Читать книгу Decolonizing Anarchism - Maia Ramnath - Страница 7

By the first decade of the twentieth century, Indian revolutionists had established a worldwide presence through labor diasporas and educational circuits, often converging on the same cosmopolitan cities as their radical counterparts from East and Southeast Asia, Egypt, Turkey, and Ireland. Their tasks overseas were twofold: to organize insurrectionary activities, and to spread ­information and propaganda.

The Swadeshi (autonomy; literally “one’s own country”) movement was a flash point of unrest sparked in 1905 by the administrative partition of Bengal. It took heart from the Japanese victory over Russia in the same year, setting the rapturous precedent of an Asian nation defeating a European power. From the moment of the movement’s emergence, police intelligence reports and newspaper accounts anointed its militant wing as anarchists. Accurate or not, the label dogged them at home and abroad.

In a 1916 newspaper article Ram Chandra, one of the leaders of the Ghadar Party founded by Indian anticolonial militants in the United States, objected to a remark in the London Times that “just as Ireland still has her Sinn Fein extremists, so has India still her anarchists and her fanatical bombthrowers.” Chandra retorted, “The truth in this statement is that India has her Sinn Feiners. The falsehood lies in the implication that the Hindu revolutionists are a forlorn hope of intransigents. They are not ‘anarchists’; they are nationalists; and hence the whole nation is and is ­growing to be, with them.”[1]

Such disclaimers were meant to defend the revolutionaries’ legitimacy. To be called an anarchist in the ­rhetoric of the day meant being seen as a purveyor of meaningless violence; to be dubbed a nationalist meant being seen to serve a just cause—democratic self-­determination in the face of imperial tyranny and the looting of one’s country. Precisely because of their claim to the justice of their cause, they objected far more to the label of anarchist than terrorist, a term then used matter-of-factly without any particular moral condemnation to describe a tactic of extralegal, ­conspiratorial deployment of ­propaganda of the deed.

The most obvious factor in the pinning of the anarchist tag on the Swadeshi militants was their willingness to express their hatred of the British colonial government through violent means. The Indian radicals’ penchant for dramatic, symbolic bombings and assassinations linked them in the public eye to an international spate of attacks on establishment figures, applying to them the caricature of the bearded desperado cradling a sphere with a guttering fuse under his coat.

Ideological anarchism, of course, is not to be equated with violence and irrationality. But the traits that made the link plausible went deeper than that. Besides the philosophical and tactical orientation toward propaganda of the deed (not to mention a quasi-mystical fascination with the bomb), they shared with certain contemporary strands of the Western anarchist tradition a voluntarist ethic of individual action, militant romanticism, disregard for conventional standards of law and propriety in the face of what they saw as greater truths, a frictional relationship with bourgeois materialist society, and a marked antigovernment stance. Although in this context the objection was to the British colonial government specifically, by the simple dropping of an article many of their statements were virtually indistinguishable from anarchist ones regarding ­government in general.

In the end the question we need to ask, in examining the praxis of the Swadeshi militants as they became links in a wider nexus stretching from Calcutta to London and Paris, is not “Were the Swadeshi extremists anarchists?” or even “What kind of anarchists were they?” An even better question is, “Where do they fit into the revolutionary family tree of which anarchism and its various cousins are also scions?”

Bengal

Since the 1870s there had been a proliferation of social and religious reform societies (samitis), athletic or “physical culture” clubs (akharas), and cultural nationalist groups, including both open and secret “student organizations inspired by the Carbonari and [Giuseppe] Mazzini’s Young Italy,” which is to say by the form of mid-nineteenth-­century romantic republicanism that played such a prominent role in the development of international revolution. The newly politicized Anusilan Samiti emerged around 1902 or 1903 from a consolidation of several akharas, with Aurobindo Ghose as one of the key movers. Born and educated in England, Ghose idolized figures like Mazzini and Charles Stewart Parnell, the hero of Irish home rule. Philosophically, he morphed over the years from ­agnosticism to spiritual leadership as a Hindu mystic.

After the Bengal partition, he along with his younger brother Barindra Kumar Ghose and a few of their friends began energetically recruiting and training young men in lathi (wooden staff) and martial arts, swimming, and horseback and bicycle riding. Students also received lectures on political and military history including such topics as the Sikh Khalsa, the French Revolution, and the Italian Resorgimento. Anglo-Irish transplant Sister Nivedita (born Margaret Noble) lectured on “patriotic feelings and a sense of duty to the country,” and donated her library, including a well-known Mazzini biography, whose chapter on guerrilla warfare was extensively copied and circulated.[2]

Nivedita also introduced a conscious connection with ideological anarchism. She had followed the famous sage Swami Vivekananda to India intending to work at the Ramakrishna Mission, but once there threw herself into the cause of Indian national liberation, eventually separating herself from the mission in order to pursue her political commitments without compromise. But Vivekananda was not her only philosophical inspiration; she had also discovered Peter Kropotkin en route, becoming fiercely excited about his ideas, which she claimed “confirm[ed] me in my determination toward Anarchy.” When she met Kropotkin in London in 1902 after some correspondence, she decided that he knew “more than any other man of what India needs.”[3] Given her close association with Aurobindo’s circle, it seems likely that Kropotkin’s ideas entered the mix.

