One of Vinayak’s favourite books was The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. He wanted to study the Quran as well and began with the English, and later the Bengali version. Not satisfied by it, he asked a Muslim friend to help him with the original. After washing his hands and feet, Vinayak would sit reverentially to read the scripture, page by page, verse by verse, with his companion, who read the suras (verses) and translated them into Hindi.
~
Meanwhile, by mid-1914, unrest was brewing in Europe. What began as a conflict between Austria–Hungary and Serbia, leading to the assassination of the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, at Sarajevo, soon mushroomed into a conflict that gripped all Europe and the world in four years of strategic stalemate and unprecedented butchery. The conflagration pitted the Central Powers (Germany, Austria–Hungary and Turkey) against the Allies (France, Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan and later the United States of America in 1917) into one of the greatest watersheds of twentieth-century geopolitical history. It led to the fall of four imperial dynasties (Germany, Russia, Austria–Hungary and Turkey) and brought in its wake the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, destabilizing all Europe. It also sowed the seeds for a larger and more catastrophic conflict on the world stage.
With Britain’s entry into the First World War, all her colonies, including India, had no option but to be dragged into this conflict. Around 5 August 1914, the British War Council ratified the involvement of the British Indian Army and Indian soldiers into this conflict. The Indian Army had already been employed in several wars in China, Egypt, Sudan, Perak (in Malaysia) and Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia). However, Indians were not employed in conflicts involving ‘white enemies’, such as the Boer Wars, 14 largely due to a racial strategy. It was rather unthinkable that the ‘black Indian’ should be seen hacking a ‘white European’ of any nationality, as that would embolden him to do similar things with his colonial masters back home. The horrors of 1857 had simply not left the British Indian government it seemed. Yet, as the conflict increased with every passing day, the dire necessity for soldiers made Britain disregard this policy of racial hierarchy in the army.
By the winter of 1914, Indian troops were at the western front and fought at the first Battle of Ypres. They were deployed as reinforcements in the battlefields of Europe and fought in most theatres of the war, including Gallipoli and North and East Africa and Mesopotamia. An estimated total of 1,215,318 soldiers were sent abroad to all the war zones—Mesopotamia, Egypt, France, East Africa, Gallipoli, Salonica, Aden and the Persian Gulf. Nearly 1.5 million volunteered to fight. About 47,746 were classed as killed or missing, with about 65,000 wounded. More than 101,439 casualties of Indian soldiers were reported. In addition, £3.5 million was paid by India as ‘war gratuities’ of British officers and men of the normal garrisons of India. A further sum of £13.1 million was paid from Indian revenues for the war. In cash and kind an estimate of £146.2 million was India’s gigantic contribution to Britain in this effort—something that is valuated at £50 billion, or even higher, today! 15
The princely states and the Indian political bourgeoisie lapped this up as an opportunity driven by different motives. For the Indian princes who were virtually under British thraldom, it was yet another opportunity to ingratiate themselves to their colonial masters. Apart from ‘The Imperial Service Troops’ organized by the princely states and put in the service of Viceroy Lord Hardinge, assistance in kind also came in large quantities as did generous grants of money from the maharajas of Mysore, Jodhpur, Gwalior and the Nizam of Hyderabad. Food, clothes, ambulances, horses, labourers and motorcars were donated. The outpouring of Indian support overwhelmed even the British. It was largely believed by many that the moment Britain got into trouble, the whole of India would burst into a blaze of rebellion, more so given the efforts of the Germans to stir and support the anti-British unrest in India.
However, an irksome communal issue got intertwined with the war efforts with the Ottoman Empire of Turkey joining its forces with Germany against the British by end October 1914. The sultans of the Ottoman Empire claimed the highest position in Islam, that of the caliphate—an Islamic kingdom under the caliph, or Khalifah, the politico-religious successor of Prophet Muhammad himself and a leader of the entire ummah, or global Muslim community. Caliphates such as the Rashidun, the Umayyad and the Abbasid had existed in medieval times. The Ottoman Empire claimed its stake as the fourth caliphate in 1517 and took control over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Such an exalted religious and political figure was naturally held in great reverence by Muslims of South Asia too. The British feared that the large contingent of Muslim soldiers in the army would not support them in this war against their Khalifah. The fear of desertion by the troops, or even jihad, if forced to fight against their Turkish ‘brethren’ constantly plagued the British. To assuage these fears, several Muslim leaders and princes had to publicly seek complete loyalty from the Muslim subjects and soldiers towards the British war efforts.
