The Quality of Empathy

Gurminder K Bhambra

Ranajit Guha, as set out so clearly in the other articles in this issue, was a complex man. He was at the University of Sussex for close on twenty years and is most well-known for work that he did at the end of that period; that is, his work on historiography and the setting up of Subaltern Studies. My own initial encounter with Guha’s work was through these very studies. In particular, I was taken with the way in which he used historiography to investigate the exclusion of the subaltern from the structure of academic disciplines and thereby revealed the parochial and partial nature of the histories produced. Here, I want to return to his earlier work; to his first book, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the idea of Permanent Settlement.

Guha had started work on this topic in the 1950s and it was published in 1963 by a French publisher around the time that Guha started as a lecturer at Sussex. By all accounts, Asa Briggs, then Dean of the Social Sciences, who would go on to become Vice Chancellor, had invited Guha to apply for the job on the basis of this work. Around the same time, Briggs was also involved in bringing the economic historian, Donald Winch, to Sussex. Winch’s first book, Classical Political Economy and the Colonies, was published two years after Guha’s and ostensibly dealt with similar themes. It was developed from his dissertation which dealt with ‘the optimal conditions for colonial economic development’ and was primarily focused on Britain’s settler colonies with only a brief discussion of India via the work of the Mills.

The overlap between their concerns is sufficient, however, for it to be a puzzle – at least ostensibly – as to why they never appeared to acknowledge the work of the other. Winch did reference Stokes’s The English Utilitarians and India, which had been published just prior to Guha’s book and with which it was often compared and addressed in tandem. One reason could be that provided by David Fieldhouse in his review of Winch’s book which notes that while Winch ‘is good on economic theory, … [he] is obviously less strong on colonial history’. However, this would be to point to an intellectual divergence that was confirmed only through Guha’s later work directly addressing the colonial context. A Rule of Property is as much focused on economic theory as is Winch’s text and I will discuss the implications of their similarity subsequently. First, to the text itself.  

A Rule of Property addresses the debates that took place between East India Company administrators in Bengal in the late eighteenth century around the status of land, how it was best to be managed, and the consequences of this for the possibility of colonial governance and deriving revenue over the longer term. The focus of the debates was the idea of a ‘permanent settlement’ or solution. The primary impetus was that a new way of organising the ownership of the land was required and that this would be best served by entrusting its care to ‘a class of native entrepreneurs who had solid interests in the land and were politically reliable’ (p9). That is, the proposals being debated were around establishing a right of private property in land. The security of landownership was deemed to be necessary for the creation of a sound administration.

It was acknowledged by the colonial administrators of the time that they held no good title to the land. Alexander Dow, for example, noted that while the provinces were held ‘in appearance, by a grant from the present emperor’, in reality, they were only maintained ‘by the right of arms’ (quoted in Guha p25). As such, what was necessary was to establish the legitimacy of dominion beyond that which was provided through the act of conquest. This was done by developing economic theories that saw the territory governed as if it were a Company estate. This estate could then be parcelled out to local zamindars who would come to own the land, permanently, as property and be made responsible for the payment of taxes on it, thus ensuring a steady stream of revenue for the colonial government. It was this separation of the right of ownership from the right to collect revenue that would establish the permanence of dominion.

Guha, impressively and rigorously – as Sanjay Subrahamyam notes in his obituary – ‘took apart the minutes, proposals and counterproposals that were presented and debated in the administrative councils of the time’. He set out their different economic premises – deriving from mercantilist, physiocratic, and classical political economy – and demonstrated that, despite their differences, they nonetheless shared a common political focus, establishing the permanence of orderly dominion. However, this political orientation, is much less a concern for Guha in A Rule of Property, rather, his focus is on the detail of the economic debates.

As an aside – as I was reading in preparation for this, I came across reference to a review of Guha’s book, by Sarvepalli Gopal, published in 1966, who regarded it primarily as an exercise in British intellectual history, with the implication being that it was therefore of little concern to historians of India. A Das Gupta similarly suggested that the book had little to do with India ‘because India existed beyond the thoughts of Englishmen’. Guha rebutted this critique in the 1981 preface to the second edition of his book (comment and critique took longer in the times before social media) by stating that if the historical origins of the concepts and theories underpinning the most important land reform introduced by the British in India, which led to the statute of permanent proprietary rights, wasn’t important to the study of Indian history, he didn’t know what would be. Nonetheless, there was something to the critique.

