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 self-
government.
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 lower-
classes 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 post-
colonial thinkers, like Said, hoped to displace. Like scholars of gender, Said
argued that the bipolar reduced race to an "essentialist" category."