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ОглавлениеDominance without Hegemony: The Argument Explained
Subaltern Studies is known for advocating—and, it is claimed, exemplifying—a rejection of Eurocentric theories inherited from the nineteenth century. If the theories they implicate are indeed Eurocentric, then they should be rejected outright. But first a relevant question presents itself: Are the characterizations accurate? We need to understand why, as Dipesh Chakrabarty contends, the modern experience of the East “could not be written as a simple application of the analytics of capital and nationalism available to Western Marxism.”1
Chakrabarty and other Subalternist theorists acknowledge that many of the foundational historical arguments for this thesis were either developed in or inspired by the work of Ranajit Guha, who starting in the very first volume of Subaltern Studies, offered a historical sociology of colonial India that sought to establish the specificity of colonial modernity. His focus was the Indian experience, but the relevance of these essays is considered to extend far beyond the Subcontinent. Guha argued that while liberal and colonial ideology described Indian political development as coextensive with the European experience, in fact the modernization of India departed in basic ways from that of Western Europe. The differences were significant enough to create a qualitatively different kind of political culture in South Asia. It is on the basis of this argument that much subsequent Subalternist theorization proceeded.
The root cause of the East-West divergence is taken to reside in the peculiar nature of the colonial bourgeoisie. As summarized in theses 1 and 2 in the preceding chapter, it is the absence of a revolutionary bourgeoisie that accounts for the persistence of two parallel political domains, the elite and the subaltern. Had capital in the colonial setting not forsaken its “universalizing mission,” it would have integrated subaltern culture into its own liberal worldview as part of its hegemonic strategy. In so doing, it would have generated a coherent culture, as was purportedly achieved in Europe. But in colonial India, Guha suggests, capital attained dominance without integrating the dominated classes into either its own worldview or the institutions characteristic of its rule in Europe. There thus remained a chasm between elite and subaltern domains. Hence, political culture in colonial and postcolonial settings did not and could not converge with the patterns observed in Europe. The subaltern domain continued to subsist as a distinct sphere, even though it could not remain hermetically sealed from elite influence. The persistence of this divide in the postcolonial world is what motivates the call for a new framework, because, the Subalternists declare, Marxist and liberal theories attain validity only in settings with a secure bourgeois culture.
This is a remarkably ambitious and exciting set of arguments. If successful, they would provide the Subalternist project with a powerful historical sociology on which could rest its more ambitious and widely known pronouncements. It is therefore remarkable how little attention these arguments have drawn. While his work has elicited a great deal of commentary, it is Guha’s theorization of peasant rebellion in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India that has attracted the most attention (though, as I shall argue in Chapter 7, there has been a rather dramatic misrepresentation of the book, often by the Subalternists themselves).2 Yet even while Elementary Aspects has attained a special status in postcolonial studies, it is not the site at which Guha developed his case for the two roads to bourgeois power. Initially he presented these arguments, albeit in highly telescoped form, in Subaltern Studies’ debut collection in 1982.3 He then developed them further in two essays published in 1989 and 1992, which were brought together in 1997 in the aptly titled Dominance without Hegemony.4 It is this pair of essays that develop the arguments relevant to our discussion. In an important sense, even though Guha elaborated his views on this issue following the release of Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, the latter presupposes the basic framework laid down by the former. So, if the wider arguments in the Subalternist oeuvre are to be assessed, the first requirement is an appraisal of the historical sociology on which they rest, as developed by Guha. It is to this task that the present chapter, and the two that follow, are devoted.
2.1 SUBALTERN STUDIES IN CONTEXT
Subaltern Studies was born of crisis. In a retrospective look at the project’s origins, Ranajit Guha recalls the sense of frustration and bewilderment felt by many Indian radicals, especially the younger ones, during the 1970s. In the latter half of the 1960s, India had descended into its deepest political crisis since Independence. The Indian National Congress (INC) had been through a bitter leadership battle after Jawaharlal Nehru’s death in 1964, from which his daughter, Indira Gandhi, emerged as party leader and prime minster, but not before a bruising confrontation with regional party bosses. Furthermore, India had its second war with Pakistan in 1971, which also caused massive economic hardship for working people, triggering a significant upswing in industrial conflict and culminating in a historic strike by the Indian railway union, which, at its peak, involved well over a million workers. Although the strike lasted only about three weeks, its scope was enormous, shutting down much of the national rail system, and only massive state mobilization of the police and paramilitary forces achieved its defeat.5 In the countryside, peasant actions in West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh were being organized by breakaway Communist activists, who soon came to be known as Naxalites, and who declared the bankruptcy of not only the Congress Party but the two major Communist parties as well. And in 1975, Indira Gandhi declared a nationwide state of emergency, suspending constitutional liberties and unleashing a wave of repression across the country. The Emergency lasted almost two years, and when, in a fit of hubris, Gandhi called for national elections in 1977, fully expecting to win, the outcome was an overwhelming defeat for the INC by a loose coalition of opposition parties. For the first time since 1947, the Congress had been ousted from power in Delhi.
This decade-long crisis formed the backdrop to the launch of Subaltern Studies. As Guha recalls, the events of the 1970s called into question the national mythology about Indian political culture. At the very least, the political maelstrom belied the Indian National Congress’s claim to represent the masses. The ruling elite could not unleash its wave of repression while still claiming “the ascendancy of the Congress to power in independent India as the fulfillment of a promise of rulership by consent.”6 But the doubts did not stop there. The crisis years had exposed a chasm separating the political universe of the ruling elite from the culture of subaltern groups. The whole idea of a national political body, a new and encompassing ethos that bound the polity together at independence, seemed now to be no more than a shibboleth. “What came to be questioned,” Guha writes, “was thus not only the record of the ruling party which had been in power for over two decades by then, but also the entire generation that had put it in power.”7
If Congress rule had not in fact rested on the consent of the masses, then serious questions arose about its rise to power, its connection to the Indian population, its strategy during the independence movement, and so on. “One of the many unsettling effects” of the 1970s, Guha continues, “was to bring the impact of the twenty-year-old nation-state’s crisis to bear on a settled and in many respects codified understanding of the colonial past.”8 What the intellectual ferment called for was a new analysis of Indian politics over the previous half century or so, starting with the final decades of colonial rule. Guha summarizes the issue in two related puzzles:
1. What was there in our colonial past and our engagement with nationalism to land us in our current predicament—that is, the aggravating and seemingly insoluble difficulties of the nation-state?
2. How are the unbearable difficulties of our current condition compatible with and explained by what happened during colonial rule and our predecessors’ engagement with the politics and culture of that period?9
The turbulent decade thus pressed into relief an intellectual project: to undertake a reexamination of late colonial politics, and thereby to generate an explanation for the political turmoil in which the nation was now embroiled, three decades after Independence. Central to this project would be an investigation of the real roots of Congress power, an explication of its inability to mold a cohesive nation-state, an exploration of its resort to coercion to maintain its rule, and a discussion of what this revealed about the dominant order. It is important now, three decades after the launching of Subaltern Studies, to recall that the inspiration was, at its core, political. It was geared to achieve an understanding of the roots of the political order that colonialism had bequeathed to the Subcontinent. The goal was to inaugurate a new historiography of colonialism, and of the nationalist response to British rule, as a step toward understanding the crisis of the postcolonial state.
