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PURNA CHOUDHURI Date: 30-08-2012

M.A.ENGLISH

ROLL NO.- 1237, 3rd SEMESTER

EFL UNIVERSITY

:A Response on Can The Subaltern Speak? :

The article begins with Spivak writing about Foucault and Deleuze conversing on the entity

of subjectivity. What Spivak clings to in this entire article is her criticism of the intellectual wests

keen desire for discovering the clichs associated with this term. Thus actually, were talking about

white men speaking to white men about coloured subjects. She then brings in colonialism and states

that all knowledge about the third world was always moulded in the framework of the political and

economic interests of the colonisers. Therefore, any sort of research involved in the colonial project

has always been biased towards the western academia; the western scholar wrote and produced the

other as his object of desire in order to gain currency in his land. It is here that Spivak actually puts

up the ambiguity of the west to write about the occidental by neglecting the entire paraphernalia of

colonial discourse.

Spivak points to the fact that research has been in a way always colonial - in trying to define

the over there subject as the object of study and as some sort of commodity that knowledge

should be extracted from and brought back home. Gayatri Spivak claims the west to be obsessed

with preserving its own ideologies as subject, and any discourse that finds place in this scenario

eventually ends up being the discoursing agents themselves. Its like importing the raw materials

from the east, manufacturing goods out of them and then again exporting them back to where they

came from in want of economic sustenance. Thus, while examining the validity of the western

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representation of the other, she proposes that this body of thought which shows keen interest in

writing about the other is secluding itself entirely from postcolonial or feminist scrutiny.

Here, what relates Subaltern Studies to subjectivity is the equivocal tone that Spivak

acquires while speaking about Ranajit Guhas project. She acknowledges the fact that the Indian

subalterns have been subjected to epistemic violence by their colonial superiors and that the

editorial team has tried to voice out their identity by re-appropriating Gramscis concept of the

subaltern, yet she remains sceptic about the fact that it does not completely erase the dependence

upon western intellectuals to speak for the subaltern condition rather than allowing them to speak

for themselves. Spivak further argues that by voicing their identity and reclaiming a collective

cultural entity, subalterns will in fact re-inscribe and re-appropriate their subordinate position in the

society. She states that this marginalised, peripheral mass is composed of heterogeneous ethnicities

that have separate identities and the academic assumption of a subaltern thus, doesnt account for

this heterogeneity of the colonized body politic. She gives the example ofSatipratha where a woman

was deemed to sacrifice herself alive on the funeral pyre of her husband in order to attain spiritual

salvation. This particular ritual occupied a much more religious significance in the lives of the Hindus

that was later deemed criminal offence by the colonizers and abolished. Here Spivak aims to

demonstrate that the entire viewpoint from which a particular trait constituting the subaltern

identity is scrutinized by the occidental is clearly different from that of the oriental. Thus, she

exemplifies the failure of the white man to speak for the subaltern where the latter ends up

entering the intellectual discourse mostly through the lens of the prominent ideologies. Lastly she

concludes that the subaltern is not privileged within the dominant discourse, and will never succeed

in establishing its identity in the conventional institutions of power. If the problematic is understood

in this sense, it is quite obvious that that subaltern would not be able to speak for themselves ever.