Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 135
and social equality with passionate love for the religion
and land of [India J:' thereby saving him from the dreadful
fate of alienated Westernization as "a cynical atheist or
social rebel . .. uprooted from the land of his birth and cut
away from the mass of the people." Instead, he was able to
connect "the modern rational cult of human equality and
social reform" with an indigenous intellectual tradition.24
But this enthusiastic fellow was not content with theory,
said Yajnik; he must have praxis. He blossomed first as a propagandist
and lecturer for the Bombay Arya Samaj as well as
a generous funder thanks to his business success. Impelled
to reach out to the masses, his next step was to branch into
journalism, publishing a Gujarati-language weekly to which
he also contributed "a series of articles on the vexed social
questions of the day." As he moved further away from the
spiritual toward the material aspects of "the grim realities of
human suffering and social injustice:' he joined the struggle
against untouchability, capping his efforts at the abolition of
the caste system with a series of "cosmopolitan dinner[s J
... intended to deal a practical death-blow to the institution"
by uniting members of the intelligentsia, social luminaries,
reformers of varied ages and genders, and "notables of the depressed
(untouchable) classes" all at one table. The enterprise
generated massive public hostility, however, and in the end
broke down over irreconcilable differences on the issue of
menus: veg versus nonveg.2S
Soon afterward, seeing the need for "a daily paper
which could serve as an effective vehicle of modern social
and liberal ideas:' Latvala rescued a struggling Gujarati daily,
Akhbar i Soudagar (Business News), which he renamed