Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852-1928 - Rilegato

Haynes, Douglas E.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0520067258 ISBN 13: 9780520067257

Casa editrice: Univ of California Pr on Demand, 1991

Riassunto

This book explores the rhetoric and ritual of Indian elites undercolonialism, focusing on the city of Surat in the Bombay Presidency. It particularly examines how local elites appropriated and modified the liberal representative discourse of Britain and thus fashioned a "public' culture that excluded the city's underclasses. Departing from traditional explanations that have seen this process as resulting from English education or radical transformations in society, Haynes emphasizes the importance of the unequal power relationship between the British and those Indians who struggled for political influence and justice within the colonial framework. A major contribution of the book is Haynes' analysis of the emergence and ultimate failure of Ghandian cultural meanings in Indian politics after 1923.

The book addresses issues of importance to historians and anthropologists of India, to political scientists seeking to understand the origins of democracy in the "Third World," and general readers interested in comprehending processes of cultural change in colonial contexts.

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Douglas Haynes is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College.

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Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852-1928

By Douglas Haynes

University of California Press

Copyright © 1991 Douglas Haynes
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520067258
One
Introduction

The rise of nationalism, the development of self-governing institutions, the expansion of anticolonial protest, the emergence of intense ethnic and religious conflicts—these have been the "grand"themes in the historiography of colonial societies.1 The centrality of these themes in the writing of Asian and African history suggests that the colonial experience everywhere involved great changes in indigenous cultures of politics. Under the domination of European imperialism, the colonized altered their perceptions of the political world in fundamental ways, modifying their notions of authority, reformulating their conceptions of justice, and often forging new identities.

For students of global history, India has often served as a paradigm for understanding political change under colonial rule. The largest contemporary nation of Asia or Africa to have undergone colonial rule, it was the first to develop a "modern" nationalist organization: the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885. India had a rich history of popular protest against imperialism, culminating in the three giant campaigns led by Mahatma Gandhi between the 1920s and the 1940s. It also had a very long history of development in self-governing institutions, beginning with local municipalities and district local boards introduced by British civil servants after the mid–nineteenth century, and leading up to the creation of a parliamentary government in 1947. Accompanying the rise of nationalism and the emergence of India's liberal representative system was a process that has always been less positively evaluated in historical writings: the emergence of communal conflicts, particularly between Hindus and Muslims. As is well known, the intensification of religious communalism ultimately led to the division of British India into the separate countries of India and Pakistan,

as well as to the tragic events of 194—48, when hundreds of thousands of South Asians lost their lives in bloody rioting.

Until the last ten years, it was these processes—the growth of nationalism, of representative forms of self-government, and of communalism—that most preoccupied historians of late colonial South Asia. Central to their concerns was the chief subject of this book: the incorporation of nationalist, democratic, and communalist concepts into the political values of educated Indians. The outlines of this story are fairly well known. During the nineteenth century, a small group of men, anxious to prove their worth to their British rulers but also intent on questioning their rulers' policies, began to appropriate the notions of "nationalism," "representative government," and (later) "socialism," all principles originating in the political discourse of Western Europe. The "English-educated elite" assumed command over the top rungs of the Indian National Congress from its beginnings, guiding the country in the decolonization process, giving shape to its constitution, and setting the general contours of state ideology. In the period following independence, the continued commitment of this elite to liberal, representative, and nationalist institutions enabled India's democracy to withstand the increasingly intense conflicts between communities organized around region, religion, and caste.

Today some scholars apparently consider these issues exhausted and see little point in raising them again. They have turned to the study of social and economic structure and, more recently, of popular resistance. A few, by dismissing the traditional questions of political historiography as "elitist",have even attempted to strip these concerns of much of their legitimacy.2 Yet many of the same historians would recognize that the older models that used to explain the emergence of India's liberal representative values have serious shortcomings. And they would also acknowledge that an understanding of this process is necessary in order to appreciate the character of the contemporary political order, especially the reasons it has failed to meet the needs of India's underclasses.

