Historical Materialism 25.

2 (2017) 196–213

brill.com/hima

Maia Ramnath and the Search for a Decolonised

Antiauthoritarian Marxism
A Review of Haj to Utopia and Decolonizing Anarchism by Maia Ramnath

Dhruv Jain
York Centre for Asian Research, York University, Toronto
dhruvj@gmail.com

Abstract

In her two books, Maia Ramnath attempts to construct an antiauthoritarian/

anarchist anti-colonialist politics through an analysis of India’s freedom struggle.
Ramnath reconstructs a history of Indian anti-colonial movements from an anarchist
perspective, while seeking to locate forgotten possibilities such as the ‘libertarian
Marxism’ of the Ghadar party and its successors. Haj to Utopia is an important addition
to the literature on early communism in India inasmuch as it allows us to revisit said
history in India in a renewed and critical manner. On the other hand, Decolonizing
Anarchism is an ambitious book that seeks to unearth an antiauthoritarian account
of India’s struggle for independence, but falls far short of its intended goal because of
Ramnath’s inattentiveness to the implications of Hindu revivalism on caste and gender
in India. Thus, she reproduces many of the characteristics of mainstream nationalist
narratives.

Keywords

Ghadar – Indian communism – antiauthoritarianism – communist history – Dalit

movements – Gandhi – Ambedkar

Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global
Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire, Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2011

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12301270

the Search for a Decolonised Antiauthoritarian Marxism 197

Maia Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India’s

Liberation Struggle, Oakland, CA.: AK Press, 2011

Maia Ramnath’s comprehensive academic study of the Ghadar movement and

party, Haj to Utopia, and her explicitly political book, Decolonizing Anarchism,
attempt to delineate through a historical framework a politics which Ramnath
feels is lacking in contemporary North American anarchist movements: an
antiauthoritarian/anarchist anti-colonialism. Ramnath seeks to reconstruct
a history of Indian anti-colonial movements by ‘exploring a slice of South
Asian history through the lens of an anarchist analysis’ and placing at the
centre of her inquiry the following questions: ‘what becomes visible or legible,
what is foregrounded or emphasized, that may otherwise seem to defy logic
or simply be overlooked? What in India’s counterhistory does this shed light
on – what forgotten but not lost possibilities?’1 Retroactively it becomes
clear that Ramnath’s affinity for the Ghadar movement lies in its blending of
various tendencies of radicalism including syndicalism, republicanism, and
libertarian Marxism combined with a heavy emphasis on action over theory
and romantic rhetoric; all in sharp juxtaposition to the ‘mainstream Left’
or Bolshevism. Haj to Utopia is undoubtedly an invaluable contribution to
the history of early communism in India inasmuch as it allows us to revisit
it in a critical manner. In particular, Ramnath allows us to re-examine the
relationship between different radical strains that comprised the landscape
of early communism in India through her reconsideration of the Ghadar
party’s role in said history. By doing so, Ramnath on the one hand provides
a necessary corrective to existing historical accounts of the importance
and the scope of influence that the Ghadar party had on early communism
in India; however, she simultaneously overstates the uniqueness of the
Ghadar party by differentiating it too sharply from the other revolutionary
trends in India, in particular the Communist Party of India. There is little to
recommend in Decolonizing Anarchism, however, except for a short chapter
on the ‘Critical Leftists’, because of Ramnath’s inattentiveness to questions of
caste and religion. Unintentionally, Ramnath thus reproduces many tropes of
conventional narratives in nationalist historiography and forgets the forgotten
possibilities herself.

1  Haj to Utopia (hereafter Ramnath 2011a), p. 5.

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198 Jain

A Necessary Corrective

Haj to Utopia is an invaluable addition to the scant scholarship that exists

on Indian diasporic radicalism and is necessary reading for any scholar of
communism in India, but also for those scholars interested in the development
of the communist movement around the world. Scholars of American and
Canadian communism and syndicalism can no longer swear ignorance of the
existence of a radicalised Indian diaspora which often intersected, interacted
and overlapped with mainstays of North American radicalism including the
IWW, the Fenian organisations, and early socialist organisations and radicals
like Agnes Smedly. Furthermore, Ramnath’s book is a welcome corrective to
existing historical accounts of communism in India which tend to understate
the importance of the Ghadar party, albeit while minimally acknowledging
their role. Indeed, the Ghadar party is commonly referred to as ‘nationalist
revolutionaries’ abroad. The orthodox historical account written by the
Historical Commission of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), for example,
sums up the contributions of the Ghadar party thusly:

None of the endeavours to bring about a revolutionary upsurge with the

help of Indian soldiers during the First World War succeeded. This was
mainly due to the lack of proper political direction and the failure to
project before the people an ideal of their future society. However, these
efforts are in contrast to the attitude of the Indian National Congress,
which supported the imperialist war.2