2.2 THE ROOTS OF THE POSTCOLONIAL CRISIS
The core elements of the Subalternist collective’s theorization of India’s political crisis were offered in the inaugural volume of Subaltern Studies, in its opening pages.10 It was Ranajit Guha who introduced the argument, and he did so as a set of numbered propositions, which captured the two axes that became central to much of his later work—the roots of the political impasse, and the failure of existing historiography to account for it. Guha began by noting that an encompassing political culture did not exist in India. Instead, the colonial era produced an enduring divide between the spheres of elite political and subaltern politics. Elite politics was coextensive with the domain of formal juridical institutions; this was the dimension of Indian political culture that had been modernized with the onset of colonialism, through which British administrative and juridical practices had been transplanted over the course of their rule. The elite political sphere was, of course, inhabited by the European elites who managed the colonial state apparatus; it also included, Guha seems to suggest, their Indian collaborators—those sections of the domestic ruling class that were recruited into the colonial order. To be sure, these new institutions were not entirely pristine replications of their European counterparts; of necessity, they had to be fused with elements of the precolonial state apparatus inherited from the Mughal state. Nevertheless, this domain of politics had its own integrity and its own practices.
While elite politics could be identified with the modern, formal institutions built around the colonial state, subaltern politics constituted a distinct domain, set apart from that of the ruling classes, with an idiom and practices of its own. Central to these was a reliance on informal, local networks that were based on kinship, local ties, and the primordial relations typical of traditional agrarian societies; occasionally, under certain conditions, this reliance on local networks also generated class association. Generally, however, whereas the elite domain was characterized by the discourse of law and juridical equality, the subaltern domain was suffused with traditional forms of hierarchy and subordination. The transformation that accompanied colonialism was thus of a certain kind: although it did transplant recognizably “modern” practices to the Subcontinent, these practices remained largely confined to the upper crust of the political system, leaving the culture of the subaltern classes largely intact.
Not only did each domain have its distinct idiom and reproductive practices, it also had its characteristic form of political mobilization. Elites relied on typically oligarchical, top-down strategies to elicit mass support for their campaigns—using parts of the state apparatus, patron-client networks, subtle forms of coercion, the mass media, and so on. Subaltern mobilization, on the other hand, was “horizontal” in its tactical deployment, relying on the same informal associational forms that were central to political reproduction in this sphere. Mainstream historiography, Guha charges, begins with the assumption that political culture under colonial rule was a seamless, integrated whole—it assumes that subaltern culture had become assimilated into that of the dominant classes. Hence, in its examination of elite political practice and discourse, it wrongly assumes that the conclusions derived from a study of this domain will also pertain to the political practice of subaltern groups. But the domains had not in fact been integrated, he reminds us, and the political practice associated with each was quite distinct. Subaltern political mobilization therefore warrants a historiography of its own, sensitive to its peculiarities, its distinctive moral universe—in short, its independence from elite political discourse and design. Only thus can we discover the roots of the present crisis, for it is in the persistent discontinuity between the two domains that we will find the key to the postcolonial state’s crisis.
The fissure between elite and subaltern spheres was not preordained, nor was it the outgrowth of certain enduring cultural facts about India. It was, rather, the consequence of a very specific peculiarity of India’s colonial experience, “the index of an important historical truth, that is, the failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to speak for the nation.”11 What Guha means by this is that the Indian bourgeoisie failed to successfully integrate the culture of the disparate groupings in Indian society into one all-embracing political community. Of particular relevance was its failure to assimilate the laboring classes into its political project, especially in the years leading up to independence from the British. As he observes, “There remained vast areas in the life and consciousness of the people which were never integrated into [the bourgeoisie’s] hegemony.”12 The persistence of the two distinct domains is thus a direct consequence of the failure of a particular historical agent—namely, the bourgeoisie. And although in this synoptic presentation Guha focuses on Indian capitalists, we will see below that the failure belonged to capital as a whole in the colonial era, in both its European and Indian guises. Had the bourgeoisie secured hegemony, the process of national integration could have been successful, thereby generating a coherent national political culture rather than the fractured dualism that India actually inherited.
Now in this early essay, Guha does point to one other actor who might have been relevant for pushing India in the direction of an integrated political order: the working class. Toward the very end of the piece, he raises the possibility that the nationalist movement could have taken a different path, and produced a different outcome, had labor been able to assert itself more effectively. The bourgeoisie could have been pushed into a subordinate position, or could have been displaced altogether, in the style of a national liberation movement. The reason this did not take place was that “the working class was not sufficiently mature in the objective conditions of its social being and in its consciousness” to pull the movement in a different direction.13
This is a curious diagnosis of labor’s failure. Was the Indian working class less mature in its objective conditions than the Chinese or Vietnamese? What, in any case, does it mean for conditions to be “mature”? Clearly, one could quibble with Guha’s argument. But what is noteworthy is that, at this stage, he opens up the possibility of two distinct outcomes for the Indian nationalist movement,and two actors relevant to its course: capital and labor. However, this is the only time that Guha—or his colleagues—contemplates two distinct paths. In his subsequent work, the focus is trained single-mindedly on the capitalist class—its nature, preferences, political strategy, and failings. We will see that this turns out to be a critical failing of Subaltern Studies, not just as historiography but also as analysis.
Let us return to the argument about the bourgeoisie’s failure to achieve hegemony. For it to have any plausibility, Guha would need to provide two additional pieces of information. First, we would need a working definition of hegemony, to assess whether Indian capitalists did in fact fail at securing it. The concept is notoriously slippery, and if any verdict is to be rendered on the value of Guha’s argument, then we need to have a working definition of what the term denotes. Second, and just as important, Guha would need to provide a specific kind of counterfactual, which established two claims implicit in his argument, the first claim being that the relevant agent capable of bringing about an integrated political culture is in fact the bourgeoisie, since it is to the politics and record of this actor that he directs his attention in the Indian case. For the bourgeoisie to shoulder the blame in India, it must have been appropriately successful elsewhere. We must be confident that this actor does have an interest in and capacity for the task Guha assigns it. Second, Guha needs to adduce cases in which this actor did indeed achieve hegemony over subaltern classes, so that not only can we be confident that hegemony is a real possibility but, even more so, have some sense of what hegemony looks like when it actually obtains. In other words, although Guha did not make much of this point when he penned the opening essay to Subaltern Studies, the argument for the Indian bourgeoisie’s failure is intrinsically and unavoidably contrastive. To announce a failure in nation-building or in achieving hegemony simply makes no sense unless judged against historical cases that can be taken as standards of nation-building and genuine bourgeois hegemony. Absent a real historical benchmark, there is no way to assess whether the Indian record is one of relative success or failure—could it not be that the Indian experience just happens to be what hegemony looks like?
