The term subaltern has traveled widely, mutating as it has animated political projects and academic interventions across several continents. Originally a late-medieval term for peasants and vassals and later for low-ranked military troops of peasant background, it was adapted by Marxist philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci (1978) to refer to subordinated groups and classes in his analysis of the “Southern Question” in Italy. His overarching concern was to produce “a methodology of subaltern historiography, a history of the subaltern classes, and a political strategy of transformation based upon the historical development and existence of the subaltern” (M. Green 2002, 3). Gramsci’s analysis of subalternity in relation to domination and uneven development had a major impact on thinkers grappling with colonialism and its legacies in the Global South. More than fifty years later, Gramsci’s concept of the subaltern was reworked by the Subaltern Studies Collective, a group of historians of South Asia that was founded in 1982 and led by Ranajit Guha. The collective sought to counter the elitist bias in South Asian historiography by centering the perspective of nonelite groups, using the term to refer to a shifting mass of groups subordinated along lines of caste, class, gender, religion, and...