The orthodox account thus fails to fully realise the positive impact of the
Ghadar party through: 1) their capacity to bring together a number of different
influences, ideologies and movements under a common platform; 2) the spread
of revolutionary propaganda in India from 1913 to 1920, at a time in which no
group in India was capable of doing the same; and 3) the laying down the
foundations by roving groups of Ghadarites going from village to village, all of
which would become vital for the next phase of the revolutionary movement.3
The Ghadar movement and party were predominately based in the Indian
diaspora. The majority of migrants were not politically conscious and had
moved to North America for personal advancement.4 However, Indian
students, like their working-class counterparts, found their opportunities

2  History Commission of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) 2005, p. 23.

3  Ramnath 2011a, p. 51.
4  Ramnath 2011a, p. 23.

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the Search for a Decolonised Antiauthoritarian Marxism 199

limited due to the racism that they experienced, which resulted in a sizeable
minority developing seditious ideas of their own that were cultivated by the
to-be Ghadarites.5 The struggle against racism and deportation, combined with
an ideological newspaper, allowed the Hindustan Association in Vancouver,
an organisational precursor to the Ghadar party, to spread the ideas of anti-
British anti-colonialism.6 Other efforts to form similar organisations were
started in Seattle, Portland and Astoria. In particular the Indian Independence
League formed in Portland and Astoria would serve as seeds for the future
Ghadar party.7 However, it ought to be noted that the relationship between
anti-racist/anti-immigrant and anti-colonial activities always remained
tenuous, especially as some put a greater emphasis on either aspect of the
relationship; this became evident in Portland where the organisation became
more enmeshed in anti-racist/anti-immigrant activism, rather than the anti-
colonial movement that became identified with the increasingly California-
based Ghadar movement.8 In 1913, these organisations coalesced to form
the Pacific Coast Hindi Association.9 However, reminiscent of debates that
generally existed in the revolutionary socialist movement, the question of
organisation was raised. The problem was condensed thusly: ‘who were
the real Ghadarites? Har Dayal’s use of the word in the first issue referred
expansively to all of India’s patriotic revolutionaries to date, encompassing all
the Bengalis, all the Punjabis, and the activists in London and Paris circles.
Yet at the same time he was stressing the need to form a party in the more
specific sense’.10 Thus, one ought to speak of both a Ghadar movement and the
Ghadar party. The Ghadarites, as a whole, were thus not centrally organised,
with an organisational headquarters, but rather a decentralised network of
militants held together by the newspaper based out of San Francisco that
served as an ideological headquarters.11 This ideological unity was limited
inasmuch as numerous Ghadarites shared a number of other ideological
commitments including Hindu nationalism, Marxism and pan-Islamism.12
‘Yet,’ Ramnath argues, ‘the links were causal and contingent, and though many
observers and historians have tended to dismiss Ghadar’s political orientation

5  Ramnath 2011a, p. 22.

6   Ramnath 2011a, p. 27.
7  Ramnath 2011a, p. 30.
8  Ramnath 2011a, p. 31.
9  Ramnath 2011a, p. 32.
10  Ramnath 2011a, p. 35.
11  Ramnath 2011a, p. 4.
12  Ramnath 2011a, p. 5.

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as an untheorized hodgepodge, I believe we can perceive within Ghadarite

words and deeds an eclectic and evolving, yet consistent radical programme.’13
This programme can be summed up thusly: anti-colonialist, patriotic,
internationalist, secularist, modernist, radically democratic, republican, anti-
capitalist, ‘militantly revolutionist’, and ‘in temperament audacious, dedicated,
courageous unto death; in aesthetic romantically capable of gestures such as
declaiming a bold slogan, witticism, or verse of farewell poetry at the foot of
the gallows’.14 Besides their organising activities in the fields and universities
across North America, a considerable amount of emphasis and effort went
into the production of a clearly written revolutionary socialist newspaper
that would be circulated amongst the broader international and national
patriotic movement.15 This newspaper in particular played an important role
in the spread of revolutionary socialist ideas throughout the Indian diaspora
and was even able to make its way into India at a time in which no similar
paper existed. It is important to note that the newspaper did not simply
convey the nationalist aspirations of Indians alone, but those of revolutionary
movements and nationalists across the world including the struggles in Russia,
China, Mexico, Ireland and Egypt.16 Furthermore, Canadian Ghadarites were
not unaware of the conditions around them and drew comparisons between
the conditions of the First Nations to those of Indians.17 In this regard, the
Ghadarites and the international patriotic movement served as a conduit
through which relationships, organisational and ideological alike, could be
established. This was particularly important as the Ghadar party tried to break
down the boundaries between the Hindu-majoritarian nationalist movement
and the pan-Islamist Khilafatist movement.
The outbreak of World War I saw the Ghadar party exhorting its supporters
in North America, especially in the wake of the Komatagara Maru incident, and
around the world, to return to India and fight for the overthrow of the British
Raj.18 It is interesting to note that the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
and the Ghadar party differed in their assessments of the war. Whereas for the
North American and European syndicalists the war was a disaster and they
expressed their anti-imperialism through opposition to the war; the Ghadar
party welcomed the war, siding with the Germans against the British, and saw

13  Ibid.
14  Ramnath 2011a, p. 7.
15  Ramnath 2011a, p. 37.
16  Ramnath 2011a, p. 39.
17  Ramnath 2011a, p. 44.
18  Ramnath 2011a, p. 50.

