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Guha ' s account , the subaltern emerges with forms of sociality and political community at odds with nation and class , defying the models of rationality and social action that conventional historiography uses . Guha argues persuasively that such models are elitist insofar as they deny the subaltern ' s autonomous consciousness and that they are drawn from colonial and liberal-nationalist projects of appropriating the subaltern .
It is true that the effort to retrieve the autonomy of the subaltern subject resembled the " history from below " approach developed by social history in the West . But the subalternist search for a humanist subject-agent frequently ended up with the discovery of the failure of subaltern agency : the moment of rebellion always contained within it the moment of failure . The desire to recover the subaltern ' s autonomy was repeatedly frustrated because subalternity , by definition , signified the impossibility of autonomy : subaltern rebellions only offered fleeting moments of defiance , " a night-time of love ," not " a life-time of love ." 15 While these scholars failed to recognize fully that the subalterns ' resistance did not simply oppose power but was also constituted by it , their own work showed this to be the case . Further complicating the urge to recover the subject was the fact that , unlike British and U . S . social history , Subaltern Studies drew on anti-humanist structuralist and poststructuralist writings . Ranajit Guha ' s deft readings of colonial records , in particular , drew explicitly from Ferdinand de Sassure , Claude Levi-Strauss , Roman Jakobson , Roland Barthes , and Michel Foucault . Partly , the reliance on such theorists and the emphasis on " textual " readings arose from , as Dipesh Chakrabarty points out , the absence of workers ' diaries and other such sources available to British historians .' 6 Indian peasants had left no sources , no documents from which their own " voice " could be retrieved . But the emphasis on " readings " of texts and the recourse to theorists such as Foucault , whose writings cast a shroud of doubt over the idea of the autonomous subject , contained an awareness that the colonial subaltern was not just a form of " general " subalternity . While the operation of power relations in colonial and metropolitan theaters had parallels , the conditions of subalternity were also irreducibly different . Subaltern Studies , therefore , could not just be the Indian version of the " history from below " approach ; it had to conceive the subaltern differently and write different histories .
THIS DIFFERENCE HAS GROWN in subsequent Subaltern Studies volumes as the desire to recover the subaltern subject became increasingly entangled in the analysis of how subalternity was constituted by dominant discourses . Of course , the tension between the recovery of the subaltern as a subject outside the elite discourse and the analysis of subalternity as an effect of discursive systems was present from the very beginning .' 7 It also continues to characterize Subaltern
15 Veena Das , " Subaltern as Perspective ," Subaltern Studies VI ( Delhi , 1989 ), 315 .
16 Dipesh Chakrabarty , " Trafficking in History and Theory : Subaltern Studies ," Beyond the
Disciplines : The New Humanities , K . K . Ruthven , ed . ( Canberra , 1992 ), 102 .
17 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ' s essay in Subaltern Studies IV pointed out this tension . " Subaltern Studies : Deconstructing Historiography ," in Subaltern Studies IV ( Delhi , 1985 ), 337-38 .
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1994