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- Convenors:
-
Harald Fischer-Tine
(ETH Zurich)
Kim Wagner (Queen Mary, University of London)
- Location:
- 21D68a
- Start time:
- 23 July, 2014 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
The panel explores the rhetoric and practice of political violence and revolutionary terrorism in late colonial India and analyses the reaction of colonial officials and western media.
Long Abstract:
From the initial rise of Indian revolutionary terrorism in the 1890s until the end of the Raj, British policies in India were often shaped by fears of Indian 'plots' and 'conspiracies' or outbursts of 'native violence'. The proposed panel explores the various challenges and threats, both real and imagined, that emanated from the activities of anti-colonial revolutionary nationalists in India and abroad, and analyzes the reactions of colonial and metropolitan authorities. Some contributions reconstruct the pre-history of British anxieties about Indian violence, while others examine various strategies that evolved to counter the perceived terrorist threat in the period under survey, such as legal innovations, policing, the creation of new technologies of identification and surveillance, and the establishment of intelligence institutions exclusively concerned with counter-insurgency. Special emphasis is laid on the activities of diasporic Indian 'terrorists' who led their crusade against British imperialism outside the bounds of British India. Their frequent cooperation with other European, American and Asian discontents of the imperial world order, such as Russian anarchists or Irish Fenians, built horizontal alliances that created particularly intense anxieties among British observers. Lastly, the discursive construction of what constituted a terrorist threat not only in official documents and newspaper reporting but also in popular culture is put under scrutiny.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Kama Maclean (University of New South Wales)
Paper short abstract:
This paper provides some background into the attempt, in late 1929, by revolutionaries to assassinate Viceroy Irwin. While the action overtly ‘failed’, it succeeded in bringing the issue of political violence to the fore, to not only Congress politics but also within revolutionary circles.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation, I wish to examine the interstice between revolutionary action, colonial reaction, and public interpretation in interwar India. This begins with a reading of the dynamics within the revolutionary organisation responsible for the attack on Viecroy Irwin's train, the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA). There was some disagreement within the organisation about what political violence - discursively construed as terrorism by the British - might achieve, coming as it did immediately prior to the Lahore Congress. Then there is the interpretation of actions by the members of the Congress, the British and by the targets themselves.
This particular 'action' was planned by the HSRA's central committee, but subsequently cancelled when it was realised that it would place undue pressure on the annual Congress at Lahore. The Lahore Congress was to consider escalating the nationalist demand from dominion status to complete independence, and to embark upon a program of civil disobedience. However a faction of the HSRA proceeded with the plot, keen to pressure the Viceroy and demonstrate to the Congress (especially Gandhi), the support that the revolutionaries enjoyed. The public interpretation of the 'action' provided an additional layer of analysis, as did the reaction of the Viceroy, who maintained an exemplary stiff upper lip throughout.
Gajendra Singh (University of Exeter)
Paper short abstract:
This paper is a study of the Ghadar Movement through the testimony of Jodh Singh; a sipahi, mazdur, revolutionary, turncoat, approver, and victim of a psychotic breakdown. He inhabited the many worlds of Ghadar and the neuroses with which the Conspiracy was treated in the Anglo-American imagination.
Paper long abstract:
On 12th March 1918, a psychiatric evaluation declared Jodh Singh, a prisoner held in Alameda County Jail in California, to be legally insane. His crime was one of 'Malingering' - the refusal to testify before a court tasked with prosecuting Indian migrants in North America who had tried to launch an armed revolt against British rule in India from November 1914. It was one in a long list of similar prosecutions that had taken place in India, Burma and Canada, and was partly financed and orchestrated by British Intelligence.
Jodh Singh straddled the worlds of the Imperialist imagination and Ghadar reality. He was a Punjabi Sikh and had been a soldiers, migrant labourer, turncoat and approver before suffering a psychotic breakdown in a courtroom in San Francisco. The detailed interviews and analyses of Jodh Singh's dreams following his breakdown offers some measure of intimacy with the rank-and-file of the Ghadar Movement about whom very little was ever recorded or preserved. It also becomes a prism through which one can begin to understand the desperate neuroses that plagued both Britain and the United States. The desire to prosecute a trans-regional and trans-Pacific conspiracy about which they knew very little, resulted in Ghadar assuming a fictive, nightmarish quality in the Anglo-American imagination. And Jodh Singh, diagnosed as possessing all of the degenerative qualities of the 'homosexual type' was one such victim.