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it as a conjuncture in which much could be achieved.19 It has been estimated

that in the first two years of World War I 8,000 Ghadarites from around the
globe returned to fight.20 However, arrests, poor communications, and
espionage resulted in widespread confusion and organisational weaknesses
from the very beginning.21 Arms promised by the Berlin India Committee
(BIC) never arrived.22 An attempt to ferment a rebellion in February 1915 with
the help of disaffected army regiments was quickly squashed.23 The result of
this stillborn rebellion was roving groups of Ghadarites going from village to
village handing out revolutionary propaganda, building contacts, finding easy
targets for revolutionary expropriations etc.24 It is noteworthy however that the
majority of people arrested in connection with the mutiny were not returnees,
but instead local people who had been radicalised by Ghadarite literature
and returnees. By 1917 the San Francisco HQ was split between two different
leaders both claiming to be the ‘real Ghadarite’ and both producing their
own respective papers.25 Furthermore, other attempts to ferment mutinies
in other British colonial outposts like Burma, Siam, Malaysia and Indonesia
were similarly unsuccessful.26 Most accounts of the Ghadar party end here;
the Ghadar party had been crushed, its members dispersed, on the run, or
jailed. However, Ramnath’s book does not do so, instead offering a wealth of
information about the influence of the Ghadar party on efforts to organise
Muslims vis-à-vis the Khilafatist movement, again under the leadership of the
ill-fated BIC and their German handlers, and subsequently on another of the
main sources for the communist movement in India: the Muhajirin.
In 1917, Har Dayal, having left San Francisco and fearing arrest, arrived in
Istanbul via Geneva, where he had convinced the Germans of his plans to
establish a revolutionary headquarters there to organise Muslims both there
and in several other cities including Mecca, Baghdad and Kabul in a rebellion
against the British.27 The Ghadar party through its trans-national networks
had already made contact with the pan-Islamist movement abroad and
notable revolutionaries like Ajit Singh had already been operating out of Iran

19  Ramnath 2011a, p. 62.

20  Ramnath 2011a, p. 51.
21  Ibid.
22  Ramnath 2011a, p. 54.
23  Ramnath 2011a, p. 60.
24  Ramnath 2011a, p. 51.
25  Ramnath 2011a, p. 62.
26  Ramnath 2011a, pp. 77–94.
27  Ramnath 2011a, pp. 175–6.

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since 1907.28 However, once again things did not work out as planned. First
of all, Har Dayal’s group was unable to work with already established pan-
Islamist organisations in the country, who regarded his English newspaper as
simply Hindu nationalist propaganda with occasional and tokenistic attempts
to appeal to Muslims.29 Second, the strong Hindu revivalist underpinnings of
Har Dayal’s politics made his attempts to organise Muslims unpopular.30 Third,
despite Turkish government support for the project, they remained suspicious
of Har Dayal’s efforts to organise anti-British rebellions, and were unable to
overcome existing ethnic/regional/national divisions.31 As Ramnath notes,
‘In other words, true Pan-Islamic unity was a mirage beyond the power of any
propaganda to embody.’ In subsequent years, the BIC would try several more
times, including the colourfully named ‘Silk Letters Plot’ and the Singapore
mutiny, to make this pan-Islamic unity a reality to no avail.32 However, a far
more significant aspect of these attempts was that they served as the historical
background for the Muhajirin. In 1917, the Bolshevik government called on
Muslims, as such, around the world, but in particular in the Central Asia/
Transcaucasus region, to play their respective role in the world revolution
in ‘struggle against Western imperialism, especially as manifest in its most
advanced form, British capitalism’.33 This strategy included the military and
political training of cadres from Asian backgrounds as an irregular ancillary
force of the Red Army.34 Muslims inspired by the Khilafatist movement had
been travelling to Afghanistan to join the Provisional Government of India since
1915, since they had come to consider India to be Dar-al-Harab, or under infidel
rule, and thus chose to quit India.35 ‘They might be content simply to dwell
elsewhere within the Dar-al-Islam, but they might also feel morally obligated to
fight: whether to defend the sultan-caliph’s realm or to launch rebellion against
British rule in India directly.’36 A small group of these Muhajirin ‘were courted by
the Red Army and attacked by the Turkmen counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘were
persuaded to transfer their revolutionary zeal from the caliph in Istanbul to the
revolutionary regime in Moscow.’37 Initially trained in political and military

28  Ramnath 2011a, pp. 170–5.

29  Ramnath 2011a, p. 176.
30  Ramnath 2011a, p. 177.
31  Ramnath 2011a, p. 178.
32  Ramnath 2011a, pp. 185–93.
33  Ramnath 2011a, pp. 194–5.
34  Ramnath 2011a, p. 196.
35  Ramnath 2011a, p. 201.
36  Ibid.
37  Ibid.

