Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

84 I Ramnath
malaise. Biographer Emily Brown suggests that Har Dayal
WlS having trouble squaring his more overtly Hindu ideals
with Cama and Rana's focus on international socialism. I I
Based on his writings of the time, though, it appears he
was himself struggling with what content he wished to express
through a spiritual idiom, and doubting whether that
idiom could be a vehicle tor what he found himself wanting
to say. Aldred's evaluation ofHar Dayal's ideological
development was that
he now proclaimed his belief in the coming republic,
which was to be a church, a religious confraternity,
based on an ideal, on freewill and mutual cooperation.
Its motto was to be: Atheism, cosmopolitanism
and moral law. This republic would not be a state,
because the latter represented force and persecution.
No modification of its activity, no tinkering with
parliaments and senates and parties, could bring up
the republic. The latter must grow up by the side of
the state, which it would undermine finally.
Aldred added that Har Dayal "also asserted the superiority
of woman, declared for anti-patriotism and repudiated
the race idea as a relic of barbarism." 12 If this is an accurate
reflection and not simply Aldred's own projection, Har
Dayal's new "religion" was a self-consciously modernist and
unmistakably anarchistic utopian vision.
Har Dayal first relocated to Algiers, where he planned
to live ascetically in a climate kinder to his fragile health,
but was no more contented there than in France. His next