Savarkar
Page 19
The English had not stopped at merely taking away the Padshahi of the Padshah of Delhi, but had recently decided even to take away the title of Padshah from the descendants of Babar. The Emperor, though reduced to such an extremity, and Zinat Mahal, the beloved, clever, and determined Begum of the Emperor, had already decided that this last opportunity of regaining the lost glory should not be allowed to go by, and if dying was the only resource, then they should die the death which would only befit an Emperor and an Empress. 66
Agreeing with Nana Saheb’s belief, Vinayak also suggests that the 1857 movement was one that brought Hindus and Muslims together; that Hindustan was ‘thereafter the united nation of the adherents of Islam as well as Hinduism’. 67 The animosity between the two communities, he explains, was necessitated in the past when the Muslims were aggressive invaders and rulers and the Hindus the submissive ruled. But now, both of them had a common enemy in the British who threatened both their regime and religion. Hence that antagonism of the past was buried and common cause was made. Thus, to protect their respective swadharmas and swaraj, it was necessary for Hindus and Muslims to join hands. Elaborating on this point, he states:
As long as the Mahomedans lived in India in the capacity of the alien rulers, so long to be willing to live with them like brothers was to acknowledge national weakness. Hence it was, up to then, necessary for the Hindus to consider the Mahomedans as foreigners. And moreover this rulership of the Mahomedans, Guru Govind in the Panjab, Rana Pratap in Rajputana, Chhatrasal in Bundelkhand, and the Maharattas by even sitting upon the throne at Delhi, had destroyed; and, after a struggle of centuries, Hindu sovereignty had defeated the rulership of the Mahomedans and had come to its own all over India. It was no national shame to join hands with Mahomedans then, but it would, on the contrary, be an act of generosity. So, now, the original antagonism between the Hindus and the Mahomedans might be consigned to the past. Their present relation was one not of rulers and ruled, foreigner and native, but simply that of brothers with the one difference between them of religion alone. For, they were both children of the soil of Hindusthan. Their names were different, but they were all children of the same Mother; India therefore being the common mother of these two, they were brothers by blood. Nana Sahib, Bahadur Shah of Delhi, Moulvi Ahmad Shah, Khan Bahadur Khan, and other leaders of 1857 felt this relationship to some extent and, so, gathered round the flag of Swadesh leaving aside their enmity, now so unreasonable and stupid. In short, the broad feature of the policy of Nana Sahib and Azimullah were that the Hindus and the Mahomedans should unite and fight shoulder to shoulder for the independence of their country and that, when freedom was gained, the United States of India should be formed under the Indian rulers and princes. 68
He even praised the spirit of ‘jehad’ that ‘the great and saintly’ Maulvi Ahmed Shah had so cleverly woven through every corner of Lucknow and Agra. Delhi was liberated on 11 May 1857 and by 16 May all remnants of British rule were erased, and Zafar was declared the emperor of India. Celebrating this momentous episode, Vinayak writes: ‘The five days during which Hindus and Mahomedans proclaimed that India was their country and they were all brethren, the days when Hindus and Mahomedans unanimously raised the flag of national freedom at Delhi. Be those grand days ever memorable in the history of Hindusthan.’ 69
He emphasized how the event had helped unite Indians against all divisions of caste, creed, religion and region. It was this unity and sense of national identity that he wanted to tap into and mobilize yet again for a unified struggle against British tyranny.
Not one individual, not one class, alone had been moved deeply by seeing the sufferings of their country. Hindu and Mahomedan, Brahmin and Sudra, Kshatriya and Vaishya, prince and pauper, men and women, Pandits and Moulvies, sepoys and the police, townsmen and villagers, merchants and farmers—men of different religions, men of different castes, people following widely different professions—not able any longer to bear the sight of the persecution of the Mother, brought about the avenging Revolution in an incredibly short time. 70
The book ends on a note of both poignancy and optimism in which he describes a scene in the Delhi Durbar of the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar:
During the heat of the Revolution he (Zafar) composed a Ghazal. Someone asked him:
Dumdumay mein dam nahin khair maango jaanki
Ai Zafar thandi hui shamsher Hindusthanki.
