Ibid., 13.
29 Ibid., 9–11. See especially p. 11 for Chakrabarty’s characterization of Hobsbawm.
30 Ibid., 13.
31 Ibid., 14.
32 Guha, quoted at ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 15.
36 Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History, 3–5.
37 Partha Chatterjee, “The Nation and Its Peasants,” in Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 163.
38 Ibid., 164.
39 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 7.
40 Ibid., 23.
41 Ibid., 242–3.
42 Ibid., 8, 249–51.
43 Gyanendra Pandey, “In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today,” Representations 37 (Winter 1992), 27–55
44 Chief among these were Rosalind O’Hanlon, “Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 22:1 (1988), 189–224; C. A. Bayly, “Rallying around the Subaltern,” Journal of Peasant Studies 16:1 (1988), 110–20; Tom Brass, “Moral Economists, Subalterns, New Social Movements, and the (Re-) Emergence of a (Post-) Modernized (Middle) Peasant,” Journal of Peasant Studies 18:2 (1991), 173–205; David Washbrook and Rosalind O’Hanlon, “After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism and Politics in the Third World,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34:1 (1992), 141–67; Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry 20:2 (1994), 328–56; Sumit Sarkar, “The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies,” in Sarkar, Writing Social History, 82–108. Vinay Bahl, “Relevance (or Irrelevance) of Subaltern Studies,” Economic and Political Weekly 32:23 (June 7–13, 1997), 1333–44.
45 See the largely positive appraisals by Jacques Pouchepadass, “Pluralizing Reason,” History and Theory 41:3 (Oct. 2002), 381–91; and Carola Dietze, “Toward a History on Equal Terms: A Discussion of Provincializing Europe,” History and Theory 47:1 (2008), 69–84; for a somewhat more skeptical response, see Barbara Weinstein, “History without a Cause? Grand Narratives, World History and the Postcolonial Dilemma,” International Review of Social History 50 (2005), 71–93.
46 See especially Sumit Sarkar, “Orientalism Revisited: Saidian Frameworks in the Writing of Modern Indian History,” Oxford Literary Review 16:1–2 (1994), 205–24; Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “ ‘The Making of the Working Class’: E. P. Thompson and Indian History,” History Workshop 43 (Spring 1997), 177–96; Achin Vanaik, The Furies of Indian Communalism: Religion, Modernity, and Secularization (London: Verso, 1997); O’Hanlon and Washbrook, “After Orientalism.” For an incisive critique of Subaltern Studies’ place within postcolonial theory more generally, see Aijaz Ahmad, “Postcolonial Theory and the ‘Post’ Condition”, The Socialist Register, 1997, Vol. 33, 353–81.
47 Brass, “Moral Economists, Subalterns.”
48 See Ramachandra Guha, “Subaltern and Bhadralok Studies,” Economic and Political Weekly (Aug. 19, 1995), 2056–58; Sarkar “Decline of the Subaltern.”
49 See Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura.”
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
