In parliament, questions about the length of the trial, its unsound basis, and the treatment of prisoners were routinely raised by many MPs, including Fenner Brockway, Joseph Kenworthy, Philip Oliver, Peter Freeman, David Kirkwood and John Kinley. Some suggested that it was the labour movement as a whole that was being attacked in the name of fighting global communism.20 Certainly, as Hutchinson – whose mother, Mary Knight, a British communist, campaigned vigorously on behalf of the prisoners – noted with satisfaction, ‘statesmen in foreign countries made sarcastic comments on British justice in theory and in practice … and the much-vaunted traditions of British justice were shown to be hollow and public opinion was alarmed’.21 The Independent Labour Party also voiced bitter parliamentary criticism of the trials through Brockway, while condemnatory statements were issued by a diverse range of public figures. As Harold Laski would note in his preface to Hutchinson’s memoir, the Meerut prosecution pointed to the continuity of imperialist repression across party lines, since ‘the responsibility for undertaking it lies at the door of a Tory viceroy, that for its continuance … to a Socialist Secretary of State’, with the greater moral culpability upon the latter for betrayal of principles.22 Protest resolutions flooded the India Office, particularly once the draconian sentences – years of imprisonment and transportation for most of the defendants – were announced in January 1933. The Daily Herald described the trial process itself as ‘one of the greatest judicial scandals in the history of the Empire’, while the Manchester Guardian, though typically scornful of the far-left politics of the defendants themselves, noted the tenuous nature of the evidence presented for the existence of a conspiracy, and deemed the affair ‘a long-drawn scandal of British justice in India’.23 Even as it deprecated the fact that this extended ‘unpleasant episode in the history of British justice’ was ‘giving Communism an unexampled advertisement’, it was, the liberal newspaper also opined, ‘an evil thing to prosecute men for their opinions’ – or to be seen to be doing so.24 A critical statement calling for justice for the prisoners was issued by a joint council representing the Trades Union Congress, the Labour Party and the Parliamentary Labour Party.25 Indeed, the pressure of British public opinion – particularly after the sentences ‘raised a storm of protest’ in both India and Britain – did eventually lead to the sentences being reduced considerably.26 As one historian of the episode has remarked, the Meerut Conspiracy Case has no parallel in Indian history; given the relative anonymity of the defendants, ‘the extraordinary amount of international attention which the case received puts it into a special category of historical significance’.27 Meerut, much like the Scottsboro case of a few years before, and through overlapping activist circuits, ‘became a global passion among the committed, the presence of three Englishmen among the defendants eliciting special curiosity and sympathy among anticolonialists in the metropole’.28
The moment of Meerut also takes on significance as yet another colonial juridical crisis – arguably the first in the twentieth century – which provided a means for the voices of anticolonial resistance, this time also inflected by international communism and communist internationalism, to be heard in the British public sphere. Developments in travel and communication technologies enabled both the swift dissemination of news and propaganda and actual communication links between metropolitan and colonial activists. The letter in the Manchester Guardian co-signed by H. G. Wells, Harold Laski, R. H. Tawney and Walter Walsh had urged that the prisoners be given the ‘elementary rights of British citizens on trial’, such as bail and trial by jury, and, equally significantly, suggested that the views of ‘the leaders of Indian political opinion’, calling for amnesty, be heeded.29 Such views – and the more militant ones of other sections of the Indian political spectrum – were, indeed, registering on the British political scene. In producing its pamphlets, the Meerut campaign deliberately used the Meerut prisoners’ individual testimonies, less perhaps to ‘humanize’ the defendants through eliciting sympathy, as Pennybacker argues, than to allow for more radical anticolonial voices in India to emerge in the British public sphere on their own terms, making claims upon human solidarity.30 The articulate and defiant statements of the Meerut accused became central to the British Meerut Defence Committee as voices that could and would represent themselves. These were voices and views that also resisted cooptation by the more acceptable face of nationalism speciously lauded by the Meerut prosecutors. As Gandhi toured England during the Second Round Table talks in 1931, to considerable adulation in liberal circles, voices from Meerut also made clear that politics in India went beyond the remit of Gandhian nationalism, and that other questions were being asked, not just of the colonial government, but also of the Indian capitalists, landlords, upper castes and political elites. Once again, it became clear that the colonized, a heterogeneous group, were in fact capable of representing themselves robustly in more than one sense.