(Now that, every moment, you are becoming weaker
pray for your life [to the English]
for, Oh! Emperor, the sword of India is now broken forever!)
The Emperor replied:
Ghazion mein bu rahegi jab talak iman ki
Tab toh London tak chalegi teg Hindustan ki.
(As long as there remains the least trace of love of faith in the hearts of our heroes
so long, the sword of Hindustan shall remain sharp
and one day shall flash even at the gates of London.) 71
For Vinayak the historical legacy of India was an important aspect of all his writings. History was a tool that served to propagate a particular reading, and evocation, of Indian national identity from time immemorial. He hoped that a historically enlightened Indian would identify with a sense of national pride and move forward, just as the revolutionaries in America (1776), France (1789) and Italy (1848–49) had done.
Just like the Mazzini biography, this book too had a tortuous route to publication and sale. The journey of the book towards its publication is as fascinating as its contents and the research that went into it. In fact, it created a literary history of sorts by being the first book to be proscribed even before it was published. By 1907, the British government had enough suspicions about the activities at India House and had planted several moles there to get regular feedback. As mentioned earlier, a few chapters of Vinayak’s book on 1857, which were in Marathi, were found missing from the House. They found their way to the British Intelligence Headquarters at Scotland Yard. Yet Vinayak and his associates in Abhinav Bharat managed to smuggle the manuscript out of London and dispatched it to India, foiling the strict customs vigilance at Indian ports.
Babarao tried his best to find a printer, but no one dared to take the risk. Mr Limaye of Solapur, editor of the weekly Swaraj , agreed to print it. But the authorities got wind of it and with the threat of an impending raid looming large, Limaye backed out. Simultaneous raids took place at several prominent printing houses across Maharashtra. Finding it impossible to get the book printed in India, Babarao sent the manuscript to Paris. Here too, as Vinayak noted, ‘the French detectives were working hand in hand with the British Police to suppress the . . . revolutionary activities in France; and under their threat even a French printer could not be found ready to run the risk of printing this history’. 72
Thereafter, it was decided that the book should be printed in Germany. Since Germany was a seat of Indology and Sanskrit learning, it might have the Devanagari script. However, the compositors there were totally ignorant about Marathi and did a shoddy job. In London, a few Abhinav Bharat members—Koregaonkar, Phadke and Kunte—decided to translate the book into English, under the supervision of V.V.S. Aiyar, to enable a wider readership. Once again, they tried to publish the translated version and the original in France and Germany but met with little success as both countries did not want to offend Britain. The German publisher showed the manuscript to his lawyer who warned him that his ‘business would be ruined if the firm is known to undertake such works’. 73 Finally, the manuscripts made their way to Holland where a printing press was convinced to publish it. The revolutionaries spread rumours that the book was being printed in France in order to hoodwink and distract the British intelligence and police. The book was finally printed and was ready for distribution.
The British intelligence carried reports about the book, and the viceroy, Lord Minto, sent back a terse message on 14 December 1908: ‘I hope we can stop Savarkar’s book on the Mutiny from entering India.’ 74 Accordin
gly, J.C. Ker, personal assistant to the director of criminal intelligence, noted that to prevent the import of the book they would need to use Section 19 of the Sea Customs Act, 75 given it was a ‘most objectionable book’. However, he advised caution that it would be unsafe to publicly notify it as such, prior to examining the title, contents and the tone of the book through a proof copy that could be procured. 76 An alternative route of using the Post Office Act was also considered but vetoed by C.J. Stevenson-Moore, the officiating director of criminal intelligence.
