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Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

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Echoes and Intersections I 71<br />

come after or alongside the ecstasy of destruction. The<br />

nihilists' Narodnik or populist outgrowth began to idealize<br />

the peasantry as not only the revolutionary class but<br />

also the bearer of the true spiritual essence of the Russian<br />

people and maintainer of its preindustrial organic social<br />

and economic formations. As the argument ran, there was<br />

no need to pass through the prescribed stages of capitalism<br />

only to end up, after much suffering, back where they had<br />

started, with some form of romanticized stateless socialism<br />

based on the village commune or mir. Furthermore, to the<br />

Narodnik Slavophile, the true soul of Russia was in effect<br />

an Asian village soul, and many of the same mystical stereotypes<br />

that Indians bore were attributed to it. Such a true<br />

Russian felt the czar's enforced modernization as an alien<br />

Western encroachment no less than the Indian villagers did<br />

their modernization at British hands. In this too the urban<br />

intellectual Swadeshists resembled the Russian Slavophiles.<br />

In the meantime, Criminal Investigation Department<br />

director William Cleveland had another, more menacing<br />

take on the true nature of the Indian soul. In his introductory<br />

remarks on "anarchism;' written for his assistant Ker's<br />

1919 documentary compilation Political Trouble in India,<br />

he diagnosed the "psychology of the politico-criminal<br />

activities ofIndians" as none other than a fervidly intense<br />

religious nationalism. 58 To characterize this, he enlisted the<br />

aid of an extended quotation from John Nicol Farquhar's<br />

Religious Nationalism, published in 1912.59<br />

Farquhar identified this new trend (in contrast to the<br />

thin, bloodless old politicism) as a species of religiOUS nationalism<br />

indicating the maturation of "racial" confidence,

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