Guha took up neither of these challenges in Subaltern Studies I. He was content, at that point, to present his core propositions as the signposts of a new research agenda. It was in a series of later essays that he fleshed out what he had in mind when he characterized the bourgeoisie as having failed to gain hegemony; and it was in these essays that he offered some sense of where we might find successful hegemonic projects against which the Indian achievement could be judged. As indicated earlier in this chapter, the two key publications toward this end were first published as “Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography” (1989) and “Discipline and Mobilize” (1992), and were conjoined as the core of his 1997 book Dominance without Hegemony. It was in this book that readers could view Guha’s argument at its fullest, inasmuch as he provided both the ingredients missing from his opening salvo in Subaltern Studies I. It is to this larger work that we now turn.
2.3 THE TWO PATHS TO BOURGEOIS POWER
Dominance without Hegemony is structured not simply as history but as a critique of what Guha presents as liberal ideology. He argues that the dominant liberal historiography of India, in both its colonial and nationalist versions, suffers from a basic misconception. It assumes that the dominant classes and subaltern groups inhabited the same political and cultural universe. As a result, it blandly assumes that histories of elite strategies and preferences are an accurate stand-in for the political goals and contributions of the lower orders. But for such a state of affairs to have obtained, the dominant class in India—the capitalist class—would have had to establish its hegemony over society as a whole, which is exactly what Guha is concerned to deny. Since the bourgeoisie failed in this regard, the various and sundry political forces did not coalesce into one encompassing community. This was the failure of the nation to “come into its own.” And this was what laid down the conditions for the political crisis of the 1970s. But what exactly is hegemony, and how does it generate an encompassing political sphere, bringing together all the disparate social groupings?
Guha defines hegemony as a state in which a class establishes its dominance by relying more on the consent of other classes than it does on coercion. As he presents it, “hegemony stands for a condition of Dominance (D), such that … Persuasion (P) outweighs Coercion (C).”14 Hegemony does not imply the absence of coercion but rather its relegation to a minor role, relative to the importance of persuasion. A hegemonic class maintains its rule by eliciting the active consent of subaltern groups to its dominance in society. In so doing, it “speaks for all of society,” as Guha frequently puts it. This ability to “speak for society” is what enables the bourgeoisie to tear down the walls separating elite culture from that of subaltern groups, and thus to incorporate the latter into the political nation. Capital wins over other groups to its rule by accommodating their interests to some significant degree, by creating a polity in which the pursuit of interests is no longer a zero-sum game.15
Notably, Guha argues that hegemony is an achievement entirely specific to modern, capitalist polities. It is a condition that was, he argues, impossible in precapitalist systems. Premodern ruling classes had neither the interest nor the capacity to incorporate laboring groups into the political culture. They did not strive to elicit subaltern consent, basing their rule instead on brute force or the threat of its application.16 There was no attempt at persuasion, no “exchange at the level of culture,” no process of political education. These polities were despotisms pure and simple. Guha concludes that, strictly speaking, formations such as this “did not have a ruling culture, although there was a ruler’s culture operating side by side with that of the ruled in a state of mutual indifference.”17 The potential for their integration into an organic whole came about only with the rise of capitalism, as part of the political project of the rising bourgeoisie.
Now that we have a sense of what the concept of hegemony denotes, we come to the second challenge, namely, what are the cases of the successful attainment of hegemony against which the Indian case is being judged? The arena in which capital was able most clearly to establish itself as the hegemonic class was Western Europe, in particular England and France, and the period in which these advances were made was the early modern era. In fact, the time of capital’s ascension to power can be pinpointed with some accuracy, for it was in two revolutionary explosions that the bourgeoisie established its rule: the English Revolution of 1640 and the great French Revolution of 1789. These revolutions marked the arrival of not only a new class but a new form of rule, an entirely new structure of class dominance. The modern bourgeoisie, as exemplified by English and French capitalists, maintained their power through the consent of the masses. In so doing, they also created the modern political nation.
This is the achievement against which the performance of the Indian bourgeoisie is judged. For Guha, the European experience established two things: first, that the bourgeoisie is the critical agent behind the establishment of the modern political nation, with its characteristic political idiom and institutions; and second, that the achievements are most clearly exemplified in the classic bourgeois revolutions of the early modern era. The capitalist class in India had the opportunity to construct its own nation, through a political mobilization of its own, when it participated in the nationalist mobilization against colonial rule. It could have charted a path parallel to the one taken by the classic capitalist classes in Europe, constructing a viable and consensual political order. But, Guha argues, the independence movement merely revealed the Indian bourgeoisie’s utter inadequacy, its abject failure to attain real hegemony over the rest of society.
The standard set by the European achievement Guha refers to as the “competence” of the class—its potential as an historic agent; to this he contrasts the “performance” of the actual class, as it was found in India. The difference between its competence and its actual performance is what he is pressing in his later essays—the conditions under colonialism were such that the Indian bourgeoisie’s performance fell far short of its competence.18 Indeed, the shortfall was so significant that it constitutes, for Guha, a fact of world-historic significance: it amounts to a “structural fault in the historic project of the bourgeoisie.”19 In other words, even though colonialism created a bourgeoisie on the Subcontinent and placed it on a trajectory that might have followed that of European modernization, this was not to be: the Indian capitalist class was committed to a political project fundamentally different from that of its European predecessors. Colonialism created a bourgeoisie, but one that would not, or could not, forge a recognizably modern political order.
The error of liberal historiography, then, is its assumption that the colonial order was built around real bourgeois hegemony, as was the case in Western Europe. It construes the colonial state as an extension of the liberal state of Great Britain. On the nationalist side, historians have assumed that the Indian bourgeoisie secured the ability to “speak for the nation,” much as English and French capitalists had done during the classic bourgeois revolutions. Both of these formulations, however, fail to appreciate the “structural fault” between the bourgeois project as it took shape in Europe, and its local manifestation in the Subcontinent. What, then, explains this fault line separating the trajectory of the classic bourgeois transitions in the West from the bourgeois transitions in the colonies? To explain the disjuncture between the two experiences, Guha must proceed by first establishing the nature of the paradigmatic transformation in Europe and then by examining why a similar transformation was forestalled in India, even though actors of the same kind dominated the scene.
2.4 CAPITAL’S UNIVERSALIZING TENDENCY AND THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTIONS
For Guha, Europe’s political modernization issued from the same underlying forces as its economic modernization—the rise and subsequent ascendance of the capitalist class. Having arisen within the confines of feudal agrarian structures, the emergent bourgeoisie found its further economic expansion blocked by the ancien régime. In order to remove the obstacles to its further expansion, the capitalist class undertook a political struggle against the feudal monarchy. Once in power, the nascent capitalist class consolidated its economic program through legislation that enabled a more rapid spread of markets into the agrarian economy. They also initiated an ambitious program of political and cultural liberalization to round out the process of economic liberalization. As we will see, the central components of this dimension of European development were, for Guha, the creation of liberal political institutions and the eventual forging of a national political identity. More to the point, because the construction of these institutions is an achievement attributed to the bourgeoisie, it constitutes the standard against which Indian capital’s agency is measured.
