From the Great War to the Indian Subaltern Studies: provincializing Europe among possible worlds, minor stories, and gender subalternity

Abstract

Starting from the Great War, fracture of historic course, watershed of contemporary culture and beginning point in the process of shifting the center of the world, the article reflects on currency of Indian Subaltern Studies. In particular, in the cultural debate on postcoloniality, it focuses on the contribution of Dipesh Chakrabarty in proving that the pattern of a euro-centric and patriarchal universal History, originated in Europe with the primacy of its modernity, must necessarily give space to the subaltern voices emerging from the suburbs of the globe (Provincializing Europe), by an adequate methodology that recoveries them in terms of historical and cultural reconstruction. Then it emerges the work of feminist scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the gender subalternity, neglected issue in the official Indian historiography. Spivak locates in literature useful source through which to make the history more closely at what happened, notwithstanding the possibility that subalterns have had to express themselves, and she also shows, in the Indian postcolonial context, that different forms of minority, from ethnicity to caste, embodied in the condition of the female gender, intertwine in the figure of the woman, subaltern subject par excellence. This is the case of the tribal women of Bengal, to which, however, the Indian writer Mahasweta Devi can give a significant voice.