Insurgent Empire
Page 27
The Sense of a Beginning
I have argued that the quarter-century or so spanning the years leading up to the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1884 and the aftermath of the Partition of Bengal in 1905 functioned as a kind of pedagogical watershed for many British liberals and radicals with an interest in the Indian empire. The votaries of imperial tutelage in nationalism also became the beneficiaries of an education in anticolonial resistance. Reformist assumptions were deepened, challenged or unsettled by their encounter with ‘unrest’ and the cultural resources and possibilities it drew on. Back in Britain, these Edwardian political travellers remained a dissident minority, but their interventions in the media and in parliament, and, in the ‘level-headed’ MacDonald’s case, as ‘intermediary between the Indians and the British Government’, were not without effect.217 MacDonald was even invited to take up the presidency of the Indian National Congress in 1911, which he was unable to do because of his wife’s illness.218 Moulton also observes that ‘without persistent Radical prodding the constitutional reforms of 1909 would probably have had fewer liberalizing features’.219 What matters more than the undoubtedly circumscribed impact such dissidents may have had on policy was the insight that figures like Hardie, Nevinson and MacDonald brought back from their travels – that there were imaginative, political and spiritual resources, drawn from South Asian traditions, ‘that might provide meaningful correctives or alternatives’ to those put in place by colonialism or offered by Britain and the West’.220 Hilda Howsin, who did not travel to India, but who wrote in defence of the Indian cause in her 1909 work The Significance of Indian Nationalism, would describe this as the presence of the West not so much teaching as helping regenerate and renew ‘in India the consciousness of her ancient ideals, of her latent powers, of her own traditions of liberty, of justice, of self-ordained constitutionalism’.221 The spectre of ‘self-determination’ now certainly haunted even modest and conditional discussions of a greater share in rule for colonial subjects. As V. H. Rutherford, who also visited India during this period and would become a prominent parliamentary advocate of the Indian nationalist cause, would pointedly observe in his ‘Introductory Note’ to Howsin’s work: ‘Great Britain, the boasted home of Freedom, is face to face with a national and patriotic demand for Freedom on the part of India, and the awful question arises: Will the British people exhibit sufficient moral courage to decide for Freedom, or, driven by a cowardly and selfish Imperialism, plunge deeper into the Dead Sea of Despotism?’222 Interestingly, for Rutherford, the answer to this question would determine not only whether Britain could take credit for tutoring ‘a sublime and bloodless revolution’, but also whether Britons were in fact the ‘slaves’ that the anthem to Britannic rule denied they were.223 Howsin ends her own tract with the ominous warning that, if Britain does not seize the moment to recognize India’s claims, ‘in wresting from our grasp that which is rightfully her due, India will achieve at once her own emancipation and the disgrace and downfall of the British Empire’.224
The moment of Swadeshi, then, needs to be seen here as part of a global moment of questioning European hegemony, one early contributing strand of ‘a geography of political affinity that was resolutely anti-imperial and anti-capitalist’ which emerged in both metropole and colonies in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Dilip Menon notes correctly that, rather than assume Swadeshi met an untimely end by 1910, ‘we need to conceptualize the after-life and indeed the afterglow of Swadeshi in the first two decades of the twentieth century within the worldwide insurgency against empire involving anarchists, socialists, Sinn Feinians in a geography that extended from Mexico to the Phillipines’.225 As others have noted, London would become an important node in this network in the wake of the First World War, functioning as a ‘junction box’ which brought together critics of empire from across the globe. While modulated by the political travels of its imperial sceptics and dissidents, Britain’s education into anticolonialism would also continue at home.
PART II
AGITATIONS AND
ALLIANCES
5
The Interpreter of Insurgencies:
Shapurji Saklatvala and Democratic
Voice in Britain and India
From him British Labour, sometimes a little inclined, I am afraid, to be too parochial, has learned more clearly and definitely than ever before of the real conditions of India’s toiling millions, and of how Britain’s labour standards can never really be secure while there exists the menace of a great mass of underpaid and sweated labour in the East.
