Introduction. “Learning to Learn from Below”: Understanding Subalternity

Abstract

In a remarkable commentary on the "new" subaltern, Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak examines the question of "subaltern consciousness" not as subject consciousness but in terms of "social agency-institutionally validated action" taking democracy and development as the two most urgent concerns (Spivak 2012a). 1 Spivak sets out to do this by "learning to learn from below." If considered in its transparent, most direct state, this is the task that scholars must engage with so as to speak with the subaltern, and be willing to learn from below without entangling voice with ideology, concepts or theory. 2The questions that concern the papers in this special issue may be understood in terms of the authors' overall interest in addressing issues emerging from below: subalternity, marginality, and exclusion. The articles examine complex dimensions of the experience of exclusion and inclusion through certain visible and invisible markers of difference. In addition to existing categories of caste, class, gender, and religion, new categories of distinction and differentiation may be imposed on forms, practices and experiences of subalternity. A new kind of neo-liberal India has emerged where the boundaries of distinction and exclusion as well as, contrarily, inclusion, have been modified, maintained or reproduced through encounters with "modernity." The nation state remains central in this encounter as it sets the rules, boundaries and enclosures, as well as the liberatory parameters, in all aspects of governmentality. At the same time, tradition with caste, gender and religious prejudice holds its own in a society marked by division, hierarchy, patriarchy and ideas about what may be appropriate or necessary for social well-being. Agency however is not outside the purview of the issues raised in this complexity characteristic of social life. It remains central to analyses of how, while subjectivity may be framed within the discourse of subalternity, agency remains simultaneously present. The burden of subalternity is not overwhelming and subjects, individually and collectively, find cracks, fissures and the space for agency in everyday life. These may be expressed individually or through collective movements