50 Some of the articles on this subject are collected in Rajeev Bhargava, ed., Secularism and Its Critics (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). The best engagement with Subaltern Studies on this issue is Achin Vanaik’s brilliant Furies of Indian Communalism.
51 The Subalternist critique of the Indian bourgeoisie repeats many arguments from an earlier debate among historians about the course of German modernization. In that context, too, German capitalists were indicted for shortcomings based on a highly romanticized conception of the British and French experience. This line of argument was brilliantly criticized in Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). The German debate was preceded by a similar set of arguments among British Marxist historians about England’s path to modernity, touched off by E. P. Thompson’s well-known article “The Peculiarities of the English,” Socialist Register 2 (1965), 311–62. Surprisingly, in spite of their obvious relevance, none of these works finds mention in the Subalternist literature.
52 Chatterjee tries to present Guha’s arguments as coextensive with his own, but as I will show in chapter 8, the attempt is unsuccessful.
53 For an interesting set of arguments on Gramsci’s incorporation into postcolonial studies and the Subalternist oeuvre, see Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
Dominance 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