In Midnight’s Children, the Subalterns Speak!

There is no human activity from which all intellectual intervention can be excluded—homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens.

—antonio gramsci, “the formation of intellectuals”

But if small things go, will large things be close behind?

—salman rushdie, midnight’s children

My main point in this article is to suggest that even though the subalterns “do not speak directly in archival documents which are usually produced by the ruling classes” (Chakrabarty, “Small History” 478), they speak nonetheless in bits and traces within the elite discourses. Wherever the elite speak, the subaltern speaks as well because “supplementarity” is the condition of their possibility.¹ “Man is aristocratic,” Antonio Gramsci argues, “because he is the servant of the soil” (80). Just like other structural opposites, the subaltern constitutes the elite not by being outside the domains of modern knowledge production but by inhabiting them. It is, therefore, hard to imagine the one without imagining the “other.” I do not at all mean to suggest, however, that the subalterns are able to speak for themselves or to suggest that the intellectuals’ role is now over, but to submit that there is a more complicated nexus between the rulers and the subalterns than it is often thought.

In his article “The Impossibility of Subaltern History,” the critic Gyan Prakash argues that the subaltern refuses to be outside modernity, and the discourse that puts him or her outside history is indicative of the will of those who practice such exclusionary discourse. He further contends, “Quite simply, I wish to suggest that subalternity erupts within the system of dominance and marks its limits from within, that its externality to dominant systems of knowledge and power surfaces inside the system of dominance, but only as an intimation, as a trace of that which eludes the dominant discourse” (288). Reading critically the role of the Arya Samaj in India in rationalizing Hinduism, Prakash notes that the endeavor of the Arya Samaj to suppress the Puranic rituals itself vindicates the fact that when the elite (here the Arya Samaj) speaks, the subaltern (here the Hinduism of the Puranas) speaks too. In other words, the relation between the elite and the subaltern is determined by the attempt to domination and the resistance to such domination. He further argues, “Subaltern knowledges and subjects register their presence by acting upon the dominant discourse, by forcing it into contradictions, by making it speak in tongues” (293). Along similar lines, Salman Rushdie notes how the subaltern voting blocks composed of the Harijans, or untouchables, as well as the Sikhs and Muslims, ended Indira Gandhi’s repressive rule in 1977 (Imaginary 43, 52) and put in power those who treated them as persons. Both Rushdie and Prakash suggest that the subalterns and the elite are constitutive and constituted by each other; they coimplicate and are coeval.

However, as Dipesh Chakrabarty contends, even though the goal of the subalterns is to resist elite domination, their actions cannot be equated with the conscious and concerted nationalist political movements (“Small History” 472). At the same time, though, the subaltern modes of resistance should not be ignored as something “pre-political,” or, worse, equated with “primitive” and “irrational” human behavior. Once again, it is hard to stratify subaltern sensibilities and activities from the analytical frameworks provided by Western modernity. As pointed out at the beginning of the article, the subalterns speak ineluctably and simultaneously with the elites, rather than being contained by them. The American historian Eugen Weber corroborates this argument when he remarks that “the illiterate are not in fact inarticulate; they can and do express themselves in several ways” (qtd. in Chakrabarty, “Small History” 478). In fact, as Chakrabarty tells us, Ranajit Guha retrieves the “collective imagination” of the peasant rebellion through the discourses recorded by the rulers and their officials (“Small History” 479). This interconnected and interdependent relation between the elite and the subaltern is demonstrated well in Rushdie’s celebrated novel Midnight’s Children. In fact, things are so mixed up in the novel that any kind of rigid segmentation or stratification between people and their environment simply collapses upon...