generis theoretical categories.
The Specificity of Colonial Modernity and the Dislodging of Eurocentrism
We move now to the implications of the argument from uniqueness. Theses 3 through 5 examine the consequences for political power and nationhood, while thesis 6 takes up the problem of Eurocentrism
• Thesis 3: Colonialism and the Pluralization of Power
Since colonial capitalism does not seek to overthrow the feudal landed classes, and instead merely accommodates them, it also backs away from eliminating the concomitant forms of domination. Unlike what took place in Europe, where an ascendant bourgeoisie swept away antiquated power relations even as it set about displacing feudal rule, the bourgeoisie in colonial and postcolonial settings learned to live with them. Thus one finds coexistence and active reproduction of classically bourgeois power relations—such as the wage relation—with forms of subordination typically associated with precapitalist social formations. It follows that modernity in such a setting will not keep to the same path as in Europe, with the same basic institutions, their verisimilitude increasing with time. Instead it will be an altogether different kind of modernity, one in which apparently outdated power relations will be reproduced alongside more “modern” ones. This is an index of the fact that the bourgeoisie in colonial conditions failed “to live up to its own universalizing project.”26
The immediate implication of this survival of antediluvian forms of social domination, Chakrabarty argues, is to force us to rethink the nature of power. In Europe, where the bourgeoisie was able to transform the social order, power came to be aligned with the rule of capital. Not so in colonial modernity. Guha’s analysis, observes Chakrabarty, “fundamentally pluralizes the history of power in global modernity and separates it from any universal history of capital.”27 Hence, even while capital can be seen to expand around the globe, “the global history of capitalism need not reproduce everywhere the same history of power … [C]apital and power can be seen as analytically separable categories.” Marxists are the primary targets of this admonishment, since they are held to assume a co-linearity between capital and power. If one accepts that a disjuncture between the two is possible, then the relevance of canonical Marxism cannot but suffer: the “traditional European-Marxist political thought that fuses the two [i.e., capital and power] is therefore always relevant but always inadequate for theorizing power in colonial-modern histories.”28
• Thesis 4: The Two Domains of Colonial Politics
Colonial capital’s refusal to take up its universalizing mission, its willingness to accommodate the ancien régime, has some important implications for political analysis. First, since it leaves untouched older forms of power, and therefore also the political idiom linked to those power relations, it means that the bourgeoisie does not integrate subaltern culture into its own modernizing discourse. A split between the two domains persists, so that the elite and the popular remain distinct social formations. This does not by any means suggest they are entirely independent of each other; it means rather that there is a recognizable “subaltern” domain of politics, related to, but distinct from, that of the ruling classes. This state of affairs is held to be in sharp contrast to Europe, where, claim the Subalternists, as an index of its hegemony a revolutionary bourgeoisie successfully integrated the popular into the domain of elite and organized politics.
Second, the persistence of this subaltern domain means that forms of political engagement typically associated with premodern politics will persist in modern times, as will the idiom in which the struggles of the poor and the oppressed have long been formulated. The language of a recognizably bourgeois politics will not be universal. Indeed, the assumption that politics is organized around the rational pursuit of individual interests becomes problematic. Often politics will be waged in religious language and around religious issues. Furthermore, the dominant axis will typically be community/ethnicity, not individual or class interests.
If peasant struggles in India are organized around caste or ethnic groupings, or are expressed in nonsecular terms, it is not a sign of their being “prepolitical,” and hence premodern, as the Subalternists accuse Marxists such as Eric Hobsbawm to be claiming.29 Instead, it shows they are thoroughly political and modern, for they reflect the fundamentally different character of colonial modernity. European political theory commits the error of equating modernity with recognizably bourgeois forms of power and political discourse. Colonial modernity, however, generates a break between these two; it produces a capitalism that accommodates to the hierarchies and the culture of the ancien régime. This is capitalism, yes, but without capitalist power relations and without a recognizably capitalist culture. Politics in such settings is therefore “heteroglossic in its idioms and fundamentally plural in its structure, interlocking within itself strands of different types of relationships that [do] not make up a logical whole.”30 If peasant political consciousness here does not resemble that of the Western laboring classes, it is because it cannot. The problem is not with the peasant, but with the expectations of the scholar, who brings to the table of analysis an unwarranted teleology.
• Thesis 5: The Spuriousness of Colonial Nationalism
Once it is accepted that, because of the absence of a universalizing bourgeoisie, there remained a gulf between the elite and popular domains within the culture, it cannot but affect our understanding of colonial nationalism. For colonial apologists, the colonial state was an agent of progress because it imported European culture into the conquered territories, a culture that lifted the native population from its rude state into modern civilization. It created a nation where once there was none. For nationalist historians, on the other hand, the rejection of colonial apologetics did not lead to a thorough critique of colonial capitalism. They replaced the flawed premise of colonialism’s civilizing mission with a bland acceptance of a purportedly hegemonic domestic bourgeoisie. Nationalist historiography endowed the nationalist movement’s leaders with a spurious legitimacy, since it is assumed that this leadership spoke for the nation.
An acceptance of the Subalternist critique of colonial capitalism requires a rejection of both the colonial and the nationalist theorizations of the independence movement and the state to which it gave birth. Chakrabarty concludes that the Subalternist theorization of nationalism calls for a “critical stance toward such official or statist nationalism and its attendant historiography.”31 The foundation of their rejection of official nationalism was their observation that two spheres of politics persisted—the popular and the elite—the coexistence of which was the “index of an important historical truth, that is, the failure of the bourgeoisie to speak for the nation.”32 Because the bourgeoisie failed to integrate the elite and subaltern domains into one, there was no question of the nationalist leadership articulating a nation-building project akin to that of the European bourgeoisie, since “there was no unitary nation to speak for.”33 The real question, which the Subalternist historians now undertook to answer, “was how and through what practices an official nationalism emerged that claimed to represent such a unitary nation.”34 Subaltern Studies thus launched not only a critique of nationalist politics, but also of the historiography that endowed this nationalism with a spurious legitimacy.
• Thesis 6: The Eurocentrism of Classical Theory
Having examined the social implications of the bourgeoisie’s putative abandonment of its universalizing drive, we turn now to the implications for theory. The upshot of the preceding theses is that the colonial and postcolonial social formations cannot be assimilated into the same general framework as those of the advanced West. Not only do they diverge in their basic structure, but they cannot be assumed to be moving along the same broad trajectory of development. From this premise, postcolonial theory draws a seemingly natural conclusion: if the reality of colonial social formations is fundamentally different from that of Western social formation, then theoretical categories generated from the experience of the West cannot be appropriate for an understanding of the East.
