Can the subaltern Speak?

- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Introduction

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She
is a University Professor at the Columbia University and a founding member of the
establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Considered one of the most
influential postcolonial intellectuals, Spivak is best known for her essay Can the Subaltern
Speak? and for her translation of an introduction to Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie. She
also translated such works of Mahasweta Devi as Imaginary Maps and Breast Stories into
English and with separate critical appreciation on the texts and Devi's life and writing style in
general. She has often referred to herself as a „practical Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist.‟

Spivak was awarded the 2012 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for being ‘a critical theorist
and educator speaking for the humanities against intellectual colonialism in relation to the
globalized world.’ In 2013, she received the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award
given by the Republic of India.

About the Topic

‘Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988) by Gayatri Spivak relates to the manner in which
western cultures investigate other cultures. Spivak uses the example of the Indian Sati practice of
widow suicide, however the main significance of it is in its first part which presents the ethical
problems of investigating a different culture base on "universal" concepts and frameworks. Then
it critically deals with an array of western writers starting from Marx to Foucault, Deleuze and
Derrida.

She introduces the question of gender and sexual difference in the work. Subaltern
according to Spivak is those who belong to the third world countries. It is impossible for them to
speak up as they are divided by gender, class, caste, region, religion and other narratives. These
divisions do not allow them to stand up in unity.

The Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci applied the term subaltern to refer the
second rank officer to the unorganized masses that must be politicized for the workers'
revolution to succeed. In the 1980s Ranajit Guha proposed that the Subaltern Studies Group
appropriated the term, focusing their attention on the disenfranchised peoples of India. Thus
Derrida has described as an „antre‟

1. Dominant foreign groups.

2. Dominant indigenous groups on the all-India level.

3. Dominant indigenous groups at the regional and local levels.

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 4. The terms „people‟ and „subaltern classes‟ are used as synonymous throughout [Guha‟s
definition]. The social groups and elements included in this category represent the
demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have
described as the „elite.‟

Truth Construction

Spivak uses deconstruction to examine how true is constructed. Thus she states, “Some of
the most radical criticism coming out of the West today is the result of an interested desire to
conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject.” She takes the example of Sati. Sati
was a practice among the Hindus in which a woman was burnt alive with the pyre of her dead
husband. When the British came to India they outlawed this practice. Though it saved a number
of lives of women, it also helped British to secure their rule in India.

Again the outlawing of this practice had a complete absence of Indian women voice.
According to British, “white men saved brown women from brown men.” This statement created
a truth that Indians are barbarians and British on the other hand are civilized and hence their
rules were justified over the Indians. Human conscious is constructed randomly. We do not
construct our identities. We have them written for us.

Knowledge is Not Innocent

Spivak criticizes Foucault and Deleuze for committing „epistemic violence„-that is

projecting eurocentric knowledge on to the third world countries. She is of the view that Western
Academic thinking is produced in order to support their economic interests. Thus the knowledge
is like any other commodity that is exported from Europe to third world countries. Knowledge is
never innocent. It expresses the interest of its producer. This westernized knowledge tends to
construct our identities and for the third world people, Europe becomes the ideal.

Criticism of Essentialist Ideology

Spivak uses Marxist ideology to criticize the leftists. According to her, the leftists
essentialize the subalterns i.e. They consider the third world people to be same as one identity
and same issues. It has 3 negative impacts on subalterns.

1. It provides an opportunity to make attempt from outside to reform subalterns

i.e. It paves way for colonialism.
2. It provides a logocentric assumption of cultural unity among Heterogenous
people.
3. The subalterns become dependent on the Western intellectuals to speak for
their condition rather than allowing them to speak for themselves.

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The Suicide of Bhubaneswari

In the end, Spivak brings to light the suicide of an ordinary woman to explain how
outside effects the subaltern. According to her, Bhubaneswari Bhaduri ended her life because she
did not want to participate in an association that she was assigned to commit.

However, after her death, her suicide was misinterpreted and her story was written by her
family in a different way. They considered her suicide as an outcome of a failed love affair rather
than a protest. Thus Spivak concludes that it is impossible to reclaim and rewrite history in the
Western framework as they construct truth for us as Bhubaneshwari‟s family constructed for her
and hence Subaltern cannot speak.

Conclusion

Spivak tries to overthrow the binary opposition between subject and object, self and
other, Occident and Orient, center and marginal and the majority and minority. Thus she
concludes, The subaltern cannot speak. There is no virtue in global laundry lists with 'woman' as
a pious item. Representation has not withered away. The female intellectual as intellectual has a
circumscribed task which she must not disown with a flourish.

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