Translations of Antonio Gramsci’s works into English from the 1950s onwards drew the attention of Indian academics searching for alternative understandings of Marxism—especially the Subaltern Studies Group launched in 1982 by Ranajit Guha. The end of the 1977 Emergency saw the rapid spread of democratic mobilisations across India and contributed to a growing interest in exploring Marxist ideas outside the Soviet framework. Despite their differences, the parliamentary Left parties believed that the end of Congress’s dominance would bring a change in political power where the Left would be the decisive force.
Instead, there was an emergence of regional parties supported by dominant peasant castes and headed by authoritarian populist leaders, and the Hindu-nationalist BJP rose steadily to power as a national party. This betrayal of the Left’s expectations led a section of Marxist intellectuals towards Gramsci; they realised that an economic crisis may not push the masses towards the Left—the greater need was for a better understanding of mass peasant consciousness, and of the cultural, ideological dimensions of dominance and subordination.
This collection of essays by preeminent scholars introduces readers to the Gramscian ideas of hegemony, civil and political society, coercion and consent, wars of manoeuvre and position, the role of the party and intellectuals, and subaltern historiography in a Gramscian framework. Who constitutes the peasantry, how they can be mobilised, how they are shaped by the hegemony of dominant classes, how far they maintain a culture and a consciousness of their own—these Gramscian concerns remain pertinent to the analysis of Indian society today.
Scholars of Indian Marxism, Subaltern Studies, political science, history and philosophy will find this volume invaluable.
The Editors
Partha Chatterjee is Honorary Professor, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (CSSS), Calcutta, and Professor Emeritus, Columbia University. He was Professor of Political Science at CSSS, Calcutta, and Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York. His books include Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986), The Nation and Its Fragments (1993), The Politics of the Governed (2004), The Black Hole of Empire (2012) and I Am the People (2019). His Bengali books include Itihaser uttaradhikar (2000), Praja o tantra (2005) and Nagarik (2021).
Sobhanlal Datta Gupta taught at Presidency College, the University of Burdwan and CSSS, Calcutta, and retired as Surendra Nath Banerjee Professor of Political Science at the University of Calcutta. His books include Comintern, India and the Colonial Question, 1920-1937 (1980), Comintern and the Destiny of Communism in India, 1919-1943 (2009) and Marxism in Dark Times (2012). He has edited two volumes of writings on Gramsci in Bengali, titled Antoniyo Gramshi: Bichar-bisleshan (1993, 2000) and co-edited a Bengali translation of selected writings by Gramsci (1993).
Acknowledgements Introduction PARTHA CHATTERJEE and SOBHANLAL DATTA GUPTA
1. The Thought of Gramsci SUSOBHAN SARKAR 2. Gramsci’s Theory of Politics SOBHANLAL DATTA GUPTA 3. Bureaucracy and Social Hegemony ASOK SEN 4. The Leninism of Gramsci MOHIT SEN
5. On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India RANAJIT GUHA 6. Antonio Gramsci and the Indian Peasant Question DAVID ARNOLD 7. Gramsci and Different Kinds of Difference SUDIPTA KAVIRAJ 8. Can the Subaltern Speak? GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK
9. From Hegemony to Counter-Hegemony: A Journey in a Non-Imaginary Unreal Space AJIT K. CHAUDHURY 10. Gramsci’s Concept of Common Sense: Towards a Theory of Subaltern Consciousness in Hegemony Processes ARUN K. PATNAIK
11. Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography RANAJIT GUHA
12. Caste and Subaltern Consciousness PARTHA CHATTERJEE 13. Culture and Subaltern Consciousness: An Aspect of the MGR Phenomenon M. S. S. PANDIAN 14. Antonio Gramsci and Dialectics: A Critical Commemoration of the Philosophy of Autocritical Marxism ARUN BOSE
15. Of Revolutions, Classical and Passive KALYAN K. SANYAL 16. Subaltern Histories and Post-Enlightenment Rationalism DIPESH CHAKRABARTY 17. Fascism and National Culture: Reading Gramsci in the Days of Hindutva AIJAZ AHMAD
The Contributors