We are Anarchists: Essays on Anarchism, Pacifism, and the Indian Independence Movement, 1923–1953

Abbreviations

AINTUC All India National Trade Union Congress

AITUC All India Trade Union Congress

CPI Communist Party of India

DCI Department of Criminal Intelligence at Scotland Yard

FAUD Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands

IIC Indian Independence Committee

IIS Indian Institute of Sociology

INC Indian National Congress

INTUC Indian National Trade Union Congress

IRA Indian Revolutionary Association

IWA International Workingmen’s Association

IWMA International Working Men’s Association

IWW Industrial Workers of the World

LAI League against Imperialism

LSI Libertarian Socialist Institute

PAICRC Provisional All-India Central Revolutionary Committee

WRI War Resisters’ International

Acknowledgments

Editing this book has been a labor of love, but I could not have done it alone. I would like to thank Andrew Zonneveld, Charles Weigl, and AK Press for taking on the project, and for their advice, help, and constant support throughout the writing process. I am very grateful to Julia Simoniello for bringing Acharya to life with the beautiful cover image. I am also indebted to Lina Bernstein, Jesse Cohn, Vadim Damier, Andrew Davies, Stephen Legg, Sara Legrandjacques, Pavan Malreddy, and Alex Tickell for their comments and clarifications as well.

M. P. T. Acharya wrote in numerous languages, and one of the greatest tasks has been to find and translate his writings. I am hugely grateful to Sarah Arens, Constance Bantman, Enrique Galvan-Alvarez, and Julia Scheib for their invaluable help with those translations.

Any historian relies on archives, and archivists and librarians are key to unlocking those archives. I am particularly thankful to Stefan Dickers at the Bishopsgate Institute, London; Jacques Gillen at Mundaneum, Centre d’archives de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles & Espace d’expositions temporaries; Katherine Schmelling at Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University; Carol Stewart at the Anderson Library, University of Strathclyde; the staff at the British Library, London; the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam; and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

Lastly, I could not have done this without Ariane Mildenberg, who patiently listened to many of my stories about Acharya, gave feedback, and offered advice without hesitation.

M. P. T. Acharya: A Revolutionary, an Agitator, a Writer

Born in Madras (now Chennai), India, on April 15, 1887, the Indian revolutionary Mandayam Prativadi Bhayankaram Tirumal M. P. T. Acharya had a three-decade career in the international anarchist movement from 1923 until his death in 1954. Throughout those years, this Indian anarchist—who was striving on his own in the whole sub-continent to establish a movement, as Albert Meltzer recalled—mapped new conceptual territories as he straddled both anti-imperial and anarchist circles.¹ At a time when the Russian Revolution set in motion new hopes for colonized nations and their revolutionaries, Acharya’s turn to anarchism is remarkable and stands out against more well-known contemporaries—and former comrades—such as Virendranath Chatto Chattopadhyaya and M. N. Roy as well as the Tolstoyan anarcho-pacifist tendencies of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Indeed, in a fitting testimony to Acharya, Meltzer wrote in his obituary:

[I]t was impossible to comprehend the difficulty in standing out against the tide so completely as was necessary in a country like India. It was easy for former nationalist revolutionaries to assert their claims to the positions left vacant by the old imperialist oppressors. This Acharya would not do. He remained an uncompromising rebel, and when age prevented him from speaking, he continued writing right up to the time of his death.²

Echoing Meltzer, Vladimir Muños said that Acharya was incorruptible, Victor Garcia called Acharya the most prominent figure among Indian libertarians, and Hem Day summed up: he is not well known to all, even to our own people, for he has neither the fame of Gandhi, nor the fame of Nehru, nor the popularity of Vinoba, nor the notoriety of Kumarapa, nor the dignity of Tagore. He is Acharya, a revolutionary, an agitator, a writer.³ A prolific writer, Acharya’s essays are testimony to a tireless agitator and intellectual within the international anarchist movement, often giving a unique perspective on anarchism, pacifism, and the Indian independence movement. Collected here for the first time, Acharya’s essays open a window onto the global reach of anarchism in this period and enables a more nuanced understanding of Indian anti-colonial struggles against oppressive state power, be it imperialist, Bolshevik, or capitalist.