The British newspapers carried reports of the proscription of the book and ban on its sale in British India. The Homeward Mail from India, China and The East dated 9 August 1909 and the Times , dated 11 August 1909, reported:
The mail from India brings the following notification issued at Simla on July 23—‘In exercise of the power conferred by Section 19 of the Sea Customs Act 1878 (viii of 1878), the Governor-in-Council is pleased to prohibit the bringing by sea or by land into British India of any copy of the book or pamphlet in Marathi on the subject of the Indian Mutiny by Vinayek Damodar Sarvarkar or any English translation or version of the same. 77
Vinayak wrote a spirited letter challenging the proscription. This was published in The London Times :
It is admitted by the authorities that they were not sure whether the manuscript had gone to print. If that is so, how does the government know that the book is going to be so dangerously seditious as to get it proscribed before its publication, or even before it was printed? The government either possesses a copy of the manuscript or does not. If they have a copy, then why did they not prosecute me for sedition as that would have been the only course legitimately left to them? On the contrary, if they have no copy of the manuscript how could they be so cocksure of the seditious nature of a book of which they do not know anything beyond some vague, partial, and unauthenticated reports? 78
On 17 September 1909, Vinayak wrote in the Kal :
My attention has been drawn to the orders issued by the Government of India under the Customs Act, prohibiting the entry of a History of the Indian Mutiny alleged to be written by me, into India. It may be legal to suppress a book even before it is published. But certainly it can never be just. The Governor-General of India has mentioned my name in this connection without any inquiry and thereby laid himself open to censure. If the evidence in the hands of Government was reliable, they should have informed me of the charge and heard me. If the proper evidence was not forthcoming, it was the moral duty of Government to ask me to enter on my defense before condemning me. But it appears that Government are pleased to attack me unawares. Under such circumstances, I can declare that I have no connection with any book of such a nature as is indicated in the orders of the Government of India. 79
The revolutionaries of Abhinav Bharat however found ingenious ways of having the book smuggled to India. Copies were wrapped in artistic covers printed with innocuous and bogus names such as ‘The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club’, 80 ‘Scott’s Works’ and ‘Don Quixote’. Boxes with false labels were used and one such box was smuggled into India by Sikandar Hayat Khan. However, since there was no ban on its sale in England, books were secretly sold and distributed at several places. The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the India Office Library (IOL) hold copies of the first edition. Madame Bhikaji Cama, who was in Paris, made copies available at a price of 10 shillings. She also got a second edition published in France. Vinayak had given her the original Marathi manuscript for safekeeping, which she had deposited in a bank locker in Paris. However, it was generally believed that during the First World War, the bank was destroyed and with it, the manuscript. It was only in 1947 that Savarkar received a letter from one Ramlal Bajpayee in America stating that the original was safe with his friend D.D.S. Kutinho in London, and two years later he managed to get the copy back through one Dr Gohokar of America. 81 A third edition was published by Lala Har Dayal and the Ghadr Party in America. Copies were sold in New York at $2 for a hardback and $1.50 for paperback versions.
A few decades later, the great Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh had the fourth edition of the book secretly published in India. 82 There are references of how Bhagat Singh was deeply influenced by a small English biography of Savarkar that he read in the Dwarkadas Library of Lahore. 83 Copies of the book were found during raids conducted on all the members of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) who were accused in the Lahore Conspiracy Case (1928–31), including Bhagat Singh. This fact is bolstered by a first-person account given by Durga Das Khanna in an interview in 1976. 84
Khanna was the former chairman of the Punjab Legislative Council in independent India but in his younger days he had been a revolutionary. He recalls his first meetings with Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev Thapar, the Punjab revolutionaries who had formed the HSRA in the 1920s. During their recruitment drive for the organization they had met Khanna, spoken to him about politics and a wide range of issues to gauge his political orientation, and they had also recommended several books. These included Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky’s The ABC of Communism (1920), Daniel Breen’s My Fight for Irish Freedom (1924), and Chitragupta’s Life of Barrister Savarkar. It hence becomes clear that Bhagat Singh and his associates expected new recruits to the HSRA to not only read about the Russian Revolution and the Irish Republican Army, but also Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s life story.
