Utopia in Crisis? Subaltern Imaginations in Contemporary Bihar

Abstract

The Subaltern Studies Collective inaugurated an important point of departure in Indian historiography and social sciences by demanding that attention be directed to subalterns (a term adapted from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks) as makers of their own destinies. Their scholarship raises three issues, which are discussed in this article. The first of these relates to the empirical observation about subaltern resistance to elites. The second pertains to the analytical dichotomy between elite and subaltern modes of conducting politics. The third centres on the valorisation of a putatively coherent fragment that seeks autonomy from the totality of the state. The fundamental problem with the perspective advanced by the subaltern studies scholars stems from their implicit assumption that utopian ideals centred on reclaiming dignity and asserting social equality are necessarily derivative of European Enlightenment ideals.

Key Words:

• Bihar
• ethnography
• Musahar
• agricultural labour
• agonistic politics

Notes

¹ For instance, in referring to specific observances and customs, they would say “Humare Musahar samaj mein…” (In our Musahar society) rather than saying “Humare Musahar jati mein” (In our Musahar caste). Sometimes, I was told about Musahar “varg,” which would translate into Musahar class.

² Sub-infeudation referred to the practice of estate-holders leasing their estates to lesser proprietors. This arrangement was replicated all the way down to the actual cultivator of the land. The actual cultivator of the land was thus bound to a small-scale proprietor by means of tenuous sharecropping or casual tenancy arrangements: they were either sharecroppers or agricultural labourers paid in arbitrary combinations of cash and kind.

³ Some observers have suggested that this was organised in June (see Mukul 1999, 3470).

⁴ Incidentally, for Gramsci, on whose writings most Subalternist scholars uncritically draw, folklores were the stuff of superstitions that needed to be uprooted and replaced with more modern views. See criticisms of Gramsci’s vanguardism in Rabasa (2005), Lloyd (1993) and Beverley (1999). For a nuanced critique, see Gencarella (2010).