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