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Convergences: Inventories of the Present
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Convergences: Inventories of the Present
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Edward W. Saw, General Editor
Dominance without
Hegemony HMtory and Power in CowniaL India
RANAJIT GUHA
Harvard Univecsity Press CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND 1997
Copyright (fj 1997 by the President and Fellows of HarvW'd College
All rights reserved Printed ill the United States of America
Library of CongreJJ Cata/oging-in-Publiratwn Data Guha,
Ranajit.
Dominance without Hegemony: history and power in colonial India / Ranajit Guha. p.
cm.-(Convergences)
Includes index. ISBN 0-674-2I482-X (cloth, a1k. pape,).-ISBN 0-674-21483-8 (paper: alk. paper)
l. India-History-British occupation, 1765-1947. 2. Civil service-India.
3. India-Politics and government_1765--1947.
J. Title. 11. Series: Convergences (Cambridge, Mass.)
DS463.G837 1997 954-dc21
97-15888 CIP
Q,\J,lS\� DS 1..\ bJ
.a feels obliged to reproach him for his belief in witches and magic. in karma and transmigration. and above all for his tendency to explain events by fate and divine will rather than "any rational cause."" Nothing heralds more eloquently the advent of a ruling culture that requires the past to be read as an unfolding of Reason rather than Providence and insists on causality rather than faith as the key to historical understanding. Foil to this ab stract rationalism is an equally abstract humanism which serves as a second device to oppose feudal ideas, and Basham Sods fault with the Kashmir chronicler for his failure to acknowledge man as the maker of his own history and master of his own destiny. "Nowhere does he explicitly state," says this humanist critic, "that man is wholly incapable of moulding in some measure his own history, but superhuman forces or beings evidently have the big gest part in the destiny of man . "2! The critique in
all
these instances has come from liberal ideol
ogy-the ideology of the bourgeoisie in dominance-which is, by deSnition, hostile to and destructive of slave-owning and feudal cultures. It is, without doubt, a critique which speaks &om outside
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Coloniali.Jm in South AJia
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. the ideological domains of the objects criticized. But that, in turn, raises a question of fundamental importance for our inquiry. Where then, one may ask, does the critique of liberalism itself come from? It comes from an ideology that is antagonistic towards the dominant culture and declares war on it even before the class for which it speaks comes to rule. In rushing thus in advance of the conquest of power by its class, this critique demonstrates, all over again, a historic decal age characteristic of all periods of great social transformation when a young and ascendant class challenges the authority of another that is older and moribund but still dominant, The bourgeoisie itself had dramatized such decalage during the Enlightenment by a relentless critique of the allcien r
,.,,(
productions; Christian missionary efforts at ameliorating the con ditions of lower-caste and tribal populations; Orientalist projects aimed at exploring, interpreting, and preserving the heritage of ancient and medieval Indian culture; constitutional and adminis trative measures to accommodate the Indian elite in a secondary position within the colonial power structure; paternalistic (tna baap) British attitude towards the peasantry; tenancy legislations; legal (if often ineffective) abolition of feudal impositions; legal and institutional measures to promote a subcontinental market consis tent with colonial interests by removing precapitalist impediments to its development at the local and regional levels as well as by positive interventions in favor of monetization, standardization of weights and measures, and the modernization of instruments of credit and means of transport; enactment of factory laws (however inadequately enforced); partial standardization of wages in certain industries; official inquiries into the conditions of workers. peas ants, untouchables, and adivasis, legal (though not fully effective) prohibition of widow-burning, child marriage, female infanticide, and Hindu polygamy, and so on. The idea of Improvement which informed these and other meas ures so often displayed by colonialist historiography as evidence of the essentially liberal character of the raj was a cardinal feature of the political culture of England for the greater part of a centu ry beginning with the 1780s '7 There was hardly anything in that country's economic and technological progress, its social and po litical movements, or in the intellectual trends of the period, which was not a response, in one sense or another, to the urge for Im provement-that big thrust of an optimistic and ascendant bour geoisie to prove itself adequate to its own historic project. Since this era of Improvement coincided with the formative phase of colonialism in India, it was inevitable that the raj, too, would be caught up in some of the enthusi�m radiating from the metropolis. Indeed, India figured almost obsessively in the metropolitan dis Course on Improvement, precisely because of its importance as a limiting case. Consequently, during these decades, says Asa Briggs, different "schools" of Englishmen as well as great individuals tested their theories and tried out their ideas on Indian soil.
32
Dominance without Hegemony
Whigs. Evangelicals, even men of the Manchester School were drawn or driven to concern themselves with Indian as well as with English questions, with the balance sheet of commitment and responsibility, with the serious issues of freedom, authority, plan and force, above all with questions of " scale" which did not always arise in the development of improvement in England itself."
