Subalternity and Agency

3. Motivation behind her writing of "Can the Subaltern Speak?"

“The British Codification of Hindu Law”:
1. Wishes to discuss British epistemic violence in the codification of
Hindu Law.
2. Colonial British Masters sought to:
“Form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions
whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but
English in taste, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect. To that class
we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country to
enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the
Western nomenclature, and to render them by degree fit vehicles
for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.”
3. Spivak argues that for Foucault and Deleuze the subproletariat (the lowest “class”) “can speak and know their condition” .
4. Spivak disagrees with this contention.
5. Spivak explores the consciousness (subjectivity) of
woman as subaltern.
6. Widow sacrifice: sati

7. “White men are saving brown women from brown men” (p. 92). The problem of consciousness in woman as subaltern is encapsulated in this sentence.
8. This sentence, however, is contrasted from the Indian nativist argument: “The women actually wanted
to die”

Conclusion:
The Subaltern cannot speak. There is no virtue in global laundry lists with ‘woman’ as a pious item. Representation has not withered away. The female intellectual as intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not disown with a flourish. (p. 104).

Source: Gayatri Sivak essay: "Can the Subaltern Speak?"