John Pincince (Loyola University-Chicago)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the complex web of interaction between colonial policing and surveillance, imperial intelligence networks, trans-continental anti-colonial resistance, and colonial law and four legal trials that played out across three continents during a tumultuous a two year period 1909-1910.
Paper long abstract:
On July 1, 1909, at the Institute of Imperial Studies, London, Madan Lal Dhingra fired his Browning pistol three times, the bullets piercing the body of the Sir William Curzon-Wyllie, the Political Aide-de-Camp to the Secretary of State for India. Five months later, and more than 7,000 kms away, Anant Kanhere shot and killed A.M.T. Jackson, the District Magistrate at Nasik, in Bombay Presidency. During that five month period and after, we see a remarkable shift in the British imperial view about anti-colonial resistance in India and its "spread" throughout Europe and North America. This paper examines the complex web of interaction between colonial policing and surveillance, imperial intelligence networks, trans-continental anti-colonial resistance, and colonial law and four legal trials that played out across three continents during a tumultuous a two year period 1909-1910.
Daniel Brueckenhaus (Beloit College)
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the early twentieth century, this paper analyzes the effects of coalitions that Indian anti-colonialists formed with both German right-wing authorities and German communists, on British notions of political policing, as well as on the broader European political and ideological landscape.
Paper long abstract:
During the first half of the twentieth century, the British imperial authorities saw themselves faced with a novel threat. Confronted with a heightened level of police surveillance in the colonies and in Britain, political activists from India and other British territories were moving to continental Europe. There, they formed new alliances with both German right-wing authorities, and German communists. This paper argues that such German-anti-colonialist alliances caused the British police authorities to develop a new, transnational and trans-imperial concept of surveillance. In addition, Western European reactions to these coalitions "across the color line" also formed an important part of a more wide-ranging transformation of Europe's political and ideological landscape. The cooperation between anti-colonialists and German anti-democratic forces was perceived, in Britain and France, as an attack on a Western European model of governance that combined liberal politics at home with autocratic rule in the colonies. As the paper argues, the authorities of France and Britain in reaction moved closer together ideologically and politically, while setting themselves apart from Germany. At the same time, the new level of cooperation between French and British political police officers increasingly undermined the very liberal foundations that many Western Europeans saw as a central, distinguishing characteristic of their own political culture.
Teresa Segura-Garcia (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
In the late colonial period, Maharaja Sayaji Rao III of Baroda positioned his state (the main princely state of western India) as a blueprint for the Indian nation. The local loyalties he fostered have contributed to layered and often contradictory experiences of belonging in postcolonial India.
Paper long abstract:
In the late colonial period, the Indian princely states comprised a third of the territory of the Indian subcontinent and one fifth of its population. Within South Asian historiography, they have been understood as British-sponsored remnants of tradition that were marked for extinction. If the princely states' seemingly unproblematic absorption into independent India has cast a long shadow over research on these polities, this paper complicates this teleological narrative through the study of Baroda, the leading princely state of Western India. In Baroda, Maharaja Sayaji Rao III articulated a local project of patriotic nationalist belonging through an extensive programme of social, cultural and educational reforms. Museums, schools, libraries, parks and sports grounds cultivated local attachment and pride.
At the same time, Sayaji Rao III maintained close ties with and provided financial support to all-India anticolonial nationalists, from Congress moderates to radicals exiled in Europe. How may we reconcile his efforts in building up Baroda as a 'patria' with his support for an all-India national space? I argue that in the early twentieth century Sayaji Rao III positioned Baroda as a blueprint for the Indian nation - a model that stood in for it until Independence could be brought about. Even as it disappeared with its accession into the Union of India in 1949, Baroda was central to the construction of independent India. At the same time, I propose that the local loyalties advanced by Sayaji Rao III have contributed to layered and often contradictory experiences of belonging in postcolonial western India.