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ABSTRACT
This article traces the life and activities of the Indian anti-colonial nationalist Virendranath 'Chatto' Chattopadhyaya in the European anarchist movement from 1910 to 1927. While Chatto is better known for his role as secretary for the Comintern-led League Against Imperialism (1927-1933), this article argues that his peripatetic movements in European revolutionary networks during the early decades of the twentieth century suggests a much closer attraction to the ideas and practices of anarchism - including insurrectionist terrorism - than often acknowledged. Drawing on Leela Gandhi's insight into the revolutionary practices of the 'politics of friendship', it opens a window onto the cross-fertilised world of anti-colonial and anarchist internationalism in the early twentieth century.
Keywords: Anarchism, anti-colonialism, nationalism, terrorism, First World War, Chattopadhyaya
The Indian anti-colonial nationalist Virendranath 'Chatto' Chattopadhyaya is perhaps best known for his work as secretary for the Comintern-led League Against Imperialism (LAI), where he worked closely with Willi Münzenberg from 1927 until 1931.1 However, by the time Chatto co-founded the LAI in 1927, he had travelled in anti-colonial nationalist and radical socialist circles in Europe for almost two decades. During that period, despite becoming a committed Bolshevik by the mid-1920s, he associated with well-known European anarchists such as Jean Grave, Jeanne Morand, Luigi Bertoni, Panait Muşoiu, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, Rudolf Rocker, and Armando Borghi and had become an experienced anti-colonial nationalist revolutionary. That said, Chatto probably only briefly fully embraced anarchism in early 1920s Berlin, and his relation to anarchism remains mostly by association. However, as Carl Levy reminds us, 'it is also worth bearing in mind that one did not have to be a signed-up member of an anarchist group to be affected by its influence'.2 With that in mind, and drawing on Leela Gandhi's persuasive claim that such forms of radical internationalism mutated into a 'series of countercultural revolutionary practices', which she calls the 'politics of friendship', I argue that his movements among European anarchists suggest a much closer affiliation between the politics of Indian national liberation and the revolutionary promise of anarchist freedom than often acknowledged by historians.3 While the links between the Indian nationalists in the Ghadr Party and anarchists in the United States have recently been explored to some extent, focusing particularly on Lala Har...