Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

132 I Ramnath
When Indulal Yaj nik met Acharya in Amsterdam in
1930-31, he was attached to the "School of Anarchist­
Syndicalism" there.16 He kept tabs on emerging trade union
activity in Madras, and wrote to one of the key figures in
the Labour-Kisan Party there inJuly 1923 concerning the
New International Wo rkmen's Association, which unlike
the Com intern he described as "anti-political and federal.
It is an improvement far ahead of the Third International
with which I am at loggerheads after cooperating with hope
t()f a whole year. I know all the personalities there well including
Lenin, whom I had met twice. I am fighting them
all in every writing and talk and everywhere."17 He also
mentioned a Russian anarcho-syndicalist paper called Ttay
{lthe Wo rker, which he supplied with items on the Indian
labor movement. IX
Chana, meanwhile, returned to the USSR in 1931,
dedicating himself to a life as a scholar and Soviet citizen
until he was shot in a Stalinist purge in 1937. He had
fo und a brief happiness (after a tumultuous, and mutually
damaging relationship with Smedley in the early 1920s)
with a Russian woman n::uned Lidia Karunovskaya,
who headed the Indonesian section of the Institute of
Anthropology and Ethnography in Leningrad, where he
worked as a linguist. 19
Meanwhile in 1935, Acharya finally overcame a longstanding
ban on his entry into India. He had been trying
since 1926, only to be repeatedly denied a passport or
threatened with arrest on arrival. Now he scratched out
a living as a journalist in Bombay, contributing a series
of eight articles for the Mahratta called "Reminiscences