The group’s militancy soon intensified in a program of targeted assassinations, bombings, sabotage, and political dacoity (social banditry) to obtain weapons and funds. There were raids on police stations, armories, British treasuries, tax collections, and even expropriations of wealthy Indians, some of whom were presented with certificates declaring them holders of a debt to be repaid after the revolution by the treasurers of a Free India. Besides arms and ammunition, funding went toward printing costs and legal expenses. Bande Mataram was founded in 1906 as an English-language daily paper targeting the educated elite, as companion to the Yugantar, “the paper for the masses” in colloquial Bengali.[4]

The revolutionary headquarters was an empty house and grounds on Calcutta’s outskirts, known as Maniktola Garden. There in idyllic seclusion, they set up bomb-making and arms-storage facilities along with a library, on the principle of revolutionizing minds in order to achieve revolutionary goals. Bullets and bombs, they knew, were only a quick fix; deeper, lasting change would require the education of consciousness through integrated physical, political, and spiritual training.

The curriculum included economics, history, geography, and the philosophy of revolution. There was also technical training in departments such as that “referred to in Upen’s notebooks as ‘Ex+Mech+An,’” which historian Peter Heehs interprets as “explosives, mechanics and anarchism.” Heehs reports that one fifteen-year-old recruit recalled, “‘In the garden Upen Babu used to teach us Upanishads and politics and Barindra Babu [taught Bhagavad] Gita and History of Russo-Japanese war and Ullas Babu delivered lectures on explosives.’ Indu Bhusan Roy spent his time ‘studying Gita and preparing shells.’”[5]

What they took from this text, Krishna’s prebattle advice to the warrior Arjuna, was that one should act in accordance with dharma without overly worrying about the results. If the actions themselves were righteous, then the results could not be otherwise. Karma yoga—the way of action in the world of material causality—was one of the recognized paths to liberation, as much as the ways of meditation or devotion.

Among the other incendiary texts that the Criminal Investigation Department found when it raided the Maniktola Garden library were Ananda Math, Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s famous novel of warrior monks that later became part of the Hindu nationalist canon; Aurobindo’s Bhawani Mandir (“temple of the goddess,” or Kali, manifest as pure shakti, force, or power), a blueprint for a utopian community; Sikher Balidan, extolling Sikh martyrdom; and Raja ke, questioning the institution of monarchy.[6] Many of these texts expressed the pursuit of national liberation in the idiom of intense religiosity. Others combined pragmatic how-to instructions with ­philosophical justifications for militant activity.

Mukti Kon Pathe (“which way lies salvation?”) mainly contained excerpts from the Yugantar on topics such as “Battalion Drill Made Easy” and “Field Exercises.” Its author noted that particularly for Bengalis, cultivating muscular development was important, referring to the British colonial taxonomy that classified them as a feeble “non-martial race.” Yet even if they were not able to achieve the requisite physical training by the time action became imperative, they nevertheless might find “consolation in the thought that not much muscle is required to kill a European with a revolver or a rifle, or to kill many Europeans with a Maxim gun. It does not take much strength to pull a trigger; even a Bengali can do that.”[7]

The author also systematically outlined the other items required for organizing insurrection. Under the heading “Revolution” were subtopics such as “Building Up Public Opinion,” which listed newspapers, music, literature, and “secret meetings and associations.” On the matter of clandestinity, he observed: “Secret societies are necessary since it is impossible to talk of freedom openly because of bayonets and guns. If one wants to talk of freedom publicly, he must necessarily do so in a roundabout way. It is precisely for this reason that a secret place is necessary where people may discuss ‘What is truth?’ without having recourse to hypocrisy. But it must be a place that the tyrant cannot see.” As examples of models for good covert practice, the author pointed to the Russian revolutionists and the militant ­ascetics of Ananda Math.[8]

The text listed three ways to obtain arms:

1. By preparing weapons silently in some secret place. In this way, the Russian nihilists prepare the bombs. Indians will be sent to foreign countries to learn the art of making weapons. On their return to India they will manufacture cannon, guns, etc., with the help of enthusiastic youths.

