It was only with the 1971 translation of Gramsci’s Selections from the Prison Notebooks by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith that English-speaking academia in the West and in India could really begin to appreciate the facets of Gramsci’s mind that were captured in the scattered writings he did while imprisoned in Mussolini’s fascist Italy. In the Western world, the reading of Gramsci gave rise to the culturalist New Left, while in India, Gramsci scholarship yielded the prolific harvest of postcolonial theory and its most recognizable component, Subaltern Studies.
In India, the political context in which a reading of Gramsci was received was the Emergency of the mid 1970s and the brutal statist defeat of Naxalism. Intellectually on the Left, this signalled a shift away from Mao towards Gramsci. The intellectual and political yield of Gramsci in India, especially in terms of the Subaltern Studies collective, is a questionable one. It is in this light that this review assesses the very useful volume edited by Partha Chatterjee and Sobhanlal Datta Gupta. Essays included in the volume spanning the years 1968 and 1996 are by Aijaz Ahmad, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Kalyan Sen, Sudipto Kaviraj, MSS Pandian, Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among others. The introduction notes that the early writings on Gramsci included in this volume such as the ones by Susobhan Sarkar, Sobhanlal Datta Gupta and Mohit Sen attempt to place Gramsci within the matrix of other Marxist theorists such as Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.
Gramsci is an attractive writer on varied accounts. The first is the sheer fecundity of his repertoire, spanning concepts like hegemony, the passive revolution, the war of position and the war of manoeuvre. Second is the vast range of intellectual engagement from which the conceptual repertoire arises, including the significance of common sense, the role of intellectuals, an assessment of the Risorgimento period in Italian history, and American Fordism. Third is the element of mystique that surrounds Gramsci’s life, especially his imprisonment and his physical debilities that did not inhibit the sharpness of his mind.
The major problem in the Gramscian appropriation by postcolonial theory and particularly by members of the Subaltern Studies group has to do with selective adaptation. This is a point that the last essay in the volume by Aijaz Ahmad makes, suggesting that this eclecticism takes too many liberties with the indispensable Marxist and Enlightenment backgrounds of Gramsci’s philosophy. Ahmad is particularly critical of the incorporation of the Gramscian term ‘subaltern’ as he suggests that it becomes a catch-all alternative to the classical Marxist category of class and the attitude towards the Left which this creates (p. 248). Rejection of the Enlightenment by postcolonial theory has met with a great deal of wariness. This is a point acknowledged by Dipesh Chakrabarty in his essay where he cites Sumit Sarkar’s warning that postcolonial theory has ‘stimulated forms of indigenism not easy to distinguish from the Standard Sangh Parivar argument’ (p. 228). This wariness becomes even more poignant with the political rise of Hindu nationalism, and Meera Nanda’s recent book Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism: The Wages of Unreason makes a direct connection.
The postcolonial and subaltern reading of Gramsci does a disservice to the analysis of fascism, which itself is the very ‘linchpin’ of Gramsci’s thought. Most postcolonial analyses tend to miss the connections between acute crises in the capitalist regime of accumulation as they depart from the Marxist analysis of class and replaced it with a foregrounding of the subaltern.
The essays included in this volume are till 1996, which is over a decade before the financial crisis of 2008. Very few prominent postcolonial theorists, barring perhaps Partha Chatterjee, briefly in his book on populism, I Am the People: Reflections on Popular Sovereignty, have engaged with the populist fallout of that 2008 crisis in any significant way. Subaltern Studies emerged very much around the end of the decade of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s when the stagflation of the 1970s and the larger financialization of the global economy led to the demise of the Fordist-Keynesian consensus. Such changes in the capitalist accumulation structure do not seem to significantly reflect in the theoretical exertions of postcolonial theory and Subaltern Studies.
The invocation of Gramsci in the analysis of fascism then becomes an almost futile cultural handwringing for the simple reason that the crises of capitalism are never really considered with the depth required. This is especially in the direction of the actual crises of capitalism that lie below at the ‘base’ of fascism and its cultural and nationalistic manifestations. The chapter by Kalyan Sanyal may be considered an exception to this largely culturalist and superstructural rendering as he delves into the ‘interior’ of the capitalist production process to make a distinction between classic revolutions of the Jacobin variety and passive revolutions of the Italian Risorgimento and the American Fordist kind.
The reading of Gramsci is rendered even more tricky by the nature of Gramsci’s theoretical interventions. They were tentative, never revised and written to evade the prison censor. As Sudipta Kaviraj points out in his essay, Selections from the Prison Notebooks does not have the form of a book for the simple reason that it was never written as one (p. 86). To this scattered form is added another proclivity of postcolonial studies and Subaltern School theorists, which is to add layer upon layer of esoteric philosophers ranging from Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida to Gilles Deleuze, in the elusive attempt to understand the subaltern consciousness, only to pose the question of whether the subaltern can really speak. This of course, is an eponymous reference to the much-discussed and cited essay by another one of the well-known academics of postcolonial theory, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and which is widely read and cited more for its density of style and inaccessibility than for being able to ascertain the answer to the question it poses.
