Tag Archives: freedom

Deshbondhu Chittoronjon Dash (দেশবন্ধু চিত্তরঞ্জন দাশ)

 

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Portrait of Deshbondhu. Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

Recently I was reading over the “Presidential Address of Desabhandhu C. R. Das at the thirty-seventh session of the Indian National Congress held at Gaya on 26th December 1922” also known as “Freedom Through Disobedience.” I kept highlighting key passages for my own reference, but I thought that I’d post them up here for those interested in such things but who don’t have the time or desire to read the full 75 page speech. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes here come from that speech. But if you are interested in reading a lot, you could also check out this other collection of his speeches, “India for Indians” which fleshes out some of the details of Deshbondhu’s worldview which his Gaya speech leaves out. This will be somewhat relevant to the Ancient Constitution post I made earlier.
Deshbondhu (title meaning “friend of the nation”) seems like a much more lucid thinker than practically any other Indian independence leader who has risen to prominence in the historical memory of Indian independence in the west. In many ways he ends up approaching conclusions which in the west are associated with radical federalism, anarchism, classical liberalism, or proto-fascist conservatism. If this collection of ideas seems incongruous to you, you might want to check out this essay on anarchism and nationalism called Anarchist Integralism: Aesthetics, Politics and the Après-Garde which although hostile to integralism, shows how all these ideas are related to one another. Ultimately I think that Deshbondhu’s Swaraj ideology, like the preceding Swadeshi Ideology in its Bankinchandra through its Tagore forms, as well as Subhash Chandra Bose‘s unnamed ideology, and pretty much all forms of Bengali and Indian “culturalism” including Hindutva are all Indian manifestations of integralism. Deshbondhu’s iteration seems to be a more anarchic, libertarian, and internationalist iteration of Indian integralism than the average (though not as free spirited as Tagore).

Like Burke, and the liberals I mentioned in the Ancient Constitution post, Deshbondhu believed that rule of law had to be subservient to some other concept of law (shall we call it natural law?) in order to justify obedience:

Why are the Indian Criminal Law Amendment Act 1908 and the Prevention of Seditious Meetings Act 1911 to be retained on the Statute Book? For the preservation of law and order? They little think these learned gentlemen responsible for the report that these Statutes, giving as they do to the Executive wide, arbitrary and discretionary powers of constraint, constitute a state of things wherein it is the duty of every individual to resist and to defy the tyranny of such lawless laws. These Statutes in themselves constitute a breach of law and order, for, law and order is the result of the rule of law; and where you deny the existence of the rule of law, you cannot turn round and say it is your duty as law-abiding citizens to obey the law.

p. 14

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India’s Ancient Constitution, Part 1

Did India have an Ancient Constitution worth respecting, or not? Did the British uphold it, or destroy it? For a Libertarian or Burkean Conservative Hindu, these are important questions to consider dispassionately. The answer actually matters. If India had an Ancient Constitution which was destroyed when the British came, then much of India’s existing constitution, a combination of British laws and the arbitrarily imposed theories of Ambedkar, is an usurpation of the ancient rights and privileges primordial to the land and the race. The very basis of the Indian state is in question in this case. On the other hand, if India had no such Ancient Constitution, or if it was destroyed by the Mughals and restored by the British, then the period of British rule was a period of liberation from Oriental Despotism wherein India was Brought Into History as Hegel might have said. This is a somewhat false binary, but I present it anyway to show some of the dramatic potential conclusions we can come to.

Its also important to consider what such a concept as an Ancient Constitution really even means. Is it a principle of abstract justice which is universal? Or do different societies create internally valid social compacts which might differ from one another in legitimate ways? Or is this an incorrect way of framing the question?

I’m not really going to try to definitively settle the historical question in this post. I’m still doing research on the topic and will put out my full view on it later if I think I gain enough information to make such a judgement. I’ll instead just briefly discuss what the idea of an Ancient Constitution meant to a few thinkers in the context of India. I’ll look at Bose, Burke, Roy, and Naoroji.

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Portrait of Subhash Chandra Bose. Image source: quotesgram.com

Bose:

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The Anglo-Saxons Were Robbers and Pirates in Their Own Country

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Lysander Spooner. Image Source: Volokh

Wipe out, then, these feudal robbers – the whole race of kings, and queens, and nobles, and all their accomplices in every grade of life, and take possession of all the spoils which they and their predecessors have wrung from you and your ancestors. Put an end to their Parliaments and Courts. Blot out forever their statute books. They contain little or nothing else than the records of their villanies. Free England and Ireland, and thus all the rest of the empire, of the tyrants and robbers that are plundering, enslaving, and crushing, and starving you.