Herbert Bryan
As Indian activists travelled, some basing themselves outside India, in the years leading up to the First World War, Swadeshi acquired international dimensions. ‘Activists in London, Paris and New York, led by Shyamji Krishnavarma, Bhikaji Cama and Lajpat Rai, respectively, set up centers for anticolonial agitation and pamphleteering, and they coordinated their efforts with Swadeshi radicalism in India,’ notes Kris Manjapra.1 The Swadeshi movement can itself be situated ‘in the context of growing identification by Indians with a world-wide belt of insurgencies in the first years of the twentieth century to oppose European and American imperial power’.2 At the very beginning of the century, Krishnavarma, who was a friend of Richard Congreve’s and in close contact with Henry Hyndman, had already established the Indian Home Rule Society in London, and the controversial journal the Indian Sociologist (which would be banned for import to and sale in India) to espouse a more radical position than that of the Congress Moderates. Though he was not able to make the substantial inroads into British political discourse or public opinion that he had hoped to, not least because he moved to Paris in 1907, Krishnavarma’s idea was one that would be espoused by larger numbers of colonial intellectuals in the years following the First World War. He believed that ‘interpreters’ of political relations between Britain and its colonies were needed, people who would be able to show, as in the Indian case, ‘how Indians really felt and fared under British rule’.3 Krishnavarma’s writings in the Indian Sociologist also made clear that colonial peoples had to take charge of their own liberation – an idea that would come more prominently into view during the interwar period. His most material contribution, however, may have been the setting up of fellowships to enable young Indians to come and study in London, and India House, in Highgate, which would become a political nerve centre for Indian revolutionary nationalists. Unsurprisingly, Krishnavarma was pilloried in parliament as ‘undesirable and dangerous’, a target for expulsion, quite possibly one of the reasons he felt obliged to leave Britain.4 He had also made contacts with Irish and Egyptian nationalists, and written about those freedom struggles in his journal, again foreshadowing the more extensive anticolonial networks that would emerge in the interwar decades.5 Even as such networks which drew inspiration and strategies from each other sprang up across the globe, creating transnational connections, a ‘wide spectrum of opinion now came to accept the nation-state as the universally normal and legitimate form of the modern state’.6 The espousal of ‘self-determination’ by both Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin (the former drawing on and reframing the latter) only strengthened this position. Where the likes of Congreve, Jones and Blunt had had to make a relatively lonely case for the right to nationhood of non-European polities, with the contradictions and double standards more visible in the years following the Great War, the right to self-determination could be pointed to with greater confidence in making the case against imperial rule. Once it became clear, however, that Wilsonian proclamations did not extend, in practice, to the sovereignty of most non-European peoples, anticolonial nationalism, stiff with disillusionment, emerged ‘as a major force in world affairs’.7 As we shall see, even as nationalists ‘incorporated his principles into their rhetorical arsenal’, the gradualism of Wilson’s view of self-determination for the colonies would also be challenged, along with the idea that colonial rule might also continue with his much-touted ‘consent of t
he governed’.8
If the war had diminished the power and prestige of the major European empires in the eyes of many colonial subjects, an even more seismic event had taken place over its course: the Russian Revolution of 1917. The revolutionary overthrow of an authoritarian monarchy – a project with an explicitly egalitarian programme at its heart – would have a galvanizing influence on resistance to imperial rule in many parts of the world. The Communist International (Comintern) established in 1919 was a significant catalyst in this process, although the vacillations of its position on ‘the Colonial Question’ would sometimes become part of the problem. As we shift now from the early years of the twentieth century to the interwar period, the networks, groupings, solidarities and influences which emerged in the wake of the 1917 ‘October Revolution’ are the mise en scène for the emergence, in Britain, of a more distinct form of anticolonialism. Technological advances in communication and travel brought far more traffic between colonial contexts, as well as between these contexts and various metropolitan centres; this movement, which included labour migrations, was naturally