The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  6Lala Lajpat Rai, The Political Future of India (1919), 184; the argument here draws from Faisal Devji’s discussion of Mughal politics in The Impossible Indian, 9–40.

  7The argument here draws in part from Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments. Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ, 1993).

  8Cashman, The Myth of the Lokamanya, 75–95.

  9Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (London, 2013), Nikki R. Keddie, Sayyid Jamal Ad-Din Al-Afghani: A Political Biography (Berkeley, CA, 1972).

  10David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton, NJ, 1978); Barbara D. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Princeton, NJ, 2014) Devji, ‘Apologetic Modernity’.

  11Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India.

  12Gyan Pandey, ‘Rallying Round the Cow: Sectarian Strife in the Bhojpur Region, c.1888–1917’, in Ranajit Guha, Subaltern Studies II (1983), 60–130. Sandra Freitag, Collective Action and Community. Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communism in North India (Berkeley, CA, 1989).

  13Surendra Rao, Bunts in History and Culture; M. Venkateshwar Rao, ‘District Associations and Their Contribution to the Political Development of Andhra, 1892–1920’, PhD thesis, Osmania University, 1992; Swarupa Gupta, Notions of Nationhood in Bengal: Perspectives on Samaj, c.1867–1905 (Delhi, 2009), 275.

  14Sumit Sarkar, Modern India. 1885–1947 (New Delhi, 2014), 105.

  15Stephen Bottomore, ‘“An Amazing Quarter Mile of Moving Gold, Gems and Genealogy”: Filming India’s 1902/03 Delhi Durbar’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, xv (1995), 495–515; Alan Trevithick, ‘Some Structural and Sequential Aspects of the British Imperial Assemblages at Delhi: 1877–1911’, Modern Asian Studies, xxiv (1990), 569.

  16Chris Fuller, ‘Anthropology and Government in British India, 1881–1911: Ibbetson and Risley Reconsidered’, Talk to Max Planck Institut, Göttingen (2014); Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (Delhi, 1973), 17.

  17B. R. Nanda, Gokhale: The Indian Moderates and the British Raj (Princeton, NJ, 1999), 243–4; Nanda, The Collected Works of Lala Lajpat Rai, I, 90; Anthony J. Parel (ed.), Gandhi: ‘Hind Swaraj’ and Other Writings (Cambridge, 2012), 20.

  18Quoted in Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago, 2008), 144; Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908, 86–87.

  19Parel (ed.), Gandhi, 21; Karuna Mantena, ‘Another Realism. The Politics of Gandhian Nonviolence’, American Political Science Review 106, 2 (2012), 455–70.

  20Shruti Kapila, ‘Self, Spencer and Swaraj. Nationalist Thought and Critiques of Liberalism, 1890–1920’, Modern Intellectual History, iv (2007), 109–27.

  21Harald Fischer-Tiné, Shyamji Krishnavarma: Sanskrit, Sociology and Anti-Imperialism (New Delhi, 2015).

  22Pal, Speeches, 54

  23Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Swadeshi Samaj’, Nabya Bharat, xxiii (1905), 29–47; translated in Rabindranath Tagore, Greater India (Madras, 1921), 1–8.

  24Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908, 379.

  25Sarkar, Modern India. 1885–1947, 120, 283–5, 302, 370–404.

  26Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908, 375.

  27Ibid., 148–171.

  28P. A. S. Mani, Life Assurance In India (Bombay, 1950), 287.

  29Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908, 124.

  30Vinay Bahl, ‘The Emergence of Large-Scale Steel Industry in India under British Colonial Rule, 1880–1907’, Indian Economic & Social History Review, xxxi (1994), 452–6.

  31Lucy Peck, ‘Linking Histories: The Planning of New Delhi’, India International Centre Quarterly, xxxiii (2006), 1–12; Marquess of Crewe, ‘Local Autonomy in India’, Hansard, House of Lords, 29 July 1912, §.742.

  32Hansard, House of Lords, 21 February 1912, §162.

  33Lord Curzon, Correspondence about Clive Statue, May 1909–Aug 1920, IOR Mss Eur F112/512.

  34Dane Kennedy, ‘Diagnosing the Colonial Dilemma. Tropical Neurashthenia and the Alienated Briton’, in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy (eds.), Decentring Empire. Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (London, 2006), 151–181.

  35B. R. Tomlinson, ‘India and the British Empire, 1880–1935’, Indian Economic & Social History Review, xii (1975), 347; John Gallagher and Anil Seal, ‘Britain and India between the Wars’, Modern Asian Studies, xv (1981), 389.

  13. Military Liberalism and the Indian Crowd

  1Report on the Punjab Disturbances, April 1919, Parliamentary Papers, 1920 (Cmd. 534), 933–6; Report of the committee appointed by the government of India to investigate the disturbances in the Punjab, Parliamentary Papers, 1920 (Cmd. 681), 38.