2. By importing weapons of all kinds from foreign countries.

3. Through the assistance of native soldiers.

In August 1907, the Yugantar suggested that “much work can be done by the revolutionists very cautiously spreading the gospel of independence among the native troops,” thereby at once gaining both weapons and mutineers. The textbook assured the revolutionist that soldiers too were human beings, despite their role as mercenaries to a tyrant, and would therefore surely join their arms with the revolution once the situation was fully explained to them by “the clever Bengali.”[9]

The Yugantar often published on the justification and need for violence in resisting the systemic violence of colonial oppression. In other words, it was not the revolutionists who had introduced force into the dialogue. “The laws of the English are based on brute force. If we want to liberate ourselves from those laws, it is brute force that is necessary. . . . There is no other door of admission into life but death.”[10] An article headed “Away with Fear” declared that British supremacy was an illusion, which if once challenged, must crumble away. If Indians would conquer their own fear and take initiative, victory and liberation would be easy.

What we want now is a number of men who will take the lead in giving a push and thus encourage the masses and infuse hope in the minds of those who are almost dead with fear and dread. . . . They must be shown by deeds done before their eyes that the work is not impossible exactly to the extent that they think it to be.[11]

Hence, the Yugantar strengthened the perception of anarchism by its emphasis on taking a complete antigovernment stance, as opposed to collaboration or participation of any kind. Bande Mataram too came under frequent attack for its “seditious” content as well as plain “intention of bringing the Government into hatred and contempt.”[12] This was a misreading, though, of such ­statements as this one:

[Indian secretary of state] Mr. Morley has said that we [Indians] cannot work the machinery of our Government for a week if England generously walks out of our country. . . . [But] did it not strike Mr. Morley that if, instead of walking out the English were by force driven out of India, the Government will go on perhaps better than before, for the simple reason that the exercise of power and organisation necessary to drive out so organised an enemy will in the struggle that would ensue teach us to arrange our own affairs sufficiently well.[13]

This passage called for the takeover, not the abolition, of government, while suggesting that it was in the crucible of revolutionary action that people learned autonomy—a foreshadowing of Fanon.

The other “principle revolutionary textbook” was Bartaman Rananiti (“modern art of war”), a 1907 Bengali version of Jan S. Bloch’s Modern Weapons and Modern War.[14] The book contained information on weapons, army organization, and guerrilla tactics, recommended as “the mode of fighting adopted by a nation which is weak, disarmed and oppressed by conquerors, but resolved to break the bondage of slavery.” In such a war, the author predicted that the native troops and mountain tribes would be sure to join in; irregular warfare would forge the country’s youths into heroes, leading ultimately to popular uprising on a much larger scale; and a protracted conflict could only ­benefit the people while wearing down the enemy.[15]

But Bartaman Rananiti also drew on the concept of karma yoga. An early chapter was a reprint of an October 1906 Yugantar article that stated, “‘War is the order of creation.’ After explaining that destruction is creation in another form”—a rather Bakuninesque sentiment—“the writer proceeds, ‘Destruction is natural and war is, therefore, also natural.’” Gangrenous body parts, he pointed out, must be removed to save the whole. Therefore “war is inevitable when oppression cannot be stopped by any other means whatsoever, when the leprosy of slavery corrupts the blood of the body of the nation and robs it of its vitality.”[16] The article went on to invoke Krishna, Rama, and Kali as exemplars of divine sanction for an avenging (and purifying) destruction—making this too a potential seed text for both anarchist- and Hindu nationalist–inflected radical rhetorics.

Significantly, in the process of a dedicated practice by which the vanguard’s hearts were to be forged and tested, while rousing and inspiring the people, conventional morality became irrelevant: for “A nation yearning for freedom . . . the power of discriminating between right and wrong is gone. Everything is sacrificed at the feet of the goddess of liberty.”[17]

The author of Mukti Kon Pathe claimed that if the revolution was being brought about for the welfare of society, then it was perfectly just to collect money from society for the purpose. Admittedly theft and dacoity are crimes because they violate the principle of the good of society. But the “political dacoit” is aiming at the social good: “so no sin but rather virtue attaches to the destruction of this small good for the sake of some higher good. Therefore if revolutionists extort money from the miserly or luxurious wealthy members of society by the application of force, their ­conduct is perfectly just.”[18]

Beyond levying “donations” from the rich, the final stage of the funding plan called for robbing government treasuries. “This also is justified because, from the moment the kingly power tramples upon the welfare of the subjects, the king may be regarded as a robber from whom it is perfectly right to snatch away his stolen money.” For the social bandit, apparently, property was theft, and redistribution a function of a moral economy—although in this case, the text somewhat mysteriously added, “to defray the expenses of establishing the future kingly power.”[19] Again two ­tendencies coexist. Which would prevail? Or would they diverge?

