Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  54. See Stanley A. Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India (Berkeley/Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1962), p. 191.

  55. Thompson and Garratt, Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule, p. 541.

  56. Viceroy Curzon, cited in Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973), p. 20.

  57. Ibid.

  58. Ibid.

  59. Ibid., p. 21.

  60. Owen, The British Left and India, p. 83.

  61. Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement, p. 23.

  62. B. C. Pal, cited in ibid., p. 68.

  63. Ibid., 28.

  64. Sarkar notes that what is more surprising than the eventual alienation of Muslims is the level of their participation. Mosques offered prayers against partition, and declarations of fraternity and shared national unity were frequently made. A practice appears to have developed of sending out agitators in pairs consisting of a Hindu and a Muslim. The Muslim folk poet Mofiuddin Bayati composed Swadeshi songs. Ibid., pp. 425–6. See Chapter 8, below, for an extended account of the Muslim role in Swadeshi.

  65. Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World, transl. Surendranath Tagore (London: Penguin, 1985).

  66. Aurobindo Ghose, ‘English Democracy Shown Up’, in Haridas Mukherjee and Uma Mukherjee, Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought in Indian Politics, 2nd edn (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1997), p. 178.

  67. Ibid., p. 179.

  68. Ibid.

  69. Kenneth O. Morgan, Keir Hardie: Radical and Socialist (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1975), p. 192.

  70. Ibid.

  71. Cited in ibid., p. 194.

  72. Ghose, ‘English Democracy Shown Up’, p. 180, emphasis in original.

  73. Morgan, Keir Hardie, p. 194.

  74. Hardie, India, p. 42.

  75. Ibid., p. 75.

  76. Ibid., p. 46.

  77. Ibid., p. 46. The plausible suggestion that Hardie may have been misled with regard to the question of loyalty is Jonathan Hyslop’s. See his ‘The World Voyage of James Keir Hardie: Indian Nationalism, Zulu Insurgency and the British Labour Diaspora 1907–1908’, Journal of Global History 1: 3 (November 2006), pp. 343–62.

  78. Hardie, India, p. 46.

  79. Ibid., p. 72.

  80. Ibid., p. 106.

  81. Ibid., p. 88.

  82. Hyslop, ‘World Voyage’, p. 348.

  83. Hardie, India, pp. 125, 120.

  84. Ibid., p. 139.

  85. Morgan, Keir Hardie, p. 193.

  86. Hardie, India, p. 131; William Stewart, J. Keir Hardie: A Biography (London: National Labour Press, 1921), p. 264.

  87. Hyslop, ‘World Voyage’, pp. 352–3.

  88. Theodore L. Shay, The Legacy of the Lokamanya: The Political Philosophy of Bal Gangadhar Tilak (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 103.

  89. Cited in D. V. Tahmankar, Lokamanya Tilak (London: John Murray, 1956), p. 136.

  90. Bal Gangadhar, Tilak, ‘Tenets of the New Party’ in Bal Gangadhar Tilak: His Writings and Speeches. Appreciation by Babu Aurobindo Ghose, 3rd edn (Madras: Ganesh and Co., 1922), p. 56.

  91. Ibid., p. 61.

  92. Ibid., p. 65.

  93. Ibid.

  94. Ibid., p. 60.

  95. Tilak, ‘The Shivaji Festival’, in Tilak: His Writings and Speeches, p. 77.

  96. Tilak, ‘Tenets of the New Party’, p. 63.

  97. Henry W. Nevinson, More Changes, More Chances (London: Nisbet, 1925), p. 226.

  98. Cited in Angela V. John, War, Journalism and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century: The Life and Times of Henry W. Nevinson (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), p. 105.

  99. Henry W. Nevinson, The New Spirit in India (London: Harper, 1908).

  100. John, War, Journalism and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century, p. 119.

  101. Owen, British Left and India, p. 87.

  102. Nevinson, New Spirit of India, p. 122.

  103. Ibid., p. 43.

  104. For a brief but heartfelt tribute to their friendship, see E. M. Forster, ‘ “We Speak to India”: “Some Books” – A Backward Glance over 1941’, broadcast on 10 December 1941, in The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2008), pp. 155–6.

  105. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (London: Penguin, 2015 [1924]), p. 190, my emphasis.

  106. Benita Parry, ‘Materiality and Mystification in “A Passage to India” ’, in Novel: A Forum on Fiction 31: 2 (Spring 1998), p. 185.

