Extracts from Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997)

... proceeded from a thoroughly unexamined belief that the so-called unitary character of politics was nothing other than the effect of the homogenizing function of colonialism.

This notion of colonialism as a homogenizing force is fundamental to both of the dominant historiographies—neocolonialist and nationalist. The former characterizes it in positive terms as either a cultural or an institutional force. According to one of its versions, the colonial regime politicized India by the introduction of liberal education, and the ideas and activities of a Western-educated elite in the course of its collaboration with the raj were all that was there to Indian politics. According to another version, which superseded the first, it was not so much the metropolitan liberal culture as the colonial administration itself which created a political arena for the natives by involving them in a scramble for rewards in the form of privileges and power in governmental institutions developed by the raj.

Whichever version one takes, it is the civilizing or institutionalizing function of the regime that figures as the generative impulse of Indian politics and its unifying force in this neocolonialist view. The nationalist standpoint shares the same assumption, but turns it to its own advantage by defining the content and character of politics simply in terms of the indigenous elite’s response to colonial rule and the sum of all the ideas and activities by which it dealt with the government of the day.

Between these two interpretations the question of power was reduced to an elite contest with no room left in it for the South Asian people except as an inert mass deployed by the dominant elements to serve their own ends according to strategies of their own invention. We took notice of this omission in an inaugural statement in Subaltern Studies I (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982) thus:

What is clearly left out of this un-historical historiography is the politics of the people. For parallel to the domain of elite politics there existed throughout the colonial period another domain of Indian politics in which the principal actors were not the dominant groups of the indigenous society or the colonial authorities but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and the intermediate strata in town and country—that is, the people. This was an autonomous domain, for [end p.x] it neither originated in elite politics nor did its existence depend on the latter.

Underlying the exclusive and elitist approach is an idea which has prevailed in historiography since the rise of the Italian city- states and has continued through the Enlightenment until the emergence of the modern nation-states nearer our time. This is the idea that with the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie in Western Europe all of the power relations of civil society have everywhere been so fully assimilated to those of the state that the two may be said to have coincided in an undifferentiated and integrated space where alone such relations have situated and articulated them- selves ever since. It has been possible therefore for historical scholarship that has fed on this theorem for centuries and made it into the stuff of academic common sense to represent power in its most generalized form as Civil Society = Nation = State.

To say and demonstrate, as we have done, that the domain of politics is not unitary but structurally split is of course to spoil the elegance of this equation at once. However, by doing so, we take it upon ourselves to redefine how these three terms relate to each other in such a domain. Our attempt to face up to that task leads directly, as indicated above, to the question: “What is colonialism and what is a colonial state?”

Questions like these have of course been asked before. An answer to one or another of them is indeed presupposed in all that has ever been written about British rule in South Asia. This has been so since the first histories of the subcontinent were published by the East India Company’s servants as early the 1770s and has continued to be the case until today with the imperial theme established firmly as an object of academic research and teaching. Yet the progress of scholarship during the last two hundred years has done little to challenge or even seriously interrogate such presuppositions. In fact, they have hardly moved from where Bolts and Verelst had left them standing as a set of necessary, if invisible, prejudices which the passage of time has allowed to merge unobtrusively in the background of historical discourse. Thanks to an amazing oversight characteristic of academic work of all kinds irrespective of their points of view, the notion of a unitary political domain has survived until now even the mutually [p.xi] opposed readings of the Indian past from imperialist and nationalist points of view.

We take the enigma of that oversight common to both of those rival ideologies as our point of departure and go on to suggest that the colonial state in South Asia was very unlike and indeed fundamentally different from the metropolitan bourgeois state which had sired it. The difference consisted in the fact that the metropolitan state was hegemonic in character with its claim to dominance based on a power relation in which the moment of persuasion outweighed that of coercion, whereas the colonial state was non- hegemonic with persuasion outweighed by coercion in its structure of dominance. Indeed, we have argued that 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. And since it was nonhegemonic, it was not possible for that state to assimilate the civil society or the colonized to itself. We have defined the character of the colonial state therefore as a dominance without hegemony.

The consequence of this paradox for the political culture of colonial India was to generate an original alloy from the fusion and overdetermination of two distinct paradigms—an originality which has been witness to the historic failure of capital to realize its universalizing tendency under colonial conditions, and the corresponding failure of the metropolitan bourgeois culture to dissolve or assimilate fully the indigenous culture of South Asia in the power relations of the colonial period. We have followed up these considerations by reflecting on the character of colonialist historiography and shown how it has sought to endow colonialism with a spurious hegemony denied it by history.

Dominance without hegemony has a nationalist aspect as well. This follows from the structural split in politics and the coexistence of its two domains. As it has been put in the statement cited above, “The co-existence of these two domains or streams, which can be sensed by intuition and proved by demonstration as well, was the index of an important historical truth, that is, the failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to speak for the nation. There were vast areas in the life and consciousness of the people which were never integrated into their hegemony. [p.xii]

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 students of contemporary South Asia busy for years to come. For our part we have concentrated, in what follows, on two important moments of its career under the raj which anticipated its accession to power by mobilization and by historiography. What was at issue in both respects was its desire for recognition in its claim to speak for the people constituted as a nation and to challenge thereby any pretensions the alien rulers had to represent the colonized. A rivalry between an aspirant to power and its incumbent, this was in essence a contest for hegemony.

Our approach to these problems picks its way through historiography, as the readers will notice no doubt from the signs displayed all over the text and the arguments these refer to. We have taken this particular course not out of any conviction that this is the only possible way of asking questions about colonialism and the colonial state. One could have formulated the same or very similar questions deductively following the classical models of political philosophy (whose influence, especially that of Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Montesquieu, on the development of our own argument should be obvious to all) or any of their latter-day adaptations in academic work on the modern state-systems. But we have decided on the historiographical approach primarily because it helps us to combine the advantages of the classical theories with a consideration of history as writing.

The importance of the latter for our problematic is hard to exaggerate. For at a certain level the question of power in colonial South Asia or anywhere else in a land under foreign occupation can be phrased succinctly as “Who writes the history of the subjugated people?” In the Indian instance that question resonates with one that agitated the very first architects of the empire as they asked, “Who is the king of Bengal?” As Warren Hastings and Philip Francis were both thoughtful enough to declare in response, the East India Company’s claim to such “kingship” derived entirely from the right of conquest. For all that was involved in such a claim, ranging from the assumption of statutory authority to act as Diwan to grabbing the produce of the land and converting it by the [p.xiii] most predatory means into mercantile wealth, rested simply and exclusively on the power of the sword.

What we have tried to point out here is how that sword conferred a “right” on the pen as well. It was conquest which empowered the conquerors to impose on the colonized a past written from the colonizer’s point of view and uphold that writing as foundational to the law of the land. Our attempt to inform this study of colonialism by the pathos of a purloined past is therefore not so much a matter of professional convenience as a strategy to situate the writing of a conquered people’s history by conquerors at the very heart of the question of one nation’s oppression by another.

To think the colonial condition of rulership and historiography together in this manner is of course to think of the second term too as a force. To do so would not be to raise the power of the pen to that of the gun by utpreksa—the figure of Sanskrit poetics which allows a thing to be elevated fancifully, if absurdly on occasions, to the likeness of something superior to it. Rather, it would be to put on record the effect of an atidesa—a metonymic extension by which statist concerns forced their way into historical interpretation, allowing a colonial dominance to overflow and appropriate a writing culture of the colonized.

But such extension did not come about as a simple laterality. The force of that writing culture was destined to acquire a vertical thrust as well. For it enlisted the colonized too as interpreters of their own past and created the conditions for an Indian historiography of India. However, as discussed in these pages, such an agenda for the reclamation of an appropriated past could in no way be adequate to its concept without wrenching itself away from its liberal-imperialist armature, without in fact arming itself with a genuinely anti-imperialist critique for which it did not, alas, have either the strength or the motivation yet. It was precisely such debility that frustrated whatever was there as a desire for power underlying the first historical discourses informed by an Indian point of view. Insofar as any nationalist claim to speak for a people’s past was hegemonic by implication, it would be sometime yet for that claim to be fully upheld by historiography.

My thanks are due to the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (Calcutta) for permission to use the text of my Sakharam Ganesh [p.xiv]

as a fact of Indian history and used as an argument in favor of a zamindari settlement. The past acquired its depth in these accounts from elaborately constructed genealogies going back to (an often mythical) antiquity in some cases and from (genuine or fabricated) Mughal charters as evidence of proprietary right. This had the effect of conferring a sense of spurious continuity on what was a total rupture brought about by the intervention of a European power in the structure of landed property in South Asia. The illusion of continuity was reinforced further by global histories which drew copiously on medieval chronicles in order to situate the British dominion in a line of conquests that had begun with the Turko-Afghans and within a tradition that allowed the conquerors to extract tribute from the conquered.

These preliminary exercises in colonialist historiography, whether done on a local or a global scale, abetted thus in laying the foundations of the raj. Nothing illustrates this better than the way the Indian past was mobilized by the various contending parties in the debates within the Company’s administration during the last three decades of the eighteenth century. The history of the subject population was reconstructed there over and over again as the central question of the relation of property to empire became the subject of controversies between Hastings and Francis in the 1770s, between Grant and Shore in the 1780s, and between Shore and Cornwallis in 1788-1792 on the eve of the Permanent Settlement. The outcome of such attempts at appropriation was to provide legal and administrative support for those measures which in the course of time set up British rule in the subcontinent eventually as a rule of property.

This rudimentary historiography was soon followed up by a more mature and sophisticated discourse when the time came for the growing colonial state, already secure in its control of the wealth of the land, to reinforce its apparatus of ideological control as well. All the energies and skills of nineteenth-century British scholarship were harnessed to this project. It investigated, recorded, and wrote up the Indian past in a vast corpus which, worked by many hands during the seventy years between Mill’s History of British India (1812) and Hunter’s Indian Empire (1881), came to constitute an entirely new kind of knowledge. A colonialist knowledge, its function was to erect that past as a pedestal on [p.2] which the triumphs and glories of the colonizers and their instrument, the colonial state, could be displayed to best advantage.

Indian history, assimilated thereby to the history of Great Britain, would henceforth be used as a comprehensive measure of difference between the peoples of these two countries. Politically that difference was spelled out as one between rulers and the ruled; ethnically, between a white Herrenvolk and blacks; materially, between a prosperous Western power and its poor Asian subjects; culturally, between higher and lower levels of civilization, between the superior religion of Christianity and indigenous belief systems made up of superstition and barbarism—all adding up to an irreconcilable difference between colonizer and colonized. The Indian past was thus painted red.

However, the appropriation of a past by conquest carries with it the risk of rebounding upon the conquerors. It can end up by sacralizing the past for the subject people and encouraging them to use it in their effort to define and affirm their own identity. This, no doubt, was what happened in the instance under discussion, and the appropriated past came to serve as the sign of the Other not only for the colonizers but, ironically, for the colonized as well. The colonized, in their turn, reconstructed their past for purposes opposed to those of their rulers and made it the ground for marking out their differences in cultural and political terms. History became thus a game for two to playas the alien colonialist project of appropriation was matched by an indigenous nationalist project of counter-appropriation.

