Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

80 I Ramnalh
reputation.!' Then again, circa 1912, there were few people
in Bay Area political circles who would not have known
Har Dayal by reputation.
Har Dayal
Har Dayal was born in Delhi in 1884 or 1885. A gifted student
from an early age, he embarked on a stellar academic
career that took him to the National College in Lahore and
then to Oxford on scholarship in 1905. Both Indian and
English mentors predicted a great role fo r him in the affairs
of his country as a lawyer or civil servant. All were equally
shocked when just months short of completing his degree,
Har Dayal wrote a letter to the British secretary of state for
India renouncing his scholarship and leaving the university
on the grounds that he could no longer in good conscience
accept aid from a government whose presence in India was
illegitimate. In an abrupt shift from "young Englishman"
to homespun patriot, he threw himselfinto "the study of
the history of the free. parliamentarian i nstitntiom; the
tenacity with which the British people fought fo r and defended
their individual liberties." Why, he charged, should
the desire for national and individual freedom, considered
"the supreme social virtue" among the English, be called
"madness and sedition" when evinced by an Indian? His
mind, "always an enormous and readily absorbing sponge,
became filled with the unrest of the New Century," that
encompassed "nationalisms of all subject peoples (Irish,
Polish and what not), revolution ism against native despots