Subaltern perspective: B.R. Ambedkar, Ranajit Guha, David Hardiman
Sociology - Indian Society Continuity and Change · Unit II · Topic 7 of 16 · 4 min read
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1. The perspective
Subaltern means of inferior rank. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, used it in his Prison Notebooks for groups excluded from power and from the making of official history: peasants, workers, women, lower castes. The subaltern perspective studies society and history from below, through the experience and consciousness of these groups, rather than through the elite.
Features:
- Critique of elitist history: both colonial and nationalist history spoke for the elite.
- Subalterns have their own consciousness and politics; they are not passive followers.
- Use of unconventional sources: folk songs, rumours, oral memory, police and court records read against the grain.
- Attention to caste, tribe and gender as axes of domination.
2. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1891–1956)
Ambedkar is placed in this perspective because he analysed caste from the standpoint of those at its bottom.
Works. Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development (paper at Columbia University, 1916); Annihilation of Caste (1936); Who Were the Shudras? (1946); The Untouchables (1948); The Buddha and His Dhamma (published 1957).
On the origin and mechanism of caste.
- The essence of caste is endogamy superimposed on exogamy. Indian society was originally organised into exogamous clans; caste arose when groups closed themselves by endogamy.
- To maintain endogamy and the balance of the sexes within a group, customs such as sati, enforced widowhood and child marriage developed.
- The Brahmins were the first to close themselves; other groups imitated them (the “infection of imitation”) or were shut out.
- In Who Were the Shudras? he argued the Shudras were originally Kshatriyas degraded after conflict with Brahmins.
- Annihilation of Caste: caste is a division of labourers, not merely of labour; it is graded inequality, and it cannot be ended without rejecting the scriptures that sanction it.
Disabilities of the Scheduled Castes (the standard 10-mark answer):
- Religious: denial of entry into temples, of the right to study the Vedas and of the services of Brahmin priests; considered polluting.
- Social: untouchability and unapproachability; segregated settlements outside the village; denial of access to wells, tanks, roads and schools; restrictions on dress, ornaments and processions.
- Economic: confined to “unclean” occupations (scavenging, leather work, removing carcasses); landlessness; bonded and agricultural labour; no right to own property in many regions.
- Educational: exclusion from schools and learning.
- Political: no share in village councils or administration before the modern period.
His struggle and remedies. Mahad Satyagraha for the right to draw water from the Chavadar tank (1927), the public burning of the Manusmriti (1927), the Kalaram temple entry movement at Nashik (1930), separate electorates at the Round Table Conferences and the Poona Pact (1932) that substituted reserved seats; “Educate, Agitate, Organise”. As chairman of the Drafting Committee he shaped Article 17 (abolition of untouchability), Articles 15(4), 16(4) and 46 and reserved seats (Articles 330 and 332). In 1956 he converted to Buddhism with his followers at Nagpur.
Legal follow-up: the Untouchability (Offences) Act, 1955, renamed the Protection of Civil Rights Act in 1976, and the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989.
3. Ranajit Guha (1923–2023)
- Founder-editor of Subaltern Studies (Volume I, 1982), published by Oxford University Press, Delhi.
- His opening essay “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India” argued that Indian historiography had been dominated by elitism, both colonialist and bourgeois-nationalist, and that there was an autonomous “politics of the people”.
- Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983) read colonial records to recover the consciousness of rebel peasants.
4. David Hardiman
- A British historian and member of the Subaltern Studies collective.
- Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat: Kheda District 1917–1934 (1981).
- The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India (1987): the Devi movement of 1922–23 among the Adivasis of south Gujarat, in which a goddess was said to command them to give up liquor and meat and boycott Parsi liquor dealers. It was an Adivasi movement of self-assertion, not merely Gandhian influence.
- Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in Western India (1996).
How this is examined
The Ambedkar disabilities question appeared in both January 2026 (80 marks) and February 2025. Structure it: Ambedkar’s life in two lines, the five heads of disability, his movements, and the constitutional remedies. For the 16-mark “What is subaltern perspective?”, spend a third on the perspective (Gramsci, Guha, from below) and two thirds on Ambedkar’s theory of caste and his struggle.
Now try the real questions: Sociology - Indian Society Continuity and Change past question papers.