Acharya’s wandering movements across India, Europe, the Middle East, the United States, and Russia during the early twentieth century has made it difficult for historians to trace his personal and political development from anti-colonial nationalist to co-founder of the Communist Party of India (CPI) in October 1920 and then, lastly, to international anarchist, as the archives housing his works are scattered across three continents. Aside from Maia Ramnath’s acknowledgment that among radical nationalist revolutionaries, none made their identification with the international anarchist movement more explicit than Acharya, there has been no sustained attempt to understand Acharya’s anarchist philosophy as both a logical extension of and departure from his anti-colonial revolutionary activities.⁴ Vadim Damier briefly discusses Acharya’s work within the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) milieu of the 1920s, while Lina Bernstein has done a commendable job of tracing his activities in Russia during the revolutionary years.⁵ C. S. Subramanyam’s biography does not include any detailed examination of Acharya’s anarchist activities, focusing instead almost exclusively on his anti-colonial and Bolshevik work. In fact, Subramanyam even notes that, after Acharya’s turn to anarchism, he seems to have come back [to India] having lost faith in political organization and political parties. That probably accounts for the lack of any significant political activity of his that could be traced or any activity that had any relevance to the events and movements of this period 1935–1954.⁶ Subramanyam’s suggestion that Acharya disappeared from politics in India signals, of course, the relatively minor influence of anarchism in India, but at the same time it also reveals a significant omission in Subramanyam’s own critical historiography as Subramanyam was one of the founding members of the CPI in the south of India. While skeptics might object that Acharya’s writings had little impact in India, his place within the international anarchist scene compels us to think more carefully about the global reach of anarchism and, at the same time, to acknowledge the limits of anarchist thought and praxis in the colonial Indian context, where the project of national liberation backed by the Communist International often held greater sway. Instead, working toward imaginary futures, Acharya’s anarchist writings signal a decidedly international approach to the question of freedom that extended beyond the immediate concerns of the establishment of an independent Indian nation-state.⁷ Therefore, to understand Acharya’s turn to anarchism and writings on pacifism and the Indian independence movement, it is useful to provide a biographical sketch of his revolutionary activities from 1907 until 1922.

Indian anti-colonial nationalism and the communist turn, 1907–1922

In the first installment of his Reminiscences of a Revolutionary (serialized from July to October, 1937 in The Mahratta), entitled Why I Left India and How?, Acharya describes his flight from India, activities in London and Paris, and his attempt to go to Morocco to join the Rifs against Spain.⁸ As it happened, before turning to anarchism, Acharya was already an experienced revolutionary anti-colonial agitator. In collaboration with C. Subramania Bharati, he edited the nationalist paper India in the French-Tamil city of Pondicherry from August to November 1907. When the British Government put pressure on the French authorities in Pondicherry to suppress the Indian revolutionaries in the province, Acharya decided to leave for Europe in November 1908. Arriving in Paris in early 1909, and proceeding to London a week later, he quickly became involved with the nationalists at India House, a hostel set up by Shyamaji Krishnavarma for Indian students and hub for revolutionary activity in the first decade of the twentieth century, then under leadership of the militant nationalist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. After the Indian nationalist Madan Lal Dhingra assassinated political assistant Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie in London on July 1, 1909, the India House group came under heavy surveillance by the Department of Criminal Intelligence (DCI) at Scotland Yard, and many of the Indians left London for Paris.

In an effort to learn armed warfare, Acharya and his friend Sukh Sagar Dutt instead decided to leave for Morocco to join the Rifs in their fight against Spain.⁹ Acharya only made it to Gibraltar, and returned to Paris, where he joined the Paris Indian Society, led by Madame Bhikaiji Cama, editor of The Bande Mataram, S. R. Rana, a pearl merchant and financier of the Indians in Paris, Chatto, and Lala Har Dayal. Alongside Cama, Rana, Chatto, Har Dayal, V. V. S. Aiyar, Madhav Rao, Govind Amin, and other Indian revolutionaries in Paris, Acharya associated with French socialists such as Jean Jaurès and Jean Longuet, Russian revolutionaries like Charles Rappoport, Ilya Rubanovich, and Mikhail Pavlovich, as well as Turkish, Persian, and Egyptian anti-colonial nationalists, notably Mansour Rifaat, who became a long-standing friend of Acharya. Additionally, according to Bhupendranath Dutta’s recollections, Chatto and Acharya also associated with anarchists in Paris, although it is uncertain who these may have been.¹⁰

Acharya moved to Berlin in November 1910 to foment revolt among the Indians in the city, and then to Munich a few months later, where he first met Walter Strickland, a staunch supporter of the Indian revolutionaries in Europe and the most anti-­British Englishman, as he later recalled.¹¹ At the suggestion of Ajit Singh and Chatto, and with a letter of introduction in hand from Strickland, Acharya moved to Constantinople (now Istanbul) in November 1911. There he made contact with the Committee of Union and Progress in an effort to secure the support of Muslims against British interests in the region, but no substantial connections were established.

