Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 161
mere unchaining of furies, I would say . .. let him blame
himself, who has acquiesced in the existence of conditions
which have driven his fellowmen to extremes of madness
and despair."79 He copied down inspiring lyrics ranging
from the Internationale to Charge of the Light Brigade.
Singh also compiled demographic and economic
statistics about the United States-an interest perhaps
not surprising given his Ghadar links-and most poignantly,
scraps of the words of revolutionary martyrs and
political prisoners such as Patrick Henry, Figner, Nikolai
Alexandrovich Morozov, and Ferrer, for solace in his present
circumstances.SO Legend has it that when the executioners
arrived at Singh's cell to escort him to the gallows,
he was sitting absorbed in a book, attempting to finish
Lenin's biography before he died.
The point here is not to cherry-pick scraps that support
a slender thesis on Singh's true political stance while
ignoring those that imply something else. In fact, he copied
down many quotations that he plainly did not agree with,
but valued as food for thought. Cherry-picking is anyway
impossible in his writings; no excerpt is sufficiently
representative without locating it in the complexity of the
whole. What does seem clear is that through all his study,
and the huge range of writers he quoted, he was trying to
balance the imperatives ofliberty and equality, socialism
and democracy, always in pursuit of the meaning of just ice
and freedom.
While Singh is one of the most beloved heroes of the
freedom struggle, it is hard to speculate about what role
he would have played if he had lived longer, or how his