Decolonizing Anarchism. Maia Ramnath

as an alien Western encroachment no less than the Indian villagers did their modernization at British hands. In this too the urban intellectual Swadeshists resembled the Russian Slavophiles.

      In the meantime, Criminal Investigation Department director William Cleveland had another, more menacing take on the true nature of the Indian soul. In his introductory remarks on “anarchism,” written for his assistant Ker’s 1919 documentary compilation Political Trouble in India, he diagnosed the “psychology of the politico-criminal activities of Indians” as none other than a fervidly intense religious nationalism.[58] To characterize this, he enlisted the aid of an extended quotation from John Nicol Farquhar’s Religious Nationalism, published in 1912.[59]

      Farquhar identified this new trend (in contrast to the thin, bloodless old politicism) as a species of religious nationalism indicating the maturation of “racial” confidence, which produced greater independence of thought as well as greater demands for 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 suffer. 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, for 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 Dayananda, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and 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 sensationalized obsession with Kali-worshipping bandits dating from nearly a century earlier—an obsession enshrined as a timeless trope from William Sleeman’s books in 1815 to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984. The Thuggee and Dacoity Department was reconstituted in 1903 as the Criminal Investigation Department with a new focus on seditious activity. Granted, the revolutionists did not help matters with passages such as this one from the Yugantar of May 2, 1908:

      The Mother is thirsty and is pointing out to her sons the only thing that can quench that thirst. Nothing less than human blood and decapitated human heads will satisfy her. Let her sons, therefore, worship her with these offerings, and let them not shrink even from sacrificing their lives to procure them. On the day on which the Mother is worshipped in this way in every village, on that day will the people of India be inspired with a divine spirit and the crown of independence will fall into their hands.[61]

      Like many Orientalist fantasies, this was a cocreated myth.