Jahanavi-appa perhaps looks like the writer Gayatri Spivak, at least when she wears a sari and puts on a shawl during the evenings of retreating winter. Despite being so beautiful in mind and body, I feel comfortable because her arguments are intensely analytical. When the boy told her that it were the English colonizers who saved the widows by banning the widow-burning rituals, she did not respond to him because it would have been a complex discussion on the issue of the subaltern, but she certainly explained that by rescuing the widows from being burnt, they did not change the fate of the widows. The rescued widow remained a subaltern. The young boy did not fully comprehend the explanation but pondered over the idea in silence.
The claim of subalternity is common academic conversational pas-time. The claim is rarely seriously taken and that is the primary error of subaltern-identity-discourse. You have to take the term seriously if you want to understand the identity marker in the discursive domain of what and how Spivak has been trying to define it.
“I am a Madhesi so I am a subaltern,” one of my students claimed. “I am a very subaltern working woman,” a research student identified herself. “We Nepalis are the subaltern under the Marxist rule.” “I am the most victimized subaltern because acres of land have not been returned to me even after the peace process.” There are scores of such voices. How many of subalterns are we surrounded by? Everyone is a subaltern. None of these proclamations were seriously made which instantly marginalized and devalued the term.
The other problem with these claims is lacking the sense of history and its proper study. Spivak sought to find a critical term of reference that would be appropriate to delineate the experiences of the individuals extremely marginalized, deprived, and victimized by western colonialism. This was her academic effort to find a context and describe the term subaltern. The popular words like woman, peasants, workers, and colonized were not appropriate terms to understand the subaltern. These two problems mentioned lead to further comic melodrama. “So you say that I am not a subaltern even if I and my class are so very marginalized by the political institutions?” “Women are always subaltern,” another researcher proposed.
I replied Jahanavi-appa by email before going to Pokhara because she wanted to discuss with a group of students there on a further nuanced identity marker, the native informant.
In the context of the seriousness of the use of the term subaltern, I have to be comic if not absurd. I am planning to make a long list of the claims of subalternity by the Nepalis from all walks of life. My question would then be how many of such people are erased from the dominant political discourse and historical conditions of Nepal. How many of them are not even able to complete, what Spivak calls, the speech act or a dialogue, to put it in a simple term?
How many of them are completely erased in the dominant democratic consciousness as Madhesis, women, and the tribal? The voice is not put together, not articulated. How come all women are the subaltern when the identity-marker does not denote a class. There cannot be a subaltern class for Spivak.
Furthermore, if the songs of the Teej are the sites of expression, resistance, feeling and emotions of women, how many of such songs participate or do not participate in the national consciousness of a country like Nepal? Do the singers, by the very act of singing, encompass a space of liberation through the expressions? Or do their songs not take a shape of dialogic utterance between the speaker and listener in form of awareness between the two? Do the singers achieve agreeable response of awareness from the listeners?
Subalternity is a flexible and fluid term in such a way that no one is a subaltern by class and religion, gender and ethnicity, and geographical locations alone. One is free to use the term in common vocabulary, but the term has immense academic bearing to understand who/when is a subaltern and who/when is not. It is a very flexible subject position and hence is a complex one. I will talk to Jahnavi-appa in Pokhara and come back to you.
When words are loaded with history, one is not free to use them flippantly from serious academic and even popular journalistic positions. Such terms come into usage by serious production of knowledge and hence they have to be understood from proper knowledge locations.
orungupto@gmail.com
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