Mazzini in Calcutta. The unexpected echos of the Italian Risorgimento

Abstract

This essay traces a reading of the Italian Risorgimento made by a group of Indian historians, the subaltern studies group, and its use in the historiographical reconstruction of Indian independence. The Italian Risorgimento is for them a touchstone, an exemplary case for the modernization and nationalization of states that have experienced such “spurious” paths, in comparison to those that have undergone a “canonical” development in European history, from the French Revolution onwards.  The members of this group of Indian historians read the Italian Risorgimento politically through the conceptual lens developed by Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks. The essay analyzes two books: Ranajit Guha’s Dominance without Hegemony, which through the Gramscian concept of hegemony claims a political space of action for the subalterns, and Partha Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, which develops, in close comparison with the Gramscian reading of the Risorgimento, a radical critique of the nationalist elites for their detachment from the subalterns. The two authors use the Gramscian concepts – “passive revolution”, “dominion”, “hegemony,” “historical bloc” – because they are, to their post-colonial eyes, the most fruitful concepts in respect to those of the Enlightenment and classical liberalism in Europe. The linear narrative of Western progress in India took the form of colonialism, which played a supporting role for the ruling elites: First for the colonial elites, then their national replacement. In contrast, the arsenal of Gramscian concepts, forged in a central country (fully European and Western) and at the same time peripheral (politically and economically always “in delay”), became useful in challenging the separation of elites from subalterns, both from a historiographical perspective and from a contemporary political point of view.