While the importance of Guha’s book appears clear, to me at least, I am interested in the place of colonial histories in the book, or, rather, their absence. It is obvious that Guha is not unaware of them and, given his subsequent work, he is alert to the relationship between power and knowledge in the construction of disciplines and the production of histories. So, what accounts for his failure to locate the discussions of the East India Company administrators within their colonial context and discuss the implications of their theories with regard to that? I suggest that this is where the overlap between Guha and Winch is perhaps more pertinent.

The illegitimacy of colonial rule may have been so obvious to Guha that it was regarded as otiose to even mention that this was the context in which he was working. However, another explanation could be that, as a Marxist – as he was then and later – he worked within a frame of political economy that regarded capitalism as the more significant historical moment. One whose unfolding through time and history had to be understood in its own terms.

In Guha’s presentation of the discussions that were happening among colonial administrators about how best to organise the ownership and distribution of the land under their control, there is no questioning of their right to do so. The act of conquest is seemingly naturalised and forms no part of the contextualisation of the subsequent discussions oriented to establishing a permanence of dominion. As Subrahmanyam notes, Guha also had very little to say about ‘the complex property regimes [of the Mughal period] that had been in place before Company rule’. Something that was not omitted by at least one of the administrators under discussion, Dublin-born Phillip Francis.

This flattening of history and elision of its complexities enables colonial conquest to be made subordinate in an account of political economy oriented around ideas of capitalist development. This is also enabled through the way in which the debates constructed Mughal rule as despotic or feudal, at the same time as establishing a neo-feudal settlement. The British established despotism in the provinces and then claimed that Oriental despotism was the reason that they were needed in order to bring progress and modernity to these benighted areas!

While Guha’s political commitment to Marxism shifted over time – with him coming to support the Maoist Naxalbari peasant movements in the 1970s – the refusal to consider colonialism as central to the emergence and development of capitalism perhaps blunted the force of his arguments. Even in the terms of his own book, A Rule of Property, the question of colonialism is central to the emergence of the very need, on the part of the colonial administrators themselves, for a Permanent Settlement and yet this context is relegated to a few paragraphs.

I remember giving a lecture that mentioned British colonial rule in India and a student coming up to me afterwards and asking, ‘but what were the British doing in India?’ ‘Well, quite,’ I replied.

What were the British doing in India? And under what authority were they seeking to determine the patterns of land ownership and distribution there? And further, how do their understandings of property in the colonial context continue to shape our understandings in the present and how are our contemporary understandings inadequate to the extent that we do not acknowledge the significance of colonialism to the emergence of the very idea of property?

Not taking colonial histories seriously in the development of economic ideas is a shared elision in the work of Guha and Winch. While their political orientations may well have been different – Winch identified strongly as working class, whereas Guha saw himself as belonging to the Third World – what they had in common was a failure to acknowledge the significance of colonial histories to the emergence of a global political economy.

Guha’s identification with the struggles of the peasantry in the 1970s no doubt went on to shape his reflections on history and historiography, even if he did not return to consider the implications for political economy. This was also a moment when, as Vinita Damodaran notes, postcolonial nationalism was beginning to devour its children. Fifty years on, as political figures in India seek to decolonize from the ‘double empire’, it would be a shame – to put it mildly – if postcolonial perspectives were mobilized in the turn to populist ethno-religious nationalism as opposed to being the counter to it. Guha’s political commitments would undoubtedly have been with the latter.

Gurminder K Bhambra is Professor of Historical Sociology at the University of Sussex. She is author of Connected Sociologies and the award-winning Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination. She is also co-editor of Imperial Inequalities and co-author, with John Holmwood, of Colonialism and Modern Social Theory.

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Adi Cooper

I had the opportunity to share my reflections regarding being taught by Ranajit Guha at an event at Sussex University celebrating his career on 20th October 2023. I have had, and continue to have, a very varied career – I am a long away from where I was in 1984 submitting my PhD on the tebhaga movement, the sharecroppers’ struggle that took place in Bengal in the late 1940s. I have worked in the charity sector, as a paramedic, as a qualified social worker, manager and senior leader in Adult Social Services. I continue to work in the specialist field of safeguarding adults in England. This may appear quite random but there is a connection between then and now. People requiring safeguarding are often the most marginalised and vulnerable in our society in England; sharecroppers were amongst the most oppressed and dispossessed in rural communities in Bengal.

