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The Imperialist Approach

1 The Imperialist approach is also known as the Cambridge school and this perspective is seen in the writings of viceroys such as Lord Duferin, Curzon and Minto.Its views on Colonialism and Nationalism in India can be summed up in the following points : 1. India under British rule grew into a stage at which she could advance claim to the sight of selfgovernment. 2. The British rule was essentially Benevolent,understood the aspirations of Indians and gradually moved towards it fulfillment. 3. The imperialistic historiographers deny the existence of colonial exploitation,underdevelopment and other anti-imperialistic and nationalistic forces. 4. They also deny the existence of colonialism as an economic,political and social structure. 5. They say it was simply a foreign rule and neither was it exploitative.Hence,they do not agree with the view that the socio-economic and political development of India required the overthrow of colonialism. 6. They do not see any basic contradiction between the British and Indian interests which led to the national movement. 7. India as a nation was a myth.India was neither a nation nor a nation-in-making but a group of different castes and religious groups which are the real basis of political organisation. 8. Nationalism in India was not anti-imperialistic;rather the politicization of Indian society developed along the lines of traditional social formations such as linguistic,regional,castes or religious communities rather modern categories of class and nation. 9. The struggle against colonialism was a motiveless and simulated combat.It was merely a product of the need and interests of the elite groups who used to serve either their own narrow interests or the interests of their perspective groups. 10. The basic pattern was of an educated middle class reared by British rule engaged in various renaissance activities and virtually turning against their masters and so giving birth to modern nationalism out of frustrated, selfish ambitions, ideals of patriotism and democracy derived from western culture or natural revulsion against foreign rule. 11. The imperialist approach questioned the ontology of a unified nationalist movement and has traced instead only a series of localized movements in colonial India. 12. India was not a nation but an aggregate of desperate interest groups and they were united as they had to operate within a centralized national administrative framework created by the British.

Criticism and analysis of the imperialistic approach 1. This approach denies the existence and legitimacy of exploitative nature of British rule and of Nationalism as a movement of the Indian people to overthrow imperialism. 2. Categories such as nation,class,mobilization,ideology etc which are generally used by historians to analyse colonialism and nationalism are missing from this approach. 3. It deliberately misses the economic exploitation,under development,racialism and the role of the masses in the anti-imperialistic struggle.

Nationalist Approach

1 The nationalist approach is one of the major approach in Indian Historiography. In-the colonial period, this school was represented by the political activitiest such as Lajpat Ray, A.C, Majumdar, R.G. Pradhan, pattavi Sitharamya, Surendranath Banerjee, C.F. Adrevs and Girija Mukharjee. More recenfly, B.R. Nanda, Elisweswa!' Prasao and Amlesh Tripathy have made distinguishing contribution within the frame work of this approach. The nationalist historians especially the more recent ones, show an awareness of the exploitative character of colonialism. On the whole they feel that the nationalist movement was the result of the spread and realisation on Liberty. They also take full cognizance of the process of India becoming a nation, and see the natural movement as a movement of the people. Weakness of Nationalist Historians Their major weakness, however, is that they tend to ignore or, at least, underplay the inner contradiction of Indian society both in terms of class and caste. They tend to ignore the fact while the nationalist movement people or the nation as a whole (that is, of all class vis-a-vis colonialism) it only did so from a particular class perspective and that consequently, there was a constant struggle between different social, ideological perspective for hegemony over the movement. They also usually take up the position adopted by the right wing of the nationalist movement and equate it with the movement as a whole. Their treatment of the

strategic and ideological dimensions of the movement is also inadequate.

