Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 61
Savarkar fled to Paris in 1910. Heedless of warnings not
to return to London, he did so anyway and was arrested on
arrival at Victoria Station under the Fugitive Offenders Act,
then deported by ship to India with a stopover in Marseilles.
There he attempted to escape by leaping from a porthole into
the harbor and swimming to shore, only to be snatched by
police waiting on the pier. (One account has it that the comrades
who were supposed to meet him and spirit him into
concealment had lingered at a cafe and arrived too late.)
To no avail, high-profile supporters among the
British and French Left took up the case. London anarchist
Guy Aldred formed a Savarkar Release Committee
as soon as he himself got out of jail. He also featured the
case in his own fiery paper Herald a/Revolt and produced
an appeal on the matter in August 1910 addressed "To
the English proletariat."31
When the Indian Sociologist was proscribed and its
publisher, Arthur Horsley, convicted for printing sedition,
Aldred offered his own shoestring Bakunin Press to continue
publication. He made it clear that while he did not agree
fully with the paper's content, being an advocate neither of
political violence and assassination nor "nationalism, and
... the Statism it implied;' he did believe in free speech,
freedom as a general principle, and resistance to imperial
rule.36 His meager combined office and living quarters
were searched, and when three hundred copies of the paper
(though no trace of a press) were found, he too was convicted
fo r sedition and sentenced to a year in prison.37 Printing
then shifted to Paris, and the paper continued to appear until
1914, despite several more enforced relocations.