continued to subsist as a distinct sphere, even though it could not remain hermetically sealed from elite influence. The persistence of this divide in the postcolonial world is what motivates the call for a new framework, because, the Subalternists declare, Marxist and liberal theories attain validity only in settings with a secure bourgeois culture.
This is a remarkably ambitious and exciting set of arguments. If successful, they would provide the Subalternist project with a powerful historical sociology on which could rest its more ambitious and widely known pronouncements. It is therefore remarkable how little attention these arguments have drawn. While his work has elicited a great deal of commentary, it is Guha’s theorization of peasant rebellion in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India that has attracted the most attention (though, as I shall argue in Chapter 7, there has been a rather dramatic misrepresentation of the book, often by the Subalternists themselves).2 Yet even while Elementary Aspects has attained a special status in postcolonial studies, it is not the site at which Guha developed his case for the two roads to bourgeois power. Initially he presented these arguments, albeit in highly telescoped form, in Subaltern Studies’ debut collection in 1982.3 He then developed them further in two essays published in 1989 and 1992, which were brought together in 1997 in the aptly titled Dominance without Hegemony.4 It is this pair of essays that develop the arguments relevant to our discussion. In an important sense, even though Guha elaborated his views on this issue following the release of Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, the latter presupposes the basic framework laid down by the former. So, if the wider arguments in the Subalternist oeuvre are to be assessed, the first requirement is an appraisal of the historical sociology on which they rest, as developed by Guha. It is to this task that the present chapter, and the two that follow, are devoted.
2.1 SUBALTERN STUDIES IN CONTEXT
Subaltern Studies was born of crisis. In a retrospective look at the project’s origins, Ranajit Guha recalls the sense of frustration and bewilderment felt by many Indian radicals, especially the younger ones, during the 1970s. In the latter half of the 1960s, India had descended into its deepest political crisis since Independence. The Indian National Congress (INC) had been through a bitter leadership battle after Jawaharlal Nehru’s death in 1964, from which his daughter, Indira Gandhi, emerged as party leader and prime minster, but not before a bruising confrontation with regional party bosses. Furthermore, India had its second war with Pakistan in 1971, which also caused massive economic hardship for working people, triggering a significant upswing in industrial conflict and culminating in a historic strike by the Indian railway union, which, at its peak, involved well over a million workers. Although the strike lasted only about three weeks, its scope was enormous, shutting down much of the national rail system, and only massive state mobilization of the police and paramilitary forces achieved its defeat.5 In the countryside, peasant actions in West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh were being organized by breakaway Communist activists, who soon came to be known as Naxalites, and who declared the bankruptcy of not only the Congress Party but the two major Communist parties as well. And in 1975, Indira Gandhi declared a nationwide state of emergency, suspending constitutional liberties and unleashing a wave of repression across the country. The Emergency lasted almost two years, and when, in a fit of hubris, Gandhi called for national elections in 1977, fully expecting to win, the outcome was an overwhelming defeat for the INC by a loose coalition of opposition parties. For the first time since 1947, the Congress had been ousted from power in Delhi.
This decade-long crisis formed the backdrop to the launch of Subaltern Studies. As Guha recalls, the events of the 1970s called into question the national mythology about Indian political culture. At the very least, the political maelstrom belied the Indian National Congress’s claim to represent the masses. The ruling elite could not unleash its wave of repression while still claiming “the ascendancy of the Congress to power in independent India as the fulfillment of a promise of rulership by consent.”6 But the doubts did not stop there. The crisis years had exposed a chasm separating the political universe of the ruling elite from the culture of subaltern groups. The whole idea of a national political body, a new and encompassing ethos that bound the polity together at independence, seemed now to be no more than a shibboleth. “What came to be questioned,” Guha writes, “was thus not only the record of the ruling party which had been in power for over two decades by then, but also the entire generation that had put it in power.”7
If Congress rule had not in fact rested on the consent of the masses, then serious questions arose about its rise to power, its connection to the Indian population, its strategy during the independence movement, and so on. “One of the many unsettling effects” of the 1970s, Guha continues, “was to bring the impact of the twenty-year-old nation-state’s crisis to bear on a settled and in many respects codified understanding of the colonial past.”8 What the intellectual ferment called for was a new analysis of Indian politics over the previous half century or so, starting with the final decades of colonial rule. Guha summarizes the issue in two related puzzles:
1. What was there in our colonial past and our engagement with nationalism to land us in our current predicament—that is, the aggravating and seemingly insoluble difficulties of the nation-state?
2. How are the unbearable difficulties of our current condition compatible with and explained by what happened during colonial rule and our predecessors’ engagement with the politics and culture of that period?9
The turbulent decade thus pressed into relief an intellectual project: to undertake a reexamination of late colonial politics, and thereby to generate an explanation for the political turmoil in which the nation was now embroiled, three decades after Independence. Central to this project would be an investigation of the real roots of Congress power, an explication of its inability to mold a cohesive nation-state, an exploration of its resort to coercion to maintain its rule, and a discussion of what this revealed about the dominant order. It is important now, three decades after the launching of Subaltern Studies, to recall that the inspiration was, at its core, political. It was geared to achieve an understanding of the roots of the political order that colonialism had bequeathed to the Subcontinent. The goal was to inaugurate a new historiography of colonialism, and of the nationalist response to British rule, as a step toward understanding the crisis of the postcolonial state.
2.2 THE ROOTS OF THE POSTCOLONIAL CRISIS
The core elements of the Subalternist collective’s theorization of India’s political crisis were offered in the inaugural volume of Subaltern Studies, in its opening pages.10 It was Ranajit Guha who introduced the argument, and he did so as a set of numbered propositions, which captured the two axes that became central to much of his later work—the roots of the political impasse, and the failure of existing historiography to account for it. Guha began by noting that an encompassing political culture did not exist in India. Instead, the colonial era produced an enduring divide between the spheres of elite political and subaltern politics. Elite politics was coextensive with the domain of formal juridical institutions; this was the dimension of Indian political culture that had been modernized with the onset of colonialism, through which British administrative and juridical practices had been transplanted over the course of their rule. The elite political sphere was, of course, inhabited by the European elites who managed the colonial state apparatus; it also included, Guha seems to suggest, their Indian collaborators—those sections of the domestic ruling class that were recruited into the colonial order. To be sure, these new institutions were not entirely pristine replications of their European counterparts; of necessity, they had to be fused with elements of the precolonial state apparatus inherited from the Mughal state. Nevertheless, this domain of politics had its own integrity and its own practices.
While elite politics could be identified with the modern, formal institutions built around the colonial state, subaltern politics constituted a distinct domain,