Thus prepared, the Maniktola Garden gang launched a series of bombings, dacoities, and assassination attempts between 1906 and 1908.[20] Harsh punitive reaction then enforced a lull in militant activities, effectively muzzling the radical press, preventing meetings, and accelerating convictions and deportations. All of this, by making open dissent so difficult within British India, simply increased clandestine activity and injected fresh blood into the ­radical ­community overseas.

London

Oxford lecturer and sometime-theosophist Shyamaji Krishnavarma had founded the Indian Home Rule Society in London a mere six months before the partition of Bengal.[21] He stated three official objectives for the organization: to secure Indian home rule (obviously), carry on propaganda in the United Kingdom for this purpose, and spread among the people of India greater knowledge of the advantages of freedom and national unity.[22] An important element of this enterprise was the notoriously “seditious . . . penny monthly”[23] the Indian Sociologist, which Krishnavarma founded and edited with the aid of long-term ally Henry Mayers Hyndman, a “high-minded English gentleman” and prominent socialist. Printed in English as “an organ of freedom, and of political, social, and religious reforms,” the periodical’s intent was “to plead the cause of India and its unrepresented millions before the Bar of Public Opinion in Great Britain and Ireland,” striving “to inculcate the great sociological truth that ‘it is impossible to join injustice and brutality abroad with justice and humanity at home.” It was also meant as a tool for developing the revolutionary student movement, on the presumption that the well-educated young rebels would likely hold ­prominent and influential positions on their return home.[24]

In Highgate, Krishnavarma also set up a headquarters dubbed India House to serve as a boardinghouse and training center for neophyte revolutionaries. With financial help from wealthy patriot Sardar Singh Revabhai Rana, a Paris-based pearl merchant, he made several attempts at funding fellowships to bring Indian students to London for a political awakening. Fellows were required to spend a minimum of two years in Europe or the United States studying a profession of their choice, living at a home or hostel on an allowance of sixteen shillings per week. On returning to India, each was to “solemnly declare” that he would never accept any “post, office of emoluments, or service under the British Government.”[25] Scholarship recipients began arriving in 1906, just as Swadeshi activities were picking up in Bengal.

In contrast to the fervid Swadeshi papers, the Indian Sociologist had a plain affinity with the progressive libertarian thinking of the time. Quotations from Herbert Spencer crowned the masthead: “Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man”; “Resistance to aggression is not simply justifiable but imperative. Non-resistance hurts both altruism and egoism.”[26] Eschewing links with any political party, Krishnavarma expanded on these ideas in an introduction to the first issue: “The British people . . . can never succeed in being a nation of freemen and lovers of freedom so long as they continue to send out members of the dominating classes to exercise despotisms in Britain’s name upon the various conquered races that constitute Britain’s military Empire.” Spencer, he said, had proven that “all despotisms, whether political or religious, whether of sex, caste, or of custom, may be generalized as limitations to individuality, which it is the nature of civilization to remove.”[27] Hyndman stated in the same issue that “Indians must learn to rely upon themselves alone for their political salvation, i.e., the forcible expulsion of the British rule from India and not hope for anything from the changes of governors and governments.”[28]

Every Sunday, meetings and discussions open to all Indians took place, focusing on issues of independence, and often featuring patriotic speeches, lectures, songs, and magic lantern projections of martyred resistance heroes. Scholarship winner Vinayak Damodar Savarkar read weekly excerpts from his historical work “The Indian War of Independence of 1857,” and a commemoration was held on May 10, 1907, the fiftieth anniversary of the uprising.

Meanwhile, more serious activities were unfolding in the shadows. Since August 1906, arms trafficking occurred under cover of Nitisen Dwarkadas and Gyanchand Varma’s Eastern Export and Import Company in Gray’s Inn Place.[29] In June, a Dr. Desai who was studying at London University “gave a lecture at the India House on the making of bombs, justifying their use and explaining what ingredients were required. He reportedly said, ‘When one of you is prepared to use a bomb at the risk of his life, come to me and I will give full particulars.’”[30]

By then the India House community also functioned as a recruiting ground for a more exclusive inner circle dominated by Savarkar, the Abhinava Bharat. Although one of the young militants recalled that “under [Savarkar’s] direction we were training ourselves as propagandists of revolutionary nationalism,” the special intelligence branch assigned to them described them yet again as “the anarchist gang.” The young men were also under constant surveillance from Scotland Yard. A pair of detectives followed each one, and some even grew to be on friendly terms with their escorts.[31] By spring 1908, informants were reporting that “the policy of assassinations was advocated at regular Sunday meetings.” Some of the Abhinava Bharat inner core had taken up target practice at a shooting range on Tottenham Court Road. On July 1, 1909, one of the budding sharpshooters, a student called Madan Lal Dhingra, successfully targeted William Curzon-Wyllie, aide to the secretary of state for India. Dhingra was hanged, then lauded as a revolutionary martyr with the aid of a much-republished courtroom speech, in which he expressed regret not for his deed but rather for having just one life to lose for his country.[32]

