1. Who is the “Subaltern”?

The term “subaltern” refers to people who are at the very bottom of the social ladder and are outside of the power structures of society. This includes the illiterate peasantry, tribal groups, and the lowest strata of the urban proletariat.

Spivak argues that these people aren’t just “oppressed”; they are in a position where they have no way to represent themselves within the dominant language or legal systems of the world.

2. The Problem with Western Intellectuals

Spivak begins by critiquing famous Western thinkers like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. She argues that:

The Illusion of Transparency: These thinkers often claim that the oppressed can “speak for themselves” and that the intellectual’s job is just to let them talk.

The “Subject of Europe“: Spivak says this is dangerous because it ignores how the intellectual is still a part of a powerful Western system.

By pretending to be “transparent,” these thinkers actually re-establish the Western scholar as the center of knowledge, while ignoring how global capitalism and imperialism still control the lives of the oppressed.

3. The Two Meanings of “Representation”

To explain how people are silenced, Spivak distinguishes between two German words for “representation” that are often confused in English:

Vertretung (Proxy): This is political representation, like a lawyer or a politician “speaking for” someone else.

Darstellung (Portrait): This is descriptive representation, like a book or a movie “showing” or “re-presenting” a certain group of people.

The Argument: Spivak warns that intellectuals often act as if they are just “portraying” (Darstellung) the oppressed, when they are actually “speaking for” them (Vertretung) in a way that serves the intellectual’s own interests.

4. Epistemic Violence

This is a key concept. “Epistemic violence” refers to the way a dominant culture (like British colonialism) destroys the knowledge, history, and legal systems of a colonized people and replaces them with its own.

For example, when the British codified Hindu law, they used their own Western logic to interpret ancient texts, effectively wiping out the original meaning and the local ways of living.

This “violence” makes it so that the colonized person can only “speak” if they use the language and logic of the colonizer.

5. The “Doubly Silenced” Subaltern Woman

Spivak argues that if the subaltern is silenced, the subaltern woman is even worse off. She is caught between patriarchy (male dominance in her own culture) and imperialism (the foreign power).

She famously describes this struggle using the example of Sati (the historical practice of widow sacrifice in India).

The British View: “White men are saving brown women from brown men”. The colonizers used the “protection” of women to justify their rule.

The Indian Elite View: “The women actually wanted to die” as a sign of religious devotion.

The Result: The woman’s own voice and her own reasons for her actions are completely lost between these two male-dominated narratives.

6. The Conclusion: “The Subaltern Cannot Speak”

Spivak’s most famous and controversial conclusion is that “the subaltern cannot speak“.

She doesn’t mean that they don’t have vocal cords or don’t try to talk.

She means that even when they do try to speak, the system is not set up to hear them. There is no “space” in the dominant discourse for their voice to be understood on its own terms.

7. The Story of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri

To prove her point, Spivak tells the story of a young woman named Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, who hanged herself in 1926.

Bhuvaneswari was involved in the Indian independence movement and was tasked with a political assassination she couldn’t bring herself to do.

She knew that if she killed herself, people would assume it was because of a “failed love affair” or an “illicit pregnancy”.

To “speak” and prove it wasn’t a pregnancy, she waited until she was menstruating to commit the act.

The Failure of Speech: Even though she used her own body to “write” her message, her own family and society still ignored her political reasons and remembered her death as a simple tragic romance.

Summary for Study: Spivak is telling us that we cannot simply “give a voice” to the oppressed. Instead, we must work to unlearn our own privileges and realize how the very ways we think and talk might be participating in the silencing of others.