Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 207
on the grounds of their character and function, regardless
of who was running them.
Furthermore, the revolutionaries' horizon of liberation
was transnational: there must be no enslavement of peoples
anywhere in the world, not just in India. No one was free
until and unless everyone was free, they wrote; until then,
the system(s) of oppression were still functional. This required
taking the analytic step from opposing a foreign
government in a particular context to contesting imperialism
in general; from resisting foreign capital in one locality
to fighting global capitalism as a whole.
Thus from the anticolonial (as opposed to the national)
standpoint, the work ofliberation was not completed
in 1947. The post-British era might then be considered a
period of continuing antisystemic struggle against both
neocolonialism and internal colonialism as the new nationstate
redefined its relationship to global capitalism, and its
own dispossessed and marginalized peoples.
Activists and political theorists Nivedita Menon and
Aditya Nigam read the movement history oflate twentiethcentury
India in terms of a contradiction, not between capital
and labor or colonizer and colonized, but more broadly
between "power and contestation." From the perspective of
what Menon and Nigam identify as the Indian New Left,
"power is the axis constituted by Nation and Capital, while
contestations are of two kinds-one demanding inclusion
within, the other running counter to these entities."2
(Plainly the anarchist preference would be for the latter.)
The following chapter scans the terrain of Indian
social movements since 1947 to see what's visible to an