The two have been locked in an indecisive battle ever since. The contradictions of colonialism which have inspired this contest in the first place lingered on at the ideological level even after their resolution, in constitutional terms, by the Transfer of Power. The cultural regime of colonialism clearly outlived the raj in the study of the Indian past, as was obvious from the influence which con- tinued to be exerted on it by the more recent avatars of colonialist historiography. What made it possible, indeed necessary, for that influence to persist was a fundamental agreement between the Indian bourgeoisie and the British whom they replaced as rulers about the nature of colonialism itself—that is, what it was and what constituted its power relations. Both proceeded from the stand- [p.3] point of liberalism to regard the colonial state as an organic extension of the metropolitan bourgeois state and colonialism as an adaptation, if not quite a replication, of the classical bourgeois culture of the West in English rendering. Generally speaking, that phenomenon was regarded by both as a positive confirmation of the universalizing tendency of capital—a point to which we shall soon return.

The rivalries of the two bourgeoisies and their representations in colonialist and nationalist discourses did little to diminish the importance of this essential agreement. On the contrary, all trans- actions between the two parties which made up the stuff of elite politics followed from an understanding to abide by a common set of rules based on the British constitutionalist parliamentary model. It was a matter of playing cricket. If a nationalist agitation ran into difficulty, the bureaucracy would gloat that Gandhi was on a poor wicket, and he would, on his part, condemn the administration as “un- British 11 whenever he felt outraged by the harshness of official violence.

Neither side appears to have realized the absurdity of accusing each other of deviating from norms which were displayed as ideals but prevented in fact from realizing themselves to any significant extent at all in the dominant idioms of political practice. This incomprehension, so symptomatic of the malaise of a liberalism grafted on to colonial conditions, informed historical discourses corresponding to both the points of view and underscored their common failure to discern the anomalies that made colonialism into a figure of paradox.

The paradox consists of the fact that the performance of the elite groups whose careers have provided both these historiographies with their principal themes was widely at variance with their historic competence. Thus there were the metropolitan bourgeoisie who professed and practiced democracy at home, but were quite happy to conduct the government of their Indian empire as an autocracy. Champions of the right of the European nations to self-determination1 they denied the same right to their Indian subjects until the very last phase of the raj and granted it without grace only when forced to do so under the impact of the anti-imperialist struggles of the subject population. Their antagonism to feudal values and institutions in their own society made little difference [p.4] (in spite of the much publicized though rather ineffective campaigns against sati child marriage, and so on) to their vast tolerance of pre-capitalist values and institutions in Indian society.

Their opposite numbers, 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. Pliant and prone to compromise from their inception, they lived in a state of happy accommodation with imperialism for the greater part of their career as a constituted political force between 1885 and 1947. The destruction of the colonial state was never a part of their project. They abjured and indeed resolutely opposed all forms of armed struggle against the raj, and settled for pressure politics as their main tactical means in bargaining for power. Compromise and accommodation were equally characteristic of their attitude to the semi-feudal values and institutions entrenched in Indian society. The liberalism they 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 in 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.

How come that liberal historiography of both kinds fails to take notice of such paradoxes? Why is it that on those rare occasions when it does take notice, it still makes no serious attempt to explain them? Why, on the contrary, is the discrepancy between competence and performance in the record of the metropolitan bourgeoisie trivialized so often by liberal-imperialism and its intellectual representatives merely as an exceptional and aberrant instance of malfunctioning in the administrative apparatus of the raj? Why does liberal-nationalism, in its turn, tend to ac- count for discrepancies of the same order in the record of the indigenous bourgeoisie simply as local difficulties generated by some weak survivals of a pre capitalist culture and destined to be overcome by the leaders of the nation on their march to progress? How is it that no real effort is ever made by historians on either side to link these paradoxes to any structural fault in the historic project of the bourgeoisie? [p.5]

respondingly to construct, in nationalist writings, the dominance of the Indian bourgeoisie as the political effect of a consensus representing all of the will of the people -that is, as hegemonic again.

There is little in this sweet and sanitized image of dominance to expose or explain the harsh realities of politics during the raj. On the contrary, the presumption of hegemony makes for a seriously distorted view of the colonial state and its configuration of power. It is important, therefore, that the critique of historiography should begin by questioning the universalist assumptions of liberal ideology and the attribution of hegemony taken for granted in colonialist and nationalist interpretations of the Indian past. It must begin, in short, by situating itself outside the universe of liberal discourse.

The General Configuration of Power in Colonial India

In colonial India, where the role of capital was still marginal in the mode of production and the authority of the state structured as an autocracy that did not recognize any citizenship or rule of law, power simply stood for a series of inequalities between the rulers and the ruled as well as between classes, strata, and individuals. These unequal relationships, in spite of the bewildering diversity of their form and character and their numerous permutations, may all be said to have derived from a general relation—that of Dominance (D) and Subordination (S). These two terms imply each other: it is not possible to think of D without S and vice versa. As such, they permit us to conceptualize the historical articulation of power in colonial India in all its institutional, modal, and discursive aspects as the interaction of these two terms—as D/S in short.

Figure 1. General Configuration of Power

[end p.20]

While these two terms, in their interaction, give power its substance and form, each of them, in its own turn, is determined and indeed constituted by a pair of interacting elements—D by Coercion (C) and Persuasion (P), and S by Collaboration (C*) and Resistance (R), as shown in Figure 1. However, the relation between the terms of each of the constitutive pairs is not quite the same as that between the terms of the parent pair. D and S imply each other just as do C and P on the one hand, and C* and R on the other. But while D and S imply each other logically and the implication applies to all cases where an authority structure can be legitimately defined in those terms, the same is not true of the other dyads. There the terms imply each other contingently. In other words, the mutual implication of D and S has a universal validity for all power relations informed by them, whereas that of C and P or of C* and R is true only under given conditions.

The mutual implication of D and S is logical and universal in the sense that, considered at the level of abstraction, it may be said to obtain wherever there is power, that is, under all historical social formations irrespective of the modalities in which authority is exercised there. Yet nothing in this abstract universality contradicts the truth of the contingency of power relations arising from the reciprocity of C and P in D and that of C* and R in S. On the contrary, such contingency must be recognized as the site where “human passion”—Hegel’s name for the determinate aspects of socially significant human activity34—mediates the concept of power and turns it into a history of dominance and subordination. Indeed, it is this interplay of the universal and the contingent, the logical and the empirical aspects of D/S, that makes up “the warp and the weft in the fabric of world history.”35

This is why the necessity of contingency is recognized even in the ideals of absolute authority constructed by classical political philosophy, although the very notion of absolutism requires that necessity to make its appearance in the guise of exceptions to the prescribed norms of power. In other words, the contingent and the empirical stand for a zero sign even in those discourses that make the concept of power coincide ideally with its history. It is a shadow which no body politic, however authoritarian, can manage to shake off. Witness, for instance, how “Soveraignty … the Soule of the Common-wealth,” that Hobbesian paradigm of pure Domi- [p.21] nance and an apparently “immortall” figure of power, is “subject to violent death” from the contingency of “Intestine Discord” caused by “the ignorance and passions of men.”36

The specificities of event and experience which provide historiography with its matériel are all a function of this interplay of the universal and the contingent. For it is precisely the force of this mutuality which distributes the constituent elements of D and S in varying moments to make up those characteristic variations in power relations that distinguish one society from another and one event from another. It can be said, borrowing a concept from political economy, that the power relation D/S differs from society to society and from event to event according to the organic composition of D and S. Just as the character of any fund of capital—its capacity to reproduce and expand itself—and its difference from any other fund in these respects depend on its organic composition, that is, on the weight of its constant part relative to that of its variable part, so does the character of D/S, in any particular instance, depend on the relative weightage of the elements C and p in D and of C* and R in S—on the organic composition of that power relation in short.

What determines that organic composition of power is of course a host of factors and their combinations, circumstantial as well as structural. Insofar as these factors are not quite the same in all articulations of C and P on the one hand, and of C* and R on the other, and insofar as the presence of such factors and their combinations is specific to the societies where they obtain and helps thereby to determine their individuality, the organic composition of D and S is, of necessity, contingent. Considered thus, there can be no ideal structure of power that is not subject to and modified by the contingencies of history: no Nazi fantasy of total force that is not disturbed by nightmares of dissent, no populist utopia of total consent that is not traversed by a constable’s beat, if not trodden by army jackboots.

Considered thus, again, some of the vocabulary of politics which has been turned into antique hoards by the enthusiasm of collectors or debased by indiscriminate use, can return to circulation. For instance, the important word “hegemony”—which is crucial to our argument—may now be relocated at that point where its notion intersects with the trajectory of real historical power relations. [p.22] As used in this work, hegemony stands for a condition of Dominance (D), such that, in the organic composition of D, Persuasion (P) outweighs Coercion (C). Defined in these terms, hegemony operates as a dynamic concept and keeps even the most persuasive structure of Dominance always and necessarily open to Resistance. At the same time, it avoids the Gramscian juxtaposition of domination and hegemony (a term sometimes used in the Prison Notebooks synonymously with leadership) as antinomies.37 This has, alas, provided far too often a theoretical pretext for the fabrication of a liberal absurdity—the absurdity of the idea of an uncoercive state—in spite of the basic drive of Gramsci’s own work to the contrary.

Since hegemony, as we understand it, is a particular condition of D and the latter is constituted by C and P, it follows that there can be no hegemonic system under which P outweighs C to the point of reducing it to nullity. Were that to happen, there would be no Dominance, hence no hegemony. In short, hegemony, deduced thus from Dominance, offers us the double advantage of pre-empting a slide towards a liberal-utopian conceptualization of the state and of representing power as a concrete historical relation informed necessarily and irreducibly both by force and by consent. We shall use this term in the sense discussed above as an aid to our study of the paradoxes of power which made the constituent elements of D and S entail each other in the manner they did in Indian politics under colonial rule.

II. Paradoxes of Power

Idioms of Dominance and Subordination

The articulation of D and S and their constituent elements at the purely phenomenal level of Indian politics should be evident even to unreflective observation. It will notice, from the corner of its lazy eye, that there was nothing in the nature of authority which, under British rule, was not an instance of these elements operating singly or, as was most often the case, in combination. To try and list up all such instances in an inventory would, of course, be futile. Since the field of politics, taken as a whole, was not bounded and these elements constituted that field, their number was necessarily [p.23] beyond count. Also, the distribution of these instances was not definitive either in a structural or a diachronic sense. Since the elements were mutually interactive, each of their instances was subject to the overdetermining effects of other instances both within and outside the province of its primary affiliation. And, again, the sheer force of contingency could, from time to time, prise any particular instance out of an originating province and assign it to another, so that what might have begun its career as an issue of, say, C or C*, would end up by being attributed, respectively, to P or R and vice versa.

The flux of such fusion and displacement as well as the sheer immeasurability of occurrence in an unbounded field call for an approach that would enable us to understand the operation of these elements without constructing an inventory of all their instances. For such an approach one can do no better than to start by recognizing that a principle of differentiation between two idioms is at work within each of the four constituents of D and S. One of these idioms derives from the metropolitan political culture of the colonizers, the other from the precolonial political traditions of the colonized. They derive, in short, from two distinct paradigms, one of which is typically British and the other Indian. It is the coalescence of these two idioms and their divergence which deter- mine the tensions within each element and define its character.