One of the more audacious such acts of self-representation was that undertaken by Shaukat Usmani, the journalist (he edited an Urdu working-class paper) and trade unionist who, from his jail cell in Meerut, contested British elections twice as a candidate for the Communist Party of Great Britain – once in Spen Valley in 1929 against John Simon himself, and once in St Pancras in 1931 (where he won 75,000 votes). Like Saklatvala, Usmani sought to make himself a presence in the British public sphere with the help of the CPGB, drawing attention to both British misrule in India and the injustices of the Meerut case. Sharp and cogent, Usmani’s statement, an explicit defence of communism, was the first extracted and included in a section called ‘The Prisoners’ Reply’ in The Meerut Prisoners and the Charge against Them, a pamphlet published by the Defence Committee that carried extensive extracts from the prisoners’ defence statements.31 His electrifying inaugural gesture queried the very terms of the charge of attempting to undermine the ‘sovereignty’ of the king-emperor:
There is nothing like a sovereign under the sovereignty of capitalism. The sovereignty of the British Empire to-day belongs to the omnipotent Big Five (Banks), who not only forge methods of exploitation in India but are as ruthless in Britain, too. The British working class, which is our ally, is as much their victim as the Colonial peoples.32
If there was any ‘conspiracy’, Usmani averred, it was that instigated by finance capital ‘against the rising forces of revolution throughout the colonial world’, which included those in China, Indonesia, Iraq, Syria and Morocco.33 Dharni Goswami, a member of the Workers and Peasants Party (WPP), was another of the Meerut accused who evinced a remarkable defiance of tone in his defence statement.34 He had become a member of the party, he notes, almost scornfully, for self-evident reasons: ‘the WPP is the only party in India that stands for complete independence from British Imperialism and the thorough democratisation of India based on economic and social emancipation and political freedom of men and women’.35 Goswami’s experience as an organizer with jute workers gave him unique insight into an industry that had begun as a heavily colonial enterprise, but now saw Indian capitalists also ‘appropriate the huge profit that comes out of this industry’, at the expense of the sweated and the starving.36 While refusing to distance himself from the work he himself had done, for instance, in organizing a Scavengers Union, Goswami pointed out that collective resistance also had been undertaken independently of him and other labour organizers, when its members went on strike without waiting for a formal decision. This was one instance among many of the oppressed castes undertaking resistance independently of both Gandhi and the Communist Party, which was itself heavily populated by members of the dominant castes, like Goswami himself.37 His point was partly that the resistance was organic and self-sustaining even in the face of constant repression and punitive action; he and other communists only sought to give it organizational form.
One of the most striking aspects of the Meerut detainees’ statements is the combination of their willingness to criticize both imperialism and the limits of the mainstream nationa
list response to it. While the language of Marxism explicitly facilitates and anchors such analysis, one defendant noted that it was the experience of being a colonial subject that had led him to Marxism, rather than the other way around. ‘It was my studies and experiences and the objective conditions in a colonial country that made me a Communist by conviction’, insisted Gopal Chandra Basah of the Bengal Textile Union, a youth organizer, ‘and I am sure that any radical young man given the same chances and conditions would develop similarly’.38 In other words, in the context of imperialism’s constitutive entanglement with capitalism, Marxism and communism provided a common global language in which both the identification of oppressive structures and liberation from them could be articulated. Another organizer in the jute industry, R. R. Mitra, announced that he saw no contradiction in claiming to be at once an internationalist and a nationalist, the latter as a necessary vehicle of anticolonialism: ‘As an internationalist I stand for a free federation of all the peoples of the earth, but that cannot be achieved unless all are freed from the yoke of subjection and all stand on a free and equal footing.’39 The point of the conspiracy charges, Mitra averred quite rightly, was not so much to remove thirty-one individuals from the field of action as ‘reading a lesson to all who would follow the line of the mass revolutionary struggle in future’.40 His point was further fleshed out by Gopendra Chakravarty, an official of the East India Railway Union, who noted that the conspiracy case mounted by the British government of India was also a warning shot across the bow of the bourgeois nationalists about ‘the dangers of appealing to the masses, owing to the risk it involved of letting loose the class struggle’.41 ‘Red Scares’, he observed shrewdly, had already shown their electoral utility in Britain. Meanwhile, Gautam Adhikari, a scientist by training, in fierce words that would be repeatedly cited in pamphlets, quite simply turned the charges against the imperial government, boldly accusing the prosecution benches of representing class crimes:
Who are the social criminals? I ask the bloodthirsty imperialists who carried fire and sword through entire continents, who have instituted a colonial régime of blood and terror, who have reduced the toiling millions of these continents to abject poverty, intolerable slavery and are threatening them with mass extinction as a people; or the Communists, who are out to mobilise the revolutionary energies of the toiling masses of the whole world and hurl it against this wretched system based on ruthless oppression and brutal exploitation, smash it and create in its place a new one … ?42
