1482 Gyan Prakash
The importance of such topics is self-evident , but the real significance of the shift to the analysis of discourses is the reformulation of the notion of the subaltern . It is tempting to characterize this shift as an abandonment of the search for subaltern groups in favor of the discovery of discourses and texts . But this would be inaccurate . Although some scholars have rejected the positivistic retrieval of the subalterns , the notion of the subalterns ' radical heterogeneity with , though not autonomy from , the dominant remains crucial . It is true , however , that scholars locate this heterogeneity in discourses , woven into the fabric of dominant structures and manifesting itself in the very operation of power . In other words , subalterns and subalternity do not disappear into discourse but appear in its interstices , subordinated by structures over which they exert pressure . Thus Shahid Amin shows that Indian nationalists in 1921-1922 , confronted with the millennial and deeply subversive language of peasant politics , were quick to claim peasant actions as their own and Gandhian . Unable to acknowledge the peasants ' insurgent appropriation of Gandhi , Indian nationalists represented it in the stereotypical saint-devotee relationship . 20 Amin develops this point further in his innovative monograph on the peasant violence in 1922 that resulted in the death of several policemen and led Gandhi to suspend the noncooperation campaign against British rule . Returning to this emotive date in Indian nationalist history , Amin shows that this violent event , " criminalized " in the colonial judicial discourse , was " nationalized " by the elite nationalists , first by an " obligatory amnesia " and then by selective remembrance and reappropriation . 21 To take another example , Gyanendra Pandey suggests that the discourse of the Indian nation-state , which had to imagine India as a national community , could not recognize community ( religious , cultural , social , and local ) as a political form ; thus it pitted nationalism ( termed good because it " stood above " difference ) against communalism ( termed evil because it did not " rise above " difference ). 22
Such reexaminations of South Asian history do not invoke " real " subalterns , prior to discourse , in framing their critique . Placing subalterns in the labyrinth of discourse , they cannot claim an unmediated access to their reality . The actual subalterns and subalternity emerge between the folds of the discourse , in its silences and blindness , and in its overdetermined pronouncements . Interpreting the 1922 peasant violence , Amin identifies the subaltern presence as an effect in the discourse . This effect manifests itself in a telling dilemma the nationalists faced . On the one hand , they could not endorse peasant violence as nationalist activity , but , on the other , they had to acknowledge the peasant " criminals " as part of the nation . They sought to resolve this dilemma by admitting the event in the narrative of the nation while . denying it agency : the peasants were shown to act the way they did because they were provoked , or because they were insufficiently trained in the methods of nonviolence .
Defense of the Fragment : Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today ," Representations 37 , ( Winter 1992 ): 27-55 .
20 Amin , " Gandhi as Mahatma ," 2-7 .
21 See Pandey ' s forthcoming Event , Metaphor Memory , : Chauri Chaura 1922-1992 ( Berkeley , Calif .,
1995 ).
22 See Pandey , Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India , 235-43 , 254-61 .
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1994