Order and Danda

To turn first to D and its constituents, it is clear that C comes before P and indeed before all the other elements. This precedence accrues to it by the logic of colonial state formation. For there can be no colonialism without coercion, no subjugation of an entire people in its own homeland by foreigners without the explicit use of force. Insofar as the raj was an autocracy—a description with which even some of its apologists have found it hard to disagree—C prevails in D as its crucial defining element. Its precedence in the order of elements is equally justified by the temporal development of British power in the subcontinent. For that power had established itself initially by an act of conquest, as some of the first colonialists themselves acknowledged without hesitation. They used the power of the sword effectively to cut through the [p.24] maze of conflicting jurisdictions exercised by a moribund Mughal Emperor, an effete Nawab, and a company of foreign merchants officiating as tax collectors. “There was no power in India,” said Philip Francis, “but the power of the sword, and that was the British sword, and no other.” And in saying so, he confirmed his famous rival, Warren Hastings, who also had spoken of the sword as the most valid title the British had to sovereignty in India.38

However, the justification of Britain’s occupation of India by the right of conquest was subjected before long to a dialectical shift as colonialism outgrew its predatory, mercantilist beginnings to graduate to a more systematic, imperial career. What was acquired haphazardly by conquest developed, in the course of this transition, into a carefully “regulated empire.” Corresponding to that change, the exclusive reliance on the sword, too, gave way to an orderly control in which force (without losing its primacy in the duplex system of D) had to learn to live with institutions and ideologies designed to generate consent. In other words, the idiom of conquest was replaced by the idiom of Order.

Within the British tradition, as indeed in bourgeois politics in general, Order is enforced by the coercive apparatus of the state. That apparatus was well on display under the raj, which boasted one of the largest standing armies of the world, an elaborate penal system, and a highly developed police force. Its bureaucracy was armed with powers which could and often did muzzle free speech and censor the press, curb the individual’s freedom of movement, and deny the right of assembly to the people—all in the name of Order. It is no wonder then that Order came to be identified with some of the most repugnant aspects of colonial rule and helped to designate it as an autocracy. What, however, made the imprimatur of colonialism particularly remarkable was that in India the official concern for Order extended to matters which were regarded in Western Europe, since the end of the absolute monarchies, as having little to do with the state or to do, at the most, with its non-coercive functions alone.

Instances abound. Thus it is clearly on record that Order was made to preside over public health, sanitation, and municipalization in the large urban centers from the very beginning of the raj. Some of the first medical reports on Calcutta were produced by the law-enforcing agencies of that city, while the operations of the [p.25] army to fight the plague in Pune testified to the readiness with which official violence could step in to tackle problems of disease control. And as Veena Talwar Oldenburg tells us in her remarkable work,39 the authority of the sword in urban development was unmistakable in the purely military considerations introduced by the British into the municipalization of Lucknow after the Mutiny.

In rural India the coercive intervention of the state was allowed to encroach on a domain which was jealously guarded by the instruments and ideology of bourgeois law in metropolitan Britain. This was the domain of the body, made inviolable by habeas corpus and the individual’s right to the security of his or her own person. But the body of the colonized person was not so secure under the rule of the same bourgeoisie in our subcontinent, as the uses of Order to mobilize manpower demonstrated again and again. A step had already been taken in the early days of the East India Company’s rule towards drafting begar (forced labor) for public works. The memory of press gangs used to force villagers to build roads for the Company’s army under the administration of Hastings continued to be evoked in folklore well into the nineteenth century, as, for example, in the ballad Rastar Kavita of 1836.40 Discontinued as official practice in the central parts of British India under late colonialism, the drafting of paharis, adivasis, and in general the rural poor for porterage and similar services demanded by visiting bureaucrats continued for much longer in the outlying hilly and forest regions. In one such region, the Kumauns,41 landholders were required to provide labor and services for the benefit of touring government officials and European sportsmen. They had also to supply labor for an entire range of public works. This was supposed to be paid for. But in practice the villagers were made to carry civilian and army baggage, set up rest huts (chappars), prepare sites for buildings and roads, and transport iron and timber needed for the construction of bridges—all for no remuneration at all.

Some of these aspects of forced labor, known locally as coolie utar, had been taken over by the British from chieftains who ruled these hills before them. But it is one of the characteristic paradoxes of colonialism that such feudal practices, far from being abolished or at least reduced, were in fact reinforced under a government representing the authority of the world’s most advanced bourgeoi- [p.26] sie. What had been a matter of custom under the hill rajas acquired a sort of statutory dignity under the raj and was systematized by its forest department into an administrative routine. The result was to convert the management of forced labor increasingly into a concern for Order as the people became more and more resolute in their resistance to it.

The idiom of Order helped also to mobilize labor for plantations owned by Europeans. The collusion between the indigo factories of nineteenth-century Bengal and the guardians of order was such an obvious and salient feature of the local administration that even Torap, the leading peasant character of Dinabandhu Mitra’s Neel-Darpan, failed to convince his fellow ryots about the district magistrate’s innocence in this respect. It would be true, however, to say that government policy had, by this time, turned decisively against the indigo planters, so that the support they received from the local administration did not necessarily have the approval of the higher authorities.42

But no such distinction could be made in the case of the tea plantations. The utterly oppressive system of labor recruitment for the Assam tea estates was sanctioned by the law of the central government and administered faithfully, even enthusiastically, by its regional representatives. At both levels this was done as a conscious measure of official solidarity with planters, even if it meant the perpetuation of inhumanity towards coolies. No less a person than the Law Member of the Government of India admitted that the labor contract authorized by the law was designed to commit a person to employment in Assam even before he knew what he was doing and hold him to his promise for some years on pain of arrest and imprisonment. “Conditions like these have no place in the ordinary law of master and servant,” he said. “We made them part of the law of British India at the instance and for the benefit of the planters of Assam.” And for quite some time, until his celebrated change of heart was to occur, Henry Cotton himself lent his authority, as the Chief Commissioner of Assam, to suppress the evidence of planters’ oppression in official reports and used the powers of his office to apprehend runaway coolies and return them to their masters.43

In one vital respect the mobilization of coolies for tea plantations differed little from the mobilization of cannon-fodder for the First [p.27] World War. In both cases, it was a matter of C being articulated in the idiom of Order. As recruitment for active service was made into an essential part of the Government of India’s contribution to Britain’s war efforts, all the coercive organs of the state—from the army through the judiciary to the police and village watch—were brought into operation in order to rob the vast mass of the subaltern population of its manpower. The thrust of this offensive penetrated to the deepest levels of rural society—perhaps the only imperial initiative ever to do so—especially in the regions inhabited by what the British called “the martial races.”

In Punjab, the most important of such martial regions, recruitment was conducted more vigorously than elsewhere and yielded the largest haul. All the agencies of Order, at all levels from Lieutenant-Governor to lambardars, combined here to bribe and bully the peasantry into surrendering their able-bodied men to the army, and would beat, torture, and sometimes shoot them for refusing to comply. How the horrors of war on the Western Front and the Middle East were thus brought home to the Punjab villages by official intervention in what was supposed to be voluntary enlistment has been documented amply enough by the Hunter Committee and the Congress Inquiry Committee of 1919-20 not to require any discussion here. The most important lesson to draw from that massive body of evidence for the purpose of our present argument is that Order, as an idiom of state violence, constituted a distinctive feature of colonialism primarily in one respect: that is, in colonial India, it was allowed to intrude again and again into many such areas of the life of the people as would have been firmly kept out of bounds in metropolitan Britain. In other words, the specificity of D in the power relations of the raj derived to a significant degree from the structuring of C by Order.

But the idiom of Order did not function all by itself. It interacted with another idiom to make C what it was under colonial conditions. That was an Indian idiom—the idiom of Danda, which was central to all indigenous notions of dominance. All the semi-feudal practices and theories of power which had come down intact from the precolonial era or were remolded under the impact of colonialism without being radically altered fed in varying degrees on this idiom. The private feudal armies and levies, caste and territorial [p.28] panchayats governed by local elite authority, caste sanctions imposed by the elite and religious sanctions by the priesthood, bonded labor and begar, the partial entitlement of landlords to civilian and criminal jurisdiction over the tenantry, punitive measures taken against women for disobeying patriarchal moral codes, elite violence organized on sectarian, ethnic and caste lines, and so on are all instances of C framed in the idiom of Danda. They represent only a small sample taken from a large area of indigenous politics, where almost any superordinate authority that sought support from an Indian tradition of coercion tended inevitably to fall back on the concept of Danda.

That concept is central to ancient Indian polity, based in its classical form on monarchical absolutism, and it extends far beyond “punishment” (which is how it is usually translated into English) to stand for all that is implied by dominance in that particular historical context. It represents, as Gonda has observed, an ensemble of “power, authority and punishment.”44 It emphasizes force and fear as the fundamental principles of politics. Source and foundation of royal authority, Danda is regarded as the manifestation of divine will in the affairs of the state.

There are no shastric discourses on dharma and niti which are indifferent to this theme, but the Laws of Manu may be said to speak for all of them.45 Danda is described in that text as an emanation of the supreme generative deity Brahman himself, indeed as “his own son” (VII, 14)—a red-eyed, dark-skinned god (VII, 25), “through fear of [whom] all created beings, both the immoveable and moveable, allow themselves to be enjoyed and swerve not from their duties” (VII, 15). Danda is identified as the universal authority: “Danda is (in reality) the king and the male, that [is] the ruler, and that is called the surety for the four orders’ obedience to the law” (VII, 17). Any deviation from Danda would turn the world upside down: “If the king did not, without tiring, inflict danda on those worthy to be punished, the stronger would roast the weaker, like fish on a spit; the crow would eat the sacrificial cake and the dog would lick the sacrificial viands, and ownership would not remain with anyone, the lower ones would (usurp the place of) the higher ones” (VII, 20-21).

This harsh concept of power served, in the colonial period, to legitimize all exercises of coercive authority by the dominant over [p.29] the subordinate in every walk of life that was outside the jealously guarded realm of official Order. The sacral aspect of the idiom allowed such exercise to justify itself by a morality conforming fully to the semi-feudal values still pronounced in our culture. “In this emphasis on the role of punishment in maintaining order,” writes a distinguished student of ancient Indian polity, “some statements on the interdependence of dharma and danda come dangerously close to identifying the legal and the moral, to assuming (at least for the lower strata of society) that moral behaviour is possible only through coercion and conformity .In this view there can be no real moral choice on the part of the masses, and fear of punishment replaces positive allegiance to dharma.”46

Armed with this doctrine, every landlord could indeed play “maharaj” to his tenants in extracting begar from them or setting his lathi-wielding myrmidons on them if they refused to oblige. Again, according to this principle, the use of violence by upper-caste elites against untouchables and adivasis or the instigation of sectarian strife by a dominant local group against the subaltern adherents of a faith other than its own, could pass as a meritorious act modeled on a sovereign’s defense of dharma. And since, as noticed above, Danda is depicted as a male (Manu: VII, 17), there could be nothing wrong about exploiting women by force either for labor or for the sexual gratification of men. Indeed, punitive sanctions imposed on women for disregarding a code of sexual morality constructed entirely from a male point of view could be justified as essential for the maintenance of an undifferentiated moral order . In short, Danda was there to uphold a putative king’s authority in every little kingdom constituted by D and S in all relationships of gender, age, caste, and class.