  2Nigel Collett, The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer (2006), 340.

  3Derek Sayer, ‘British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre 1919–1920’, Past & Present, cxxxi (1991), 158.

  4Hew Strachan, The First World War (Oxford, 2003), I, 793; Tan Tai-Yong, ‘An Imperial Home-Front: Punjab and the First World War’, The Journal of Military History, lxiv (2000), 371–409; Lala Lajpat Rai, Young India; an Interpretation and a History of the Nationalist Movement from within (New York, NY, 1917), 36.

  5Ritika Prasad, Tracks of Change. Railways and Everyday Life in Colonial India (Cambridge, 2015), 215; David Lockwood, The Indian Bourgeoisie: A Political History of the Indian Capitalist Class in the Early Twentieth Century (London, 2012), 31.

  6Tai-Yong, ‘An Imperial Home-Front’, 382; David Omissi, ‘Europe Through Indian Eyes: Indian Soldiers Encounter England and France, 1914–1918’, The English Historical Review, cxxii (2007), 371–96.

  7David C. Potter, ‘Manpower Shortage and the End of Colonialism: The Case of the Indian Civil Service’, Modern Asian Studies, vii (1973), 49.

  8Tai-Yong, ‘An Imperial Home-Front’, 394, 398.

  9Tomlinson, ‘India and the British Empire, 1880–1935’; 352; Peter Robb, ‘The Government of India and Annie Besant’, Modern Asian Studies, x (1976), 125; Bernard Houghton, ‘Reform in India’, Political Science Quarterly, (1920), 546.

  10Lala Lajpat Rai, Unhappy India (Calcutta, 1928), 442; Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916–1931 (London, 2014).

  11Speech at Surat, 1 Aug 1918 in Mohandas K Gandhi, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 100 vols (Delhi, 1958), xvii, 171; to S. Sastri in Gandhi, Collected Works, xvii, 135; Letter from E. L. L. Hammond, 18 Dec 1917 in Gandhi, Collected Works, xvi, 507; Tai-Yong, ‘An Imperial Home-Front’, 384, 397; David Hardiman, Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat: Kheda District, 1917–34 (Delhi; New York, 1982), 107.

  12Gandhi, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, xvii, 17, 133.

  13Judith M. Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power: Indian Politics 1915–1922 (Cambridge, 1972), 246; Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York, 1982); Gandhi, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, xxi, 90.

  14Gyan Pandey, ‘The Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism. The Peasant Movement in Awadh, 1919–1922’, in Ranajit Guha, Subaltern Studies I: (New Delhi, 1986), 143; Daniel Kent Carrasco, ‘Jayaprakahsan Narayan and Lok Niti. Socialism, Gandhism and Political Cultures of Protest in the XX Century’ (King’s College London PhD thesis, 2015), 39.

  15Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power, 61; Sarkar, Modern India. 1885–1947, 169–170; Pandey, ‘The Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism. The Peasant Movement in Awadh, 1919–1922’, 193; Rajat Kanta Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal, 1875–1927 (Oxford, 1984), 344.

  16Judith Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (1994), 225, 309; Pandey, ‘The Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism. The Peasant Movement in Awadh, 1919–1922’, 189; Speech at Mangalore, August 1920, Gandhi, Collected Works, xxi, 187.

  17Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power, 291.

  18Rajat K. Ray, ‘Masses in Politics : The Non-Coo
peration Movement in Bengal 1920–1922’, Indian Economic & Social History Review, xi (1974), 388–91.

  19Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992 (Berkeley, CA, 1995) Mantena, ‘Another Realism’.

  20C. S. Venkatachar, Narrative, April 25 1977, IOR Mss Eur F 180/85, 10-12; Report of the Reforms Enquiry Committee, Parliamentary Papers 1924–5 (Cmd. 2360), i, 94.

  21Parliamentary Papers, 1924-5 (Cmd. 2360) i, 57.

  22Views of Local Governments, Parliamentary Papers 1924–5 (Cmd. 2362), iii, 311

  23Simon Epstein, ‘District Officers in Decline: The Erosion of British Authority in the Bombay Countryside, 1919 to 1947’, Modern Asian Studies, xvi (1982), 500–1; Alan W. Heston, ‘Official Yields Per Acre in India, 1886–1947: Some Questions of Interpretation’, Indian Economic & Social History Review, x (1973), 328.

  24Views of Local Governments, Parliamentary Papers 1924–5 (Cmd. 2362), iii, 8; Indian Financial Statement and Budget, 1921–2, Parliamentary Papers 1921(153), 36.

