Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle

Description

Decolonizing Anarchism examines the history of South Asian struggles against colonialism and neocolonialism, highlighting lesser-known dissidents as well as iconic figures. What emerges is an alternate narrative of decolonization, in which liberation is not defined by the achievement of a nation-state. Author Maia Ramnath suggests that the anarchist vision of an alternate society closely echoes the concept of total decolonization on the political, economic, social, cultural, and psychological planes. Decolonizing Anarchism facilitates more than a reinterpretation of the history of anticolonialism; it also supplies insight into the meaning of anarchism itself.

“Maia Ramnath offers a refreshingly different perspective on anticolonial movements in India, not only by focusing on little-remembered anarchist exiles such as Har Dayal, Mukerji and Acharya but more important, highlighting the persistent trend that sought to strengthen autonomous local communities against the modern nation-state. A superbly original book.”—Partha Chatterjee, author of Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Post-colonial Democracy

“[Ramnath] audaciously reframes the dominant narrative of Indian radicalism by detailing its explosive and ongoing symbiosis with decolonial anarchism.”—Dylan Rodríguez, author of Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition

Maia Ramnath is a teacher, writer, activist, and dancer/aerialist living in New York City. She is the author of The Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire—in many ways a companion volume to this one. She is currently a member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies board and Historians against War steering committee.

Title #3 in the Anarchist Interventions series co-published with the IAS.