Improvement and Dharma

There were two distinct idioms at work within the element p as well. One of these was the British idiom of Improvement, which informed all efforts made by the colonial rulers to relate nonantagonistically to the ruled. These included among others the introduction of Western-style education (siksha) and English as the language of administration and instruction; official and quasi- official patronage for Indian literary, theatrical, and other artistic [p.30] productions; Christian missionary efforts at ameliorating the conditions of lower-caste and tribal populations; Orientalist projects aimed at exploring, interpreting, and preserving the heritage of ancient and medieval Indian culture; constitutional and administrative measures to accommodate the Indian elite in a secondary position within the colonial power structure; paternalistic (mabaap) British attitude towards the peasantry; tenancy legislations; legal (if often ineffective) abolition of feudal impositions; legal and institutional measures to promote a subcontinental market consistent 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, peasants, 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 measures 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 century beginning with the 1780s.47 There was hardly anything in that country’s economic and technological progress, its social and political movements, or in the intellectual trends of the period, which was not a response, in one sense or another, to the urge for Improvement—that big thrust of an optimistic and ascendant bourgeoisie 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 enthusiasm radiating from the metropolis. Indeed, India figured almost obsessively in the metropolitan discourse 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. [p.31] 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.48

The idea of Improvement made its debut in India with the administration of Lord Cornwallis. The verb “improve” and adjectival and noun phrases based on it occurred frequently in his correspondence and official pronouncements—something like nineteen times in his two famous minutes of 18 September 1789 and 3 February 1790 written in defence of his plan for an immediate introduction of Permanent Settlement.49 The plan, an echo, fifteen years later, of Philip Francis’s physiocratic doctrines, was intended to bestow permanent proprietary rights in land on the zamindars of Bengal in order to convert them into “economical landlords and prudent trustees of public interest” who would transform agriculture by bringing wastelands into cultivation, building irrigation works, and generally enhancing the value of landed property to an extent “hitherto unknown in Hindoostan.”50

But this vision of economic improvement was framed by considerations of power. Permanent Settlement was “indispensably necessary” not only “to restore this country to a state of prosperity” but “to enable it to continue to be a solid support to the British interests and power in this part of the world.”51 For the stability of that power was critically dependent on the collaboration of the propertied classes. “In case of a foreign invasion,” wrote Cornwallis,

it is a matter of the last [that is, ultimate] importance, considering the means by which we keep possession of this country, that the proprietors of the lands should be attached to us, from motives of self-interest. A landholder, who is secured in the quiet enjoyment of a profitable estate can have no motive for wishing for a change. On the contrary , if the rents of his lands are raised, in proportion to their improvement, … he will readily listen to any offers which are likely to bring about a change that cannot place him in a worse situation, but which hold out to him hopes of a better.52 [p.32]

In other words, Improvement was a political strategy to persuade the indigenous elite to “attach” themselves to the colonial regime.

Improvement as the means of political persuasion remained central to official policy throughout the formative period of the raj between Permanent Settlement and the Mutiny. The Govemor-General who promoted this policy more vigorously and more successfully than anyone else was William Bentinck. He took over Cornwallis’s legacy, nurtured and developed it with great authority , and bequeathed it to all subsequent administrations as an established principle of government. A Benthamite of sorts and admirer of James Mill, he too wrote and spoke obsessively about Improvement. An improving landlord himself in the Fenlands of his native England, he speculated about the benefits of a modest degree of capitalist development in Indian agriculture. He advocated, albeit unsuccessfully, a policy of opening up the subcontinent to British settlers with capital and skill, so that their enterprise could contribute to economic prosperity by exploiting its “singularly cheap supply of labour.”53 An enthusiast for Evangelicalism, he swung the weight of the government in favor of a number of initiatives for social reform. Deeply convinced of “the superiority which has gained us the dominion of India,” he made English the principal language of government, promoted Western-style education, and generally encouraged the propagation of a liberal culture among the intelligentsia and the urban middle classes.

All this has made a historian describe him, with good reason, as a “liberal imperialist”54—that characteristic product of nineteenth-century British politics whose historical function was to persuade the colonized and the colonizer to coexist without mutual antagonism. However, any temptation to interpret Bentinck’s success in this role as evidence of a pure and disinterested goodwill must be tempered by the recognition that his liberalism was the faithful and astute instrument of a hard-headed imperialism. For this was, in effect, his response to the fear which haunted so many of the more perceptive British observers during the second quarter of the nineteenth century—the fear that the regime’s isolation from the people under its rule would gravely undermine its security.55 “Is there anywhere the prospect of our obtaining, in a season of exigency,” Bentinck wondered, “that co-operation which a community, not avowedly hostile, ought to afford to its rulers ? Is it not rather true [p.33] that we are the objects of dislike to the bulk of those classes who possess the influence, courage, and vigour of character which would enable them to aid us?”56

It is the attachment of these elite sections of Indian society to the raj which he sought to ensure, in the true Cornwallis tradition, by the politics of Improvement—a strategy of persuasion to make imperial dominance acceptable, even desirable, to Indians. All the initiatives which originated with the colonial state for educational, social, and generally cultural reform, all laws, regulations, and institutions by which it sought to ameliorate the material conditions of our people, all its measures to “civilize” us and contribute to our “happiness” in conformity to the doctrines of Evangelicalism and Utilitarianism were variations on the idiom of Improvement, a derivative of metropolitan liberalism which operated, under colonial conditions, as an active principle of the element P in D/S.

The success of that strategy can hardly be exaggerated. Combined with a fair amount of force, it helped Britain to keep the antagonism of the subject population well under control despite the two extensive rebellions of 1857 and 1942 and many local uprisings. That peace between the rulers and the ruled was mediated to no mean extent by the indigenous elite. Thanks to the propagation of western-style education, they had imbibed the ideology of liberal-imperialism well enough to believe that “dominion by the English would be conducive to the happiness of projas”—the prophecy which, at the conclusion of Anandamath, persuades its hero to withdraw from armed opposition to the raj. Nothing could demonstrate the power of that ideology more clearly than its author’s notion of such happiness both as a benefit of positivist knowledge acquired from the West and as an outcome of the assimilation of Utilitarianism to the supposedly rational core of Hindu religious culture.57

What made such assimilation possible was the presence of an Indian idiom of politics—the idiom of Dharma—alongside the British idiom of Improvement in P. For it was to Dharma that the indigenous elite turned in order to justify and explain the initiatives by which they hoped to make their subordinates relate to them as nonantagonistically as possible. Even when an initiative was [p.34] clearly liberal in form and intent, such as setting up a village school, its rationale was sought in Dharma, understood, broadly, as the quintessence of “virtue, the moral duty,” which implied a social duty conforming to one’s place in the caste hierarchy as well as the local power structures—that is, conforming to what Weber called the “organic” societal doctrine of Hinduism.” (sic)58 In this sense, any elite authority, whether exercised by an individual or a group, would model itself on rajadharma, the archetypal dominance of Hindu polity, and imply not only the prerogatives of coercion (danda) but also an obligation to protect, foster, support, and promote the subordinate. The ideal, consecrated both by myth, as in that of King Prthu, the primordial provider and protector, and by prescription as in the Samhitas and the Santiparva and Anusasanikaparva of the Mahabharata, could, under certain historical circumstances, act as a powerful instrument of class conciliation.59 Kosambi comments on this with profound insight in his discussion of Asokan dhamma.

The state [he writes] developed a new function after Asoka, the reconciliation of classes. This had never been visualised by the Arthasastra … The special tool for this conciliatory action was precisely the universal dhamma in the new sense. King and citizen found common meeting-ground in freshly developed religion … It can even be said that the Indian national character received the stamp of dhamma from the time of Asoka. The word soon came to mean something else than equity, namely religion—and by no means the sort of religion Asoka himself professed. The most prominent future cultural developments thereafter would always bear the misleading outer cover of some dharma. It is altogether fitting that the present Indian national symbol is derived from what remains of the Asokan lion-capital at Sarnath.60

Between the Asokan and Nehruite phases of its career the concept is invoked by yet another generation of the elite in its endeavor to build neither a kingdom nor even a dynastic republic but a nation as the stepping stone for its access to power. Wanting both in the material conditions and the culture adequate for this task its attempt to speak for the nation relied heavily on the traditional idiom of Dharma, with the curious result that something as contemporary as nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalism [p.35] often made its appearance in political discourse dressed up as ancient Hindu wisdom. This is why even in its very first (if unsuccessful) attempt to mobilize the masses in a campaign of opposition to the raj, the nationalist elite, in the course of the Swadeshi Movement of 1903-1908, made Dharma into a unifying (aikya) and harmonizing (samanjasya) principle of politics, as witness the many writings of the great ideologue of that period, Rabindranath Tagore. Commenting on the patriotic upsurge against Curzon’s plan to partition Bengal he observed: “What is it that lies at the root of all our miseries? It lies in our mutual isolation. It therefore follows that any serious application to the cause of our country’s welfare must be addressed to the work of uniting the disparate Many of our land. What is it that can unify the disparate Many? Dharma.”61

The idiom of Swadeshi politics which thus identified Dharma with patriotic duty on the one hand and with Hindu religiosity on the other, failed, in the event, to conciliate the mutually antagonistic interests with the body politic—especially the opposing interests of Hindu and Muslim sectarian politics. The more the Hindu middle classes united in a nationalism inspired by Dharma, the more the exclusive aspects of Hindu Dharma divided the nation, ranging the rural gentry against the peasantry, upper castes against Namasudras, and above all Hindus and Muslims against each other.

Subsequently, even after the Congress had emerged as a mass party under Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership and the nationalist elite acquired a relatively broader base for itself in Indian politics, its urge to speak for the nation was still wanting in those material and spiritual conditions which alone would have made it possible to do so. As a result, the idiom of Dharma continued to influence elite political discourse, especially of that particular variety which refused to acknowledge class struggle as a necessary and significant instrument of the struggle against imperialism. Since Gandhism was, in this period, the most important of all the ideologies of class collaboration within the nationalist movement, it was also the one that had the most elaborate and most frequent recourse to the concept of Dharma.

This is documented so well in all that was significant about Gandhi’s ideas and practice that it would do, for the economy of [p.36] the present discussion, to limit ourselves to his theory of trusteeship which epitomizes it. “It is the duty of the ruler,” he wrote,

to serve his people. What I have said about the ruler applies to all owners of wealth. Just as it is the duty of the ruler to be the trustee and friend of the people, so that of the latter is not to be jealous of the former. The poor man must know that to a great extent poverty is due to his own faults and shortcomings. So while the poor man must strive to improve his condition, let him not hate the ruler and wish his destruction … He must not want rulership for himself, but remain content by earning his own wants. This condition of mutual co-operation and help is the Swaraj of my conception.