This study turns again to the historical examination of the development of India's liberal political system and of the liberal, democratic value system of its English-educated elite by focusing on a single urban center, the city of Surat in western India. The questions it asks are familiar to Indian historians. Why did Indian elites appropriate liberal and national concepts during late colonial rule? Why did communal identities and conceptions of justice crystallize and intensify at the same time as the emergence of democratic discourse? Why did discussion and debate in the central arenas of politics become confined to these two idioms—the liberal-democratic and the communal? Perhaps most

important, how did the language of democracy, despite its seeming advocacy of the equality and rights of the underclasses, serve to exclude these classes from full-fledged participation in forging India's contemporary polity?

While many of the questions I examine here are traditional ones, the approach I use to examine them is not. Rather than draw upon the standard tools of political history, I wish here to apply the methodology of ethnohistory. The study borrows from anthropology the concern with the construction of cultural meaning, the process by which human beings create and reproduce their understandings of the world in the course of social action. In the pages that follow, I explore the symbolic behavior—the rhetoric and the ritual—of leaderships in Surat as they interacted with their political overlords. The focus on politics as symbolic action and discursive practice will allow me to question interpretative models that suggest that the entry of democratic values into the language of elite politics was an outgrowth of forces external to the political process, such as "westernization," "modernization," and the "emergence of capitalism." Instead, I argue that day-to-day struggles for power and justice under colonial domination were themselves the most significant engines of cultural change.

This study departs from most existing political history in another way, also influenced by anthropological approaches. While most works touching upon questions of political ideology in India explore either national-level organizations or leaders of national, or at least regional, prominence, often during a rather short period, I choose to examine a specific locality over a long time. For those familiar with the history of Indian politics, the choice of Surat as a subject for this inquiry may seem an especially odd one for a work that claims to describe a dynamic characteristic of large areas of the subcontinent. The city and the region surrounding it produced no leaders of national stature until the rise of Morarji Desai, a native of the southern Gujarat region (and later prime minister of India), during the 1930s. With the exception of the famous Indian National Congress meetings of 1907, an event that will receive little attention in this work, Surat has never been especially well known for its contributions to the nationalist struggle or the history of communalism. Why not, one might ask (and, indeed, I have been asked), concentrate instead on national-level actors operating in national arenas? The answer is that an analysis of cultural processes and ideological change can benefit as much from a circumscribed focus as, say, the study of factional conflict or peasant unrest. If we are to leave behind the notion that change is the inexorable result of anonymous historical forces and view culture instead as a product of specific men and women in specific historical environments, constantly construing

the meanings of their social actions as they seek power and struggle for justice, then it is only through studies concentrating on particular places or groups that we can capture these processes. The micro approach of the ethnohistorian becomes an invaluable tool for reconstructing the patterns of everyday encounter between local elites and their colonial rulers that helped give shape to the contemporary Indian culture of politics.

Although the initial choice of Surat was almost arbitrary, in retrospect it seems particularly fortunate. The city's history is relatively well documented as early as the seventeenth century, which makes it possible to examine the emergence of liberal representative principle over a much longer history of symbolic interaction between city dwellers and their political overlords. Surat also had some of the social diversity characteristic of Indian society as a whole. The broad patterns of its political development intersect well with themes that historians have emphasized in more general works, such as the growth of Gandhian nationalism and the emergence of religious communalism. This is, of course, not to say that Surat was a typical city. Indeed, no single place could be typical, for each had its own social configurations, its own subcultural traditions, and its own historical experiences under colonialism. But by focusing on a particular locale like Surat, we can hope to understand the general character of the processes by which the colonized in Asia and Africa accommodated themselves culturally to political domination by European rulers. Though concentrating on a single city, this analysis will allow a questioning of existing models of change in the culture of politics and a positing of an alternative approach that should prove testable elsewhere in India and the colonized world.

