ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an account of political resistance that does not rescind its active, agitational dimensions and, moreover, takes up the question of resistance in the specific context of anti-colonial nationalism in India. It focuses on the political philosophy of Aurobindo Ghose, conventionally referred to by his first name. Poet, polyglot, mystic, and revolutionary, he was admitted into the select ranks of the Indian Civil Service, and was responsible for galvanizing the nationalist movement in India well before M. K. Gandhi entered Indian politics and succeeded in turning the emphasis of resistance from force into protest. "Disaffection"—and particularly, its excitement—emerged as the term on which imperial administration settled in order to exercise its illegitimate force and, correspondingly, around which native resistance was organized. The self-serving instrumentality of seditious excitement prompted Aurobindo to conceptualize passive resistance as, in essence, a refusal of the coercive restrictions on thought, speech, and action imposed through the arbitrary binary of active and passive.
