What is colonialism and what is a colonial state? In exploring these questions, Ranajit Guha points out that the South Asian colonial state was a historical paradox. Britain may have ruled India as a colony, but it never achieved hegemony over most of the population, collaborating with the nationalist elite but never persuading the masses. Thus the colonial state, as Guha defines it in this closely argued work, was a paradox--a dominance without hegemony. His work will be essential to an understanding of Indian history.

What is colonialism and what is a colonial state? Ranajit Guha points out that the colonial state in South Asia was fundamentally different from the metropolitan bourgeois state which sired it. The metropolitan state was hegemonic in character, and its claim to dominance was based on a power relation in which persuasion outweighed coercion. Conversely, the colonial state was non-hegemonic, and in its structure of dominance coercion was paramount. Indeed, 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. It was not possible for that non-hegemonic state to assimilate the civil society of the colonized to itself. Thus the colonial state, as Guha defines it in this closely argued work, was a paradox--a dominance without hegemony. Dominance without Hegemony had a nationalist aspect as well. This arose from a structural split between the elite and subaltern domains of politics, and the consequent failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to integrate vast areas of the life and consciousness of the people into an alternative hegemony. That predicament is discussed in terms of the nationalist project of anticipating power by mobilizing the masses and producing an alternative historiography. In both endeavors the elite claimed to speak for the people constituted as a nation and sought to challenge the pretensions of an alien regime to represent the colonized. A rivalry between an aspirant to power and its incumbent, this was in essence a contest for hegemony.

This Book Points Out That The Colonial State In South Asia Was Fundamentally Different From The Metropoliton Bourgeois State Which Sired It.

The past is not just, as has been famously said, another country with foreign customs: it is a contested and colonized terrain. Indigenous histories have been expropriated, eclipsed, sometimes even wholly eradicated, in the service of imperialist aims buttressed by a distinctly Western philosophy of history. Ranajit Guha, perhaps the most influential figure in postcolonial and subaltern studies at work today, offers a critique of such historiography by taking issue with the Hegelian concept of World-history. That concept, he contends, reduces the course of human history to the amoral record of states and empires, great men and clashing civilizations. It renders invisible the quotidian experience of ordinary people and casts off all that came before it into the nether-existence known as "Prehistory." On the Indian subcontinent, Guha believes, this Western way of looking at the past was so successfully insinuated by British colonization that few today can see clearly its ongoing and pernicious influence. He argues that to break out of this habit of mind and go beyond the Eurocentric and statist limit of World-history historians should learn from literature to make their narratives doubly inclusive: to extend them in scope not only to make room for the pasts of the so-called peoples without history but to address the historicality of everyday life as well. Only then, as Guha demonstrates through an examination of Rabindranath Tagore's critique of historiography, can we recapture a more fully human past of "experience and wonder."

Ranajit Guha`s writings have had a formative impact on several disciplines: postcolonial studies, literature, anthropology, history cultural studies, art history. Guha first became known as the practitioner of a critical Marxism that ran parallel to the work of British and French Marxist historians of the 1960s and 1970s but which, instead of recreating a `history from below, sought active political engagement by deploying insights drawn from Gramsci and Mao. More recently, Cuba`s work has drawn attention to the phenomenological and the everyday, and been noticed for its critique of the disciplinary practices of history-writing. Guha`s reputation rests most famously on his role as the founder and guiding spirit of Subaltern Studies, which has critiqued colonialist and nationalist historiographies. In spawning new ways of thinking about history, this has created an intellectual ferment richer than anything else emerging out of modern South Asia. Guha`s historical and political writings, tucked away in obscure journals and collections, have been virtually inaccessible; they are brought together for the first time in the present volume by Partha Chatterjee, whose long association with Guha as a founder-member of the Subaltern Studies editorial board is complemented by his own international stature as a historian, political theorist, and public intellectual. Every serious student of South Asian history, politics, and anthropology will be enriched by the astonishing diversity of insights and scholarship within this book.

Introduction -- Geographical politics and the politics of geography -- Latin America and the production of the global economy -- From passive revolution to silent revolution: the politics of state, space, and class formation in modern Mexico -- The changing state of resistance: defending place and producing space in Oaxaca -- The clash of spatializations: class power and the production of Chiapas -- Conclusion