Models of Change in Indian Political Culture

Existing approaches to the development of India's liberal polity, contemporary historians tend to agree, all have significant limitations. Yet in recent years few new alternatives have arisen to replace the old. Though most historians consciously reject paradigms that stress English education, the emergence of capitalism, or colonial constitutional reform as the key variable responsible for the appropriation of democratic values and rhetoric by Indian elites, many are forced to resort to these same models as shorthand when they deal in their writings and classroom expositions with change in political culture. Even more critical, the absence of explicit alternatives to the existing models has meant that older, often culture-bound, conceptions of political change remain entrenched in popular understandings of Asian and African history, particularly in the West. The need for an approach that can challenge

ethnocentric or empirically inadequate interpretations is self-evident to anyone who teaches Indian history. The purpose of addressing these models thus is not to resurrect some straw men whose views can then easily be dismissed, or to deny the value of works of continuing importance at both empirical and interpretative levels. Rather, it is to make explicit the paradigms that underlie thinking about the once-colonized world in Euro-American culture so that the process of unlearning these paradigms can be made more conscious.

The question of why Indian elites developed commitments to liberal political principle has most commonly been associated with approaches stressing the notions of westernization and modernization. Two decades ago, these two approaches to change were dominant among Western academics; today they still pervade popular conceptions of non-Western history. Each evoked at least implicitly the image of a superior civilization—the "West" or "modernity"—confronting a backward, static, and "traditional" society and of the colonized either absorbing foreign values or reacting against them. The concept of westernization suggested that those who came in contact with Western values through English-language education abandoned traditional beliefs largely because they had been exposed to these values.3 Modernization theorists claimed to escape from these overtly ethnocentric judgments by accepting that every society may develop its own path to the acquisition of certain "modern" traits, such as "rationality," "democracy," "nationalism," "achievement orientation," "humanitarianism," and "secularism."4 But since these traits were usually evaluated positively and since they were always considered to be characteristic of European and American societies and not originally of the societies subjected to colonialism, modernization theory too was often imbued with assumptions of Western cultural superiority. Moreover, the causal logic in many modernization studies was often unclear; sometimes the diffusion of a set of modern traits seemed to occur through some natural and inexorable process that was never quite delineated. Studies that did provide historical explanation often pointed to Western intellectual forces—education, missionary activity, or the ideas of individual colonial officers—as the key factors stimulating change.5

Such criticism is not meant to suggest that Western education and ideas were unimportant formative influences. Indeed, since the proponents of liberal democratic ideals in India were all highly educated, the role of English schooling must be acknowledged. It was in their schools and colleges that many members of the Indian elite were exposed to European political traditions, to law, and to parliamentary procedures that became so critical to their politics. The problem is that westernization and modernization alone are rather limited explanations for value

shifts. If one relaxes the assumption of Western superiority inherent in these concepts, one is often left with the conclusion that culture contact inevitably produces cultural change. Only by taking into account the context of power in educational institutions and in the larger colonial world of which these institutions were part is it possible to understand why English education was such a transformative experience in India; learning thus must be considered a political process shaped by the character of domination. But once this is accepted, education loses its privileged place as a site of cultural change. Other political arenas, such as those examined in this work, become equally significant.

Finally, those who adopted the academic discourse of westernization and modernization often explicitly or implicitly regarded the acceptance of nationalist and democratic values as part of an onward march of history that derived from universal human drives for "freedom." In essence these approaches were rooted in an evolutionary perspective that saw all societies as moving naturally, though perhaps unevenly, toward convergence with certain Euro-American norms. In practice each model thus served, though often unconsciously, to bolster the hegemony of the West long after the political structures of colonialism had been dismantled.6

Sociological approaches to the development of political change, particularly what one might call the classical Marxian approach, have had a history nearly as long as that of Westernization and modernization.7 These approaches, too, located the source of cultural change in Europe. But rather than looking to Western education as the chief agent of cultural change, sociological explanations suggested that the growth of nationalist and democratic values stemmed from radical shifts in the economy and society associated with colonial rule. Commercialization, the growth of private property, and the development of the British legal order fundamentally transformed Indian society, which had previously been based on "precapitalist" or "feudal" relations. The classes which arose from such processes readily adopted liberal political values when these met their economic and political interests.8