reflected in greater political and intellectual traffic. Certainly, developments in communication ‘allowed colonized subjects around the world unprecedented access to information about conditions in other colonies’.9 As a result, anticolonial activists recognized that ‘the problem of empire was not specific to single nations but instead a global problem requiring global resources and solutions’ – though, at the same time, the national would retain its specificity and power as a legitimizing category for emancipatory aspirations.10 The global or transnational was never a stark alternative to the local or the national; these terms were frequently seen as intertwined, even in a dialectical relationship.11 Global alliances between anticolonial groupings could, however, take on different political complexions. As some historians of ‘the internationalist moment’ between 1917 and the beginning of the Second World War have noted, ‘although in retrospect a number of classificatory labels suggest themselves – socialist, communist, fascist, Pan-Islamic – the sentiment (and it was often a sentiment) was far less differentiated, more amorphous than these labels can describe’.12 The Bolshevik revolution, however, set many such broadly dissident tendencies in dialogue in a ‘qualitatively different’ way.13
Integral to the process was the presence of black and Asian anticolonial intellectuals and campaigners as an active nodal link between resistance movements in the colonies and metropolitan dissidence; many were engaged, in complex ways, with both Marxism and nationalism. As is now well known, in the 1930s London (like Berlin and Paris) became a kind of ‘junction box’ for oppositional black and Asian figures from various parts of the British Empire – not least because, ironically enough, it was possible to articulate criticism of that Empire in the city that was its beating heart without being subjected to repressive colonial anti-sedition legislation. London therefore ‘provided a unique incubator for radical black internationalist discourse’.14 Although some lived in other British cities, it was London which seemed to have made it possible for colonial subjects – writers, intellectuals, labour activists, campaigners and journalists – to encounter each other, and to organize away from more repressive contexts. The internationalism of anticolonialism emerged, as Marc Matera, among others, notes, ‘through the initiative of non-European thinkers and activists’.15 Importantly, these thinkers and activists placed non-European initiative at the centre of their anticolonial thought. With Indian radicals shifting base to Paris and other European capitals, the presence of black (African and Caribbean) radicals and revolutionary leftists became increasingly crucial to putting pressure on and radicalizing groups and individuals broadly belonging to the British left.16 The notion of colonial tutelage, as we have seen, had already been challenged by nineteenth-century insurgencies. In the interwar period there would be an even more explicit rejection of the idea that colonial government was necessary in order that backward races might be taught to govern themselves, not least because of the attempt to rehabilitate colonial rule in the form of ‘mandates’ and ‘trusteeship’.17
A different kind of tutelage, however, would take place in the heart of the metropolis. As Asian and black anticolonial figures collaborated with progressive British critics of empire, they frequently interrogated the latter’s tendency to endorse gradualism and such notions as ‘trusteeship’, guiding ‘backward’ regions to self-government. In the process they not only internationalized British opposition to empire, but also pushed it in more radical directions. The relationships between these anticolonial figures and white British dissidents are an important part of the story, but these were not always a simple matter of affinities or friendship, textured as they were, like the city’s own agonistic encounters, as much by friction, disagreement, tensions and negotiation as by sympathy and goodwill. Black and Asian antagonists of empire served as important conduits of engagement between crises of insurgency in the colonies and British critics of the imperial project, as well as contributing, where possible, to mainstream public discourse and parliamentary forums. As interpreters between British dissidents and the millions who were asserting themselves in far corners of the Empire, they ‘appropriated the practices of liberal civil society – speaking to crowds at political rallies or in Hyde Park, petitioning the Colonial Office, and publishing books, small tracts, and journals – performing citizenship in advance of its formal achievement’.18 They themselves were often simultaneously students and pedagogues, learning from insurgent movements and sharing their knowledge with British domestic dissidents – not always, it must be said, with complete success.
