History I

Reading A Primary Source

A STUDY OF HEGEMONY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY THROUGH

THE GREAT TRIAL OF 1922

SUBMITTED TO
Prof. Hota Agnikumar

SUBMITTED BY:
Aaron K James (2022-5LLB-03)
Year I
Semester II

NALSAR UNIVERSITY OF LAW, HYDERABAD

Plan
M.K Gandhi’s 1922 trial by the Imperial British Judiciary, termed as The Great Trial of
1922—probably so named owing to the eminence of the figure accused rather than to any
considerations of magnitude attaching to the trial itself—has been an endlessly
mythologized event in the Indian freedom struggle. 1 The highlighting of this arbitrary
historical event, at first glance, seems to reek of the Great Man theory of History and
ought to excite a feeling of offense in the mind of any scholarly inquirer of
historiography. I will here display a statement by Isaiah Berlin which will serve as the
foundation on which, and in conflict with which, my argument rests. This essay is an
exploration of individual agency and its role within a Gramscian hegemonic framework,
using the 1922 trial as an illustration.

“Historical students are told not to pay too much attention to personal factors or heroic
and unusual figures in human history. They are told to attend to the lives of ordinary
men, or to economic considerations or social factors or irrational impulses or
traditional, collective and unconscious springs of action; or not to forget such
impersonal, inconspicuous, dull, slowly or imperceptibly altering factors of change as
erosion of the soil, or systems of irrigation and drainage, which may be more influential
than spectacular victories, or catastrophic events, or acts of genius; they are told not to
allow themselves to be carried away by the desire to be entertaining or paradoxical, or
over-rationalistic, or to point a moral or demonstrate a theory; and much else of this
kind.”2

The 1922 Trial And Its Relevance

Seeing then that the current historical focus, at least in the popular gaze, is inordinately
romantic about this trial, it is perhaps worth investigating the merits of this attention. That
there was a grand clash between two eminent minds (the judge and Gandhi) may be
quickly apparent upon examining the case, but even that circumstance does not seem to
justify the legendary reputation of what was in reality a mere bureaucratic formality. On
point of law, there was no real argument at all; the accused, upon being told of his
charges, forthwith pleaded guilty. But perhaps this very act is what makes this so
illustrating an example of the colonial milieu in which this battle was fought. After all—
unless one be merely a student of the law who takes for granted that the social order is
wholly explained by, and subject to, the law—it is plainly evident that the real questions
of society can never be answered with sole reference to judicial or formal proceedings. 

Formal structures of governance are part of the ‘direct domination’ as theorized by

Antonio Gramsci3, and, as is understood by his own conception, it is not an adequate
explanation of the causes of action (or inaction) by whatever section of society is in
question. What is, in fact, the real mover of social action is the cultural hegemony in
which this system of direct domination subsists.4

1
Durant, Will. The Case for India. Mumbai, Strand Book Stall, 2007. p. 58 (This edition of may be found on
archive.org)
2
Berlin, Isaiah. The Concept of Scientific History in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays. p.
39
3
Gross, David. “‘MIND-FORG’D MANACLES’: HEGEMONY AND COUNTER-HEGEMONY IN
BLAKE.” The Eighteenth Century, vol. 27, no. 1, 1986, p. 3. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41467368.
4
the word discourse and culture are, in this essay, often used as an allusion to the idea of hegemony
Therefore, in studying this most un-judicial proceeding of the law court, we get a rare
chance to see—with eyes no longer blinded by the formal veneer of domination—the
context (or the hegemonic culture) in which Gandhi was acting—and in acting, being the
author of India’s anti-hegemonic movement. 

In a recent lecture, Professor Hota made the observation that “When you revolt against
the state in the language and rhetoric of the state, the state has already won the game.” As
earlier, with reference to the idea of hegemony, this statement is significant. For indeed,
the state, by privileging its interpretation of society as evinced by its bureaucratic
classification, pushes that interpretation in the form of the dominant discourse upon the
unsuspecting public. If the public takes for granted artificial constructions such as
‘Justice’, ‘Law’, ‘Order’, ‘Due Process’, and other such lies propagated by the
ubiquitousness of authority, it will never discover its interests or create more accurate
lenses with which to study its own condition. It will be as if a child, misdiagnosed at a
young age with faulty vision, were prescribed powerful glasses which they never took
pains to remove at a more advanced time of life—to see what the eyes of nature really
represent to themself. (Of course, at the risk of straining the reader, I must be quick to
point out that, even if indigenously developed discourse may closer reflect the realities of
native peoples, they cannot accurately be labeled as being ‘closer to nature,’ because they
too are, in the end, merely discourses—modes of interpretation; and to privilege one over
the other by such terms as ‘natural’ is merely to superimpose another interpretive
discourse on top of the first.)

With this in mind, Gandhi’s words to the judge bear a striking dissimilarity to the tone of
Indian dissent that persisted before his time. 5 Long before the Congress had ever resolved
to aspire towards complete Independence—and even then, their complicity and docility
towards British hegemony was evident—Gandhi was arguing for his own cause in his
own terms. An example here is requisite. In the concluding remarks of his defence,
Gandhi said:

“Non-violence implies voluntary submission to the penalty for non-co-operation with

evil. I am here, therefore, to invite and submit cheerfully to the highest penalty that can
be inflicted upon me for what in law is deliberate crime, and what appears to me to be
the highest duty of a citizen. The only course open to you, the Judge and the assessors, is
either to resign your posts and thus dissociate yourselves from evil, if you feel that the
law you are called upon to administer is an evil, and that in reality I am innocent, or to
inflict on me the severest penalty, if you believe that the system and the law you are
assisting to administer are good for the people of this country, and that my activity is,
therefore, injurious to the common weal.”6

He delegitimizes the inherent violence of the state’s machinery by offering his own
solution of non-violence. This act—most human in appearance—perhaps served best to
open the public eye towards the blatant inhumanity of the colonial government’s very
foundations. It induces aporia—the Socratic state of doubt and bewilderment that lies

5
Durant, Will. The Case for India. Mumbai, Strand Book Stall, 2007. p. 56
6
“Great Trial of 1922 | Famous Speeches by Mahatma Gandhi.” MKGandhi.org,
https://www.mkgandhi.org/speeches/gto1922.htm. Accessed 24 January 2023.
between the dismantlement of an old belief and the construction of a new one—and
rattles the pillars of the colonial state’s hegemonic supremacy. 