Because the work of classical Marxians located the mechanism of change in the larger society rather than in the transmission of ideas, it escaped the assumption of Western cultural superiority. No doubt for this reason the approach proved far more attractive than modernization or westernization to intellectuals in India. Empirically, however, the sociological interpretation proved problematic. Some areas of India undoubtedly underwent major social transformations during the nineteenth century. But recent scholarship, including much work by revisionist Marxist scholars, has raised significant doubt about whether similar structural changes took place everywhere during this period.9 Yet

despite the unevenness of socioeconomic change, commitments to liberal political values emerged almost uniformly in urban South Asia during the later nineteenth century. These inconsistencies led a number of more recent Marxist historians to question whether there was any one-to-one relationship between the class status of Indian political leaders and their ideologies. Bipan Chandra, in his seminal study of economic nationalism, has argued that nationalist intellectuals of the late nineteenth century "showed a high degree of altruism in proposing policies which went against the narrow interests of that section of society to which most of them belonged." While middle class in their economic position, he asserts, the nationalists were capitalist in outlook.10 But though such revisionist alternatives to the classical models have corrected the tendency to emphasize a mechanical correlation between ideological developments and social structure, they have generally not suggested any alternative mechanism of cultural change. In the studies of Chandra and others, class analysis has become more a tool of description than a theory of causation; that is, these works show simply that certain "classes" adopted certain ideological positions. Unfortunately, in dismissing overly deterministic Marxian interpretations without positing alternatives, the revisionists by default often lead us back to explanations based upon the Indian response to Western cultural influences.

Finally, both the sociological approach and much revisionist work tended to rest on assumptions about change in society and culture no less teleological than those of westernization and modernization. These studies, too, tended to view colonized societies as moving steadily toward the adoption of nationalism, democracy, and sometimes socialism by evolutionary processes that either must or should take place. Those few recent studies that escape these kinds of assumptions and that stress instead the importance of colonial domination to the adoption of twentieth-century values and norms rarely have explored how domination accomplishes these ends.11

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, historians working on elite politics turned away from the question of how Western notions became entrenched in the Indian culture of politics. Some looked at the ways nationalist leaders drew upon regional and religious symbolism in attempts to mobilize followers; others examined the specific social and economic interests underlying the behavior of Indian politicians in their regions and localities.12 Collectively this work called into question the utility of viewing liberal or bourgeois ideology as the sole motive force in Indian politics, pointing both to the importance of "neotraditional" values and the preoccupations of local factional groupings with status, wealth, and power. In the process, however, they tended to

tilt scholarship toward recognition of continuity and away from consideration of change.

The most important and cohesive approach to develop in political history during the last two decades was that of the Cambridge "school," a group of historians led by Anil Seal at Cambridge University.13 Its members—though less united than the label "school" might suggest— did offer some common understandings of the development of liberal political institutions on the subcontinent, and all of them tended to exclude any analysis of the dynamics of cultural and ideological change from their work. The Cambridge historians saw the emergence of public and national politics largely as an accommodation of Indian elites to the changing structure of the Raj, particularly to the growing importance of the institutions of self-government established by the colonial rulers. Indian politicians entered these institutions often carrying with them the preexisting concerns and conflicts of powerful local magnates. They also formed political associations to bring pressure on these institutions from outside, forging new linkages between localities and creating a "structure of their own which could match the administrative and representative structures of the Raj." The most significant of the new public organizations was the Indian National Congress.14