Tebhaga

It is no exaggeration to say that Ranajit Guha changed my life; first in motivating me to undertake my degree in the School of African and Asian studies (AFRAS) in Sussex University, and then to undertake a PhD on sharecroppers’ struggles, particularly the tebhaga movement. In 1976, when I was choosing a subject for my PhD, no one had studied the tebhaga movement, which grew from a pre-history of peasant activism and was led by the Kisan Sabha, the peasant wing of the Communist Party of India.

Ranajit supported me to do my PhD in so many ways – significantly by advising me to do a PhD in the first place. I wanted to go to India after 3 years of studying Indian history and he said – ‘don’t go as a tourist but go as a scholar’, so I did. In Kolkata his connections sent me to the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences where I was supervised, befriended and supported by so many people through different networks, scholars and students. His name opened doors.

I had read – probably directed by Ranajit – Sunil Sen’s memoirs of being an activist in Dinajpur in the tebhaga movement. I wanted to know more: how, what, when and where the movement had taken place. I wanted to understand how marginalised and oppressed Bengali sharecroppers became the fighters, resisters, and activists in the tebhaga movement, demanding to keep a larger share of the crop, challenging the landlords and oppression in their lives. I wanted to record their history. I undertook conventional research and found written records in the Writers Building in Kolkata and government archives in Dhaka. I wanted to go beyond and behind these texts to find out from people who were still alive in the late 1970s what they remembered, and I was fortunate as so many people were able to tell me their stories.

I learnt Bengali before I left England and spent 2 years meeting and interviewing over 200 people who had been involved in the tebhaga struggles. I searched out people, followed up leads, used different networks to find them. I collected their memories, stories and songs. I spoke to so many different people, in towns and villages, young and old, men and women, in West Bengal and Bangladesh; landlords, sharecroppers and agricultural labourers, peasant activists and communists, including a Minister in the West Bengal CPM government. I travelled all over Bengal and then returned to England to write the PhD thesis. I tried to do justice to their experiences.

Studying the tebhaga movement was unconventional because it was about Bengal – both East and West Bengal, now Bangladesh and India. My privilege as foreign scholar was that I could do this, at that time, when local historians couldn’t cross the international border. This helped me with my own issues about being a white English woman doing this work. Local scholars assured me that in this way I could make a helpful contribution. In current discussions and debates about decolonising, I can frame this discomfort in a clearer way.

The post-colonial legacy of guilt haunted me even though my own family were immigrants to the UK, and anti-imperialists. They were communists. In this context I remember walking through some paddy fields with an interpreter (because my Bengali wasn’t adequate for understanding all the local dialects), in single file behind an elderly peasant activist who was walking ahead of us, whom I was going to interview, talking to himself. ‘What was he saying?’ The interpreter told me – ‘he was asking himself, ‘why has this English woman come all this way to speak to me. This because of international communism’. This has stayed with me for decades. There was some truth in his reflection because I had been brought up with an internationalist perspective in a communist family.

Studying in Sussex

Ranajit had been my tutor throughout my undergraduate course, as well as supervising my PhD. I had met him in 1972, arriving in Brighton after travelling overland from Pakistan. Coming back to Sussex I really wanted to know more about the history of the non-European world. A schoolfriend introduced me to Ranajit and I was inspired. I moved across to AFRAS and this changed the course of my life. University life in Sussex in the 1970s was very different to how I understand it might be now. Sussex had a radical reputation both academically and in terms of the student experience. The radical approach to learning was why I had applied to go there: the inter-disciplinary schools of studies and the more fluid approach to curriculum, with courses based on cross-cutting themes like ‘millenarian movements’, rather than historical periods. I was attracted to the radical political activism that Sussex was known for. I was already involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement, anti-Vietnam demos, school student radicalism in London. Sussex was perfect for me.

