Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism 1489
lifeless layers of suppressed evidence and episodes. Instead, we get a stage on which several different but interrelated dramas are performed, jostling for attention and prominence; curtains are abruptly drawn on some, and often the voices of the peasant actors can only be heard in the din of the other, more powerful, voices.
To read Amin ' s work in this way shows, I hope, that his deconstructive strategy does not " flatten " the tension that has existed, as Florencia Mallon notes correctly, in this scholarship from the very beginning. To be sure, Amin ' s account is not animated by the urge to recover the subaltern as an autonomous subject. But he places his inquiry in the tension between nationalism ' s claim to know the peasant and its representation of the subalterns as the " criminals " of Chauri Chaura. The subaltern remains a recalcitrant presence in discourse, at once part of the nation and outside it. Amin trafficks between these two positions, demonstrating that subaltern insurgency left its mark, however disfigured, on the discourse- " an invisible design covered over in the palimpsest."
Neither Amin ' s retelling of the 1922 event nor Chakrabarty ' s project of " provincializing Europe " can be separated from postcolonial critiques of disciplines, including the discipline of history. Thus, even as Subaltern Studies has shifted from its original goal of recovering the subaltern autonomy, the subaltern has emerged as a position from which the discipline of history can be rethought. This rethinking does not entail the rejection of the discipline and its procedures of research. Far from it. As Chakrabarty writes, " it is not possible to simply walk out of the deep collusion between ' history ' and the modernizing narrative( s).' Nor is it possible to abandon historical research so long as it is pursued as an academic discipline in universities and functions to universalize capitalism and the nation-state. There is no alternative but to inhabit the discipline, delve into archives, and push at the limits of historical knowledge to turn its contradictions, ambivalences, and gaps into grounds for its rewriting.
IF SUBALTERN STUDIES ' POWERFUL INTERVENTION in South Asian historiography has turned into a sharp critique of the discipline of history, this is because South Asia is not an isolated arena but is woven into the web of historical discourse centered, as Chakrabarty argues, in the modern West. Through the long histories of colonialism and nationalism, the discourse of modernity, capitalism, and citizenship has acquired a strong though peculiar presence in the history of the region. The institutions of higher education in South Asia, relatively large and thriving, have functioned since the mid-nineteenth century in relation to the metropolitan academy, including centers for South Asian studies in the West. For all these reasons, India ' s historical scholarship has been uniquely placed to both experience and formulate searching critiques of metropolitan discourses even as its object remains the field of South Asia. To its credit, Subaltern Studies turned South Asia ' s entanglement with the modern West as the basis for rendering its
41 Chakrabarty, " Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History," 19.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1994