Such analysis – and the repeated insistence that the enemy was British finance-capital rather than the British people – enabled the Meerut campaign in Britain to make connections between an apparent crisis of Britishness and Britain’s own traditions of vernacular radicalism. It was a point, as we have seen, that Saklatvala had repeatedly emphasized in trying to forge common cause between British and Indian labour. ‘The complaint is essentially that of “incitement of antagonism between capital and labour,” a phrase carrying us back to the old anti-combination laws in Britain 100 years ago’, the preface to The Meerut Prisoners and the Charge against Them pointed out, again stressing that the attack was a more general one against all anti-capitalist organizing.43
Picking up on these connections, in Meerut, a Workers Theatre Movement play that toured Britain in 1932, the players-as-prisoners warn their audience: ‘Those who have jailed the workers in India are the men who cut your wages and enforce the Means Test in Britain.’44 The play itself is perhaps, like much agitprop, more powerful in the performance than read, taking the form of a mass declamation. What is striking in the directions for actors is the emphasis on voice as the vehicle for expressing solidarity, also symbolized by extended ‘hands across the sea’: ‘Inflection of the voice is most important.’45 The guidelines are, perhaps somewhat predictably, gendered, the emphasis on muscularity: ‘Pretty girlish voices must be cut right out, but a strong feminine voice vibrating with the conviction of the message can be just as effective as a masculine one.’46 The directions are specific as to when whispers, staccatos, mass speaking, contrasts, inflections and crescendos are to be deployed. ‘This sketch offers most unusual opportunities for voice-acting’, the directions note, going on to suggest: ‘Get the utmost out of words – these and your faces are your only means of expression.’47 Of the play itself, which began with the shout, ‘Murder! Murder! MURDER! MURDER!’, one actor recalled: ‘At the time, it was quite the most exciting bit of theatre I had ever seen and, looking back over the fifty years that have slipped by since then, I find it still has the power to move and excite me.’48 With a handful of actors using ‘poles’ dexterously – vertically and horizontally – to represent prison bars, the play also relied on powerful visuals. The attempt was to offer a swift education in ideologies of colonial rule and labour exploitation: ‘They foster our religious differences in order to divide us, so that they can extract their millions yearly in profits and taxation … They tell you we are religious maniacs.’ In a sign of the official jitters occasioned by the Meerut protests in Britain, performances of the play, which lasted only five or six minutes, often commanded a strong police presence, and some were proscribed entirely.
The most powerful words on Meerut from the camp of Western critics of imperialism eventually came from the pen of French antifascist writer and Gandhi’s biographer Romain Rolland, who wrote a short polemic for the British Meerut campaign after draconian jail and transportation sentences were announced for the majority of the Meerut convicts in 1932.49 For Rolland, who was clearly influenced by the Meerut testimonies, the moment had universal import; the protests around the Meerut trials and sentences presented a challenge to those who ‘renounce the struggle in advance’ by contenting themselves with ‘the miserable excuse for not acting, that what is has always been and that one cannot change it’.50 While oppression may always have been a feature of human life, the last half-century had also been unique in the ‘degree of deliberate organisation’ with which nine-tenths of humanity was being crushed by the ‘imperialism of money’: ‘Menaced by the trembling of the capitalist economy, which in its difficulties plunges to madly destructive courses, shaken by the revolts which to-day like earthquakes stir the enslaved peoples, this hideous oppression manifests itself yet more brutally, employing to an extent and with a rigour unexampled, the most monstrous means … By terror it was established and is maintained.’51
If British India offered an exemplar of most ‘gigantic proportions’, the phenomenon Rolland described extended well beyond it and Britain to the Dutch Indies and French Indo-china – and that was not counting Italian, Belgian, Portuguese and US imperialism, not to mention the instances of South Africa, South America and Japan. What had changed with Meerut? As long as the oppressed responded to exploitation ‘only by intermittent and piecemeal spasms of revolt’, coercion was able to prevail ‘swiftly and noiselessly’.52 Gandhi’s large-scale organization of the masses saw the colonial system begin ‘to lose all measure of restraint’, but it was reassured nonetheless by the way in which ‘the genius of one man’ was able to hold back the wave.53 But with the moment of Meerut, in which the rebellion of labour exceeded the ‘magnanimous opposition’ of those like Gandhi, Rolland contended, a ‘new era has opened in the revolt of the oppressed world’, met of course by repression, ‘immediate and implacable’.54 Rolland’s analysis here, startling in some ways coming from so well-known a partisan of Gandhi, was explicitly inflected by that of prominent Meerut prisoner R. S. Nimbkar, whom he cites on the English brand of liberalism, as ‘not only powerless to repair the verdict’ but ‘incapable of conceiving either the illegal proceedings which have become current or the exceptional laws which the imperialist terrorism of Great Britain applies to six-sevenths of the people of its Empire, to one-sixth of the population of the world’.55
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