It was a privilege to be taught by Ranajit although I don’t think I recognised this at the time – you take for granted that your experience is normal when you are young and have little to compare it with. I have memories only of tutorials with 2 or 3 other students. Ranajit spoke about whatever the subject was – he was hugely knowledgeable, and there were discussions and debates. I remember him talking about the way in which Greek philosophers taught their students through discourse. So, his teaching methods did make sense. What was this like for students? Exciting and scary. Writing essays to explore ideas. Being pushed to think and consider different ways of thinking. Light bulb moments. Stimulating and intellectually challenging. Terrifying and I was always in awe of him. Our essays would be tightly critiqued with respect and ambition. Correcting our use of language. ‘Inspirational and challenging’ as I called this piece.

He was an intellectual giant – Anna (another student of Ranajit’s in the 1970s) reminded me that he learnt Gujarati to read Gandhi’s work. He referenced Marx, Lenin and Gramsci, structuralism and post structuralism, semiotics. We learnt how to deconstruct text – being able to read other stories from what was on the surface, to see through to what was behind and the stories that weren’t told. This was his biggest legacy. Anna reminded me of her arguments with him about feminism – would sexism fade away with capitalism as a relic of feudalism? And he always had the last word. Studying with Ranajit was never dull. He always went to what was most important – issues of justice and human rights, class analysis. He also said that history was the true and only worthwhile academic discipline. He was so astonishingly erudite; he would use literature and multiple cultural references; unapologetically an intellectual.

AFRAS had a very strong identity – we learnt about imperialism and post-colonialism from radical scholars. So different to history in school. It was a great place to be and learn. Ranajit was part of that – he had his own style and brilliance. Additionally, it was special but not unusual to be invited to academics’ homes to meet other students. I did feel privileged but a bit overwhelmed to meet the scholars that Ranajit brought together. It was helpful to know that there was a community of interest, in which he was the centre. The connections were helpful when I went to India and in validating what I was doing, which always felt niche and isolated, particularly when I was in England.

When I came back to England in 1979, I experienced serious culture shock on re-entry. Looking back, I think Ranajit’s high standards of scholarship and his critique of my writing triggered a writer’s block and I made the very difficult decision to change supervisor. I moved to work with Terry Byres at SOAS, who helped me through this. I completed my PhD on sharecroppers struggles and sharecropping in Bengal in 1930s and 1940s. It was published in Kolkata and part translated into Bengali and published in Bangladesh. I was driven to ensure that at least there was a record of what I had been able to find out. I owed it to all the people that I had met. Decades later I emailed Ranajit, prompted by Shireen Huq, a mutual friend who visited him in Austria (she also studied with Ranajit in the late 1970s). I said what I’d been doing over the many years and got a lovely response from Mechtild Guha; there was closure.

Remembering those years, I want to also reflect on our politics at that time. We were intellectually and academically applying a Marxist lens and critiquing it – so my PhD was about the economic history of sharecropping as a semi-feudal mode of production, as well as a political history of a peasant struggle. Ranajit introduced us to what was happening in Indian communism at the time, including the Naxalite struggles. This had significant personal resonance for me; coming from a communist family, as a child living through the 1950’s Cold War backlash of anti-communism, parents who had been deported from America due to McCarthyism. This was another connection. I had a tutor who could make some sense of that. Researching a peasant struggle led by communists was amazing on a personal level. I was in West Bengal when the CP(M) came to power after Indira Gandhi’s Emergency Rule: this was an extraordinary experience for me. All the hammer and sickle graffiti on the walls and communist red flags waved in demonstrations on the maidan. This was incredible for someone whose grandfather, a Polish tailor, had heard Lenin speak in Paris. In India and Bangladesh, my communist party family identity was an asset, not something to hide. People trusted and helped me in my research because of it. As the elderly peasant activist said – I had come to speak to him ‘because of international communism’.

Postscript/legacy – some final words

Looking back, I just feel very grateful to have had the experience of being taught and inspired by Ranajit. In subsequent decades I have randomly come across people who knew his work, so belatedly I have understood that during those years he was developing his subaltern studies approach. It is always such a surprise and a gift to have those conversations. I have continued to utilise the skills I learnt, and I have always maintained my values and commitment to supporting people who are most marginalised and excluded. For the last 15 years as a social work leader this has taken the form of transforming the ways vulnerable adults are safeguarding in England.

