Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

158 I Ramnalh
sounds far cruder than that seen in the usual HSRA documents,
whose writers were quite politically sophisticated.
Movement chronicler Gurdev Singh Deol notes that the
writer(s) of "many letters of that type . .. received both by
the Government officials and prominent members of the
public" were never traced.73
During his final two years in jail, from April 1929 until
he was hanged on March 23, 1931, Singh did not await
death quietly. In addition to continuing his activism within
the walls and honing the messaging to be spread from the
trial's public platform, he was busy reading, writing, and
making preparations for four intended manuscripts: on the
personal side, an autobiography and a soliloquy titled "At
The Door of Death;' plus a more general "History of the
Revolutionary Movement in India" and an essay called "The
Idea of Socialism." It is unknown how far he got in making
notes toward these projects. A friend destroyed many documents
in 1938 to prevent these works from falling into the
hands of police, although other writings were smuggled out
and published both before and after Singh's death.
HisJail Notebook, a collection of quotes :md notations,
offers a window into his preoccupations and thought
processes. He was in a sense a brilliant autodidact, independently
pursuing many of the same concerns that one would
expect to find within any zone where iterations oflibertarian
socialism and antiauthoritarian Marxism converge. One
request he made in July 1930 for library books for his reading
list survives in a letter to his old friend Jaidev Gupta.74
It included Militarism by Karl Liebknecht, Why Men Fight
by Bertrand Russell, Soviets at Work, Collapse of the Second