that of subaltern politics this was achieved horizontally’. In the first case this meant reliance on the ‘colonial adaptation of British parliamentary institutions and the residua of ... the political institutions of the pre-colonial period’, while the latter ‘relied on traditional organization of kinship and territoriality or on class associations’; the former was more ‘legalistic’, the latter more ‘violent’; the former more ‘controlled, the latter more spontaneous’ (p. 4). In his commentary on the originality of Subaltern Studies, Chakrabarty (2002: 8) emphasises that
By explicitly rejecting the characterization of peasant consciousness as prepolitical, and by avoiding evolutionary models of consciousness, Guha was prepared to suggest that the nature of collective action against exploitation in colonial India was such that it effectively led to a new constellation of the political ... Guha insisted that, instead of being an anachronism in a modernizing colonial world, the peasant was a real contemporary of colonialism and a fundamental part of the modernity to which colonial rule gave rise in India. The peasant’s was not a backward consciousness ... Elitist histories of peasant uprisings missed the significance of this gesture by seeing it as prepolitical (emphasis in original).
Of course, it is evidently not only ‘elitist histories’ that are being criticised here but also the writings of the British and other Marxist social historians. This argument is developed at length in Guha’s justly famous piece on ‘The Prose of Counter-insurgency’. Guha starts from the observation that ‘peasant insurrections [were not] purely spontaneous and unpremeditated affairs’ (1992a: 1). Given the risks faced by peasants and how much was at stake for them, it is mistaken to see peasant insurgency in any other way than as a ‘motivated and conscious undertaking on the part of the rural masses’. Yet historiography has been prepared to deal with the peasant not ‘as an entity whose will and reason constituted the praxis called rebellion’ (p. 2), but simply ‘as an empirical person or member of a class’.7 As a result, ‘insurgency is regarded as external to the peasant’s consciousness and Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate for Reason, the logic of that consciousness’ (p. 3). In other words, peasants were considered not as thinking subjects in the historical literature, but simply as bearers of a social location. Guha undertakes a detailed assessment of the discourse of this history from the colonial period to the present and concludes that, whether it is colonial history, liberal history, nationalist history or Marxist history that is produced, ‘the rebel has no place in this history as the subject of rebellion’ (p. 27):
Once a peasant rebellion has been assimilated to the career of the Raj, the Nation or the people, it becomes easy for the historian to abdicate the responsibility he has of exploring and describing the consciousness specific to that rebellion and be content to ascribe to it a transcendental consciousness. In operative terms this means denying a will to the mass of the rebels themselves and representing them merely as instruments of some other will (p. 38).
A major consequence of this general perspective is to fail to recognise the central role played in rebellions by the spirituality of the insurgents, which modernist historiography refers to as ‘religion’. Guha uses the example of the Santal Rebellion of 1855–7 to make his point, yet in doing so he opens up a major problem for the history of political consciousness, which he is ultimately unable to resolve.8 The leading protagonists of the rebellion express themselves in a discourse that denies their own agency and rather ascribes it to their god ‘Thakur’, who is said to do the fighting himself; as a result, it is ‘not possible to speak of insurgency in this case except as a religious consciousness ... as predicated on a will other than their own’ (p. 35). As Chakrabarty (1998: 20) asks: ‘what does it then mean when we both take the subaltern’s views seriously – the subaltern ascribes the agency for their rebellion to some god – and we want to confer on the subaltern agency or subjecthood in their own history, a status the subaltern’s status denies?’ Neither Guha nor Chakrabarty is able to find an adequate solution to this conundrum, which remains aporetic, as ‘the supernatural was part of what constituted public life for the non-modern Santals of the nineteenth century’ (p. 20). Guha distances himself from those positions that see religion as an irrational (‘superstitious’) expression of the secular, yet, as Chakrabarty notes, his position ‘becomes a combination of the anthropologist’s politeness ... and a Marxist (or modern) sense of frustration with the intrusion of the supernatural into public life’ (p. 21), which he calls a ‘massive demonstration of self-estrangement’ (Guha, 1992a: 34). Although Guha understands that we are faced with a religious idiom of politics, he is unable to attempt an analysis of it in its own terms: ‘It was this consciousness, an unquestionably false consciousness if ever there was one, which also generated a certain kind of alienation: it made the subject look upon his destiny not as a function of his own will and action, but as that of forces outside and independent of himself’ (Guha, 1999: 268). Yet that consciousness was never so false as not to recognise the real enemy or as to not sustain a mass popular rebellion of extreme importance against the colonial state. Unfortunately, the Santals’ statements are treated as ‘beliefs’ and anthropologised, with the consequence that ‘we cannot write history from within those beliefs. We thus produce “good”, not subversive histories’ (Chakrabarty, 1998: 22, emphasis added).
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
