Anti-Colonialism in the Vernacular: Swami Sehajanand and Anti-Caste and Anti-Colonial Peasant Intellectual Thought in India

Writing in the 1910s Swami Sehajanand, a Hindu saint and later the founder of the Indian Peasant’s Front which later became the Communist Party of India, started his intellectual career as an advocate of Brahmanical supremacy. By the end of his intellectual career by late 1940s, he had broken all his ties with any caste organizations and created anti-imperial peasant struggles by arguing that for the collapse of imperialism it was necessary to confront the caste system in India. He was a strong critic of Gandhi’s anti-colonial though and centered caste as the main target of his politics and thus challenged both Gandhi and the Indian National Congress’s strategy of fighting the British. He thus saw the breaking of the feudal land relations in India as central to contesting imperialism in India.

This paper will build an intellectual biography of Sehajanand’s anti-colonial thought by engaging with a newly discovered archive of his work which contains hitherto untranslated and unexplored works. These new sources were chanced upon while working on a larger project of an oral history and a political ethnography of the Communist Party of India.

The paper will contribute to the sociological knowledge of anti-colonial thought by introducing the centrality of caste as a social relation to the success of colonialism. Sehajanand’s though provides a window to explore the dialectic of caste and colonialism and the challenge of confronting them simultaneously.