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