Another name for that Swaraj is Dharmaraj, literally, the Rule of Dharma: “A just administration is Satyayuga (Age of Truth), Swaraj, Dharmaraj, Ramraj, people’s government. In such government, the ruler will be the protector, trustee and friend of the people.”62

Gandhi made no secret of the practical uses he had in mind for this theory. It was formulated and avowed in opposition to socialist theory and in defense of landlordism. “I enunciated this theory,” he said, “when, the socialist theory was placed before the country in respect to the possessions held by zamindars and ruling chiefs.”63 To avoid class struggle in the countryside, he pleaded with the landlords to “regard themselves, even as the Japanese nobles did [!], as trustees holding their wealth for the good of their wards, the ryots.”64 In his Dharmaraj, “a model zamindar” would help his ryots to overcome their “ignorance of the laws of sanitation and hygiene” and

He will study the economic condition of the ryots under his care, establish schools in which he will educate his own children side by side with those of the ryots. He will purify the village well and the village tank. He will teach the ryot to sweep his roads and clean his latrines by himself doing this necessary labour. He will throw open without reserve his own gardens for the unrestricted use of the ryot. He will use as hospital, school or the like most of the unnecessary buildings which he keeps for his pleasure. [p.37]

In general, Gandhi expected that “model zamindar” to “reduce himself to poverty in order that the ryot may have the necessaries of life.” It is a measure of his commitment to this ideology of class conciliation based on tenants’ subordination to landlords that these hopeful lines were published in Young India in December 1929 when the peasantry were being driven by the force of the Depression to rise against the zamindars and talukdars of the United Provinces (renamed Uttar Pradesh after Independence). These sentiments, he wrote, were inspired by the very positive impressions he had gained, during a recent tour of that province, of some young landlords who “had simplified their lives and fired by patriotic zeal were easing the burden of the ryots.”

In the same article he also hoped that the capitalist class would “read the signs of the times” and voluntarily surrender its wealth before “the impending chaos into which, if the capitalist does not wake up betimes, awakened but ignorant, famishing millions will plunge the country and which not even the armed force that a powerful government can bring into play can avert.” His appeal to the capitalists’ fear of the consequences of class struggle and their sense of Dharma did not, apparently, go unheeded. For the article quoted above was followed exactly a fortnight later in the pages of the same journal by extracts from a speech delivered by a leading capitalist at the Maharashtra Merchants’ Conference.65 “Speaking on the duty of capitalists,” wrote Gandhi in an editorial note, “he [the speaker] presented an ideal which it will be difficult even for a labour man to improve upon.” It would be equally justified to say that the interpretation of the Gandhian theory of trusteeship in favor of capitalism could hardly have been bettered by Gandhi himself. Indeed, the speech testifies to the ingenuity with which the most advanced section of the bourgeoisie used the idiom of Dharma in order to promote class conciliation as well as to secure a place for its own interests within the developing ideology of elitist nationalism. The speaker was Ghanshyamdas Birla.

In his speech Birla deplored that the modern capitalist was treated as an alien “belonging to a separate class,” which he felt was not in agreement with Indian tradition: “in the days of yore the situation was something quite different. If we analyse the functions of the Vaishya of the ancient times, we find that he was assigned [p.38] the duty of production and distribution not for personal gain but for common good. All the wealth that he amassed, he held as a trustee for the nation.”

Having assimilated thus the present to the past, capitalist to Vaishya, his social and economic role to the functionalism of varna flramadharma, his hunt for profit to a concern for common good, exploitation to trusteeship and above all his class interest to the national interest, Birla then goes on to exhort his audience of industrialists and traders to act up to their swadharma and “fulfil their real function … not as exploiters, but as servants of society,” as those genuinely engaged in production and distribution “for the service of the community.” All this, to ward off the spectre of class struggle and avert the chaos of popular violence about which Gandhi had warned the bourgeoisie. “No Communism or Bolshevism can thrive if we know and discharge our duty,” said Birla. “If I may say so, it is we who provided a fertile soil for the development of Communism and Bolshevism by relegating our duty to the background. If we knew our duty and followed it faithfully, I am sure that we could save society from many evils.” This identifcation of Communism and Bolshevism, the most radical of all the contemporary movements of class struggle, as “evils,” that is adharma, corresponds to the dharmic function of trusteeship assigned by Gandhi to indigenous capitalism and is willingly accepted by Birla on its behalf.

Thus the penetration of elite nationalism by the interests of big business came to be mediated by the classical idiom of political conciliation—Dharma. Within the relation D/S, it invested the element P with a characteristically Indian ingredient to match the British ingredient of Improvement promoted by liberal-imperialism. The purpose served by each idiom, in its respective domain, was to assuage contradictions by making them mutually nonantagonistic and enable the engine of dominance to run on smoothly.

Obedience and Bhakti

We have noticed how the idea of Improvement had already been caught up in the drift of Utilitarianism even when it was still associated with Physiocracy and how it was eventually assimilated [p.39]

by emphasizing the mutuality of interest between rulers and the ruled in, say, constitutional reforms or defence of the realm; with the former glorified as partnership, power sharing, self-government, and the latter as patriotism.

How the idiom of Obedience helped to shape Indian collaboration at such crises may be studied in the light of Gandhi’s record during the Boer War when, as even the hagiographer D. G. Tendulkar admits, “his loyalty to the empire drove him to side with the British in the teeth of opposition from some of his countrymen.”76 His offer of help, made on behalf of the Indian community in South Africa, was at first treated by the British with almost undisguised contempt. However, they were eventually persuaded to accept it, and an Indian Ambulance Corps, made up of over 1,000 Indian stretcher-bearers, was formed and allowed to serve at the front.77 The speeches and writings in which Gandhi justifies his offer and reflects on its outcome between October 1899 and April 1900 constitute a classic text of collaborationist nationalism. Here are some samples.

We do not know how to handle arms. It is not our fault: it is perhaps our misfortune that we cannot, but it may be there are other duties … and, no matter of what description they may be, we would consider it a privilege to he called upon to perform them … If an unflinching devotion to duty and an extreme eagerness to serve our Sovereign can make us of any use on the field of battle, we trust we would not fail.

The motive underlying this humble offer is to endeavour to prove that, in common with other subjects of the Queen-Empress in South Mrica, the Indians, too, are ready to do duty for their Sovereign on the battlefield. The offer is meant to be an earnest of the Indian loyalty. (19 October 1899)

Some local English-speaking Indians met together a few days ago, and decided that because they were British subjects, and as such demanded rights, they ought to forget their domestic differences, and irrespective of their opinion on the justice of the war, render some service, no matter how humble, on the battlefield during the crisis, even if it were to act as bearers of the wounded … They have offered their services without pay, unconditionally, to the Government or the Imperial authorities, stating that they do not

the milkmaids (gopis) of Vraj, the initiative is always his to seduce, dally with, and desert his female partners. It is a relationship of love that is an authentic instance of the primacy assumed by the male in the sexual politics of a patriarchal society. This implies, among other things, the passivity of the female. Bhakti actually prescribes such passivity by depicting the gopis as women who have no sexual passion (prakrta-kama) of their own, but are merely conducive to Krishna’s pleasure: “In all these ecstatic sports the Gopis never had the slightest desire for their own pleasure, but all their efforts were directed towards effecting the supreme pleasure of the Bhagavat.”88

The sexual instrumentality of women is then spiritualized by the srngara mode (also known as madhura-bhava) into an ideal of love that transcends all that is of the body and of the world. In this transcendental eroticism, says De, “the supersensuous Madhurabhava of the Gopis is different from the sensuous Kama in the fact that the significance of the former consists entirely in contributing to the pleasure of its divine object, while the latter, as a mundane feeling, aims primarily at one’s own pleasure.”89 The only female among Krishna’s companions to show any signs of such “mundane feeling,” that is, Kubja, who wanted to relate to him as an active partner, is roundly denounced, “for her desire for sport was entirely for her own sensual pleasure, while that of the Gopis was exclusively intended for Krsna.”90

In conformity to this mode, says Allchin, “the soul of the devotee becomes a gopi in its relationship to Krsna, and this calls for the envisaging of a change of sex in male devotees, who in this sentiment [i.e. rasa] become as it were the female consort of the God.”91 If the male devotee could be transformed, out of Bhakti, into a gopi for the benefit of Krishna’s dalliance-and there are sects who cultivate this particular rasa more than the others92—why, one wonders, does the god himself, with all his love of play, never undergo a similar transformation for the benefit of his male devotees? The answer must be that even mythopoeia is subject to the morality of male dominance, and since a devotee is a subordinate by definition, even an erotic construction of his relation to the deity is necessarily postulated on the superordinate status of the latter.

Bhakti, in other words, is an ideology of subordinationpar excellence. All the inferior terms in any relationship of power structured [p.49] as D/S within the Indian tradition, can be derived from it. This emerges with striking clarity from the rationalization of rasa theory by Jiva Goswami, the great theologian of Vaishnavism. He regrouped the five primary modalities, and their many variations into three, namely, “Asraya-bhakti, Dasya-bhakti, and Prasraya- bhakti, in which Krsna appears respectively as the Palaka (Protector), Prabhu (Master) and Lalaka (Superior Relative), and his devotee respectively as Palya (Subject), Dasa (Servant) and Lalya (Inferior Relative).”93 There is nothing in the nature of authority in precolonial India which is not comprehensively covered by these three dyads—Palaka/Palya, Prabhu/Dasa, and Lalaka/Lalya.

Bhakti may thus be said to have continued the political theories enunciated and elaborated over the centuries by the Dharmasastras and adapted them to the conditions of later feudalism. However, it did not derive subordination from dandaniti—the principle of the big stick—which, in the Dharmasastras, had made subalternity predicated on fear generated by the alliance between Kshatriya’s brawn and Brahman’s brain. On the contrary, those of its cults which were addressed to the religiosity of the lower strata of Hindu society, had it as their function to try and endear the dominant to the subordinate and assuage the rigor of dasya thereby.

It was these that spiritualized the effort, fatigue, and frustration involved in the labor and services offered by peasants, craftsmen, and subaltern specialists to local elites, in the unacknowledged and unremunerated labor of women in domestic chores, in the work done by kamin for jajman, in the use-values produced by tenants as gifts and nazrana for landlords, and so on. In all such instances Bhakti conferred on the superordinate the sanctity of a deity or his surrogate, and translated dominance into the benign function of a palaka, prabhu, or lalaka (depending on the nature of the social relation and services involved) to whom the subordinate related as a devotee. Correspondingly, the latter’s submission, which rested in the last resort on the sanction of force, was made to appear as self-induced and voluntary—that is, as collaboration in short.

But that classical idiom of Indian politics was not made into an ingredient of C* under the raj merely by the force of traditional religiosity among the subaltern masses unaffected by Western- style education and liberal culture. Bhakti required a nineteenth-century Jiva Goswami to adapt it to the requirements of colonial [p.50] 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.94 Here, he starts off 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 (aikya) or cohesion (bandhan) 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 modification meant, for Bankimchandra, a radical decline in Bhakti under the impact of colonialism: “Look at the evils and disorders caused by the loss of Bhakti in our country. Hindus were never wanting in Bhakti. It has always been one of the principal elements of the Hindu religion and Hindu shastras. But now Bhakti has completely disappeared from the community of those who are educated or only half-educated. They have failed to grasp the true significance of the western doctrine of egalitarianism (samyabad) and perverted it to mean that people are equal everywhere in every sense and nobody owes Bhakti to anyone else.” The consequence, according to him, has been to turn family life into a hell, create discord in politics, make education harmful, perpetuate stagnation and disorder in society and fill the individual’s soul with impurity and conceit.

The remedy for these evils lay, of course, in the revitalization of Bhakti. But no sooner does the author set out to prescribe how than it becomes obvious that his formula deviates significantly from those time-honored codes whose decline he laments so much. Thus he adheres closely to orthodox Hindu tradition in nominating those who are, in his opinion, deserving of Bhakti within an ex- [p.51]

historical progeny of industrial and finance capital, but also for its historic Other.