Guha, as well as the Subalternists in general, insists that this modernizing project was in turn driven by a deeper structural force, namely, the universalizing drive of capital. This concept occupies a central place in their theoretical work; at times they refer to it as a drive, at other times as an urge or even a mission, and sometimes as a tendency. They do take the universalizing drive to have propelled Europe’s political and economic transformation, but they also see it as having governed the emergence of the dominant ideologies of the era: liberalism, secularism, and socialism. Thus, while the bourgeoisie’s political struggle is the proximate cause of the ancien régime’s demise, the struggle is in turn the expression of a deeper motor force. It is necessary, then, to examine what Guha has to say about the connection between capital’s universalization and the bourgeois-democratic transformation of Europe. This examination will enable an analysis of why a parallel process could not occur in India, and what the consequences were of this “structural fault” in the bourgeois project.
CAPITAL’S UNIVERSALIZING TENDENCY
At its core, capital’s universalizing tendency is simply, for Guha, the drive by capitalists to expand their scope of operations. Although this is an economic imperative, it also brings along with it certain political and cultural transformations. Guha draws directly on Marx’s theory in this regard, and his summary statement reads like an introduction to the Moor himself:
This [universalizing] tendency derives from the self-expansion of capital. Its function is to create a world market, subjugate all antecedent modes of production, and replace all jural and institutional concomitants of such modes and generally the entire edifice of precapitalist cultures by laws, institutions, values, and other elements of a culture appropriate to bourgeois rule.20
We should note that the transformative urge has two distinct components for Guha: the economic, which pushes capital to expand into the world, create a global market, and then supplant antediluvian economic forms that stand in its way; and the politico-cultural, which refers to the construction of bourgeois norms and practices in areas where capital takes root. We will have more to say on this distinction later in the present chapter, and a great deal more in chapters 4 and 5. For now, it is enough to underline that Guha is aware of this distinction, and seems to suggest that the two dimensions should be coextensive.
The propulsive force of capital’s self-expansion has some important consequences. The first of these is that it creates an interest in overthrowing the ancien régime. In the orthodox Marxist account, which Guha takes for granted, early modern capitalists found their expansion blocked by the feudal nobility’s political and cultural dominance. Feudal lords used their influence within the state to enact legislation that obstructed the further consolidation of capitalist production. Thus, through the use of state levers, premodern economic forms were kept artificially alive—the protection of noble privileges, the grant of monopoly rights to particular merchants and regional lords, the numerous price and quantity controls allowed to guilds, and so on. The fact that such obstacles were encountered by the vast majority of capitalist economic units generated a corresponding consciousness around a collective project, both political and cultural—a project to seek state power in order to fashion juridical structures aligned with the needs of the multiplying capitalist enterprises and to push aside the class of nobles kept on life support by the state’s protection. This is the sense in which capital’s universalizing drive created, for the nascent bourgeoisie, an interest and motive to launch a political struggle against the feudal order.
Another consequence of capital’s universalizing drive was to complement the interest in initiating a political campaign with the capacity to effectively wage the campaign. Drawing again on his reading of Marx, Guha argues that it is
[this universalist] drive which, as Marx argues in The German Ideology, makes the emergence of “ruling ideas” a necessary concomitant of capital’s dominance in the mode of production and enable [sic] these ideas, in turn, to invest the bourgeoisie with the historic responsibility to “represent” the rest of society, to speak for the nation.21
In other words, the emergent bourgeois class is able to rise above its sectional outlook and build upon its common interests with other classes—especially workers and peasants—to forge a collective political project against the ancien régime. Its interests are successfully represented as universal interests—indeed, at the moment of struggle, they are universal, inasmuch as they are the condition for the furtherance of the interests of its allies.22 This is the basis for bourgeois hegemony in the antifeudal struggle. Having achieved this popular hegemony, it mobilizes the broad political coalition of allied classes against the feudal monarchy in order to replace it with the new bourgeois order.
THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTIONS
The dynamic described in the preceding section was, for Guha, most clearly captured in what he calls the “comprehensive character of the English and French revolutions respectively of 1648 and 1789.”23 Apparently he takes the social analysis of these revolutions to be uncontroversial. Despite their central place in his analysis, he expends little effort in explaining their origins; nor does he defend his interpretation of their significance. He seems to take the interpretation he offers as apodictic. This generates a stark imbalance in his presentation of the contrast between the European bourgeoisie’s rise to power and that of colonial capital. While the latter is described in great detail, the former is relegated to condensed and rather cryptic statements. Nevertheless, the main elements of Guha’s analysis are clear enough. To encapsulate his views, he approvingly quotes Marx’s characterization of the revolutions as having heralded “a new social order, the victory of bourgeois ownership over feudal ownership, of nationality over provincialism, of competition over the guild, of the rule of landowner over the domination of the owner by the land, of enlightenment over superstition,” and so forth.24 The bourgeois revolutions thus represented nothing less than a complete social and cultural revolution. Guha considers three aspects to be central to their significance.
Dismantling Feudal Landed Power
The revolutions were launched by the bourgeoisie in order to dismantle feudal agrarian relations. This follows naturally from the premise that capital is propelled to expand its zone of operation. In predominantly agricultural economies, as long as the peasantry remained in possession of its land and was subject to feudal rent, capital would come up against hard limits to its expansion. The central task in 1640 and in 1789, therefore, was to eradicate feudal lordly power. It was only with the abolition of feudal property that the bourgeoisie could fulfill its historic mission—to overturn the rule of the landowner, create a national market, overcome localism, forge a national community, and so on. The critical place of this element of the classic revolutions emerges even more clearly when Guha explains the reasons for Indian capital’s failures. Above all for him, the roots of failure lie in the compromises made with landed classes, so that instead of overthrowing them, capital acceded to their continued rule in the countryside.
Securing Hegemony over the Antifeudal Coalition
Even though the bourgeoisie was committed to overthrowing feudal power, it could not do so alone. It was still a minor actor in the broader political landscape, lacking the means to assault the dominant order on its own. Hence, it had to bring other classes—primarily the peasantry, but also subordinate urban classes—to its side. It could do so either by various authoritarian and coercive means, or by soliciting their consensual participation. Guha maintains that one of the crowning achievements of the bourgeoisie in the great revolutions of 1640 and 1789 was that it secured broad-ranging consent to its leadership. This is an important part of his argument: he regards a central contrast between the bourgeois revolutions and the Indian nationalist movement to have been that elite leaders in the former movements secured compliance from subaltern classes through consent, while those in the latter could do so only through coercion.
Guha contends that the leaders of the bourgeois revolutions achieved consent by genuinely accommodating subaltern interests within their political programs—an instance of capital’s universalizing tendency—though he does not detail what those concessions might have been. What he seems to have in mind is peasants and workers being won over on the promise to dismantle seignorial power, and, equally important, the promise of political liberties. The effectiveness of bourgeois leadership issued from the fact that the concessions they made were real, not empty slogans. Their assumption of leadership thus had a genuine basis: “it was initially as an acknowledgement of the connection between its own interests and those of all the other nonruling classes that the bourgeoisie had led the struggle against feudalism and established its hegemony over the peasantry.”25
The bourgeoisie, then, acquired social consent to its leadership through recognition of subaltern interests. The reliance on consent, as against coercion or discipline, is what Guha takes to be the defining characteristic of political hegemony. He often discusses hegemony not only in terms of consent, but as the ability truly to represent the interests of others, to “speak for” other classes; in the bourgeois revolutions, he writes, “the bourgeoisie in the West could speak for all of society in a recognizably hegemonic voice, even as it was striving for power, or had just won it.”26 A hegemonic class can “speak for all of society” because it recognizes, and represents, the interests of subordinate groups. In so doing, it can relegate coercion to a secondary or even peripheral role in the maintenance of its power. Its strategy is to integrate the other classes into one encompassing community of interests, albeit one in which power imbalances are preserved.
