Mapping Subaltern Historiography of India as an Epistemological Question

Author(s)	SOUMEN DAS
Country	India
Abstract	Subaltern historiography is essentially an epistemological question of the very idea of India. Ranajit Guha observed that both colonialist as well as nationalist historiographies of modern India are elitist in nature and ignored the politics of subaltern people as prepolitical based on false consciousness. But, subaltern politics in colonial India, he claims, was a separate political process, organized in an ‘autonomous domain’ independent of elite politics as resistance to the domination of the elites. This intellectual journey of making subaltern historiography suddenly experiences a change with the retirement of Guha from the editorial team of Subaltern Studies group. Since then, the journey took a postcolonial turn to study fragmentary and incomplete consciousness of subaltern people in India and recently taken an ethnographic turn by focusing on the subconsciousness of different marginal groups.
Keywords	subaltern studies, elitist historiography, prepolitical/political, domination and consciousness, autonomous domain, postcolonial turn.
Field	Sociology > Politics
Published In	Volume 7, Issue 5, September-October 2025
Published On	2025-10-22
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2025.v07i05.58600

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