Geographies of Anticolonialism

Political Networks Across and Beyond South India, c. 1900-1930

Andrew Davies

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781119381556, 9781119381549
• eBook ISBN: 9781119381563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

A fresh approach to scholarship on the diverse nature of Indian anticolonial processes.

• Brings together a varied selection of literature to explore Indian anticolonialism in new ways
• Offers a different perspective to geographers seeking to understand political resistance to colonialism
• Addresses contemporary studies that argue nationalism was joined by other political processes, such as revolutionary and anarchist ideologies, to shape the Indian independence movement
• Includes a focus on a specific anticolonial group, the "Pondicherry Gang, " and investigates their significant impact which went beyond South India
• Helps readers understand the diverse nature of anticolonialism, which in turn prompts thinking about the various geographies produced through anticolonial activity

Chapter One
Post? Anti? De? Why Anticolonialism Still Matters

Introduction

From around 1906 to 1915, a small group of Indian men (with an even smaller group of women) found themselves in the small French territorial enclave of Pondicherry on India's southeastern coastline. The men, the majority of whom were from Tamil‐speaking regions of India, were the core of an emergent anticolonialism in Southern India. Already, they had been involved in a number of revolutionary nationalist activities, and all were identified as being parts of an ‘extremist’ faction amongst the Indian National Congress (INC), the main legal organisation by which Indians could agitate for change within British‐governed India. By moving to Pondicherry, the group escaped from immediate prosecution or imprisonment, but moved into a space of exile, shut off and contained within the small confines of the city and with limited means to earn money and survive.

Despite these restrictions, Pondicherry became an important nodal point in an international network of anticolonial agitation which stretched to London, Paris, New York, San Francisco, Tashkent, Constantinople, Berlin and Tangiers to name only a few. Revolutionaries passed through Pondicherry, were not only trained there in the techniques of anticolonial revolution, but also smuggled guns and revolutionary materials into the rest of India through the city's port. However, being confined to Pondicherry, as well as the changing political situation in India and globally by the outbreak of World War One, meant that the group was never able to agitate effectively and to create a mass movement in South India, and by 1915, Pondicherry's moment as a centre for political radicalism had gone. Despite this, for such a small group operating in often distressed circumstances, the radicals who found themselves in Pondicherry played an important role in shaping the wider geographies of anticolonialism which were emerging globally in the early twentieth century.

It is this group, who came to be known variously as the Pondicherry ‘Gang’, ‘group’, ‘anarchists’ and a variety of other names by the British authorities who spied on them whilst they lived in Pondicherry, who form the focus of this book. What the book argues is that although a relatively minor moment in the struggle for India's independence, the activities of the Pondicherry ‘Gang’ are of vital importance in understanding how anticolonialism was a diverse set of activities, which crucially were productive of new geographies of the world. The Pondicherry group of anticolonialists was never really as cohesive a group as the colonial authorities made them out to be. However, the individuals who moved through Pondicherry illuminate how anticolonialism was dynamic and heterogeneous in its attempts to resist imperial and colonial domination.

This emphasis on anticolonialism is particularly important as the legacies of colonialism, and how we deal with them is increasingly visible in academic and public life in the twenty‐first century. Social and political movements have emerged over the past decade to challenge orthodoxies and colonial assumptions which, alongside long‐existing struggles, have shifted some of the face of public discussion. In North America, the indigenous struggle over the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock brought together indigenous communities and environmental activists in ways which reworked existing solidarities, and the fight for racial justice, with its often underplayed links (in mainstream commentaries at least) to colonial racial hierarchies, have meant that the anti‐confederate statue movement, Black Lives Matter and the NFL Anthem/Colin Kaepernick protests have all worked to destabilise many hegemonic structures of power and domination. In South Africa, the Rhodes Must Fall movement at Cape Town University expanded to a nationwide and eventually transnational struggle to recognise the colonial legacies that are embedded within higher education institutions across the world (Bhambra, Gebrial and Nisanclogu 2018; Rhodes Must Fall Oxford 2018). Elsewhere in Europe, activists and intellectuals have been developing a range of responses, from policy documents to museum galleries to policy reports/books, to highlight the complicity of nations from Scandinavia to Belgium to Germany in colonial projects which are often downplayed compared to British or French colonialism.

