Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

74 I Ramnath
power, which Chirol did somewhat indulgently acknowledge,
British rule was on the whole, he repeated, beneficial
and salubrious fo r India. The true root of the unrest must
therefore be the perverse, bloodthirsty nature ofBrahminic
religion itself.
Nevertheless, despite their obtuse misreading,
Farquhar, Cleveland, and Chirol-whether or not they
knew it-were responding to an undeniable anti rationalist
dement common to a certain strand of religious politics
and a certain strand within the anarchist tradition, to
whom an erotically charged millenarian sensibility was
mutually legible in ways that escaped rationalist liberals
and socialists. The political significance came whenever
millennial escape was transposed into the impulse to create
a rupture not between this world and a transcendent one
somewhere else, but rather between the existing society and
a future one based on an ethical or moral order enacted in
this world.62
Furthermore, what in mid-nineteenth- to early
twentieth-century Eutope took the form of a rejection
of certain (rational, industrial, or disciplinary) elf'ments
of modernity, became for Indian extremists and Russian
populists a proudly self-essentializing rejection of We stern
elements. For both, a hatred of the modernizing/colonizing
state was paramount and class analysis was minimal. This
affinity continued to echo in the mutually reinrorcing statements
of European Romanticist and cultural Pan-Asianist
antiliberal critics of modernity.
This was a crucial evolutionary node, from which
Right and Left branchings were possible. Already within