  107. Ibid., p. 180.

  108. Ibid., p. 177.

  109. Ibid., p. 191.

  110. Nevinson, New Spirit of India, p. 66.

  111. Tilak, cited in ibid., p. 72.

  112. Cited ibid., p. 74.

  113. Ibid., p. 75.

  114. Ibid., p. 76.

  115. Ibid., p. 69.

  116. Ibid., p. 74.

  117. Ibid., p. 126.

  118. Ibid., pp. 128–9.

  119. Ibid., p. 131.

  120. Ibid., p. 132.

  121. Ibid., pp. 221–2.

  122. Ibid., p. 223.

  123. Cited in ibid., pp. 223, 221.

  124. Ibid., p. 226.

  125. Ibid.

  126. Aurobindo Ghose, ‘Look on This Picture, Then on That’, in Mukherjee and Mukherjee, Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought, p. 51.

  127. Aurobindo Ghose, ‘The New Thought: Nationalism Not Extremism’, in Mukherjee and Mukherjee, Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought, p. 19.

  128. Ibid., pp. 20, 22.

  129. Aurobindo Ghose, ‘The New Thought: Shall India be Free? National Development and Foreign Rule’, in Mukherjee and Mukherjee, Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought, p.25.

  130. Aurobindo Ghose, ‘The Man of the Past and the Man of the Future’, in Mukherjee and Mukherjee, Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought, p. 6.

  131. Aurobindo Ghose, ‘English Obduracy and Its Reason’, in Mukher-jee and Mukherjee, Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought, p. 98.

  132. Aurobindo Ghose, ‘Morleyism Analysed’, in Mukherjee and Mukherjee, Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought, p. 94.

  133. Aurobindo Ghose, ‘English Obduracy’, in Mukherjee and Mukherjee, Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought, p. 100.

  134. Ibid.

  135. Aurobindo Ghose, ‘The New Thought: Shall India be Free?’, p. 33.

  136. Ibid., p. 35.

  137. Aurobindo Ghose, ‘Look on This Picture’, p. 52.

  138. Ibid., 52.

  139. Aurobindo, ‘The Old Year’, in Mukherjee and Mukherjee, Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought, pp. 38, 36.

  140. Aurobindo, ‘Graduated Boycott’, in Mukherjee and Mukherjee, Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought, p. 46.

  141. Aurobindo, ‘Asiatic Democracy’, in Mukherjee and Mukherjee, Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought, p. 252.

  142. Aurobindo, ‘Our Rulers and Boycott’, in Mukherjee and Mukherjee, Sri Aurobindo and the New Thought, p. 123.

  143. Ibid.

  144. Forster, ‘ “We Speak to India” ’, p. 155; Nevinson, New Spirit of India, p. 159.

  145. Nevinson, New Spirit of India, p. 153.

  146. Ibid.

  147. Ibid., p. 155.

  148. Ibid., p. 156.

  149. Ibid.

  150. Ibid.

  151. Ibid., p. 159.

  152. Ibid., p. 157.

  153. Ibid., p. 159.

  154. Ibid.

  155. Nevinson, More Changes, More Chances, p. 272.

  156. Nevinson, New Spirit of India, p. 188.

  157. Owen, British Left and India, p. 89.

  158. Ibid.

  159. Nevinson, New Spirit of India, pp. 261–2.

  160. Ibid., p. 320.

  161. Ibid., p. 323.

  162. Ibid.

  163. Ibid., pp. 326–7.

  164. Ibid., p. 327.

  165. Ibid., p. 329.

  166. Ibid., p. 34.

  167. Owen, British Left and India,
p. 89.

  168. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 28.

  169. Nevinson, New Spirit of India, p. 330.

  170. Ibid., pp. 310, 328.

  171. Ibid., p. 321.

  172. Ibid., p. 329.

  173. Ibid., p. 331.

  174. Ibid., p. 335.

  175. Ibid.

  176. Henry W. Nevinson, ‘India’s Coral Strand’, Saturday Review of Literature, New York, 1924, reprinted in Philip Gardner, ed., E. M Forster: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 256–7.

  177. Ibid., p. 257.

  178. John, War, Journalism and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century, p. 112.

  179. Aurobindo Ghose, ‘Mr Macdonald’s Visit’, Karmayogin: A Weekly Review, 27 November 1909, available at aurobindo.ru.

  180. Peter Cain writes: ‘Despite his close association with Hobson and Robertson through the Rainbow Circle, there is no trace of any attempt to link together a radical analysis of the domestic economy with imperialism; which meant, in effect, that his socialism was a good deal vaguer than their radical liberalism in pointing out the defects of capitalism’. Peter Cain, ‘Introduction’, in J. Ramsay MacDonald, Labour and the Empire (London: Routledge, 1998), p. vi.

