Hegemony without Dominance

This essay in reversing historian Ranajit Guha’s classic colonialist formulation ‘Dominance without Hegemony’ contrarily suggests that the postcolonial state in India has hegemony without dominance. Over six decades of statist presence, it argues, the Indian social has acquired intimate literacy over the language and idioms of rule of law and statist practices. This pervasive circulation and currency—or hegemonic presence—of the statist idioms however has implied neither its uninhibited dominance, nor an unreserved compliance to it. Rather, the chapter argues, the engagement with rule of law is transactional or instrumental, and takes the form of routine circumvention and erosion, inventive negotiations, leading ultimately to recurrent resurrections and fetishization of law. This transactional and non-transcending articulation of law ultimately indexes a symptomatology of repetition compulsion that pointedly gestures towards irresolvable aporia of sovereignty of the modern Indian state; this paper strives to capture this predicament of the Indian polity through the lacanian category of ‘generalised perversion’