Meanwhile back home, Savarkar’s brother Ganesh had been prosecuted for sedition and sentenced to transportation for life. Documents found at Ganesh’s home and in the hands of accomplices during the proceedings “indicate[d] that the association aimed at some sort of organisation founded upon the model of revolutionary societies in Russia,” including Thomas Frost’s The Secret Societies of the European Revolution, 1776–1876, a book “in which is described the secret organisation of the Russian Nihilists, consisting of small circles or groups affiliated into sections, each member knowing only the members of the circle to which he belonged. This may explain the existence of various small groups of young men who are found in this case to have been working for the same objects and drawing weapons from the same source without personal ­acquaintance with the members of other groups.”[33]

Enraged at his brother’s conviction, Savarkar called for the murder of English people in India as reprisal. He sent a consignment of twenty Browning pistols and ammunition back to India concealed in a false-bottom box in the luggage of Govind Amin, India House’s resident chef and ammunition buyer. These pistols were then used in the assassination of a district magistrate in Maharashtra. Savarkar was quickly implicated in the killing, thought to be a dual act of revenge for Dhingra’s death and Ganesh’s imprisonment. Demonstrating its transnational perspective, the Indian Sociologist commented, “Allowing for the difference in the longitudes of Paris and Nasik the time of our writing to sympathise with the members of the family of Mr. Savarkar synchronized almost to a minute with that of the assassination avenging the sentence of transportation passed on him. There is a sort ‘poetic justice’ in all this which will, we doubt not, strike the imagination of our readers.”[34]

Savarkar fled to Paris in 1910. Heedless of warnings not to return to London, he did so anyway and was arrested on arrival at Victoria Station under the Fugitive Offenders Act, then deported by ship to India with a stopover in Marseilles. There he attempted to escape by leaping from a porthole into the harbor and swimming to shore, only to be snatched by police waiting on the pier. (One account has it that the comrades who were supposed to meet him and spirit him into concealment had lingered at a café and ­arrived too late.)

To no avail, high-profile supporters among the British and French Left took up the case. London anarchist Guy Aldred formed a Savarkar Release Committee as soon as he himself got out of jail. He also featured the case in his own fiery paper Herald of Revolt and produced an appeal on the matter in August 1910 addressed “To the English proletariat.”[35]

When the Indian Sociologist was proscribed and its publisher, Arthur Horsley, convicted for printing sedition, Aldred offered his own shoestring Bakunin Press to continue publication. He made it clear that while he did not agree fully with the paper’s content, being an advocate neither of political violence and assassination nor “nationalism, and . . . the Statism it implied,” he did believe in free speech, freedom as a general principle, and resistance to imperial rule.[36] His meager combined office and living quarters were searched, and when three hundred copies of the paper (though no trace of a press) were found, he too was convicted for sedition and sentenced to a year in prison.[37] Printing then shifted to Paris, and the paper continued to appear until 1914, despite several more enforced relocations.

Paris

After the Dhingra incident, London abruptly became too hot for Indian radicals to function freely, though a few did try to maintain an active presence. Now the primary center of Indian overseas radicalism moved to Paris. The political expatriate community there was already well established, centered around Rana and Madame Bhikaji Rustomji Cama, both of whom maintained close ties with the London community.

Besides carrying the cachet of its revolutionary history, France had the advantage of lying outside British jurisdiction. Ironically, France’s own colonial outposts inside India offered them this functional free zone: French Pondicherry became a key location for moving weaponry and literature into the country, and “the great importance of both Pondicherry and Chandernagore from the point of view of the anarchists,” said the officiating director of Criminal Intelligence Department, lay in their independent postal connections with European countries.[38]

Paris was also an unparalleled hub for cross-fertilization among Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Filipino modernist, liberal and Left, anarchist, nationalist, and internationalist movements, hosting exiles from countries throughout East Asia and the Ottoman Empire. The Indians formed particularly strong bonds with the Egyptians.