A decade later, in the 1940s, the other major national heroes, Rash Behari Bose and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, also got an edition of The Indian War of Independence of 1857 printed in Japan. A Tamil edition of the book, edited by Jayamani Subrahmanyam, one of the publicity officers of Netaji’s Indian National Army (INA), was also discovered in tatters in one of the raids.
Thus, for almost three-and-a-half-decades the book served as a veritable Bible for all revolutionaries. Through the book, Vinayak managed to draw a lineage of revolutionaries starting from its roots in the 1857 war till the time of India’s independence, positing himself at the centre as one of its important intellectual fountainheads. Subbarao, editor of Gosthi , notes about the book:
The British Raj in India has treated Savarkar’s book as most dangerous for their existence here. So it has been banned. But it has been read by millions of our countrymen including my humble self. In trying to elevate the events of 1857, which interested historians and administrators had not hesitated to call for decades as an ‘Indian Mutiny’, to its right pose of Indian War of Independence, albeit a foiled attempt at that, it is not a work of patriotic alchemist turning base mutineering into noble revolutionary action. Even in these days, what would the efforts of Subhas Bose’s Azad Hind Fouj be called if Savarkar’s alchemy had not intervened? True, both the 1857 and 1943 ‘wars’ have ended in failure for our country. But the motive behind—was it mere mutineering or War of Independence? If Savarkar had not intervened between 1857 and 1943, I am sure that the recent efforts of the Indian National Army would have been again dubbed as an ignoble mutiny effectively crushed by the valiant British-cum-Congress arms and armlessness. But thanks to Savarkar’s book, Indian sense of a ‘mutiny’ has been itself revolutionized. Not even Lord Wavell, I suppose can now call Bose’s efforts as a mutiny. The chief credit for the change of values must go to Savarkar, and to him alone. But the greatest value of Savarkar’s book lies in its gift to the nation of that Torch of Freedom in whose light a humble I and a thousand other Indians have our dear daughters named after Laxmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi. Even Netaji Bose in a fateful hour had to form an army of corps after Rani of Jhansi. But for Savarkar’s discovery of that valiant heroine, Rani of Jhansi should have been a long-forgotten ‘mutineer’ of the nineteenth-century. 85
5
And the Storm Breaks
London, 1907
The commemoration of the martyrs of 1857, speeches at India House and the articles in the Indian Sociologist brought Shyamji and his boarding house under the surveillance and attack of the British gove
rnment and press. On 9 May 1907, as news came in about Lala Lajpat Rai and Sardar Ajit Singh’s deportation, without trial, to prison in Mandalay, Burma, for alleged sedition, a wave of indignation swept through Indians in London. The Indian Sociologist carried several articles and letters from leaders such as Dadabhai Naoroji, Bhikaji Cama and others condemning this act. Shyamji wrote in the June 1907 editorial:
To us personally the sudden disappearance of Lala Lajpat Rai from the field of operations in India under such painful circumstances has given a shock, which we cannot describe in words. On almost the very day of his arrest we received a highly pathetic letter from him imploring us to do all in our power to bring the ‘Panjabee’ case to the notice of the British Public and Foreign Press. Little did he think when he penned that letter that in less than three weeks he would be arrested and deported under a cruel and oppressive regulation of the so-called civilized Government of India. 1
Thereafter, a public meeting of Indians was held at India House on 7 June 1909. Presiding over it, Shyamji passed a public resolution condemning the unjust deportation by a ‘tyrannical and oppressive alien Government of India’. 2 In the course of his speech, Shyamji remarked: ‘We, representing the advanced section of the Indian people, absolutely deny the right of the British to remain any longer in India, and are prepared to achieve Indian Independence at all risks.’ He declared that all Indians serving the British government must be treated with suspicion and that they could not trust British promises any longer. 3