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Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

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85 I <strong>Ramnath</strong><br />

sllch as British rule, anticapitalism, and most scandalous<br />

oLdl, hee love. But as he continued to lecture in Oakland,<br />

Berkeley, and Palo Alto, he and his cause began to attract<br />

prominent progressives in the area, including Jack London,<br />

Clarence Darrow, and literary critic Van Wyck Brooks.'" He<br />

also drew the attention of the San Francisco Bulletin's editor<br />

Fremont Older, who introduced him to a wider circle of"refo<br />

rmers, labout leaders, intellectuals:' and "fighters fo r social<br />

justice and so fo rth." Soon Har Dayal was regarded as a leader<br />

among the "free thinkers called 'radicals' of San Francisco,<br />

the Bay Cities, Palo Alto, and the whole region." !)<br />

Overall, the radical energy and intellectual dynamism<br />

of the Bay Area was a refreshing stimulant fo r Har Dayal,<br />

whose political convictions had flagged amid the lull in<br />

the nationalist movement that followed Savarkar's arrest.<br />

In LlCt, between his return to California in 1911 and the<br />

end of 1912, he was more engaged in the city's radical milieu<br />

than with the Indian community, with whom he had<br />

relatively little direct involvement during this period. ,I,<br />

Har Dayal spent summer 1912 making plans fo r a<br />

propaganda magazine and a lecture series on sociology. He<br />

continued a series of articles fo r Modern Rwiew between<br />

1911 and 1913 on the condition of the Indian community<br />

in North America, in which it was plain that his ideas fo r<br />

a total social and cultural transformation went far beyond<br />

simply eliminating foreign rule.'7 Attacking the caste system<br />

and archaic educational approaches, and discounting<br />

both nation and religion as meaningful categories of affiliation,<br />

he argued that Indian progressives ought to be concerned<br />

with "the great ideas of social equality and personal

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