What emerged out of these encounters were cultural and political formations, movements and organizations – the League against Imperialism, with its very active British branch, being only one example – that were substantially dialogical in nature; black, Asian and white British dissidents learned from and shaped each other’s politics while forging alliances that took work on all sides. As we shall see in the following pages, what figures – the most prominent voices were, unsurprisingly, male – such as Shapurji Saklatvala, George Padmore, Claude McKay and C. L. R. James brought to the table, in addition to an uncompromising rejection of gradualism and tutelage, was an insistence on self-representation and self-emancipation. While all these figures were closely engaged with collectivities of resistance, each also had a distinctive personal voice that they impressed upon their work. At all times they sought to bring a sense of the live and urgent collective struggles taking place across national borders and in distant parts of the Empire. All of them launched powerful attacks on paternalism and gradualism, on tutelage and trusteeship, drawing on these struggles to illustrate the futility of these cherished imperial concepts. We begin in this chapter by looking at a very unusual figure, one of the few left-wing radical critics of empire who made it to the House of Commons, and was able to use that position of prominence over seven years to craft powerful attacks on the imperial project from the very heart of Westminster. Even more significantly, Shapurji Saklatvala was able to pick up the links that had been made by earlier critics of empire, such as Ernest Jones and Frederic Harrison, and insist on the necessity of solidarity between those who were at the receiving end of exploitation by capitalism and class in Britain, and those who suffered a racialized manifestation of that exploitation in the colonies. Solidarity, he would explain, was not a matter of proffering charitable feelings, but essential to survival itself – both in the colonies and in the heart of the metropole.
The Impatient Communist
There are not two ways of ruling another nation. There is not a democratic and sympathetic way, and also an unsympathetic way.
Shapurji Saklatvala
On 17 June 1927 a heated debate was underway in the House of Commons on a controversial proposal to send to India a commission that would review the provisions of the India Act of 1919, with a view to possible further limited constitutional reforms. To be headed by the right-leaning Liberal S
ir John Simon, a cautious proponent of gradual changes, the proposed consultative body would have no Indian representative. The Simon Commission’s blatantly racist composition – especially egregious given that it was a body set up to discuss the issue of political representation for Indians – was manifestly inflammatory, and the protests that rocked India a few months later surprised many political observers by their ‘sheer ferocity’.19 When the commissioners did arrive in India, they were greeted by a sea of black flags and placards reading ‘Go back, Simon’. In Britain itself, however, it would be left to the member for North Battersea to voice outright criticism of the commission, in an indignant and characteristically direct parliamentary peroration:
It is absolutely impossible for one country to hold another in subjection and pretend to offer them measures of reform giving them a partnership in the commonwealth. That is all humbug. I see that a new Commission is going to be appointed, and I would like to ask what is going to be the scope of that Commission and its terms of reference. Everybody knows, whether it is put in black and white or not, that the first thing that will be put in the terms of reference is how this country can keep a stranglehold over India.20
A fellow MP had had quite enough. Launching into an ad hominem attack on his prolix colleague’s personal history, George Pilcher, member for Penryn and Falmouth, noted that, while the honourable member for Battersea had ‘made some very cruel and unjustifiable charges against the European population in Bombay’ in relation to poverty, low wages and slums, he himself belonged to the wealthy community ‘most responsible’ for Mumbai’s industrial development.21 It was ‘high time’, Pilcher sneered, for parliament to ‘know who the hon. Member for North Battersea is and what is his relationship with that great industrial community in Bombay’.22 During another fractious debate on the Simon Commission that autumn, it was the turn of the Tory under-secretary of state for India to get personal about his Battersea colleague, who had once again attacked the mission. No one with ‘the remotest knowledge of India’, snarled Earl Winterton, ‘could possibly accept the hon. Gentleman as an exponent of Indian opinion. As far as I know, he has absolutely no authority of any sort. He is repudiated by every responsible organisation in India.’23