‘Subaltern studies’ refers to the importance of ‘subordinate’ groups in the making of history. The latter are usually defined as encompassing the urban and rural lower/under-classes, the majority in any society although, generally, the term is said to refer to all non-elites, including women. Most often the discourse concentrates on instances of social protest or at other times when the ‘subalterns’ make their ‘voices’ heard in response to, or even independent of, manipulations/interventions by elites.

The conventional understanding of the origins of this discourse looks to the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (d. 1937) but notes that the concept of ‘history from below’, of which subaltern studies is said to be a spin-off, has been extant since at least the 1960s, with the appearance of the 1963 The Making of the English Working Class, authored by Edward P. Thompson (d. 1993). In this same tradition are the works of such others as the British historian Christopher Hill (d. 2003), whose contributions commenced in the 1940s, Eric Hobsbawm (d. 2012) and those of the American historian Gary B. Nash (d. 2021), from the 1960s.

‘Subaltern studies’ as a distinct, named field, is usually understood to have risen to prominence in the late 1970s among historians of the Subcontinent. Beginning in 1982, under the editorship of Ranajit Guha, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, began to publish volumes in the series ‘Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society’. By 2001, some eleven volumes, comprising more than 47 essays, had appeared. In 1988, Guha co-edited, with Gayatri Chakravorty-Spivak, a single volume entitled Selected Subaltern Studies with a foreword by Edward Said (d. 2003). In 1997 Guha edited A Subaltern Studies Reader. In 2001 David Ludden, a South Asian studies specialist, edited Reading Subaltern Studies with an appendix listing the contents of the series’ first ten volumes. Interest in the subaltern spread: in the 1990s a Latin American subaltern studies group was established.

As to the field of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, in the years preceding the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution it was not otherwise free from the influence of outside discourses.