The purview of this paper is the linguist shift of a (Leftist) Marxist to a (Left of Center) Subaltern paradigm by historians who were and are examining the development of the latter period of the British Indian Colonial State, and the beginning of the nation-States that emerged from the former Colonial Empire. It is, further, a reappraisal of their contribution after the better part of thirty-five years since the Subaltern “School” appearance within the discipline of the history of Subcontinent.
As it is with writing, when one outlines and estimates the length and breathe of a project the challenge takes on a life of its own over which the composer has little control. To prove the proposal within his abstract, your lecturer will need one to two more sections to prove his assertions, and, since he has reached the end of his allotted time, and must allow his fellow colleagues the dais to present their worthy researches.
Before he does render the floor to his esteemed colleagues, he would like to outline the future course of this effort. He intends to look at the issues of underdevelopment and de-industrialization in relation to Subaltern theory; then, to define the Subalternist’s vision of what a “history from below” means, and how the Post-Modernist historian has shifted the Modernist Marxist paradigm to one relevant to the contemporary Neo-Liberal (capital letters) Global world.
Finally onward, to the linguist parole of the Subaltern historians, and how this mystifies the object (history) and to point to a new direction for a progressive historiography, and, hopefully to return partially to the demystification of which the historical Marxists were attempting to develop in the Nineteenth through the initial decades of the Twentieth Centuries.
Your critic merely desires a platform to finish the project here begun.