Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 179
instead a range of overlapping, segmentary, sovereign units
oriented toward different centers. Ray describes this as a
cellular "beehive" structure.
For centuries, the various communities and the villages
had lived in their demarcated spheres, secure in
the autonomy of their local and communal concerns
from the interference of the [center] .... [T]he selfregulating
units of society were forced into dependence
as an alien government broke into concerns
hitherto regulated within the village and the community.
The British made state power central to the
life of the people, and thereby profoundly disturbed
the balance between the various cells.2s
Still, while decentralized and pluralistic, with a nearendless
capacity to accommodate new cells and be "enriched"
by any new arrivals willing to be incorporated without
attempting to overhaul the whole, this society was also
hierarchical. Tagore, says Ray, "deprecated the inequality
but valued the multiplicity" of the traditional cellular society;
for him, India's community of sentiment was that of a
civilization, but not of a modern nation-state.26 In contrast,
Nehru's democratic vision was uniformly egalitarian but
also centralized. Would visionaries invested in the shape of
decolonized India have to choose between the priorities of
freedom and equality?
The village republic idea is sometimes dismissed as
an invention of East India Company ideologues such as
Charles Metcalfe and Henry Maine, who deployed it as a