The problem with the subaltern may not be that she is prevented from speaking. It may be that she is allowed to speak in a way that makes her speech unusable as theory. Sociology has become rather good at listening to the marginalised. It interviews them, records them, archives them, cites them, gives them space in ethnographies and, increasingly, insists upon the ethical necessity of hearing their voices. But there is something strangely incomplete about this generosity. The subaltern is permitted to enter the sociological text, yet the terms in which she enters remain largely determined by someone else. She enters as experience. Someone else turns that experience into a concept. She supplies the life; the sociologist supplies the abstraction. She speaks, but the speech arrives already separated from its capacity to theorise. Perhaps, then, the more difficult question after Spivak is not Can the subaltern speak? but Can the subaltern theorise? And if she can, under what conditions will what she produces be recognised as theory rather than experience, testimony, consciousness, culture, identity, or merely “local knowledge”?

This is not an argument against empiricism. There is nothing inherently emancipatory about theory, just as there is nothing inherently oppressive about empirical research. Indeed, empiricism has often been indispensable to the exposure of domination. Caste discrimination, dispossession, humiliation, unequal access to resources and everyday forms of exclusion become politically difficult to deny precisely when they are documented. The problem begins elsewhere: when the empirical and the theoretical cease to be methodological distinctions and become social distinctions between kinds of knowers. When some people are systematically positioned as those who experience society and others as those who explain it, empiricism acquires an epistemic politics. It produces a division of labour in which one group supplies the material of knowledge and another acquires the authority to make that material intelligible. It is in this sense—not as a simple synonym for colonialism—that empiricism can become a form of colonisation of the theoretical.

Colonial knowledge provides an important genealogy for this problem. Bernard Cohn’s account of colonialism and its forms of knowledge showed that the colonial state did not merely govern an already intelligible Indian society. It sought to make that society legible through surveys, censuses, ethnographies, legal categories and administrative classifications. Knowledge was therefore not external to rule. It was one of the means through which rule became possible. Nicholas Dirks’s Castes of Mind similarly asks us to think about caste not simply as an ancient institution that colonialism encountered but as a category whose modern form was profoundly shaped by colonial practices of classification. Whatever position one takes on the strength of the colonial-invention thesis, the larger epistemological point remains important: classification does not merely discover objects; it establishes the conditions under which certain objects can be discovered.

The university inherits a version of this problem even after the colonial administrator disappears. The sociologist replaces the census official, the ethnographer replaces the colonial surveyor, the interview replaces the interrogation, and the field replaces the district report. These are not equivalent practices, and it would be historically irresponsible to collapse them into one another. Yet there remains a structural question worth asking: who occupies the position from which society becomes an object of knowledge? The difficulty is that the answer is often obscured by the apparent intimacy of contemporary research. The sociologist may sit with villagers, converse with workers, record Dalit narratives, participate in everyday life and patiently listen to people’s accounts of themselves. Yet intimacy does not necessarily dissolve epistemic hierarchy. One can know someone intimately while still occupying the position of the one who converts their knowledge into knowledge for the discipline.

This is particularly revealing in the development of Indian sociology. M. N. Srinivas’s work represents one of the most important attempts to understand Indian society through close empirical engagement with social life. In Religion and Society Among the Coorgs of South India, and later in his writings on caste and social change, Srinivas made concepts such as Sanskritization and dominant caste central to the sociological vocabulary of India. The achievement is considerable. He moved sociology away from some of the more speculative descriptions of Indian society and toward sustained observation of social processes. But precisely because these concepts have been so successful, they invite a different question. What does it mean for a social process to become a sociological concept? What is gained when the sociologist names a process, and what disappears in the act of naming it?

Consider Sanskritization. A sociological account might identify the adoption of practices associated with a higher caste by a lower caste as a process through which status is negotiated or sought. But the people involved in that process do not necessarily encounter their world in the vocabulary of “Sanskritization.” They may have their own concepts of honour, imitation, pollution, respectability, shame, aspiration, hierarchy and social distance. Their practices may contain implicit theories of the society they inhabit. Yet when these practices enter sociology, their conceptual status changes. The sociologist’s abstraction becomes theory. The actors’ abstractions are more likely to remain beliefs, ideologies, cultural meanings, or local understandings. This difference may seem innocent. It is not.

