What is colonialism? What is a colonial state? With these questions the investigation of this already classic book of Subaltern Studies begins. Ranajit Guha shows here how the colonial state in the Indian subcontinent, and in general in almost all the old nineteenth-century colonies, was essentially different from the metropolitan bourgeois state. The bourgeoisie was able to assert its dominance in Europe, and specifically in England, through a combination of coercion and persuasion. At the end of this process, the liberal democratic ideology turned the metropolitan state into something similar to a legitimate representative of the interests of civil society, identifying it with the nation and the nation with the state. This form of state was however impossible in India, where a high level of violence had to be applied in order to sustain the Raj. The uniqueness of the colonial state in the Indian subcontinent rested precisely on this paradox: it was an autocracy sustained in the East by the main bourgeois liberal democracy in the West. This non-hegemonic state was unable to assimilate civil society from the colonized.
Guha, however, does not stop at the historical denunciation of the British elites and imperialism. It extends criticism of its successors: the Indian elites and the Indian nation state. From the analysis of colonial and nationalist historiographical discourses, it shows the undeniable continuity with the colonial regime. The nationalist leaders, until recently collaborationists, emulated the metropolitan bourgeoisie claiming the representation of the entire nation, with the explicit objective of avoiding any hint of class struggle. By leaving out peasants and workers, in India another voice was suppressed, a subordinate voice that corresponded to a large part of society, and whose antagonism the nationalist bourgeoisie tried to neutralize more through discipline than persuasion. In this case too, Guha demonstrates how the Indian leaders and the new state failed to overcome the main contradiction of the British Raj, that of domination without hegemony.