Anarchism emerged as an influential ideological trend within socialist, leftwing and working-class movements in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Mikhail Bakunin and Pyotr Kropotkin are the two most well-known anarchists, though quite a few other ideologues and activists from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to Rudolf Rocker contributed to the evolution of anarchist thought between the late nineteenth century and the 1950s.
In its heyday, anarchism and its variant syndicalism (or anarcho-syndicalism) had a considerable following among industrial workers in parts of Western Europe, especially in France and Spain where the present-day General Confederation of Labour (CGT) and National Confederation of Labour (CNT) respectively can trace their origins to syndicalist labour unions.
Whereas anarcho-syndicalism declined after the Second World War, many aspects of the anarchist critique of the state remain relevant. However, the utopian prescriptions of anarchists have rendered anarchism unsuitable for actual politics. This seems to be particularly true for anti-colonial struggles for which the independent nation-state has been the primary goal. For anarchists, liberation from colonialism is meaningful only if it leads to a society in which the state and its organs have no role to play. 
Considering that nationalism has been such a potent force for mobilising people against colonial rule, the anarchist vision might have had very limited appeal for national liberation movements.
Ole Birk Laursen’s biography of the anarchist thinker and activist M.P.T. Acharya depicts an utterly lonely figure apparently unable to come to terms with the political situation in India on the eve of independence and decided to refrain from active involvement in politics in the last 20 years of his life. Having spent nearly 26 years abroad, mostly in Europe, Acharya returned to India in 1935. For the next two decades, till his death in 1954, he lived in virtual solitude in Bombay. It is difficult to understand why an experienced political figure like him should have dwelt in such isolation at a time when so much was happening around him.
Acharya was briefly, as a teenager, involved in the nationalist activity in Madras (where he was born and had his schooling). He soon became a follower of Tilak, and had to relocate to Pondicherry to evade arrest. Since the British were pressurising the French authorities to take action against revolutionaries, Acharya left for Colombo in disguise. He was barely 21 years old at this time. From Colombo, he travelled to France, and then went on to London where he came in touch with nationalists connected with India House. Acharya’s arrival in London coincided with the assassination of Curzon-Wyllie by Madan Lal Dhingra. This resulted in a crackdown on Indian political activists who had to go underground or leave England.
Even those who were not implicated or under suspicion found it expedient to maintain a low profile. From this time till the outbreak of the First World War, Acharya led a peripatetic existence. Laursen has painstakingly pieced together the confusing details of Acharya’s wanderings in support of diverse radical causes: Morocco, Lisbon, Paris, Brussels, Rotterdam, Munich and Constantinople. In Constantinople, he tried to mobilise support for Ottoman Turkey which was engaged in a war with Italy (1911-12), and advocated a unified nationalist campaign in India to collect donations for Turkey. Yet, he made it clear that “he was wary of the dangerous aspects of revolutionary struggles based on religious or ethno-nationalist unity” (pp.46-47).
In 1912, Acharya travelled to the US where he established contact with the Ghadarites and returned to Europe soon after the outbreak of the First World War. By the end of 1914, he was in Berlin which had become an important base for Indian revolutionaries. The key organiser among them was the famous Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, more familiar as Chatto (Sarojini Naidu was Chatto’s younger sister).
Also read: The Many Revolutionary Romances of Virendranath ‘Chatto’ Chattopadhyaya, the Anti-Colonial Exile
Following the October Revolution in Russia, Chatto and several other radical revolutionaries who had hitherto, 1914 onwards, received assistance from the German Foreign Office for the anti-colonial struggle against Britain, now turned to Soviet Russia for inspiration and help. Acharya moved to Moscow after the war, and his revolutionary work took him to Kabul, Tashkent, Andijan, Skobelev (Ferghana). Skobelev was to be the starting point of an expedition to liberate India by entering it via routes across the Badakhshan mountains. Indians were to be recruited for this purpose, and the Soviets were to provide assistance in the form of arms and clothing. This was obviously an unworkable plan, but the very fact that Acharya and other revolutionaries expended so much time and effort on it speaks volumes about the revolutionary zeal of those who volunteered to undertake the task.
