Editorial selection and matter, Gyanendra Pandey; individual
chapters, the contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Subaltern citizens and their histories : investigations from India and the
USA / edited by Gyanendra Pandey.
p. cm. – (Intersections: colonial and postcolonial histories; 1)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Minorities – Civil rights – India. 2. Minorities – Civil rights – United
States. 3. Marginality, Social – India. 4. Marginality, Social – United
States. I. Pandey, Gyanendra, 1950–
JQ220.M5S83 2009
323.154 – dc22
2009008236
ISBN 0-203-87227-4 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0–415–77832–8 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–87227–4 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–77832–9 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–87227–7 (ebk)
Contents
Notes on contributors vii
Preface and acknowledgments ix
1 Introduction: the subaltern as subaltern citizen 1
GYANENDRA PANDEY
PART I
Equal but separate? 13
2 Can there be a subaltern middle class? 15
GYANENDRA PANDEY
3 Race, power, and multipositionality: examples from the
lives of black schoolteachers 31
EARL LEWIS
4 Recasting the women’s question: the girl-child/woman
in the colonial encounter 47
RUBY LAL
5 Casual sex: subaltern sexuality ‘on the road’ in early
twentieth-century America 63
COLIN R. JOHNSON
PART II
Writing the subaltern 79
6 The question of a pre-history 81
MILIND WAKANKAR
vi Contents
7 Writing ordinary lives 96
M.S.S. PANDIAN
8 Subaltern city, subaltern citizens: New Orleans, urban
identity, and people of African descent 109
LESLIE HARRIS
9 Culture/politics: the curious double-bind of the Indian adivasi 125
PRATHAMA BANERJEE
PART III
The state and the people 143
10 Subordination, governance and the legislative state in
early colonial India 145
SUDIPTA SEN
11 Subaltern immigrants: undocumented workers
and national belonging in the United States 161
MARY E. ODEM
12 Could slaves enfranchise themselves? Rumours, narratives,
and arenas of politics in the American South 178
STEVEN HAHN
13 Democracy and subaltern citizens in India 193
PARTHA CHATTERJEE
PART IV
Afterword 209
14 Afterword 211
JONATHAN PRUDE
Index 223
Notes on contributors
Prathama Banerjeeis currently a fellow at the Centre for Studies in Developing
Societies, Delhi. She is the author of The Politics of Time: ‘Primitives’ and
History-Writing in a Colonial Society (2006), and several academic articles,
including ‘Re-presenting Pasts: Santals in Colonial Bengal’, in Partha
Chatterjee and Anjan Ghosh, eds., History and the Present(2002).
Partha Chatterjee is Professor of Political Science at the Centre for Studies in
Social Sciences in Kolkata, India, and Professor of Anthropology at Columbia
University, New York. He is a founding member of the Subaltern Studies col-
lective. His major publications include The Politics of the Governed: Popular
Politics in Most of the World (2004), A Princely Impostor? The Strange and
Universal History of Bhawal (2003), and The Nation and its Fragments.
Colonial and Postcolonial Histories(1994).
Steven Hahn is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History at the
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. His book, A Nation Under Our Feet:
Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
(2003), won the Pulitzer Prize in History and the Bancroft Prize in American
History. He is also the author of The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman
Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890(1983).
Leslie Harrisis Associate Professor of History at Emory University. Her publica-
tions include In the Shadow of Slavery:African Americans in New York City,
1626–1863 (2003) and Slavery in New York City, co-edited with Ira Berlin
(2005). Her current book project is entitled Enchained Masculinity: African-
American Men of the Slave South.
Colin R. Johnsonis Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University,
Bloomington, where he holds adjunct appointments in the Department of
History and the programme in American Studies. He is finalising a book manu-
script, entitled The Little Gay Bar on the Prairie: Gender, Geography and the
Invention of Sexuality in Non-Metropolitan America.
Ruby Lal is Associate Professor of South Asian Studies at Emory University,
Atlanta. She is the author of Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World
(2005). Her current book project is entitled The Birth of the Girl-Child: Family
viii Contributors
and Civilization in the Colony. She is also writing a social/intellectual history
entitled Harem Tales, aimed at a wider reading public.