  25Indian Statutory Commission, Parliamentary Papers 1929–30 (Cmd. 3568), i, 312.

  26A. L. Carthill, The Lost Dominion (Edinburgh, 1924), 93, 238; A. L. Carthill, Madampur (Edinburgh, 1931), 327; Michael O’Dwyer, India as I Know It (London, 1926), 449-453; Venkatachar, Narrative, IOR Mss Eur F180/85, 18.

  27Taylor Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India, 1919-1956 (London, 2009), 64-72

  28Telegram to N. C. Kelkar, 18 Oct 1928 in Gandhi, Collected Works, xxxiii, 117; Brown, Modern India, 238.

  29Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty. Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (London, 2000), 303; Ilyas Ahmad, ‘The Crowd’, The Indian Journal of Political Science, ii (1940), 21.

  30Lajpat Rai, Unhappy India, 9, 13.

  14. Cycles of Violence

  1Beni Prasad, ‘Presidential Address’, The Indian Journal of Political Science, ii (1941), 435, 426; Beni Prasad, History of Jahangir (London, Bombay etc., 1922); Beni Prasad, The State in Ancient India. A Study in the Structure and Practical Working of Political Institutions in North India in Ancient Times (Allahabad, 1928); Harijan, 4 August 1946, Gandhi, Collected Works, lxxxv, 79.

  2Dietmar Rothermund, India in the Great Depression, 1929–1939 (Columbia, MO, 1992), 32–35, 41; Brown, Modern India, 254–261; Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India. Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, 1994), 261.

  3Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India, 267; Claude Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics 1931–39: The Indigenous Capitalist Class and the Rise of the Congress Party (Cambridge, 1985), 239.

  4Nandini Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India (Cambridge, 2001), 98–110.

  5David Arnold, The Congress in Tamilnad: Nationalist Politics in South India, 1919–1937 (New Delhi, 1977).

  6Sarkar, Modern India. 298–305; Judith M. Brown, Gandhi and Civil Disobedience: The Mahatma in Indian Politics 1928–1934 (Cambridge, 2009), 101–8.

  7Arnold, The Congress in Tamilnad.

  8Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (London, 1991), 498.

  9C. S. Venkatachar, Narrative, IOR Mss Eur F180/85, 29.

  10B. R. Tomlinson, ‘India and the British Empire, 1935–1947’, Indian Economic & Social History Review, xiii (1976), 331–49.

  11Tomlinson, ‘India and the British Empire, 1880–1935’, 370.

  12Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History, c.1930–50 (New Delhi, 2005), 217.

  13Report on Nehru’s activities in London, IOR L/PJ/12/293, 26–30.

  14Benjamin Zachariah, Nehru (London, 2004), 77.

  15‘Proceedings of Congress, Lucknow Session, 12–14 April 1936’, Indian Annual Register (1936), 261.

  16Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics 1931–39, 114.

  17Markovits, Indian Business, 143.

  18Zachariah, Developing India; Nanjangud S Subba Rao, Some Aspects of Economic Planning. Sir William Meyer Lectures, 1932–3, (Bangalore, 1935), 13, 99.

  19Benoy Sarkar, ‘Demo-Despotcracy and Freedom’, Calcutta Review, ixx (1939), 95; Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System (New York, NY, 2005) 52-73.

  20William Gould, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India (Cambridge, 2004), 231. Haig to Linlithgow, 27 March 1939, quoted in Gould, Hindu Nationalism 207.

  21Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman. Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge, 1985), 36–50; Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (London, 2013).

  22Indivar Kamtekar, ‘A Different War Dance: State and Class in India 1939–1945’, Past & Present, clxxvi (2002), 189.

  23Srinath Raghavan, India’s War. The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939–1945 (London, 2016), 271.

  24‘Shiver of 1942’, p.343, 345; Bayly, p.267; Hugh Tinker, ‘Indian exodus’; The Raj at War, 106.

  25Paul Greenough, ‘Political Mobilization and the Underground Literature of the Quit India Movement, 1942–44’, Modern Asian Studies, xvii (1983), 45.

  26‘Interview with V. R. Nimkar, Cambridge Centre for South Asian Studies, http://www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk/pdf/146.pdf last accessed 25 February 2016.

  27Yasmin Khan, The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War (London, 2015), 191.

  28Sarkar, Modern India. 1885–1947, 390.

  29C. A. Bayly, ‘“The Nation Within”: British India at War 1939–1947’, Proceedings of the British Academy, cxxv (2004), 281; Raghavan, India’s War 273.

  30Raghavan, India’s War, 71, 243.

  31Christopher G. Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941–1945 (Oxford, 1979), 241; Raghavan, India’s War 407.

  32Raghavan, India’s War, 68; S. C. Aggarwal, History of the Supply Department (1939–1946) (Delhi, 1947), 1 & passim.

