Found this paragraph in the intro extremely interesting. And my response and questions this time are in the form of footnotes to this paragraph

"Gayatri Spivak questions whether or not the possibility exists for any recovery of a subaltern voice that is not a kind of essentialist fiction. Although she expresses considerable sympathy for the project undertaken in contemporary historiography to give a voice to ‘the subaltern’ who had been written out of the record by conventional historical accounts, Spivak raises grave doubts about its theoretical legitimacy. She is sympathetic but critical in her response here to Ranajit Guha’s subaltern studies project which seeks to obtain what Said termed the ‘permission to speak’ by going behind the terms of reference of ‘élite’ history to include the perspective of those who are never taken into account (the subaltern social groups). Recognising and applauding the project’s endorsement of the heterogeneity of the colonial subject, and giving a qualified approval to the politics of the effort to speak a ‘politics of the people’, Spivak is nevertheless concerned to articulate what she sees as the difficulties and contradictions involved in constructing a ‘speaking position’ for the subaltern. Wanting to acknowledge the continuity and vigour of pre-colonial social practice, its ability to modify and to ‘survive’ colonial incursions and definitional strategies and exclusions, she insists that the poststructuralist mode of the project only disguises what she sees as an underlying persistent essentialism[M1] [M2] . For her, one cannot construct a category of the ‘subaltern’ that has an effective ‘voice’ clearly and unproblematically audible above the persistent and multiple echoes of its inevitable heterogeneity. Her conclusion is that for ‘the true’ subaltern group, whose identity is its difference[M3] , there is no subaltern subject that can ‘know and speak itself[M4] . Thus the intellectual must avoid reconstructing the subaltern as merely another unproblematic field of knowing, so confining its effect to the very form of representation (‘text for knowledge’) the project sought to evade and lay bare. The conclusion is expressed, perhaps unfortunately, in a rather negative way: ‘Subaltern historiography must confront the impossibility of such gestures’. Spivak’s negative, as José Rabasa has pointed out, does not ‘necessarily exclude such instances of colonized subjects defracting power as those Homi Bhabha has isolated in the case of India’." (from the introduction of "The Postcolonial Studies Reader")

---

 [M1]Does this mean any engagement with 'what it was like before colonialism' or 'an attempt in the present to build our knowledge structures' cannot escape the essentialist streak while theorising? Fanon alludes to this when he says he doesn't want to legitimize past in the struggle/combat for independence against the colonialist forces. The questions that follow this line of thinking will be - Can past be revived in its pristine form after colonialist encounter? What happens to language that we speak? Will there be a language left unmixed with colonizer's language and its array of significance such that we can rebuild and reconstruct 'our' culture from that? To illustrate this let me take an example:

“India” as a category and a “nation”, many scholars have argued, was not available before colonialist encounter. It is only after the colonial experience we can have a nation and give that nation a name - India. But this category is unscrupulously used both in colonialist and non colonialist discourses.

The history that precedes the construction of the category of India becomes Indian history.

Indian history is not written showing us how specific events in time led to the emergence of India as a category and a nation but it is written tracing its history backwards where India has remained a singular entity from the Vedic civilization to the colonial invasion. The writing itself is such that there is something “essential”  in the categorical construct i.e. India which has flown like one river. We can recall here Foucault and his way of doing history. India can then be seen as an emergence at one particular point in time in history rather than a cumulative entity which has flown from Vedic civilizations.

This kind of essentialism which Spivak speaks has not completely gone from our discourses. We still speak of Indian Sciences and Indian knowledge as if there was something called India in Vedic times and the period that follows it along a continuum till the colonial encounter. 

 [M2]Also after colonial encounter it’s difficult to distill from what we are today - what is Eastern and what is Western/colonialist. Because colonial experience renders us incapable of recognizing what language meant before without conflating the meanings with colonizer’s language. Colonial encounter erases the colonized past and the colonized has to recognize her past from within the colonial experience she has had. Colonizer’s language does that to the colonized.

 [M3]I cannot know myself if I don’t encounter the other. Is this not in some way true of the West also?  Because after Saussure, one can’t help but say all identity lies in the difference.

 [M4] Is the question here: how can you distinguish a voice that is lost in the heterogeneity of voices? How can I discover this is my voice and my speech when I cannot know how my voice itself has so many others in it? When Dipesh Chakrabarty speaks of the project in History to provincialize Europe and bring in heterogeneity into history, my rather naive question is 'isn't doing 'History' itself a European idea? what can be done instead of history? ' 'Itihasa'? so as not to universalize a European paradigm? Haven't we equated 'Itihasa' with history  to the extent that we don't know whether there was any other way of doing Itihasa? Haven't we lost in the act of translation (which is itself a product of colonial encounter), the ability to retain the significance of signs in the colonized culture?