From Coalitional Hegemony to Social Hegemony
The third critical feature of the bourgeois revolutions was their outcome: the construction of a social order in which the bourgeoisie was hegemonic, not merely dominant. What this means is that, just as it did during the antifeudal mobilization, capital maintains its power by relying more on consent than on coercion. We move now from hegemony as a characteristic of a political movement to hegemony as a means of social integration.
In his discussion of how the bourgeoisie secures popular consent to its rule, Guha returns to the language of representation: the dominant class secures its power by “representing all of the will of the people.”27 So, the achievement of the British and French bourgeoisie was that it anchored its rule not on coercion or force, but on its willingness to represent wider social interests. In this way, it embarked on the creation of an entirely new political community, unlike anything witnessed before the advent of bourgeois rule. The bourgeoisie created a new political nation, based on universal principles and issuing from its universalizing drive.
While this characterization of the new political order does describe its functional form, it does not tell us much about the institutional mechanisms through which hegemony is reproduced. If the new ruling class committed itself to the represention of wider social interests, there must have been an institutional matrix through which it achieved this end. Unfortunately, Guha does not identify the institutional supports of hegemony in the new order. We must resort, therefore, to a more interpretive strategy, pulling together his scattered remarks on the matter.
As discussed above, Guha often describes hegemony as the ability to “speak for all of society” or to “represent the will of the people.” What he seems to have in mind as the specific embodiment of this principle is that of liberalism, political and economic, both as a set of institutions and as the language of political contestation. Capital gains its legitimacy, its ability to speak for the nation, by opening a space for subaltern groups to articulate and pursue their interests—albeit within the limits of bourgeois property relations. The basic rights and freedoms associated with liberalism and political democracy are the means by which they achieve these ends. The formal freedoms associated with liberal democracy greatly expand the scope of political practice for the laboring classes. Moreover, in allowing for new political practices, they also create an entirely new political idiom. This means that the institutions of liberalism are not the only factor in the building of hegemony. The bourgeoisie also enables the creation of a new discursive form, what Guha calls a “political idiom,” through which interests are expressed by social actors. This idiom is that of rights, liberties, equality, universal principles. The political actualization of rights, freedoms,and the rule of law thus brings social classes into one encompassing political order and becomes the basis of a new political discourse.28
The significance of the bourgeois revolutions, then, was that they embodied the universalizing tendency of capital. This tendency initially took shape as a broad, antifeudal social coalition led by the bourgeoisie and became a new liberal political order based on universal rights and formal equality. In so doing, it created, for the first time, an encompassing political community that brought together dominant and subaltern classes into the same political domain. This was, for Guha, the historic achievement of the British and French bourgeoisie. As was said above, it set the standard against which the performance of colonial and national capital in India is measured.
Having examined the significance of capital’s universalizing drive in Europe, we now turn to its frustration in modern India.
2.5 UNIVERSALIZATION ABANDONED: CAPITAL’S COLONIAL VENTURE
Two forms of capital are relevant for understanding Indian political evolution: the capital that rested in European hands during the years of British rule, and the capital that belonged to Indian entrepreneurs. The very presence of these two forms—the fact that they successfully reproduced themselves over the course of two centuries and even swelled enormously in scale—might suggest that the universalizing tendency did materialize in the Subcontinent. But Guha resists any such conclusion. While capital did migrate to the Indian Subcontinent, it did not instantiate its universalism in the relevant way. What Guha has in mind is the political and cultural transformation that was unleashed in Europe. Judged by this standard, he announces, both groups failed. Neither segment of the class had any inclination to play the transformative role of their counterparts in early modern Europe. Hence, “the universalist project we have been discussing hurtled itself against an insuperable barrier in colonialism.”29 Let us, then, examine Guha’s arguments for the dimensions of bourgeois failure—both British and Indian—within colonial India.
THE MYTHOLOGY OF LIBERAL COLONIALISM
Guha begins with the observation that elite historiography assumes a basic continuity between the liberalism of British domestic culture, and the structure of colonial rule. It “regard[s] the colonial state as an organic extension of the metropolitan bourgeois state and colonialism as an adaptation, if not quite a replication, of the classic bourgeois culture of the West in English rendering.”30 Taking as its model the European experience, liberal historiography assumes that
capital, in its Indian career, succeeded in overcoming the obstacles to its self-expansion and subjugating all precapitalist relations in material and spiritual life well enough to enable the bourgeoisie to speak for all of society, as it had done on the occasion of its historic triumphs in 1648 and 1789.31
This view, generated by the bourgeoisie itself and propagated by its intellectual representatives, has sustained liberal apologetics for both the colonial and the post-colonial political order. Given this core assumption, notes Guha, it is hardly surprising that colonialism “was regarded by [bourgeois apologists] as a positive instance of the universalizing instance of capital”32 or that a basic continuity was assumed between the colonial era and the regime that followed it. Guha affirms that there was, in fact, a deep continuity between the two, but not in the fashion suggested by liberal ideology. On the contrary, in neither era was either segment of capital inclined to carry out the mission to which both claimed fidelity.
COLONIAL CAPITAL
There were two indices of the colonial bourgeoisie’s abrogation of its historic mission in India: the first was its willingness to impose an autocratic order rather than a liberal one, and the second was its resort to an alliance with, rather than the destruction of, the ancien régime.
Guha takes the political order established in India by the colonizers as direct evidence that the British bourgeoisie was not committed to the same project it had launched at home. He points to the anomaly of “the metropolitan bourgeoisie, who had professed and practiced democracy at home, but were quite happy to conduct the government of their Indian empire as an autocracy.”33 But while he frequently refers to this disjuncture as a paradox or anomaly, he understands that it is not entirely surprising.34 The fact that the colonial state “[was] created by the sword made this historically necessary.”35 It was, after all, a forcible imposition of alien rule on a subject population. The very idea of its transmutation into a liberal order was therefore problematic. Since the state had to be autocratic, there was no possibility of incorporating the laboring classes into the broad political culture in the way that had been accomplished in Europe. They remained an external force, with their own culture and interests, and while they no doubt had to be accounted for, they were not an active part of the political process. In sum, for Guha, the nature of the state presented the first and perhaps most important obstacle to the colonial bourgeoisie’s construction of a hegemonic order.
