ABSTRACT
S. Sarkar draws attention to a tendency to reify and essentialize the categories of the subaltern and its autonomy in a manner that relatively ignores the socio-economic structural contexts as a result of a fear of ending up with some form of economic determinism. The interplay between dominant coercion, hegemonic persuasion and subordinate consent is interestingly enough better illustrated by Arnold within the constraining institutional relations of colonial hospitals that attempted to confront the Indian plague of 1896–1900 and the prisons. The character of hegemony is that it functions in a grey area between contending forces and it is important that one does not get lost in the shadows. The slippages in the concept of ‘dominance without hegemony’of the elites, thus implicitly denying hegemonic rule to the dominant and consent to the subaltern while recognizing it in historiographical practice, are so often in Elementary Aspects that can attribute this to the concern to underline the supposed ‘autonomy’ of subaltern consciousness.
