PERHAPS IT IS UNFAIR TO BLAME GANDHI for inventing the formula for disorder, the idea of Satyagraha for anything one wants. The truth is that if one probes the depths of India's past, one can see the rise and fall of empires with regularity. This process continued until the end of classical India in 711CE with the Umayyad conquest of Sindh at the hands of Muhammad ibn al-Qasim. Perhaps the final end of Hindu India can be dated to 1565CE in the wake of the Battle of Talikota that finished off Vijayanagara. These dates are mere indicators of a bigger problem, a conceptual hole as it were. Through the rise and fall of empires, India never fully developed the apparatus to understand anarchy that inevitably followed the end of a political order. To be sure, there was the concept of the Law of the Fish—matsyanyaya—as outlined in the Arthashastra: "[F]or in the absence of the dispenser of punishment, a weak man is devoured by a stronger man." But this description remained stuck at the level of mere administration, never acquiring the potency of Thomas Hobbes' State of Nature, let alone the conceptual devices that were forged in the 20th century in the wake of war and destruction in Europe: the friend and enemy distinction of Carl Schmitt; the distinction that FA Hayek made between nomos and thesis, and the contrast between civil association and enterprise association of the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott. All these ideas—very different in their disciplinary moorings— had one overarching goal: how to keep anarchy from creeping into society and overwhelming order. India never escaped the yoke of imperialism and colonialism for more than a millennium and lacked the wherewithal to think even remotely along these lines. And then, all of a sudden, between the last quarter of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th, it experienced a rapid progression of individual and political rights, albeit under imperial control. The process was profoundly dislocating.

Chauri Chaura

Arc of Anarchy

Truth On Trial

Footprints of Struggle