Spivak’s essay itself brings out the problem with Subaltern Studies in terms of what the real point of such abstruse scholarship and its difficult-to-read prose is all about. The Subaltern Studies collective after four decades of its academic rise and dominance has now started being questioned in terms of what it has really achieved. The recent book by Meera Nanda has already been cited and follows another book-length study over a decade earlier by Vivek Chibber, Post-Colonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, which was equally damning in terms of its assessment. The question is what the reading of Gramsci by postcolonial theorists and Subalternists has contributed. This becomes especially salient in terms of the political fallout of the intellectual distancing from the Enlightenment and the valorization of the indigenous. In his 1974 article, Mohit Sen notes that in all Gramsci’s writings there is a clear conviction in the centrality of the working class and its historical role. And yet as Sen notes, readers of Gramsci in India tend to ‘make a fetish almost of their idealized version of what they term the working peasant’ (p. 56).
The deployment of the Gramscian concept of the passive revolution, especially by Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta Kaviraj, has yielded useful insights into the postcolonial Indian state, in terms of its being carved up and competed over by a coalition of classes like the capitalists, the rich farmers and the bureaucracy. This situation of no dominant class being able to rule on its own and the relative autonomy exercised by the state was however a phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s. There has been a significant change in the character of the Indian state since the decade of the 1990s and the liberalization policies introduced since. More significant since then has been the capture of state power by Hindutva forces and the attempt made to make Hindutva a kind of cultural common sense to be simply accepted.
Subaltern Studies and their supporters have championed the school for the major historiographical breakthrough they believe it has created from South Asia. Ranajit Guha makes precisely this point about the domination of the historiography of Indian nationalism by elitism (p. 60). Guha excoriates what he calls the history of Indian nationalism being ‘written up as a sort of spiritual biography of the Indian elite’ (p. 61). This manner of excoriation of elites combines with what Guha calls the inability of traditional history writing to ‘acknowledge, far less, interpret, the contribution made by the people on their own, that is independently of the elite, to the making and development of this nationalism’ (p. 62). The one essay in this volume that does effectively look at the tendency among the subaltern to fight for justice and in the process uphold a powerful leader who stands against the corrupt elite is by MSS Pandian on the MGR phenomenon in Tamil Nadu. As the introduction notes, this ‘analysis is significant in the context of later discussion on populism’ (p. xviii).
This attitude of excoriating elites in the name of the subaltern somehow seems to chime so much with the current mood of populist politics in North India where there is a deep-seated vehemence reserved for the Nehruvian elite in the form of resentment towards the English-speaking Khan Market and Lutyens gang. The point here is not to defend elitism, but simply to point out a difference in attitude towards elites. Contrast the point made by Guha with something that Aijaz Ahmad says in his widely read essay included in the volume, where he makes the point that progressive aspects of Nehruvian social democracy must be reconstructed as it is so much a target of the Hindutva right (p. 259).
Ahmad’s essay is far more prescient in terms of his assessment of where the Republic was headed in the late 1980s and early 1990s and it is evident in this observation: ‘it is quite unclear as to where the Republic, with its great civilizational resources and its cruel class structure, is now headed’ (p. 249). Ahmad wrote this analysis at the very beginning of the economic liberalization policies initiated by the Congress regime. He rightly notes that it has given rise to a great deal of expectation and hope. We are now witnessing in all its disturbing manifestation what happens when that expectation and hope are not fulfilled, a question that Ahmad did pose: ‘Supposing the Congress variety of “liberalization” does not succeed, shall we then be ready for an authoritarian resolution? Shall then, “the mass of the urban and rural petty bourgeois” demand that the machinery of terror and the machinery of “liberalization” be one and the same?’ (p. 251).
Over five decades elapsed between the rise of nationalism in Italy and the coming of fascism to state power. In India we see 75 years after the inauguration of the Republic the complete domination of fascist forces. Sumit Sarkar as noted discerned the dangers of an academic framework like Subaltern Studies in terms of its valorization of the indigenous and distanced himself. Academia is never done in ivory towers. The inability of Subaltern Studies scholars, in their reading of Gramsci, to read the tea leaves of Indian politics, will forever legitimately be held up as an instance of an unwarranted academic aloofness that was too tied up in the density and prolixity of its own academic prose. For a generation of academics like this reviewer, who as a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University in the late 1990s, tried in vain to wrap his head around the proliferation of Subaltern Studies, the unanswered question was, and still remains: What is the point?
Amir Ali is Assistant Professor, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.