How ‘subaltern’ Is the subaltern?

There is an obscure, haunting proverb that captures the visceral reality of human existence…. to live is to be cooked. 

The human body functions as a furnace; our flesh simmers slowly within the frying pan of our own skin. As the years advance, our interiors turn an indelible shade of brown. In this biological ledger, the depth of the sear is the truest measure of our age. 

Yet this metric invites a broader, socio-political inquiry. Can we apply a similar scale of measurement to abstract human conditions? Can we quantify how poor an individual is, how deeply they love, or precisely where they sit on the spectrum of the subaltern?

In the vintage cinematic universe of Dhallywood, a recurring trope serves as a blunt allegory for social mobility. A working-class father—a van puller or a coolie—endures backbreaking labor to finance his son’s education. 

The son excels, climbs the social ladder, marries into a patrician family, and assumes the comfortable role of the gharjamai. In adopting his new aristocratic lineage, he systematically erases his past, refusing to recognize his own father. Superficially, this is a tragedy of filial piety. 

Yet, viewed through an analytical lens, the father’s project has achieved absolute success. His ultimate ambition was to transform his offspring into the very borolok whose ears had always been deaf to his own desperate cries. 

For the son to remain receptive to his chotolok father would jeopardize his newly minted elite status. To fulfill the structural logic of the father's enterprise, the son must maintain his deafness.

However, an ideological mutation occurs when this upwardly mobile individual weaponizes his origins. If he preserves his identity as a "subaltern’s brat" solely to manipulate the labor union at his father-in-law’s conglomerate, how do we evaluate his position? 

Within the pristine salons of the elite, he remains vulnerable to the classic classist slur: bandir baccha—a pejorative that, for the coolie's son, may be a literal truth. He occupies a paradox: an individual who dines with the oligarchy, whose voice carries structural weight, yet who carries an indelible social stain. 

If he simultaneously navigates high society while remaining attuned to the whispers of his disenfranchised mother, how do we classify him?

The problem of arrival

Consider the political trajectory of Dr Atiur Rahman, the former Governor of Bangladesh Bank. Originally framed as the regime's idealized rakhal balok, his tenure became indelibly linked with one of the most audacious cyber-heists in financial history. 

Despite his elite institutional power, he routinely paraded his rustic backstory. Was he a genuine subaltern, or a brilliant performance artist of class trauma? A contemporary parallel exists in figures like Hasnat, a mason’s son turned Member of Parliament who recently addressed the Oxford Union. 

His voice has officially been heard. The critical question remains unanswered: will he follow the path of institutional assimilation, or will his ears remain attuned to the casual laborers selling their muscles in the dawn markets of Karwan Bazar? 

Even if he maintains that proximity, can he ever truly translate the unvarnished perspective of the laborer, or does the act of translation inevitably distort the message?

This ambiguity is not unique to the political right. During a brief stint in a public university dormitory, an insidious piece of campus lore surfaced: the infamous practice of wrapping an ideological dissident in a heavy blanket before administering a beating—ensuring maximum internal damage with zero visible bruising—was allegedly devised by a leftist student politician. 

Capitalism’s most sophisticated systems of control are frequently engineered by those who possess an intimate, intellectual understanding of labor’s vulnerabilities. This reveals a dark truth about the mechanics of exploitation. 

The professional ranks of capital’s enforcement machinery are often recruited from the vanguard of the institutional Left. Armed with moral arrogance and Marxist theory, these individuals understand the exact psychological and physical fault lines of the working class. 

They use emotional blackmail and shared identity to fracture labor solidarity, ultimately transitioning into highly successful capitalists themselves—exemplified by figures like the garments tycoon Rashed Khan Menon.

When the ruling class seeks to neutralize authentic subaltern resistance, its most effective tools are not traditional enforcers, but co-opted academics from the subaltern and feminist traditions. 

The strategy is clinical: the moment an organic leader emerges from the margins and gains access to elite platforms, institutional scholars invoke the canon of Gayatri Spivak to declare that by virtue of being heard, the individual has ceased to be a subaltern. 

This theoretical gatekeeping attempts to invalidate their lived experience, reducing them to the derogatory contemporary category of the chapri—an epithet designed to mock the aesthetic of upwardly mobile working-class youth. 

When representation becomes power

Yet historical precedents suggest that structural origins cannot be so easily erased by status. Were Nur Jahan or Hurrem Sultana, who rose from the imperial harem to govern empires, ever truly viewed as absolute sovereigns, or did they remain, in the eyes of the court, elevated slave-girls?

A striking structural parallel exists between the manipulation of class theory and the execution of modern feminism. In contemporary Bangladesh, the discourse of women’s liberation has frequently been hijacked by political opportunists—the historic Bakshalites—who drape partisan agendas in the language of gender equality, thereby compromising the integrity of the movement. 

