Decolonizing Anarchism. Maia Ramnath

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СКАЧАТЬ were human beings, despite their role as mercenaries to a tyrant, and would therefore surely join their arms with the revolution once the situation was fully explained to them by “the clever Bengali.”[9]

      The Yugantar often published on the justification and need for violence in resisting the systemic violence of colonial oppression. In other words, it was not the revolutionists who had introduced force into the dialogue. “The laws of the English are based on brute force. If we want to liberate ourselves from those laws, it is brute force that is necessary. . . . There is no other door of admission into life but death.”[10] An article headed “Away with Fear” declared that British supremacy was an illusion, which if once challenged, must crumble away. If Indians would conquer their own fear and take initiative, victory and liberation would be easy.

      What we want now is a number of men who will take the lead in giving a push and thus encourage the masses and infuse hope in the minds of those who are almost dead with fear and dread. . . . They must be shown by deeds done before their eyes that the work is not impossible exactly to the extent that they think it to be.[11]

      Hence, the Yugantar strengthened the perception of anarchism by its emphasis on taking a complete antigovernment stance, as opposed to collaboration or participation of any kind. Bande Mataram too came under frequent attack for its “seditious” content as well as plain “intention of bringing the Government into hatred and contempt.”[12] This was a misreading, though, of such ­statements as this one:

      [Indian secretary of state] Mr. Morley has said that we [Indians] cannot work the machinery of our Government for a week if England generously walks out of our country. . . . [But] did it not strike Mr. Morley that if, instead of walking out the English were by force driven out of India, the Government will go on perhaps better than before, for the simple reason that the exercise of power and organisation necessary to drive out so organised an enemy will in the struggle that would ensue teach us to arrange our own affairs sufficiently well.[13]

      This passage called for the takeover, not the abolition, of government, while suggesting that it was in the crucible of revolutionary action that people learned autonomy—a foreshadowing of Fanon.

      The other “principle revolutionary textbook” was Bartaman Rananiti (“modern art of war”), a 1907 Bengali version of Jan S. Bloch’s Modern Weapons and Modern War.[14] The book contained information on weapons, army organization, and guerrilla tactics, recommended as “the mode of fighting adopted by a nation which is weak, disarmed and oppressed by conquerors, but resolved to break the bondage of slavery.” In such a war, the author predicted that the native troops and mountain tribes would be sure to join in; irregular warfare would forge the country’s youths into heroes, leading ultimately to popular uprising on a much larger scale; and a protracted conflict could only ­benefit the people while wearing down the enemy.[15]

      But Bartaman Rananiti also drew on the concept of karma yoga. An early chapter was a reprint of an October 1906 Yugantar article that stated, “‘War is the order of creation.’ After explaining that destruction is creation in another form”—a rather Bakuninesque sentiment—“the writer proceeds, ‘Destruction is natural and war is, therefore, also natural.’” Gangrenous body parts, he pointed out, must be removed to save the whole. Therefore “war is inevitable when oppression cannot be stopped by any other means whatsoever, when the leprosy of slavery corrupts the blood of the body of the nation and robs it of its vitality.”[16] The article went on to invoke Krishna, Rama, and Kali as exemplars of divine sanction for an avenging (and purifying) destruction—making this too a potential seed text for both anarchist- and Hindu nationalist–inflected radical rhetorics.

      Significantly, in the process of a dedicated practice by which the vanguard’s hearts were to be forged and tested, while rousing and inspiring the people, conventional morality became irrelevant: for “A nation yearning for freedom . . . the power of discriminating between right and wrong is gone. Everything is sacrificed at the feet of the goddess of liberty.”[17]

      The author of Mukti Kon Pathe claimed that if the revolution was being brought about for the welfare of society, then it was perfectly just to collect money from society for the purpose. Admittedly theft and dacoity are crimes because they violate the principle of the good of society. But the “political dacoit” is aiming at the social good: “so no sin but rather virtue attaches to the destruction of this small good for the sake of some higher good. Therefore if revolutionists extort money from the miserly or luxurious wealthy members of society by the application of force, their ­conduct is perfectly just.”[18]

      Beyond levying “donations” from the rich, the final stage of the funding plan called for robbing government treasuries. “This also is justified because, from the moment the kingly power tramples upon the welfare of the subjects, the king may be regarded as a robber from whom it is perfectly right to snatch away his stolen money.” For the social bandit, apparently, property was theft, and redistribution a function of a moral economy—although in this case, the text somewhat mysteriously added, “to defray the expenses of establishing the future kingly power.”[19] Again two ­tendencies coexist. Which would prevail? Or would they diverge?

      Thus prepared, the Maniktola Garden gang launched a series of bombings, dacoities, and assassination attempts between 1906 and 1908.[20] Harsh punitive reaction then enforced a lull in militant activities, effectively muzzling the radical press, preventing meetings, and accelerating convictions and deportations. All of this, by making open dissent so difficult within British India, simply increased clandestine activity and injected fresh blood into the ­radical ­community overseas.

      London

      Oxford lecturer and sometime-theosophist Shyamaji Krishnavarma had founded the Indian Home Rule Society in London a mere six months before the partition of Bengal.[21] He stated three official objectives for the organization: to secure Indian home rule (obviously), carry on propaganda in the United Kingdom for this purpose, and spread among the people of India greater knowledge of the advantages of freedom and national unity.[22] An important element of this enterprise was the notoriously “seditious . . . penny monthly”[23] the Indian Sociologist, which Krishnavarma founded and edited with the aid of long-term ally Henry Mayers Hyndman, a “high-minded English gentleman” and prominent socialist. Printed in English as “an organ of freedom, and of political, social, and religious reforms,” the periodical’s intent was “to plead the cause of India and its unrepresented millions before the Bar of Public Opinion in Great Britain and Ireland,” striving “to inculcate the great sociological truth that ‘it is impossible to join injustice and brutality abroad with justice and humanity at home.” It was also meant as a tool for developing the revolutionary student movement, on the presumption that the well-educated young rebels would likely hold ­prominent and influential positions on their return home.[24]

      In Highgate, Krishnavarma also set up a headquarters dubbed India House to serve as a boardinghouse and training center for neophyte revolutionaries. With financial help from wealthy patriot Sardar Singh Revabhai Rana, a Paris-based pearl merchant, he made several attempts at funding fellowships to bring Indian students to London for a political awakening. Fellows were required to spend a minimum of two years in Europe or the United States studying a profession of their choice, living at a home or hostel on an allowance of sixteen shillings per week. On returning to India, each was to “solemnly declare” that he would never accept any “post, office of emoluments, or service under the British Government.”[25] Scholarship recipients began arriving in 1906, just as Swadeshi activities were picking up in Bengal.

      In contrast to the fervid Swadeshi papers, the Indian Sociologist had a plain affinity with the progressive libertarian thinking of the time. Quotations from Herbert Spencer crowned the masthead: “Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man”; “Resistance to aggression is not simply justifiable but imperative. Non-resistance hurts both altruism and egoism.”[26] СКАЧАТЬ