Decolonizing Anarchism. Maia Ramnath
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and the People’s Science Movement) and its variously positioned critics.
It is a crucial and delicate issue, however, to recognize that some of these critical positions have included fascism and fundamentalism. Furthermore, wherever the terminology of anarchism appears in the Indian context, right-wing elements frequently crop up as a menacing shadow not far away. This does not mean that there is any inherent affinity between anarchism and the reactionary Right, contrary to the conflation sometimes made by sectors of the mainline Indian Left. What it does indicate is that certain situations create common openings for both.
The same could be said in general of the worldwide radical ferment in the fin de siècle moment before World War I—a moment of equal significance for the rise of anarchism and the emergence of radical anticolonialism—when multiple potentialities were held in combustible suspension. Georges Sorel offers some clues here, in his writings about revolutionary syndicalism during the same period, when anticolonialists were meeting anarchists in Paris and London. Sorel was a French civil servant born in 1842, an engineer by training and a disciple of philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson. He produced the bulk of his difficult-to-categorize work on social theory in the last decade of the nineteenth and first of the twentieth centuries, after his professional retirement. As an advocate of labor syndicalism, he abhorred bureaucracy and parliamentary armchair socialism, favored total revolution over piecemeal reform, and touted worker militance and direct action to seize control of production. He also despised the state, particularly in its bourgeois capitalist incarnation. Yet the premises of his analysis were quite different from those of the socialist branch of the Enlightenment project. Antirationalist and antiliberal, his top imperative was seeking a workable, living revolutionary myth capable of revitalizing and reinspiring an alienated, moribund modern society.
As the bearer of libidinal energy or Bergsonian élan vital, the myth, in Sorel’s view, must recharge the potency of the heroic revolutionary class through militant struggle. Sorel had no doubt that the needed revitalization must come about through violence, which he differentiated from force, meaning the physical dominance of the state that was inherent in its foundation and the institutions of its preservation. Either class struggle or external threat would do the trick, though the latter would more sharply stimulate the national myth and the former the social, in which case the mythic icon of the general strike would serve to motivate the working class, while icons of the counterrevolution for which the workers’ opening move was the stimulus would rouse the bourgeoisie from its decadent stupor. Regardless of who won, the struggle would have done its work. This is why the Sorelian logic of prewar revolutionary syndicalism bore within it the seeds of both the Right and Left radical movements of the 1920s. It didn’t really matter what that myth might be; it only mattered that it did the job.
But of course, it does matter quite a lot to the outcome. From this perspective the significance of these moments of dual potentiality is not that anarchism converges with the Right but precisely that it does not. At a crossroads, choices matter most; here is where ethical orientation and content make the difference. What determined whether the myth of right-wing populist rhetoric or libertarian socialism would prevail? The key distinction is in the prefigurative content of the emancipatory vision, not in the simple fact of opposition to the state. It’s not enough to call for small government or the elimination of a foreign regime without also articulating a critique of capitalism, race, and power. This is equally true of the difference between national supremacism and radical (and potentially nonstatist) anticolonialism.
Echoes and Intersections
The Propagandists of the Deed
By the first decade of the twentieth century, Indian revolutionists had established a worldwide presence through labor diasporas and educational circuits, often converging on the same cosmopolitan cities as their radical counterparts from East and Southeast Asia, Egypt, Turkey, and Ireland. Their tasks overseas were twofold: to organize insurrectionary activities, and to spread information and propaganda.
The Swadeshi (autonomy; literally “one’s own country”) movement was a flash point of unrest sparked in 1905 by the administrative partition of Bengal. It took heart from the Japanese victory over Russia in the same year, setting the rapturous precedent of an Asian nation defeating a European power. From the moment of the movement’s emergence, police intelligence reports and newspaper accounts anointed its militant wing as anarchists. Accurate or not, the label dogged them at home and abroad.
In a 1916 newspaper article Ram Chandra, one of the leaders of the Ghadar Party founded by Indian anticolonial militants in the United States, objected to a remark in the London Times that “just as Ireland still has her Sinn Fein extremists, so has India still her anarchists and her fanatical bombthrowers.” Chandra retorted, “The truth in this statement is that India has her Sinn Feiners. The falsehood lies in the implication that the Hindu revolutionists are a forlorn hope of intransigents. They are not ‘anarchists’; they are nationalists; and hence the whole nation is and is growing to be, with them.”[1]
Such disclaimers were meant to defend the revolutionaries’ legitimacy. To be called an anarchist in the rhetoric of the day meant being seen as a purveyor of meaningless violence; to be dubbed a nationalist meant being seen to serve a just cause—democratic self-determination in the face of imperial tyranny and the looting of one’s country. Precisely because of their claim to the justice of their cause, they objected far more to the label of anarchist than terrorist, a term then used matter-of-factly without any particular moral condemnation to describe a tactic of extralegal, conspiratorial deployment of propaganda of the deed.
The most obvious factor in the pinning of the anarchist tag on the Swadeshi militants was their willingness to express their hatred of the British colonial government through violent means. The Indian radicals’ penchant for dramatic, symbolic bombings and assassinations linked them in the public eye to an international spate of attacks on establishment figures, applying to them the caricature of the bearded desperado cradling a sphere with a guttering fuse under his coat.
Ideological anarchism, of course, is not to be equated with violence and irrationality. But the traits that made the link plausible went deeper than that. Besides the philosophical and tactical orientation toward propaganda of the deed (not to mention a quasi-mystical fascination with the bomb), they shared with certain contemporary strands of the Western anarchist tradition a voluntarist ethic of individual action, militant romanticism, disregard for conventional standards of law and propriety in the face of what they saw as greater truths, a frictional relationship with bourgeois materialist society, and a marked antigovernment stance. Although in this context the objection was to the British colonial government specifically, by the simple dropping of an article many of their statements were virtually indistinguishable from anarchist ones regarding government in general.
In the end the question we need to ask, in examining the praxis of the Swadeshi militants as they became links in a wider nexus stretching from Calcutta to London and Paris, is not “Were the Swadeshi extremists anarchists?” or even “What kind of anarchists were they?” An even better question is, “Where do they fit into the revolutionary family tree of which anarchism and its various cousins are also scions?”
Bengal
Since the 1870s there had been a proliferation of social and religious reform societies (samitis), athletic or “physical culture” clubs (akharas), and cultural nationalist groups, including both open and secret “student organizations inspired by the Carbonari and [Giuseppe] Mazzini’s Young Italy,” which is to say by the form of mid-nineteenth-century romantic republicanism that played such a prominent role in the development of international revolution. The newly politicized Anusilan Samiti emerged around 1902 or 1903 from a consolidation of several akharas, with Aurobindo Ghose as one of the key movers. Born and educated in England, Ghose idolized figures like Mazzini and Charles Stewart Parnell, the hero of Irish home rule. Philosophically, he morphed over the years from agnosticism to spiritual leadership as a Hindu mystic.
After the Bengal partition, he along with his younger brother Barindra Kumar