Important!
The concepts, categories, terminologies and theories that I will mention in this article are a direct continuation of my brief overview of the historiography surrounding India’s wars post independence. I will not be going over those here! To read those, please consult this article. Also this article is more an addendum to the previous than a fully formed piece of work in itself. It will seek to clarify definitional issues I left unaddressed and provide some further detail.
A Definitional Issue
What I will herein present perhaps plays too loose with the term “subaltern studies”. Scholars of post-colonial India – and, increasingly, other parts of the world – use the term “subaltern” to refer to those groups whose social identities were dominated in historical literature by the perspectives of Western elites. To simplify: the tribal people of India’s North East may be considered to be “subaltern” as, until recently, their public image was informed by Western colonial-era understandings. That is to say, most subaltern studies scholars present that a “subaltern” cannot exist without a Western colonial perspective. This is, of course, an extremely rudimentary explanation of a school of thought that has sparked endless definitional and theoretical debates over the past 40 years.1
I do not pretend to supplant, or indeed have the ability to supplant, this understanding – though it is already being challenged for its Eurocentrism. In this short I essay, I only intend to argue that in the historiography surrounding India’s wars, there is a new subaltern group that has been formed, rather inadvertently, by historians. This is where my looseness in applying the definition of subaltern fits in. This group is subaltern because the understanding of their experiences of the war comes from memos, briefings, press releases, archival documents, reports and minutes-of-meetings found in the halls of power in New Delhi. I am of course referring to the “Official Sources” that I delineated in my previous article.
Given that the history of India’s wars has been narrated with the use of these Official Sources, sources which specifically do not mention the experiences of junior officers, other ranks or civilians, it stands to reason that this history imposes itself (unintentionally, albeit) upon their perspectives of war and violence – or ignores these perspectives entirely. The subaltern in this context is, therefore, the junior officer, the jawan or NCO, and the civilian witness or victim. With this understanding, let us proceed.
Sourcing the Subaltern of India’s Wars:
Note: I have already acknowledged the considerable strengths of the traditional “top-down” perspective utilised by previous scholars, asked and answered why they couldn’t or didn’t utilise “bottom-up” sources, and have considered the significant restrictions faced by historians on finding reliable primary sources surrounding India’s wars in my previous article.
As I acknowledged in my previous article, one of the largest obstacles that stands in the way of a subaltern history of India’s wars is the fact that private accounts are rarely recorded (even personally, such as in a diary). They have remained, largely, hidden – this is not a function of prejudice or propaganda, it is simply how Indians treat their own personal experiences.2 In the event that a soldier performed an act of exceptional courage and an account of his actions was published, it would be a much sanitised version that would inject an intentional heroism into the event. The case for civilian experiences is even more dire- occasionally, we see articles or interviews on websites such as the venerable Bharat Rakshak, but there has been no concerted effort to record these.
However, this has slowly begun to change and – as far as I can make out – this change has been driven by the ignored subalterns! Over the past decade, a number of personal accounts of India’s wars have been published. These range from the accounts of young officers to the retellings of violence experienced or witnessed by civilians. One of the most prolific such works is Lt. Gen. Ian Cardozzo’s In Quest of Freedom – a collection of short-memoirs from civilians and servicemen that has been much discussed by me in multiple other articles.
We are nearing the end of that period of time when the lived experiences of most of India’s wars can still be considered lived experiences. A subaltern history is now more important than ever. These published accounts are but a scratch on the surface of what is actually available to the historian. My interviews with veterans of 1971 and civilian survivors from the Bangladeshi side (of which I have only published one) confirm to me that these people are ready and willing to share their story. We just need to be ready to listen!
- For an in-depth discussion of the term subaltern, the method of its study and the method’s evolution, please consult: Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism”, in The American Historical Review (1994), pp. 1475-1490; Hirain Gohain, “Subaltern Studies: Turning Around the Perspective”, in Economic and Political Weekly (2012), pp. 74-76; and, of course, Partha Chatterjee, “After Subaltern Studies”, in Economic and Political Weekly (2012), pp. 44-49. ↩︎
- As an interesting comparison, if one were to look at survivors’ accounts of the 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the accounts presented by foreign victims far outnumber any Indian personal narratives – in spite of the fact that Indians formed the overwhelming number of victims. ↩︎
Leave a Reply