Another significant obstacle to the implantation of a liberal order in the colony was the kind of alliance system that the British had to forge. Of necessity, even while pushing aside the established ruling classes, colonial authorities were forced to enlist them as junior partners in the state. A few thousand colonial administrators from an alien culture could hardly hope to achieve stable rule without bringing into the fold some local sources of power. Again in contrast to the European precedent, the new elite therefore reached out to precapitalist ruling groups. A natural concomitant was the preservation of these groups’ sources of income and power, and thereby the idiom of local politics—with the result that “feudal practices, far from being abolished or at least reduced, were in fact reinforced under a government representing the authority of the world’s most advanced bourgeoisie.”36 This underlines the point that the colonial bourgeoisie’s “antagonism to feudal values and institutions in their own society made little difference … to their vast tolerance of precapitalist values and institutions in Indian society.”37
The preservation of these institutions further solidified traditional power relations and, in so doing, prevented the creation of a hegemonic bourgeois regime. There was no drive to create a singular people-nation. Instead, the heritage of colonial rule was the reproduction of archaic power relations and,through that, the distinctiveness of subaltern culture—in contact with, but separate from, the culture of its rulers. Herein lay the structural fault separating the bourgeois project in Europe from that in India. British capital exchanged its historic mission for the opportunity to secure power in its new zones of conquest. Guha concludes that “colonialism could continue as a relation of power in the subcontinent only on the condition that the colonizing bourgeoisie should fail to live up to its universalist project.”38
THE INDIAN BOURGEOISIE
If we turn now to the domestic bourgeoisie, we find that the Indian counterpart to the bourgeois revolutions in Europe was the nationalist movement for independence. The British and French capitalist classes came to power by overthrowing the feudal monarchies; Indian capital in its turn had to confront the power of feudal landed classes. But in taking them on, capital came up against not a feudal state per se but rather a colonial state that was patronizing these classes. In some respects, capital’s task paralleled that of its European predecessors—it still had to confront traditional classes but could do so only by crafting a broad political coalition. As Guha puts it, it would still have to “express its hegemonic urge in the form of universality.”39 But the form taken by this universalism would have to differ somewhat from the European version. It would have to be not just an antifeudal coalition, but a nationalist movement. “Thanks to the historic conditions of its formation,” declares Guha, “the Indian bourgeoisie could strive towards its hegemonic aim only by constituting ‘all the members of society’ into a nation and their ‘common interest’ into an ‘ideal form’ of a nationalism.”40
Any verdict on the Indian bourgeoisie’s competence at its historic mission thus derives, above all, from its performance in the nationalist movement. And the verdict is severe indeed. Guha’s summary assessment is that Indian capital failed on all three fronts that he considers central to the classic bourgeois revolutions.
The Accommodation to Landlordism
First, and perhaps foundationally, Indian capital never launched a frontal assault on the traditional landed nobility as had British and French capitalists. Instead, it tried to reach an accommodation with them. Says Guha: “Fostered by colonialism and dependent on the latter for its very survival during its formative phase, it had learned to live at peace with those pre-capitalist modes of production and culture which made the perpetuation of British rule possible.”41 The bourgeoisie thus subsisted in a “symbiosis with landlordism and complicity with many forms of feudal oppression”42 rather than in tension with it, as was the case in Europe, according to Guha. The result was that an attack on traditional classes simply was not on the cards for the nationalist movement.
The Failure to Hegemonize the Nationalist Movement
Indian capital’s reluctance to attack landlordism placed severe limits on the bourgeoisie’s ability to represent the common interest. One critical manifestation of this inability was the failure to bring the laboring classes under its leadership. As long as it refused to break with traditional landed elites, it could not accommodate even the basic demands of the peasantry, such as the call for rent reductions.43 Instead of mobilizing the peasantry against the landed classes, the bourgeoisie sought the latter’s patronage.44 The working class quickly discovered that, since capital had placed strict limits on its own political vision and ambitions, it would have little patience for integrating workers’ interests in its strategy.45 As a result,
by the time they were called upon to mobilize in the campaigns initiated by the nationalist leadership at the end of the First World War, both these groups [i.e., workers and peasants] had already developed class aims which it was not possible for the bourgeoisie to accommodate in any program sponsored exclusively under its own auspices.46
The consequences of this failure to incorporate the class interests of subaltern groups lie at the heart of Guha’s overall argument. The first and more direct consequence was that the bourgeoisie could not legitimately claim to represent “the nation.” Guha seems to rely here on a counterfactual, though he does not explicitly say this—that the evidence for genuine leadership of a movement would appear to be the absence of contending claims to that leadership.47 But because the Indian National Congress had been unable to acquire the working masses’ consent to its leadership, that space came under challenge by other political forces—socialists, communists, and other radicals, as well as other nationalist parties. This was the glimmer of an alternative hegemony to which Guha alluded in his inaugural Subaltern Studies essay, a hegemony that, if successful, would have been based in the working class and its allies.48 These forces were not, of course, able to displace the INC from the helm of the movement. But neither was the INC able to drive them out. They remained, throughout the movement’s later phases, a visible and contending force. So, while the European capitalists had been able to win a hegemonic position over its mass movements, “in India there was always yet another voice, a subaltern voice, that spoke for a large part of society which it was not for the bourgeoisie to represent.”49
Having failed to secure their active consent to its leadership, the bourgeoisie had no choice but to keep the laboring classes in line by resorting to coercion. They turned to traditional forms of authority, both material and ideational, to maintain their place at the helm of the movement. Instead of appealing to their common interests with the masses as an incentive for the latter’s participation, they leaned instead on subtle or overt threats and on traditional notions of duty, obligation, and station.50 The means used by the Indian bourgeoisie to assert control, which Guha takes as paradigmatic of a nonhegemonic leadership, were of two functional kinds: mechanisms to ensure conformity within the ranks of Congress, cadre or crowds participating in public events such as rallies, and measures to ensure wider social compliance with political initiatives such as boycotts and political campaigns. The main difference between the two was that the former pertained to a narrower band of social groups, namely those that were already within the INC or were in close contact with it, and the latter pertained to a far wider set of strata, many of which had no direct contact with the INC as an organizational body.
Guha takes the use of these disciplinary measures as proof that the INC had failed to elicit genuine consent from the masses and thus had failed to emerge as the authentic voice of subaltern aspirations. It is noteworthy that he does not say it was the degree of coercion or the kind of disciplinary measures that signaled the failure of consent. He simply points to the fact that discipline was used and then interprets this as a signal that the bourgeoisie and its political organ had failed to emerge as the nation’s genuine representative. It is a somewhat surprising argument. Undoubtedly, an organization that relies on intimidation and terror over its own base cannot lay claim to representing that base. But Guha provides no evidence whatsoever that matters had reached this stage for the Congress—which, of course, they had not. To persuade us that the INC’s coercive measures fell outside the range of measures used by organizations that can safely be regarded as “hegemonic” would require some accounting: what is the permissible range of disciplinary measures for a “hegemonic” leadership, and what kinds of measures fall outside that range? But Guha gives us not even the smidgen of an argument in this direction. We are offered only two elements—the fact that coercion was used, and the conclusion that this demonstrates a failed hegemony.
