Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

32 I Ramnath
Under the harsh stamp of racialization it became dif
ficult (on both the material and epistemological levds) for
Indians to develop without conflict an alternate, indigenous
modernity out of the materials already available,
or freely exchanged through their transnational contacts
with other activists and intellectuals. Yet even within the
given circumstances, responses to the projects and conditions
of modernity ranged from complete rejection to
complete embrace, with all variants of critical and selective
adaptation in between. For example, liberal reformers
such as Rammohan Roy, Dwarkanath Tagore, or Sir Syed
Ahmad Khan objected to their exclusion from the liberal
Enlightenment paradigm of republican democracy and
humanist rationalism, but not to that paradigm itselF
1hey saw it as a universal that was theirs by right, no less
than anyone else's (not Westernness masquerading as universalism
but rather universalism only masquerading as
Westernness).a Others rejected the whole paradigm as antithetical
to their particular ethnoculrural natures, embracing
with pride an Orientalist binary logic that had been jointly
formalized by Western scholars and Asian clerical elites.
Both the universal and binary were false, of course. The
existential condition of colonialism facilitated a flattening
out or repression of the range of internal variation on both
sides. A state of war tends toward extreme polarization; colonialism
is a permanent state of war, whether in the low-intensity
register of prolonged occupation, or the hotter moments
of conquest, reconquest, pacification, and counterinsurgency.
Accordingly, coloniality tends to generate Manichaean
binaries, as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi observed.