Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 79
Australians; extremists who "want[ed] independence and
separation through passive resistance;' who didn't "believe
the promises of the Government. They want [ed] their
own Government and [didn't] care what kind whether
Monarchical or Democratic"; and Ghadar, which wanted
"total autonomy and absolute freedom through revolution
(nothing can be achieved by begging the Government,
or passive resistance.) They [sought] to establish the free
Republic of the United States of India" as a decentralized,
subcontinental federation.!
Among the proponents of that vision were two young
scholars: Dhan Gopal Mukerji and Har Dayal, theorist
and propagandist of the early Ghadar movement.2 Mukerji
was the cousin and brother of prominent anticolonial activists
in India and the United States.' While a student at
the University of California in Berkeley, he gravitated to
socialist, anarchist, and Wo bbly friends. He later fo rmed
long-term close associations with radical writers like Will
and Ariel Durant, Roger Nash Baldwin, and Romain
Rolland. Through his encounters with a succession of mentor/informants
(an ultra-individualist voluntary hobo, a
syndicalist labor veteran, and an extremist Indian nationalist),
Mukerji's picaresque autobiography can be viewed as
both an allegory of persistent debates within the anarchist
discourse-between social and individual, rationalist and
anti rationalist, and insurrectionary and organizational
strains-and a microcosm of the Indian movement in
that context. There is no evidence that he knew Har Dayal
personally, although given their shared context, it seems
improbable that they didn't at least know one another by