Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India

Convergences: Inventories of the Present

by Ranajit Guha

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 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 closely argued 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 endeavors 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.

Genres: History, India, Nonfiction, Asia, Politics, Post Colonial, Academic

268 pages, Paperback

First published January 15, 1998

About the author

Ranajit Guha was a historian of South Asia who was greatly influential in the Subaltern Studies group, and was the editor of several of the group's early anthologies. He migrated from India to the UK in 1959, and currently lives in Vienna, Austria.
His Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India is widely considered to be a classic. Aside from this, his founding statement in the first volume of Subaltern Studies set the agenda for the Subaltern Studies group, defining the "subaltern" as "the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the ‘elite’."

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has had more impact on my own work than most other texts. Guha has, in this book, drawn together and reworked three previously published (long) essays to build a case for viewing history from below, for seeing the way colonised peoples see through and resist the colonisers' claims to legitimate dominance, and of the importance of the colonised to break the mould of colonial history to make history their own. Complex, demanding, sophisticated – he grapples with and unpacks coloniser-colonised cultural relations, colonisers claims to present a social order similar to but better than that of the colonised, and of writing the past in a way that colonisers appropriate it and the colonised write it differently to make it their own. Most importantly, he shows splits in the life worlds of the colonised – between the elites involved in and gaining standing from their links with the colonisers' and the colonial subaltern whose nationalist and other politics reject that involvement. Overall, he argues convincingly that despite the close involvement of many of the elite among colonised in the colonial state, and despite the cultural power of that state, it kept its dominance without convincing the mass of the colonised of its legitimacy. Methodologically inspiring, theoretically challenging, one of the great pieces of contemporary historical analysis.

[Peter Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came across this book while reading one of Perry Anderson's books on Antonio Gramsci and the theory of hegemony (my reading programme for which I've set out here: https://marxadventure.wordpress.com/2...).

The first section sets out a superb short explanation of the mechanism of hegemony using the a set of paired elements starting from Dominance and Subordination as the basic underpinning elements to the structure of power.

 Coercion
 /
 Dominance
 / \
 / Persuasion
Power (D/S) 
 \ Collaboration
 \ /
 Subordination
 \
 Resistance

In a very simple way this clarifies the operation of hegemony. Guha follows this with an exploration of the history of colonial India through this lens using both British terms and Indian terms. His contention is that the British failed to construct hegemony during their rule over India, that the Raj was always based primarily on force hence Dominance without Hegemony.

The subsequent section then explores the historiography of colonial India in some detail, making the case for the need for a truly Indian history and criticising British authors in particular of the nineteenth century for subsuming and subordinating Indian history to British history.

It's a superb book, written in clear language that despite the potential complexity of hegemony sets out both a clear development of the theory and then uses that theory to assess the colonial India in detail.

[Courtney Homer · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting look at the power structure of a colonized state. Written from a Marxist perspective and assuming you have a background in the history of India and prominent thinkers, Guha argues that the accepted Indian historiography is inadequate and unhistorical.

[Arvind Abraham · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is an interesting read, especially if you want to view the period of colonialism through the lens of Marxist historiography. Guha primarily uses Antonio Gramsci's intellectual tools in his historical analysis. However, his polemical writing can be a bit off-putting. I was not convinced about certain arguments, such as the claim that the Indian elites used the principle of servility in the Bhakti tradition and in the Gita to remain loyal to the British. However, his analysis of the Swadeshi movement and the Non-Cooperation Movement, and how caste sanctions and religiosity were invoked for political mobilization, was quite eye opening. It is a good read, although I wish the exposition had more clarity.

[Janice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterpiece.

[Saeed Saffar Heidari · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspiring and ambitious!

[Shane Avery · Rating 5 out of 5]

To summarize in one sentence: a post-colonial study of the configurations of power, and its idioms, within a tradition of South Asian colonial historiography, where dominance was never hegemonic; “the colonial state is the barrier at which the universalist urge of capital must stop…”

Brilliant and inspired analysis...