About the Book
What is colonialism and what is a colonial state? Ranajit Guha points out that the colonial state in South Asia was fundamentally different from the metropolitan bourgeois state which sired it. The metropolitan state was hegemonic in character, and its claim to dominance was based on a power relation in which persuasion outweighed coercion. Conversely, the colonial state was non-hegemonic, and in its structure of dominance coercion was paramount. Indeed, the originality of the South Asian colonial state lay precisely in this difference: a historical paradox, it was an autocracy set up and sustained in the East by the foremost democracy of the Western world. It was not possible for that non-hegemonic state to assimilate the civil society of the colonized to itself. Thus the colonial state, as Guha defines it in this work, was a paradox,a dominance without hegemony. Dominance without hegemony had a nationalist aspect as well. This arose from a structural split between the elite and subaltern domains of politics, and the consequent failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to integrate vast areas of the life and consciousness of the people into an alternative hegemony.
That predicament is discussed in terms of the nationalist project of anticipating power by mobilizing the masses and producing an alternative historiography. In both endeavours the elite claimed to speak for the people constituted as a nation and sought to challenge the pretensions of an alien regime to represent the colonized. A rivalry between an aspirant to power and its incumbent, this was in essence a contest for hegemony.
Table of Contents:
Part 1 Colonialism in South Asia - a dominance without hegemony and its historiography: conditions for a critique of histiography, dominance and its histographies, containment of historiography in a dominant culture, where does historical criticism come from?, the universalizing tendency of capital and its limitations, the general configuration of power in Colonial India; paradoxes of power, idioms of dominance and subordination, order and danda, improvement and dharma, obedience and bhakti, rightful dissent and Dharmic protest; dominance without hegemony - the colonialist moment, over determinations, colonialism as the failure of a universalist project, the fabrication of a spurious hegemony, the bad faith of historiography; preamble to an autocritique. Part 2 Discipline and mobilize - hegemony and elite control in nationalist campaigns: mobilization and hegemony, anticipation of power by mobilization, a fight for prestige; Swadeshi mobilization, poor Nikhilesh, caste sanctions, social boycott, liberal politics, traditional bans, Swadeshi by coercion or consent?; mobilization or non-cooperation, social boycott in non-cooperation, Gandhi's opposition to social boycott, hegemonic claims contested; Gandhian discipline, discpline versus persuasion, two disciplines - elite and subaltern; crowd control and soul control. Part 3 An Indian historiography of India - hegemonic implications of a 19th-century agenda: calling on Indians to write their own history; historiography and the formation of a colonial state, early colonial historiography, three types of narratives, education as an instrument of colonialism, the importance of English; colonialism and the language of the colonized, indigenous languages harnessed to the Raj; novels and histories; begnnings of an indigenous rationalist historiography; an ideaology of "Matribhaska"; historiography and the question of power, an appropriated past, the theme of "Kalamka", "Bahubol" and its objects; a failed agenda.
Review :
Aside from its obvious relevance to Indian history, Guha's book is a brilliant example of revolutionary historical method, new perspectives on nationalist history, and theoretical inventiveness in the procedures of historical research.--Edward W. Said
Over the years, the result of this endeavor has been the production of an eclectic brand of ideological theories, an incisive critique of the existing Indian historiography, and a renewed theoretical fervor, as this book itself epitomizes, for retrieving the history of the "subaltern" past - their revolutionary political moments and cultural class consciousness.--Amalendu K. Chakraborty "Journal of World History "
Ranajit Guha is, arguably, the most creative Indian historian of this century. His works have deeply influenced not only the writing of subcontinental history, but also historical investigations elsewhere, as well as cultural studies, literary theories, and social analyses across the world.--Amartya Sen
