xii, 4, 65–6). He characterizes British capital’s stance as championing self-determination in Europe while crushing any such aspirations in its colonies (DH 4); hence, capital’s orientation where it is hegemonic is to recognize national rights, while the evidence of its having abandoned hegemonic aspirations in India is that it denies Indians the right to self-determination. Later Guha argues that colonialist ideologues tried to legitimize British rule by gathering “evidence for the essentially liberal character of the Raj” (DH 31, 33). Here again, hegemony is tied to liberal institutions. Guha finds that what was most laudable in British political culture, and lacking in the political culture of colonialism, was “Liberalism, Democracy, Liberty, the Rule of Law, and so on” (DH 67). James Mill’s attempts to present the Indian state as an extension of the British state—and hence as being based, as was the British state, on the consent of the governed—failed because “liberal culture hardly managed to penetrate beyond the upper crust … while the ideal of liberal government persisted only as idle and empty cant until the end of the raj” (DH 80). The marker of colonialism’s inability to achieve hegemony was the “failure of liberalism to overcome the resistance of entrenched feudal customs and belief systems” (ibid.). Again and again, the marker of a truly hegemonic bourgeois order is linked with liberal ideology, representative democracy, political liberties, and the like.
29 DH 19.
30 DH 4.
31 DH 19
32 DH 4.
33 DH 4–5.
34 For references to the absence of a liberal colonial order as a paradox or anomaly, see DH xii, 4, 19, 26, 64–5.
35 DH 64.
36 DH 26–7.
37 DH 4–5.
38 DH 64.
39 DH 101.
40 Ibid. Emphasis added.
41 DH 132.
42 Ibid.
43 “With all its concern to involve the peasantry in nationalist politics, [the bourgeoisie] could not bring itself to include the struggle against rents in its programs” (DH 132).
44 See Guha’s biting critique of Mahatma Gandhi’s political philosophy on this count, which he correctly characterizes as dedicated to preserving landlordism (DH 35–9). In fact, Guha’s attitude to Gandhi throughout Dominance without Hegemony is quite critical.
45 DH 133.
46 DH 132, 133. Guha also points to the communal front as a site of bourgeois failure. It was never able to displace the All-India Muslim League as representative of the Muslim population, nor was it able to sideline the Hindu Mahasabha as the voice of devout Hindus (DH 131–3). But while Guha gives due attention to this phenomenon, he prioritizes the class problem: “much of the specificity of Indian politics of this period [the 1920s and 1930s] derives precisely from the failure of nationalism to assimilate the class interests of peasants and workers effectively into a bourgeois hegemony” (DH 133).
47 See DH 131–5.
48 See above, 33–34; see also Guha, “On some aspects of the historiography,” 7.
49 DH 134.
50 DH, chap. 2.
51 DH 5. Emphasis added.
52 Ibid. Emphasis added.
53 DH xiii.
54 DH 13.
55 DH 14.
56 DH 19–20. Emphasis added.
Dominance without Hegemony: The Argument Assessed
As I have noted, Ranajit Guha’s argument regarding the bourgeois paths to power in Europe, and then in India, is foundational to the Subalternist enterprise. It cannot be regarded merely as a component specific to the early years of Subaltern Studies—as a residue of the Subalternists’ immersion in Indian Marxism which was then abandoned in later work. Dominance without Hegemony was released in 1997, very much in the mature phase of the Subalternist project, and its arguments were clearly intended to elaborate the highly compressed declarations of the inaugural volume in the series. In its essentials, the book is entirely faithful to the earlier propositions and thereby upholds a powerful line of continuity across the career of Subaltern Studies. Moreover, in subsequent work Guha has said nothing to suggest a deviation from the book’s conclusions. Finally, his assessment of the “structural fault” separating the Indian bourgeoisie from its early modern predecessors in Europe is endorsed by other leading members of the collective, in particular by Dipesh Chakrabarty in his summation of Subaltern Studies’ theoretical commitments.1 Having elaborated in some detail the structure of Guha’s argument and the evidence he marshals in its defense, we are now positioned to offer an assessment.
In this chapter, I examine the British and French experience in far greater depth than does Guha. His version of the story occurs in highly compressed statements scattered across three essays and always presented in the form of assertion, never as argument. By contrast, I heap attention on the two cases. The level of detail I bring to the subject might strike the reader as incongruous, even excessive, but I would urge that it is warranted. As I suggested in the previous chapter, Guha’s argument about the peculiarity of colonial modernity rests on a deeper claim about the departure of the Indian bourgeois revolution—the struggle for independence from British rule—from the classic experiences of early modern Europe. He does not simply rest his case on a descriptive account of how India was transformed by colonial rule. Instead it is a comparative story about how India’s experience embodied a departure from other experiences, which the current historiography has been unable to capture because it subsumes the Subcontinent into the same general narrative as Europe. In stressing the specificity of the colonial experience, Guha’s argument is essentially and unavoidably contrastive.
A good indication of the contrastive nature of Guha’s argument is that one could accept his factual descriptions of India’s colonial history and the nature of the independence movement, while denying his conclusion that they constituted a historical break from the experience in Europe. Our judgment on whether capital abandoned its universalizing mission depends entirely on our standard for what such a mission entails, and that standard can only be based on our understanding of other, baseline cases. The claim that the bourgeoisie abandoned its mission to transform society cannot be upheld except in comparison to other cases. Without a defensible understanding of the story that forms the comparison, all we know is that something happened in India—that the Indian National Congress came to power, that it had a particular orientation toward the laboring classes, that industrialists had their own views and certain priorities. But for all we know, these facts about India could be the norm. It is perfectly possible that they could be in line with other experiences of state formation or political modernization. Perhaps the Indian experience is just what modernity looks like. If we are to accept Guha’s conclusions regarding the peculiarity of India’s ascent into modernity, we cannot avoid taking a deeper look at the cases that