Along with the princely states, the nationalists of the time too pledged their support for Britain’s war efforts. These were driven by their calculation that unstinted support during a time of crisis might motivate Britain to speedily grant more concessions to their demands after the War. Annie Besant and Tilak, who dominated the national political scene, threw their might behind this popular sentiment. The Indian National Congress openly supported Britain during this crucial period. When war broke out, Gandhi was in England, where he began organizing a medical corps similar to the force he had led in aid of the British during the Boer War. In a circular dated 22 September 1914, he called for recruitment to his Field Ambulance Training Corps. 16 Several Indians served in hospitals in Southampton and Brighton, and Gandhi himself, aided by his wife Kasturba, took nursing classes. But he soon fell ill with pleurisy and returned to India by January 1915.
Gandhi offered unconditional support to the British efforts right from the beginning. He strongly believed that it was not a good time to embarrass Britain or take advantage of her troubled situation to further the Indian liberation cause. ‘England’s need,’ he had said, ‘should not be turned into our opportunity and that it was more becoming and far-sighted not to press our demands while the war lasted.’ 17 On his return to India, he helped expand the recruitment bases for the British Indian Army from places like Gujarat that did not have the so-called traditional martial races. The apostle of non-violence was marching from village to village in 1918 in the most interior of villages of his home province, addressing mass gatherings in recruitment centres, enlisting people for the War.
Meanwhile, far away from all the action, in Cellular Jail, Vinayak was keeping a close watch on the developments despite the inadequate information available to most prisoners. Interestingly, being a keen student of international politics, Vinayak had in fact prophesied in 1910 about the outbreak of a war in Europe between Britain and Germany within the next six years. His views had been published in an article written for the first edition of the Talwar . Virendranath Chattopadhyay’s wife, Agnes Medley, mentioned Vinayak’s prophecy in a speech she delivered to Chinese students in 1927. Lala Lajpat Rai published her speech, which also traced the Indian revolutionary movement. Vinayak had translated the speech into Marathi and that too was published in Dainik Maratha . 18 In 1910, Vinayak had rationalized that such a global war would be a golden opportunity for Indians to train themselves militarily and also have their demands met from a weakened Britain. He was disappointed that when war broke out they ‘were prisoners in the Andamans, and as such helpless to make any use of it as we had planned it to do in the long past’. 19
Even as he was trying to strategize how the events could be utilized to India’s advantage came the news of Turkey’s entry into the war. Vinayak was aware of the dangers that came in the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s participation in the war and the communal polarization that it would bring with it. He therefore decided to change the strategy of wanting to upset Britain’s ap
plecart, to one where large-scale recruitment to the army was made to help ‘stave off the invasion of India from the North by the forces of Afghanistan and Turkey’. 20 Vinayak writes:
When I learnt that Turkey had gone over to Germany in that war, I had to change the plans I had made to take advantage of that war for the freedom of India. The siding of Turkey with Germany, as against England, roused all my suspicions about Pan-Islamism and I scented in that move a future danger to India. I discovered that Turkey in this war had made it possible for Germany to stretch her long arm to India and create a critical situation in India itself. This was, indeed, a circumstance favourable to my designs. For then England was bound to grant India all the rights that she would demand, or India herself could wrest them as the result of the exhaustion of England and Germany both, battered as they would be in this terrible combat between two mighty foes, not unlike the fight of two powerful elephants joined in life-and-death struggle with each other. Broken, battered, bleeding and exhausted they will lie on the field with victory to neither, and with full advantage to others who knew to profit by the situation. But I also feared that in this grim struggle between two mighty powers, the Muslims in India might find their devil’s opportunity to invite the Muslim hordes from the North to ravage India and to conquer it, instigated in that effort by the machinations in Russia. Thinking calmly over all these near and remote consequences of the war, I settled my own line of action, and, as the beginning of it, I resolved to send a long letter on the subject to the Government of India. 21
