• Thesis 4: The Two Domains of Colonial Politics
Colonial capital’s refusal to take up its universalizing mission, its willingness to accommodate the ancien régime, has some important implications for political analysis. First, since it leaves untouched older forms of power, and therefore also the political idiom linked to those power relations, it means that the bourgeoisie does not integrate subaltern culture into its own modernizing discourse. A split between the two domains persists, so that the elite and the popular remain distinct social formations. This does not by any means suggest they are entirely independent of each other; it means rather that there is a recognizable “subaltern” domain of politics, related to, but distinct from, that of the ruling classes. This state of affairs is held to be in sharp contrast to Europe, where, claim the Subalternists, as an index of its hegemony a revolutionary bourgeoisie successfully integrated the popular into the domain of elite and organized politics.
Second, the persistence of this subaltern domain means that forms of political engagement typically associated with premodern politics will persist in modern times, as will the idiom in which the struggles of the poor and the oppressed have long been formulated. The language of a recognizably bourgeois politics will not be universal. Indeed, the assumption that politics is organized around the rational pursuit of individual interests becomes problematic. Often politics will be waged in religious language and around religious issues. Furthermore, the dominant axis will typically be community/ethnicity, not individual or class interests.
If peasant struggles in India are organized around caste or ethnic groupings, or are expressed in nonsecular terms, it is not a sign of their being “prepolitical,” and hence premodern, as the Subalternists accuse Marxists such as Eric Hobsbawm to be claiming.29 Instead, it shows they are thoroughly political and modern, for they reflect the fundamentally different character of colonial modernity. European political theory commits the error of equating modernity with recognizably bourgeois forms of power and political discourse. Colonial modernity, however, generates a break between these two; it produces a capitalism that accommodates to the hierarchies and the culture of the ancien régime. This is capitalism, yes, but without capitalist power relations and without a recognizably capitalist culture. Politics in such settings is therefore “heteroglossic in its idioms and fundamentally plural in its structure, interlocking within itself strands of different types of relationships that [do] not make up a logical whole.”30 If peasant political consciousness here does not resemble that of the Western laboring classes, it is because it cannot. The problem is not with the peasant, but with the expectations of the scholar, who brings to the table of analysis an unwarranted teleology.
• Thesis 5: The Spuriousness of Colonial Nationalism
Once it is accepted that, because of the absence of a universalizing bourgeoisie, there remained a gulf between the elite and popular domains within the culture, it cannot but affect our understanding of colonial nationalism. For colonial apologists, the colonial state was an agent of progress because it imported European culture into the conquered territories, a culture that lifted the native population from its rude state into modern civilization. It created a nation where once there was none. For nationalist historians, on the other hand, the rejection of colonial apologetics did not lead to a thorough critique of colonial capitalism. They replaced the flawed premise of colonialism’s civilizing mission with a bland acceptance of a purportedly hegemonic domestic bourgeoisie. Nationalist historiography endowed the nationalist movement’s leaders with a spurious legitimacy, since it is assumed that this leadership spoke for the nation.
An acceptance of the Subalternist critique of colonial capitalism requires a rejection of both the colonial and the nationalist theorizations of the independence movement and the state to which it gave birth. Chakrabarty concludes that the Subalternist theorization of nationalism calls for a “critical stance toward such official or statist nationalism and its attendant historiography.”31 The foundation of their rejection of official nationalism was their observation that two spheres of politics persisted—the popular and the elite—the coexistence of which was the “index of an important historical truth, that is, the failure of the bourgeoisie to speak for the nation.”32 Because the bourgeoisie failed to integrate the elite and subaltern domains into one, there was no question of the nationalist leadership articulating a nation-building project akin to that of the European bourgeoisie, since “there was no unitary nation to speak for.”33 The real question, which the Subalternist historians now undertook to answer, “was how and through what practices an official nationalism emerged that claimed to represent such a unitary nation.”34 Subaltern Studies thus launched not only a critique of nationalist politics, but also of the historiography that endowed this nationalism with a spurious legitimacy.
• Thesis 6: The Eurocentrism of Classical Theory
Having examined the social implications of the bourgeoisie’s putative abandonment of its universalizing drive, we turn now to the implications for theory. The upshot of the preceding theses is that the colonial and postcolonial social formations cannot be assimilated into the same general framework as those of the advanced West. Not only do they diverge in their basic structure, but they cannot be assumed to be moving along the same broad trajectory of development. From this premise, postcolonial theory draws a seemingly natural conclusion: if the reality of colonial social formations is fundamentally different from that of Western social formation, then theoretical categories generated from the experience of the West cannot be appropriate for an understanding of the East.
Hence, as Chakrabarty avers, “a history of political modernity in India could not be written as a simple application of the analytics of capital and nationalism available to Western Marxism.”35 These analytics are lacking because they are based on the assumption that colonial social formations are sufficiently similar to Western ones—or are on the same path of development—to justify reliance on the same theoretical framework. It is this basic congruence between West and East that the Subalternists deny, and it is this claim that is the basis for their conclusion that Western theories cannot be grafted onto Eastern realities. Two issues in particular stand out: agency and historicism.
Let us first address agency. For Subalternist theorists, the Eurocentrism of received theory is especially evident in its understanding of political movements. Their critique focuses on the matter of political psychology. Subalternists often accuse Western theorists of imputing a provincial and culturally specific psychology to peasants and workers in the East. Chakrabarty suggests that Marxist analysis cannot appreciate the dynamics of labor struggles in colonial India, because it assumes that Indian workers function in a liberal, bourgeois culture. This assumption, he insists, is carried over from Marx’s own work on the labor contract, insofar as the latter assumes that both labor and capitalists have internalized bourgeois norms.36 The most egregious Eurocentric assumption is that workers are motivated by material needs. Chakrabarty takes Marxists to task for assuming that workers make choices based on their interests. This assumes that workers are motivated by what he calls a “utilitarian calculus,” which he equates with a bourgeois culture. What Marxists fail to understand, he contends, is that workers in India were motivated by an entirely different kind of psychology, namely a psychology specific to their pre-bourgeois culture, wherein choices were not made on “rational” grounds to serve material interests. Rather, workers’ choices reflected the premium they placed on community, religion, and honor.
Partha Chatterjee largely embraces the same strictures for the analysis of peasant politics. He warns that agrarian movements in colonial India cannot be subsumed under Marxist or liberal theories, which are organized around the Western notions of interest and rationality—common components in the theories imported from Europe. Among the culprits he lists are Marxism, modernization theory, Chayanovian theories, the disciplines of economics and sociology, and liberal theory more generally. Peasant agency must be understood “in its own constitutive forms,”37 a mode of understanding that none of the approaches just listed can achieve. “We must,” argues Chatterjee, “grant that peasant consciousness has its own paradigmatic