‘In the people’s voice’: Saklatvala and the Commons
Admittedly, the task of a solitary Communist member in a hostile capitalist House of Commons is a difficult one.
Shapurji Saklatvala
A refusal to register the voices – still less the resistance – of colonial subjects was built into the very structure of colonialism, Saklatvala argued, as he made it his task to voice that resistance in the House of Commons. He would remind his colleagues repeatedly that their discussions on India evaded the fact that the Raj was being resisted fiercely, and was only able to perpetuate itself through intense repression:
We are debating here as if the Bengal ordinances were never promulgated, as if the shooting of Bombay operatives during the cotton strike had never taken place, as if a great strike of thousands of railway workers is not even now going on in the Punjab, with men starving … as if all these things had not happened, as if a great controversy is not raging, not only with the people of India but with people all over the world, whether British Imperialism, whatever its past history, is at all permissible to exist now for the benefit of the citizens of Great Britain herself.53
It is this refusal that enabled the myth of the liberal empire to persist, along with the notion that ‘true’ Indian opinion was ‘moderate’ – an adjective that simply denoted views in accordance with those of the Colonial Office. In an astonishing maiden speech as a Labour MP in the House of Commons on 23 November 1922, Saklatvala brought together a range of themes he would develop and finesse – often at stupendous length – in the seven years he spent there. Foremost among these was the right of ordinary citizens to be heard and represented, rather than have ‘reforms’ imposed from on high. Opening with an apology for not speaking in ‘the traditional manner of the House of Commons’, he insisted with courteous firmness that it betokened no lack of respect for his colleagues if ‘we of the people shall now require that the people’s matters shall be talked in the people’s voice’.54 The speech was long and covered substantial domestic ground, but moved swiftly enough to Saklatvala’s signature project – illuminating the workings of empire as inextricably tied to the workings of capitalism, thus tying together the fates of all those at the mercy of the ‘spread of the cult of private enterprise’.55 It was a theme to which Saklatvala would return over and over again: imperialism was not simply about forcing nations under foreign subjugation and thus violating British values – though it was that too – but also about putting in place systemic inequalities and exploitation that rebounded as damagingly on British workers as on colonial subjects. From this perspective, anti-imperialism – a rejection of the economic workings of empire – was as essential to the health of British society as it was to colonized ones. Colonialism’s ‘seductive tale’ full of ‘glamour’ became an altogether different narrative when it registered high unemployment figures in Britain: ‘It is the growth of this private enterprise, of these large corporations and trusts, these huge industrial concerns in India, which is beginning to tell its tale upon the workers of this country.’56
The constitutive futility and bad faith of colonial ‘reforms’ undertaken on the assumed wishes of colonial subjects, while they were simultaneously rendered ‘dumb’, would become one of Saklatvala’s parliamentary and campaigning preoccupations. It would also underlie his unflagging insistence on the need for constant democratic contact between the working peoples of Britain and subjects of the Empire – necessary not just for the colonized, but in order that the former too might understand their own historical circumstances. In February 1923, with the House debating the Indian States (Protection against Disaffection) Act of 1922, which limited criticism of native rulers of states, Saklatvala offered a fierce critique of the ‘mock Debate’ and even his own Labour colleagues’ attempts to have royal assent withheld from the Bill:
By our very effort to save the Government from rushing into a mad act, we are liable here on the Labour Benches to be surreptitiously drawn into an Imperial policy, as if we wanted Imperialism to be run more correctly than they desire, but though there is such a danger, there is no reality in it.57
There can, Saklatvala repeats, be no mitigated, reformed or ‘democratic’ version of imperialism – a danger even Indian nationalists court when they parlay with the British government, ‘tacitly accepting the right of this country to send a Viceroy at all’.58 The war had made clear that there could be no halfway house, ‘that no country and no nation can now live at peace and in prosperity by crushing other nations economically’.59 The only ‘reforms’ that would make sense would obviate any requirement for imperial rule, and ‘start a scheme by which the workers and peasants of India enjoy the same standard of life as the workers and peasants of Europe and of America’.60 Saklatvala also repeatedly emphasized the paradox of petitioning for reforms in a colonial context: either a country had the right to rule another without being told how to do it, or it had no right to do so; anything else was just ‘little details in the art of governing another nation by a sort of hypnotisation’.61
Saklatvala’s criticisms enshrined the insight that, for all their humanitarian pretensions, reformist approaches to empire were devoid of a genuine universalism which ought to be, by definition, indivisible. If ‘the same principles of life are in every European or Asiatic nation’, then it was constitutively impossible to ‘bestow’ such things as freedom and sovereignty in a ‘gradual’ manner. The routine elision of anticolonial resistance in favour of negotiation and petitioning obscured the simple fact, Saklatvala took pains to point out, that no British man or woman or any person in Europe would ‘tolerate for one day a power so despotic and arbitrary as the Crown … is insisting upon enjoying in India’.62 And so – and this was the point which bore repetition – it was far from a uniquely British habit to resist tyranny; theories emphasizing ineluctable difference in order to argue, for instance, that Asians venerated despotism were themselves, Comrade Sak pronounced damningly, a consequence of ‘Western ignorance’ and self-regard: ‘It is an untruthful statement to say that the people of the East are tolerating high privileges in monarchy and in their ruling castes and classes. It is a false notion. It is the Western conceit; it is the Westerner admiring himself, as though the Westerners have the highest consciousness of human life.’63 Pointing to examples of rebellion by the Chinese, Turks and Persians, the last having ‘overthrown completely one monarch after another’, Saklatvala tore apart fraudulent theories according to which ‘Asiatic people always allow a good deal of latitude to their monarchs’ as enacting a self-serving and willed ‘Western ignorance’ of histories of Asian resistance.64 In fact, he averred with a touch of malice, the opposite was true: ‘No Eastern country would tolerate as the British people have tolerated the humbug and nonsense from the governing classes.’65 Equally, ‘schoolboyish’ British theories of India as a country always ruled by a foreign monarch appeared to overlook the fact that Britain had routinely sourced its own rulers from abroad: ‘A few families supply monarchs to Europe just as a few biscuit factories supply biscuits all over Europe.’66 Saklatvala rejected reformism because it inscribed the right of an imperial ‘higher consciousness’ to extend its generosity and intelligence towards a consciousness figured as less advanced. As a result, it was fundamentally antithetical to the principle of human equality, and led inevitably to double standards even in progressive rhetoric: ‘You call the Indians seditious when they protest against these things, but when you rise in revolt in this country against the ruling classes it is called the spirit of democracy.’67
Saklatvala was unabashedly universalist even as he insisted on the need for historical specificity. Given that ‘human feeling, the human heart and the human mind are just the same in India as here or elsewhere’, he deemed appeals to absolute cultural difference and relativism an elaborate ploy, deployed selectively and self-servingly.68 It enabled the absence of consistent principle from imperial practice – ‘Sometimes one thing is right and at another moment it is wron
g’.69 Such selectivity invariably worked in favour of the ruling imperial class by allowing factories, mines or dockyards to be set up as universally beneficent, but suddenly generating culturally sensitive apologetics when it came to fair working conditions, equal labour rights or minimum wages: ‘We cannot do it, because India is cut up by caste, or because of Hindu and Mohammedan hatreds, or because there are depressed classes.’70 Spreading the benefits of modernity was given as an excuse to colonize, ‘to start cotton factories, jute factories, steel works, engineering works, post offices, railways and telegraphs’; but the same modernity was deemed far too much of an experiment when it becomes the basis of demands for social justice and decent working conditions.71 Saklatvala’s own insights about the need to radicalize both Indian nationalism and the British response to it were shaped by the growing industrial unrest in India. They prompted him to observe trenchantly in parliament that any progress on wages for Indian workers had not so much been ‘granted’ as ‘extorted by the workers fighting inch by inch against you’.72 Such pieces of progressive legislation as existed in India, too, had only come to pass after some nominal powers were extended to Indians. The much-vaunted role of imperial trustee had generally only been exercised with machine guns and soldiers, ‘with bayonets ready’ on behalf of industrialists, in the face of protests like those demanding an end to brutal conditions in the Bengal mines.73 Why, he asked his colleagues pointedly, did those claiming to have gone to India ‘because suttees were being burnt’ have nothing to offer factory women facing an infant mortality rate of 600 to 700 per thousand?74
In 1927, the beneficent delusions, as Saklatvala saw them, of the gradualist camp took the form of a ‘great British blunder’ – the all-white and all-British commission headed by Sir John Simon. As one historian notes: ‘In one stroke the British had achieved the very thing that had eluded Gandhi since the end of non-cooperation – nationalist unity … Boycotts and protests against the Simon Commission’s stately progress across the subcontinent reawakened the excitement of direct action. It also coincided with an extremely alarming level of workers’ strikes and communist and terrorist activity.’75 As Gandhi launched his famous Salt Satyagraha, and finally called for ‘Purna Swaraj’ or ‘Complete Independence’, seeking to regain greater control of a movement split between agitators and constitutionalists, Saklatvala once again bore the mantle of ‘the member for India’ in the House of Commons, and challenged not only its terms of reference but its most fundamental assumptions. The arguments he had made against imperialism and the philosophy of reform on the basis of the right to voice and self-determination now came together in the form of a powerful and sustained polemic:
Just as this country would not allow Chinamen or Germans to write a constitution for this country, it is equally absurd for this country to appoint a Committee to write a constitution for the people of India, on whatever basis. The only point of discussion in this Chamber should be whether this country is still to be a tyrant over India, or whether it will be courageous enough to say ‘no’ and cease to be a tyrant. There is no gradual process about this.76
The only kind of commission that would make any kind of sense would be one whose brief was to ‘investigate as between Imperialism and anti-Imperialism’, one which consisted not of dissembling reformers who traded in ambiguity, but rather of ‘honest imperialists’ and ‘candid, open-minded, outspoken anti-Imperialists’.77