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matters by M.N. Roy in Tashkent and subsequently at the Moscow University

of the Toilers of the East, they would help compromise the group of Indian
revolutionaries that would form the Communist Party of India (CPI) in 1921
while abroad.38 Ramnath thus effectively demonstrates that the Ghadar party
played a fundamentally important role in the development of communism;
however, as will be demonstrated, Ramnath simultaneously overstates the case
by arguing for too sharp a dividing line between the Communist Party of India
and the Ghadar party’s successors

Overstating the Case

The Ghadar movement thus ‘served as a missing link, a source of hidden

continuity between the Bengali “anarchist” conspiracies, “national
revolutionary terrorism” and Punjabi agitations of the early twentieth century;
and the radical Left and revolutionist movements of the 1920s.’39 Ramnath thus
correctly locates Ghadar within the Indian revolutionary socialist tradition,
rather than simply the nationalist tradition. However, Ramnath’s account
distinguishes too sharply between the Ghadarites and the CPI, which she refers
to as ‘mainline’ and orthodox.40 As Ramnath writes, ‘In fact, the sister groups
Ghadar and Kirti represented a stubbornly autonomous alternative, distinct
from the mainline CPI.’41 It is this sharp demarcation which will be challenged
and shown to be unsustainable.
Ramnath argues that Ghadar’s politics were a heterodox communist
politics, but unfairly seeks to juxtapose them to the supposedly more
monolithic or orthodox communism of the CPI. The fundamental problem
with Ramnath’s account in this regard is that it assumes a homogenous CPI
to which the Ghadarites could be juxtaposed. However, it would be simply
anachronistic to speak of an ‘orthodox’ CPI until at least 1962, although there
was an important split in the Punjab unit in 1948 on Ghadarite lines, especially
because of the numerous different trends that existed within the CPI.42 This
allows Ramnath to argue that the ‘libertarian’ perspectives of the communist
newspaper Kirti, which Ramnath considers the successor of the Ghadar party,
rendered them fundamentally different from those of the CPI. Ramnath, in

38  Ramnath 2011a, pp. 201–2.

39  Ramnath 2011a, p. 2.
40  Ramnath 2011a, pp. 140, 162.
41  Ramnath 2011a, p. 14.
42  See Ram 1969, pp. 1–158; Basu 2000, p. 3; Judge 1992, pp. 67–70.

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204 Jain

effect, returns to a classical division between a supposed antiauthoritarianism

(anarchism) and a supposed authoritarianism (communism). However, it
would be more useful to understand how this tension between the Ghadar
party and the CPI in fact reflects the tension that existed within the communist
movement itself. The very fact that the Ghadar party was invited to the Fourth
Congress of the Comintern, as Ramnath herself notes, in 1922, speaks to the
very longevity of this very debate in the communist movement.43 Ramnath’s
account is unsustainable in several respects: first, numerous Ghadarites did
at various times join the CPI and became key organisational leaders. The
Ghadarites played an especially important role in Punjab under the leadership
of the former Ghadarites Santokh Singh and Rattan Singh.44 Second, the Kirti
communists would be regularly involved in the debates between communist
groups in India. In 1925, the Kanpur conference, organised under the auspices,
not of M.N. Roy, but a national communist, Satyabhakta, was held; among
its participants were members of the Kirti newspaper.45 At this conference
different communist groups from around the country, including the émigré
CPI, met to coordinate their activities and form a single communist party.
Although Kirti was not included in a list of newspapers produced by the CPI
drawn up at the Bombay meeting of the CPI, the Kirti communists remained in
close touch with the CPI.46 Indeed, the Kirti communists would help form the
All-India Workers’ and Peasants’ Party in 1928 with the CPI’s aid.47 Ramnath’s
argument is rendered even more implausible when one realises that the
resolution calling for the formation of the All-India Workers’ and Peasants’
Party was proposed by Muzaffer Ahmad, and saw Sohan Singh Josh being
elected to the presidium of the newly formed party.48 Furthermore, at this
very same conference the All-India Workers’ and Peasants’ Party unanimously
voted to join the Comintern-led League Against Imperialism.49 Third, the Kirti
communists themselves would finally merge with the CPI, which would be
impossible if the politically distance between them was so great.50
This leads to the second fundamental problem with Ramnath’s account:
her insistence that the Ghadar party had their own mode of politics, and that

43  Ramnath 2011a, p. 139.

44  History Commission of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) 2005, p. 65.
45  History Commission of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) 2005, p. 129.
46  History Commission of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) 2005, pp. 106–7, 129.
47  History Commission of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) 2005, pp. 132–3.
48  History Commission of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) 2005, p. 133.
49  Ibid.
50  Ramnath 2011a, p. 125.