The Failure of Bourgeois Liberalism
We now arrive at the third dimension of the Indian bourgeoisie’s failure. Unwilling to attack landlordism, having compromised with feudal interests, refusing to acknowledge the authentic interests of labor and the peasantry, and unconfident in its political legitimacy—the bourgeoisie failed to establish its hegemony over the new order. In sum, “the indigenous bourgeoisie, spawned and nurtured by colonialism itself, adopted a role that was distinguished by its failure to measure up to the heroism of the European bourgeoisie in its period of ascendancy.”51 Again Guha’s characterization of its failures reverts to the language of liberalism and representation:
The liberalism they [the Indian bourgeoisie] professed was never strong enough to exceed the limitations of the half-hearted initiatives for reform which issued from the colonial administration. This mediocre liberalism, a caricature of the vigorous democratic culture of the epoch of the rise of the bourgeoisie of the West, operated throughout the colonial period in a symbiotic relationship with the still active and vigorous forces of the semi-feudal culture of India.52
The bourgeoisie’s “mediocre liberalism,” which Guha contrasts to the “heroism of the European bourgeoisie” and in particular to the “vigorous democratic culture” that it helped cultivate, was the direct expression of its refusal to shape its program in ways that would accommodate the interests of the subaltern classes. It reflected capital’s inability, or unwillingness, to secure their consent to its leadership.
Capital’s half-hearted liberalism meant, finally, a failure to integrate subaltern culture into its own. Having no organic link to the masses, resorting to becoming allied with traditional classes, and mobilizing traditional cultural tropes and forms of power to keep the masses in line during the independence movement, the bourgeoisie succeeded only in giving further life to the autonomy of subaltern culture. Instead of incorporating them into a new, inclusive, and expansive world-view, it preserved their traditional political practices and idioms. The consequence was the phenomenon which Subaltern Studies took as the defining feature of postcolonial India: the existence and reproduction of a distinct subaltern domain, a separate political culture that exists parallel to and in contact with, but has never been absorbed into, modern bourgeois politics. As Guha concludes, the failure of the bourgeoisie to “speak for the nation” during its nationalist phase carried over into the postcolonial era:
That failure is self-evident from the difficulty which has frustrated the bourgeoisie in its effort so far at winning a hegemonic role for itself even after half a century since the birth of a sovereign Indian nation-state. The predicament continues to grow worse, and by current showing should keep the students of contemporary South Asia busy for years to come.53
Thus, the ultimate expression of India’s failed bourgeois revolution was the failure to build an integrated political culture, which would have been possible only if the capitalist class had recognized the real interests of the laboring classes. This it did not do, because as it entered India, capital—in both its European and Indian guises—abandoned its historic tasks. In exchange for power, capital relinquished its universalizing mission.
At the heart of the Subalternist project, and of postcolonial theory more generally, stands the claim that there is a deep fault line separating Western capitalist nations from the postcolonial world. The importance of Ranajit Guha’s work is that it offers a historical sociology that seeks to explain how and why this fault line came into being. The power of his argument lies in the fact that he does not derive it from the kind of essentialism that can sometimes be found in postcolonial theory or in the writings of other Subalternists. He relies, instead, on a historical argument about the different biographies of capital in the two zones. Central to Guha’s explanation is the claim that the kind of modernization that capital wrought in the West was not on the agenda as it travelled to the colonial world—that in colonial social formations, capital abandoned its universalizing drive.
Having unpacked in some detail the specifics of this argument, we are now in a position to make some observations about its peculiarities. The first has to do with what Guha means by capital’s universalization. Recall that he begins by locating the drive to universalize in the economic logic of capitalist production—in what he calls the “self-expansion of capital,” which propels it to “create a world market [and] subjugate all antecedent modes of production.”54 But, while Guha bases the expansion of capital’s ambit on its economic logic, this soon recedes into the background of his analysis. What begins to loom larger is the notion that, as it expands, capital must also transform the political and cultural matrix of traditional societies. Indeed, for Guha, the true test for whether capital has established itself in a region—what he refers to as its universalization—is the extent to which it replaces the local culture with “laws, institutions, values, and other elements of a culture appropriate to bourgeois rule.”55
Although this shift might appear minor, its consequences are significant. In Marx’s rendering, the expansion of capital’s sphere does not carry any direct implication for the form of political rule. The spread of its characteristic economic relations is consistent with, and might even require, coercive state structures. For Guha, however, since the universalizing drive is identified with acquisition of the consent of subaltern groups, his framework generates a distinct cultural criterion for testing the extent of capital’s universalization: insofar as capital fails to promote a liberal polity, it fails in its universalizing mission. With admirable clarity, Guha brings together the three phenomena—capital’s universalization, bourgeois hegemony, and hegemony as the ability to represent the general will—in a passage denouncing liberal apologetics:
[T]here is no acknowledgement in [liberal] discourse that in reality the universalist project we have been discussing hurtled itself against an insuperable barrier in colonialism. Hence the attempt, in colonialist writings, to make the rule of British capital appear as a rule based on the consent of the subject population—that is, as hegemonic—and correspondingly to construct, in nationalist writings, the dominance of the Indian bourgeoisie as the political effect of a consensus representing the will of the people—that is, as hegemonic again.56
The evidence for the failure of capital’s universalization is that the bourgeoisie failed to garner the consent of those it was exploiting or, even more, that it was unable to represent “the will of the people.” This strongly suggests that for the universalistic project to have successfully unfolded, capital needed to have emerged as spokesman for the general will. Where liberals err is not in their acceptance of this as a criterion for universalization, but in their claim that the Indian story embodies just such a project.
Two issues are involved here. The first is the suggestion of a very tight fit between the economic dimension of capitalist expansion and the generation of a new cultural and political environment. Such a claim may not appear controversial, since it would seem natural to assume that a drastic change in economic institutions should call forth at least some changes in culture and politics. But it is one thing to argue that economic changes are likely to generate pressures for corresponding shifts in culture and politics; it is quite another to use particular institutional and cultural changes as a test for whether the economic transformation is in fact taking place. Guha not only argues that the universalization of capital induces the rise of new cultural forms, but he takes the dissemination of particular instances of these as a litmus for whether or not capital has been universalized. Hence his insistence that, in failing to transform subaltern culture, to break down its obduracy and integrate it into a national culture, capital abandoned its universalizing mission. He never considers the possibility that the expansion of capital’s economic logic simply may not require the kind of deep cultural transformations that he thinks it does. He does not consider that capital might be able to meet its basic needs by relying on the very cultural forms he thinks are inimical to it—those typical of traditional political economies, suffused with outdated forms of social hierarchy and subordination. So, while there could certainly be some shifts in politics and culture, they may not be of the kind that Guha assumes are necessary.
And just what are the institutions Guha points to as evidence for capital’s universalization? Not only does he insist that capital must revolutionize the political culture; he seems also to have a very clear idea of just what the content of the new culture must be. Again and again, he links capital’s universalization with the rise of liberal political and cultural institutions. If the colonial bourgeoisie failed in its mission, it is because of having turned its back on the liberalism it professed in the West; if the Indian business houses were found wanting in their mettle, it is because of their “mediocre liberalism,” which was a “caricature” of the liberalism of their Western counterparts. If capital in India failed in its transformative mission, it is because it did not replace the political idioms of the traditional order with those of modern bourgeois society—the rule of law, formal equality, self-determination, and so on. Capital’s aborted universalization is inferred from the fact that these notions did not become institutionalized in the broader political culture. Guha does not consider that the shift to capitalist social structures might actually fit quite well with the idiom of traditional politics. If this is indeed the case, then the perpetuation of what he calls precapitalist institutions might not constitute evidence for an aborted universalization after all.