  181. J. Ramsay MacDonald, The Awakening of India (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), pp. 211, 301.

  182. Ibid., p. 119.

  183. Ibid., p. 7.

  184. Owen, British Left and India, p. 89.

  185. MacDonald, Awakening of India, p. 297.

  186. Ibid., pp. 65, 99.

  187. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), 214.

  188. MacDonald, Awakening of India, p. 105.

  189. Ibid., p. 215.

  190. Ibid., p. 193.

  191. Ibid., p. 121.

  192. Owen, British Left and India, p. 90.

  193. Macdonald, Awakening of India, p. 100.

  194. Ibid., pp. 51, 103.

  195. Ibid., p. 226.

  196. Ibid., pp. 186, 189.

  197. Ibid., p. 74.

  198. Ibid., p. 122.

  199. Ibid.

  200. Ibid., p. 96.

  201. Ibid., p. 138.

  202. Ibid., p. 168.

  203. Ibid., p. 213.

  204. Ibid.

  205. Ibid., pp. 211–12.

  206. Ibid., p. 308.

  207. Parry, ‘Materiality and Mystification’, p. 177; Forster, A Passage to India, p. 120.

  208. MacDonald, Awakening of India, p. 5.

  209. Ibid., p. 302.

  210. Ibid., pp. 308–9.

  211. Ibid.

  212. Ibid., p. 310.

  213. Ibid.

  214. Ibid., p. 311.

  215. Ibid., p. 214.

  216. J. Ramsay MacDonald, The Government of India (London: Swarthmore, 1919), p. 16.

  217. Owen, British Left and India, p. 92.

  218. Edward C. Moulton, ‘British Radicals and India in the Early Twentieth Century’, in A. J. A. Morris, ed., Edwardian Radicalism 1900–1914: Some Aspects of British Radicalism (London/Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 44.

  219. Ibid.

  220. Michael Adas, ‘Contested Hegemony: The Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on the Civilizing Mission Ideology’, Journal of World History 15: 1 (March 2004), p. 50.

  221. Hilda Howsin, The Significance of Indian Nationalism (London: A. C. Fifield, 1909), pp. 17–18.

  222. V. H. Rutherford, ‘Introductory Note by Dr Rutherford’, in ibid., p. 7.

  223. Ibid., 8.

  224. Howsin, Significance of Indian Nationalism, p. 96.

  225. Dilip M. Menon, ‘The Many Spaces and Times of Swadeshi’, Economic and Political Weekly 47: 42 (2012), available at epw.in.

  5. The Interpreter of Insurgencies

  1. Kris Manjapra, ‘Communist Internationalism and Transcolonial Recognition’, in Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, eds, Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 162.

  2. Dilip M. Menon, ‘The Many Spaces and Times of Swadeshi’, Economic and Political Weekly 47: 42 (2012), available at epw.in.

  3. Shyamaji Krishnavarma, cited in Tilak Raj Sareen, Indian Revolutionary Movement Abroad (1905–1921) (New Delhi: Sterling, 1979), p. 4.

  4. Ibid., p. 9.

  5. For more on this, see Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Kate O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); Ashwini Tambe and Harald Tiné, eds, The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011).

  6. Partha Chatterjee, ‘Nationalism, Internationalism, and Cosmopolitanism: Some Observations from Modern Indian History’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36: 2 (August 2016), p. 323.

  7. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 5.

  8. Ibid., p. 91. Manela notes that, in a pivotal speech given in Caxton Hall in January 1918, British prime minister David Lloyd George, ‘in a promiscuous rhetorical flourish’, elided ‘the Bolshevik term “self-determination” together with Wilson’s favourite phrase, “consent of the governed” ’. Ibid., p. 39.

  9. Heather Streets-Salter, ‘International and Global Anti-colonial Movements’, in Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds, World Histories from Below: Disruption and Dissent from 1750 to the Present (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), p. 48.

  10. Ibid., p. 47.

  11. For a brief overview of these terms and the relationships between them, see Ali Raza, Franzisca Roy and Benjamin Zachariah, ‘Introduction’, in Raza, Roy and Zachariah, eds, The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views, 1917–1939 (Los Angeles: Sage, 2015), p. xi.