Earl Lewisis Provost of Emory University, Executive Vice President for Academic
Affairs, and Asa Griggs Candler Professor of History and African American
Studies. He is the author and co-editor of seven books, including To Make Our
World Anew: AHistory of African Americans(2000), the widely acclaimed Love
on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White(2001), and the co-authored
Defending Diversity: Affirmative Action at the University of Michigan(2004).
Mary E. Odemis Associate Professor of History and Women’s Studies at Emory
University, Atlanta. She is the author of Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and
Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920(1995),
co-editor of Mexican Immigration to the US Southeast: Impact and Challenges
(2005), and co-editor of Latino Immigration and the Transformation of the US
South(2009).
Gyanendra Pandey is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at
Emory University. He is a founding member of the Subaltern Studies collective
and editor of the Routledge book series, ‘Intersections: Colonial and
Postcolonial Histories’. His major publications include The Construction of
Communalism in Colonial North India (1990), Remembering Partition:
Violence, Nationalism and History in India (2001), and Routine Violence:
Nations, Fragments, Histories(2005).
M.S.S. Pandianis a Visiting Fellow at the Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study
of Developing Societies, Delhi. His publications include Brahmin and Non-
Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present (2006), and Subaltern
Studies XII: Muslims, Dalits, and the Fabrication of History, co-edited with
Shail Mayaram and Ajay Skaria (2006).
Jonathan Prudeis Associate Professor of History at Emory University. He is the
author of The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the
Social History of Rural America (1985) and co-editor of The Coming of
Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860
(1983; new edition 1999). He is currently completing a book, entitled The
Appearance of Class: The Visual Presence of American Working People from
the Revolution to World War I, to be published in 2010.
Sudipta Senis Professor of History at the University of California, at Davis. His
publications include A Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the
Origins of British-India (2001) and Empire of Free Trade: The East India
Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace(1998). A forthcoming
book is entitled Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River.
Milind Wakankaris Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New
York, Stony Brook. His publications include ‘The Anomaly of Kabir: Culture
and Canonicity in Indian Modernity’ in Subaltern Studies XIII(2002). His first
book, entitled Subalternity and Religion: The Prehistory of Dalit Empowerment
in South Asia, will appear in the ‘Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories’ series from Routledge in 2009.
Preface and acknowledgments
The essays presented in this volume have emerged out of conversations between
scholars of the USA and India, which began at two workshops held at Emory
University in October 2006 and December 2007 and have continued through sub-
sequent exchanges via e-mail as well as in smaller meetings of several of the schol-
ars involved. The conversations were centrally concerned with the question of
changing modes of disenfranchisement, and the historical struggles over them, in
the different locations of South Asia and North America.
An important part of the discussion focused on languages of class (or, more gen-
erally, privilege), and how these intersected with (i) constructions of caste/race/eth-
nicity and (ii) gender and sexuality. The issue for many participants was how one or
another dimension of these divisions came to be privileged over others, and what
such privileging tells us about the history, politics and self-consciousness of these
different societies.The larger task we set ourselves was to open up the question of
how Americanness and Indianness (Indian and American ‘exceptionalism’) was –
and is – constructed, and to investigate the roles assigned or allowed to the subor-
dinated and the marginalised in such constructions.
The resulting volume, the first in a series, is part of what we hope will be an ongo-
ing engagement. It is at the same time an invitation to other scholars working on
India and the USA, as also on other parts of the world, to join us in re-thinking the
conditions of history-writing and of political engagement and possibilities in the
light of our varied, undiscovered and unrecognised pasts.
A few essays included in this anthology have appeared before in a different form:
earlier versions of the essays by Colin Johnson, Ruby Lal, Earl Lewis, Mary Odem
and Milind Wakankar were published in a special issue of Interventions (10, 3,
November 2008), and an earlier version of my essay on the subaltern middle class
in Public Culture(21, 2, Spring 2009). We are grateful to the editors and publish-
ers of these journals for permission to reproduce them here.
I wish to take this opportunity to express my deep gratitude to Emory University,
and especially to Emory College, the Institute for Critical International Studies, the
Graduate School, the Provost’s Office, and the Race and Difference Initiative, for
their generous support in the organisation and funding of the workshops held
at Emory in 2006 and 2007; and especially to Earl Lewis, Provost of Emory