forces did not coalesce into one encompassing community. This was the failure of the nation to “come into its own.” And this was what laid down the conditions for the political crisis of the 1970s. But what exactly is hegemony, and how does it generate an encompassing political sphere, bringing together all the disparate social groupings?
Guha defines hegemony as a state in which a class establishes its dominance by relying more on the consent of other classes than it does on coercion. As he presents it, “hegemony stands for a condition of Dominance (D), such that … Persuasion (P) outweighs Coercion (C).”14 Hegemony does not imply the absence of coercion but rather its relegation to a minor role, relative to the importance of persuasion. A hegemonic class maintains its rule by eliciting the active consent of subaltern groups to its dominance in society. In so doing, it “speaks for all of society,” as Guha frequently puts it. This ability to “speak for society” is what enables the bourgeoisie to tear down the walls separating elite culture from that of subaltern groups, and thus to incorporate the latter into the political nation. Capital wins over other groups to its rule by accommodating their interests to some significant degree, by creating a polity in which the pursuit of interests is no longer a zero-sum game.15
Notably, Guha argues that hegemony is an achievement entirely specific to modern, capitalist polities. It is a condition that was, he argues, impossible in precapitalist systems. Premodern ruling classes had neither the interest nor the capacity to incorporate laboring groups into the political culture. They did not strive to elicit subaltern consent, basing their rule instead on brute force or the threat of its application.16 There was no attempt at persuasion, no “exchange at the level of culture,” no process of political education. These polities were despotisms pure and simple. Guha concludes that, strictly speaking, formations such as this “did not have a ruling culture, although there was a ruler’s culture operating side by side with that of the ruled in a state of mutual indifference.”17 The potential for their integration into an organic whole came about only with the rise of capitalism, as part of the political project of the rising bourgeoisie.
Now that we have a sense of what the concept of hegemony denotes, we come to the second challenge, namely, what are the cases of the successful attainment of hegemony against which the Indian case is being judged? The arena in which capital was able most clearly to establish itself as the hegemonic class was Western Europe, in particular England and France, and the period in which these advances were made was the early modern era. In fact, the time of capital’s ascension to power can be pinpointed with some accuracy, for it was in two revolutionary explosions that the bourgeoisie established its rule: the English Revolution of 1640 and the great French Revolution of 1789. These revolutions marked the arrival of not only a new class but a new form of rule, an entirely new structure of class dominance. The modern bourgeoisie, as exemplified by English and French capitalists, maintained their power through the consent of the masses. In so doing, they also created the modern political nation.
This is the achievement against which the performance of the Indian bourgeoisie is judged. For Guha, the European experience established two things: first, that the bourgeoisie is the critical agent behind the establishment of the modern political nation, with its characteristic political idiom and institutions; and second, that the achievements are most clearly exemplified in the classic bourgeois revolutions of the early modern era. The capitalist class in India had the opportunity to construct its own nation, through a political mobilization of its own, when it participated in the nationalist mobilization against colonial rule. It could have charted a path parallel to the one taken by the classic capitalist classes in Europe, constructing a viable and consensual political order. But, Guha argues, the independence movement merely revealed the Indian bourgeoisie’s utter inadequacy, its abject failure to attain real hegemony over the rest of society.
The standard set by the European achievement Guha refers to as the “competence” of the class—its potential as an historic agent; to this he contrasts the “performance” of the actual class, as it was found in India. The difference between its competence and its actual performance is what he is pressing in his later essays—the conditions under colonialism were such that the Indian bourgeoisie’s performance fell far short of its competence.18 Indeed, the shortfall was so significant that it constitutes, for Guha, a fact of world-historic significance: it amounts to a “structural fault in the historic project of the bourgeoisie.”19 In other words, even though colonialism created a bourgeoisie on the Subcontinent and placed it on a trajectory that might have followed that of European modernization, this was not to be: the Indian capitalist class was committed to a political project fundamentally different from that of its European predecessors. Colonialism created a bourgeoisie, but one that would not, or could not, forge a recognizably modern political order.
The error of liberal historiography, then, is its assumption that the colonial order was built around real bourgeois hegemony, as was the case in Western Europe. It construes the colonial state as an extension of the liberal state of Great Britain. On the nationalist side, historians have assumed that the Indian bourgeoisie secured the ability to “speak for the nation,” much as English and French capitalists had done during the classic bourgeois revolutions. Both of these formulations, however, fail to appreciate the “structural fault” between the bourgeois project as it took shape in Europe, and its local manifestation in the Subcontinent. What, then, explains this fault line separating the trajectory of the classic bourgeois transitions in the West from the bourgeois transitions in the colonies? To explain the disjuncture between the two experiences, Guha must proceed by first establishing the nature of the paradigmatic transformation in Europe and then by examining why a similar transformation was forestalled in India, even though actors of the same kind dominated the scene.
2.4 CAPITAL’S UNIVERSALIZING TENDENCY AND THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTIONS
For Guha, Europe’s political modernization issued from the same underlying forces as its economic modernization—the rise and subsequent ascendance of the capitalist class. Having arisen within the confines of feudal agrarian structures, the emergent bourgeoisie found its further economic expansion blocked by the ancien régime. In order to remove the obstacles to its further expansion, the capitalist class undertook a political struggle against the feudal monarchy. Once in power, the nascent capitalist class consolidated its economic program through legislation that enabled a more rapid spread of markets into the agrarian economy. They also initiated an ambitious program of political and cultural liberalization to round out the process of economic liberalization. As we will see, the central components of this dimension of European development were, for Guha, the creation of liberal political institutions and the eventual forging of a national political identity. More to the point, because the construction of these institutions is an achievement attributed to the bourgeoisie, it constitutes the standard against which Indian capital’s agency is measured.
Guha, as well as the Subalternists in general, insists that this modernizing project was in turn driven by a deeper structural force, namely, the universalizing drive of capital. This concept occupies a central place in their theoretical work; at times they refer to it as a drive, at other times as an urge or even a mission, and sometimes as a tendency. They do take the universalizing drive to have propelled Europe’s political and economic transformation, but they also see it as having governed the emergence of the dominant ideologies of the era: liberalism, secularism, and socialism. Thus, while the bourgeoisie’s political struggle is the proximate cause of the ancien régime’s demise, the struggle is in turn the expression of a deeper motor force. It is necessary, then, to examine what Guha has to say about the connection between capital’s universalization and the bourgeois-democratic transformation of Europe. This examination will enable an analysis of why a parallel process could not occur in India, and what the consequences were of this “structural fault” in the bourgeois project.
CAPITAL’S UNIVERSALIZING TENDENCY
At its core, capital’s universalizing tendency is