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any adoption of Marxism-Leninism was merely tactical in nature.51 Ramnath

argues that

Ghadar is often positioned as a transitional phase between two modes of

revolutionary struggle, namely, the conspiratorial secret society and the
mass organization model … However, Ghadar should not be seen just as a
temporary or intermediate half measure, but as a relatively stable model
distinct from other more unequivocal tendencies (in both directions)
during both the prewar and the interwar periods.52

Ramnath in this regard does not take into account how the failure of the
Ghadar mutiny demonstrated that the basic underlying conditions which
had necessitated the Ghadar party had changed. Har Dayal wrote in Bande
Mataram in 1910, three years prior to the formation of Ghadar, ‘We must …
try to strengthen all groups of workers outside India. The centre of gravity
of political work has been shifted from Calcutta, Poona, and Lahore to Paris,
Geneva, Berlin, London and New York.’53 Future leaders of the CPI such as
S.A. Dange and Muzaffar Ahmad had yet to become communists and remained
nationalists with radical inclinations.54 It was only in 1922 that S.A. Dange
would form the first domestic socialist newspaper under the influence of Roy’s
émigré-produced newspaper and publications.55 Furthermore, working-class
and revolutionary movements were growing across India, and in 1920 the All-
India Trade Union Congress was formed.56 The centre of gravity had shifted
once again to Madras, Kolkata, Bombay and Kanpur.57 These developments
also paralleled a political shift. Ramnath notes that

postwar and post-prison Ghadarites, having embraced the new doctrines,

now saw themselves as having a more ‘mature’ level of political
consciousness, through which they understood the causes for the failure
in 1915 to be (a) treachery (exacerbated by poor security culture, which

51  Ramnath 2011a, p. 164.

52  Ramnath 2011a, p. 6.
53  Ramnath 2011a, p. 2.
54  Chattopadhyay 2011, pp. 84–135.
55  Chattopadhyay 2011, p. 95.
56  Chattopadhyay 2011, p. 53.
57  Ram 1969, p. 4.

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Rattan Singh attributed to lack of experience) and (b) failure to link the
vanguard insurrection movement with the masses.58

Ramnath, defending the Ghadar party’s own historical record against the
Ghadarites’ own retrospection and summation, states that the latter were
not correct in their analysis as, 1) ‘conspiratorial action was necessary only
when repression made open organising impossible’ and 2) there had been
no failure in developing mass organisations, whilst admitting that they had
failed to build a revolutionary organisation within India.59 Regardless, Ghadar
party members who remained politically active, especially in Left politics,
regarded their earlier political work to be symptomatic of political immaturity.
They advocated a shift from an emphasis on rebellion alone to political work
amongst workers and peasants. This shift is apparent in Ramnath’s retelling
of the passing of the torch from Santokh Singh to Sohan Singh Josh. In the
encounter between Singh and Josh, Singh tells Josh to ‘go cautiously’, which
Josh took to mean that he needed to ‘patiently organise the workers and
peasants to fight their struggles … do not indulge in bombastic slogans.’60
Ramnath’s contradictory argument is clear, for example, when she posits that
Kirti’s articles, which argued that Bolshevik land distribution policies under
the NEP were a model for the distribution of land and power in India, were
in fact evidence of a ‘more politically decentralised and economically mixed
social vision [that] makes Ghadar-Kirti communism quite legible as the
ideological kin of a Makhnovian libertarian socialism.’61 It cannot be disputed
that the different communist groups around India, including Kirti which
has been formed by former Ghadarites, all had their own understandings of
the significance of the Comintern and its ideology; however, this reflected
a debate within the communist movement in India and was not evidence
of the Ghadarites being completely apart from the CPI. The Ghadarites, in
effect, paralleled Lih’s argument that ‘[in] each of the various clashes over
these issues within Russian Social Democracy, Lenin can be easily located.
He is always on the side making the most confident assumptions about the
empirical possibility of a mass underground Social-Democratic movement.’62
The Ghadarites similarly supported those elements that emphasised the
possibility of mass underground armed movements, whether it be the Red

58  Ramnath 2011a, p. 125.

59  Ramnath 2011a, p. 164.
60  Ramnath 2011a, pp. 156–7.
61  Ramnath 2011a, pp. 163–4.
62  Lih 2008, p. 7.

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Communist Party (1948) or, subsequently, as Ramnath notes, ‘the surviving

