Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

178 I Ramnath
Both Tagon: and Gandhi denied that the modern state
was the most natural or desirable form for an emancipated,
"regenerated" Indian society to take, and warned against
the dangers of centralized authority, which they felt would
threaten self-sufficiency at the local level. For them, the
anticolonial commitment to self-determination ran deeper
than the transfer of political power.
Historian Rajat K. Ray writes,
They shared the conviction that the essence of
Indian civilization lay in the self-regulating character
of society. This social autonomy was rendered feasible
by the peripheral existence of the state insofar as
the inner life of the community was concerned . ...
Tagore's concept of "self-strength"
(Atmashakti') and Gandhi's notion of "self-rule"
(Swaraj ') were both anti-state in tendency, one
stressing the autonomy of the community and the
other the self-sufficiency of the village. Neither of
these prophets ofIndian regeneration gave primacy
to the political movemenr in thpir docrri!!e of selfhelp.
The aim was to make society self-sufficient
again, so as to render the state irrelevant.23
According to the theorists of South Asian state formation,
the unitary, centralized state was a late addition
to the subcontinental repertory of political formations.24
Prior to the nineteenth-century imposition of British
paramountcy-the doctrine that all subcontinental power
must be subject to one overarching authority-there was