What is colonialism and what is a colonial state?
When one country grabs territory and establishes its rule somewhere else, then there is colonialism and 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.
Hilarious! White Britain, which was technologically advanced and which had a cohesive and intelligent ruling class, was obviously very different from Brown India . Guha had to study History for many many years before he made this great discovery. But he didn't make this discovery in India. He had emigrated to England many decades previously.
The metropolitan state was hegemonic in character, and its claim to dominance was based on a power relation in which persuasion outweighed coercion.
No. Coercion outweighed persuasion because the metropolitan state had greater resources at its command. Britain was militarily powerful and could put down any insurrection- or even an industrial disturbance- with a very fucking heavy hand. General Napier showed the 'Physical Force' Chartists his canons. He could blow them to smithereens and would be handsomely rewarded by the Government for doing so. By contrast, the East India Company ruled India with a light hand. Since it was a commercial enterprise, it preferred persuasion to coercion though, no doubt, it could be as rapacious as its rivals. When it failed to persuade the sepoy that the new cartridge was not dipped in beef or pork fat, there was a Mutiny which it was very costly to suppress. That mistake was not repeated.
Conversely, the colonial state was non-hegemonic,
It was Imperial and thus highly hegemonic. The Political Agent in the Princely States kept the ruler on a tight leash. The hegemon is the leader who is obeyed. Gramscian hegemony is a different kettle of fish and only applies to the proletariat in a country like Italy- not the hard working Arab cultivators of colonized Libya.
Under the British Raj, people lived under their traditional Chieftains and Tax-farmers and Princes. Their own customs and religious laws continued to apply to them. British paramountcy involved little in the way of Dominance displays. It operated behind the scenes. Indeed, prior to the Great War, few ordinary Indians were aware that the country was ruled by foreigners.
and in its structure of dominance coercion was paramount.
Nonsense! The Political Agent or District Magistrate might convey displeasure in veiled terms and, speaking generally, that was all that was required. True, incompetence in the Army led to a Mutiny which was put down at some expense and much brutality, but the thing was wholly avoidable. As Disraeli said in 1857, India hadn't been conquered. It was administered according to its own laws and customs and generally with its own consent.
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.
Nonsense! The foremost democracy was the US which ethnically cleansed the indigenous inhabitants while importing African slaves. England prior to 1832 was a limited monarchy with a highly restricted franchise. It wasn't till 1867 that one could say with certainty that it would evolve into an American style democracy. But this was because the Civil War had shown that a democracy can mobilize resources for 'total war' in a superior manner to limited monarchies or even the Imperial realms of the Russian autocrat.
It was not possible for that non-hegemonic state to assimilate the civil society of the colonized to itself.
Yet, that is precisely what happened. British Civil Servants set up the Indian National Congress which took power from the Crown some sixty years later. India's civil society is a pretty accurate reflection of that of the UK. The military scarcely has any role while lawyers are plentifully in evidence. We even have ex-merchant bankers like Mahua Moitra in Parliament. But then the UK now has a Hindu P.M
Thus the colonial state, as Guha defines it in this closely argued work, was a paradox—a dominance without hegemony.
Indians paid the Brits to govern them. They weren't particularly apt pupils but the fact is India is what it is because of Britain.
If the Brits weren't hegemonic, how come all the leaders of the successor states in South Asia (with the exception of Burma) had English speaking barristers as their leaders?
Dominance without hegemony had a nationalist aspect as well.
Guys with names like Hume and Wedderburn and Cotton helped found the Indian National Congress. The head of the Home Rule League was named Annie Beasant. These were pure White peeps who nevertheless identified with Indian nationalism.
This arose from a structural split between the elite and subaltern domains of politics,
The elite domain is separate from the non-elite domain. Where two things are wholly distinct, it is foolish to speak of a structural split.
and the consequent failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to integrate vast areas of the life and consciousness of the people into an alternative hegemony.
The thing wasn't worth doing because the consciousness of the people in a shithole is shitty as fuck. Still, Gandhi pretended that he was actually a starving peasant which was cool coz his brain truly was full of shit.
That predicament is discussed in terms of the nationalist project of anticipating power by mobilizing the masses and producing an alternative historiography.
Telling stupid lies may produce an alternative historiography but the thing is utterly useless. Don't fucking do it.