The discussion in the book on this rather obscure episode is largely based on material available in the Russian State Archives of Social and Political History (RGASPI), particularly the correspondence of Acharya with M.N. Roy, who was given the responsibility to direct the expedition. These sources could have been supplemented by archival records on the subject in the Government Archives of Uzbekistan. Some of these documents have been used by, among others, Dilorom Karomat to retrieve the history of Indian freedom fighters in Central Asia in the years following the Russian Revolution.
Twilight years
Acharya was also associated with initiatives to form the Communist Party of India (or the Indian Communist Party). The party was founded in October 1920 at Tashkent which at this time was the capital of the Turkestan Soviet Socialist Republic. Shortly after the Communist Party was established, differences cropped up between on the one hand Acharya and some of the activists to whom he was close such as Abdul Rabb, and on the other hand Roy and those who were ideologically committed to Marxism.
Rabb himself was not a communist, and he had a fairly large following in Tashkent and Bukhara among local youth. In the ensuing factional tussle among revolutionaries of various shades, Acharya aligned himself with opponents of Roy. From Laursen’s account, it appears that this marked the beginning of his estrangement from Marxism and communism culminating in a complete break by 1922 when he, along with his Russian wife Magda Nachman, quietly left for Berlin. Nachman was a painter and the two remained intimate lifelong companions till her death in 1951 (Nachman’s demise hastened Acharya’s death; he was already suffering from TB). The evidence cited by Laursen regarding the supposed persecution of Acharya in Russia prior to his departure for Berlin is largely from Acharya himself and not very convincing. In any case the process resulting in the sudden shift to anarchism remains unclear.
Once in Berlin, Acharya turned rabidly anti-Bolshevik, and anti-communist. As he settled down in Berlin, where he stayed till the ascendancy of the Nazis, he found new political acquaintances among disillusioned socialists and ‘revisionist’ Marxists. There was no dearth of such ideological fellow travellers in Weimar Berlin after the failure of the German Revolution in 1919 and the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. He gravitated towards anarchist circles and developed his ideas about the relevance of anarchism to the specific historical conditions of India. One of his key theoretical formulations was, ‘“If people want Socialism they must act for a society without the state – which can only be managed in small independent communes acting together for common benefit…”’ (quoted on p.139). Further Acharya, like many anarchist thinkers, advocated the formation of cooperatives and communal living for creating a new society based on equality.
Initially, he continued to be part of some of the older networks of Indian political exiles and maintained his links with the charismatic Chatto. There can be little doubt that Chatto played a crucial role in giving stability to Acharya’s presence among Berlin Indians at this stage. However, this phase did not last very long. In all likelihood, the association with Chatto helped Acharya in gaining access to anarchist circles in different parts of Europe. The former was highly respected by prominent anarchists. The anarchist thinker Rocker wrote about him that, ‘“Chatto was a very charming man, an excellent and brilliant conversationalist, who gave flavour to every meeting … He also possessed a broad political vision and clearly recognized that a social transformation of the West would never happen unless the problem of colonial politics was not overcome and if the slave peoples of Asia did not enjoy the same rights as the Western nations”’ (cited on p.129).
Virendranath Chattopadhyaya. Photo: Courtesy Swiss Federal Archives
Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s (and beyond, after he had moved to India) Acharya wrote on a wide range of subjects from an anarchist perspective, contributing to numerous journals such as L’En Dehors and Der Syndikalist, as well as nationalist Indian newspapers such as Bombay Chronicle. An article by him on the women’s question in L’En Dehors (‘De la Jalousie’) triggered a debate on gender relations in the Japanese anarchist-feminist journal Fujin Sensen in which some of his arguments about sexuality and jealousy were criticised by the leading Japanese feminist activist and poet Takamure Itsue. Significantly Fujin Sensen stopped publication in the early thirties with the rise of fascism in Japan.