There were some Indian liberals on whom that universalist illusion had little or no effect. They were among the more advanced elements of the intelligentsia. They had acquired, by education, an understanding of the rule of law as an ideal, but knew from their own experience as the colonized that it did not work in colonialist practice. In this knowledge, they differed from the mass of their “uneducated” compatriots who had not yet learnt to evaluate the performance of the Sarkar by that alien norm. But they also differed from their opposite numbers in England. For, unlike them, the Indian liberal was not born to a tradition imbued with the ideology of a rule of law, nor was that a code he used systematically to think and express his notions of power. He was, therefore, quick to notice the distortion of that code in the governance of the raj and interpret it as a telling difference between English doctrine and Anglo-Indian deed. In this clash of perceptions between the liberal as the colonizer and the liberal as the colonized, we have yet another demonstration of the parallax of power: since the dominant’s angle of vision must differ from that of the dominated in any observation of the phenomenon D by both, there must always be two rather different images of that phenomenon obtained from such observation.

It is not surprising therefore that Dodwell’s view of the rule of law in India should differ radically from the view taken of the raj by two representative Indian liberals. One of them, Rabindranath Tagore, turns to this theme again and again in a series of essays between 1893 and 1903.112 He writes of the illusions of the first liberals: “We had just graduated and undertaken to translate such foreign phrases as equality, liberty, fraternity, etc., into Bangla. We thought that Europe, with all its physical prowess, acknowledged the weak as its equal in terms of human right. We, the recent graduates, were absolutely overwhelmed and looked upon them as gods whom we could go on worshipping for all time and who would go on helping us for ever with their beneficence.”113 But such sentiments proved wrong. The British were quick to demonstrate that they would not treat Indians as equals after all. Tagore cites instances of racist arrogance on the part of the whites in their [p.68] social transactions with the natives and of racial discrimination on the part of the regime in the judicial and other areas of public administration.114 He accuses the English of acting on the basis of a morality “split right in the middle (dvikhandita),”

so that they find it very difficult indeed to come to a fair judge- ment in cases of dispute between their own compatriots and others. For it is not unlikely that an Englishman who would not hesitate to try and reduce the Indian population by punching, kicking or shooting without any provocation at all, would still be considered as innocent as a lamb by his own community. Consequently, he would not be regarded by the English as guilty of murder in quite the same way as would be a native murderer … To sentence such a man to death by hanging could therefore be considered by them as legal murder.115

And, again,

It is quite easy for an Englishman to hit an Indian-and that, not merely because he is physically strong … This is because, in this case, I am merely an individual, while he, an Englishman, stands for the power of the state. In a court of law, I shall be judged as an ordinary mortal and he as an Englishman. And if I hit an Englishman, the judge would consider it as an attack on the authority of the state, as undermining English prestige. As a result, I cannot be tried for anything as simple as common assault.116

As Tagore was about to publish the first of this series of articles “speaking bitterness” in 1893, Gandhi too was on the point of launching on his political career in South Africa. There he was quick to notice—indeed, was forced to notice—how professions of bourgeois democracy were violated in the practice of imperialism. “My public life began in 1893 in South Africa in troubled weather,” he recalled at his trial at the end of the Non-cooperation Movement nearly thirty years later. “My first contact with British authority in that country was not of a happy character. I discovered that as a man and an Indian I had no rights. More correctly, I discovered that I had no rights as a man because I was an Indian.”117 [p.69]

However, unlike Tagore whom the arrogance of the rulers had already transformed from a loyalist liberal into a nationalist critic of the raj, Gandhi was slow to shed his illusions. For the next twenty years or so he would still be ready to grant British imperialism the benefit of doubt and explain away white racism in South Africa as “an excrescence upon a system that was intrinsically and mainly good.”118 But the system finally lost its standing with him after the Jalianwalabagh atrocities and the blatant manner in which these were condoned by the colonial authorities both in India and England. “The Punjab crime was white-washed and most culprits went not only unpunished, but remained in service and some continued to draw pensions from the Indian revenue, and in some cases were even rewarded.”119 So Gandhi who had already described the Rowlatt Act as “a law designed to rob the people of all real freedom,” went on to denounce “the law itself in this country” as “used to serve the foreign exploiter” and as ..prostituted consciously or unconsciously for the benefit of the exploiter .”120

So much for Dodwell’s “rule of law” in colonial India! So much for its standing as “a cultural achievement of universal significance”! Quite clearly its .’universality” was not obvious even to such liberals among the subjugated people, who, by their own admission, had started off with a good deal of faith in it. Gandhi spoke of the conceit and self-deception of the colonialists and their native collaborators in this respect thus:

The greatest misfortune is that Englishmen and their Indian associates in the administration of the country do not know that they are engaged in the crime [of using the law for the purposes of colonial exploitation] I have attempted to describe. I am satisfied that many English and Indian officials honestly believe that they are administering one of the best systems devised in the world and that India is making steady though slow progress. They do not know that a subtle but effective system of terrorism and an organized display of force on the one hand, and the deprivation of all powers of retaliation or self-defence on the other, have emasculated the people and induced in them the habit of simulation. This awful habit has added to the ignorance and the self-deception of the administrators.121 [p.70]

Tagore’s critique went even further. He attributed the defects of the system not so much to “the ignorance and the self-deception of the administrators” as to the limitations of English bourgeois culture itself. If the “ Anglo-Indians” (a nineteenth-century term for the British living and working in India) ignored in their con- duct all those liberal norms and democratic ideals they cherished in their metropolitan culture, said Tagore, it was because they had systematized the sense of Western superiority with regard 10 the peoples of the East into a political philosophy based on the theories of Herbert Spencer and others. According to those theories, the laws of evolution required an adjustment of political and moral principles to the level of any given civilization, so that the application of the more advanced Western principles to the relatively backward and very different non- Western societies could be harmful to their wellbeing and bring discredit upon the civilizing agents themselves. “The point I want to make,” wrote Tagore, “is that an idea is fast gaining ground in India as well as in England itself that European principles are meant for Europe alone. Indians are so very different that the principles of civilization are not fully suitable for their needs.” Thus, even the most eminent of Indian liberals—one who believed in the universality of culture more than many of his contemporaries—was not deceived by the universalist claim of English liberalism. On the contrary, he identified it as a cultural dialect’s pretension to the status of a universal language.

What such pretension meant, in colonialist practice, was that it put an assumption of European superiority at the very core of the governance of India. It meant distancing the governors from the governed and generating among the former a fear of isolation of which Cornwallis and Bentinck had warned, and which their successors now sought to overcome by a display of force. British rule, wrote Tagore in despair, seemed not to recognize that it was good “both for the realm and the rulers that the administration should be as free of conflict and antagonism as possible.” He referred to Kipling’s imagery of India as a zoo where the natives had to be kept under control by the whip combined with “a promise of bones for food and even a little affection that was owing to pets.” But it would be disastrous to introduce “such things as ethics, friendship, civilization, and so on into this treatment, for that might threaten [p.71] the life of the keeper himself.” Colonial rule, he concluded, was “a blend of cruelty and haughty assertion of force.”

According to this perception, Dodwell’s rule of law had evidently not arrived even thirty years after the Mutiny. Nor was it yet in sight thirty years later, when, as noticed above, Gandhi thought it fit to describe the regime as an “effective system of terrorism and an organized display of force.” Thus, in the estimate of even the most “reasonable” Indians, colonialism amounted to a dominance without hegemony—that is, to D with its organic composition seriously undermined by the dilution of the element P. Nothing could testify more to the failure of metropolitan bourgeois culture to inform the structure of authority in Britain’s subcontinental empire fully by its own content.

The Fabrication of a Spurious Hegemony

One of the consequences of that failure has been to inhibit the homogenization of the domain of politics. F or, under conditions of dominance without hegemony, the life of civil society can never be fully absorbed into the activity of the state. That is why pre-capitalist politics, in which dominance neither solicits nor acquires hegemony, are usually characterized by the coexistence of several cultures of which the culture of the ruling group is only one, even if the strongest, among others. Thus, as Kosambi tells us, during the long era of Indian feudalism cultural modes peculiar to it had to learn to Jive with those of the historically precedent but still active hunting and foodgathering social formations. What is equally important is that this compromise was rationalized by the dominant culture in such a way as to give it the appearance of a universal, eternal, or some other supra-historical phenomenon or entity .The triumphant Brahmanical culture of later feudalism would therefore inscribe the pastoral, Vedic yajna into the Dharmasastras as a timeless tradition, adopt a myriad of primitive local deities and refashion them into images of a supra-local Hindu pantheon, and everywhere “the Brahmin would write puranas to make aboriginal rites respectable.”122

Even the bourgeoisie, in the course of its striving for dominance in Western Europe, would make a virtue of accommodating its rivals by ideological ploys of the same kind: “for instance, in an age [p.72] and in a country where royal power, aristocracy and bourgeoisie are contending for domination and where, therefore, domination is shared, the doctrine of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an ‘eternal law’.”123 In those words the authors of The German Ideology noticed how an ascending but still immature bourgeoisie had tried, a hundred years ago, to make its failure to achieve paramountcy appear as a constitutional principle valid for all time. From our own position in the last decade of the twentieth century, it is possible now to look back on the same bourgeoisie which, having come of age, had established its hegemonic dominance in metropolitan Europe and expanded into a colonial empire only to realize that its rule over its Asian subjects must rely, alas, more on force than consent. Consequently, in its attempt to disguise its failure to make dominance informed by hegemony in its colonial project it had recourse again to that well-tried universalist trick.

But there was a difference this time. Unlike in the earlier phase, universalism was no longer a signal of real advance, but merely a gesture in the direction of a past triumph. It was a nostalgia that fed on the historic achievement of the bourgeoisie in its youth when by acting for its particular interest it could still be regarded as acting for the general interest, and when the nation-state, put to use as an instrument of the will of its own class, could still appear as if it was an embodiment of people’s will as a whole. In other words, the heady sense of dominance blessed with hegemony lingered on for a while even after the moment of glory had passed and was transformed, by reflection, into a universal and almost transcendental attribute of bourgeois power valid for all time and place. From that abstraction it was but one short step to conceptualizing its last historic “achievement,” that is, colonialism, too, as hegemonic.

It was historiography which, more than any other bourgeois knowledge, contributed to the fabrication of this spurious hegemony. “It is the state which first supplies a content,” said Hegel, “which not only lends itself to the prose of history but actually helps to produce it.”124 The truth of this observation is fully borne out by the complicity between the formation of a colonial state in India and the production of colonialist histories of the raj. These histories fall roughly into two classes of writing. The first corresponds to the [p.73] initial, mercantilist phase of British power in the subcontinent. Phrased in the idiom of coercion, it emphasizes the moment of conquest rather than order. Alexander Dow, “Lieutenant-Colonel in the Company’s Service,” testified truly to the inspiration derived from the sword by the pen in this particular genre as he dedicated one of its most representative specimens, The History of Hindustan, to the King of England, thus: “The success of your Majesty’s arms has laid open the East to the researches of the curious.”125

The works of many other writers of the period—Verelst, Bolts, Scrafton and Grant—to name some of the better known amongst them—are witness to this explicit collaboration between arms and researches. They refute, in anticipation, the attempt that was to be made later on by many a pundit to represent British historiography as a curricular effort to educate Indians in liberal values. For the aim of mercantilist historiography was simply to educate the East India Company. By investigating the relation between government and landed property in the precolonial period it wanted to equip the Company with a knowledge that would help it to extract the highest possible amount of revenue from the conquered territories and use it to finance its seaborne trade.