Like others writing at the time, the Cambridge historians decisively moved away from the teleological assumptions of both the westernization-modernization and Marxian approaches. But this movement came at the cost of any serious consideration of change in the culture of politics. Seal, perhaps the most cynical among the Cambridge scholars, downplayed ideology altogether, insisting that what really determined political behavior was "the race for influence, status and resources." Democratic discourse merely masked the true concerns of dominant groups in India. There was a "palpable gap," he stated, "between what politicians claimed to represent and what they really stood for."15 Indians, playing the rules of a colonially constructed game, dressed themselves in the guise of organizational forms that their rulers would recognize for the purpose of advancing their own economic and political interests. The various studies by members of the Cambridge group suggested that at the local level Indians remained organized largely around traditional factions (and to a lesser extent around religious groupings) as they involved themselves in new forms of political organization. The way in which notions of authority, identity, and justice were reformulated and rethought as Indians participated in the new arenas of politics was a marginal concern of the Cambridge historians.

Since the mid-1970s, when most of the works associated with the Cambridge school were published, there have been considerable developments in the historiography of India, most notably in examining un-

derclass movements and resistance. Historians have generally set aside issues of elite politics and the development of representative institutions and democratic values. But in doing so they have left most scholars seriously dissatisfied with the existing models to explain the older questions.

Hegemony and Culture: an Ethnohistorical Approach

While all the major historical models point to important factors that must be considered in any work on the emergence of democratic discourse, each has significant limitations. In this study I acknowledge the importance of education but view English-language schooling as a necessary rather than a sufficient explanatory factor for the formation of liberal democratic consciousness. I accept a relationship between socioeconomic position and cultural values—although not a deterministic one—but see no sufficient structural transformation in social relations in Surat City to account for the shifts in the culture of local politics during the late colonial period. I depart from any teleology which would view liberal democratic outlooks as an inevitable outgrowth of inexorable historical processes. And while I emphasize the critical importance of colonial institutional structures and of local factional struggles, I stress that real changes in consciousness did take place and that the rhetoric of local politicians must be taken seriously. Indeed, I argue that it was through their rhetorical and ritual actions that Surti elites constituted the emergent public culture of the late nineteenth century.

While this work also addresses the "grand" questions of Indian political history, it argues that the main factor conditioning the construction of political ideology and culture was the unequal power relationship between the colonial rulers and the colonized. Public culture in Surat, I suggest, was a product of British rule and, more important, of the efforts and struggles of local elites to create a place for themselves within the colonial order. Indigenous politicians shaped their values and selfimages in reference to political languages derived from their rulers' culture because these languages carried a special persuasive power in the context of British colonial domination, particularly in arenas of politics influenced by the new institutions of self-government. As local elites sought to influence their rulers and their relation with their political overlords, they made recourse to a vocabulary and symbols that had meaning to their rulers. In carving out niches for themselves within the Raj, competing with each other for power, striving for justice, and even criticizing colonial rule, they developed commitments to

political principles whose origins ultimately were alien. Thus, in the arenas civil administrators considered most critical, discussion and debate became confined within Anglo-Indian political idioms. The hegemony of these idioms was so strong that all attempts to construct alternative political discourses of power were eventually overwhelmed. The principle of public representation and its seeming antithesis—communal representation—both became established through the same processes, that is, the efforts of local leaders to interpret and reinterpret borrowed political conceptions in the everyday struggles of local politics.

These arguments owe a debt to two different intellectual sources, neither of which has been regularly applied to the development of nationalism and democracy in India. The first is those scholars who form what might be called the American ethnohistorical school of Indian history. This group, led by such figures as Bernard Cohn, Arjun Appadurai, Nicholas Dirks, Lucy Caroll, and Richard Fox, has focused on British efforts to comprehend and categorize Indian society and culture and on the role of Indians in constructing their own cultures, in part by resorting to their rulers' own political idioms.16 In pointing to colonial institutions such as the courts, the army, and imperial ritual as critical sites of cultural production and reproduction, members of this school have questioned whether nineteenth-and twentieth-century Indian commitments to tribe, caste, and religion can be seen merely as reflections of traditional values. Many of these identities, they have insisted, reflect as much a cultural accommodation of Indians to colonial understandings of their society as an ethos rooted in precolonial principles and loyalties.

