Editor’s note

Many of the articles in this issue focus on subaltern resistance in literature, albeit in different forms and in relation to diverse locations; Pakistan, India, New Zealand, the Philippines and Japan. The key concepts invoked are subaltern resistance, subaltern narrative voices, subaltern politics, human rights discourse and “knowing subalternity” – the awareness of people’s own oppression. Subaltern Studies, established by Ranajit Guha and fellow historians, became a field of enquiry in the 1980s in an attempt to redress the propensity in South Asian historiography to focus on the elite culture instead of the subaltern classes. Although they recognized diversity in subaltern groups, Gayatri Spivak’s critical question “Can the subaltern speak?” challenged the assumptions of the Subaltern historians, pointing to their essentialist premises in addressing subalternity, a class defined by its difference from the elite (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1999, 216–218). This line of enquiry has become an imperative concern in postcolonial studies as the articles in this issue show. Those by Nazneen Ahmed, Rajender Kaur and Pramod K. Nayar introduce literary representations of cultural resistance and protest, while specific reference to Spivak is made by Madhurima Chakraborty, Sujatha Moni and Megha Anwer.

Nazneen Ahmed discusses poetry of resistance, in particular Ekushey poems in the context of Bengali resistance in East Pakistan to the proposed imposition of Urdu as the national language, at the time of the newly formed nation of Pakistan. Ahmed argues that poetry, rather than fiction, is more specific to articulating Bengali resistance to the Pakistan state due to the fact that oral dissemination provides a collective expression or, in Kamau Brathwaite’s terms, “nation language”. The role of orally recited poetry is “particularly crucial in colonized societies of limited literacy”, claims Ahmed, since it enables a shared dialect to mobilize collective resistance. Rajender Kaur, in her article on the Bengal famine of 1943, begins with the premise that literature and art also shaped cultural and political debates by “articulating a range of perspectives on issues of peasant agency and resistance”. Bengal famine literature, she explains, has a predominant focus on the nationalist campaign of Quit India and on colonial misrule, whilst ignoring the more pressing issues of inequalities of class, caste and gender. Kaur examines three texts that offer disparate views on famine resistance or its absence. Madhurima Chakraborty’s interview with the Bengali fiction writer and activist Mahasweta Devi, which follows, continues the debate on subaltern narrative voices. Devi, who writes about tribal groups and lower-caste communities, stresses the importance of social responsibility in writing. The difficulty of speaking for the subaltern has always been a concern in postcolonial studies, as Spivak’s seminal work acknowledges, and although Chakraborty points to paradoxes of creativity and the representation of reality in Devi’s work, Devi proclaims that the importance of fiction is to know and write about people’s lives, in an attempt to represent real circumstances. “The literary and the cultural contribute as much to the construction of a human rights discourse as does the juridical and political”, asserts Pramod K. Nayar in his article, while arguing that subaltern writings must be treated not merely as social documents but given the same attention as mainstream literature. In his examination of three life narratives by Dalits, socially oppressed castes in India, Nayar looks at specific narrative devices which he calls “eco-tropics” to highlight subaltern narrative voices and their relationship with the land. The narratives of these texts show a distinction between oppression and dignity, proposing a moral economy. However, Nayar also refers to a “knowing subalternity”, where people are actively aware of various forms of oppression: “the knowing subaltern is able to look at rights, trope wrongs, and make demands for fairer development processes”.

Aravind Adiga’s novel The White Tiger is also associated with subaltern resistance, but in her article Megha Anwer considers this novel to be alerting the middle class to the threat of collective politics. Arguing that critics have analysed The White Tiger as either representing an orientalized view of India as underdeveloped or conversely showing India as an emerging global power – “India Shining” – Anwer instead suggests that this novel explores the threat of subaltern insurrection. Although Anwer acknowledges both Adiga’s endeavour to give the subaltern a voice and his claim to depict the reality of society’s injustices in his novel, she asks whether this novel actually does give the subaltern access to power, proposing that it “addresses a native, anglophone and highly literate Indian audience in an attempt to make them aware of their complicity in the ongoing structures of violence and marginalization”.

“Knowing subalternity” is further considered in the continuing theme of subaltern resistance in Sujatha Moni’s scrutiny of the play Harvest, a satire on transplant tourism where body parts become commodities. This sci-fi plot caricatures the reality of the trade in body parts sold by Third World donors to First World receivers, and reveals social fragmentation on both sides. Referring to how poverty drives people to sell their kidneys, Moni explores the position of the subaltern, suggesting that “possibilities for challenging power exist [ … for] subaltern subjects, who possess knowledge and consciousness of the operations of power and of their own victimization”. The potential of drama as “resistance literature” is also examined by Melissa Kennedy, who compares two indigenous plays: one by the Japanese Ainu, Postman Heijiro, and an earlier one, Te Raukura, by the Maori writer Harry Dansey. Both depict actual tragedies; however, Kennedy shows how the Japanese play recontextualizes the experience of a postman, who died in a snowstorm but saved the mailbag by protecting it within his coat, foregrounding the indigenous Ainu identity in this act of heroic sacrifice, in order to overwrite historical accounts of Japanese heroism informed by nationalistic fervour. Historical assumptions are also challenged in Fiona Kidman’s novel The Captive Wife, as Doreen D’Cruz demonstrates. In this novel, the focus on gender concerns the abduction of a European woman by Maori in early 19th-century New Zealand and gives voice to the abducted woman through the form of oral narrative, positioning it against her husband’s masculine version in journal-style sections. As in Ahmed’s essay, the significance of oral narrative is stressed. Here, fiction intervenes to reclaim female historiography in the context of masculine, colonial and racial domination at the time of European settlement. Myra Mendible, in her article on Philippine/American writer Ninotchka Rosca’s political aesthetic, shows that, as in Kidman’s The Captive Wife, her work demonstrates “productive hybridization” and interweaves fiction with the historical account. Rosca, a political activist advocating women’s rights, is committed to deploying literature as politics, fusing the literary and the political in her novel State of War in which a festival becomes the site of collective resistance. Mendible argues that although the festival registers a tradition of oppositional writing, Rosca self-consciously shows the limits of its political potential as the festival also implicates the novel in the process of consumption and production.

These articles together demonstrate the significance of integrating the fictional and the political, and also emphasize the complex relationships between writing and social responsibility.

Finally, we have a wonderfully contemplative poem, “Salinas”, by Nancy Anne Miller, to complete the issue.

Melanie A. Murray