Acharya proceeded to the United States in July 1912, where he lived with Chandra Kanta Chakravarti in New York City. As Acharya later wrote to Boris Yelensky, in New York he first met both Alexander Berkman and Hippolyte Havel.¹² In 1914, he joined the Yugantar Ashram in San Francisco where he translated for the Tamil edition of the Ghadar, the organ of the Hindustan Association of the Pacific Coast (Ghadar Party). Because of his involvement with the Ghadar Party, he was later sentenced in absentia in the Ghadar Conspiracy Trial of 1917–1918.¹³

Shortly after the First World War broke out in August 1914, Acharya’s old comrade Chatto set up the Berlin-based Indian Independence Committee (IIC), located at Wielandstrasse 38. The IIC was formally attached to the Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient (Intelligence Bureau for the East), a branch of the German Foreign Office. Among the other founding members were Chempakaraman Pillai, Abdul Hafiz, and Moreshwar Prabhakar, while Har Dayal, Tarakhnath Das, Mohamed Barkatullah, and Harish Chandra soon joined. Acharya also soon returned from the U.S. to Berlin, and under the auspices of the IIC he led missions to the Middle East to secure the help of the Muslim world against Britain. Spending considerable time in Constantinople again, Acharya made little progress, though, and as the tides of the war were turning, he and Chatto relocated to Stockholm in May 1917, where a socialist peace conference was in the planning. As European socialists from the divided Second International debated over the next six months, Acharya and Chatto tried to bring the question of Indian independence into the peace negotiations. Meanwhile, the Russian Revolution set other aspirations in motion. Acharya and Chatto attended the third Zimmerwald conference in Stockholm in September 1917, making contact with Konstantin Troyanovsky and Angelica Balabanoff, which led to a turn to communism after the Russian Revolution.¹⁴ Many years later, in one of his Letters to the Editor of the periodical Thought (Chapter 48), Acharya described Balabanoff as the mentor of Lenin and Mussolini whom she later quit. Perhaps still hopeful of assistance from the international socialist movement, Acharya attended the International Socialist Congress in Bern, Switzerland, in February 1919, but is not known to have addressed the audience. He did, however, discuss Madame Cama’s ailing health with Jean Longuet.¹⁵

After more than a decade of revolutionary activities across India, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, Acharya spent three years in Russia during the revolutionary years. In May 1919, he and a group of Indians led by Mahendra Pratap met Lenin in Moscow, before they proceeded to Kabul (now in Afghanistan), where they set up the Indian Revolutionary Association (IRA). Congratulating them, Lenin wrote: I am glad to greet the young union of Muslim and Hindu revolutionaries and sincerely wish that this Association will extend its activities among all workmen of the East.¹⁶ Perhaps encouraged by Lenin’s support, Acharya responded to Lenin’s request for comments on his thesis on colonial and national problems, including the rise of pan-Islamism: Is it necessary to fight it?, Acharya asked, and concluded: pan-Islamism, like all similar other –isms—pan-Germanism, pan-Slavism, and so on—is now a Utopia which exists only in the brains of a few perhaps idealist but misguided, unpractical but harmless people, however persistent their efforts may be.¹⁷ However, despite Lenin’s backing of the IRA, the Emir of Afghanistan, supported by Britain after the third Anglo-Afghan War (1919), soon expelled Acharya and his comrade Abdur Rabb for anti-British activities. They instead relocated to Tashkent (now in Uzbekistan) where they formed the Provisional All-India Central Revolutionary Committee (PAICRC) in August 1920. The PAICRC was supplemented by the formation of the CPI in October 1920, with Acharya as Chairman and M. N. Roy as Secretary. However, Acharya soon disagreed with Roy over the direction of the CPI, unhappy to subordinate the project of Indian national liberation to the Comintern, and he was subsequently expelled from the CPI in January 1921 on account of actively supporting people engaged in frankly anticommunist propaganda.¹⁸ Signaling Acharya’s turn to anarchism, a couple of weeks later, he attended Peter Kropotkin’s funeral in Moscow.¹⁹ Acharya stayed in Moscow and took up work for the American Relief Administration, where he worked with the Russian anarchist Abba Gordin, and he most likely met his wife, the Russian artist Magda Nachman (1889–1951), around this time.²⁰ During his sojourn in Moscow, Acharya also met Rose Witkop, Guy Aldred’s partner and sister to Milly Witkop, Rudolf Rocker’s partner, as well as Alexander Berkman again.²¹