Marxist Approach

1 The Marxist school emerged on the since later. Its foundations, so far the study of the nationalist movement in concerned, were laid by R. Palme Dutt and A.R. Desai, but several otherhave developed it over the years. Unlike the imperialist school, the Marxist historians clearly seeprimary contradiction as well as the process of nation making and unlike the nationalist, they alsotake full note of the inner contradiction of Indian society. According to the soviet historian, the foundation of the Indian National Congress was inseparably connected with the rise of an indigenous Indian Capitalist industry. Accordingly to thetheory of economic determinism, changes in the structure of the economic produced new socialrelationship, transforming society from i status-based to a contract-based one, and set in motiona large scale social mobility which had never taken place in India before. The political struggle forfreedom was a culmination of the social change which started in Bengal during the second half ofthe eighteenth century a product of the disruption of the old economic and social order proceeding from the gro6h of a market society. The penetration of British trade in the interior and the Britishland settlements which made land a saleable and alienable commodity, helped the growth of a market economy in India and as a result a new social class of traders, merchants, subordinate agent of the company and Private British Traders, middlemen and money-leaders sprang up.The political development of modern India since the beginning of the nineteenth

century can beconsidered as the history of the struggle of this class to find a new identity. B.B. Mishra, a non-Marxist historian, has also expressed the view that radical changes under British rule, emanating from progress sf education and advancement of technology, led to the growth of a middle class whose component parts exhibited an element of uniformity in spite of being heterogeneous and even mutually conflicting at time. Mishra also specifies the economic process by which these social developments were brought about. Modern capitalism in India developed from the import of foreign capital and skill as pill of the transformation of India as an appendage to the imperial economy, for producing raw materials to feed British industry. The export of agricultural produced created a trade surplus which paid for the construction of railways and other public works, as well as for the import of capital goods and machinery which began to process locally the raw materials earlier developed for export. K.M. Panikkar, another non-Marxist historian, also emphasized the central role of the new middle class in the national movement, but instead of specifying any decisive economic changebehind their emergence, he pointed to shift in the centre of power and influence within Indian society as a result of the administrative and political impact of the British Raj. Panikkar uses the term class rather loosely. Sometimes using it almost as a synonym forcaste. Marxist historians have used the concept in a more rigorous manner and have attributedthe emergence of new classes in Indian society to specific economic progress. R.P. Dutt whoseIndian Today still remains the most authoritative Marxist work on modern India, wrote that thegrowth of modern industry in the second half of the nineteenth country led to the rise of the bourgeoisie, together with a new educated

middle class of lowyers, administrators, teachers and journalists. The writings of quite a few Marxian historians and sociologists echoed the same view before and after Independence. But gradually there was a shift of emphasis from R.P.Dutta’s bourgeoisie to intermediate groups variously designated as the educated middle class the Petty bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia. A.R. Desai's work on Indian nationalism took up in this respect the earlier threads woven into the brilliant analysis of M.N. Roy. With the growth of modern industries, wrote Professor Desai, new classes of modern bourgeoisie and a working class came into existence, along with the processional classes. The intelligentsia, drawn from the professional classes, developed before the industrial bourgeoisie and led the national movement in each phase. The more recent work of the soviet historians has followed the lines indicated by A.R Desai. N.M. Goldberg, a leading soviet ideologist, has introduced a somewhat tentative distinction ! the class basis of the moderate and extremist movements within the Indian National Congress. In his view the native capitalist class, weak ad tied to foreign economic interests, was irresolute on the demand which it express leaders; but the petty bourgeois i.e., who lay behind the extremist movement, were more forthright. In a complementary study of urban Maharastra in the late nineteenth century, V.l. Pavlov observes that India's national industrial bourgeoisie first developed in Bombay by accumulating capital in comprador activities associated with European merchant capital operating in the overseas cotton trade and the opium trade with China. Bipan Chandra, who exhibits this new reaction, assigns the most important role In the riseof Indian nationalism to the formulation of an ideology by the Indian intelligentsia, though he allows some weight to the growth of the Indian capitalist class. To him, the problem concerns thereal nature of imperialism and