The point is not that Srinivas should have simply reproduced the villagers’ categories. That would replace one problem with another. Sociology cannot abandon abstraction simply because abstraction can dominate. Nor should the concepts of social actors be treated as automatically more authentic than those of researchers. The more difficult issue is the unequal distribution of the right to move between the particular and the general. Sociology grants its trained practitioners a peculiar licence: they may move from a village to “Indian society,” from an observation to a concept, from particular interactions to a general proposition. The people who inhabit the village are rarely granted the same epistemic movement. Their observations remain attached to their location. The sociologist’s observations acquire portability.

André Béteille makes this problem visible in a different way. In Caste, Class and Power, Béteille’s analysis of a Tanjore village distinguishes among caste, class and power and examines the changing relationship between these forms of stratification. The analytical sophistication of this distinction is precisely what makes it sociologically productive. Yet it also allows us to see the peculiar labour performed by sociology. The village is full of social distinctions, but sociology rearranges them into its own conceptual architecture. Caste becomes one dimension, class another, power another. The social world is translated into a language that permits comparison, abstraction and generalisation.

But what happens to the concepts through which the inhabitants themselves understand these relations? A landless labourer may possess an extraordinarily precise understanding of dependence, humiliation and patronage. A lower-caste person may understand hierarchy not as an abstract system of stratification but as a series of bodily prohibitions, insults, spaces one cannot enter, food one cannot touch, people before whom one must stand differently. A landlord may possess an equally elaborate theory of authority. These understandings can be sociologically consequential without necessarily becoming sociology. The problem is therefore not that the sociologist invents a reality that does not exist. It is that the sociological vocabulary can become the privileged vocabulary of reality.

This distinction between knowing society and theorising society is where Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai’s The Cracked Mirror becomes particularly important. Their distinction between experience and theory forces us to confront an uncomfortable possibility: perhaps the distribution of theoretical authority follows social hierarchies more closely than sociology likes to admit. The oppressed are frequently considered authoritative about their experience but not necessarily about the theoretical meaning of that experience. The Dalit is presumed to know what humiliation feels like. The sociologist is presumed to know what humiliation means. One becomes the witness; the other, the theorist.

There is an irony here. The more sociology insists that the oppressed must be heard, the more it may risk producing an enormous archive of experiences that remain theoretically subordinated. The interview can become a machine for converting speech into data. The life history becomes evidence. The testimony becomes a quotation. The sociologist’s task begins after the speaking has ended: coding, interpreting, contextualising, theorising. The subaltern is thus not necessarily silenced. She is empiricised.

This might be a more useful concept than simply saying that the subaltern is silenced. To empiricise the subaltern is to recognise her as a source of experience while withholding, or failing to recognise, her capacity to transform that experience into concepts that possess validity beyond the immediate site of experience. She is made visible precisely as someone whose world can be known. What remains uncertain is whether she can become someone who produces knowledge of the world.

The distinction becomes particularly stark in the reception of B. R. Ambedkar. Ambedkar cannot comfortably be placed within the category of the informant. He does not merely testify to caste. He theorises it. Annihilation of Caste does not ask the reader simply to sympathise with an oppressed community. It provides an account of the mechanisms through which caste reproduces itself, of the relationship between religious doctrine and social hierarchy, and of the ideological conditions under which inequality persists. Ambedkar refuses the division between experience and theory because he occupies both sides of it. He is situated within the experience of caste and simultaneously claims the authority to produce an account of caste.

This is precisely what makes Ambedkar’s relationship to Indian sociology so theoretically productive. The question is not simply why sociology failed to “include” Ambedkar for so long. The deeper question is what the disciplinary distinction between sociology, political thought, social criticism and experience does to thinkers like Ambedkar. When Ambedkar is treated as a historical figure, political leader, anti-caste activist or moral thinker, something can be lost: the possibility that he is also a theorist of society. The same problem appears more widely in the reception of Dalit intellectual production. Dalit autobiographies are often read as invaluable accounts of lived experience. But why does a Dalit autobiography so readily become “experience” while a sociological monograph becomes “theory”? Why are the concepts embedded in the former not subjected to the same search for abstraction, generality and explanatory power that we routinely grant to the latter?