I ceased my academic career once my PhD was published, although have developed one in social work. But I have come back to this part of my life. An American professor sought me out a few years ago; I showed her the notebooks recording the interviews that had been kept in the loft, unopened for 25 years. She wrote a blog about the encounter. That was a key turning point. Subsequently Dr Layli Uddin contacted me and with her encouragement and support, I have been transcribing the interview notes. I want to place the transcripts in archives so others can access them, reflect, analyse, and learn from these stories.

This is also part of Ranajit’s lasting influence. I still believe that this work is so important – there is an ongoing interest in subaltern studies; in the histories of people, seen to be at the margins but really at the centre. There is so much richness in these recollections of their experiences, their memories. This is a legacy that I want to pass on to others. A legacy that wouldn’t exist, if not for Ranajit Guha.

References

Adrienne Cooper Sharecropping and Sharecropper’s Struggles in Bengal 1930-1950, K.P.Bagchi, Kolkata, 1988

Sunil Sen Agrarian Struggles in Bengal 1946-47 P.P.H. Delhi 1972

The full text of the presentation is in the upcoming volume:

Ranajit Guha (1923-2023): Bishesh Sankalan (Ranajit Guha (1923-2023): A Special Commemorative Collection). Edited by Sourav Chattopadhyay, Kolkata: Alochana Chakra, 2024. ISBN: 978-93-83208-15-9.

Adi Cooper OBE is a Visiting Professor at the University of Bedfordshire, Independent Chair of two Safeguarding Adults Boards in London and Adviser for safeguarding adults (Partners in Care and Heath). She is a Non-Executive Director of Social Work England. She also works as a safeguarding consultant and has published books and articles on safeguarding adults. She is a qualified social worker and worked in Adult Social Care for over 30 years, including as Director of Adult Social Services, Housing and Health for nine years. Her PhD thesis about the tebhaga movement was published in Kolkata on ‘sharecropping and sharecroppers struggles in Bengal 1930-50’ and she studied as an undergraduate and post-graduate with Ranajit Guha at Sussex University. Twitter @adi_coo

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Sanjay Seth

After graduating from the University of Sydney in the early 1980s, I chose to pursue my PhD studies at the Australian National University (ANU), because – somewhat surprisingly – the ANU, located in the small capital city of Canberra, was at that time, arguably, one of best places to be for the study of Indian history. Anthony Low, the well-known historian of South Asia and Africa, was Vice-Chancellor of the university, and had put energy and resources into encouraging the study of South Asian history.

Ranajit Guha was the centre of this, and he, along with the well-known Australian philosopher Eugene Kamenka, became my PhD supervisor. Two of his other PhD students, Raghab Chattopadhyaya and Kamal Ahmed, and Dipesh Chakrabarty (who was finishing his PhD, and was Anthony Low’s student) often joined me in conversations with Ranajit – Ranajit tended not to have formal supervisory sessions but rather to have conversations, where he threw out an array of unfamiliar ideas and insights which we would subsequently discuss for hours over endless cups of (bad) coffee.

A stream of subalternists came through as visiting scholars, including Partha Chatterjee and Sumit Sarkar – I mention these two in particular because when I was in India working at various archives Sumit was my supervisor, and when I went to Calcutta I had some enlightening conversations with Partha. My PhD dissertation, later published as Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics: The Case of Colonial India, bore the imprint of all these teachers and colleagues.

These details are by way of setting the scene, for my aim in this brief essay is not to reminisce, but to indicate how Ranajit’s work on Indian history influenced me – what I learned, as it were.

When I first arrived at the ANU, it was, as I remember it, at the tail end of an explosion of studies of the peasantry in the Third World, and also of the ‘modes of production’ debate. Alongside my readings in German idealism, Marxism, and structuralism, I immersed myself in some of these debates. These were fascinating, but it soon struck my then-youthful self that what was missing, or at least partially missing from these debates, was the question of power. Peasant studies often resulted in increasingly fine distinctions between middle, upper middle, and lower middle peasants, while the modes of production debates seemed to me to have forgotten the reason they were worth having – struggle had receded into the background, and a certain scholasticism crept in.

