Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 89
and personal sacrifice, ranking him with Christ and
Buddha as a "benefactor of humanitY:' He approved of the
ideas of equal economic distribution and abolition of money,
yet also insisted that materialism alone was insufficient.
Choice and volition must not be disregarded; civilization
did not proceed mechanically through inevitable teleology
but was also affected by "a product of personal influences."
Finally, Har Dayal wanted to modify the notion of
class struggle by rejecting what he called "class-selfishness"
in favor of "social cooperation based on the appreciation of
a higher ideal."22
Despite the degree to which he had "[become 1 very
busy with Americans" during this period, he also managed
to earn the loyalty of many Indian students at Berkeley
and Stanford. But his rival as charismatic mentor was
Jatindra Nath Lahiri, a veteran of the Bengali movement
best known for carrying out an assassination in 1905, who
provided a direct conduit for the philosophy and training
methods of the Bengali akhara.23 The basis for the
ideological conflict between Lahiri and Dayal, said Darisi
Chenchiah, one of the Berkeley students and later a Ghadar
activist, was the role of religion in political revolution. Was
it a distraction, substitute, or inspiration? Another point of
contention was Lahiri's claim that Har Dayal was a coward
and hypocrite for having left India when the political situation
grew precarious in 1908, and instead speaking out
from the safety of twelve thousand miles' distance. Har
Dayal's retort was that he was following in the footsteps of
luminaries such as Mazzini and Sun Yat Sen, who worked
from peripatetic exile. Lahiri further charged that Har