South Asian Anarchism: A Review Meditations on Maia Ramnath's Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (California World History Library, USA, 2011), and her Decolonizing Anarchism: an Antiauthoritarian History of India's Liberation Struggle (AK Press, USA, 2012). - by Michael Schmidt, South Africa, 2012, revised 2021 MAIA RAMNATH C HAJ to UTOPIA HOW THE GHANAY MOVEMENT CHARTED GLOBAL RADICALISM -4 ATTEMPTED TO OVERTHROW THE BRITISH EMPIRE Decolonizing Anarchism Maia Ramnath What the Institute for Anarchist Studies' Maia Ramnath has achieved with these two books whose angles of approach differ yet which form companion volumes in that they intersect on the little-known anarchist movement of South Asia, is a breathtaking, sorely-needed re-envisioning of anarchism's forgotten organisational strength in the colonial world which points to its great potential to pragmatically combat imperialism today. Anarchism's Anti-imperialism Enabled its Global Reach To paint the backdrop to Ramnath's work, we need to break with conventional anarchist histories. Lucien van der Walt and Steven Hirsch's Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Post-Colonial World (2010) states: "The First International provided the womb in which the anarchist movement emerged, but the formal meetings of the International, its press, and its debates were located within the body of a dynamic global working class and peasant network. Anarchism had an organised presence in Argentina, Cuba, Egypt and Mexico from the 1870s, followed by Ireland, South Africa and Ukraine in the 1880s. The first anarchist-led, syndicalist, unions outside of Spain (the Spanish Regional Workers' Federation, 1870) and the USA (the Central Labor Union, 1884) were Mexico's General Congress of Mexican Workers (1876) and Cuba's Workers' Circle (1887). These were the immediate ancestors of the better known syndicalist unions that emerged globally from the 1890s onwards. To put it another way, anarchism was not a West European doctrine that diffused outwards, perfectly formed, to a passive 'periphery.' Rather, the movement emerged simultaneously and transnationally, created by interlinked activists on [four]
continents - a pattern of inter-connection, exchange and sharing, rooted in 'informal internationalism,' which would persist into the 1940s and beyond." They concluded that to "speak of discrete 'Northern' and 'Southern' anarchist and syndicalist movements" as is common in contemporary anarchist discourse, "would be misleading and inaccurate." It cannot be overemphasised how for the first 50 years of its existence as a proletarian mass movement since its origin in the First International, the anarchist movement often entrenched itself far more deeply in the colonies of the imperialist powers and in those parts of the world still shackled by post-colonial regimes than in its better-known Western heartlands like France or Spain. Until Lenin, Marxism had almost nothing to offer on the national question in the colonies, and until Mao, who had been an anarchist in his youth, neither did Marxism have anything to offer the peasantry in such regions - regions that Marx and Engels, speaking as de facto German supremacists from the high tower of German capitalism, dismissed in their Communist