Most of these writers were quite candid about their political motivation, as witness the administrative prescriptions which figured so prominently in every exercise of this kind. The concentration, in such writing, on the coercive element of dominance also makes for an objectivity rarely found in the colonialist discourse of later generations. Unaffected yet by the idiom of Improvement, hence unconcerned to promote any affection among the conquerors for the conquered, it maintains a considerable distance from the latter. In that perspective the physical features of the land acquired by the sword show up as clearly as do the details of the cultural landscape such as the religions, customs, manners, and so on of the people subjugated by the sword. In both cases it is a matter of observing a set of objects. In all of this genre, therefore, anthropology exudes a self-confidence which parallels and complements that of politics. It is the confidence of the colonizer in his dual role of conquistador and scholar.

Colonialist historiography outgrew such mercantilist concern by the end of the eighteenth century and acquired, within the next [p.74]

organizational means and ideological tenets did they bring about mobilization in order to make strategic use of it in the battle for hegemony? A historic rupture in the first of these movements offers us a point of entry into the problematic framed by these questions.

II. Swadeshi Mobilization

Poor Nikhilesh

One of the principal leaders of the Swadeshi Movement during its initial phase was the great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. In 1906 he led a much publicized demonstration through the streets of Calcutta, singing nationalist hymns and distributing rakhi among the crowd. The rakhi, a gaily colored twine used as a wristband in some Hindu communities and lineage groups to celebrate the solidarity of their members, was adopted, for this occasion, as a symbol of unity—unity of the two fragments of Bengal forced apart by the alien rulers, unity of Bengal as a whole and the rest of India—in short, the unity of the nation against the raj, the wicked instrument of division and subjugation. The anti-partition march, which dramatized that will to unity , had a big impact on the agitation. So had Tagore’s poems and songs written to celebrate the glory and sanctity of the motherland, and his elegant prose which expounded his thoughts on colonialism and nationalism in a number of political essays. One of these essays, “Swadeshi Samaj,” contained the vision of a self-governing and self-reliant nation and formed the core of a patriotic curriculum at all those young people’s associations (samiti) from which the movement recruited its most dedicated activists. By 1907 Swadeshi enthusiasm had found in him its poet, its philosopher, and its political leader—a Platonic combination par excellence.

When, therefore, within a year or so Rabindranath started back-pedaling and eventually withdrew from politics altogether, he aroused a great deal of hostility. His withdrawal was variously interpreted as capricious (for poets could be notoriously fickle in their attitude to affairs of the world), as irresponsible (for, being rich, he couldn’t care less for his people), and as cowardly (because he was against the politics of violence) .Sensitive to such criticism, [p.108] he tried to explain his position in a series of five articles written at the time. And then, in 1916, eight years after the event and five after Bengal had been departitioned, he resumed the debate, making it clear that so far as he was concerned the argument was far from closed. Only, the intervening years had enabled him to cast it imaginatively in the form of a novel called Gharey Bairey. 11

Nikhilesh, the hero of this novel, is an enlightened landlord who, unlike some others of his class, does not oppress his tenant cultivators. He is also a patriot and an idealist, and has been trying for many years even before the advent of Swadeshi to set up Swadeshi-style enterprises, all of which turned out to be much too uneconomical and prone to bankruptcy. Nikhilesh is thus a paragon of virtue—a compound of patriotism, idealism, intellectualism, and unworldliness highly regarded by middle-class Bengalis nurtured on a diet of romantic literature.

Appropriately, our hero has a young, beautiful, and adoring wife, and all goes well until about the middle of Chapter One, when the villain, Sandip, his best friend, arrives on the scene. He resolutely sets about working towards his dual objective-of breaking up Nikhilesh’s marriage by trying to seduce his wife, and ruining his estate by turning it into a sort of base area for the Swadeshi campaign. His activists are let loose all over the place, promoting Swadeshi by a technique that includes blackmail, deceit, bullying, assault, and plain robbery. The poorer of the Hindu peasants feel harassed. The Muslims are particularly outraged by the blatant display of Hindu chauvinism on the part of the nationalists. Eventually, Nikhilesh, after he is himself relieved of a great deal of cash by his wife acting under her lover’s influence, decides to call it a day, throws Sandip and his gang out of his estate, and prepares to retire to Calcutta himself. But events move far too quickly for him. An anti-Hindu jacquerie, instigated by roving moulavies, flares up among his Muslim tenants. He, goes out, un- armed, to pacify them and is gravely wounded. The novel ends with his repentant wife anxiously overhearing a conversation between the estate manager and the family doctor about a body with a battered head.

That head wound was a metaphor for the author’s own battered reputation of 1908. For the fate of Nikhilesh reflected his own predicament of the Swadeshi days, when, like his noble but thor- [p.109] oughly misunderstood hero, he too had courted unpopularity by refusing to conform. What concerned both was the individual’s freedom to choose his own way of serving the cause of social and political emancipation. If, therefore, patriotism were allowed to base itself on fear and coercion rather than persuasion, that would be altogether self-defeating for the national cause.

Caste Sanctions

Coercion had already established itself as a means of mobilization for Swadeshi quite early in the campaign. A dossier compiled in 1909 by the Director of Criminal Intelligence cites several hundred cases,12 some of them going back to 1905. These were of two kinds. First, there was a massive indulgence in physical coercion aimed at the destruction of imported goods as well as intimidation and assault of those who bought, sold, or otherwise patronized such imports or cooperated with the administration as active opponents of the movement. It goes without saying that no mobilization based on such violence could have any claim to popular consent. We shall therefore move on to consider the implications of the other, less obvious if no less sinister, kind of coercion—social coercion—which directly addressed the mind and destroyed persuasion at its source. Reported in large numbers both by the police and the contemporary press, coercion such as this came in the form of caste sanctions which meant, in effect, withdrawal of ritual services, refusal of inter-dining, boycott of wedding receptions and funeral ceremonies, and other pressures amounting to partial or total ostracism of those considered guilty of deviation from Swadeshi norms.

Social coercion was, for Tagore, at least as obnoxious as physical coercion. To him as to many other liberals Swadeshi, with its emphasis on self-help, self-cultivation, and self-improvement, was less of a struggle for power than a social reform movement of exceptionally lofty character. Its purpose was to unite all in an endeavor to liberate society from thraldom precisely to those conservative and obscurantist institutions, values, and customs which authorized caste sanction. The latter, he said in an outspoken essay, was as “conducive to the perpetuation of spiritual servitude” as the propagation of Swadeshi by the threat of arson or assault.13 [p.110]

The use of caste sanction is indeed basic to Hindu orthodoxy. It constitutes the most explicit and immediate application of what is regarded by some as a governing principle of the caste system, namely the opposition between purity and pollution. If therefore it transpires, as it does from the evidence, that mobilization for the Swadeshi Movement relied on caste sanction to no mean extent, it should help us to grasp the character of Indian nationalism itself as a tissue of contradictions with its emancipatory and unifying urge resisted and modified significantly by the disciplinary and divisive forces of social conservatism.

The incidence of sanction as documented in the intelligence reports mentioned above is quite striking in its geographical distribution. It shows that most of the cases were reported from small, sleepy villages located far in the outback. That is quite clearly an index of the grassroots character of the movement, the religiosity of which was perhaps in no small measure a function of its rusticity. Taken together with the fact that sanctions were more numerous in the politically more active districts (generally speaking, the eastern districts of Bengal as compared to the western ones), this would appear to suggest a fairly high correlation between nationalism and casteism.

The implication is even more disturbing when one takes into account the fact that the available statistics are far from complete and grossly underestimate the phenomenon. For the total number of sanctions must have been far in excess of the number reported. Being subjected to caste discipline was a stigma that put a Hindu to shame. Attached to an individual or a family, it had a tendency to outlive formal absolution. One would rather not report such a thing to the law, for to do so would be to let the local grapevine magnify the offense many times its original size. And, more often than not, the sanction would be such as to make it impossible for any court to take cognizance of it in legal terms. As an ill-humored note scribbled by a Home Department official on the memorandum mentioned above reads: “Cases of social boycott did not come before the courts.”14 We are not surprised.

The quality of evidence is, however, extremely rich and can be used to throw much light on the nature of the offenses which called for caste sanction. These fall into three classes, each of which may [p.111] be said to correspond to a category of offense punishable according to the canon of sanatan Hinduism. The first of these includes what would be subsumed, under that tradition, within the broad category of patakas (sins) arising from the violation of dharma (as bya breach of rules forbidding incest or theft or slaughter of cows) and acara (by the transgression, for instance, of such duties as those related to the daily routine of bath, meditation, and worship, or to ritually prescribed services, and so on).

Under the Swadeshi conditions, too, violations of dharma and acara were regarded as equally culpable. Only, these terms had now acquired an entirely new range of connotations. These were political connotations according to which loyalty to the motherland qualified as an instance of dharma, while certain demonstrative aspects of nationalist behavior assumed the sanctity of acara. Caste sanction was therefore imposed on those who were considered guilty of violating the new dharma of patriotism because they continued to work for the alien regime as police officials, prosecuting lawyers, crown witnesses, and in other equally despicable roles, or had failed as landlords in their duty to ban the sale of foreign goods within their estates, as grocers—to stop retailing Liverpool salt, and so forth. Among the victims, too, were those who could be said to have transgressed the new acara by refusing to go through the ritual of oath-taking in support of Swadeshi or wear rakhi on the wrist as a token of solidarity with the campaign.

A second class of offenses were those which resulted from impurities acquired from contact with unclean objects. Taken strictly according to the traditional Hindu norm of purity , the number of such objects could be legion. These could range all the way from human excreta or spittle to shorn hair to food cooked by a person lower than ego in the caste hierarchy, or a glass of alcoholic drink, or even a garment left unwashed after being worn overnight. The list could vary considerably from area to area, and the local lists could be quite different from, though not necessarily shorter than, those given in the DharmaSastras.

The ancient law-givers often operated by what was known as tarupya—the rule of resemblance—in order to extend the scope of sin and impurity to allow, in effect, a modification of established blacklists by the addition of some new items and omission of some of the older ones. A highly creative exercise in tadrupya did indeed [p.112] occur during the Swadeshi Movement when foreign manufactures of all kinds, including those from Germany and Austria, were put on a par with British imports and regarded as impure by analogy. These included umbrellas, glass bangles and chimneys for paraffin lanterns, chinaware, canvas and patent-leather shoes, colored prints, cigarettes, sugar, salt, and cotton textiles.

The last three items had the stigma doubly rubbed into them: they were impure not merely because of their alien origin but also because the salt and the sugar were believed to have been adulterated with ground cow-bone powder, while the Manchester textiles were said to have been made out of yarn processed with the fat and blood of the same sacred species. These substances were regarded as a most serious source of pollution, for they presupposed the slaughter of cows—a grave sin for a Hindu to commit or condone. Thus the Swadeshi idea of impurity associated with what was foreign (bilati) was reinforced by a traditional notion of impurity associated with what was sacrilegious. The ambivalence these objects acquired as being offensive in terms of politics as well as of religion corresponded to the dual manner of the pollution they caused: physically, as unclean things which contaminated those who ate, wore, touched, or otherwise came into direct contact with them; and politically, as imported goods which it was unpatriotic and against the economic doctrine of Swadeshi to buy, sell, or consume.