how it contradicted the true interests of all classes of Indian people. In his view, the realization of this problem by the intelligentsia and their consequent propagation of an anti-imperialist ideology, which represented the common interests of all classes of India, gave rise to Indian nationalism.In any case, Bipan Chandra points out. It was not until after the First World War that they received any support from leading men of commerce and industry. Sumit Sarkar also expresses similar doubts about the simplistic version of the class-approach used by R.P Dutta and certain soviet historians. He point to the inconvenient facts of indifference and even hostility shown towards swodeshi by the bulk of the professional trading community in Bengal and the lukewarm attitude of the industrial bourgeoisie of Bombay and Gujarat. He also observes that the glib talk the urban betty-bourgeois character of the swodeshi movement obscures the link which so many of the participants had with land through some form of Zamindari or intermediate tenure. Shortcomings However, many of them and Palme Dutta in particular are not able to fully integrate theirtreatment of their primary anti-imperialist contradiction and the secondary inner contradictions, and tend to counter pose the anti-imperialist struggle to the class of social struggle. They also tend to see the movement as a structured bourgeois movement, it not the bourgeoisies movement and miss its open-ended and all-class character. They see the bourgeoisie as playing the dominate role in the movement- they tend to equate or conflate the national leadership with the bourgeoisie or capitalist class. They also interpret the class character of the movement in terms of its forms of struggle (i.e., in its non-violent character) and in the fact that it made strategic retreats and compromises. A few take an even narrow view. They suggest that access to financial resources determined the ability to influence the course and direction of nationalist politics.

Many of the Marxist writers also do not do an actual detailed historical investigation of the strategy, programme, ideology, extent and forms of mass mobilization and strategic and tactical maneuvers of the national movement.

THE SUBALTERN STUDIES

1 During the closing decades of the last century, the scholars associated with the

journal Subaltern Studies shot into fame by vehemently criticising all other forms of Indian history-writing. They put forward their own interpretation of the modern Indian history as a whole, particularly of Indian nationalism. Beginning in the early 1980s, with the publication of the first volume of Subaltern Studies (in 1982), this trend of interpretation of Indian nationalism became quite influential among certain sections of Indian historians. It was declared to be a radical departure in modern Indian historiography which claimed to dissociate from all earlier views on Indian national movement. In what can be called the manifesto of the project, Ranajit Guha, in the very first volume of the Subaltern Studies, declared that ‘The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism – colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism.’ According to Guha, all types of elitist histories have one thing in common and that is the absence of the politics of the people from their accounts. He criticised the three main trends in Indian historiography – i) colonialist, which saw the colonial rule as the fulfillment of a mission to enlighten the ignorant people; ii) nationalist, which visualised all the protest activities as parts of the making of the nation-state; and iii) Marxist, which subsumed the people’s struggles under the progression towards revolution and a socialist state. According to him, there are no attempts in these works to understand and write about the way in which the subaltern groups view the world and practice their politics. Earlier historians were criticised for ignoring the popular initiative and accepting the official negative characterisation of the rebel and the rebellion. In his essay ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, Ranajit Guha launched a scathing attack on the existing peasant and tribal histories in India for considering the peasant rebellions as ‘purely spontaneous and unpremediated affairs’ and for ignoring the consciousness of the rebels themselves. He accused all the accounts of rebellions, starting with the immediate official reports to the histories written by the left radicals, of writing the texts of counter-insurgency which refused to recognise the agency of the people and ‘to acknowledge the insurgent as the