In contrast, a study of previous trials of Indian rebels will demonstrate a keenness on part
of the accused to justify themselves in the law itself. They did not forthrightly reject the
law. They sought to find their niche within the discourse that already dominated them, not
replace that with their own conception.

Hegemony’s Role In The Maintenance Of The State

It is a historical fact that no state can subsist without the passive consent of the governed.
Those states that have not felt this fact so necessary to acknowledge have only been the
ones in which there already existed a hegemonic culture which unconsciously propped up
a state insensible to the source of its powers. However, necessity felt or unfelt, the
rejection of this principle has led historians of the past into countless absurdities. It is
unreasonable to say that France invaded Russia in 1811 merely because Napoleon
resolved upon conducting an invasion. Nor is it a sufficient explanation to say that the
failure of the Continental Blockade and the geopolitical circumstances of the time
necessitated Napoleon’s decision. The very privilege of Napoleon in this explanation
shows its inadequacy—because it ought to be obvious to any inquirer that Napoleon’s
decision was a meaningless set of words unless they were obeyed by his subordinates
——and if the subordinates to the subordinates themselves obeyed the trickled down
orders—and so on. So why did France invade Russia in 1811? Because various factors
induced Napoleon to make that decision, and everyone who mattered in its execution
obeyed the chain of command over which Napoleon was the head. 7 Now the real question
of history presents itself: why did all those millions of people obey Napoleon Bonaparte? 

It is certain that all of them had their own several inclinations and circumstances that
guided them into obeying the order; but one unifying constant amongst all of them is the
hegemonic discourse by which they were all comprehended. Years of revolutionary wars
made the French bellicose and confident in their military prowess; a decade of
Napoleonic rule bid them trust in the procedures of government; this trust was
conditioned by the centuries of having been ruled by a monarch whose commands the
people were in the habit of obeying. All these infinite factors contribute to the individual
biography in shaping the range (and likelihood) of their choice of action. It simply does
not occur to Napoleon’s adjutant that he can simply say ‘no’ or that he can pull out his
gun and shoot Napoleon. Why? Because, even if the thought occurs, the adjutant believes
that everyone around him is convinced of Napoleon’s legitimacy 8 and therefore will shoot
him too for the treasonous act. It is this collective delusion of order that props up
governments. Were this to disappear, the first act of violence ordered by Napoleon would
be met with confused looks of consternation or scorn.—And this disappearance of
collective delusion means so much more than that. In every instance of agreement
between two parties, there exists an infinitude of discourses, without which there could be
neither understanding nor acceptance. The conditions of good, bad, just, unjust, equal,
unequal, etc are all only agreed upon by the ubiquity of a constant discourse. 

7
This is my restatement of Tolstoy’s historiographical essay in War and Peace, Part III, bk.1, ch.1.
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Edited by Amy Mandelker, translated by Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude,
OUP Oxford, 2010.
8
Hume, David; Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding section 68-70
The Individual And Hegemony
Colonial governments especially are bound to this principle because they are at so much
pains to instill a discourse of trust among the people through its performative institutions
of law, judiciary, punishment, justice, etc. When Gandhi set about dismantling this
through his own performance, it can be said that he had begun destroying the colonial
state in a manner more devastating than any armaments of wrath may have wrought. For,
indeed, even if the colonial state were thoroughly broken up by an external force, as long
as the culture of being under a colonial state persisted, it could just regrow itself and
continue parasitizing the host peoples as if nothing had changed. It is culture that props
governments. And the destruction of culture destroys governments more than the
puissance of arms. The print culture of 18th century France destroyed the Bourbon
Monarchy more assuredly than all the vaunts of Robespierre or Saint-Just. Yet the lives
and actions of Robespierre and Saint-Just may be considered the manifestations of the
changed French culture—the apotheosis of which was the tide of revolution. To restate
the previous points: lives of individual actors in history are products of their cultural
milieu, but their actions wreak changes on the very culture through which they were born.
Therefore, individual actors may be studied as high-points from which the cultural shift
may be calculated.

Finally, having established a methodology, we can return to Gandhi. Although his own
action did not obviously amount to much (he was imprisoned anyway, and his movement
flagged soon after), his actions are still historically interesting. Although he was an
extraordinary individual who cannot a priori be considered representative of the Indian
milieu, his very influence over the Indian imagination evinces the fact that his actions
resonated with the self-referential imaginations of the native peoples. It then follows that
this trial is a portal through which we may identify the torrential bend of the Indian
Movement at that period. It is one of the markers of counter-hegemony—a paradigmatic
shift through which the erosion of the British Raj’s legitimacy began waning. A shift that,
with the conjunction of various geopolitical factors, culminated in Indian Independence
and, what’s more remarkable, the survival and the subsistence of the free Indian state
with its own autonomous culture.—Even then, the completeness of this transition may
easily be called into question by examining the laughable similarity between the liberated
Indian state and the colonial structure which preceded it. But that is an examination for
another time.