It was the large population of Russian political exiles, though, whom the Bengali revolutionists looked to as their most significant source of inspiration as well as technical and organizational mentorship. They admired the efficacy of their fellow revolutionists, whose uncompromising calls for emancipation from imperial autocracy they understood to be analogous to their own. These particular Russians were of the maximalist faction of Socialists-Revolutionaries, bearing the mantle of the late nineteenth-century People’s Will Party (Narodnaya Volya). The group was associated with Bakunin’s hyperviolent protégé Sergey Nechayev. It also had been linked to the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881—an act that the Swadeshi militants warmly approved. The most recent wave of exiles had arrived after the postrevolutionary crackdown in 1905; by 1907, the Paris police reported “some 1500 Russian ‘terrorists’” resident there, among them Vera Figner, Vera Zasulich, Vladimir Burtsev, Victor Serge, and Nikolai Safranski, who was regarded as the ringleader and remained under heavy surveillance.

Back in November 1907, Har Dayal had written in the Indian Sociologist, “Every Indian must be convinced that if Russian methods are carried on in our country rigorously by our oppressors, the so-called British rulers, we must meet it with measure for measure.”[39] He repeated the argument for learning “the art of organising secret societies and insurrections” from the Russians in the next issue, December 1907: “It seems that any agitation in India now must be carried on secretly, and that the only methods which can bring the English Government to its sense are the Russian methods vigorously and incessantly applied until the English relax their tyranny and are driven out of the country.”[40] In August 1908, he added, “As to the ethics of dynamite, it may be laid down in a general way that where the people have political power there is no need for the use of explosives. It only promotes reaction. But where the people are utterly defenceless, both politically and militarily, then one may look on the bomb or any other weapon as legitimate. Its employment then becomes merely a question of expediency. We hope to discuss this question, ­particularly with reference to India, in an early issue.”[41]

Back in Maniktola Garden, Hem Chandra Das (Kanungo) had grown impatient with a string of botched bombing and assassination operations followed by a year of relative inactivity. So he took the initiative to seek more advanced revolutionary techniques through an apprenticeship with the Russians in Paris.[42] Funded by Rana ostensibly to study chemistry—often a convenient route to the science of explosives, it would appear—Kanungo was joined by his Maharashtrian friend Pandurang Mahadev Bapat.[43] Das and Bapat were reported to be in contact with a female anarchist from the United States in Paris who Heehs suggests (rather implausibly, I think) could have been Emma Goldman. Whoever she was, she introduced them to a mysterious figure known as PhD, identified only as a leading figure in a French socialist organization. PhD and one of his comrades, “a former officer belonging to his party,” offered them instruction in “history, geography and economics, along with socialism, communism, etc.,” along with notes on the organization of secret societies, and after some initial hesitation, “got a member of their party to instruct Hem and Bapat in explosive chemistry and demolition.” French police reports are vague on which of these was Safranski, since he was both a former “brilliant” officer in the Russian army, and enrolled in l’Ecole des Langues Orientales.[44]

Another student was Miss Perin Naoroji, granddaughter of the renowned parliamentarian Dadabhai Naoroji, best known for his book on the economic drain theory of British colonial rule. The “Grand Old Man” had her educated in Europe along with her three sisters. Since Perin’s boardinghouse was on Cama’s street, the Boulevard Montparnasse, intelligence surmised the girl had “learned politics from her.” Crossing the English Channel to visit one of her sisters in London, she was with Savarkar at the time of his arrest. She followed his case with interest, visiting him in jail and then returning to Paris after it was over. Thereafter she could be found “working hard in the Extremist ranks,” and within a few months she was reportedly being tutored in bomb making by W. Bromjevski, described as “a young Polish engineer, believed to be an anarchist, who visited her and her sister constantly at their flat for months.” The sisters returned to India at the end of the year, yet remained in communication with Cama, “with whom [Perin] had arranged a simple but effective cipher before she left Paris.”[45]

What of the local French anarchists? Soon after arriving in Paris, Kanungo had been introduced to Albert (Joseph) Libertad, founder of the journal L’anarchie, as someone who might be able to provide expertise in explosives and clandestine organization. According to Kanungo’s memoir, when Libertad invited him to attend anarchist meetings, Kanungo went, under the impression that “anarchism was just another word for revolution.”[46] But once he realized what they were talking about, he withdrew. Libertad was an exponent of illegalism, an amoral and extreme individualist school of thought. L’anarchie’s rhetoric favored criminality as an antinomian lifestyle and expressed antipathy to all forms of organization. None of this interested Kanungo, dedicated as he was to a militant cause with a focused goal. The reason he had become so frustrated with his Swadeshi comrades in the first place was what he saw as their aimless ineffectuality; this was not the remedy he sought. Ironically, the fabled rampage of the Libertad-inspired outlaw Bonnot gang in 1911–12 may have borne some resemblance to the Samiti’s dacoities, albeit more purely nihilist in their hatred of the bourgeoisie, lacking the additional motive of funding an anticolonial struggle.[47]

