Convergences: Inventories of the Present Edward W. Said, General Editor Dominance without Hegemony Hidtory and Power in Colonial India RANAJIT GUHA Harvard University Press CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND 1997 Copyright © 1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 1 o my colleagues of the SubaLtern Studied project, 1974-1989 Library ofCongrud Cataloging-in-Publication Data Guha, Ranajit. Dominance without Hegemony : history and power in colonial India / Ranajit Guha. p. cm. —(Convergences) Includes index. ISBN 0-674-21482-X (cloth : alk. paper).-ISBN 0-674-21483-8 (paper : alk. paper) 1. India—History—British occupation, 1765-1947. 2. Civil service—India. 3. India—Politics and government—1765-1947. I. Title. II. Series: Convergences (Cambridge, Mass.) DS463.G837 1997 97-15888 954-dc21 CIP • DS Contents Preface ix Note on Transliteration . xvii 1. Colonialism in South Asia: A Dominance 'without Hegemony a and Its Historiography 1 S '. I. Conditions for a Critique of Historiography 1 • Dominance and Its Historiographies 1 m Containment of Historiography in a Dominant Culture 6 5 Where Does Historical Criticism Come From? 11 H The Universalizing Tendency of Capital and Its Limitations 13 1 The General Configuration of Power in Colonial India 20 f II. Paradoxes of Power 23 5 Idioms of Dominance and Subordination 23 X Order and Danda 24 — Improvement and Dbarma 30 ~z Obedience and Bhakti 39 — Rightful Dissent and Dharmic Protest 55 — III. Dominance without Hegemony: The Colonialist Moment 60 Overdeterminations 60 Colonialism as the Failure of a Universalist Project 63 The Fabrication of a Spurious Hegemony 71 = The Bad Faith of Historiography 80 IV. Preamble to an Autocritique 95 2. Discipline and Mobilize: Hegemony and Elite Control in Nationalist Campaigns . 100 I. Mobilization and Hegemony 100 Anticipation of Power by Mobilization 100 A Fight for Prestige 104 II. Swadeshi Mobilization 108 Poor Nikhilesh 108 viii Contents Caste Sanctions 110 Social Boycott 114 Preface Liberal Politics, Traditional Bans 116 Swadeshi by Coercion or Consent? 120 III. Mobilization for Non-cooperation 122 Social Boycott in Non-cooperation 122 Gandhi's Opposition to Social Boycott 126 Hegemonic Claims Contested 131 IV. Gandhian Discipline 135 Discipline versus Persuasion 135 Two Disciplines — Elite and Subaltern 139 Crowd Control and Soul Control 143 This book is made up of modified versions of three essays written V. Conclusion 150 in 1986-87 and published between 1988 and 1992. All three con- nect with our project, Subaltern Studies, and refer back to and 3. An Indian Historiography of India: Hegemonic Implications develop certain positions I have taken up there. That project made of a Nineteenth-Century Agenda 152 its debut by announcing its revisionist aims for studies on colonial I. Calling on Indians to Write Their Own History 152 i India. However, in doing so, it did not claim any novelty. Ours was II. Historiography and the Formation of a Colonial State 156 i not the first or only intervention to express discontent about the Early Colonial Historiography 156 state of South Asian historiography and social sciences and pro- Three Types of Narratives 160 voke debates about it. Debates of this kind had already started in Education as an Instrument of Colonialism 165 the nineteenth century, when Indian intellectuals put on record The Importance of English 169 III. Colonialism and the Languages of the Colonized 176 their first public, though cautious and loyalist, criticism of the Indigenous Languages Harnessed to the Raj 176 colonial administration and have continued ever since as one vari- Novels and Histories 178 ety or another of a whole range of liberal-imperialist and liberal- Beginnings of an Indigenous Rationalist Historiography 184 nationalist tendencies. In spite of their differences in other An Ideology of Matribhiwha 188 respects, these tendencies have been unanimous in the assumption IV. Historiography and the Question of Power 193 that the power relations of colonial rule were contained in an An Appropriated Past 193 integrated and unified field with all the ideologies and political The Theme oiKalamka 200 practices of the period articulated within a single domain. Bahubol and Its Objects 203 Subaltern Studied made its debut by questioning that assumption V. A Failed Agenda 210 and arguing that there •was no such unified and singular domain of Notes 215 politics and the latter was, to the contrary, structurally split be- tween an elite and a subaltern part, each of which was autonomous Glossary 233 in its own 'way. Much of •what we have to say has indeed been Index 241 concerned with documenting the existence of these two distinct but interacting parts as well as with arguing why such a structural split between them was historically necessary. However, by questioning that monistic conception we immedi- ately and inevitably raised a question about the nature of the colonial state itself. For all those tendencies I have mentioned had IX x