Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 85
choice was Martinique, another French colony. This is
where Bhai Parmanand, an old comrade from London and
Lahore who was then working as an Arya Samaj missionary
to the Indian indentured laborers of British Guiana
and elsewhere in the Caribbean, found him absorbed in a
bare-bones routine of study and meditation, sleeping on
the floor, and subsisting on boiled grain and potatoes. Har
Dayal explained that he intended to offer the world a new
philosophy. Parmanand tried to dissuade him. Surely the
world didn't need another creed. Why not go to the United
States and teach people about one of the existing schools
of Hindu philosophy-some of which were atheistic and
rationalistic, if that's what he was after?
Har Dayal agreed to give it a try. He went first to
Harvard University, where he met the Sikh priest and
scholar Teja Singh. This West Coast community leader invited
him to come to California, where he said there were
"thousands of Sikhs and other Punjabi laborers working in
fields or factories . .. who lacked leadership in their struggle
for social acceptance and economic equality."13 Har Dayal
accepted, but only after a stint in Hawaii living in a cave
on Waikiki Beach, "where Japanese Buddhist fishermen,
who regarded him as a Buddhist sage, fed him and lent him
their ears." He was reportedly capable of discussing many
aspects of this philosophy at great length, but at the same
time he was also studying Kant, Hegel, and Marx.
He arrived in Berkeley early in 1911, and then was
hired at Stanford as a lecturer in Indian philosophy for academic
year 1912-13. After only a few months, however,
he resigned over his public stances on controversial topics