To date, the work of the ethnohistorians has concentrated on subjects which fall to a certain extent within the traditional purview of anthropology. That is, they have examined phenomena which appear unfamiliar, perhaps strange and exotic, to Westerners: the role of caste and tribe, of religious institutions and religious identities, and of imperial ritual. Logically, however, their method is equally valid for understanding cultural forms that have been more central to the concerns of political historians. Like caste, tribe, and religion, the notions of the people, the public good, democracy, and nationhood were by no means natural ones but were culturally constructed by Indian elites in their day-to-day politics under the British Raj. Just as ethnohistory challenges the notion of an unchanging Indian culture when it is applied to questions of religious and caste identity, it can also be called upon to question approaches that have viewed liberal democratic forms in India as a product of inevitable evolutionary processes. It suggests instead the great importance of human symbolic action in colonial arenas such as

the schools, courts, municipalities, and provincial assemblies to the development of public culture.

The second source of inspiration for this study is the concept of "cultural hegemony" exerted by the dominant classes within a society, a notion first developed in the work of the Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci but since explicated and enriched by a wide range of recent scholarship.17 In this case, the dominant group to be analyzed is British India's civil elite, and the subordinate groups, the local leaderships or elites of Surat (I will deal with the real underclasses of the city in a moment). By constructing powerful institutional structures in which the elites of Surat felt compelled to operate, I argue, colonial rulers successfully forged a loose hegemony over certain arenas of politics in the city. Local leaderships, working within these structures, continuously resorted to British political models as they gave meaning to their actions. Commitments to ethnic identities, to democracy, and to nationalism, commitments that characterize the culture of politics in India today, are all to a great extent by-products of a colonial domination that stretched into the ideological sphere. As Ashis Nandy has suggested, British colonialism was not merely a matter of the conquest of territory and the appropriation of Indian economic resources; it also involved the "colonization of minds."18

The notion of hegemony, unfortunately, often conjures up an image of a dominant group simply imposing its thinking upon all members of a society through the conscious engineering of culture. When the term is used in this way, subordinate groups appear deprived of any role whatsoever in shaping their own cultural values. They are manipulated into adopting a "false consciousness" that inhibits them from transforming their position of social and economic subordination. To a certain extent, sections in Gramsci's writings suggest just such an interpretation. Much recent work, however, has contended that Gramsci in other passages offers a more complex understanding of hegemony, one that allocates to the dominated a creative part in fashioning their own culture. I do not wish to engage in a debate over whose interpretation of Gramsci is right, an exercise that is probably futile given the inconsistencies in his writings. But I do think that the more complex understanding of hegemony developed in recent scholarship can provide a useful theoretical perspective, whether or not it reflects a "correct" reading of Gramsci. With certain adjustments prompted by this scholarship, the notion of hegemony can be applied to processes of cultural formation in colonial contexts.

First of all, the implication that subordinate groups have a false consciousness should be dropped. To use this term immediately privileges

the revolutionary's definition of what is important at the expense of the subordinate group's own principles. Ideologies and values that stop short of being revolutionary need not be "false"; they may still serve very real interests of the subordinated. Reformist attitudes and beliefs, for instance, may in fact reflect a disposition to avoid risk that seems far more "rational" given the realities of power than more radical alternatives.19 Similarly, a priority given to family, community, or religion rather than to the reconstruction of the larger polity may reflect important psychic and social needs of a worker or peasant. But dismissing the bogey of false consciousness need not lead to the overthrow of the hegemonic model; hegemony simply requires that the subordinate be accomplices in perpetuating the symbolic structures that uphold existing inequalities.20