In both endeavors the elite claimed to speak for the people constituted as a nation
The head of State or head of Government claims to speak for the people of his nation. The elite of a nation may make no such claim. Indeed, they may have extra-territorial loyalties or a universalist ideology with no roots in the country.
and sought to challenge the pretensions of an alien regime to represent the colonized.
But all those 'challenges' were stupid and useless. Some nutters chucked bombs and were hanged. A lot more preferred to queue up in an orderly fashion to go to jail from time to time so as to secure benefits for themselves later on. That's it. That's the whole story.
A rivalry between an aspirant to power and its incumbent, this was in essence a contest for hegemony.
Fuck hegemony. Peeps wanted to climb the greasy pole and get the big jobs and big salaries and big pensions and big government contracts and a chance to throw their weight around and talk bollocks. The Commies had a theory of history which said they'd take over and kick ass but Indian Commies (save in Kerala) were shite and so they have all but disappeared. It turned out variegating Maoist shite with Gramscian shite didn't help any. Italy turned its back on Euro-Commie shittiness. Its current PM belongs to a lineal descendant of Mussolini's Fascist party. She praises Modi in immoderate terms. Meanwhile Guha, who is one hundred years old, continues to reside in Vienna.
Partha Chatterjee gives this succinct account of Guha's foolish tome-
In 'Dominance without Hegemony” (1989), Guha argued that there were two distinct idioms of politics that were intertwined in colonial India: one was British and the other pre-colonial Indian.
This is nonsense. There were many such idioms. Princes and Political Agents used one idiom. Legislators or would be Legislators used another. There were religious idioms of various kinds and there was caste and class mobilization as well. In addition, there was a technocratic idiom backed by statistical research and various economic, sociological, and political theories.
The coercive laws of the colonial state were justified by
the fact that all countries have coercive laws- even colonized ones.
a combination of the British concept of order and the Indian notion of daṇḍa or punishment,
The British and the Indians and the Eskimos have a concept of law and order as enforced by punishment for illegal actions.
while persuasion took the form of
saying 'do this. It will be good for you.'
a mix of the liberal idea of improvement with that of dharma or right conduct.
Right conduct is conducive to improvement in the quality of life. The reverse is also the case. Persuasion takes the form 'do this. It will be good for you because your life will be better. Also, you are more likely to go to Heaven.'
For the subaltern classes, obedience was expressed in the idiom of bhakti (devotion),
No. Rebellion or defiance of social conventions could be expressed in that idiom. Obedience was expressed in the idiom of loyalty and dependence, not devotion.
whereas rightful dissent took the form of protest against the violation of dharma.
It could do but, equally, it might make no mention of it. Anyway, the nature of dharma was 'essentially contested'.
Guha made the important point that peasant resistance in colonial India was not derived from liberal notions of right but from the duty to protest against the adharma (wrong conduct) of the ruler.
There is no such duty. That is why the Indian peasant did not protest anytime the Viceroy had a crafty wank.
What is strange is that Guha came from East Bengal where the majority of peasants were Muslims. They cared about 'Deen', not 'dharma'.
But in India under British rule, coercion always outweighed persuasion.
There was little coercion because coercion costs money and India didn't have a lot of it. Nor was there much in the way of persuasion. What obtained was a tolerable degree of incentive compatibility. The police would arrest at least some of the criminals. The Army would put down depredations by frontier tribes. This was a 'night-watchman' state. Nothing more.
Consequently, colonial rule was a dominance without hegemony.
It was hegemony based on military and economic dominance. What was surprising is that it developed quite a good administrative 'steel frame'.
He extended the argument to assert that the ruling classes of independent India too had failed to achieve hegemony, since there was frequent and overt use of violence to maintain their dominance.
Mao never used violence. Nor did Stalin. They won over reactionary elements by showering them with cuddles and kisses.
Why was Guha so fucking stupid? The answer was that he thought in Bengali even when he was writing in English. Towards the end of his life he returned to that language to write puerile shite.
Occasionally, however, the death of a comrade could stir him to a rare depth of critical self-perception.
This is what he said when Samar Sen died- “The life of an intellectual in our ill-fated country is blessed with the dignity of humanity only when it is agitated by the April storm, prolonged by conflicts among the people and made complex by the whirlpool of alienation – when, in other words, it can find no peace.”
I suppose that is why he stayed away from the ill-fated country he mentions. His was not the life of an intellectual. The pool of his mind remained stagnant. It rested in a peace so profound, Death could not diminish it. Say not Guha is dead. He lives wherever Bengali is spoken by blathershite to blathershite in saecula seculorum.
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