Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

72 I Ramnath
which produced greater independence of thought as
well as greater demands fo r full political independence.
Marked by its commitment to a comprehensive revitalization
of national life, it was "fired" by deep devotion and
self-consecration "to God and India." And he claimed that
"finally, whether in anarchists or men of peace, the new
nationalism is willing to serve and sutter. The deluded boys
who believed they could bring in India's millennium by
murdering a few white men were quite prepared to give
their lives for their country; and the healthy movements
which incarnate the new spirit at its best spend themselves
in unselfish service." Here he pointed to a divergence between
anarchists and Hindu revivalists, fo r whom, given
their possession of such a plainly superior civilization, it
was "a religious duty to get rid of the Europeans and all the
evils that attend him."60
But Farquhar nevertheless identified "a general attitude
. .. common to the revivalists and the anarchists. It is
clear as noonday that the religious aspect of anarchism was
merely an extension of that revival of Hinduism which is
the work of Dayan and a, Ramakrishna. Vivekamnda :md
the Theosophists." Farquhar was thus setting up an unproblematic
equivalence between anarchism and the religious
nationalism that would later spawn a noxious Indian variant
of fascism, while actually misrepresenting both sides of
the equation.
This distorted characterization of Hinduism was not
new. Cleveland's descriptions of a cult of "furious devotion
to some divinity of hate and blood" recall in nearly identical
terms those of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department's