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n! .."'ade its debut in India with the T_ _ i4!:.d still of hirn§.� a gainst the grain of his own ' welI-renearsea: " : und;nted faith in the legal and moral validity ?f B'ribs1 !'3'rn-"un tcy. In that indecisive switch one can already see the""Y"'ptoms of
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ColonialMm in Soatb Alia 47 �
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rule, and Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay was the most eminent of all those intellectuals who came forward to step into that role. The tenth chapter of his celebrated treatise on religion, Dharmatattva, is a monument to his theoretical contribution in this respect.9-( Here. he starts ofT with a reference to the five-rasa formula, but moves on from theology to sociology to characterize Bhakti as a principle of worldly authority: "Whoever is superior to us and benefits us by his superiority, is an object of Bhakti. The social uses of Bhakti are (1) that the inferior will never act as a follower of the superior unless there is Bhakti; (2) that unless the inferior follows the superior, there cannot be any unity (aiJcya) or cohesion (ban'dhaa) in society. nor can it achieve any Improvement (unnati)." The contradictions involved in this attempt to match the feudal concept of Bhakti to the bourgeois notion of Improvement are more instructive for us than its inadequacy as a sociological theory. For they are an authentic measure, apart from being an exemplar. of the difficulties of Indian liberalism to cope with the question of authority at a time when the codes which had hitherto been used to signal the latter were being inexorably modified. That modificat ion meant, for Bankimchandra, a radical decline in Bhakti under tIlei;:';pac-i'o("co!orualism: "Look at the evirs and disorders caused l?ftlw Joss ()f J�h�ti in our country. Hindus were never wanting �,!!h"kti.,h, has always been one of the principal elements of the Hindu religion and Hindu shastras. But now Bhakti has com £letely diSilppeared -from the community of those who are educated _P;..-_�gnJ,y half-educated. They have failed to grasp the true significance, of the western doctrine of egalitarianism (.Jamyaba'J) "Q�erve,rted it to mean that people are equal everywhere in every sense and nobody owes BI!a\y
But Rightful Dissent was not all that was there to R. There was also --' " " " -'''-'''''-re�rria.an"idjQmat w
their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed. ''98 Quite clearly all men are not
created equal in a society ordered in a hierarchy of castes. Far from being endowed with "certain inalienable rights," they are endowed, by virtue of their birth into one caste or another, with inflexible
duties prescribed by the shastras and by custom. Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness are not theirs by right but accrue to them, when they do, by the benevolence of governments. The latter are instituted among men by God and derive their powers not "from
the consent of the governed" but from the sanction of DaI).Q.a, son
of God.
What, then, does such protest derive from, if not from a sense of right? It derives from the righteousness of the defense of Dharma, or to emphasize more precisely the negative aspect of resistance,
from the morality of struggle against adharma. Now, the ruler's Dharma, rajdharma, insists that the king must protect his sub
jects." This is so basic that the primeval King Prthu, who incar nated Vi�l)u himself and served as a model for all subsequent rulers
on earth, is depicted in the Mahabharata as "the one who protects the earth and her inhabitants."Ioo Indeed, the king's failure to live up to his protective role amounts to the most serious violation of Dharma, and leads to the destruction both of himself and his subjects.IOl The latter are therefore advised-in the Santiparva
(57,43-44) of the Mahabharata-to abandon him "like a leaky boat on the sea." But the Anusasanaparva (6. 1 32-133) goes even further and calls for regicide as the subjects' duty to redress ad
harma arising from the king's failure to protect them. Thus,
The subjects should arm themselves for killing that king who does not protect them [who simply plunders their riches, who confounds all distinctions, who is incapable of taking their lead,
Coloniawm in Soutb Alia 59 who is without mercy, and who is considered as the most sinful of kings.] That king who tells his people that he is their protector but who does not or is unable to protect them, should be killed by his subjects in a body like a dog that is alIected with the rabies and has become mad. There is nothi�gjp. this.. prescription for. violence against rulers Jzi1IleJ'i" irecfth t �� J ?ostulated on the rights of the subjects. In a polity dev()i�" of "'!l-y_niiiioo" of citizenship, they have no rights but only duties. The duty enjoined upon them is merely to undo the a;n;ariil';" mvolved in a "lapse of rajadharma, so that the trans"cen d';;,tarconstitution of Dharma, in which the king serve� as �n " fXecii�e;:can be _ �m�"� ��n. Translated into the politics of resistance under the raj this implied an effort to correct what appeared to Indians as a deviation from the ideals of government inspired by Dharma. The values informing such resistance were :i�.. .,..1- therefore charged with religiosity: vidira which suggested a sort of " providential justice that had nothing to do with the Englishman's * �"-"'-!!:io'