pressures for corresponding shifts in culture and politics; it is quite another to use particular institutional and cultural changes as a test for whether the economic transformation is in fact taking place. Guha not only argues that the universalization of capital induces the rise of new cultural forms, but he takes the dissemination of particular instances of these as a litmus for whether or not capital has been universalized. Hence his insistence that, in failing to transform subaltern culture, to break down its obduracy and integrate it into a national culture, capital abandoned its universalizing mission. He never considers the possibility that the expansion of capital’s economic logic simply may not require the kind of deep cultural transformations that he thinks it does. He does not consider that capital might be able to meet its basic needs by relying on the very cultural forms he thinks are inimical to it—those typical of traditional political economies, suffused with outdated forms of social hierarchy and subordination. So, while there could certainly be some shifts in politics and culture, they may not be of the kind that Guha assumes are necessary.
And just what are the institutions Guha points to as evidence for capital’s universalization? Not only does he insist that capital must revolutionize the political culture; he seems also to have a very clear idea of just what the content of the new culture must be. Again and again, he links capital’s universalization with the rise of liberal political and cultural institutions. If the colonial bourgeoisie failed in its mission, it is because of having turned its back on the liberalism it professed in the West; if the Indian business houses were found wanting in their mettle, it is because of their “mediocre liberalism,” which was a “caricature” of the liberalism of their Western counterparts. If capital in India failed in its transformative mission, it is because it did not replace the political idioms of the traditional order with those of modern bourgeois society—the rule of law, formal equality, self-determination, and so on. Capital’s aborted universalization is inferred from the fact that these notions did not become institutionalized in the broader political culture. Guha does not consider that the shift to capitalist social structures might actually fit quite well with the idiom of traditional politics. If this is indeed the case, then the perpetuation of what he calls precapitalist institutions might not constitute evidence for an aborted universalization after all.
Guha’s argument about capital’s universalization rests on his understanding of the bourgeoisie as historic actor. He takes the notions of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois liberalism quite literally—these political forms do not simply arise in the capitalist era but are, for him, desired and fought for by the bourgeoisie. Capitalists are, at least in the classic cases, the vectors of these ideals, and it is bourgeois agency that implants them in the political culture. As in the case for capital’s universalization, Guha shifts the focus from the economic—such as the imperative of profit maximization—as the sine qua non of bourgeois goals, to the pursuit of certain political and cultural ends. The bourgeois revolutions are significant for him because they crystallize what he takes to be the real achievements of the bourgeoisie as a historical actor—not merely the establishment of capitalist economic relations, but the universalization of the class’s political and ideological commitments.
It is surprising that Guha does not entertain the possibility that the spread of the cultural and political forms he associates with the British and French bourgeoisie might have issued from other sources; hence, while they might have become established in the capitalist era, they would not have been brought about by capitalist design. This is surprising only because, by the time Guha published Dominance without Hegemony, there was a veritable mountain of historical literature pointing precisely in this direction.
We now turn to the historical evidence on the course of the so-called bourgeois revolutions.
1 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 15.
2 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).
3 Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” Subaltern Studies I (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 1–8.
4 Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), henceforth cited as DH. The volume also contained Guha’s 1988 S. G. Deuskar Lecture. The two essays in question are “Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography,” which was included in Subaltern Studies VI (1989), and “Discipline and Mobilize: Hegemony and Elite Control in Nationalist Campaigns,” originally published in Subaltern Studies VII (1992).
5 For a history and analysis of the strike, see Stephen Sherlock, The Indian Railways Strike of 1974: A Study of Power and Organised Labour (Delhi: Rupa, 2001).
6 Ranajit Guha, “Introduction,” The Subaltern Studies Reader (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xix. Emphasis added.
7 Ibid., xiii.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., xi.
10 Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography.”
11 Ibid., 5. Emphasis in the original.
12 Ibid., 5–6.
13 Ibid., 6.
14 DH 23.
15 Guha clearly derives his argument from a certain reading of Gramsci, one that was very much in vogue among Marxists during the 1980s. As I indicated in Chapter 1, I will not comment on the merits of his interpretation of Gramsci’s work, though I do believe that it is questionable.
16 DH 63–4.
17 DH 64.
18 DH 4.
19 DH 5.
20 DH 13–14. For Guha’s approving quotes from Marx on this matter, see DH 14–15.
21 DH 63. Emphasis added..
22 Ibid. Interestingly, Guha does not explain clearly how the universalizing drive should enable the bourgeoisie to subordinate subaltern classes’ interests to their own. Presumably it has to do with the fact that a capitalist economy will provide a foundation for greater political freedoms and for positive effects on the allies’ incomes.
23 DH 17. Guha uses the date 1648, but readers should not be confused by this. The revolution he has in mind is the same one that began in 1640.
24 DH 17–18.
25 DH 134.
26 Guha uses this very expression—“to speak for all of society”—at least twice in discussions of the bourgeoisie’s role in the classical revolutions. See DH 19 and 134. On p. 19, he then links this capacity with the acquisition of hegemony, and hegemony itself as “rule based on the consent of the subject population.”
27 DH 20.
28 There are two contexts in which we can discern Guha’s commitment to this view—in direct discussions of the postrevolutionary regimes and in discussions of the nonhegemonic order of South Asia, in which Britain and France are used as counterfactuals. He is quite consistent across both. Textual support for his association of bourgeois hegemony with the discourse and institutions of liberalism can be found throughout Dominance without Hegemony. The evidence for the colonial order being nonhegemonic is its autocratic character,
