Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 81
(Russian, Turkish, etc.), the movement for votes for women,
labour and socialistic developments:'5 In between India
House meetings and Abhinava Bharat activities, Har Dayal
also met Kropotkin and George Bernard Shaw.6
When Har Dayal returned to India in early 1908,
his personal life was overtaken by the vocation of ascetic
revolutionary sage, at the expense of his relationship
to his wife, Sundar, who had married him at seventeen
and accompanied him to England against the wishes of
her family? Setting up a house in Kanpur, he gathered a
clique of "disciples:' who studied "revolutionary books
... from Europe: on the Russian revolution (against the
Czar), Irish Nationalist Movement, the Italian movement
ofMazzini, [Giuseppe] Garibaldi, [Conte] Cavour,
the German Nationalist Movement and the making of the
German Empire by Bismark [sic], Egyptian Nationalism,
Young Turkism, the Rise of Japan, Polish Nationalism, the
French Revolution." In short, Har Dayal had worked his
way through the Enlightenment and the democratic republicanism
of the "Long Nineteenth Century." "Sometimes he
would recite and act out passages from some book on the
French Revolution, concerning [ Georges-Jacques] Danton
or Napoleon or some other fighting revolutionist. He would
discuss the teachings of [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau, whose
'Social Contract' he carried around, or ofVoltaire."H As this
curriculum illustrated, he had no objection to Europe or
modernity; but his rejection of Britain and its institutions
was unequivocal-a distinction he noted in an essay.
His cohort of "nationalists and revolutionaries of all
ages" spent their evenings enjoying the cool breezes along