subject of his own history’. According to Guha, they all failed to acknowledge that there existed a parallel subaltern domain of politics which was not influenced by the elite politics and which possessed an independent, self-generating dynamics. Its roots lay in pre-colonial popular social and political structures. However, this domain was not archaic: ‘As modern as indigenous elite politics, it was distinguished by its relatively greater depth in time as well as in structure’. In his view, there was now an urgent requirement for setting the record straight by viewing the history from the point-of-view of the subaltern classes. The politics of the people was crucial because it constituted an autonomous domain which ‘neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence depend on the latter’. The people’s politics differed from the elite politics in several crucial aspects.51 Perspectives on Indian Nationalism-II For one, its roots lay in the traditional organisations of the people such as caste and kinship networks, tribal solidarity, territoriality, etc. Secondly, while elite mobilisations were vertical in nature, people’s mobilisations were horizontal. Thirdly, whereas the elite mobilisation was legalistic and pacific, the subaltern mobilisation was relatively violent. Fourthly, the elite mobilisation was more cautious and controlled while the subaltern mobilisation was more spontaneous. The Subaltern historians, disenchanted with the Congress nationalism and its embodiment in the Indian state, rejected the thesis that popular mobilisation was the result of either economic conditions or initiatives from the top. They claimed to have discovered a popular autonomous domain which was opposed to the elite domain of politics. This domain of the subaltern was defined by perpetual resistance and rebellion against the elite. The subaltern historians also attributed a general unity to this domain clubbing together a variety of heterogeneous groups such as tribes, peasantry, proletariat and, occasionally, the middle classes as well. Moreover, this domain was said to be almost completely uninfluenced by the elite politics and was claimed to posses an independent, self-generating dynamics.

The charismatic leadership was no longer viewed as the chief force behind a movement. It was instead the people’s interpretation of such charisma which acquired prominence in analysis of a movement. This idea is present in most of the early contributions to the series. Gyanendra Pandey, in ‘Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism’ (SS I), argues that peasant movement in Awadh arose before and independently of the Non-cooperation movement. According to him, peasants’ understanding of the local power structure and its alliance with colonial power was more advanced than that of the Congress leaders. In fact, the peasant militancy was reduced wherever the Congress organisation was stronger. In Stephen Henningham’s account of the ‘Quit India in Bihar and the Eastern United Provinces’ (SS II), the elite and the subaltern domains were clearly distinguished from each other. He talks of two movements existing together but parallel to each other – ‘an elite uprising’, started by ‘the high caste rich peasants and small landlords who dominated the Congress’, and a ‘subaltern rebellion’ powered by ‘the poor, low caste people of the region’. Shahid Amin, in his article ‘Gandhi as Mahatma’ (in SS III), studies the popular perception of Mahatma Gandhi. He shows that the popular perception and actions were completely at variance with the Congress leaders’ perception of Gandhi. Although the Mahatma’s messages were spread widely through ‘rumours’, there was an entire philosophy of economy and politics behind it – the need to become a good human being, to give up drinking, gambling and violence, to take up spinning and to maintain communal harmony. The stories which circulated also emphasised the magical powers of Mahatma and his capacity to reward or punish those who obeyed or disobeyed him. On the other hand, the Mahatma’s name and his supposed magical powers were also used to reinforce as well as establish caste hierarchies, to make the debtors pay and to boost the cow-protection movement. All these popular interpretations of the Mahatma’s messages reached their climax during the Chauri Chaura incidents in 1922 when his name was invoked to burn the police post, to kill the policemen and to loot the market.

David Hardiman, in his numerous articles, focused on subaltern themes and argued that whether it was the tribal assertion in South Gujarat, or the Bhil movement in Eastern Gujarat, or the radicalism of the agricultural workers during the Civil Disobedience Movement, there was an independent politics of the subaltern classes against the elites.52 Introduction Similarly, Sumit Sarkar, in ‘The Conditions and Nature of Subaltern Militancy’ (SS III), argues that the Non-cooperation movement in Bengal ‘revealed a picture of masses outstripping leaders…and the popular initiative eventually alarmed leaders into calling for a halt’. Thus, ‘the subaltern groups…formed a relatively autonomous political domain with specific features and collective mentalities which need to be explored, and that this was a world distinct from the domain of the elite politicians who in early twentieth century Bengal came overwhelmingly from high-caste educated professional groups connected with zamindari or intermediate tenure-holding’. Thus we see that in these and in many other essays in the earlier volumes, an attempt was made to separate the elite and the subaltern domains and to establish the autonomy of subaltern consciousness and action. This phase was generally characterised by emphasis on subaltern themes and autonomous subaltern consciousness. The subalternist historians forcefully asserted that both the colonial ideology and the bourgeois nationalist ideology failed to establish their hegemony over the subaltern domain. Moreover, the Indian bourgeoisie failed in its prime work of speaking for the nation, and the Congress nationalism was bourgeois and elite which restrained popular radicalism. A few years after its inauguration as advocates of people’s voice in history and proponents of an autonomous subaltern political domain, the project of Subaltern Studies underwent significant changes. Under postmodernist and postcolonialist influences, many of its contributors began to question its earlier emphasis on autonomous subaltern consciousness. Gayatri Spivak, in particular, criticised the humanist viewpoint adopted by the earlier trend within Subaltern Studies. At