This process has become so clearly important to academia that the need to be ‘decolonial’ or to ‘decolonise’ our education systems and wider societies is frequently used as a rallying cry for a variety of social justice movements. In terms of geography, it is notable that the 2017 Royal Geographical Society Conference theme was ‘Decolonising Geographical Knowledges’. At the same time, there has been a predictable backlash against these movements. From the broadly ‘right‐wing’ sections of society, university students and lecturers, often when they are women, or people of colour, or most often both, have been attacked for, amongst other things, being ‘snowflakes’ who are too sensitive about historical injustices and need to toughen up to the realities of a harsh world, or for attacking and seeking to remove traditional (read: ‘white’) authors and intellectuals from disciplines. These attacks often wilfully ignore the contexts and nuance of the arguments for creating a more inclusive and diverse education system (and indeed wider world).

This book is written then at something of a ‘decolonial’ moment where the varied practices, experiences and legacies of colonialism are at the forefront of many debates in society. Why then, is this book titled ‘Geographies of Anticolonialism’? As will become clear throughout this introduction and the rest of the book, whilst the decolonial and the postcolonial are undoubtedly vital and important to the ongoing struggle against colonial forms of domination, my argument is that geography would be well served not to ‘forget’ the anticolonial as an equally important, yet subtly different register for understanding the practices and experiences of resistance to colonialism/imperialism. As Mary Gilmartin, in the discussion surrounding her lecture for the journal Political Geography at the RGS–IBG conference in 2017 argued, we should be mindful of what the struggles against colonialism in the past and present actually offer us, and what anticolonialism's rigorous commitment to dismantling the political structures of colonialism gives us alongside the equally important cultural, epistemological and ontological strategies which form a core aspect of postcolonial and decolonial approaches (see also Gilmartin 2009; Naylor et al. 2018 for more by Gilmartin on post‐/de/anticolonialism and geography). For the rest of this introductory chapter, I will set out the ways in which geographers have engaged with these terms. In particular, through this chapter, and on into the next chapter which deals with anticolonial thought in more detail, I want to argue that, whilst all three terms, and their related schools of thought are ‘against’ and therefore ‘anti‐colonial’, geographers and academics are, as Gilmartin suggested, missing out on something vitally important if we ignore or downplay the anticolonial in these more contemporary movements. In the suitably imperial/colonial surroundings of the Ondaatje Theatre of the RGS building in South Kensington, London, I remember having to suppress a cry of ‘Yes! Someone else gets it!’ when Mary said this.

Crucially, my point is that anticolonialism is not just an aspect of the past, or a historical relic, something which it is often relegated to – for example, in Robert J.C. Young's recent (2015) primer on the variety of approaches to colonialism, the chapter on anticolonialism deals exclusively with movements that struggled against formal practices of colonialism in the past – and therefore, anticolonialism is something that is discussed in the past tense, rather than something which is ongoing. This book is my attempt to think through what that response could be, and to (hopefully) open up ground for other attempts to understand the myriad ways in which anticolonial geographies were and are relationally produced in practises which fruitfully intersect with post‐ and decolonial approaches to geography. It is then, something of a beginning and hopefully opens up some space for similar discussions in the future about different anticolonial geographies.

