Definition of "subaltern"

Two weeks after giving birth […] she [Rachida Dati] was removed and offered no consolation prize other than the subaltern position of No 2 on the UMP's list for the next European elections.

2009 January 27, Agnes Poirier, “The fall of Rachida Dati reflects badly on the French president”, in The Guardian‎

Celebrating the subversive practices of subaltern groups

2013, Isher-Paul Sahni, “More than Horseplay”, in Studies in Popular Culture, volume 35, page 81

She was an extraordinarily beautiful girl, Margaret Devereux ; and made all the men frantic by running away with a penniless young fellow ; a mere nobody sir a subaltern in a foot regiment, or something of that kind.

1891, Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, London, New York, N.Y., Melbourne, Vic.: Ward Lock & Co.

As a subaltern of 24, Neave was captured in the defence of Calais in May 1940.

2003 February 20, Ciar Byrne, “Colditz: remade with love”, in The Guardian‎

Young refers sardonically to the existence of reams of postcolonial "theory", and promises to give us "postcolonialism from below, which is what and where it should rightly be, given that it elaborates a politics of ‘the subaltern’, that is, subordinated classes and peoples".

2003 August 9, Steven Poole, “Postcolonialism and all that jazz”, in The Guardian‎

In Ghosh's novel, a canonical western scientist is pitted against a counterscientific group of native folk-medicine practitioners led by Mangala, a subaltern in every conceivable meaning of the term.

2012, Aparajita De, Amrita Ghosh, Ujjwal Jana, Subaltern Vision: A Study in Postcolonial Indian English Text, page 109