of its own. Central to these was a reliance on informal, local networks that were based on kinship, local ties, and the primordial relations typical of traditional agrarian societies; occasionally, under certain conditions, this reliance on local networks also generated class association. Generally, however, whereas the elite domain was characterized by the discourse of law and juridical equality, the subaltern domain was suffused with traditional forms of hierarchy and subordination. The transformation that accompanied colonialism was thus of a certain kind: although it did transplant recognizably “modern” practices to the Subcontinent, these practices remained largely confined to the upper crust of the political system, leaving the culture of the subaltern classes largely intact.
Not only did each domain have its distinct idiom and reproductive practices, it also had its characteristic form of political mobilization. Elites relied on typically oligarchical, top-down strategies to elicit mass support for their campaigns—using parts of the state apparatus, patron-client networks, subtle forms of coercion, the mass media, and so on. Subaltern mobilization, on the other hand, was “horizontal” in its tactical deployment, relying on the same informal associational forms that were central to political reproduction in this sphere. Mainstream historiography, Guha charges, begins with the assumption that political culture under colonial rule was a seamless, integrated whole—it assumes that subaltern culture had become assimilated into that of the dominant classes. Hence, in its examination of elite political practice and discourse, it wrongly assumes that the conclusions derived from a study of this domain will also pertain to the political practice of subaltern groups. But the domains had not in fact been integrated, he reminds us, and the political practice associated with each was quite distinct. Subaltern political mobilization therefore warrants a historiography of its own, sensitive to its peculiarities, its distinctive moral universe—in short, its independence from elite political discourse and design. Only thus can we discover the roots of the present crisis, for it is in the persistent discontinuity between the two domains that we will find the key to the postcolonial state’s crisis.
The fissure between elite and subaltern spheres was not preordained, nor was it the outgrowth of certain enduring cultural facts about India. It was, rather, the consequence of a very specific peculiarity of India’s colonial experience, “the index of an important historical truth, that is, the failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to speak for the nation.”11 What Guha means by this is that the Indian bourgeoisie failed to successfully integrate the culture of the disparate groupings in Indian society into one all-embracing political community. Of particular relevance was its failure to assimilate the laboring classes into its political project, especially in the years leading up to independence from the British. As he observes, “There remained vast areas in the life and consciousness of the people which were never integrated into [the bourgeoisie’s] hegemony.”12 The persistence of the two distinct domains is thus a direct consequence of the failure of a particular historical agent—namely, the bourgeoisie. And although in this synoptic presentation Guha focuses on Indian capitalists, we will see below that the failure belonged to capital as a whole in the colonial era, in both its European and Indian guises. Had the bourgeoisie secured hegemony, the process of national integration could have been successful, thereby generating a coherent national political culture rather than the fractured dualism that India actually inherited.
Now in this early essay, Guha does point to one other actor who might have been relevant for pushing India in the direction of an integrated political order: the working class. Toward the very end of the piece, he raises the possibility that the nationalist movement could have taken a different path, and produced a different outcome, had labor been able to assert itself more effectively. The bourgeoisie could have been pushed into a subordinate position, or could have been displaced altogether, in the style of a national liberation movement. The reason this did not take place was that “the working class was not sufficiently mature in the objective conditions of its social being and in its consciousness” to pull the movement in a different direction.13
This is a curious diagnosis of labor’s failure. Was the Indian working class less mature in its objective conditions than the Chinese or Vietnamese? What, in any case, does it mean for conditions to be “mature”? Clearly, one could quibble with Guha’s argument. But what is noteworthy is that, at this stage, he opens up the possibility of two distinct outcomes for the Indian nationalist movement,and two actors relevant to its course: capital and labor. However, this is the only time that Guha—or his colleagues—contemplates two distinct paths. In his subsequent work, the focus is trained single-mindedly on the capitalist class—its nature, preferences, political strategy, and failings. We will see that this turns out to be a critical failing of Subaltern Studies, not just as historiography but also as analysis.
Let us return to the argument about the bourgeoisie’s failure to achieve hegemony. For it to have any plausibility, Guha would need to provide two additional pieces of information. First, we would need a working definition of hegemony, to assess whether Indian capitalists did in fact fail at securing it. The concept is notoriously slippery, and if any verdict is to be rendered on the value of Guha’s argument, then we need to have a working definition of what the term denotes. Second, and just as important, Guha would need to provide a specific kind of counterfactual, which established two claims implicit in his argument, the first claim being that the relevant agent capable of bringing about an integrated political culture is in fact the bourgeoisie, since it is to the politics and record of this actor that he directs his attention in the Indian case. For the bourgeoisie to shoulder the blame in India, it must have been appropriately successful elsewhere. We must be confident that this actor does have an interest in and capacity for the task Guha assigns it. Second, Guha needs to adduce cases in which this actor did indeed achieve hegemony over subaltern classes, so that not only can we be confident that hegemony is a real possibility but, even more so, have some sense of what hegemony looks like when it actually obtains. In other words, although Guha did not make much of this point when he penned the opening essay to Subaltern Studies, the argument for the Indian bourgeoisie’s failure is intrinsically and unavoidably contrastive. To announce a failure in nation-building or in achieving hegemony simply makes no sense unless judged against historical cases that can be taken as standards of nation-building and genuine bourgeois hegemony. Absent a real historical benchmark, there is no way to assess whether the Indian record is one of relative success or failure—could it not be that the Indian experience just happens to be what hegemony looks like?
Guha took up neither of these challenges in Subaltern Studies I. He was content, at that point, to present his core propositions as the signposts of a new research agenda. It was in a series of later essays that he fleshed out what he had in mind when he characterized the bourgeoisie as having failed to gain hegemony; and it was in these essays that he offered some sense of where we might find successful hegemonic projects against which the Indian achievement could be judged. As indicated earlier in this chapter, the two key publications toward this end were first published as “Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography” (1989) and “Discipline and Mobilize” (1992), and were conjoined as the core of his 1997 book Dominance without Hegemony. It was in this book that readers could view Guha’s argument at its fullest, inasmuch as he provided both the ingredients missing from his opening salvo in Subaltern Studies I. It is to this larger work that we now turn.
2.3 THE TWO PATHS TO BOURGEOIS POWER
Dominance without Hegemony is structured not simply as history but as a critique of what Guha presents as liberal ideology. He argues that the dominant liberal historiography of India, in both its colonial and nationalist versions, suffers from a basic misconception. It assumes that the dominant classes and subaltern groups inhabited the same political and cultural universe. As a result, it blandly assumes that histories of elite strategies and preferences are an accurate stand-in for the political goals and contributions of the lower orders. But for such a state of affairs to have obtained, the dominant class in India—the capitalist class—would have had to establish its hegemony over society as a whole, which is exactly what Guha is concerned to