When French law enforcement officials got wind of the rumor that the notorious “Russian anarchist [Safranski was] instructing natives of India . . . in manufacture of explosives,” they were quick to inform their British counterparts.[48] But the detectives arrived too late; the suspect was gone, and the information successfully transmitted to India and the United States. Their prize was “a single cyclostyled copy of a manual of explosives” whose opening sentence declared, “The aim of the present work is to place in the hands of a revolutionary people such a powerful weapon as explosive matter is.”[49]

Full Circle

In late 1907 or early 1908, with their training complete, Kanungo and Bapat left to bear their new skills and information back to India. Thereafter the Criminal Investigation Department recorded, “Special emissaries . . . moved from time to time between India and Europe for arms and bomb manuals.”[50] Kanungo’s manual contained three sections: preparation of explosive substances, fabrication of shells, and use of the finished products. In the estimation of James Campbell Ker, assistant to the director of Criminal Intelligence,

The subject is exhaustively and scientifically treated; the amount of attention given to detail may be gathered from the fact that the composition and manufacture of thirty different explosives of one class only, namely those containing salts of chloric and chlorous acids, are described. The reason why it is necessary to be able to make explosives of various substances is given as follows: “In revolutionary practice we have often to use not the explosives we should like to use, but those which we can prepare with the materials at hand. . . . Again in the time of armed conflict the expenditure of explosives is considerable, and it is necessary to expropriate pharmaceutical shops (just as armouries are ­expropriated) and out of useful substances to ­prepare what is needed.”[51]

The remainder of the manual, Ker explained, gave specialized instructions for making percussion and fuse bombs, with fuses ranging from instantaneous detonation through lengths of seconds or minutes, up to eight or nine hours. Possible uses for the results of such handiwork included street fighting, assassination, and destroying bridges or buildings. Heehs too goes into some detail about the explosives used (picric acid, sulfuric acid, fulminate of mercury, and nitroglycerine) and construction of bombs: shells made of forged spheres, or cleverly concealed in hollowed-out bedposts or books, as in the instance of the deadly but maddeningly unexploded Cadbury cocoa tin packed with detonators and explosive material, all encased in a copy of Herbert Broom’s Commentary on the Common Law, intended to kill Chief Presidency Magistrate Douglas Kingsford in 1908.[52]

Above all else, it was the use of the bomb that drew the Bengalis into focus as anarchists in the colonial government’s eyes. More than just a tactical instrument, at times it manifested for them as the focus of a viscerally intense cult of devotion to annihilation that shaded imperceptibly into sacrificial devotion to the mother goddess-as-nation. The bomb was also personified as the “benefactor of the poor . . . [which] has been brought across the seas. Worship it, sing its praises, bow to it. Bande Mataram.”[53]

The quotation is from Har Dayal’s “Shabash! In Praise of the Bomb,” a pamphlet written from San Francisco on the occasion of a grenade blast heard by Indian expatriates around the world—namely, the attempt on Viceroy Lord Hardinge’s life during his elephant-borne ceremonial entrance into Delhi to reinaugurate the city as the seat of empire in December 1912.[54] Maniktola Garden veteran Rash Behari Bose had masterminded the attack. But the actual bomber was a young man named Basanta Kumar Biswas, to whom Bose had imparted both the “political indoctrination and practical training he would need to carry out his mission.”[55] Disguised as a woman with the significant alias of Lakshmibai (the rani of Jhansi, heroine of the 1857 mutiny), Biswas flung the bomb from a balcony overlooking the parade route. Although the blast seriously wounded the viceroy, it did not kill him; the Indian attendant riding behind him was less fortunate.

Cama commented in the Bande Mataram of January 1913, “The enemy entered formally Delhi on the 23rd December 1912, but under what an omen? . . . This bomb-throwing was just to announce to the whole world that the English Government is discarded, and verily, whenever there is an opportunity the Revolutionaries are sure to show their mind, spirit and principle in Hindustan!”[56] Cama’s comments made it clear that whether or not the target had been killed or injured was irrelevant; its message exceeded the bomb’s immediate effect. The catalyzing act to rouse the laggard and latent to action was at the heart of the ideal. Sure enough, the spectacular deed ignited a new series of murders and attempted murders carried out by both the major groups in Bengal.

Many socialists and nationalists considered the adoption of this kind of action a sign of impatience—the voluntaristic belief that a single autonomous will could jump-start the change rather than waiting for its conditions to ripen through the slower processes of parliamentary modification, mass education, molecular shifts, or structural impasse. It also indicated an analysis that saw oppression as stemming from an external source, relatively easy to excise, rather than from internal and systemic contradictions, which would require a more profound transformation to correct. Such an externalization of oppression was ­particularly easy to adopt under conditions of colonial rule.