Ghadari babas [giving] their blessing to Charu Mazumdar and the Naxalites’
and noting that, ‘[the] first elected leader of the new Communist Party of India
(Marxist-Leninist) (CPI-ML) in Pubjab was a veteran Ghadarite’.63

Ideological Hodgepodge

Ramnath argues that Ghadar’s purported ideological ‘incoherence’ which

effectively melded politically libertarian aspects of French and American
political liberalism and anti-colonialism ‘is actually quite legible through a logic
of anarchism – which thereby provides a somewhat ironic bridge between rival
nationalist and Communist readings of the Ghadar story.’64 Ramnath suggests
that anarchism need not be hostile to anti-colonial movements by arguing for a
form of anarchism that 1) allows for an admittedly contested ‘strategic identity
politics’ ‘where the assertion of collective existence and demand for recognition
functions as a stand against genocide, apartheid, systemic discrimination, or
forced assimilation to a dominant norm’ which makes geographical claims
whilst still differentiating between state and nation;65 and 2) should not be anti-
modern and ought to reconstruct a different form of modernity, pivoting on
‘the quest for collective liberation in its most meaningful sense, by maximizing
the conditions for autonomy and egalitarian social relationships, sustainable
production and reproduction’, thus differentiating it from colonial modernity.66
Furthermore, Ramnath argues that several key aspects of anarchist theory and
practice were unwittingly adopted by the anti-colonial movement in India:
1) ‘the perception of the government itself as an evil and the state as clearly
extraneous to society, so that the primary sites of resistance were the defining
mechanisms of state function, including both disciplinary and ideological
apparatuses’;67 2) ‘the primary resistance to the onset of industrialisation’
which she juxtaposes to supposedly Marxist and syndicalist positions which
assumed that the transition to industrialism had in fact already occurred;68
and 3) the active resistance in the field of cultural hegemony.69 Ramnath tries

63  Ramnath 2011a, p. 236.

64  Ramnath 2011a, p. 6.
65  Decolonizing Anarchism (hereafter Ramnath 2011b), p. 21.
66  Ramnath 2011b, p. 37.
67  Ramnath 2011b, p. 26.
68  Ibid.
69  Ramnath 2011b, p. 27.

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208 Jain

to construct this antiauthoritarian anti-colonial narrative through a series of

thumbnail biographies of Indian historical figures who supposedly embodied
particular antiauthoritarian politics. Her account is most convincing when she
discusses the ‘Critical Leftists’: Acharya, Lotvala and Bhagat Singh, and their
respective attempts to delineate a libertarian socialism in juxtaposition to the
communist orthodoxy of the CPI.70
Ramnath acknowledges that her history is not complete inasmuch as it does
not include the voices of anti-caste and women voices, and simply focuses on
the male high-caste voices of Indian nationalist history, but then curiously
writes,

this is not a history of caste or patriarchy, or the movements to dismantle

the structures of oppression based on them. So for the purposes of this
project, it seemed better to offer what is actually there rather than to
simply condemn or discard the record of what isn’t there – and then
continue the efforts it chronicles to broaden and deepen liberation, in
practice.71

It is this very odd proviso that plagues Ramnath’s book throughout. It is difficult
to imagine an attempt to reconstruct an antiauthoritarian history of India
that does not take into consideration the central problems of contemporary
Indian politics: 1) Hindu revivalism and far-right Hindu nationalism; 2) caste
politics; and 3) the politics of gender. Indeed, Decolonizing Anarchism can be
regarded as dangerously naive. Furthermore, Ramnath does little to discuss
the contradictory nature of the different movements and people that she
would deem as antiauthoritarian. It would be difficult to proceed biography
by biography; however, it will suffice to analyse the case of V.D. Sarvarkar,
M.K. Gandhi, and her scattered comments on Dalit movements.
Ramnath wants to pull apart anarchism from the far right inasmuch as they
are commonly found associated with one another in the Indian ‘mainline
Left’ imaginary.72 However, Ramnath does irrevocable damage to her own
argument through the inclusion in her history of the founder of the far-right
Hindu-nationalist movement, V.D. Sarvarkar. Ramnath begins her history of
antiauthoritarian anti-colonialism with the émigré revolutionary nationalist
circles in Paris, London etc. This is unsurprising given Ramnath’s earlier
research; however, what is surprising is Ramnath’s attention to Sarvarkar. It is