another level, the idea of subalternity became much wider to include even the colonial elite as they were considered subaltern vis-à-vis the imperialist rulers, the phenomenon being termed by Partha Chatterjee as ‘subalternity of the elite’. Chatterjee’s influential book, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986), derived from the postcolonial framework of Edward Said which considered the colonial power-knowledge as overwhelming and irresistible. His later book, The Nation and its Fragments (1995), carries this analysis even further. Subalternity as a concept was also redefined. Earlier, it stood for the oppressed classes in opposition to the dominant classes both inside and outside. Later, it was conceptualised in opposition to colonialism, modernity and Enlightenment. The earlier emphasis on the ‘subaltern’ now gave way to a focus on ‘community’. Earlier the elite nationalism was stated to hijack the people’s initiatives for its own project; now the entire project of nationalism was declared to be only a version of colonial discourse with its emphasis on centralisation of movement, and later of the state. The ideas of secularism and enlightenment rationalism were attacked and there began an emphasis on the ‘fragments’ and ‘episodes’. Thus, the subaltern historiography on Indian nationalism went through two phases. [For further details on Subaltern School, see S.B. Upadhyay 2015]

2 Following the contributions of the Cambridge school, another group of historians dealing with the nationalist movement involved the subaltern field of history. This group of historians –with their focus on lower-class individuals of Indian society – offered a direct challenge to the elite-driven model proposed by Cambridge scholars; arguing that a level of separation existed between elites and the masses of India. Because of this separation, historian Ranajit Guha proclaims that no sense of cohesion existed in the nationalist movement as subaltern classes maintained values and beliefs that diverged significantly from the elites and bourgeoisie of their society (Guha and Spivak, 41). Guha argues that this difference “derived from the conditions of exploitation to which the subaltern classes were subjected” to in the past (Guha and Spivak, 41). This is important to consider, he argues, since “the experience of exploitation and labour endowed this politics [subaltern] with many idioms, norms, and values which put it in a category apart from elite politics (Guha and Spivak, 41). Guha also points out that elite and subaltern mobilization schemes were wholly different as well; with elites “more legalistic and constitutionalist” in their movements, while subalterns maintained a “more violent” and “spontaneous” stance in their reactions to political developments (Guha and Spivak, 40-41). Regardless of these differences, however, Guha maintains that elites often tried to integrate the lowerclasses of Indian society into their struggle against the British; a clear “trademark” of subaltern history and its “focus on the dialectic between political mobilization by the leadership [of a society] and autonomous popular initiatives" (Sarkar, 8). Yet, Guha points out that “the braiding together of the two strands of elite and subaltern politics led invariably to explosive situations,” thus, “indicating that the masses mobilized by the elite to fight for their own objectives managed to break away from their control” (Guha and Spivak, 42). To a certain degree, this sentiment reflects elements of the Cambridge school since Guha makes it clear that elites (politicians) attempted to direct the masses for their own particular (selfish) wishes. Due to the absence of an effective leadership or the ability to control the masses, however, Guha argues that the nationalist effort was “far too fragmented to form effectively into anything like a national liberation movement” (Guha and Spivak, 42-43). Because of this inherent fragmentation, historians Peers and Gooptu posit that subaltern accounts of India – such as Guha’s analysis – often fail to “explore nationalism as a category” and, in turn, examine it as a series of “popular movements” (Sarkar, 9).