Reading Ranajit’s opening essay in Subaltern Studies 1, and even more so his Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, was the corrective or antidote I was searching for, for here the question of power was an organising concept. The very category of ‘subaltern classes’, borrowed from Gramsci, dispensed with fine gradations – as Ranajit explained in his opening statement in Subaltern Studies I, “The social groups and elements included in this category represent the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the ‘elite’.” This was not, of course, because he was unaware that both categories were heterogenous, but rather because he was seeking to highlight that notwithstanding the undoubted differences, divisions and forms of ‘internal’ exploitation between landless peasants, middle peasants and so on, the fundamental dividing line was not about size of landholding but of relations of domination and subordination.

This, according to Ranajit, was manifested most clearly in the course of peasant jacqueries, the subject of his brilliant Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency. These rebellions usually aimed not simply to expropriate property, but to reverse relations of domination and subordination, to ‘turn the world upside down’. This was because the power relations they challenged were not of the bourgeois type, ones marked by formal equality, but rather inscribed in the naked use of force, in dress, in language and bodily comportment, all parts of an elaborate semiotics of power.

Peasant rebellions were thus marked by what Ranajit described and analysed as ‘negation’, a consequence of the fact that the peasant’s “identity amounted to the sum of his subalternity…he learnt to recognise himself not by the property and attributes of his own social being but by a diminution, if not negation, of those of his superiors.” Hence why inversion was the principal modality of peasant rebellion- “a political struggle in which the rebel appropriated and/or destroyed the insignia of his enemy’s power and hoped thus to abolish the marks of his own subalternity…a project which was, by its very nature, negatively constituted.”

After the appearance of Elementary Aspects and the first few volumes of SS, it was often commented that this was an ‘application’ to India of the ‘history from below’ pioneered by brilliant historians like EP Thompson, George Rudé and Eric Hobsbawm. What this missed, however, was that the histories of Rudé and Hobsbawm characterised their subjects as ‘backward’, and their forms of protest and rebellion as ‘prepolitical’. Hobsbawm and Rudé were not seeking to diminish the struggles of those whom they were studying – the very fact that they sought to recover these struggles indicated otherwise – but this judgment reflected their view that by the standards of the sorts of struggles that occur on the grounds of bourgeois society, these earlier ones were undertaken by people who were not in a position to develop forms of militant organisation, or envision an alternative social order.

Early in Elementary Aspects, Ranajit writes that while this may be so for Europe, “the notion of pre-political peasant insurgency helps little in understanding the experience of colonial India.” In the course of the book, two reasons why this is so emerge – reasons that are in tension with each other. The first refers back to what I mentioned above – in a pre or non-bourgeois society where surplus extraction is not effected through the wage-labour capital relation, but through domination and subordination anchored in multiple points and effected through multiple means, including violence, any revolt was ipso facto political – there was simply no possibility of gradualism or ‘economism’. Important a point as this was, it lent itself to the reading that peasant revolt in India was political because of Indian ‘backwardness’, because India was ‘feudal’.

The other reading, at odds with the first, was that peasant revolts in colonial India were ‘political’ not because of Indian backwardness, feudalism or premodernity, but on the contrary, because in colonial and post-Independence India the dominance of capital had not also resulted in the dominance of bourgeois society and culture. As Ranajit put it in SSI, subaltern politics “was traditional only insofar as its roots could be traced back to pre-colonial times, but it was by no means archaic in the sense of being outmoded;” it was, in fact, “as modern as elite politics.”

In a later summation of Ranajit’s position, in “A Small History of Subaltern Studies,” Dipesh Chakrabarty wrote, “the global history of capitalism need not reproduce everywhere the same history of power. In the calculus of modernity, power is not a dependent variable and capital an independent one.” What Ranajit was signalling towards, in other words, was that colonial India was modern rather than premodern, but that this had not been accompanied by the sorts of transformations in the relations of power and politics that had (arguably) accompanied the dominance of capital in Europe.

If, for example (to paraphrase Marx) it was a feature of bourgeois society that formal political equality acquired the force of a fixed prejudice, this – and many other features thought to characterise bourgeois society – were not typical of India in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. And that is why Ranajit ends Elementary Aspects with a rhetorical flourish, claiming that the consciousness that had informed peasant insurgency in nineteenth century India extended into the twentieth, such that “Many of the mass movements which have swept through our land since then bear at least some of its hallmarks,” and, “No jacquerie in the countryside, no street riot in our towns is an exception.” This is the core idea underpinning his Dominance without Hegemony – that colonial capitalism and the colonial state integrated India into global capital and modern forms of statehood, but without establishing a hegemonic bourgeois culture.

