Comparative Intellectual History: The Frankfurt School, Subaltern Studies, and Modern Thought

This paper uses the comparative intellectual history framework, inspired by Cemil Aydin’s The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought’s emphasis on comparing various types of modern anti-Westernisms, in order to investigate a path through twentieth century South Asian intellectual history. As has been remarked in many different venues, particularly Vinayuk Chaturvedi’s edited Mapping Subaltern Studies, comparing Subaltern Studies with the Frankfurt School provides an especially interesting vantage point through which to understand the impetus towards rejecting a crude historical materialism with a serious engagement with culture and culturalist knowledge. I examine the form and content of Subaltern Studies through analysis of life histories of several of its proponents and critics within a broader social history of modern thought. This social history of Subaltern Studies is framed against the thought of the Frankfurt School, in order to deepen our understanding of the contexts of and motives for the developments and legacies of Subaltern Studies. This allows historians to see Subaltern Studies as one (but not the only) constituent portion of twentieth-century South Asian intellectual life. Parsing out its place within South Asian intellectual communities in the twentieth century contextualizes their contributions within a South Asian social terrain, thereby lifting the analysis outside of nationalist historical conceptualization.