At the same time, Acharya was working with several anarcho-syndicalist, anti-colonial and anti-war organisations. These included the anarchist International Working Men’s Association founded in 1922 (not to be confused with the First International), the Hindusthan Association of Central Europe, the International Anti-Militarist Bureau against War and Reaction, and the League Against Imperialism (LAI). The League emerged as a transnational platform that brought together nationalists of Asia and Africa. Nehru’s close association with the LAI is well known, and scholars from S. Gopal (Jawarharlal Nehru: A Biography, volume I) to Michele Louro in her recent study Comrades Against Imperialism, have underlined the role played by the LAI in shaping Nehru’s internationalism. Acharya’s involvement with the LAI was short-lived, and as was typical of his attitude towards such organisations working within which required some amount of flexibility, he quickly became very critical of it. He found it easier to converse with ‘ultra-left’ intellectuals (this is how they described themselves) of whom Karl Korsch, lately expelled from the German Communist Party (1926) was the most notable.
Also read: M.P.T. Acharya: The Forgotten Indian Anarchist in Europe Who Fought for True Freedom
Acharya became a regular participant in meetings of the ‘Kritischer Marxismus’ study circle formed by Korsch. The discussions in these meetings helped Acharya develop his own anarchist worldview, making it theoretically more sophisticated. Korsch perceptively remarked that ‘“there was never any doubt about his revolutionary straightforwardness, but he was quite apt to mix things up both theoretically and in matters of practice”’ (quoted on p.158). He seems to have been genuinely fond of Acharya whom he referred to as ‘a somewhat bewildered “ultra-leftist”’. Laursen’s chapters on the Weimar years contain a wealth of information about leftwing, anarchist, anti-colonial, socialist and revisionist trends in Europe during the twenties and early thirties.
After Hitler came to power, living and working in Germany became increasingly dangerous for many Indians who were at the margins of the left and a few of Acharya’s friends were either arrested or expelled. In 1934, he and his wife fled from Berlin and found shelter in Zurich for the time being. Acharya then went on to India alone, and was joined by Nachman a little later. For someone whose politics had acquired meaning in the intellectual environment of inter-war Germany, and who had spent most of his youth in Europe, it must have been a hard decision. But he really had no choice, the more so as he had no steady source of income. It was with enormous difficulty that he was able to find money for travelling to India. In India too he had no regular means of livelihood, and died in abject poverty. He made some new contacts, revived older political relationships, attempted to establish ties with Japanese and Chinese anarchists, and studied the anarchist elements of Gandhian thought. He offered an anarchist interpretation of Gandhi’s ideas, contributing several articles to the Harijan.
Laursen notes that, “For twenty-five years, Acharya had engaged extensively with Gandhi’s thoughts and actions, wavering between great admiration and fierce criticism, but now embraced Gandhi into the anarchist fold” (p.237). It might have been worthwhile to have explored the anarchist understanding of Gandhi in some more detail. Towards the end of his life he was ideologically closest to Gandhians such as Kishorlal Mashruwala, Maganbhai Desai (and Vinoba Bhave whom he esteemed a lot).
Acharya’s personal integrity, his ideological commitment, his refusal to dilute his principles, his powerful anti-statist stance, and inflexibility make him a heroic yet tragic figure. Tragic because even though he lived for several years in Bombay which at this time had a strong tradition of leftwing working-class radicalism, his anarchist politics did not attract any following. One might end by referring to a small incident which highlights the respect that contemporary nationalists who knew Acharya as an unbending revolutionary had for him, and also the political culture of that bygone era.
Laursen mentions, almost in passing, Nehru’s moving gesture of sending to Acharya (who was a bitter critic of India’s first prime minister), a token sum of five hundred rupees sometime in 1950, ‘“from his pocket”’ (Acharya cited in Laursen, p. 230). Acharya had no problem sharing this bit of information with his old anarchist friend Augustin Souchy (who had fought in the Spanish Revolution), nor was he embarrassed that he had accepted the amount. All three of them – Acharya, Nehru, Souchy – were mature enough, and had the refinement, to make a distinction between a personal enemy and a political opponent! In that sense, they belonged to the same world, a world that Laursen brings to life through his meticulous research and straightforward narrative.
