The research that has culminated in this book began in an attempt to escape the reductive equation of anticolonialism with nationalism. Given numerous reservations about that project, both analytical and political, I hoped to identify precedents for ways of conceiving anticolonialism that transcended or critiqued it, and that were capable of proposing alternative visions of a liberated society that neither mirrored the logic of imperialism (and Orientalism) nor replicated the extractive and disciplinary institutions of the modern state while merely replacing foreign with local control. On the other hand, the historical salience and emotional power of a national liberation struggle in undertaking the work of decolonization is impossible to deny. Yet as the revolutionaries of Kirti and the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army well knew, truly liberatory struggle is not only against that which restricts freedom, but also for that which facilitates or produces freedom. The ejection of foreign rule is one thing, and the implementation of a postindependence socioeconomic and political order based on maximizing substantive liberty, equality, and solidarity quite another. What does the independent society actually look like?
A comprehensive radical critique of colonial rule entailed more than an analysis of the foreignness of the regime; it also required a response to the regime’s very structure and character. Colonization imposed complex processes of rationalization, bureaucratization, and technical-industrial development, as well as insertion into the unprecedented expansion of global capitalism.16
Regardless of what alternate forms of modernity would have emerged in the absence of European intervention, that intervention did produce a situation in which the material conditions, social destabilizations, and economic transformations associated with the modernization process were perceived as corollaries of colonization. By contextualizing the revolutionary movement abroad relative to the shift s, trends, and currents of international radicalism over the first few de cades of the twentieth century, we may see the configuration of factions within the Indian independence struggle mirroring the spectrum of possible responses to these conditions manifest within Western movements of opposition and critical resistance, including varieties of accommodation, incorporation, synthesis, transcendence, resistance, and rejection.
Three Anticolonial Discourses
In my exploration of ways of conceptualizing anticolonial struggle that transcended nationalism during this globally turbulent period (1905–1930), two major antisystemic movements stood out as transnational vehicles for opposition to Western imperialism and critique of modern capitalist society, both of which were available in various forms to Indian radicals: Socialism and Pan-Islamism. Yet any attempt to define either of these complex, multifold terms is fraught with as many contradictions and counterexamples as in the case of nationalism.
If we approach the three “isms” not as ideological monoliths but as heteroglossic discourses,17 we can recognize an analogous range of positions within each of them on the debates then in progress over how to respond to the confrontation with modernity—whether by espousing Enlightenment rationalism or by embracing its various antitheses, whether defined as spiritual, mystical, nihilist, millenarian, or romanticist.
Rationalism forms an important axis in the intellectual history of revolution, cutting across leftist, nationalist, and religious responses. While this epistemological axis does not replace those based in material economic or political structures, it is nevertheless necessary to take account of modes of resistance that cannot be “legitimated by a post-enlightenment rationalist frame,”18 and furthermore to acknowledge that such modes cannot be wholly identified with religious movements; rather, mystical/romantic or antiliberal modalities occur within all three discourses alongside those modalities legible to a rationalist, material interest–based analysis, whether of the liberal or socialist orientation. I suspect that in actuality both modalities may almost always be operating at once, and that it is simply a matter of relative proportion in each case. Ghadar and its analogues certainly contained elements of both.
In such a way (e.g., by positing nationalist, leftist, and Islamist modalities) each as a discourse or flexible idiom in which various ideological statements could be made, and a range of political and philosophical positions taken, rather than a unified ideology itself—the interaction of the three movements during this period could be reframed as a transposition of analogous ideas, goals, and aspirations among them. The Ghadarite network, through its various alliances and alignments, was capable of engaging with those who were making compatible utterances—that is, statements of militant anti-imperialism, economic egalitarianism, and social emancipation—in any of these three languages.
The Limits of Translatability
In order to recognize functionally comparable statements within separate “semantic fields,” a practical theorist must look underneath form for content, within idiom for intent, behind problematic for thematic.19 More directly, an organizer must ask whether alliances and coalitions are all necessarily provisional, based only on a negative term; whether a shared opposition is their common immediate goal. But is this enough? How much compatibility is necessary between the positive terms of multiple alternative visions to enable their adherents to work together beyond resistance? Which differences are semantic and superficial, and which are substantive and prohibitive?
Some of the confusion in defining an “ism” arises from equating a discourse in its totality only with the most dominant or authoritative statement it has been used to make (or with one’s preferred interpretation, dominant or not). The same tendency is also behind many orthodox exponents’ refusal to admit any possibility of rapprochement or compatibility with other discourses, or even with dissenters claiming to be part of their own. If X and Y may be defined as X and Y only in their most purified and homogenized form, then indeed there is no common ground, no possible overlap; the meanings of X and Y are polarized. But more often than not, I would guess, the strands that can most successfully interweave across categoric boundaries are likely to be the heterodox or counterdominant ones on both sides, the threads straggling from the fringes beyond the reach of doctrinal enforcement, though still recognizably part of the fabric.20
A caveat, however: I am not therefore suggesting that all discourses were interchangeable, or even that the parameters of each spectrum were isomorphic. The threads they shared were nevertheless woven into fabrics of different shades and patterns. Moreover, every language imposes its own limitations and tendencies regarding what it is equipped to express most directly in its available vocabulary or repertory of concepts, and what requires more complex circumlocutions. And while each language is versatile, there may be points at which it becomes expedient to borrow words or even switch to another tongue better suited to the concept or construction one is trying to express.
Nevertheless, if the emphasis is on connections and alliances, the interface between different ideological networks, and the points of translatability between their idioms, then we might ask not what a nationalist says and does, but what is being said in the idiom and done according to the logic of nationalism; not what a socialist or Pan-Islamist stipulates, but what kind of socialism and what kind of Pan-Islamism are operative. In that regard, the question then became with what kind of nationalists, leftists and Islamists, in what contexts, and at what points of each network, via interfaces based on which shared traits or common elements, were the Ghadarites engaged in meaningful interactions; and how, precisely, were these Indian anticolonialists situated in the context of the international radicalism of the time.
Praxis
Finally, notwithstanding all this talk of ideology and discourse, this work is not intended to be an abstract philosophical exercise. Rather, my approach to intellectual history is much like that described by Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski in the preface to their 1986 book on Egyptian nationalism. Combining the “internal” and “external” approaches, the authors explain: “This work proceeds on the basis of several assumptions about historical inquiry. Perhaps the most basic of these is that there are crucial interrelationships between the intellectual life of a society and its political development.