Scholarship on India (and on much of the non-Western world) has usually been marked by a teleology in which the future of India can be seen in the present of Europe. The evident differences of India or other non-Western locations can then, even where they are recognized and attended to, be seen as marks of an incomplete ‘transition’, and the search begins for what the causes and remedies of that incomplete transition might be.

Writing the history of the non-West was thus often a search for its ‘lacks’ and its shortcomings, and descriptions of how far it had proceeded in its ‘transition’ to where the West had already arrived, all this in keeping with the premise that what had first happened in the West would eventually reshape the Rest. The result was often, as Achille Mbembe puts it of studies of Africa in On the Postcolony, “while we feel we now know nearly everything that African states, societies and economies are not, we still know nothing about what they actually are.”

Ranajit and many of his collaborators in SS rejected this, not out of nationalist self-assertion, but on the grounds that some of the most striking features of colonial and post-Independence India are not marks of the as-yet incomplete victory of capital, but in some cases constitute a structural feature of capital and modernity in India. Subsequent work by other subalternists, including but not limited to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work on the Calcutta working class and Partha Chatterjee’s work on the peasantry, and in more recent times his Politics of the Governed, have started from this presumption. So too – and not necessarily because of the influence of Ranajit or SS – with other works I admire, including those of Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind on Egypt.

All of these start not by taking western modernity as the norm and measuring Indian (or Egyptian, etc) distance from it, but by examining the manifold ways in which the self-expansion of capital and the governmentalized state are now an integral part of everyday life and politics in many parts of the Global South, but without a corresponding effacement of forms of hierarchy, affect and mobilization that do not take their ground and point of departure from bourgeois culture. If we recognise that the non-West is not at an earlier point in the arc of western historical development, it follows that we must also recognise that making sense of it may require modifying or abandoning some of our conceptual vocabulary, which was born in the course of making sense of European history, and inventing new categories of analysis – as I argue in my recent book, Beyond Reason: Postcolonial Theory and the Social Sciences.

The non-West has for a very long time been regarded as different from the western world. But the ‘difference’ Ranajit and the SS scholars drew attention to was not an essentialist, ontological, and racist difference – ‘East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’. Nor was it the ‘difference’ recognized by stadial theories of historical development, according to which the non-Western world is at an earlier and lesser stage of ‘modernization’ and Enlightenment. They suggested instead that these two unpalatable choices may not exhaust our intellectual options, and made it possible to recognise that the non-West is different not because it is ‘not yet’ modern and fully rational, but that the globalization of capital and modernity has not effaced difference, and also that what we have taken to be Reason is but a historically and culturally specific way of conceiving of, understanding and inhabiting the world, rather than the ‘correct’ way finally discovered.

The spread of capitalism, for which colonialism was one of the main mechanisms, did indeed transform the non-Western world in many ways: but forms of thinking, living and conceiving of collective life that do not accord with Western modernity have not always been consigned to the dustbin of history. It is necessary, then, to study the non-West not as an earlier form of what the West was, but rather as something that embodies ways of life and thought that are part of the modern but without necessarily being like the Western forms of modernity. Ranajit’s work and the work of his fellow subalternists was not the only road to this realisation, of course; but for me it was critical, and it influenced my subsequent intellectual trajectory. 

References

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “A Small History of Subaltern Studies,” in his Habitations of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

Guha, Ranajit. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).

Guha, Ranajit, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Guha (ed), Subaltern Studies I (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982).

Guha, Ranajit, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Harvard University Press, 1998).

Mbembe, Achille, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

Seth, Sanjay, Beyond Reason: Postcolonial Theory and the Social Sciences (NY: Oxford University Press, 2021).

Sanjay Seth is Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has written extensively on modern Indian history, postcolonial theory and international relations. His most recent books are Beyond Reason: Postcolonial Theory and the Social Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2021) and História e Pós-colonialismo (Imprensa de História Contemporânea, 2022). 

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TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Seth, Sanjay 2024. ‘Guha, Indian History, and me’ Discover Society: New Series 4 (1):