  33Bayly, ‘“The Nation Within”’, 284.

  34Raghavan, India’s War, 425.

  35Kamtekar, ‘A Different War Dance’; Raghavan, 346.

  36Raghavan, India’s War. S Iyengar, ‘Economic Control in India During the War’, Indian Journal of Economics, xxiv (1944), 258.

  37Raghavan, India’s War, 351.

  38Janam Mukherjee, ‘Hungry Bengal. War, Famine, Riots, and the End of Empire. 1939–1946’ (University of Michican PhD thesis, 2011), 166, 200; Anwesha Roy, ‘Making Riots, Making Peace. Communal Riots and Anti-Communal Resistance in Bengal, 1941–47’ (Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2015), 115–130.

  39David C. Potter, India’s Political Administrators, 1919–1983 (Oxford, 1986), 129–31.

  40Wavell, ‘Note on the Services’, 29 June 1946, Nicholas Mansergh (ed.), The Transfer of Power, 12 vols (London, 1970–1983), viii, 1087; Douglas Houghton, ‘Diary of Ten Weeks in India’, Jan–Mar 1946, People’s History Museum, Manchester.

  41Wavell to Amery’, 25 February 1944, The Transfer of Power, iv, 760; Gandhi, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, ‘Statement to the Press’ and ‘G.E.B. Abell’s Note’, both 11 February 1946, lxxxiii, 121 & 420.

  42Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (London, 2000), 592.

  43Azad to Wavell, 25 June 1946, Nicholas Mansergh (ed.) The Transfer of Power, 1942–7 (12 vols, London, 1970–83), viii, p.1033, 1037.

  44Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman; Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven, CT, 2007), 11.

  45Wavell to Lord Pethwick-Lawrence, 10 Sept 1946; Nehru to Wavell, 18 September 1946; Pethwick-Lawrence to Wavell, 20 Sept 1946, Transfer of Power, viii, 482–4, 538–57.

  46Wavell to Pethwick Lawrence, 23 Sept 1946, Transfer of Power, viii, 573–6.

  47Shahid Hamid, Disastrous Twilight: A Personal Record of the Partition of India by Major-General Shahid Hamid (Barnsley, 1993), 98.

  48‘Removal of Records from India’, IOR R/3/1/149.

  49Wavell to
Lord Pethwick-Lawrence, 10 September 1046, Transfer of Power, viii, 484.

  50The account of the Calcutta killings here particularly draws from Roy, ‘Making Riots, Making Peace. Communal Riots and Anti-Communal Resistance in Bengal, 1941–47’; Mukherjee, ‘Hungry Bengal. War, Famine, Riots, and the End of Empire. 1939–1946’.

  51Khan, The Great Partition, 66.

  52Harun-or-Rashid, The Foreshadowing of Bangladesh: Bengal Muslim League and Muslim Politics, 1906–1947 (Dhaka, 2003), 245.

  53Roy, ‘Making Riots, Making Peace’, 252.

  54Ibid., 289.

  55Khan, The Great Partition.

  56Khan, The Great Partition; Swarna Aiyar, ‘“August Anarchy”. The Partition Massacres in Punjab, 1947’, in D. A. Low and Howard Brasted (eds.), Freedom, Trauma, Continuities. Northern India and Independence (Walnut Creek, CA, 1998), 15–39.

  57Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge, 2001), 144–6; Yasmin Khan, ‘Performing Peace. Gandhi’s Assassination as a Critical Moment in the Consolidation of the Nehruvian State’, Modern Asian Studies, xlv (2011), 57–80.

  15. The Great Delusion

  1Jahnavi Phalkey, Atomic State (Ranikhet, 2013).

  2Kamtekar, ‘A Different War Dance’.

  3Syed Waliullah, Tree Without Roots (London, 1967).

  4Classic texts in this literature on imperial ideas are Said, Orientalism; Inden, Imagining India; Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj; Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, CA, 1999).

  5Taylor C. Sherman, ‘The Integration of the Princely State of Hyderabad and the Making of the Postcolonial State in India, 1948–56’, Indian Economic & Social History Review, xliv (2007), 501.

  6Inderpal Grewal, ‘The Masculinities of Post-Colonial Governance: Bureaucratic Memoirs of the Indian Civil Service’, Modern Asian Studies, i (2016) 602–35; AFP news agency, ‘Happiness for Some in Pakistan’s Gated Communities’ (2013); Personal interview with Anuraag Chowlfa, 14 February 2014.

  7Niraja Jayal Gopal, Citizenship and its Discontents. An Indian History (Cambridge, MA, 2013); Karuna Mantena, ‘Popular Sovereignty and anti-colonialism in Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner, Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 2016), 296-309.