" The two sentences go a long way to legitimize each other. One never encounters the testimony of the women’s voice consciousness. Such a testimony would not be ideology-transcendent or “fully” subjective, of course, but it would constitute the ingredients for producing a counter-sentence. As one goes down the grotesquely mistranscribed names of these women, the sacrificed widows, in the police reports included in the records of the East India Company, one cannot put together a “voice.” The most one can sense is the immense heterogeneity breaking through even such a skeletal and ignorant account (castes, for example, are regularly described as tribes). Faced with the dialectically interlocking sentences that are constructible as “White men are saving brown women from brown men” and “The women wanted to die,” the metropolitan feminist migrant (removed from the actual theater of decolonization) asks the question of simple semiosis— What does this signify?—and begins to plot a history. "

― , Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea