Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

174 I Ramnath
existed in the past than that the idea of it was welcomed as
a desirable future.
Gandhi's utopia was influenced by his readings of
Ruskin, Thoreau, Morris, Kropotkin, and most particularly
Tolstoy, with whom he corresponded, and whose antimilitarist,
socially emancipatory version of Christian ity was
not unlike Gandhi's version ofHinduism.lc Of course, his
culturally specific religiosity gives his thought and practice
quite a different guise from anything generally associated
with anarchism in the We st. IN It was precisely his religiosity,
along with antimodernism and refusal to endorse class
war or repudiate the caste system, that led the Indian Left to
angrily reject him, holding him accountable for the festering
canker of communalism within the Indian national movement
and Indian society's persistent attachment to archaic
structures of oppression. Instead of stoking dialectical conflict,
he called for social harmony, counseling a benevolent,
paternalistic relationship between landlords and peasants.
The paradigm for decolonization that prevailed during
the mid-twentieth century pegged socialism and secularism
to modernization, development. and scientific knmv!edgc.
To Gandhi, technology and industry were components not
of emancipation but rather of spiritual and cultural damage,
which is yet another reason why many leftists denounced
him as a reactionary. He emphatically rejected post­
Enlightenment reason, preferring a premodern condition,
although not in the form of stasis or regression. Gandhi
also at times fell into the trap of cultural superiority, which
paradoxically made it possible for anarchistic content to coincide
with an "extreme nationalist position." Nevertheless