3 Historians who use this term take it from Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), an Italian Marxist and Communist who was imprisoned for a long time by Mussolini's police (from 1926) until his death at age 46. In prison, he wrote notebooks on politics and history and philosophy. He declared that the subaltern was the subjected underclass in a society on whom the dominant power exerts its hegemonic influence. Subalterns means, of inferior status or rank; subordinate; hence, of rank, power, authority, action "traditional" histories, often neglected the ordinary, the average, the everyday because they were not the stuff of "big history." Historians have tended to use this term in a way that takes back the history— much the same way that the term queer has been brought into the language of queer theory, subaltern has been a way for historians (and theoreticians) to expand their language, to recognize the historically subordinate position of the lives of various groups of people, but in recognizing their "subalternity" giving them a voice and an agency. Subaltern Studies emerged around 1982 as a series of journal articles published by Oxford University Press in India. A group of Indian scholars trained in the west wanted to reclaim their history. Its main goal was to retake history for the underclasses, for the voices that had not been heard previous.

Scholars of the subaltern hoped to break away from histories of the elites and the Eurocentric bias of current imperial history. In the main, the wrote against the "Cambridge School" which seemed to uphold the colonial legacy— i.e. it was elite-centered. Instead, they focused on subaltern in terms of class, caste, gender, race, language and culture. They espoused the idea that there may have been political dominance, but that this was not hegemonic. The primary leader was Ranajit Guha who had written works on peasant uprisings in India. Another of the leading scholars of subaltern studies is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. She draws on a number of theoretical positions in her analysis of Indian history: deconstruction, marxism, feminism. She was highly critical of current histories of India that were told from the vantage point of the colonizers and presented a story of the colony via the British adminstrators (Young, 159). What she and other historians (including Ranajit Guha) wanted was to reclaim their history, to give voice to the subjected peoples. Any other history merely reconstructs imperialist hegemony and does not give voice to the people—those who resisted, those who supported, those who experienced colonial incursion. According to the Subaltern Studies group, this history is designed to be a "contribution made by people on their own, that it, independently of the élite" (quoted in Young 160). They did this by establishing a journal out of Oxford, Delhi and Australia and called it Subaltern Studies to write a history against the grain and restore history to the subordinated. In other words, to give the common people back their agency.

In other words, proponents of subaltern studies suggest that we need to find alternate sources to locate the voice of the subaltern historically. Elite records, like those at the home office or foreign office could still be used, but you had to read them with a different pair of lenses. So even though we might be subject to using these same sources, we can read them "against the grain" –this phrase comes from Walter Benjamin's theoretical work. Many SS critics, like Dipesh Chakrabarty ("postcoloniality and the artifice of history" in representations) suggest that it is really impossible to fully break from the western narrative. Obviously, the introduction of subaltern studies, like all of our theories we've encountered this term, has tremendous political repercussions. In a society like Great Britain, that claims to operate as a "Commonwealth" yet sees racism around every corner as well as the desire to keep out the blacks who cause all the problems (refer to recent Prime Minister elections), the writing and

mapping of a history of previously silent groups creates an undercurrent throughout the society

Thus subaltern history will help to lay bare previously covered histories, previously ignored events, previously purposeful hidden secrets of the past.

All of these people dealt head on with the concept of the "other." Otherness is part of modern nationalist rhetoric to define a nation, to have a nationalist spirit—patriotism, for example is to suggest a certain level of inclusion. If there is inclusion, a nation of the self, then how do you define it? The most obvious idea is to think in terms of binary oppositions à self / other. So, "the other" was constructed as outside the nation. When this kind of bipolarity is established, the opposite tends to be negated. Otherness, once negated is subject to the power of the colonizer. It is this discourse that early postcolonial thinkers, like Said, hoped to displace. Like scholars of gender, Said argued that the bipolar reduced race to an "essentialist" category."