From Indian nationalist to international anarchist, 1923–1935

In late 1922, Acharya and Nachman returned to Berlin, where they first lived at Leibnizstrasse 42, in the Charlottenburg district, the same address where he had also lived with Chatto, Har Dayal, and Abdul Hafiz during the First World War, around the corner from the former IIC. Acharya and Nachman were then at Bochumer Strasse 5 in July 1923, and in September 1923 they moved to Kantstrasse 90. Acharya struggled to survive, often destitute and reliant on Nachman’s income, and he distanced himself from many of the other Indians in Berlin, especially his former IIC collaborator Pillai, whom I never respected and respect now less, as he wrote to his friend P. Parthasarathy in Bangalore (now Bengaluru), India, in early September 1923.²² Furthermore, he confessed: I go to very few Indians and very few come to me—as all are busy enjoying themselves with those who can afford to pay for enjoyment and have a mind to do so. He did, however, remain close friends with Chatto and Chatto’s partner in early 1920s Berlin, the American author and Ghadar-sympathizer Agnes Smedley, as well as Chatto’s brother-in-law A. C. N. Nambiar. Acharya was so destitute that Smedley appealed to the Indian National Congress (INC) for help on behalf of Acharya, but the INC does not appear to have offered any assistance.²³

While Acharya became a recluse and withdrew from most of the Indians in Berlin, Nachman traveled among Berlin’s Russian émigré artists and authors such as Marina Tsvetaeva and Vladimir Nabokov—one of Nachman’s paintings graces the back cover of Nabokov’s Glory: A Novel (1972)—and Acharya also met Nabokov.²⁴ However, aside from these figures, Acharya seems to have been closest to Chatto and his old friend Rifaat, the former Secretary of the Egyptian National Congress whom I [have] known since my Paris days when I used to help them in their National Congress affairs—once held in Brussels, he wrote. Indeed, Acharya had attended the Egyptian National Congress in Brussels in September 1910 under the name Bhayankaram, and he describes in the letter to Parthasarathy how at that time they took me and Madam Cama, Chattopadhyaya, [Mrs. Naidu’s brother here], and Asaf Ali, Barrister now released from Prison and President of Delhi Provincial Congress Committee to the congress. Moreover, according to Acharya, Dr. Rifaat was also with me for some time in Stockholm. He is here in much straitened circumstances but certainly not so bad as I am. To earn a living, Acharya also typed and translated literature for Rifaat, including some letters to the Egyptian Prime Minister Zaghloul Pasha, the British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, and officials in Cairo, and helped Rifaat publish the anti-Ahmadiya pamphlet Die Ahmadia-Sekte (1923).²⁵

Acharya also instead sought out new political collaborators. In late December 1922, Acharya and a group of Indians attended the founding meeting of the revived anarcho-syndicalist IWMA, with Rudolf Rocker, Augustin Souchy, and Alexander Schapiro as secretaries.²⁶ At the suggestion of the IWMA secretariat, a committee of Indians in Europe was subsequently set up with the aim to send anarchist literature to India. While working in complete accordance with the IWMA, the committee was not formally attached to the IWMA.²⁷ Among the other delegates at the founding meeting was the Japanese anarchist Yamaga Taiji, with whom Acharya remained in touch throughout his life.²⁸ The Indians’ first success, the secretariat noted sarcastically, was to get IWMA literature banned from import into India.²⁹ Indeed, under the Sea Customs Act of 1878, the Government of India prohibited the bringing by sea or by land into British India of any publications issued by the International Working Men’s Association (Internationale Arbeiter Assoziation), Berlin, in whatever language they may be printed.³⁰ Shortly after the meeting, writing under his middle name Bhayankar, Acharya offered a scathing critique of Roy’s Program for the Indian National Congress from December 1922 (Chapter 1).³¹ A few months later, Acharya wrote to Chittaranjan C. R. Das, editor of the radical Bengali paper Forward, that his political belief was now anarchism, pure and simple. During this transition period from communism to anarchism, he contributed to Sylvia Pankhurst’s The Workers’ Dreadnought, and the Berlin-based Russian anarcho-syndicalist IWMA paper Rabochii put’, edited by Grigori Maximoff and Schapiro, and sent his articles to India.³²

