Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Convergences - Inventories of the Present)

Rating:
Summary: Much needed
Review: Ever noticed how Marx, Gramsci, Adorno, Althusser, Zizek and all the other white male Marxist gods don't actually consider the colonial state in their confident and totalizing pronouncements on the confident and totalizing category called 'capital'? Guha is writing about the colonial state. Did colonial India have a hegemonic bourgeoisie? It was an autocracy! Autocracies work by coercion, not persuasion. The anti-colonial struggle was a heterogenous one whose revolutionary impetus came from the struggles of people teleologically minded historians would call 'pre-capitalist', 'pre-modern', 'pre-political', 'savage' or 'barbarian' - take your evolutionist pick. The mainstream nationalist elite did not in any way motivate these struggles, though they used their revolutionary impetus. Conventional Marxist epistemology is questionable and riddled with the same evolutionist thinking that led colonizers to the genocide and massacre of 'subordinate species'.

This is a fantastic book that unpacks and rejects the historiography that would deprive the 'savage', 'barbarian' and 'precapitalist' communities within colonial states of autonomy and agency in history. And in no way are these subaltern groups only "Hindu"! Tribal peoples are *not* Hindu.

Its about time Marx's categories were themselves historicized - the most dogmatic people I meet these days are those who chant the names of racist and Eurocentric thinkers like Marx and Adorno who expressed only contempt for non-white peoples euphemistically referred to via their 'modes of production'. Adorno, in the mid-twentieth century, called "Negro music" SAVAGE - outright.

PLease read Guha's book, and also Dipesh Chakrabarty's brilliant "Provincializing Europe".

Rating:
Summary: post-subaltern studies?
Review: For those looking for the beginnings of the shift from the concern with 'the subaltern' in subaltern studies, this is a good place to look. The book is predominantly concerned with constructing a case for identifying 'the British' with capitalism, imperialism, and cultural domination and 'India' with tradition, resistance, and, dare I say it, hinduism. You don't get much sense of the cultural diversity, or class differences, within 'India' from this ostensibly 'marxist' book. A reasonably good review of this book, which shows how feeble its use of Marx is, can be found in 'Rethinking Marxism' 12:1, Spring 2000.