On Essentialism and History Writing

In the Elementary Aspects, Guha had conceptualized a framework of binaries of domination/subordination, political/pre-political and elite/non-elite. His belief that the subaltern could be understood through a point of comparison led him to imagine its existence in an “autonomous domain” of Indian politics. This signaled a movement in the concept of subalternity towards a parallel sphere of influence “that neither originated from elite politics,  nor did its existence depend upon the latter”. It was not “pre-political” as Guha shows in his analysis of peasant insurgency, that the subaltern had a consciousness of its own which worked through some “elementary forms” of resistance; negation, desecration some “elementary forms” of resistance: negation, desecration, inversion, solidarity, territoriality, transmission. What this structure suggests is that Guha was not aiming at producing a narrow and particular historiography of a few peasant insurgencies. By arguing against the idea of subaltern activities as “spontaneous” and “unpremeditated affairs” he established a template that could be unproblematically mapped onto every insurgency and could explain its inherent logic. To my mind, this represented a structure that ignored the possibility of historical difference. Guha’s elementary framework sees itself as forming the “pillars of politics and of any collective action everywhere what so ever”. To me, Guha through his structural technique, was implicated in some kind of essentialism and was even “foundational” in the way Gyan Prakash understands the term: as categories “which are at some level fixed and essential, as if history were “ultimately founded in and representable through some identity-individual, class, structure”. On the other hand, Gyan Prakash situates Subaltern Studies Project as a post foundational history directed towards a post-structuralist thought.  He claims it has overcome the depictions of India in Orientalist texts as passive and separate and in nationalist texts as autonomous and essential. In as far as Prakash talks about a need to move beyond essentializing categories, one can agree. But given Guha’s structural analysis of peasant insurgency as an example, this essentialism seems to be prevalent even in Subaltern Studies. Prakash seems to negate his own stance.  He sees this field as emancipatory in that it looks beyond essences to the significance of “power relations”. But then he is so annoying when he says “it should be clear that Subaltern Studies project shares some of the  structuralist and post-structuralist critiques of the autonomous and sovereign subject”.

 Rosy Hanlon and Washbrook perhaps make a better case by suggesting that what Prakash overlooks is the significance of categories. “we cannot do without some categories, and some means of evaluating orders of certainty in order to comprehend, to explain, to elucidate and to do. They need to be understood as inventions of our own necessity”.  I get the feeling  in their essay that somehow history writing cannot be completely divorced from what Prakash thinks of as "foundationalism" . If foundationalism was something critical to nationalist and Orientalist forms of history writing, then perhaps we yet haven’t made the break to really be thinking of a “post”-foundational history.  Already, ideas such as “post-Orientalist”, “post structuralist” , “post-colonialism”, “post-modernism” and so on are very problematic  as they suggest a rupture in time when what we see is a continuity of ideas.