Accordingly, in his petition submitted to the chief commissioner of Andaman Islands in October 1914, Vinayak ‘rejoiced to see the volunteering’ efforts and hence offered to ‘volunteer to do any service in the present War, that the Indian government think fit to demand’. In the same petition, he also requested a general release of ‘all those prisoners who had been convicted for committing political offences in India’. This was being done in many countries, and also in Ireland. He believed that such a step by the Indian government during a time as crucial as this would help secure the loyalty and love of many Indians, several of whom had taken up the armed route like himself. Subtly hinting at the racial hierarchy that was prevalent in letting Indians fight Europeans, Vinayak stated that ‘a thing which one has a right to protect is a thing in which one feels a sense of ownership; and fighting side by side with the other citizens of the Empire, the rising generation of India is sure to feel a sense of equality and therefore of a sincere loyalty to the same’. He concluded his petition by assuaging government fears on such a proposal from his end: ‘If the Government suspect that my real intention in writing all this is only to secure my release, then I beg to submit let me not be released at all, with my exception let all the rest be released, let the volunteer movement go on—and I will rejoice in that as if myself was allowed to play an active part.’ 22
Quite expectedly, the government in their response dated 1 December 1914 rejected his proposals. 23 Vinayak, however, continued to contribute articles and poems to a magazine in Port Blair (that eventually never saw the light of day) that was planning to raise funds for the war.
Meanwhile, on the night of 22 September 1914, the German cruise ship, SMS Emden , under the command of Karl Friedrich Max von Müller, silently entered the dark waters of the Bay of Bengal. The 3600-tonne Emden was on a mission to sink commercial ships. The port of Madras was unguarded, as the British had not expected the war to spill over to Indian shores. Armed with twenty-two guns, the ship dropped anchor barely 2500 metres from the harbour. A volley of shots from the German cruise ship struck the tankers of the Burma Oil Company. In no time, two giant tankers—packed with 5000 tonnes of kerosene oil—went up in flames in the night sky. Next, several buildings were hit—notably, the Madras High Court, the Port Trust, the Boat House of the Madras Sailing Club and the facade of the new National Bank of India. In an attack that lasted for over thirty minutes, with about 130 shells fired from the Emden , a merchant ship on the harbour was struck, five sailors died and thirteen were injured. By the time retaliation could be mobilized, the Emden had sailed away, unharmed by the nine shells fired at it.
There was panic all over Port Blair as intelligence seemed to suggest a similar attack on its shores soon. Never were the islands so militarily unprepared for an onslaught. Within a few days, British warships were sailing on the seas around the Andamans. French submarines and Russian Dreadnoughts touched down at Port Blair. Wireless messages from the islands to Calcutta asking for replenishments of money, arms and rations were intercepted by the Emden that even looted a money-laden ship on its way back to the Andamans. For months there could be no replenishments from Calcutta, Rangoon or Madras. The Cellular Jail authorities feared that in the event of such an attack by the German-aided Indian revolutionaries, all hell would break loose and many of the convicts would turn against them.
The naval officers on board the British and Allied warships occasionally visited the Cellular Jail too. The captain of a Russian submarine, on his visit to the jail, had a long talk with Vinayak and told him that Europe still remembered that he was a prisoner in the Andamans. The rumour was that the Emden was still hovering around the place to level its attack on the Andamans. Port Blair was not of extreme importance, so why then, Vinayak wondered, was it on the radar of attack.
He later received a message that Abhinav Bharat and other revolutionary societies in Europe had contacted the Kaiser of Germany and arranged for a submarine to sail to Port Blair, bombard the jail and release the political prisoners, particularly Vinayak. This is further substantiated in a British government note dated 9 January 1918, which mentioned that ‘he [Vinayak] was one of those Andaman prisoners specially named as to be freed and used in the German plot for an attack on Bengal in December 1915’. 24 The revolutionaries had thereafter planned to rush into Burma and create a violent armed revolution in India, through Burma and Bengal. The Sedition Committee Report of 1918 25 also validated these efforts of the revolutionaries.
Indian revolutionaries such as Lala Har Dayal, Taraknath Das, Mahomed Barkatullah, Chandra Kanta Chakrabarti, Heramba Lal Gupta, Virendranath Chattopadhyay, Dr Moreshwar Govindarao Prabhakar, Dr Abdul Hafiz, Dr Chempakaraman Pillai, Bhupendra Nath Dutt, M.P. Tirumala Acharya, and Jodh Singh Mahajan, among several others, came together to form the Indian National Party in Zurich. They had attached themselves to the German general staff, had their headquarters at 28, Weilandstrasse, Charlottenburg, and had planned a major strike on India. 26 These revolutionaries had actually established quasi-embassies of ‘Independent India’ in Germany, and Heramba Lal Gupta was the Indian representative there.
All the revolutionaries were either already in Germany or America when war broke out. Only two individuals—Kunwar Mahendra Pratap Singh and Harish Chandra—moved from India to join their efforts. Kunwar Pratap was born in a princely family of Mursan in the United Provinces. He was twenty-eight when the war broke out. Leaving India on the pretext of recovering from ill health and for studying the troubled circumstances of the war, Kunwar Pratap made his way to Europe on 12 December 1914. His secretary, Harish Chandra, joined him a week later. In Europe, he met Har Dayal and Virendranath Chattopadhyay; the latter had formed the ‘Berlin Committee’ (Deutsche Verein der Freunde Indien ) or Indian Independence Party to galvanize the Indian liberation efforts. They took Pratap to meet the Kaiser who decorated him with the ‘Order of the Red Eagle’.
Pratap was married into the royal family of Jind and given his influence over the border states of Jind, Patiala and Nabha, the Germans and the revolutionaries knew that this could well be a frontier for invasion into British India. He also established connections with Lenin in Russia. A year later, on 1 December 1915, Kunwar Pratap established the first Provisional Government of India at Kabul as a government-in-exile of Free Hindustan with himself as the president. Barkatullah was named the prime minister and Maulvi Abaidullah Sindhi, the home minister. They declared a united jihad against the British. Kunw
ar Pratap was the figurehead, rallying behind whom Chattopadhyay carried out all the planning and operations.
It is worthwhile to pause and mention the keen interest the Germans took in Indian affairs right from 1907 onward. Of course, on the one hand, this was largely due to the activities of the Indian revolutionaries across Europe. But alongside, German support for anti-British nationalists had become a standard response against Britain by the time of the outbreak of the war. They supported Irish nationalists in an effort to create a revolt that would draw Irishmen from the British ranks, causing Britain to send her vast troops to Ireland instead of the Western Front. Cooperation with Sir Roger Casement in Germany to recruit from Irish Prisoners of War (POWs), attempts to deliver German guns to Irish rebels in Ireland and the German involvement in the Easter Rising of 1916, were all efforts driven by this very intention. 27
Similarly, Germany supported the Boer Revolt in South Africa. German supplies to Boer ensured that the British would not invade German South-west Africa until the second year of the war. Colonel Manie Maritz controlled the Anglo-Afrikaner forces in north-west South Africa and ignored orders to invade German territory. He also aided German units who were probing British positions along the border by not reporting German incursions across the Orange river. Germany supported the production of anti-British literature, committing of political assassinations in Britain and her allies, and attempted to endanger lines of communication through the Suez Canal. 28 The Indian revolutionaries in Europe and America assisted them in these efforts.
Germany’s support to the Muslim resistance against Britain had similar ends, with them supporting Egyptian nationalists and the Turkish sultan’s call for a jihad against Britain. German operatives in the Middle East even claimed that Kaiser Wilhelm II, the German emperor (who was the leader of a mainly Lutheran–Catholic empire) had become a Muslim and was therefore the rightful ally against Britain. However, the British were more effective than the Germans in whipping up Arab nationalism by harnessing Arab hatred for the Ottoman Turks, as the events surrounding ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ showed. 29 While Britain and her allies used Czech, Polish, Arab, Serb and other nationalists against the Central Powers, Germany used Indian, Egyptian, Boer and other revolutionaries against Britain.
Savarkar Page 44
