Guha concludes that ‘there is nothing that historiography can do to eliminate such distortion altogether ... what it can do however is to acknowledge such distortion as parametric – as a datum which determines the form of the exercise itself, and to stop pretending that it can fully grasp a past consciousness and reconstitute it’ (1992a: 33). The only way out for Guha, and indeed Chakrabarty also, is to introduce an element of ‘self-criticism’ into historical analysis so as to place the coercive content of the episteme or the discipline under scrutiny. Chakrabarty (1998: 26) thus notes that with ‘subaltern pasts ... we reach the limits of the discourse of history’, and he continues by stressing that ‘the reason for this ... is that subaltern pasts do not give the historian any principle of narration that can be rationally defended in modern public life’. He simply concludes (p. 27) that we need to take more seriously the fact that ‘other [spiritual] ways of being are not without questions of power and justice but these questions are raised ... on terms other than those of the political modern’. We are left suspended, as though we have reached the limit of what it is possible to think within the confines of history. Yet it is indeed possible to think beyond this contradiction and to give ‘non-modern’ political idioms a more important place, without abandoning rationality. In order to understand how this may be done, we need to refocus on the question of the idiom of politics.
Guha (1992b) argues that in Indian history it is centrally important to distinguish analytically the history of state power from that of capital. This largely follows from his earlier argument differentiating between two domains of politics, which leads him to maintain that capitalism dominated in India but without creating a hegemonic capitalist culture; it is this that he calls ‘dominance without hegemony’ (p. 275). Chakrabarty (2002: 13) notes that ‘the history of colonial modernity in India created a domain of the political that was heteroglossic in its idioms and irreducibly plural in its structure, interlocking within itself strands of different types of relationships that did not make up a logical whole’. Because of this, a theory of power independent of that of capital had to be developed. In his attempt, Guha argues that the power relation can be understood as composed of Dominance (D) and Subordination (S), each in turn being made up of a further relation: between Coercion (C) and Persuasion (P) for Dominance, and between Collaboration (C*) and Resistance (R) for Subordination (1992b: 229). Through the use of this double matrix, Guha is able to show how the political domain of power was structured by a number of discourses and idioms of British and Indian origin interacting to make coercion or persuasion possible. In particular, persuasion was made possible by a combination of the colonial state notion of ‘improvement’ with the Indian idea of dharma, ‘understood, broadly, as the quintessence of “virtue, the moral duty”, which implied a social duty conforming to one’s place in the caste hierarchy as well as the local power structures’ (p. 244).
Here, then, we have a political idiom not too dissimilar from, though more extensive than, that of the Kikuyu ‘civic morality’ noted by Lonsdale, yet here it is not labelled as ‘ethnic’ (the analysis is by an insider), while at the same time it is said to contribute to making persuasive collaboration with colonialism possible. Evidently the British colonialists were somewhat more successful in integrating Indian idioms into their forms of rule in the 19th century than they were in Kenya in the 20th. But, overall, we have a fundamental recognition by Guha that politics can take religious and cultural forms not always evidently ‘political’ in the modern sense, yet central to elite political subjectivity. Guha analyses these idioms ‘from the inside’ – i.e. not as an anthropologist – examining their names and political effects and noting ‘that something as contemporary as nineteenth and twentieth-century nationalism often made its appearance in political discourse dressed up as ancient Hindu wisdom’ (p. 245). We are probably here in the presence of a historically specific ‘mode of politics’, in Lazarus’s sense, yet Guha fails to take the same step when it comes to the political discourse of the Santal rebel. Why should a discourse of ‘social duty’ be more easily recognisable as ‘political’ than one that is ostensibly (crudely?) ‘religious’? Could it be that the idiom of dharma, despite its ancient origins, is more recognisably political, as it directly concerns a state politics whose main feature has universally been the maintenance and reproduction of difference and hierarchy? Could it be that the idiom of dharma is evaluated from within its own subjectivity, while that of the Santal is not?
What distinguishes the idiom of dharma from that of the Santal cannot be that the one is ‘modern’ and the other ‘traditional’, nor can it be that one is religious and the other not; it can only be that the former is ‘evidently’ a state discourse of power while the latter is not. This, it seems to me, is the nub of the fundamental problem faced by Guha’s work, by Chakrabarty’s and indeed by Subaltern Studies as a whole. Politics is equated throughout their analyses with ‘the political’, with power, the public, the civil, the state, and, as a result, it represents the social, as indeed the intellectual represents the subaltern’s voice. Politics is not consistently understood as an affirmative collective subjectivity, with the result that it is equated with that limited consciousness effectuated within the parameters of state conceptions. In their work, the subject is not conceived as prescribing a universal but is exclusively socially located; after all, it is ‘peasant subjects’ as such – the identification of a ‘peasant consciousness’ – to which Guha in particular is wedded and which he seeks to represent. Once a peasantry has been identified by the investigator – while no question is asked about how such people may have identified themselves – then it automatically follows that a subjectivity is sought that conforms to or deviates from what the investigator conceives a ‘peasant consciousness’ to be. Not surprisingly, it is the core features or ‘elementary aspects’ of the class consciousness of the peasantry that are the central concern of Guha’s (1999) work on the peasantry in colonial India. Despite the enormous step forward taken by Guha in understanding that ‘the political included actions that challenged the theorist’s usual and inherited separation between politics and religion’ (Chakrabarty, 2002: 19), the ‘religious’ idiom is still understood as an analytical deviation from the ‘obviously political’; it has to be shown to be political by analysis, while presumably the ‘obviously political’ needs no such work of analytical nomination.
The fallacy of this view can be seen through a contemporary example which is so common it is scarcely commented on. A commonplace account of the politics of ethnic, religious or xenophobic violence today in Africa and elsewhere makes reference to the poverty of those involved. I shall have occasion to mention this below in the context of South Africa, but the point to emphasise