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.
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