Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capitalism. Vivek Chibber
incorporate the class interests of subaltern groups lie at the heart of Guha’s overall argument. The first and more direct consequence was that the bourgeoisie could not legitimately claim to represent “the nation.” Guha seems to rely here on a counterfactual, though he does not explicitly say this—that the evidence for genuine leadership of a movement would appear to be the absence of contending claims to that leadership.47 But because the Indian National Congress had been unable to acquire the working masses’ consent to its leadership, that space came under challenge by other political forces—socialists, communists, and other radicals, as well as other nationalist parties. This was the glimmer of an alternative hegemony to which Guha alluded in his inaugural Subaltern Studies essay, a hegemony that, if successful, would have been based in the working class and its allies.48 These forces were not, of course, able to displace the INC from the helm of the movement. But neither was the INC able to drive them out. They remained, throughout the movement’s later phases, a visible and contending force. So, while the European capitalists had been able to win a hegemonic position over its mass movements, “in India there was always yet another voice, a subaltern voice, that spoke for a large part of society which it was not for the bourgeoisie to represent.”49
Having failed to secure their active consent to its leadership, the bourgeoisie had no choice but to keep the laboring classes in line by resorting to coercion. They turned to traditional forms of authority, both material and ideational, to maintain their place at the helm of the movement. Instead of appealing to their common interests with the masses as an incentive for the latter’s participation, they leaned instead on subtle or overt threats and on traditional notions of duty, obligation, and station.50 The means used by the Indian bourgeoisie to assert control, which Guha takes as paradigmatic of a nonhegemonic leadership, were of two functional kinds: mechanisms to ensure conformity within the ranks of Congress, cadre or crowds participating in public events such as rallies, and measures to ensure wider social compliance with political initiatives such as boycotts and political campaigns. The main difference between the two was that the former pertained to a narrower band of social groups, namely those that were already within the INC or were in close contact with it, and the latter pertained to a far wider set of strata, many of which had no direct contact with the INC as an organizational body.
Guha takes the use of these disciplinary measures as proof that the INC had failed to elicit genuine consent from the masses and thus had failed to emerge as the authentic voice of subaltern aspirations. It is noteworthy that he does not say it was the degree of coercion or the kind of disciplinary measures that signaled the failure of consent. He simply points to the fact that discipline was used and then interprets this as a signal that the bourgeoisie and its political organ had failed to emerge as the nation’s genuine representative. It is a somewhat surprising argument. Undoubtedly, an organization that relies on intimidation and terror over its own base cannot lay claim to representing that base. But Guha provides no evidence whatsoever that matters had reached this stage for the Congress—which, of course, they had not. To persuade us that the INC’s coercive measures fell outside the range of measures used by organizations that can safely be regarded as “hegemonic” would require some accounting: what is the permissible range of disciplinary measures for a “hegemonic” leadership, and what kinds of measures fall outside that range? But Guha gives us not even the smidgen of an argument in this direction. We are offered only two elements—the fact that coercion was used, and the conclusion that this demonstrates a failed hegemony.
The Failure of Bourgeois Liberalism
We now arrive at the third dimension of the Indian bourgeoisie’s failure. Unwilling to attack landlordism, having compromised with feudal interests, refusing to acknowledge the authentic interests of labor and the peasantry, and unconfident in its political legitimacy—the bourgeoisie failed to establish its hegemony over the new order. In sum, “the indigenous bourgeoisie, spawned and nurtured by colonialism itself, adopted a role that was distinguished by its failure to measure up to the heroism of the European bourgeoisie in its period of ascendancy.”51 Again Guha’s characterization of its failures reverts to the language of liberalism and representation:
The liberalism they [the Indian bourgeoisie] professed was never strong enough to exceed the limitations of the half-hearted initiatives for reform which issued from the colonial administration. This mediocre liberalism, a caricature of the vigorous democratic culture of the epoch of the rise of the bourgeoisie of the West, operated throughout the colonial period in a symbiotic relationship with the still active and vigorous forces of the semi-feudal culture of India.52
The bourgeoisie’s “mediocre liberalism,” which Guha contrasts to the “heroism of the European bourgeoisie” and in particular to the “vigorous democratic culture” that it helped cultivate, was the direct expression of its refusal to shape its program in ways that would accommodate the interests of the subaltern classes. It reflected capital’s inability, or unwillingness, to secure their consent to its leadership.
Capital’s half-hearted liberalism meant, finally, a failure to integrate subaltern culture into its own. Having no organic link to the masses, resorting to becoming allied with traditional classes, and mobilizing traditional cultural tropes and forms of power to keep the masses in line during the independence movement, the bourgeoisie succeeded only in giving further life to the autonomy of subaltern culture. Instead of incorporating them into a new, inclusive, and expansive world-view, it preserved their traditional political practices and idioms. The consequence was the phenomenon which Subaltern Studies took as the defining feature of postcolonial India: the existence and reproduction of a distinct subaltern domain, a separate political culture that exists parallel to and in contact with, but has never been absorbed into, modern bourgeois politics. As Guha concludes, the failure of the bourgeoisie to “speak for the nation” during its nationalist phase carried over into the postcolonial era:
That failure is self-evident from the difficulty which has frustrated the bourgeoisie in its effort so far at winning a hegemonic role for itself even after half a century since the birth of a sovereign Indian nation-state. The predicament continues to grow worse, and by current showing should keep the students of contemporary South Asia busy for years to come.53
Thus, the ultimate expression of India’s failed bourgeois revolution was the failure to build an integrated political culture, which would have been possible only if the capitalist class had recognized the real interests of the laboring classes. This it did not do, because as it entered India, capital—in both its European and Indian guises—abandoned its historic tasks. In exchange for power, capital relinquished its universalizing mission.
At the heart of the Subalternist project, and of postcolonial theory more generally, stands the claim that there is a deep fault line separating Western capitalist nations from the postcolonial world. The importance of Ranajit Guha’s work is that it offers a historical sociology that seeks to explain how and why this fault line came into being. The power of his argument lies in the fact that he does not derive it from the kind of essentialism that can sometimes be found in postcolonial theory or in the writings of other Subalternists. He relies, instead, on a historical argument about the different biographies of capital in the two zones. Central to Guha’s explanation is the claim that the kind of modernization that capital wrought in the West was not on the agenda as it travelled to the colonial world—that in colonial social formations, capital abandoned its universalizing drive.
Having unpacked in some detail the specifics of this argument, we are now in a position to make some observations about its peculiarities. The first has to do with what Guha means by capital’s universalization. Recall that he begins by locating the drive to universalize in the economic logic of capitalist production—in what he calls the “self-expansion of capital,” which propels it to “create a world market [and] subjugate all antecedent modes of production.”54 But, while Guha bases the expansion of capital’s ambit on its economic logic, this soon recedes into the background of his analysis. What begins to loom larger is the notion that, as it expands, capital must also transform the