Sorry Anglo-Saxons, this post is not for you. It culminates in one of the most cutting anti-Anglo rants I’ve ever read. You can just skip to the last block quote if you are short on time. Its low effort on my behalf because I’m mostly just quoting Spooner, but its worth it. Lysander Spooner wrote this letter entitled Revolution: The Only Remedy for the Oppressed Classes of Ireland, England, and Other Parts of the British Empire. He is one of my favorite Anarchist writers and if you aren’t familiar with him already, well you should be.

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How Rammohan Roy Broke Into Liberal Discourse

A bust which Roy actually had the patients to sit for (unlike many portraits of him). Image Source

A bust which Roy actually had the patients to sit for (unlike many portraits of him). Image Source

The Problem

When entering the realm of European liberal discourse, Rammohan Roy was faced with a double sided problem. Firstly, liberal thought at the time considered India to be in a state of backwardness, and therefore inherently unfit for political autonomy. Secondly, it was thought that a culture lacking a tradition of liberty couldn’t produce individuals worthy of entering the public discourse. Thus, Roy had to simultaneously challenge liberalism’s notions of civilizational advancement and backwardness, and also convince his opponents to stop seeing him as a primitive who lacked the right to participate in the intellectual arena.

Roy’s solution to this (consciously formulated or not) was to create a new paradigm within liberalism based on some concept of “class” instead of race or culture. In this paradigm elites across cultures have more in common with one another, than they do with their respective sets of commoners. This is why elites everywhere practice forms of religion closer to monotheism, and also why idolatry and trinitarianism are practiced by the masses of ignorant commoners. Based on this logic, the British elites in India should support and cooperate with their Indian counterparts, as they constitute the same in-group. Educated and mercantile elements of both societies should engage in commerce and cultural interchange, and work for the upliftment of the ignorant underclass of both British and Indian populations. In this new model, the relationship of liberal upliftment is shifted from something akin to the “white man’s burden,” to something more akin to the “bourgeois monotheist’s burden.”

Liberalism was indeed universal in regards to the equal capacities of all human beings. However, liberals saw those who came from “despotic” societies as inherently primitive in social development, and therefore unworthy of political representation. Furthermore, liberals looked for certain social indicators, which would identify people as worthy of political inclusion, and deserving a voice in the public sphere. These indicators included language, dress, education, and religion which were easily recognizable as civilized by Europeans.1

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Subversive Hindu Thought

“In childhood a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, when her lord is dead to her sons; a woman must never be independent….If a wife obeys her husband, she will for that (reason alone) be exalted in heaven.” –Manu Smriti[1] ***

“I have nothing to do with the husbands of this world”- Akka Mahadevi

Akka Mahadevi. Image source.

Akka Mahadevi in samadhi, nude but draped in her flowing hair.  Image source.

I’ll try to reserve most of my comments for the end of this post. The following is a collection of verses by female, often low caste Bhakti (devotional) poets which I’ve collected from various books and journal articles. They challenge the way we normally think about women in Hinduism. Caste rules to gender norms, and even the Vedas and Brahmins all are opened up for fiery criticism. This is a part of the Hindu tradition, which often doesn’t get much press. You normally read about how caste is inherent to Hinduism, and how if one Brahminical texts says it, then it is the official, textually certified Hindu position on the matter. Not so. Hinduism is a much more anarchic tradition than that.

The Role of Women:

By Akka Mahadevi (12th century AD):

“The preceptor became the giver;

The Lord Linga became the bridegroom;

And I became the bride.

All this the world knows

The innumerable devotees are my parents

Hence Chenna Mallikarjuna is my husband,O Prabhu,

I have nothing to do with the husbands of this world” [2]

 This is an inversion of Manu’s claim that a woman should treat the husband as God. She treats God as her husband.

“On a frame of water, raising a roof of fire,

Spreading the hailstones for the bridal floor-bed,

A husband without a head, married a wife without legs,

My parents gave me to an inseparable life,

They married me to Lord Chenna Mallikarjuna” [3]

Verses such as these can be read as conservative, but remember that this poet, like many others Bhakti sants, did refuse to get married to any man. This wasn’t just talk. Given the stigma attached to unmarried women in Indian society, this was a radical statement. In Akka Mahadevi’s case, she rejected a Jain king named Kausika rendering it an even more powerful act of defiance.

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