The idea of hegemony can also be strengthened by recognizing that subordinate groupings can play an active part in negotiating the character of the dominant value system. In Surat the concept of a negotiated version of ruling-class ideology acknowledges the creative role of local elites in constructing their own cultural forms.21 Though political discourse generally operated within the limits of alien political idioms, indigenous figures were constantly reshaping the meaning of appropriated concepts as they attempted to create places for themselves within the colonial order and came into conflict with other elites. Politics were an important battleground in which a wide variety of actors, Indian and British, contended with each other in construing meanings of the key symbols and vocabulary of public discourse. Individual actors could be selective in their choice of concepts from this discourse. Often they reinterpreted notions drawn from outside the subcontinent in light of personal and group preoccupations, their needs in specific situations, and their sometimes idiosyncratic understandings of British conceptions. Thus, eventually, alien political models were rendered Indian by the Indians who used them. And (though not a major concern of this study) the construction of meanings by South Asians in turn influenced the understandings of the British themselves. While there was no homogenization of the cultures of the colonizer and the colonized, each affected the other through a process of mutual interaction.

Projecting the notion of negotiation onto that of hegemony also allows us to understand how the outcomes of cultural domination could be multiple. In Surat no uniform political culture took shape in the civic arena. Not only did different individuals who came into conflict with each other offer competitive cultural constructions, but, in keeping with the diversity of Surat, there was also considerable subcultural variation associated with different groupings in the city. Leaders in various religious collectivities were often involved in parallel but distinct

processes of negotiating their culture with the rulers. Different elites selected different words and different colonial models from a larger potential repertoire. In general, only Hindu elites claimed to act as representatives of an undifferentiated local public; in contrast, Muslim and Parsi elites fashioned roles as leaders of religious minorities, often denying the existence of such a public. Both forms of identity, however, were in part negotiated versions of colonial political notions.

A final strengthening of the Gramscian model stems from recognizing the limited character of the hegemony—its failure to penetrate many areas of indigenous culture. In Surat the hegemony of colonialism was restricted primarily to a very narrow arena of politics—what might be called the civic arena. There it acted to confine political discussion within the limits of public and communal principles. Yet for the majority of Surat's city dwellers, most important decisions were made outside this domain. There, in the city's inner political arenas—particularly those of kinship groups and larger descent-based communities—residents conducted their politics in idioms of precolonial origin, ones that stressed such values as the importance of social reputation and duty to family, caste, neighborhood, or religious grouping. The principle of loyalty to the city's various social communities could inform even small-scale resistance to colonial purposes—for instance, in the form of corruption, nepotism, evasion of taxes, and noncompliance with municipal regulations. It did not, however, emerge into a full-blown "counterhegemony," into a language that would have directly contradicted colonial and liberal democratic assumptions.22

The consequence of the limited character of hegemony was that for the city's underclasses the politics of the civic arena were governed by principles and lines of debate that were baffling, to say the least. Nonelites had to rely upon symbolic specialists to mediate between themselves and the civic domain; they could not participate in the public arena directly. They lacked the conceptual apparatus to challenge colonial hegemony. During the noncooperation era, Gandhi's followers attempted to develop a language that both countered hegemonic assumptions and struck responsive chords in indigenous culture. But those efforts failed to institutionalize themselves in political structures comparable to those constructed by the Raj. As a result local politics reverted to a situation where "bilingual" politicians acted on behalf of the city's subordinate groups, excluding these groups from direct participation in the civic arena.23 The organization of local politics into vertical factions owes much to the dependence of most Surtis on the symbolic specialists who participated in public culture. Thus, within the civic arena, the dominant discourse was challenged but eventually not replaced. Outside the civic arena, it diffused only slowly.

Thus, the notion of a limited and negotiated hegemony offers a conceptual alternative to approaches that currently imbue popular understandings of cultural change in the "Third World." But is it really possible to test the validity of Gramscian propositions in colonial contexts? In the following chapter, I argue that such a testing is indeed possible. The key, I suggest, is to turn to the languages of day-to-day politics.

Continues...

Excerpted from Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852-1928by Douglas Haynes Copyright © 1991 by Douglas Haynes. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Univ of California Pr on Demand
• Data di pubblicazione: 1991
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0520067258
• ISBN 13: 9780520067257
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 400
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile