Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  Thus, it is not wholly true that, in the decades before 1914, arguments about empire were ‘conducted with minimal attention to the desires or rights of the colonised’.37 It was also the case that debates whose participants sought to conduct themselves without attending to the views and the ‘rightful aspirations’ of the colonized themselves were, in some instances, disrupted and reconfigured by the assertion of those rights and desires.38 When some who were prone to advocating benevolent tutelage in a liberal vein travelled to colonial contexts, witnessed unrest on the ground, and engaged with the militantly disposed, it was they who found themselves being tutored instead. Re-reading the travel memoirs of progressive Edwardians who visited India before the First World War, in the wake of the Swadeshi agitation, this chapter suggests that the seeds of a more sustained and equal engagement between British and Indian critics of empire from the late 1920s onwards were sown during this period of politicized encounters on travels.39 For all that late Victorian and early Edwardian critiques of empire can be read in terms of the familiar liberal posture of insisting that imperial pledges be fulfilled, it is impossible to miss the extent to which ‘the embers of unrest which are always smouldering there’ become ever more salient in the dispatches and memoirs of sympathetic political travellers to colonial contexts.40 Where India in particular was concerned, aspirations to benevolence were tested and disrupted by ‘the undercurrent of bitterness and discontent’ which ran through the last decades of the nineteenth century and which would take radical form as the ‘Swadeshi’ movement gathered pace in the early years of the twentieth century.41 Indeed, even some of those who very much believed in the model of Britain ‘teaching freedom’ and imparting ‘national aspirations’ to its Indian colony would, through their travels in India, come to a less one-sided understanding of how resistance to colonial rule was evolving. It is at this point that the idea of self-emancipation begins to come more determinedly into the frame of discussion, albeit in nascent form, paving the way for the more evolved internationalism which would emerge in the post-war decades. While, as Nicholas Owen suggests, British anti-imperialist work could often be structured unequally, ‘seeking to alter the relationship between the Indians and the raj without much altering the relationship between the emancipating sympathiser, and the emancipated Indian’, these roles were not stable, and in the context of the Swadeshi movement, broadly understood, could also undergo pedagogical reversal with the colonial subject becoming the tutor.42 These moments of disruption and reconfiguration are a necessary part of the longer story of the development of British criticism of empire and metropolitan anticolonialism.

  The Line of Most Resistance: Edwardian Dissenters and the ‘Unrest in India’

  In his important and illuminating work on the British left and India in the context of metropolitan anti-imperialism, Owen makes a series of useful observations about the terms of engagement between British liberals and leftists on the one hand and, on the other, Indian nationalists of different stripes.43 He argues that anti-imperialist work in Britain was constantly hampered by a basic tension ‘between linked-up agitation and sustaining a liberal in office’.44 While it had proved a useful shared tool between British and Indian constitutional campaigners who could call for reforms on the basis of the gap between ‘liberal professions and imperial practices’, liberalism of the sort which drove the British India Committee, for instance, was hamstrung by serious weaknesses. It was inherently asymmetric, tending to ‘collapse into endorsement of Western positions’, and predicated on the idea that ‘Indians had much to learn and little to teach’.45 Its professed values were not ‘commonly owned’ by Indians and Britons, since it was presumed to be taught to the former by the latter. For those on the more radical side of the new movements in India, ‘the need to reverse these flows of authority and power’ was becoming more urgent.46 Once the Labour Party entered the picture in the early years of the twentieth century, more radical figures in the Indian movement, such as Lala Lajpat Rai, were optimistic about the prospects of an alliance with them and other socialists. Owen notes, however, that this prospect ‘had its own difficulties’, including the fact that Swadeshi tactics like boycotts had an impact on British working-class interests, as did Indian protectionism.47 There was also doubt on the Labour side as to whether Congress aspirations were compatible with Labour ideals. Nonetheless, when thirty Labour MPs were returned for the first time in the 1906 election, Keir Hardie ‘promised their “strenuous backing” for the Indian cause’.48 In order to study this cause and the ongoing ‘unrest’ in India, some Labour figures visited India, and Owen argues that their ‘differing perceptions and recommendations’ give us a good sense of Labour responses to the ‘new nationalism’.49 Another traveller of significance was H. W. Nevinson, a well-known journalist who was also a member of the Liberal Club, but not unsympathetic to the Labour cause.

  Taking a slightly different route from Owen, I want to suggest that, in at least some cases, something like a ‘reversal’ of the flows of authority and knowledge took place, if only provisionally and partially. The encounter with the unfamiliar which Owen highlights as a point of difficulty for Labour sympathizers with the Indian cause could also work to push the boundaries of understanding, getting them to think against the grain of colonial paternalism. For these Edwardians who travelled to India, ambivalences about whether the Raj or nationalists would be better for this country were disturbed, we see, not so much by what Homi Bhabha famously termed ‘sly civility’ but by being confronted with the much more active agitation that followed in the wake of the Partition of Bengal in 1905.50 As the retired colonial administrator Henry Cotton would put it, deprecating the British ‘fashion of deriding the Indian movement as a mere schoolboy agitation’:

  There is now a party of Indian nationalists who despair of constitutional agitation, and openly advocate the establishment of an absolutely free and independent form of national government in India. Their aim is to sever the connection between India and England altogether and at the shortest notice. Their object is to propagate a violent anti-British agitation, and, by any means in their power, to make British rule impossible in India.51

  Cotton’s main interest was in ensuring that change was as gradual as possible, or ‘without disturbance’.52 While Owen rightly notes that people like Hardie and Nevinson were puzzled by the relative passivity and acquiescence of many adherents of the Congress, they also encountered severe fractures within that body, and a milieu of turmoil and ferment in which self-reliance and self-emancipation were being theorized and propounded. It is not quite the case that it was only among the ‘Extremists’ that these travellers encountered figures who met with their approval; they were as much disconcerted as illumined by their conversations with the likes of Ghosh and Tilak, whose fierce assertions of self (religious and Hindu) were not always modulated or rendered palatable to Western consumption. These engagements, I suggest, did shape their thinking, and cannot be irrelevant to what Owen describes as the ‘more confrontational approach in Parliament’ taken by Hardie and others upon their return to England. Tellingly, when presented with an address by Tilak during his tour, Hardie replied: ‘My sympathies were always with India, but now they’ve grown a hundredfold.’53

  Theorizing Self-Rule

  What we have to reckon with, especially in Bengal, is the revolt of the younger generation, and this revolt draws its inspiration from religious and philosophical sources which no measures merely political, either of repression or of conciliation, can reach.

  Valentine Chirol, Indian Unrest

  As a consequence, throughout Bengal, there were meetings that proclaimed that this partition was wrong, improper, and altogether despotic, and contrary to the interests of the people.

  H. M. Hyndman, The Unrest in India

  Although the twentieth century had begun with the Congress still in the hands of reformist campaigners such as Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Sir William Wedderburn, the Swadeshi movement in Bengal threw up
a decisive ideological fault line within the Congress, signalling the first turn to radicalizing and consolidating anticolonial resistance in the Indian subcontinent. The bitterly opposed Partition of Bengal in 1905, aimed at diffusing growing militancy in the region, resulted instead in the emergence of the figure of the ‘Extremist’ whose militant agitational tactics were the counterfoil to the more traditional petitioning mode of those deemed ‘Moderate’. Swadeshi translates to ‘of one’s own country’, the swa- derived from the Sanskrit prefix denoting ‘self’. While the term ‘self-emancipation’ would not explicitly appear on the rhetorical horizon of British anti-colonialism until the 1930s, the idea that the governed would claim the reins of governance for themselves – and not just wait for them to be offered – would from this point on become an increasingly significant dimension of critiques of empire in Britain. With its rhetoric of non-cooperation and people’s rule (as opposed to the Congress’s more traditional requests for a larger share in government), Swadeshi set the stage for anticolonialism in India to grow into the mass movement that it would fully become under Gandhi’s canny tutelage in the interwar period. The cognate notion of swaraj, or ‘self-rule’, which translates as ‘self-government’, could either be deployed to suggest self-government as British subjects or, as in Tilak’s famous interpretation, point to the more radical version of full independence from colonial rule.54

  By the time the distinctly authoritarian viceroy, George Curzon, undertook the fateful division of Bengal that would set off a whole new chain of events, ‘memories of rougher times had grown dim’.55 Curzon had taken over from the more liberal Ripon, determined not to yield to pressure from below: ‘If we are weak enough to yield to their clamour now, we shall not be able to dismember or reduce Bengal again; and you will be cementing and solidifying, on the eastern flank of India, a force already formidable, and certain to be a source of increasing trouble in the future.’56 In the Partition of Bengal that was announced in late 1903 and effected in mid 1905, there had admittedly been ‘an unfortunate disregard for local sentiment and public opinion’, Lord Minto would concede some years later, when he took over as viceroy from Lord Curzon.57 Nonetheless, given the indisputable existence of political agitation, he too would agree that the Partition was a wise move – one that would lower the volume of militant voices and contain ‘the growing power of a population with great intellectual gifts and a talent for making itself heard’.58 He could not have been more wrong. As the historian Sumit Sarkar – whose book on the Swadeshi movement in Bengal remains a foundational work on the subject – notes, ‘with startling rapidity after July 1905, the movement broke away from all traditional moorings, developed new techniques of militant action, and broadened into a struggle for swaraj’, or self-rule.59 Aware that the Indian peasantry and poor ‘could not be mobilised by appeals couched in the language of Western progressives’, militants sought to develop an indigenous, if mainly Hindu and manifestly upper-caste, grammar of resistance, ‘expressed in an enormous variety of causes and campaigns, in opposition to rent rises, in defence of customary rights and religious observances, and so forth’, and deploying methods such as demonstration, boycott and ‘the attempt to enforce collective action through the use of religious sanctions’.60 As the administrations in East Bengal and the Punjab responded with repressive ferocity, violence erupted across these regions; 1907 also marked, of course, the fiftieth anniversary of the 1857 uprising. Although the stated objectives of the division of territory were administrative, it is clear that other, more political motives were also at work, including the need to undermine militancy and exploit religious-communal divisions by establishing separate Muslim-majority areas. The resistance to the division was spun by colonial administrators as merely the attempts of various elite interest groups to protect their own zones of power and influence. In fact, as Keir Hardie would also note, disquiet was far more widespread, the partition ‘coming as a kind of last straw in a long series of humiliations’ accompanied by entrenched governmental indifference to modest requests.61 Moreover, the much-disliked Curzon had, in the space of a few short years, managed to put in place legislation curbing press freedom and tightening imperial control over education.

  While ideas of self-assertion and self-reliance were not, as we have seen, absent in British India in the late nineteenth century, by the early twentieth century a series of events had won them wider adherence and, importantly, a pan-Asiatic frame of reference – particularly through Japan’s military victory over Russia in 1905, and the Chinese boycott of American goods in response to discriminatory immigration laws. Theorists of Swadeshi like Aurobindo Ghose and Bipin Chandra Pal explicitly referenced these events in calling for constructive work which would ignore colonial bureaucracy, and for full-blown passive resistance which would ‘refuse to render any voluntary and honorary service to the government’; this extended to an economic, judicial and educational boycott.62 The revolution in Egypt, as well as the Mahdi uprising in the Sudan in the mid 1880s, had demonstrated the power of unifying appeals to faith, and this would inspire what was, in the case of Swadeshi, Hindu revivalism. The Swadeshi movement constructed itself very centrally around the Sanskritic idea of atmashakti, which is generally given the loose translation of ‘soul force’ – a concept that would be central to Gandhi’s later theorizing of swaraj as freedom. Forging a rhetoric of belonging and pride in cultural heritage, Hindu revivalism, which had begun to gather force towards the end of the nineteenth century, ‘served as a major stimulus for radicalism even while creating serious problems for the future’ by further alienating Muslims.63 Muslims were not entirely absent from Swadeshi activism, however, and some played an important part in it even as, over time, its militantly Hindu rhetoric exacerbated communal divisions.64 Despite the existence of Muslim agitators like Liaqat Husain, who was active in organizing strikes, fundraising and boycotts, and the support of journals like the Mussulman, Swadeshi was hamstrung by its Hindu revivalism, as Rabindranath Tagore would make clear in his famous The Home and the World, an early and powerful critique of the limitations of nationalism.65 This context of constructing the Indian national ‘self’ by deploying some of the resources of Hinduism was the one that would be encountered by three progressive Edwardians with different political affiliations – the journalist Henry Nevinson, and the Labour politicians James Keir Hardie and Ramsey MacDonald – when they arrived to study the ‘unrest in India’; this would necessarily involve an engagement with Hinduism.

  ‘The limits of endurance’: Keir Hardie’s Seditious Journey

  In November 1907, Aurobindo Ghose wrote a piece that began in characteristically implacable fashion, noting that, while quite happy to hear tales about Russian tyranny, Englishmen were utterly impervious to hearing ‘home truths about England’s dominion in Hindusthan’.66 There were, he believed, a few exceptions to this rule, ‘some truly noble men who hold humanity far higher than Imperialism’, but who are either refused a hearing or ‘contemptuously ignored’ in the councils of the Empire.67 Yet one voice now had ‘the ear of the civilised world’, breaking through the unspoken moratorium: that of the Labour politician James Keir Hardie. He was, therefore, received with Anglo-Indian dismay:

  The hasty, hideous, indecent, savage yell that has been raised by the whole of the English Press against Mr Keir Hardie because he has dared to tell the truth about the present situation in this country is a striking confirmation of what we have said above … They are bursting with rage because their long and unscrupulously kept-up fiction of a just and benevolent Indian rule has been exposed in all its ugliness at last by one who happens to be an Englishman (Oh the sting of it!) and an Englishman of power and prestige too, who easily has the ear of the civilised world.68

  Aurobindo was referring to the stir caused in Britain by statements made by Hardie, the working-class Scot who was one of the founders of the Labour Party, in the wake of his visit to India in 1907; the Times reported him as ‘Fostering Indian Sedition’.69 Long as
sociated with a small group of more radical voices on India in parliament, Hardie had already garnered some notoriety for his views on India. In July 1906, coached by the visiting Congress leader, G. K. Gokhale, Hardie had made a speech in the House of Commons attacking conditions in the Raj, from the rising death rate to low wages in textile factories and the exclusion of Indians from administrative posts. When he finally visited India in 1907, the Labour leader toured Bengal under the guidance of Tilak and other Swadeshi campaigners, giving supportive speeches to their followers. One biographer notes: ‘Exactly what he said in his speeches there was the subject of fierce dispute; but there is little doubt that he gave every encouragement to the Congress movement’s campaign for Indian home rule.’70 Hardie was blamed for the outbreak of riots, and there were calls for him to be deported, leading Vladimir Lenin to comment happily that ‘the whole of the English bourgeois press raised a howl against the “rebel” ’.71 It is in this uproar that Aurobindo finds vindication for his own uncompromising stance against mendicancy, noting that the attempts to drown out Hardie’s ‘disengaged’ voice make clear that ‘England will not give us anything unless we can force her to her knees, this is the only moral to which the present outrageous clamour of the English Press points’.72