Sociology of Subalternism: Tribal Resistance and Marginalisation in India

The term ‘subalterno’ is drawn from Gramsci’s analysis of Italian history in Prison Notebooks (1971) (Currie 1995: 219–46). His notion of the ‘subalterno’ provided the initial intellectual inspiration for the Subaltern Studies project led by Ranajit Guha in 1982. Guha acknowledges this in his preface to the first volume. Subalternism refers to the state of groups excluded from mainstream socio-economic and political power systems, and was used to signify the centrality of dominant/dominated relationships in history.