 Subaltern refers to persons socially, politically, and geographically outside of the hegemonic power structure.  Subalterns are groups who have had their voices silenced, they can speak through their actions as a way to protest against mainstream development and create their own visions for development.  In the 1970s, the term began to be used as a reference to colonized people in the South Asian subcontinent.  Some thinkers use it in a general sense to refer to marginalized groups and the lower classes—a person rendered without agency by his or her social status.  According to Gayatri Spivak, subaltern is not just a classy word for oppressed, for Other, for somebody who's not getting a piece of the pie....In postcolonial terms, everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern—a space of difference.

 Subaltern studies detached from the economic determinism of Orthodox Marxist scholarship.  In India founder of Subaltern studies- Ranajit Guha.  Subaltern studies reflect the interplay between Western Marxism and Indian political culture.

Impact of Susobhan Sarkar- Bengali historian who was influenced by Gramasci’s works. It took shape in Britain due to the impact of Gramasci’s “Prison Notebooks”. Partha Chatterjee linked Marxian social theory to Foucauldian notions of power within 19 th and 20 th c. India. Political developments in India accelerated this struggle- Maoist peasant insurgency of Naxalbari, Indira Gandhi’s turn towards authoritarianism during the emergency years of

o This movement led towards peasant consciousness o It led towards the emergence of identity politics and multi-culturalism. o Subaltern studies became objective towards economic base as the central zone of power and contestation and moved towards culture conceived in terms of textual and discourse analysis.

 Gayatri is an Indian literary critic, theorist and Professor at Columbia University.  She considers herself as a "practical Marxist- feminist-deconstructionist“.  She is concerned for the cultural texts of those who are marginalized by dominant western culture: the new immigrant, the working class, women and other "postcolonial subjects."

 Myself, I Must Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1974).  Of Grammatology (translation, with a critical introduction, of Derrida's text) (1976)  In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987).  Selected Subaltern Studies (edited with Ranajit Guha) (1988)  The Post-Colonial Critic (1990)  The Spivak Reader (1995).  A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999).  Death of a Discipline (2003).  Chotti Munda and His Arrow (translation with critical introduction of the novel by Mahasweta Devi) (2002)  Red Thread (forthcoming)

 First of all she refers to the radical criticism that confirms the western superiority and projects it as the ‘Subject’.  Western subjectivity questioned by ‘pluralized subject effects’.  Economic factor though put under the erasure works as the ‘transcendental signified’.  French intellectuals like Foucault and Deleuze try to erase the economic determinants.  Secondly she refers to the Western world that constituted the colonized as the other and shadow of the self which is challenged and reversed by Foucault.

 The French intellectuals questioned imperialism as the best version of history.  Imperialists confirmed their version as authentic, normative, legal and politically strengthened.  According to Deleuze and Foucault the oppressed- illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of the urban subproletariate- if given the chance can speak and know their conditions.  The phased development of the subaltern is complicated by the imperialist project, that is confronted by subaltern studies group. They including Ranajit Guha try to rethink Indian colonial historiography from the perspective of the discontinuous chain of peasant insurgencies during colonial rule. Ranajit Guha divides elites into three – a. Dominant foreign group b. Dominant indigenous group at all India level c. Dominant indigenous group at the regional and local levels also known as ‘Buffer group’, which is called as ‘antre’ by Derrida.

 On the third hand, she talks about as to how the theories of Foucault and Derrida helped in erasing the superiority of the western world-i.e. Foucault’s concept of ‘power dynamics’ and Derrida’s questioning of the centre and its authenticity as no finality is there. Derrida also refers to the general crisis of European consciousness.  In the fourth part of the essay Spivak talks about the female subjects and their consciousness. In order to support her ideas she refers to Freud’s concept of repression, Indian classical sati system. The British abolition of Sati System in 1829, is understood as ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’.

 As opposed to these elite groups are people i.e. synonymous to the subaltern classes.  These intellectuals are bent upon rewriting the development of the consciousness of the Indian nation.  Foucault suggests that ‘to make visible the unseen can also mean a change of level… It is the slippage from rendering visible the mechanism to rendering the individual while avoiding psychological or linguistic analysis….’

 In the semioses of the social text elaborations of insurgency stand in the place of the utterance.  The sender – the peasant is marked only as a pointer to an irretrievable consciousness.  The historian tries to transform insurgency into text for knowledge.  So also female subject is not taken into consideration. She is doubly or triply marginalized.  For this women themselves have to take the initiative to come out of the ideology of womanhood and speak for themselves.