70  Ramnath 2011b, pp. 124–62.

71  Ramnath 2011b, p. 9.
72  Ramnath 2011b, pp. 38–9.

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the Search for a Decolonised Antiauthoritarian Marxism 209

indeed true that Sarvarkar, for a brief period, was centrally involved in circles
that agitated for and provided the means for the ‘propaganda of the deed’.
Sarvarkar did indeed send twenty revolvers to India upon hearing of the arrest
of his brother by the British for seditious activities.73 And as Ramnath points
out, Sarvarkar’s arrest and calls for his release did become a cause célèbre for
émigré revolutionary nationalists.74 However, Ramnath is aware of Sarvarkar’s
role in Indian politics and concludes the chapter by explaining that, ‘Sarvarkar
became a founding hero of the Hindu far Right, while other Abhinava Bharat
members like Har Dayal … became leaders of the dissident Left. From that
crossroads, this is the path we take now.’75 The inclusion of Sarvarkar in
any history of the Left, authoritarian and antiauthoritarian, cannot but be
controversial. Sumit Sarkar, the prominent Marxist historian, for example,
discusses these very same activities, but does not conflate these activities
with an antiauthoritarian movement.76 The few years that Sarvarkar spent
in circles that advocated propaganda of the deed is quickly overshadowed
by his lifelong role as the father of the Hindu far-right, thus one cannot but
be perturbed by Ramnath’s inclusion of him. Furthermore, this crossroads
is not as simple as Ramnath suggests, inasmuch as Hindu revivalist politics
is repeatedly mentioned without comment. For example, when Ramnath
provides a biographical sketch of Har Dayal, she mentions that ‘[biographer]
Emily Brown suggests that Har Dayal was having trouble squaring his more
overtly Hindu ideals with Cama and Rana’s focus on international socialism.’77
Ramnath defending Har Dayal claims that, ‘Har Dayal’s new “religion” was a
self-consciously modernist and unmistakably anarchist vision.’78 Ramnath
unfortunately seems to have forgotten her own chapter in Haj and Utopia
where she discusses how Har Dayal’s attempts to organise Muslim soldiers in
Turkey was rebuffed because of what was perceived as Hindu nationalism.
This inattention to the problem of Hindu revivalism becomes more shocking
in Ramnath’s discussion of Gandhi and the ‘romantic countermodernists’.
Ramnath chastises the ‘traditional Left’ in India because its

passionate devotion to economic materialism, secularism, and

modernisation, rejected Gandhian thought as reactionary. Their deep

73  Ramnath 2011b, p. 60.

74  Ramnath 2011b, p. 61.
75  Ramnath 2011b, p. 77.
76  Sarkar 1983, pp. 135, 145.
77  Ramnath 2011b, p. 84.
78  Ibid.

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210 Jain

anxiety about deviating from the principles of science and rationalism

is quite understandable, given what they were positioning themselves
against – the bloodbaths of communalism, the religiously sanctioned
degradation of the caste system, and recently the growth of religious
politics both Hindu and Islamic. Yet this made the entire category of the
spiritual or nonrational out of bounds for progressive politics, ceding it to
the Right rather than allowing it other modes of expression.79

Ramnath, on the other hand, unburdened from the concerns of the traditional
Left argues for the ‘possibility of conceptually straddling the line’.80 Ramnath
thus provides an anarchist interpretation of Gandhi. Whilst acknowledging
that Gandhi’s

culturally specific religiosity gives his thought and practice quite a

different guise from anything generally associated with anarchism in
the West [… i]t was precisely his religiosity, along with antimodernism
and refusal to endorse class war or repudiate the caste system, that led
the Indian Left to angrily reject him, holding him accountable for the
festering canker of communalism within the Indian national movement
and Indian society’s persistent attachment to archaic structures of
oppression. Instead of stoking dialectical conflict, he called for social
harmony, counseling a benevolent, paternalistic relationship between
landlords and peasants.81

Ramnath proceeds to provide snippets from Hind Swaraj to make her case for
an anarchist Gandhi, but completely overlooks Gandhi’s actions and provides
no defence to the traditional Left’s arguments against Gandhi. Ramnath thus
willingly overlooks Gandhi’s Hindu revivalism, his caste-based understanding
of India and his pro-business outlook, in favour of an idealised version of Gandhi
who emphasises village panchayats.82 Ramnath thus relies on Surendranath
Karr’s utopic vision of village republics, decentralised, unburdened by caste
etc.,83 again completely overlooking the very real caste-based nature of the
village republics and panchayats.84 In fact, India has achieved Gandhi’s real

79  Ramnath 2011b, pp. 163–4.

80  Ramnath 2011b, p. 164.
81  Ramnath 2011b, p. 174.
82  Dhanagre 1986, pp. 89–92; Roy 2014, pp. 90, 111–12.
83  Ramnath 2011b, pp. 180–1.
84  Roy 2014, pp. 49, 84.