  12. Ibid., p. xii.

  13. Ibid., p. xvii.

  14. Ian Duffield, cited in Nicholas Owen, ‘Critics of Empire in Britain’, in J. M. Brown and W. M. R. Louis, eds, The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. IV: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 202; Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), p. 194.

  15. Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), p. 14.

  16. As Maia Ramnath writes of this period, ‘The center of activity then shifted to Paris, where prominent socialists and anticolonialists S. R. Rana and Madame Rustomji Cama presided over a well-established political circle.’ Maia Ramnath, ‘Two Revolutions: The Ghadar Movement and India’s Radical Diaspora, 1913–1918’, Radical History Review 92 (Spring 2005), p. 11.

  17. As Timothy Mitchell notes, the principle of self-rule was not necessarily in contradiction with the idea of empire: ‘On the contrary, the need for self-government could provide, paradoxically, a new justification for overseas settlement and control, because only the European presence in colonised territories made a form of self-rule possible.’ Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011), p. 71. Later, this would be theorized via the doctrine of ‘trusteeship’, in which Europe would hold territories ‘in trust for civilization’. New Statesman, 1916, cited in Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, p. 76.

  18. Matera, Black London, p. 17.

  19. Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Proudest Day: India’s Long Road to Independence (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997), p. 207.

  20. Shapurji Saklatvala, HC Deb 17 June 1927 vol. 207, c. 1388.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Ibid.

  23. HC Deb 23 November 1927 vol. 210, c. 1826.

  24. There are three biographical accounts of Saklatvala’s personal and political life: Mike Squires, Saklatvala: A Political Biography (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990); Marc Wadsworth, Comrade S
ak: Shapurji Saklatvala: A Political Biography (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1998); and Sehri Saklatvala, The Fifth Commandment: Biography of Shapurji Saklatvala (Salford: Miranda, 1991). The last of these is perhaps the fullest account of his personal and family life.

  25. Secret Service files, cited in Wadsworth, Comrade Sak, p. 53.

  26. Ibid., p. 30.

  27. Ibid.

  28. For brief accounts of all these figures and their relationships to each other, see Open University, Making Britain: Discover How South Asians Shaped the Nation, 1870–1950, at open.ac.uk.

  29. Shapurji Saklatvala, ‘The Second Indian Round Table Conference’, Labour Monthly 13: 10 (October 1931), available at marxists.org. The Communist Party was deeply disapproving of Saklatvala’s decision to hold a navjote or ‘thread’ ceremony in 1927 for his children. See Wadsworth, Comrade Sak, pp. 102–4.

  30. Cited in ibid., p. 106.

  31. Herbert Bryan to Arthur Field, 23 February 1937, typed copy in Saklatvala Papers, MSS.EUR D 1173/4; Saklatvala, Fifth Commandment, p. 97.

  32. Herbert Bryan, ‘Saklatvala: An Appreciation’, Daily Herald, 24 November 1922 – typed copy in Saklatvala Papers, MSS.EUR D 1173/4.

  33. Cited in Wadsworth, Comrade Sak, p. 51.

  34. Susan D. Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 149.

  35. Arthur Field to Beram Saklatvala, 7 March 1937, in Saklatvala Papers, MSS.EUR D 1173/4.

  36. Lord Snowden to Beram Saklatvala, 4 February 1937 – typed copy in Saklatvala Papers, MSS.EUR D 1173/4.

  37. Nicholas Owen, The British Left and India: Metropolitan Anti-imperialism 1885–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 108.

  38. See ibid., pp. 198–9.

  39. Though he made many significant interventions on matters pertaining to trade unions, unemployment, Emergency powers and housing conditions, Wadsworth notes that ‘the bulk of his speeches related to India and other anti-imperialist issues’ – which included Ireland. Wadsworth, Comrade Sak, p. 51.

  40. Shapurji Saklatvala with Duncan Carmichael, ‘Statement Submitted to the Joint Committee on Indian Reforms on Behalf of the Workers’ Welfare League of India’, in Saklatvala, Fifth Commandment, Chapter 7, Appendix A, p. 115.

  41. Ibid., p. 94.

  42. Ibid.

  43. Wadsworth, Comrade Sak, p. 61. Tilak had visited Saklatvala at his home in 1910 while a guest at the ILP’s annual conference. British intelligence files on Saklatvala noted in 1911 that he kept in touch with radical nationalists such as Bipin Chandra Pal, ‘showing considerable interest in the extremist movement’ (p. 53).