On 17 June 1927, Saklatvala put to the House that the commission’s purpose of looking into reforms while holding India down in subjection was ‘humbug’.78 Once again, he distanced himself from the reformist position of his Labour colleagues, like the Labour MP George Lansbury, noting that none of this was ‘a question of reform, or gradual or quick reform’; what was at stake was ‘a question of the possible relationship between two nations on the basis of one nation deciding what is good for the other’.79 Saklatvala spelled out for his fellow parliamentarians the fundamental paradox of reformism: ‘Between slavery and freedom there is no middle course, and a transition from slavery to freedom can never be attained by gradual measures.’80 Freedom was indivisible: ‘When you make up your minds that there shall be no slavery, then the bond must break, and it must break completely … There is no such thing as gradual freedom.’81 It was a point he would make again and again in the course of the Simon Commission debates, ‘that there is no such thing as Committees and Commissions being appointed, granting stage by stage freedom to conquered nations from their conquerors’.82 The ‘antiquated, savage system of rule of another country and another people’ quite simply had to end.83
It is all nonsense to say that for the benefit of the Indians the British nation has got to be there, and is performing some benevolent action. For goodness sake be honest, and say you are a nation of enterprise, and, in seeking for enterprise to seek your own good, opportunity placed you in a strong position to throttle the country and the people of India … It is no use pretending as though a deputation had come to you from the Indians, as though a section of the moderate opinion of India came to Great Britain and said, ‘Come and protect us; come and give us military protection; come and teach us civil administration’, and so on.84
In nonetheless proposing an amendment later that year which would require Indian legislative consent to the Simon Commission, Saklatvala was making an important philosophical and political point about voice and the recognition of widespread resistance to British rule in India. His amendment would ‘compel the Government to take notice of the existence of the second party to the contract, and not to move in the matter as if they alone count, and India does not exist at all’.85 In the absence of such minimal consent, an already compromised process simply elided the other party which, he noted pointedly, having ‘heard of our one-sided activity … is objecting as strongly as possible and in whatever manner it can against this proposal’.86 This modest amendment was rejected, as was an even more minimal one in which Saklatvala proposed simply that Pandit Motilal Nehru of the Indian National Congress be invited to speak to the House so that it might ‘listen to the voice of India through another Indian and then judge for yourselves whether you are not doing a most criminal thing to-day in appointing this Commission’.87 Due in no small part to Saklatvala’s campaigning leadership, and inspired by the fluttering black flags of the Indian protests, Britain too witnessed demonstrations: ‘To hell with the Simon Commission’ read placards in Hyde Park rallies at which Saklatvala and others spoke.88
It was precisely such attempts to represent the forces of Indian anticolonial resistance in Britain that led to the spiteful personal attacks from parliamentary colleagues on Saklatvala’s own position as a Parsi from a wealthy community who was in no position to speak for Indian interests. Saklatvala was unfazed by the criticism, noting trenchantly that the question of ‘voice’, when it came to colonized people, was in any case tendentiously invoked:
Shapurji Saklatvala speaking to crowds at Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, September 1933
And we are told here that that Commission which will be appointed in India will express the voice of the people of India. A little while ago the Under-Secretary told us that it is impossible for any representative to express the voice of the people of India; but when it is the mill-owners, and the industrialists, and the magnates, and the landlords, and the zemindars, and the princes, then they represent, not only the voice of the people of India, but all that is perfect in democracy, all that can be imaginable in the world as expressing the sorrows and grievances and sufferings of the people.89
It is of some importance that Saklatvala insistently extended the same arguments he made for democracy and self-determination for India to Britain and the British people. The hierarchical division between those who were considered properly representative and those whose voices did not count applied to Britain as well: ‘Anybody who would try to speak of Great Britain as one homogeneous nation is wrong; anybody who is trying to speak of India as a homogeneous nation is wrong. Bo
th the British nation and the Indian are sharply divided into two classes.’90 This is what enabled him to make perfectly clear that he was no more a votary of the Indian capitalist classes than he was of their British counterparts, and to keep on repeating, given his responsibility to his electorate in England, Scotland and Wales, that it was a curse for all, ‘for the workers of Britain, for the workers of India and for the peasants of India, to have these Imperial ties’.91 Most valuably, he made clear that a failure to understand the workings of empire in fact hurt the British working classes: ‘The neglect of the British working-class to study British imperialism in its proper light is leading to the accomplishment of two processes, namely, a rapid Britainising of a capitalist master-class in India and a rapid Indianising of the large working-class in Britain’ – a race to the bottom for both working classes in the long run.92 These were points that had been heralded in different ways by Jones and Congreve in the wake of 1857. Even as he urged a coming together of campaigning interests, writing in the Labour Monthly, Saklatvala reminded the British labour movement that it was really in India that the ugliest face of contemporary capitalism could be seen – a face that would reveal itself at home in due course if not resisted:
Take your worst slums, your most congested lodging-houses and yet you cannot conceive of that broken-down mud hut, to enter which even a stature of 5 feet of humanity has got to nearly double up. There is no other ventilation or opening for light, and there is even nothing to see inside these huts, which are invariably completely unfurnished. I am not talking now of villages; I am talking of large industrial centres like Nagpur and Cawnpore where exist cotton mills more flourishing than most cotton mills in Lancashire, and where several thousand workers are still consigned to these death-traps.93
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