Colonial Hegemoney and Popular Resistance: Princes, Peasants, and Paramount Power

Abstract

Eschen reviews "Colonial Hegemony and Popular Resistance: Princes, Peasants, and Paramount Power" by Hira Singh.

HIRA SINGH, Colonial Hegemony and Popular Resistance: Princes, Peasants, and Paramount Power. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press Inc., 1998. (Originally published by Sage Publications, New Delhi, India.)

This feisty book, written from a Marxist perspective, is a study of the state of Rajasthan in India both before and during British colonialism. It argues, contrary to much received wisdom, that the traditional Rajasthan society was feudal, that the British were unable to transform it to capitalism, and that it was class conflict stemming from its feudal relations of production that ultimately overthrew it. While covering a range of theoretical issues, the book is deeply empirically grounded, drawing for evidence on extensive archival records and on numerous extended interviews carried out by the author with former feudal landlords and with peasants and activists in the peasant movements that spread through Rajasthan from the 1920s to independence.

While the case of Rajasthan may seem a narrow subject, unimportant to most sociologists, in fact the book is well worth examining, since it bears, directly or indirectly, on several theoretical topics critical for our understanding of social change and societal functioning, and it does so self-consciously and rigorously. Among these are the nature of state and society in non-Western societies, the causes of economic development and underdevelopment, the impact of Western colonialism on the now poor countries, and the causes and role of peasant movements in social change.

The book takes its problematic in part from the partly Marxistderived question of where India was heading prior to British colonialism: was it entrained to capitalist economic development, or was the traditional social system stagnant, needing to be broken open by the external force of British colonialism before economic progress could occur, as Marx seemed to argue in two famous newspaper articles in the New York Daily Tribune? This question is intimately related, for Marxists, to the question of whether traditional India was feudal-in which feudalism was inevitably bound, through its internal dynamics, to generate capitalism, in part through peasant uprisings, as Marxists perceived it had in Western Europe-or whether India had some other social system entirely that was less dynamic. The book also takes its problematic in part from a somewhat alternative Marxist paradigm-dependency and world systems theory-which argues that not only was Western colonialism responsible for underdevelopment in the non-Western world, but that it transformed the internal structures of all these countries into a distorted form of capitalism, sometimes maintaining, or even creating, a traditional form, such as coerced labour, but warping this "traditional" structure to the capitalist end of profit making, thus producing a misleading "feudal" facade for what were in essence capitalist relations.

This book stakes out an independent position on these matters, attacking established theories on all sides. In the process, furthermore, it engages and critiques not only the main literature on the topics just mentioned, but cultural, symbolic, and Indological interpretations of Indian society, as well as much of the theoretical writing on peasant movements-including the currently highly popular subaltern approach, against which it makes a number of devastating points. The book thus deals with a range of important theories. And it does so in an original and critical manner. The emphasis should be on critical here. As noted, this is feisty book, written in a take-no-prisoners manner. This both makes it interesting to read and, often, results in exposing critical weaknesses in received theories.

It is not, however, a book without faults. Many minor imperfections could be mentioned, but there are three more fundamental ones that really deserve attention. To begin with, the book occasionally shares the somewhat scholastic character of some of the major Marxist-inspired debates that have taken place in India, of which the so-called Mode of Production in Indian Agriculture Debate is a prime example. This debate, which raged for years in the pages of India's unique Economic and Political Weekly-unique for its superb achievement of eliciting wellwritten, scholarly, but accessible articles by academics on critical policy questions, making India, in this respect, the most highly developed society in the world-was highly confusing; so confusing that each attempt to straighten out the debate and organize the issues only resulted in organized confusion. In reading some of the articles, my eyes would begin to glaze over as confusions plumbed new depths. A central problem was a focus on definitions instead of detailing the causal models over which the disagreements really hinged. This made much of the writing scholastic-that is, over-minute and esoteric points of unclear relevance, rather than confronting the critical issues. Occasionally the discussion in Singh's book partakes too much of this characteristic. Most important, the book is sometimes too critical. The aim often seems to be not just to identify weaknesses in opponents' points of view, but to destroy them entirely. But what is often needed in social science is to sort out the good from the bad points of an alternative point of view, and to combine the former with one's own views into a higher, and more sophisticated Hegelian synthesis-one that transcends both points of view, not by some mushy merging of them, but by a theoretical reconciliation specifying under which conditions factors delineated in opposing views operate and how they interact. Occasionally this is done in the work, but the main thrust is toward destruction and displacement. Finally, the argument embodies a major contradiction in one of its main theses. This thesis is that not contradictions of colonialism, but class conflict growing out of the traditional feudal system of Rajasthan brought the system down; that the traditional system was not static, requiring colonialism to break it open, but instead contained its own contradictions, capable of moving the system forward. But, in fact, the author argues that, before British colonialism, class conflict was contained by the traditional system, and it was the impact of colonialism that, by weakening the landlords, permitted class conflict to be a major force for change.

Nevertheless, in spite of these deficiencies, this is a book well worth reading. It engages an important literature on important topics, forcing the reader to think about important questions, and perhaps leading them to the truly fascinating literature that has recently been produced on the traditional Indian state (collected and acutely discussed in Hermann Kulke's excellent reader for Oxford University Press India, 1995, The State in India 1000-1700). Singh's feisty writing will stimulate readers to mobilize their thoughts and evidence to defend their own positions. The book argues a number of challenging and unconventional theses, highly worth considering (even should they ultimately turn out to be wrong). It is, for example, one of the few books coming from a Marxist perspective to argue that colonialism did not destroy all traditional institutions or warp them to its purposes; that these could and did in cases successfully resist colonial imposition. It does a superb job of using the literature on European feudalism to demonstrate the many, and often surprising, parallels between that system and the agrarian and state system of traditional Rajasthan, thus making a plausible case that Rajasthan was, indeed, feudal. If other readers are like me, they, furthermore, will learn things about European feudalism they never knew (or at least had profoundly forgotten). Its use of interviews with those who were there in the historical past is unusual, inventive and valuable. And, finally, even its excessively critical stance has the converse virtue of leading the writer to identify truly weak points in many of the most important theoretical works in the social science literature, including some on his own Marxist side.