The answer cannot simply be that academic sociology is more rigorous. That claim would merely restate the hierarchy it is supposed to explain. The more interesting question is how rigour itself becomes institutionally defined. Who is trained to write in the language recognised as theory? Who has access to the institutions in which concepts circulate? Whose work is reviewed as theoretical? Whose observations are considered “situated,” and whose are allowed to masquerade as universal? Here Bourdieu’s sociology of the academic field becomes useful. The authority to speak scientifically is not distributed independently of social and institutional position. Academic fields establish rules concerning legitimate language, legitimate problems and legitimate forms of intellectual capital. Theory is therefore not simply a cognitive capacity. It is also an institutionally authorised activity.

This is where the idea of colonialism needs to be handled carefully. To call empiricism colonial does not require us to claim that every empirical sociologist reproduces colonial power. Nor does it mean that theory is somehow intrinsically decolonial. A theory can be profoundly colonial; an empirical study can be profoundly emancipatory. The argument concerns a structure of epistemic authority, not the intentions of individual scholars. A knowledge regime becomes colonial in a deeper sense when it repeatedly positions certain subjects as objects whose worlds are available for analysis while granting other subjects the authority to define the concepts through which those worlds become intelligible.

There is therefore a strange continuity between the colonial archive and the contemporary research interview. The colonial administrator asked questions in order to classify. The contemporary researcher may ask questions in order to understand. The intentions are radically different. Yet both raise the same reflexive problem for sociology: what happens when one person occupies the position of the questioner and another the position of the answerer? The problem is not solved merely by allowing the answerer to speak at length. The epistemic asymmetry survives if the questioner retains exclusive authority over what the answers mean.

This is perhaps the point at which Spivak’s question can be transformed most productively. “Can the subaltern speak?” is an indispensable question because representation itself can silence. But an equally important question is: Can the subaltern’s speech become theory without first being translated by someone else? The issue is not whether subalterns possess concepts. Clearly they do. Every social actor interprets, categorises, compares, remembers and theorises the world. The issue is why some forms of these intellectual activities are recognised as sociology while others are relegated to culture, consciousness or experience.

The challenge, then, is not to abolish the distinction between empirical research and theory. Sociology requires both. The challenge is to refuse the assumption that they correspond to different kinds of people. Theoretical capacity is not a property of the sociologist. Nor is experience the natural epistemic territory of the subaltern. A person can be simultaneously located within a social structure and capable of abstracting that structure. Indeed, there may be forms of theoretical knowledge that become possible precisely because one occupies a particular position within relations of domination. The oppressed does not possess an automatic epistemic privilege, but neither can their location be treated as epistemically irrelevant.

This has consequences for how we might read Indian sociology itself. Srinivas and Béteille should not simply be criticised for having produced inadequate accounts of caste or village society. Such criticism would leave intact the deeper structure of the discipline: the assumption that the appropriate response to an inadequate theory is to produce a better theory from the same position of authority. A sociology of Indian sociology would ask instead how the object called Indian society was produced through successive conceptualisations. Ghurye’s caste, Srinivas’s caste, Béteille’s caste, Ambedkar’s caste and contemporary Dalit understandings of caste need not be assumed to be competing descriptions of one self-evident object. They can be examined as different ways of making social relations intelligible.

The resulting project is therefore not a search for the “true” representation of the Other. It is an inquiry into how the Other becomes an object of representation at all. It asks who is authorised to classify, who becomes classified, whose categories become concepts, whose concepts remain experiences, and what happens when the person being theorised begins to theorise the theorist’s categories in return. The ultimate problem of sociological othering may thus lie not simply in the production of an inferior category but in the production of an unequal relationship between the knower and the known.

Perhaps the most consequential form of decolonisation, then, is not adding the subaltern to the sociological archive. The archive is already full of subaltern speech. It is full of interviews, testimonies, autobiographies, ethnographies and life histories. What remains unsettled is the status of the knowledge contained within them. Decolonisation would mean asking whether the subaltern can enter sociology not merely as its object, informant or empirical source, but as its theorist. It would mean treating experience not as the raw material from which theory must necessarily be extracted by someone else, but as a possible site of conceptual production in its own right.

The deepest epistemic violence may therefore not occur when the subaltern is prevented from speaking. It may occur when the subaltern speaks and is heard, but is heard only as evidence. She is allowed to provide the material from which society can be theorised, but not necessarily recognised as the person who can theorise society herself. In that sense, the subaltern is not silenced. Something more subtle happens. She is translated into data. And once she has become data, the discipline can listen to her without having to surrender its monopoly over theory.