So that was one failure. The other failure had to do with the peasant uprising attempted through the Maoist and other communist-led movements which had been beaten back by this time. It is in that context that the historical question once again was raised by Subaltern Studies. It tried to offer an answer to the question I mentioned earlier, namely: What was the relationship between the peasantry and the Indian state? The answer effectively was that when the peasants joined the elite-led national movement, it was not, as the nationalists believed, that the peasantry was pre-political, was somehow completely unconscious of these sorts of political questions before and was roused into political consciousness by the nationalist leadership. That was not the answer. The Subaltern Studies answer was that peasants always had their own reasons for joining or not joining this sort of politics. When they joined, they did not join for the same reasons as the elite nationalists who were launching the movement. Very often, they joined the movement on their own terms and, on many occasions, they left the movement. On many other occasions, they refused to join at all. Those became the instances that Subaltern Studies actually looked for.

In terms of the methods, I think those were in some ways innovative. As I said, there was no ready archive for this sort of work. What we tried to do was use the official archive in such a way that you could actually read peasant consciousness, that is, read the official reports and the official archive against the grain in order to try and find the voice of the subaltern, as it were.

Of course, we looked for other kinds of records, too. In fact, it was in the course of this work that we came across other evidence, the kinds of sources that conventional history would never have recognized as sources. We would look for things like rumors; we found, for instance, collections of rumors that were narrated in local newspapers at the time. Now, conventional history would dismiss this, saying it is a rumor and cannot be read as a real source. We tried to use this sort of evidence as a record of a different kind of consciousness. At that time, there was also a much greater appreciation for things like popular culture, religion in particular, and how these ideas and practices were important in trying to understand what it was that peasants were doing when they joined movements or made certain demands from movements, what it is they were looking for. These were some of the methodological innovations made by Subaltern Studies.

One of the most productive formulations of the founding father, as it were, of the Subaltern Studies collective, Ranajit Guha, vis-à-vis the specificity of the modern colonial state is that it is characterized by "dominance without hegemony". Could you explain what that phrase means and what it signifies? Also, in your book, The Nation and its Fragments, you employ this term, calling it "the rule of colonial difference". Could you elaborate on your understanding of the nature of the colonial state and the consequences that follow from it for the nature of the modern experience of the colonies?

One of the things that we tried to argue was the quite fundamental similarity between the colonial and the postcolonial states. The similarity was not so much in the actual bases of support for the two formations, because the sections of the Indian population on which the colonial state relied for support were not necessarily the same as those that supported the new nation-state. But many of the techniques of rule, the governing practices on which these regimes were based, were very similar. This was one of the strongest political arguments we were trying to make. Specifically, we would look again at the way in which state organs (courts of law, administrative agencies, etc.) would go about dealing with the large mass of the people, especially peasants. Our argument very often was that in a sense those techniques of rule had not fundamentally changed. The Indian armed forces were inherited fully intact from the British Indian army. The body of civil and criminal law as well as the structure of the courts were inherited without any major change. The structure of the bureaucracy too, especially the famous district administration of British India, was adopted wholesale, only expanded several times after independence.

It was this state of affairs that we characterized essentially, as you just said, as dominance without hegemony. We defined hegemony as a form of rule where there is an active consent on the part of those being ruled. This active consent had to be produced through all sorts of institutions and practices in society. The contrast being made was with that of a fully developed, liberal, capitalist society where there was class rule - there is no question that some classes had greater power in society - and yet there was an overall structure of governance where you could say that even those classes which were not directly in power still consented to the way in which society was ruled. There was an active consent that was produced - it was not just based on sheer force. Whereas the phenomenon we were always concerned with was the fundamentally authoritarian character of the postcolonial state. Why did it have to be authoritarian in this way, if in fact the national movement was what it claimed to be, which was a movement of the people against an authoritarian, colonial state?

The argument was that, in effect, the postcolonial national state was not based on this sort of structure of consent, which again went back to the question of the relationship between the peasants and the new state. Clearly, there was a new state that was created and this new state claimed to speak on behalf of the people as a whole and even granted formal rights of citizenship to people within its borders. This formal citizenship, however, did not mean real citizenship. So, for instance, in the classic case of Indian peasants, although they had been brought into the national movement and made members of a supposedly new national community, they actually did not have real rights of citizenship. The district administration still dealt with the rural population on the lines of the old colonial administration. Rural landlords claimed a privileged access to the local bureaucracy and the police because they were the real wielders of power in rural society. All sorts of progressive laws were made by parliament that could not be implemented because the old power groups in the countryside would not allow the agencies of government to subvert their power. Peasants now had the formal right to vote, but they could be coerced to vote as their landlords told them to vote, or even not allowed to vote at all. The necessity of force or coercion to keep peasants under control was always central, even in the new state.

I think I should add that a lot of this actually began to change - in terms of the fundamental understanding of the Indian state - through the 1980s. The '80s were quite crucial in terms of a new understanding of how the different sections of the Indian peasantry actually learned to use the room for maneuver that was opened up through the process of electoral democracy. All of the things that we now associate with the day-to-day processes of Indian democracy were not clear to us at all in the 1970s, for instance that one could pressurize elite representatives and so on. In fact, that is the most dramatic change that has taken place and I think it has to do with what many people see as a change between the early Subaltern Studies and late Subaltern Studies. The background to this is essentially that the very real perception we had of the nature of the Indian state in the 1970s - and we saw it quite categorically as a fundamentally authoritarian state - changed quite drastically through the 1980s.

It is in the same period that many new kinds of social movements emerged in India, and these social movements tried to use a whole range of completely new forms of mobilization, using the power of the vote, using the kinds of new opportunities made available through the framework of broadly liberal rights. That is something that quite fundamentally changed our understanding of what the Indian state was like. We had to admit that the process of politics was far more complicated than what we had earlier thought it to be. But, as I said, that is a change that only began to be registered through the 1990s. So it is only in the last 10-15 years that these new kinds of social movements emerged, creating, in a sense, a new ethnography of politics in India. The emergence of the caste movement especially is a good example, alongside of course a whole range of movements of relatively marginalized groups, all of which are extremely vocal, quite organized and which employ a combination of both legal, constitutional methods as well as some extralegal strategies - some degree of violence, for instance. All these movements, however, represent a kind of assertion of, broadly speaking, democratic rights of different kinds. So in trying to understand what Indian political life is all about, this has changed the picture. This was not the case in the '70s largely because, I think, the processes of governance have changed quite fundamentally.