Connolly, Gandhi and anticolonial (non)violence

Abstract

This article examines the contrasting role of violence in the anticolonial struggles of India and Ireland. It turns to the early writing of Mohandas K. Gandhi to explicate how violence for Indian nationalists shaped by the writings of Gandhi, was configured as a European methodology and antithetical to Indian culture. In contrast, James Connolly anticipates the work of Frantz Fanon in advocating violence as a necessary means to purge the ideological influence of British Colonial Rule from the minds of colonised subjects. It concludes by looking at the legacy of the two approaches to suggest that, rather paradoxically, Gandhi's utilisation of nonviolence as a strategy of resistance proved to be more disruptive to the workings of the British State.