It always seemed to me that “Subaltern” was an odd term for a school of history endeavoring to capture the narratives of the lowest classes in India. “Dalit History” seemed like a better bet to me, comprising the study of the poorest elements of the work force, the slum dwellers, and the so-called “untouchables.” This was before I understood that subaltern was not necessarily intended to replicate the Thompsonian search for a working class to whom agency could be given. Indeed, the subaltern was perhaps a worthy choice because it was so difficult to define and locate. It was, or came to be in its more recent guises, a category of people to whom agency could not be given. They were in a sense beyond the reach of agency – once they had it, they were no longer subalterns.
There is actually a rather odd aspect to the notion of the professional historian being the bearer of agency to his or her subjects. After all, the historian is by his or her location – wandering the book fair at the AHA Conference, teaching in some fairly lavishly endowed colleges and universities – aspiring to remove himself or herself from the slum of graduate school and reach secure bourgeois existence in the heights of the tenured profession – very far from the dalits of the world. They are far enough from the dwellers of American inner-cities; their difficulties speaking for and representing such people are legion.
Is there history to be written from the perspective of the convict? “Convicts of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains!” That has a pretty good ring to it. But, we would be able to see the world through the eyes of the transported convict, carried to the Americas or to Australia. What made him/her do what she did? Was she the true Durkheimian deviant – created by the society as its ultimate emblem? Is this, other than the suicide, the ultimate subaltern. Can he/she/it be celebrated?
This problem of endeavoring to reach the masses occurs to one as one reads, Roberts's, Shantaram. The book is really quite a fascinating study of Mumbai, all its many layers from top to bottom, from criminal world to business world (which may not be any distance traveled), and all its many connections to the Indian hinterland and the different parts of the world. Mumbai is out of reach to the tourist and even to the anthropologist. Who among either of these groups will live in the slum, work alongside slumdwellers as they deal with fire and cholera, talk to crime lords, see the leper colonies where black market medicines are secured, visit and sojourn in the labor catchment areas of Maharashtra, and any number of other things that the narrator does in this tale? The tale itself is a cross between Conrad’s Lord Jim and Papillon. And, it provides a glimpse of a world that exists beyond the respectable world of convention and scholarship.
And what makes it possible for such a work to exist is the fact that Roberts is an escaped convict. He does things that many other people would not do. He is forced to go to places that many other people would not go to. It isn’t a history of convicts, of course, though it certainly feels like a history of prisoners of ill-fortune; but it most certainly is a history that only a convict could have written.
If one wanted to understand the world of the turn of the 18th century, there was really only one person who had the breadth of experience to really explain it to you. That person was not a historian like Edward Gibbon or a poet like William Blake, though the latter might have told you a thing or two you needed to know. That person was Olaudah Equiano, who witnessed the world in all its aspects from enslavement in Africa, through the Middle Passage, to a number of experiences in many different slave colonies in the Americas, and finally to freedom. At the beginning of the twenty-first century one of the few people who could really give you an inside view of the world – at least outside Baltimore and “The Wire” – is a former Australian convict who now resides in Mumbai.
This is a must read, in my humble opinion, though I hasten to add that listening to the 35 CDs performed by Humphrey Brower may be even better. Brower's rendering of all the accents, and his ability to draw all the life out of the narrative is truly astounding. Whether or not Hollywood and Johnny Depp can capture the depths of this book and make it more than a mere adventure story remains to be seen. [what happened to that movie?] Of course, there are many who will feel that by purchasing this book they are allowing a man to benefit from his crimes, a man who committed murder (though I don't recall him declaring this in the novel). Oh well, it is a great story, and I think one that we all may learn from; does a man repay his debt to society, by letting that society know some of its shortcomings, some of the ways in which it functions? I don't know.
And a brief addendum: Since writing this, “Slumdog Millionaire” has appeared in the movie theaters and has carted off all the Oscars for best movie, best director, and the like. This is a good movie; it perhaps does not deserve all the awards it has garnered – since there are plenty of Bollywood movies that are better, and there is an Orientalism involved in the judgment of its quality – but it is definitely good. The director, Danny Boyle, really has done an extremely good job of being not an overbearing Brit in India, but someone who first of all declares that he knows nothing and needs to be shown what is going on. His best scenes – those early in the movie, in the slums – really provide a sense of what it must be like living in those mazes – well, perhaps not living, you get a better sense in Shantaram – but endeavoring to get by and survive, particularly as a child. In the end, though, it may fall back on established narratives, and ends in a romance that lets the viewer off the hook.We come away, realizing we have seen horrors, but they are distant – and anyway, everyone is dancing bangra at the end – so all's cool.
Shantaram, by contrast, says the world is [expletive], but don't just blame the perpetrators of these crimes – good guys and bad guys are pretty hard to distinguish – and in the end we are all complicit. In convict history, you heard it here first, we all have to realize that the voices we hear, are voices we ourselves created.
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