Throughout 1924 and 1925, Chatto, Smedley, and Nambiar associated closely with Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, reportedly even attending a reading group with Berkman, Goldman, Rudolf Rocker, and Armando Borghi. Furthermore, Chatto translated for Der Syndikalist, the organ of the Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands (FAUD), edited by Souchy.³³ If Acharya remained close friends with Chatto, Smedley, and Nambiar, it is likely that he was also introduced to these other well-known anarchists. Around the same time, the British Government put pressure on the German Government to deport Acharya, Chatto, Pillai, and some former members of the IIC and the CPI now residing in Berlin. The British authorities considered Acharya more dangerous than Pillai and concluded that: it would be very dangerous to have him at large.³⁴ However, despite lumping Acharya in with the other Indian Bolsheviks in Berlin, they also noted that: he has for some time been discredited in Soviet circles and is in the habit of writing tirades against Roy and the Bolsheviks. Being a good steno-typist, he is now reported to be employed not only by Indian revolutionaries in Berlin but by Egyptian and other extremist groups.³⁵ In another report from that period, the British authorities noted that: though he is now ostensibly a member of the Fourth International, Acharya is of course purely personally interested in Eastern unrest. This is recognized by the Third International authorities in Berlin, who treat him accordingly and do not consider him an enemy as they do other definite members of the Fourth International.³⁶ Providing information about these figures to the British authorities, the German Foreign Office noted that Chatto appears to be no longer engaged with political but only with economic questions and wrote about Acharya that: it is not possible to discover any activities of the person named. Despite having little information about Acharya from the Germans, the British authorities decided to issue a warrant for his arrest should he return to India.³⁷

Probably aware of this, Acharya applied for a passport in January 1926, claiming that his passport had been stolen, and was asked to give an account of his activities. Perhaps in an effort to distance himself from the Indian Communists in Berlin, and what the British Foreign Office perceived to be the Bolshevik danger, he stated: I have been doing propaganda against English rule in India, but I am also a convinced anti-Bolshevik. The British Foreign Office offered him an Emergency Certificate valid for a single journey to India on the most direct route. However, as a warrant was still out for his arrest, the British Consul in Berlin also made it clear that there was no guarantee that no action would be taken against him upon arrival in India.³⁸ Acharya must have considered the prospect of return too dangerous, as he did not accept the offer of an Emergency Certificate, but instead remained in Berlin and immersed himself further in the international anarchist movement.

In August 1925, Acharya contacted Thomas Keell, editor of Freedom, in London, and asked for copies of Freedom and other anarchist literature to be sent to India for propaganda purposes. He also claimed that he knew Berkman, Goldman, and Havel from Berlin, and asked Keell if he knew of anyone in Berlin who could lend him Berkman’s The Bolshevik Myth (1925) and Goldman’s work on Russia.³⁹ Keell found this request strange and checked in with Berkman, who made inquiries about M. Acharya and [was] told that he is OK, and he outlined a list of publications to be sent to Acharya.⁴⁰ Upon receipt of these, Acharya wrote to Berkman and asked for advertising bills for Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912) and The Bolshevik Myth, some of them intended for Souchy, but most of them to be included in correspondence to India, Turkey, and South Africa.⁴¹

In the summer of 1926, Acharya moved to Landgrafenstraße 3A, Berlin, and then the next month to Ringbahnstraße 4 in the Halensee area of Berlin. In October 1926, he contacted Guy Aldred, a long-time supporter of the Indian freedom struggle, asking for Aldred’s pamphlet Socialism and Parliament (1923) to be sent to India.⁴² What is more, in January 1927, Souchy wrote to Berkman that Acharya had translated some texts for him that were to be sent to Asia and India.⁴³ Testifying to the success of Acharya and the IWMA, Keell later wrote to Berkman that the Indian Government had seized a consignment of literature he had sent to Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1929.⁴⁴