Yet, this political distortion must not obscure historical realities. The fundamental rights of women were never voluntarily granted by enlightened social contracts. While John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau laid the philosophical foundations for modern citizenship in London and Paris, their definitions of universal franchise explicitly excluded women. 

The celebrated Brotherhood of the French Revolution was a strictly fraternity affair; its linguistic and legal architecture left no room for women. It required a century and a half of militant suffragette hunger strikes and martyrdom to secure the basic right to vote.

In contemporary Bangladesh, despite Islamic jurisprudence establishing clear inheritance rights, societal practice routinely converts a female heir into a "bad sister" the moment she claims her patrimony. 

Should her husband pass away, social mores dictate that she cannot remarry without forfeiting her property claims. If she dares to seek companionship, she is subjected to severe public humiliation regarding her autonomy. 

Similarly, until the historical interventions of the nineteenth century, upper-caste Hindu widows were coerced onto their husbands' funeral pyres—a horrific ritual of self-immolation that modern Bollywood cinema, through directors like Sanjay Leela Bhansali, continues to aestheticize.

It was this precise realization that guided the strategy of Begum Rokeya. She deliberately distanced herself from the mainstream anti-British nationalist movement, choosing instead to establish her girls' school in Calcutta using English donations. 

Rokeya recognized a profound hypocrisy: the native nationalist brothers who sang of communal unity were the very individuals who had historically intoxicated ten-year-old widows to push them into the flames of Sati. 

She understood that an independent patriarchy would not automatically grant human dignity to women. In the grand anthem of nationalism, there was no allocation of rights for the sisters. 

The ‘brownest’ lives

Today, the laborers who return home on vacation from the Arab world, pampered momentarily at the airport, share a structural kinship with these disenfranchised women. 

The woman who went abroad on a domestic work contract, suffered systematic physical violation, and returned as a corpse is the exact contemporary manifestation of the subjugated women Rokeya sought to liberate.

Nobody can truly represent anybody else. The presence of partisan feminists, capitalistic NGOs, or foreign proxies operating under the banner of liberation does not invalidate the urgent necessity of the discourse surrounding women's rights. 

Today, the most acute crisis at the intersection of gender and subalternity in Bangladesh is borne by the true bandis—the millions of child domestic workers hidden within private households.

These young girls, often no older than ten or twelve, form the invisible foundation of the informal economy. They are the first to wake and the last to sleep, relegated to the hard tiles of kitchen floors.

Within these private domestic spaces, a silent, horrific dynamic unfolds. Mistresses of the house, fully aware of their husbands' nocturnal incursions into the kitchen following their own marital retirement, frequently choose averted eyes or active complicity. 

If the child resists the master's advances, violence follows. If pregnancy occurs, an underground abortion is quietly arranged, a procedure that occasionally proves fatal. 

This domestic terror is maintained to safeguard the middle-class matrimonial throne, keeping the domestic peace intact. The psychological frustration of the mistress is regularly discharged onto the child's flesh through the targeted application of a hot metal spatula.

Outside the household, there is no sanctuary. The child’s meager wages are instantly expropriated: spent on her father’s gambling debts or utilized by her mother to purchase consumer goods for male relatives. 

When these girls attempt to escape this cycle of abuse and return home, their fathers, resentful of the interruption to their card games, routinely drag them back to their employers, pocketing an extra stipend for transit expenses. 

Muted by the loudest noise 

These children exist in millions, yet they are profoundly, terrifyingly alone. They possess no labor unions, no legal protections, and no platform. Their suffering is expressed only in muffled whimpers. 

Their sole form of human connection is reduced to hurried, silent sign language exchanged through bathroom ventilators with counterparts in adjacent concrete apartment blocks.

If we return to our initial metaphor of the cooking scale—measuring the precise degree to which an individual’s internal humanity has been seared by oppression—the interiors of these child domestic workers are undoubtedly the brownest, despite their tender age. Yet the cycle is not entirely unbreakable. 

If the parents of such a child choose resistance over complicity, enduring extreme hardship to send their daughter to Dhaka University, and if she eventually ascends to parliament and speaks at Oxford, a critical fork in the road appears. 

Will she choose to give voice to the silent agony of the ventilator? Or will the institutional academic-feminists, from their positions of comfort, immediately dismiss her as a co-opted "house-nigger"?

We must keep our analytical scales meticulously calibrated. The danger of betrayal is absolute; history is replete with institutional structural proxies—the real-world equivalents of Quentin Tarantino’s Stephen or the compromised Atiur Rahmans of the financial elite. 

But the existence of the proxy does not invalidate the potential of the vanguard. For amidst the systemic betrayals of the upwardly mobile, history also yields the transformative resistance of a Martin Luther King Jr. 

The scale remains our only tool to tell them apart.

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S M Rezaul Karim is a writer, thinker and political pundit who is also known as Rock Monu