Before moving on to discuss some of these terms and their evolution in geographical thought in more detail, it is worth mentioning a small detail about terminology. For a long time in postcolonial theory, and in postcolonial geography, there were a lot of debates about whether there should or should not be a hyphen inserted in the term (i.e. post‐colonial). Whilst these debates have largely disappeared, it is still important to clarify my particular use of terms here. I tend to use postcolonial as I think that the hyphen tends to create an emphasis on the experience of colonialism as something that is ‘past’ or over. Removing the hyphen, to me, not only allows a sense of the continued existence and legacies of colonialism to be maintained but also to indicate that the term is continuing to work beyond and against colonialist practices. Likewise, I do not use the term ‘anti‐colonialism’, rather choosing to use anticolonialism. Whilst my objection to the postcolonial lies largely, but not wholly, in its creation of a certain type of temporality, I use anticolonial to break down the sense that anticolonialism is only a negative reaction to the colonial situation. Removing the hyphen, to me, not only helps to both show that practices of anticolonialism were always situated and calculated responses to the specific colonial encounters that produced them but also gives these practices the space to exceed those circumstances. As will become clear throughout this book, the development of a number of responses to colonial and imperial rule involved not only negating and contesting the dominant narratives of colonialism but also showing how to imagine a future world beyond them that would be more than, to use the terms of John Holloway (2002), a shout ‘against’ the colonial system. With this clarification in mind, the rest of this introduction sets out the evolution of geography's varied engagements with resistance to the colonial and the imperial.

‘Postcolonial’ Geographies?

The impact of postcolonialism on geography is in danger of being overlooked, given the present desire to embrace decolonial approaches. The supposedly passé or elitist nature of postcolonial theory has meant that the term has come under a number of vituperative attacks in recent years – see, for example Hamid Dabashi's (2015) short but damning criticism of Homi K. Bhabha's ‘useless bourgeois post‐modernism’ (p. 7). However, despite the tensions inherent in the term, it is important to state that without the development of a variety of postcolonial approaches to geography since the early 1990s, the discipline as a whole would look remarkably different. To many postcolonialists, it was the publication of Edward Said's (2003) Orientalism that mark the emergence of a distinct postcolonial theory. It is, of course, problematic to assign a specific moment to the emergence of such a diverse range of thought, and, as Marxist critics of postcolonialism have noted, Said's orientalism only signalled the emergence of an increasingly post‐modern trend within postcolonial studies (Kaiwar 2015). However, for geography, postcolonialism emerged as an approach later on, around the same time as the ‘cultural turn’ in Geography. Postcolonial geographies are fundamentally an attempt to understand the intersections between colonialism and space. As Blunt and McEwan argue in the Introduction to Postcolonial Geographies (McEwan and Blunt 2002, p. 1), ‘postcolonialism and geography are intimately linked. Their intersections provide many challenging opportunities to explore the spatiality of colonial discourse, the spatial politics of representation, and the material effects of colonialism in different places’. Interestingly, Blunt and McEwan argue that many of the chapters in their edited collection were working towards decolonising knowledges and the articulation of colonial discourses in the past and the present. The significant overlaps between post‐/de/anticolonial approaches have therefore always been present. McEwan and Blunt's book, as well as Sidaway's survey chapter in the same collection and the chapter on postcolonial geography in Blunt and Wills (2000), marked an important point in the official recognition of postcolonial approaches to geography. Prior to this point, whilst there were a number of geographers who were writing about postcolonial issues (Blunt and Rose 1994; Phillips 1997; Radcliffe 1997), it was in the early 2000s, that postcolonialism was placed firmly as a topic of concern to all geographers. This shift was something that happened rapidly in my own personal experience, where, as someone who graduated in 2002 from an undergraduate degree which had no explicitly postcolonial content during the entire programme, I suddenly encountered an invigorated and vibra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Author’s Note
• Chapter One: Post? Anti? De? Why Anticolonialism Still Matters
• Chapter Two: Theorising Anticolonial Space
• Chapter Three: South India and Anticolonialism: The Minor Politics of Anticolonialism in a Historiographical ‘Backwater’
• Chapter Four: Appropriating Modernity and Development to Contest Colonialism: The Swadeshi Movement in South India and the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company
• Chapter Five: Spacing and Placing Anticolonialism: Pondicherry as a Hub of Radical Nationalist Anticolonial Thought
• Chapter Six: Envisioning a Spiritual and Cosmopolitan Decolonial Future? Sri Aurobindo's ‘Non‐political’ Anticolonialism
• Chapter Seven: The ‘International’ and Anarchist Life of M.P.T. Acharya
• Chapter Eight: Conclusion: The Necessity of a Geographical Anticolonial Thought, or Why Anticolonialism Still Matters
• End User License Agreement