Gramsci and peasant subalternity in India

Such key Gramscian concepts as hegemony and passive revolution, hitherto discussed mainly in relation to Western industrial societies, also have a direct relevance to the study of peasant societies. Critically applied, Gramsci's ideas give fresh emphasis to the central importance and dialectical nature of elite‐subaltern relations in rural India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His stress upon the negative and derivative aspects of peasant culture and ideology needs, however, to be qualified by an awareness of the strengths and relative autonomy of subaltern politics within the overall structure of elite domination.