A third class of anti-Swadeshi offenses included those which were regarded as transitive, like the traditional caste offenses, and called for sanction against the offender even at several removes away from the source of pollution. Pollution by samsarga, that is contact or association (for instance, with such unclean objects as those mentioned above) , is elaborately prescribed by most of the Dharmasastras, although the texts often differ in their classification of such contacts. Some would organize them into nine categories, others into three, and so on. Where they all seem to agree is to ascribe a high degree of transitivity to such contamination. As the Parasara-Madhavya, a fourteenth-century text, put it rather graphically: “Sins spread like drops of oil on water” (samkramanti hi papani tailavindurivambhasi).

Transitivity of this order was not altogether unknown under the Swadeshi conditions. It is indeed on record that individuals who [p.113]

refused to withdraw their ritual services from people excommunicated for anti-national activities were themselves excommunicated.15 The offenders, in most of these cases, were Brahmans. Authorized by tradition to officiate at Hindu religious ceremonies, they polluted themselves by acting as priests for those who traded in foreign goods and had thus been contaminated by the impurity of their merchandise. The relative infrequency of this particular kind of offense was a sign, no doubt, of the regime of castes losing some of its ancient vitality. Yet it is an interesting reflection on the calibre and quality of this phase of nationalism that it could find any use at all for such a measure of caste discipline.

Social Boycott

The manner in which offenders of all three categories were disciplined shows how deeply casteism had penetrated Swadeshi mobilization. The name by which that discipline came to be known was “social boycott.” It linked itself by this name to the central strategy of the campaign, that is, the boycott of foreign goods, and sought its justification in the authority of a nationalism poised to challenge the hegemonic pretensions of the raj. At the same time, by a play on the word samaj Bangla for “society,” the designation made that discipline into a concern of the micro-society of jati or caste which, in most of its numerous denominations, had a samaj or caste council to deal with those of its members who violated its code. Heedless of what’ a maturing nationhood could do, in theory, to undermine primordial caste formations, social boycott set out to serve the interests of the big society that was the nation by insisting on procedures used by the little society of castes to resist innovation and change. A look at the measures by which social boycott was imposed should make this clear.

Under the sanatan conditions, each of these measures would stand for an authoritative form of penalty imposed by a Brahman or a king or a caste council against anyone violating dharma or acara or the rules of purity in one form or another. A common form of punishment, not altogether unknown in the West, was to shave the hair off an offender’s head. Unlike in the West, however, depilation, according to the Hindu tradition, was not merely punitive but also expiative. An element of ritual expiation was quite

II. Historiography and the Formation of a Colonial State

Early Colonial Historiography

How the writing of history was mediated by the exercise of power can be grasped by considering a nodal point in the development of the colonial state. At this point, in 1765, the East India Company’s conquest of Bengal acquired legitimacy by a Mughal grant enabling it to collect the land revenues of the eastern provinces and to administer civil justice on behalf of the Nawab. Known technically as the Company’s accession to Diwani—a technicality which has, alas, made some scholars insensitive to its significance as the truly inaugural moment of the raj—it brought together in one single instance all the three fundamental aspects of colonialism in our subcontinent, namely, its origin in an act of force, its exploitation of the primary produce of the land as the very basis of a colonial economy, and its need to give force and exploitation the appearance of legality. Much of what was distinctive about British rule in India and set it apart from the Dutch, French, and Portuguese regimes elsewhere in Asia, derived precisely from this characteristic combination of politics, economics and law. And it was this combination again which provided the emerging colonial state with a node for structural developments in its apparatus at both the administrative and the ideological levels.

Developments at the first of these levels required that the Company should set up a bureaucracy adequate to its dual function as merchants and Diwan, which meant, in effect, the collection of land revenues in order to finance its so-called “investments.” But India was a country where, for centuries, landed property had been the very foundation of both wealth and prestige, where all aspects of culture, including religion, had land as their common denominator, and the relation between producers, proprietors, and the state had evolved over time into a bewildering variety according to differences in the local structures of dominance and economies. Consequently, fiscal operations here depended for their success on an intimate knowledge of traditions, continuities, and past procedures-a knowledge of history, in sum.

The uses of such knowledge had been impressed upon the Company, albeit somewhat negatively, since the beginning of its in- [p.156] volvement in the land question even before 1765, when its administration of some of the Ceded Districts ran into difficulties because of the refusal of the indigenous specialists to help its officials with their expertise. “After an infinite deal of trouble we have at last got a full and particular statement of the resources of this province,” wrote an exasperated Harry Verelst and his Council from one such district, namely Chittagong, in 1761: “The villainous intentions of these people that had the management of the revenues here before endeavouring to secrete from us and make as intricate as possible whatever they could, has delayed [the report] thus long.”3

Complaints of this kind increased many times both in number and bitterness with the Company’s graduation to Diwani, if only because the territories it was given to administer were considerably larger in extent, the revenues much greater in volume, and the local variations in such things as tenurial structures, customary dues, and accounting procedures more numerous, hence more intricate. The inability of its servants to cope with such problems was expressed, at every level from the Collector to the Board of Revenue, in a concerted effort to blame their own failure on want of native cooperation. James Grant spoke for all of them when he mentioned what he believed to have been a defalcation of about fifteen million rupees of the Company’s revenues every year owing to “the collusive chicanery of native agents, in withholding official intelligence from their new masters, and fraudulently converting the use of such knowledge, to their own private emolument at the public expense.”4

These words, written in 1786, twenty-one years after accession to Diwani, were quite obviously the symptom of an unresolved tension characteristic of the early, formative phase of the colonial state. The latter had not quite succeeded yet in replacing the old bureaucracy by an entirely new one. A delay of that order, which is merely the effect of a structural décalage, is characteristic of all state formation. The site of a new state is always cluttered with the remains of the one that preceded it; and the individuality of each state, as it comes to be formed, derives to no small extent from the quality and degree of resistance put up by the debris through which it has to make its way.

It is significant, therefore, that some of the resistance to the formation of a colonial state in India should have been identified [p.157] by the first colonialists as a refusal on the part of the natives to share a certain kind of knowledge with them. To notice this is already to take a step towards problematizing the question of colonialist knowledge, to threaten if not subvert the hegemonic assumption about its role as a western wisdom poured into an oriental void, to query whether the native informant represented so often in the archetype of Warren Hastings’s pandit had always been a pliant collaborator, and so forth. I cannot, alas, digress into any of these important matters here, and must press on to consider the colonialist response to what was perceived as the reluctance of indigenous specialists to share one particular kind of knowledge—a knowledge of the Indian past.

For a start, let us recall once again Grant’s strictures upon the “misconduct of native Hindostanny agents.” Complaints on that score had by this time accreted into a widely held official opinion constituting, as he said, a “theme of general declamation.”5 By joining in, he lent to such declamation the weight of his expertise as one who knew more about the subject than most of his contemporaries.6 “The collusive chicanery of native agents” was manifest, according to him, “in withholding official intelligence from their new masters.” Clearly, this was an indictment uttered in a master’s voice. It spoke with the authority of the East India Company as the “new masters” and required the natives to make their knowledge readily accessible to the masters so that the latter could convert it into “official intelligence.” The alleged “chicanery” consisted, therefore, of two shortcomings on the part of the natives: first, their refusal to part with a knowledge that owed nothing to the alien rule to which they had been recently subjected; and secondly, their resistance to “the use of such knowledge” in the “public” interest—the word “public,” the first term of a dichotomy hitherto unknown to Indian polity, being understood in this context as an attribute of the master’s domain—the domain of the colonial state.

But what was this knowledge that the servants had and the masters were so eager to acquire? To put it in plain language, it was concerned with information about the volume and value of agricultural produce, the rules for appropriation of the producer’s surplus by landlords and the state, the nature of land tenures and proprietary institutions, the technicalities of estate accounts, and above all, the laws and traditions governing the relationship of [p.158] peasants, landlords, and the state. The skills required to handle one or more aspects of such information on behalf of local societies or governmental agencies had, in precolonial India, frozen, like all other skills, into craft-like structures contained within caste-like institutions. The density of such structures and the complexity of these institutions in any region tended to correspond directly to the stability of landlordism and the depth of dependent tenurial relations there.

Since the Company, as Diwan, happened to launch on its career as revenue collectors in the eastern provinces with their well-established zamindaries and many-tiered system of subinfeudation, it was no wonder that the first British administrators had hit the hard and intractable end of traditional expertise in land management. The want of sympathy between indigenous specialists and local officials was aggravated further at this stage by the rapacity of the farming system, the ruin of many an ancient landed family under the pressure of excessive fiscal demands, the quickening pace of tax collections, and displacements caused by the impact of colonialism on an old rural society slow to respond to change.

The outcome of all this was mutual antagonism and suspicion which vitiated transactions relating to land revenues and made the grudging cooperation elicited from the so-called “intermediate agents” appear as a wicked ruse to deceive the Company’s officials. Grant expressed some of these sentiments in his long-winded prose when he set out

to prove that through the medium of natives, hitherto almost exclusively employed in real effective operations of finance, we [i.e. the Company] have been … grossly deceived in respect to the nature, form and extent of the annual assessment of Bengal; that such intermediate agents themselves have always been fully or more perfectly informed on these subjects, though they withheld their knowledge from European superintendents; and that when they have been regarded, or officially consulted as oracles to determine the most essential rights of government, they have in most cases, stood in the predicament of judge and party against the sovereign ruler … holding in the same hands … all the great offices of state, … together with the entire volume of authentic documents, accounts or official forms, so indispensably necessary to control their conduct with intelligence, while the [p.159] ruling administration were still unaided by the lights of free extensive self experience.7

It would be some time, of course, before such “self experience” was to accumulate and mature enough to be effectively opposed to native intrigue. Meanwhile, the territories had to be governed and revenues collected in order to pay for trade and war , all of which urged the fledgling raj to try and break out of what it perceived as a circle of deception. The means used for that purpose was history. Some of the very first and most important works on Indian history written from a British standpoint belong to this period of thirty years between Diwani and Permanent Settlement. Quite a few of these ranged widely over time from antiquity to the most recent past; others were content to take a relatively foreshortened view of the past going back no further than the thirteenth century. All were conspicuous by their interest in the historical aspects of the land question-an interest they shared with the Company’s ad- ministration which provided most of their authors with their livelihood.

Three Types of Narratives

Taken according to the scope and emphasis of their interest in the land question, these historical dissertations could be said to be of three types. The first of these came in the form of comprehensive surveys with the narrative extended over long periods of time and large parts of the subcontinent. Written up as political histories in which the ruling dynasties served for protagonists and their changing circumstances for plot, these narratives sought to explore the relation between power and property in pursuit of an answer to the question: Who owned the land—the king or the landed classes? Alexander Dow’s well-known work, The History of Hindostan, published in three volumes in 1768-1772, was one of the best examples of this type.8

A second type, overlapping the first to some extent and equally comprehensive in its territorial and temporal surveys, differed somewhat in emphasis. The argument about landed property hinged here on the economic aspect of the land question: How much wealth did the land produce and how was it shared between [p.160]

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