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the Search for a Decolonised Antiauthoritarian Marxism 211

dream. Arundhati Roy writes, ‘As Mahatma Gandhi desired, the rich man has
been left in possession of his (as well as everybody else’s) wealth. Chaturvarna
[the caste system] reigns unchallenged’.85
Unfortunately the generosity afforded to Sarvarkar, Har Dayal and Gandhi
is not afforded to those truly on the margins of Indian society: Dalits and
Dalit movements. Ramnath uncharitably writes, ‘Dalit movements weren’t
necessarily antiauthoritarian, although some were indeed radically egalitarian.
(Some weren’t even that, seeking not an end to the hierarchy but a better rung
on the latter for a particular group.)’86 Adding injury to insult, Ramnath writes
that ‘the Dalit movement tended to lack ideological content’.87 Ramnath
delivers the coup de grâce when she concludes that Dalit movements, ‘did not
necessarily see themselves as part of anti-colonial struggle’ and proceeds to
argue that ‘Ambedkar and his followers were more apt to be British loyalists,
blaming Gandhi and the INC for the discrimination, exclusion, and brutality
they routinely faced’.88 Surely an antiauthoritarian historian ought be
sensitive enough to not collapse a wide range of Dalit movements, ranging
in their politics, into an undifferentiated whole characterised only by British
loyalism and a lack of ideological content. Rather than deploying an anarchist
reading of Ambedkar that would have explored Ambedkar’s realisation that
independence from British rule meant little without the end of caste-rule,
Ramnath adopts a nationalist position that marginalises the very real grievances
of Dalits. Furthermore, missing is any mention of Dalit Marxist theorists and
organisations, or other attempts to address the caste perspective from an
‘antiauthoritarian’ standpoint, and the lone mention of the Dalit Panthers is
dismissively fleeting.89 Rather than trace an antiauthoritarian radical genealogy,
beautifully explored in Anand Patwardhan’s documentary Jai Bhim Comrade,
Ramnath ungenerously pivots, without explanation, to the 1980 Mandal
commission, as if it were the culmination of Dalit emancipatory demands.
While Ramnath is justified in claiming that Arundhati Roy’s ‘commitments
are intersectional, antiauthoritarian, nonhierarchical, and framed mainly in
connection with a principle of social ecology’, she is incorrect in suggesting that
this ‘social ecology’ is a ‘selected synthesis of Gandhian and socialist thought’.90
Rather, Roy has quite explicitly and controversially exposed Gandhi, in favour

85  Roy 2014, p. 140.

86  Ramnath 2011b, p. 231.
87  Ramnath 2011b, p. 232.
88  Ibid.
89  Ramnath 2011b, p. 231.
90  Ramnath 2011b, pp. 241–2.

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212 Jain

of Ambedkar.91 Unfortunately, Ramnath does not do the same and, in doing so,
fails to explore a forgotten possibility: Babu Mangoo Ram, a Dalit Ghadarite.
Ramnath then juxtaposes the Dalit movement to that of the Adivasis, pitting
two marginalised communities against one another, rather than seeking to
understand the complex relationship between these movements. Whereas the
Dalits fail to muster the necessary anti-colonial spirit that Ramnath is after,
‘[on] the other hand, the contemporary Adivasi narrative of resistance clearly
evokes the dynamics of colonization. This is particularly true in the regions
of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh – the mineral-rich, heavily forested areas in
the center of India, carved out of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh in 2000 – where
Adivasis are the bulk of the population.’92 Although Ramnath is correct to
show the parallels between contemporary neoliberal land acquisition and
British colonialism, she makes two unfounded assumptions: 1) that Advivasis
and Adivasi movements can be spoken of as a homogenous whole through
her invocation of ‘the’ Adivasis; and 2) Adivasi politics do not share, in the
main, any of the same tendencies that she accuses Dalit movements of being
characterised by. In sum, Ramnath unintentionally reproduces many romantic
stereotypes about Adivasi societies and movements.
Ramnath’s Haj to Utopia is an important contribution to the existing
literature of not only Indian diasporic radicalism and communism, but also
North American and European. In particular it allows for a reconsideration
of the early history of communism in India. It demonstrates that the Ghadar
movement was deeply influential on a number of different movements that
would come to compose the communist movement, and would animate a
genealogy of a particular trend of communism in India that would emphasis
active attempts of rebellion. Ramnath, however, overstates the uniqueness of
the Ghadar movement and party through her emphasis on their differences
with the Communist Party of India, especially as they are not borne out
through her own account. Ramnath’s affinity for the Ghadar party derives
from their particular mode of politics that emphasises action over coherent
ideology; however, while the Ghadar party developed past this mode, Ramnath
seeks to ossify it. This results in her ambitious, but failed, attempt to create an
antiauthoritarian anti-colonial history of India. Ramnath’s desire to demarcate
her account from that of the traditional Left results in her making strange allies
with the Hindu revivalist and nationalist movements. Furthermore, Ramnath
makes a number of sweeping comments about diverse movements which
betray the ideological confusion at the heart of her decolonised anarchism,

91  See Roy 2014.

92  Ramnath 2011b, p. 233.

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the Search for a Decolonised Antiauthoritarian Marxism 213

and puts into question her understanding of the basic concerns that confront
antiauthoritarian movements in India and the world today.

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