Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

The Propagandists of the Deed
By the first decade of the twentieth century, Indian
revolutionists had established a worldwide presence
through labor diasporas and educational circuits,
often converging on the same cosmopolitan cities as
their radical counterparts from East and Southeast Asia,
Egypt, Turkey, and Ireland. Their tasks overseas were twofold:
to organize insurrectionary activities, and to spread
information and propaganda.
The Swadeshi (autonomy; literally "one's own country")
movement was a Rash point of unrest sparked in 1905
by the administrative partition of Bengal. It took heart
from the Japanese victory over Russia in the same year, setting
the rapturous precedent of an Asian nation defeating
a European power. From the moment of the movement's
emergence, police intelligence reports and newspaper accounts
anointed its militant wing as anarchists. Accurate or
not, the label dogged them at home and abroad.
In a 1916 newspaper article Ram Chandra, one of the
leaders of the Ghadar Party founded by Indian anticolonial