However, Souchy was not always satisfied with the quality of Acharya’s translations. In February 1931, Souchy complained to Berkman: Acharya is not a conscientious translator, so there were errors in his translations.⁴⁵ Despite such errors, Acharya also translated for Berkman’s Relief Fund of the International Working Men’s Association for Anarchists and Anarcho-Syndicalists Imprisoned and Exiled in Russia.⁴⁶

Meanwhile, Acharya was still friends with Chatto, who had abandoned his anarchist leanings and set up the Comintern-backed League against Imperialism (LAI) in February 1927 with the German Communist Willi Münzenberg.⁴⁷ According to the DCI, Acharya assisted Chatto at the founding meeting of the LAI in Brussels, which was also attended by the future Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. However, Acharya was skeptical of the organization’s methods and objects, and was reportedly convinced that the organization is run from Moscow and that its main object is pro-Communist propaganda.⁴⁸ Given Acharya’s anti-Communist stance, it was perhaps not surprising that, when he asked Chatto for work with the LAI in December 1928, Chatto refused his request.⁴⁹ At that time, Acharya had moved again and now lived at Kaiser Platz 17 in Berlin.

Inspired by the literature sent to him by Berkman, Keell, Aldred, Souchy, and others, Acharya soon articulated his own perspectives on anarchism, often renouncing Bolshevism and the Comintern, commenting on the Indian independence struggle, particularly Gandhian pacifism, as well as developing an anarchist economic critique of state capitalism. Throughout the late 1920s, he regularly sent his own writings and other anarchist literature to communist organizations in India such as the Labour Kisan Party of Hindustan, a workers’ party formed in Madras in May 1923 that was formally attached the to CPI; and the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, a Sikh organization responsible for gurdwaras and supportive of the non-violence campaigns in India. Acharya also sent material to Satya Bhakta, editor of The Socialist and founder of the CPI in Cawnpore (now Kanpur), who had supported Acharya against Roy in The Masses of India (September 1926); J. P. Begerhotta, Secretary of the CPI; Feroze Chand, editor of The People (Lahore); G. S. Dara, Honorary Secretary of the London Indian Association and INC Secretary, and he sent "15 pamphlets published by the IWW to the Editor of the Volunteer, Hubli, South India." Reflecting on his literary and political career, K. Shivaram Karanth, editor of Vasantha, also later recalled how M. Acharya sent articles on anarchism from Germany.⁵⁰

Through and beyond anarchism

In a Letter to the Editor of The Mahratta from 1926 (Chapter 2), with reference to the German-American manufacturer and socialist Eugene Dietzgen, Acharya asserted: "Communism can come only through and beyond Anarchism not before and behind it, as Lenin predicted and died broken-hearted and mad." In other words, Acharya saw the Bolshevik understanding of communism as false, and instead argued that the only path to liberty was through anarchism. Indeed, drawing on his experiences in Russia, in his review of Angelica Balabanoff’s memoirs Erinnerungen und Erlebnisse (1927) (transl. My Life as a Rebel), published in this collection as From a Bolshevik (Chapter 7), Acharya critiqued: We are Anarchists, because we do not want authoritarianism outside or inside, because to us anti-Marxists, life and society must be, immanently one indivisible whole impossible of mechanical separation—as the Marxists inorganically think and believe. This was central to Acharya’s vision of anarchism. For instance, in his essay Dans L’Inde (translated here as In India, Chapter 5) from the IWMA-affiliated La Voix du Travail, edited by Pierre Besnard and Schapiro in Paris, he warned of the dangers of communism making its way to India through the likes of the British-based Indian Communist MP Shapurji Saklatvala and Roy. To counter the communist threat, he argued: What is needed for the Indian proletariat is new workers’ organizations, of a revolutionary syndicalist character, which alone can tear it out of the misery in which it grows. Only federalist organizations, given their complete independence, can create a solid foundation for class struggle in India. Many of the essays collected here revolve around these themes, giving us a unique insight into Acharya’s thoughts on anarchism as the only viable alternative to imperialism, communism, and capitalism.

In August 1929, Acharya again contacted the British Consul in Berlin and asked for a passport. Giving a statement again, he asserted: "since 1922, having seen the uselessness of politics and danger of agitators who want to preach violence, I have become a convinced and logical pacifist and want to