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  • Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India
  • David Kopf
Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. By Ranajit Guha (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998) 245 pp. $39.95 cloth $18.95 paper

To many, Guha, champion of the subalterns in historical writing, is the most distinctive and influential historian of modern India. B.G., or Before Guha, historians of India researched “elites” whereas A.G., or After Guha, the common people became the focus of scholarly attention. This volume contains three essays of vintage Guha (1986–1992).

The most remarkable thing about Guha as a historian is that he is no historian at all. At his best, he is a philosopher of history, and at his worst, a propagandist for a crude form of Marxist rhetoric that not only lacks subtlety, but tends to distort actual historical reality. It is also [End Page 172] frightfully dull, because history is, to him, merely dominance and hegemony, money and power. It is also a predictable melodrama about the evil empire of the British Raj, with the elites who supported it, and the Indian “people” who are oppressed by it. The British in India, he says, constituted a monolith, and their historiography was entirely colonialist in the sense of stressing the differences between themselves and the inferior “other.” In Guha’s own words, “Politically that difference was . . . between rulers and 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 (3).”

Guha’s style does not allow for even a trace of suspended judgment, complexity, or ambivalence. Conspicuously absent in his treatment is any acknowledgment of diversity in the opinions, thought, and behavior within both the British and Indian communities during the days of the Raj. Why is he so silent about the Anglicist-Orientalist controversy, for example, among the British, or about the debate between the liberals advocating Westernization as modernization and the imperialists who believed that East was East and West was West, except when two brave soldiers met face to face? Nor were all British missionaries high church and pro empire. William Carey and James Long were, among many others, decent Christians who contributed much to helping Indians find progress in the modern world, and secular radicals, such as David Drummond and David Hare, were instrumental in enlightening the Indian mind.

The same problem exists on the Indian side. Has there ever been a monolithic “Indian” nationalism that transcended the diversity of ethnicity, culture, language, and religion on the subcontinent? Guha’s total censorship of the Bengal or Hindu Renaissance during the British period cannot be justified in any way. In the first place, Guha and his followers refuse to deal with Bengali creative genius in the last century presumably because it was elitist in inspiration and, secondly, because one of the most innovative periods in Indian history took place during the height of British imperialism. Does Guha seriously believe that Rammohun Roy, Keshub Chandra Sen, Michael Dutt, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, and Rabindranath Tagore, among so many others, are simply to be categorized as members of a native elite who identified their self-interest with the British overlord? Is their class identity their only valid passport to historical recognition?

Finally, after reading the essays, this reviewer is exceedingly disturbed at the inconsistency, or contradiction, between Guha, the raging revolutionary seeking to subalternize Indian historiography, and Guha, the highly Westernized academic empire builder who has spent most of his life in Britain and Australia living on Western resources and winning Western converts. Like Said, who has become very French from his specialized interest in French Romantic literature, Guha has become [End Page 173] very very British. 1 The three essays in this volume are written in an impeccable English style hardly meant for the consumption of Indian subalterns who, if literate, would prefer books in their own vernacular. In this reviewer’s opinion, Guha’s concept of the subaltern, like Said’s Orientalism, are eagerly consumed by Western advocates of the politically correct persuasion.

David Kopf
University of Minnesota,, Minneapolis

Footnotes

1. See, for example, Edward Said...

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