SUBALTERN STUDIES. What does it mean when
a peasant resistance movement and a religious movement are
one and the same phenomenon? In the last three decades,
three different themes have surfaced in the interface between
the study of religion and Subaltern Studies: (1) the idea of
religion as a function of the Marxist/Gramscian view of early
Subaltern Studies; (2) the changing debates about religion
as the Subaltern Studies project became more involved with
cultural studies, postmodernism, and the postcolonial proj-
ect; and (3) the approach to Subaltern Studies within the
study of religion.
THE IDEA OF RELIGION AS A FUNCTION OF THE MARXIST/
GRAMSCIAN VIEW OF EARLY SUBALTERN STUDIES. Subal-
tern Studies began in India with an explicitly but not exclu-
sively Marxist and Gramscian focus. It analyzes and advo-
cates for the “bottom layer of society” by challenging
capitalist logic (Spivak, 2000, p. 324); thus it has both a neg-
ative task of undoing capitalist assessment of the underclass
as well as a positive task of describing acts of agency and inde-
pendence and resistance. Inspired in part by the work of E.
P. Thompson, and carried on by the work of scholar and edi-
tor Ranajit Guha, the publication of the nine-volume series
Subaltern Studies comprises a great bulk of the theoretical
and topical work. Subaltern Studies began in the late 1970s
and early 1980s with Indian, European, and American schol-
ars who turned toward understanding peasant consciousness
in India, in so far as any and all consciousness was a product
of material conditions. Consciousness, here, is broadly
viewed by Subaltern writers in the traditional Marxian sense
as a manner of thought determined by one’s place in the pro-
duction system; yet at the same time, these writers also view
consciousness as a form of subjectivity which can and does
develop modes of resistance to that system. Since then, the
concerns of Subaltern Studies have blossomed into a global
phenomenon with strong institutional support from main-
stream academia in Africa, South America, Ireland, and
China, as well as India, Europe, and America. Moreover,
Subaltern Studies’ focus is no longer exclusively South Asian,
but spans communities around the globe, and scholars in the
field produce articles written in a large variety of vernacular
languages besides English.
Subaltern Studies has been confronted from the very be-
ginning with the problem of how to account for the ongoing
role of religion, and the related issues of caste and kinship,
in a nonessentializing way. Its source of intellectual inspira-
tion, Antonio Gramsci, as well as others, were careful to
point out that, in the absence of a socialist party to support
the peasant class, religion was not simply self-deception or
false consciousness. Rather, religion could be viewed as “a
specific way of rationalizing the world and real life,” and “a
framework of real political activity” (Gramsci, 1971,
pp. 326–327, 337). E. P Thompson, who addressed the Sub-
altern Studies conference in its formative stages, also remind-
ed Subaltern Studies thinkers that one should not be sur-
prised at the persistent role of loyalties of religion as well as
of caste and kinship in shaping working–class consciousness
(Thompson, 1991, p. 92). Indeed, as Rajnarayan Chadavar-
kar argued, the very presence of these factors made the idea
of a working class in India a completely different enterprise
than that of Thompson’s England, inspired as it was by the
artisan class and peculiarly British challenges of polity and
organization (Thompson, 2000, p. 57).
In light of this Gramscian tension between acknowledg-
ing the role of religion in peasant consciousness and being
careful not to reify it, early Subaltern Studies showed varying
approaches to the topic. As early as 1974 R. Hilton argued
in a European context that the capacity for organization in
pursuit of social and political demands arose naturally from
the experience of peasant. Thus, by implication, religious
rites closely linked to agricultural cycles and subsistence
needs, such as rainmaking ceremonies in times of drought
and ceremonies to contain epidemics, gave expression to the
collectivity of the Indian peasant village (Hilton, in Lands-
berger, 1974).
Others argued that to invest in the idea of strong pri-
mordial ties to community, religion, caste, and kinship is to
obscure the complexity of the urban working classes in India.
For them, it was not a matter of simple transfer, of bringing
a simple, rural peasant consciousness to the factories in urban
centers throughout the subcontinent. The conflicting identi-
ties, catalyzed by industrial competition as well as by the in-
fluences of urban neighborhoods, regionalisms, and nation-
alisms, must also be added to the mix. Such complexities
demanded a culturally specific sociological discipline where-
by religion could never play a primordial, but only a contin-
gent, role (Chandravarkar).
Other Subaltern Studies scholars focused on how activ-
ists attempted to appropriate religious imagery for their own
ends. Gyan Pandey’s study of the swaraj (self-rule) move-
ment and Shahid Anin’s study of the Gorakhpurians’ inter-
pretation of Gandhi are excellent examples of this approach
(Pandey; Anin). Gyan Pandey argues that peasant move-
ments such as the Eka and the Kisan Sabha in 1921 were not
Congress-inspired and therefore “top down,” but rather mo-
tivated by a structure of land ownership that led to land
shortages and high rents. Relatedly, Anin specifically ad-
dresses the ways popular peasant culture is made out of reli-
gious symbolism. In Anin’s view, Gorakhpur villagers did
not simplistically respond to the “holy man” Mahatma Gan-
dhi, but rather developed a kind of millennialism whereby
swaraj figured directly as a form of local political agency.
These early attempts to deal with religious aspects of
peasant consciousness led to the problem of the Subaltern
Studies’ relationship to conventional Marxist theory. Early
on, Partha Chatterjee argued that peasant modes of being
cannot be called simply class consciousness, but are more
complex types of consciousness and practice (Chatterjee,
1983, pp. 58–65). Rosalind O’Hanlon also put forward the
view that changes in religion, as well as other essentialized
categories, such as caste or nation, present the scholar with
“the problem of mapping what on the surface look like fun-8800 SUBALTERN STUDIES