ABSTRACT

Political struggle is enormously more complex: in a certain sense, it can be compared to colonial wars or to old wars of conquest—in which the victorious army occupies, or proposes to occupy, permanently all or part of the conquered territory. Then the defeated army is disarmed and dispersed, but the struggle continues on the terrain of politics. It is tempting to describe the colonial state at the height of its powers as a coercive apparatus masked by trappings of hegemony. There is much to mull over in Guha’s formulation, especially the shifting line drawn between dominant and hegemonic accounts of colonial rule. It is difficult to separate the essential coercive apparatus of the colonial state, its instrumental violence, its need for survey and surveillance, and its attempts at suasion, from its quotidian, functional idioms, or the social-historical forms of its moral legitimacy. Accounts of colonial conquest, almost as a rule, deny each of these attributes to the vanquished.