Guha’s argument about capital’s universalization rests on his understanding of the bourgeoisie as historic actor. He takes the notions of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois liberalism quite literally—these political forms do not simply arise in the capitalist era but are, for him, desired and fought for by the bourgeoisie. Capitalists are, at least in the classic cases, the vectors of these ideals, and it is bourgeois agency that implants them in the political culture. As in the case for capital’s universalization, Guha shifts the focus from the economic—such as the imperative of profit maximization—as the sine qua non of bourgeois goals, to the pursuit of certain political and cultural ends. The bourgeois revolutions are significant for him because they crystallize what he takes to be the real achievements of the bourgeoisie as a historical actor—not merely the establishment of capitalist economic relations, but the universalization of the class’s political and ideological commitments.
It is surprising that Guha does not entertain the possibility that the spread of the cultural and political forms he associates with the British and French bourgeoisie might have issued from other sources; hence, while they might have become established in the capitalist era, they would not have been brought about by capitalist design. This is surprising only because, by the time Guha published Dominance without Hegemony, there was a veritable mountain of historical literature pointing precisely in this direction.
We now turn to the historical evidence on the course of the so-called bourgeois revolutions.
1 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 15.
2 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).
3 Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” Subaltern Studies I (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 1–8.
4 Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), henceforth cited as DH. The volume also contained Guha’s 1988 S. G. Deuskar Lecture. The two essays in question are “Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography,” which was included in Subaltern Studies VI (1989), and “Discipline and Mobilize: Hegemony and Elite Control in Nationalist Campaigns,” originally published in Subaltern Studies VII (1992).
5 For a history and analysis of the strike, see Stephen Sherlock, The Indian Railways Strike of 1974: A Study of Power and Organised Labour (Delhi: Rupa, 2001).
6 Ranajit Guha, “Introduction,” The Subaltern Studies Reader (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xix. Emphasis added.
7 Ibid., xiii.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., xi.
10 Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography.”
11 Ibid., 5. Emphasis in the original.
12 Ibid., 5–6.
13 Ibid., 6.
14 DH 23.
15 Guha clearly derives his argument from a certain reading of Gramsci, one that was very much in vogue among Marxists during the 1980s. As I indicated in Chapter 1, I will not comment on the merits of his interpretation of Gramsci’s work, though I do believe that it is questionable.
16 DH 63–4.
17 DH 64.
18 DH 4.
19 DH 5.
20 DH 13–14. For Guha’s approving quotes from Marx on this matter, see DH 14–15.
21 DH 63. Emphasis added..
22 Ibid. Interestingly, Guha does not explain clearly how the universalizing drive should enable the bourgeoisie to subordinate subaltern classes’ interests to their own. Presumably it has to do with the fact that a capitalist economy will provide a foundation for greater political freedoms and for positive effects on the allies’ incomes.
23 DH 17. Guha uses the date 1648, but readers should not be confused by this. The revolution he has in mind is the same one that began in 1640.
24 DH 17–18.
25 DH 134.
26 Guha uses this very expression—“to speak for all of society”—at least twice in discussions of the bourgeoisie’s role in the classical revolutions. See DH 19 and 134. On p. 19, he then links this capacity with the acquisition of hegemony, and hegemony itself as “rule based on the consent of the subject population.”
27 DH 20.
28 There are two contexts in which we can discern Guha’s commitment to this view—in direct discussions of the postrevolutionary regimes and in discussions of the nonhegemonic order of South Asia, in which Britain and France are used as counterfactuals. He is quite consistent across both. Textual support for his association of bourgeois hegemony with the discourse and institutions of liberalism can be found throughout Dominance without Hegemony. The evidence for the colonial order being nonhegemonic is its autocratic character, which Guha contrasts to the British state, which is hegemonic in that it is democratic (DH xii, 4, 65–6). He characterizes British capital’s stance as championing self-determination in Europe while crushing any such aspirations in its colonies (DH 4); hence, capital’s orientation where it is hegemonic is to recognize national rights, while the evidence of its having abandoned hegemonic aspirations in India is that it denies Indians the right to self-determination. Later Guha argues that colonialist ideologues tried to legitimize British rule by gathering “evidence for the essentially liberal character of the Raj” (DH 31, 33). Here again, hegemony is tied to liberal institutions. Guha finds that what was most laudable in British political culture, and lacking in the political culture of colonialism, was “Liberalism, Democracy, Liberty, the Rule of Law, and so on” (DH 67). James Mill’s attempts to present the Indian state as an extension of the British state—and hence as being based, as was the British state, on the consent of the governed—failed because “liberal culture hardly managed to penetrate beyond the upper crust … while the ideal of liberal government persisted only as idle and empty cant until the end of the raj” (DH 80). The marker of colonialism’s inability to achieve hegemony was the “failure of liberalism to overcome the resistance of entrenched feudal customs and belief systems” (ibid.). Again and again, the marker of a truly hegemonic bourgeois order is linked with liberal ideology, representative democracy, political liberties, and the like.
29 DH 19.
30 DH 4.
31 DH 19
32 DH 4.
33 DH 4–5.
34 For references to the absence of a liberal colonial order as a paradox or anomaly, see DH xii, 4, 19, 26, 64–5.
35 DH 64.
36 DH 26–7.
37 DH 4–5.
38 DH 64.
39 DH 101.
40 Ibid. Emphasis added.
41 DH 132.
42 Ibid.
43 “With all its concern to involve the peasantry in nationalist politics, [the bourgeoisie] could not bring itself to include the struggle against rents in its programs” (DH 132).
44 See Guha’s biting critique of Mahatma Gandhi’s political philosophy on this count, which he correctly characterizes as dedicated to preserving landlordism (DH 35–9). In fact, Guha’s attitude to Gandhi throughout Dominance without Hegemony is quite critical.
45 DH 133.
46 DH 132, 133. Guha also points to the communal front as a site of bourgeois failure. It was never able to displace the All-India Muslim League as representative of the Muslim population, nor was it able to sideline the Hindu Mahasabha as the voice of devout Hindus (DH 131–3). But while Guha gives due attention to this phenomenon, he prioritizes the class problem: “much of the specificity of Indian politics of this period [the 1920s and 1930s] derives precisely from the failure of nationalism to assimilate the class interests of peasants and workers effectively into a bourgeois hegemony” (DH 133).
47 See DH 131–5.
48 See above, 33–34; see also Guha, “On some aspects of the historiography,” 7.
49 DH 134.
50 DH, chap. 2.
51 DH 5. Emphasis added.
52 Ibid. Emphasis added.
53 DH xiii.
54 DH 13.
55 DH 14.
56 DH 19–20. Emphasis added.
