Viewing The Bible Through The Eyes And Ears of Subalterns In India

by Sathianathan Clarke

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In this paper, the term Subalterns refers to the last two groups, namely, the Dalits and the Adivasis. But before I proceed further, a brief word on the background of the term ‘subaltern" may be in order. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist writing to counter Fascism in 1920s and 1930s, popularized the term. He substituted it for the commonly accepted term "proletarian class." In India, this term has been brought to the center of critical scholarship by the Subaltern Studies Collective writing since 1982 on South Asian history and society from a "subaltern perspective." In the Preface to Subaltern Studies, Volume I, Ranajit Guha proposes the following definition: "The word ‘subaltern’. . . stands for the meaning as given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, that is, ‘of inferior rank.’ It will be used . . . as a name for the general attitude of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way."11 In a clarificatory note, at the end of this same Preface, he further opines, "The terms ‘people’ and ‘subaltern classes’ have been used synonymous throughout this note. The social groups and elements included in this category represent the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the elite."12 While I have no objections to this general trend to rewrite history and write about society from a people’s viewpoint, my own use of the term is confined to the Dalit and Adivasi communities in India. In the most general of ways they can be taken to be the labouring people who are not the elite of India. They stiffer multiple disadvantages. In the words of the World Development Report 2000/2001, "Evidence from India shows that scheduled castes [Dalits] and scheduled tribes [Adivasis] face a higher risk of poverty. These are among the structural poor who not only lack economic resources but whose poverty is strongly linked to social identity, as determined mostly by caste."13 Thus, the term Subalterns is utilized to allude to those communities, which were outside the Hindu-based caste system (Dalits and Adivasis or Tribals). Dalits number about one hundred and eighty to two hundred million and Adivasis number about eighty-five to ninety million in the population that has touched the one billion mark. In this paper, I have consciously avoided talking of the Subaltern, as if it is one phenomenon. Rather, in order to integrate the awareness that this tern connotes multiple realities, having many context-specific variations, I employ the plural, that is, Subalterns. And yet I opt for the one common term mainly to reflect the history of solidarity that is emerging between Dalit and Adivasi communities. In the end, Subalterns’ scholarship finds strategic rather than essential reasons to project a common identity for the differing strands of Dalit and Adivasi communities in India.

II. Subalterns’ Viewing of the Bible Accentuates the Domestic, the Local, and the Particular

Subalternity is characterized by the primary interplay of domestic, local and particular mechanisms of colonialism. Despite all the caveats that are built into the postcolonial biblical discourse, I find that "postcolonial" is somewhat of a modern marker, which takes its multiple birthings from a common master narrative. Thus, postcolonialism tends to deal with the diverse variants of a grand narrative: East-West, North-South, European-Asian, and Empire-Native subjects.

Of course, there is a struggle to break free of this Orientalist trapping. And yet one cannot get away from the fact that there is a divide between the local or national context and an international or global context. Thus knowledge about the local and the particular is framed, and being framed, within the overall dynamics of this international/transnational world. In the domain of Asian biblical studies let me cite the example of R.S. Sugirtharajah. From one angle, his description of postcolonialism relocates its interrogatory activity well beyond the domestic and the local. Thus he suggests, "The current postcolonial criticism takes the critique of Eurocentricism as its central task . . . negatively put, postcolonialism is not about historical stages or periodization. Neither is it about lowering the flags of the Empire and wrapping oneself with new national flags. Positively, it signifies three things -- representation, identity, and a reading posture, emerging among the former victims of colonialism."14 This line of argument is further picked tip in another article, which functions as a sort of Preface for The Post-colonial Bible. Here Sugirtharajah attempts to allow representatives from various former colonies to boldly and engagingly talk back to their Eurocentric colonizers. He reiterates the west/north/colonial -- east/south/colonized feature of the bilateral dialogue pointed to earlier: "What postcolonialism does is to enable us to question the totalizing tendencies of European reading practices and interpret the texts on their own terms and read them from our specific locations. 15 Interestingly, much of the "us" and the "our" doing this reading is projected in nation-state terms. Read it all from Religion on line