Prefeice Preface ad proceeded from a thoroughly unexamined belief that the so-called it neither originated in elite politics nor did its existence depend unitary character of politics was nothing other than the effect of on the latter. the homogenizing function of colonialism. This notion of colonialism as a homogenizing force is fundamen- Underlying the exclusive and elitist approach is an idea which tal to both of the dominant historiographies—neocolonialist and has prevailed in historiography since the rise of the Italian city- nationalist. The former characterizes it in positive terms as either states and has continued through the Enlightenment until the a cultural or an institutional force. According to one of its versions, emergence of the modern nation-states nearer our time. This is the the colonial regime politicized India by the introduction of liberal idea that with the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie in Western education, and the ideas and activities of a Western-educated elite Europe all of the power relations of civil society have everywhere in the course of its collaboration with the raj were all that was there been so fully assimilated to those of the state that the two may be to Indian politics. According to another version, which superseded said to have coincided in an undifferentiated and integrated space the first, it was not so much the metropolitan liberal culture as the where alone such relations have situated and articulated them- colonial administration itself which created a political arena for the selves ever since. It has been possible therefore for historical schol- natives by involving them in a scramble for rewards in the form of arship that has fed on this theorem for centuries and made it into privileges and power in governmental institutions developed by the stuff of academic common sense to represent power in its most the raj. generalized form as Civil Society = Nation = State. To say and demonstrate, as we have done, that the domain of Whichever version one takes, it is the civilizing or institutional- politics is not unitary but structurally split is of course to spoil the izing function of the regime that figures as the generative impulse elegance of this equation at once. However, by doing so, we take of Indian politics and its unifying force in this neocolonialist view. it upon ourselves to redefine how these three terms relate to each The nationalist standpoint shares the same assumption, but turns other in such a domain. Our attempt to face up to that task leads it to its own advantage by defining the content and character of directly, as indicated above, to the question: "What is colonialism politics simply in terms of the indigenous elite's response to colo- and what is a colonial state?" nial rule and the sum of all the ideas and activities by which it dealt with the government of the day. Questions like these have of course been asked before. An an- swer to one or another of them is indeed presupposed in all that Between these two interpretations the question of power was re- has ever been written about British rule in South Asia. This has duced to an elite contest with no room left in it for the South Asian been so since the first histories of the subcontinent were published people except as an inert mass deployed by the dominant elements to by the East India Company's servants as early the 1770s and has serve their own ends according to strategies of their own invention. continued to be the case until today with the imperial theme es- We took notice of this omission in an inaugural statement in Subal- tablished firmly as an object of academic research and teaching. tern Studied I (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982) thus: Yet the progress of scholarship during the last two hundred years has done little to challenge or even seriously interrogate such What is clearly left out of this un-historical historiography is the presuppositions. In fact, they have hardly moved from where politic*) of the people. For parallel to the domain of elite politics there Bolts and Verelst had left them standing as a set of necessary, if existed throughout the colonial period another domain of Indian invisible, prejudices which the passage of time has allowed to politics in which the principal actors were not the dominant groups of the indigenous society or the colonial authorities but merge unobtrusively in the background of historical discourse. the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the Thanks to an amazing oversight characteristic of academic work labouring population and the intermediate strata in town and of all kinds irrespective of their points of view, the notion of a country—that is, the people. This was an autonomous domain, for unitary political domain has survived until now even the mutually Xll Prefcyace Preface xiii opposed readings of the Indian past from imperialist and nation- That failure is self-evident from the difficulty which has frus- alist points of view.