process. In sum, for Guha, the nature of the state presented the first and perhaps most important obstacle to the colonial bourgeoisie’s construction of a hegemonic order.
Another significant obstacle to the implantation of a liberal order in the colony was the kind of alliance system that the British had to forge. Of necessity, even while pushing aside the established ruling classes, colonial authorities were forced to enlist them as junior partners in the state. A few thousand colonial administrators from an alien culture could hardly hope to achieve stable rule without bringing into the fold some local sources of power. Again in contrast to the European precedent, the new elite therefore reached out to precapitalist ruling groups. A natural concomitant was the preservation of these groups’ sources of income and power, and thereby the idiom of local politics—with the result that “feudal practices, far from being abolished or at least reduced, were in fact reinforced under a government representing the authority of the world’s most advanced bourgeoisie.”36 This underlines the point that the colonial bourgeoisie’s “antagonism to feudal values and institutions in their own society made little difference … to their vast tolerance of precapitalist values and institutions in Indian society.”37
The preservation of these institutions further solidified traditional power relations and, in so doing, prevented the creation of a hegemonic bourgeois regime. There was no drive to create a singular people-nation. Instead, the heritage of colonial rule was the reproduction of archaic power relations and,through that, the distinctiveness of subaltern culture—in contact with, but separate from, the culture of its rulers. Herein lay the structural fault separating the bourgeois project in Europe from that in India. British capital exchanged its historic mission for the opportunity to secure power in its new zones of conquest. Guha concludes that “colonialism could continue as a relation of power in the subcontinent only on the condition that the colonizing bourgeoisie should fail to live up to its universalist project.”38
THE INDIAN BOURGEOISIE
If we turn now to the domestic bourgeoisie, we find that the Indian counterpart to the bourgeois revolutions in Europe was the nationalist movement for independence. The British and French capitalist classes came to power by overthrowing the feudal monarchies; Indian capital in its turn had to confront the power of feudal landed classes. But in taking them on, capital came up against not a feudal state per se but rather a colonial state that was patronizing these classes. In some respects, capital’s task paralleled that of its European predecessors—it still had to confront traditional classes but could do so only by crafting a broad political coalition. As Guha puts it, it would still have to “express its hegemonic urge in the form of universality.”39 But the form taken by this universalism would have to differ somewhat from the European version. It would have to be not just an antifeudal coalition, but a nationalist movement. “Thanks to the historic conditions of its formation,” declares Guha, “the Indian bourgeoisie could strive towards its hegemonic aim only by constituting ‘all the members of society’ into a nation and their ‘common interest’ into an ‘ideal form’ of a nationalism.”40
Any verdict on the Indian bourgeoisie’s competence at its historic mission thus derives, above all, from its performance in the nationalist movement. And the verdict is severe indeed. Guha’s summary assessment is that Indian capital failed on all three fronts that he considers central to the classic bourgeois revolutions.
The Accommodation to Landlordism
First, and perhaps foundationally, Indian capital never launched a frontal assault on the traditional landed nobility as had British and French capitalists. Instead, it tried to reach an accommodation with them. Says Guha: “Fostered by colonialism and dependent on the latter for its very survival during its formative phase, it had learned to live at peace with those pre-capitalist modes of production and culture which made the perpetuation of British rule possible.”41 The bourgeoisie thus subsisted in a “symbiosis with landlordism and complicity with many forms of feudal oppression”42 rather than in tension with it, as was the case in Europe, according to Guha. The result was that an attack on traditional classes simply was not on the cards for the nationalist movement.
The Failure to Hegemonize the Nationalist Movement
Indian capital’s reluctance to attack landlordism placed severe limits on the bourgeoisie’s ability to represent the common interest. One critical manifestation of this inability was the failure to bring the laboring classes under its leadership. As long as it refused to break with traditional landed elites, it could not accommodate even the basic demands of the peasantry, such as the call for rent reductions.43 Instead of mobilizing the peasantry against the landed classes, the bourgeoisie sought the latter’s patronage.44 The working class quickly discovered that, since capital had placed strict limits on its own political vision and ambitions, it would have little patience for integrating workers’ interests in its strategy.45 As a result,
by the time they were called upon to mobilize in the campaigns initiated by the nationalist leadership at the end of the First World War, both these groups [i.e., workers and peasants] had already developed class aims which it was not possible for the bourgeoisie to accommodate in any program sponsored exclusively under its own auspices.46
The consequences of this failure to incorporate the class interests of subaltern groups lie at the heart of Guha’s overall argument. The first and more direct consequence was that the bourgeoisie could not legitimately claim to represent “the nation.” Guha seems to rely here on a counterfactual, though he does not explicitly say this—that the evidence for genuine leadership of a movement would appear to be the absence of contending claims to that leadership.47 But because the Indian National Congress had been unable to acquire the working masses’ consent to its leadership, that space came under challenge by other political forces—socialists, communists, and other radicals, as well as other nationalist parties. This was the glimmer of an alternative hegemony to which Guha alluded in his inaugural Subaltern Studies essay, a hegemony that, if successful, would have been based in the working class and its allies.48 These forces were not, of course, able to displace the INC from the helm of the movement. But neither was the INC able to drive them out. They remained, throughout the movement’s later phases, a visible and contending force. So, while the European capitalists had been able to win a hegemonic position over its mass movements, “in India there was always yet another voice, a subaltern voice, that spoke for a large part of society which it was not for the bourgeoisie to represent.”49
Having failed to secure their active consent to its leadership, the bourgeoisie had no choice but to keep the laboring classes in line by resorting to coercion. They turned to traditional forms of authority, both material and ideational, to maintain their place at the helm of the movement. Instead of appealing to their common interests with the masses as an incentive for the latter’s participation, they leaned instead on subtle or overt threats and on traditional notions of duty, obligation, and station.50 The means used by the Indian bourgeoisie to assert control, which Guha takes as paradigmatic of a nonhegemonic leadership, were of two functional kinds: mechanisms to ensure conformity within the ranks of Congress, cadre or crowds participating in public events such as rallies, and measures to ensure wider social compliance with political initiatives such as boycotts and political campaigns. The main difference between the two was that the former pertained to a narrower band of social groups, namely those that were already within the INC or were in close contact with it, and the latter pertained to a far wider set of strata, many of which had no direct contact with the INC as an organizational body.
Guha takes the use of these disciplinary measures as proof that the INC had failed to elicit genuine consent from the masses and thus had failed to emerge as the authentic voice of subaltern aspirations. It is noteworthy that he does not say it was the degree of coercion or the kind of disciplinary measures that signaled the failure of
