Introduction

In her influential and controversial essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak recounts the tale of a mysterious suicide: “A young woman of sixteen or seventeen, Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, hanged herself in her father's modest apartment in North Calcutta in 1926. The suicide was a puzzle since, as Bhubaneswari was menstruating at the time, it was clearly not a case of illicit pregnancy” (1988b: 307). Because Bhubaneswari “had known that her death would be diagnosed as the outcome of illegitimate passion,” we are told, “[s]he had . . . waited for the onset of menstruation” (307). Some years later, when Bhubaneswari's nieces are asked about the suicide, they say that “it was a case of illicit love ” (308).

Spivak confesses in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason that contemplation of “this failure of communication” had “so unnerved” her that, in her initial discussions of Bhaduri's suicide she had been led to write, “in the accents of passionate lament: the subaltern cannot speak!” (1999: 308; see also 1988b, 1985b). The lament arose from her realization that the subaltern in general, and the “historically muted subject of the subaltern woman” in particular, was inevitably consigned to being either misunderstood or misrepresented through the self-interest of those with the power to represent (1988b: 295).