Anarchism?

A special police unit had tagged Shridar Vyankatesh Ketkar (later sociologist and historian) as a member of the Savarkar brothers’ old group, which had “carried out experiments in explosives, and entered into correspondence with the anarchists of Bengal.” He later traveled to the United States to study, and wrote a letter from there in June 1909 “to a high official in India suggesting that Government should deal with the anarchist youths through the extremist leaders” to whom he claimed to have access. He said he had “discussed the subject of nihilism” with nationalist firebrand Bal Gangadhar Tilak, “nearly two years before the first bomb outrage. I had advocated nihilism while Mr. Tilak condemned it outright as injurious to the interest of the country.”[57]

What did he mean by nihilism? What uses would he have associated it with? In one sense it was reminiscent of the French illegalists’ utter rejection of social norms and institutions. But in Russia, nihilism was associated primarily with urban students and intellectuals. While they likewise rejected the governmental, educational, legal, and disciplinary institutions then existing in their society, they also proposed a more positive alternative vision for what might come after or alongside the ecstasy of destruction. The nihilists’ Narodnik or populist outgrowth began to idealize the peasantry as not only the revolutionary class but also the bearer of the true spiritual essence of the Russian people and maintainer of its preindustrial organic social and economic formations. As the argument ran, there was no need to pass through the prescribed stages of capitalism only to end up, after much suffering, back where they had started, with some form of romanticized stateless socialism based on the village commune or mir. Furthermore, to the Narodnik Slavophile, the true soul of Russia was in effect an Asian village soul, and many of the same mystical stereotypes that Indians bore were attributed to it. Such a true Russian felt the czar’s enforced modernization as an alien Western encroachment no less than the Indian villagers did their modernization at British hands. In this too the urban intellectual Swadeshists resembled the Russian Slavophiles.

In the meantime, Criminal Investigation Department director William Cleveland had another, more menacing take on the true nature of the Indian soul. In his introductory remarks on “anarchism,” written for his assistant Ker’s 1919 documentary compilation Political Trouble in India, he diagnosed the “psychology of the politico-criminal activities of Indians” as none other than a fervidly intense religious nationalism.[58] To characterize this, he enlisted the aid of an extended quotation from John Nicol Farquhar’s Religious Nationalism, published in 1912.[59]

Farquhar identified this new trend (in contrast to the thin, bloodless old politicism) as a species of religious nationalism indicating the maturation of “racial” confidence, which produced greater independence of thought as well as greater demands for full political independence. Marked by its commitment to a comprehensive revitalization of national life, it was “fired” by deep devotion and self-­consecration “to God and India.” And he claimed that “finally, whether in anarchists or men of peace, the new nationalism is willing to serve and suffer. The deluded boys who believed they could bring in India’s millennium by murdering a few white men were quite prepared to give their lives for their country; and the healthy movements which incarnate the new spirit at its best spend themselves in unselfish service.” Here he pointed to a divergence between anarchists and Hindu revivalists, for whom, given their possession of such a plainly superior civilization, it was “a religious duty to get rid of the Europeans and all the evils that attend him.”[60]

But Farquhar nevertheless identified “a general attitude . . . common to the revivalists and the anarchists. It is clear as noonday that the religious aspect of anarchism was merely an extension of that revival of Hinduism which is the work of Dayananda, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and the Theosophists.” Farquhar was thus setting up an unproblematic equivalence between anarchism and the religious nationalism that would later spawn a noxious Indian variant of fascism, while actually misrepresenting both sides of the equation.

This distorted characterization of Hinduism was not new. Cleveland’s descriptions of a cult of “furious devotion to some divinity of hate and blood” recall in nearly identical terms those of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department’s sensationalized obsession with Kali-worshipping bandits dating from nearly a century earlier—an obsession enshrined as a timeless trope from William Sleeman’s books in 1815 to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984. The Thuggee and Dacoity Department was reconstituted in 1903 as the Criminal Investigation Department with a new focus on seditious activity. Granted, the revolutionists did not help matters with passages such as this one from the Yugantar of May 2, 1908:

The Mother is thirsty and is pointing out to her sons the only thing that can quench that thirst. Nothing less than human blood and decapitated human heads will satisfy her. Let her sons, therefore, worship her with these offerings, and let them not shrink even from sacrificing their lives to procure them. On the day on which the Mother is worshipped in this way in every village, on that day will the people of India be inspired with a divine spirit and the crown of independence will fall into their hands.[61]

Like many Orientalist fantasies, this was a cocreated myth.