Writing Revolution in South Asia

History, Practice, Politics

Kama Maclean, J. Daniel Elam, Christopher Moffat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780415786683
• eBook ISBN: 9781351851251
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This comprehensive volume examines the relationship between revolutionary politics and the act of writing in modern South Asia. Its pages feature a diverse cast of characters: rebel poets and anxious legislators, party theoreticians and industrious archivists, nostalgic novelists, enterprising journalists and more. The authors interrogate the multiple forms and effects of revolutionary storytelling in politics and public life, questioning the easy distinction between 'words' and 'deeds' and considering the distinct consequences of writing itself. While acknowledging that the promise, fervour or threat of revolution is never reducible to the written word, this collection explores how manifestos, lyrics, legal documents, hagiographies and other constellations of words and sentences articulate, contest and enact revolutionary political practice in both colonial and post-colonial South Asia.

Emphasising the potential of writing to incite, contain or reorient the present, this volume promises to provoke new conversations at the intersection of historiography, politics and literature in South Asia, urging scholars and activists to interrogate their own storytelling practices and the relationship of the contemporary moment to violent and contested pasts.

This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.

INTRODUCTION

On the Form, Politics and Effects of Writing Revolution

J. Daniel Elam^a and Chris Moffat^b

^aDepartment of English and Drama, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada; ^bSchool of History, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

‘Writing Revolution’ is concerned with the relationship between revolutionary politics and the act of writing in modern South Asia. The pages that follow feature a diverse cast of characters: rebel poets and anxious legislators, party theoreticians and industrious archivists, nostalgic novelists, enterprising journalists and more. We have challenged our contributors to interrogate the multiple forms and effects of revolutionary storytelling in politics and public life: to question the easy distinction between ‘words’ and ‘deeds’ and consider the distinct consequences of writing itself. While acknowledging that the promise, fervour or threat of revolution is never reducible to the written word, we are interested in how manifestos, lyrics, legal documents, hagiographies and other constellations of words and sentences articulate, contest and enact revolutionary political practice in both colonial and post-colonial India. The potential for writing to incite, control or reorient politics is one that has informed legal cultures, fuelled literary innovations, and propelled the imaginaries of post-colonial politics in the subcontinent.

This issue is both a continuation and a reflexive assessment of an earlier special issue, ‘Reading Revolutionaries’, published in the journal Postcolonial Studies in 2013.¹ The object of this earlier collaboration was to explore new protocols of reading that might take seriously the dynamic assemblage of revolutionary thought characterising India’s late colonial period. This moment of intellectual activity has often been relegated to the margins for its association with revolutions that never came, or, alternatively, as a result of the difficulties in compiling an archive of its clandestine figures and fleeting movements.² Framed as a question—‘Who is a revolutionary?’—the 2013 volume attempted to resuscitate an intellectual lineage of anti-colonial revolution without reducing it to a single narrative and without succumbing to the mechanical rubric of ‘success’ versus ‘failure’ so common in earlier histories of revolutionary action.³ The present volume builds on this conversation, but departs from its predecessor’s particular concern with intellectual genealogies—identifying who were the revolutionaries, what was ‘revolutionary’ about their thought—to interrogate the nature of stories told about revolutionaries and revolutionary politics. We are concerned, first and foremost, with the political work accomplished by written accounts of revolutionary lives, actions and programmes. We are also interested in the ethical and political dilemmas raised by narratives of revolutionary violence, and we approach this project eager to interrogate our own participation in a long history of interpreting revolutionary rhetoric and aesthetics.

The essays collected here traverse three constitutive moments of the category of ‘revolution’ as it has been written over the past century of Indian history. First, we identify ‘revolutionary writing’ as a form of writing that emerges from both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary processes, occupying a spectrum that runs from incitement to containment. Consequently, the naming of what is ‘revolutionary’ and the legitimacy of certain forms of violence is necessarily contested, producing multiple and often contradictory archives. Contributors to this issue underscore the importance of the literary and textual worlds inhabited and created by revolutionary political thinkers as well as those of their opponents and interpreters. Collectively, we argue that the act of writing demands interrogation in its own right, as a process and labour with distinct effects and consequences and with specific advantages and limitations.

Second, some of us examine historical writing on anti-colonial revolutionary action, a genre that traverses both the period of colonial rule and the career of the independent Indian nation-state. We interrogate the desire to celebrate and polemically wield revolutionary histories, especially where they interrupt or challenge accepted views of India’s nationalist movement (Gandhian or otherwise). We consider in particular the impulse to establish an authoritative interpretation of certain events, reflecting on the narrative tropes and devices mobilised to this end.⁴ Our motivation is not to suggest there is one correct or even a ‘more authentic’ way to capture this history, but rather to demonstrate how these texts can be used as a lens to map the changing political stakes through which revolutionary stories acquire meaning.

Finally, several of the pieces in this collection engage the continued resonance of revolutionary storytelling in our twenty-first century present, and particularly the relationship between academic work, politics and the public life of the past. This includes reflection on the manner in which our work as scholars collaborating in an international context is entangled in and charged by an equally complicated global conjuncture. We feel compelled to ask not just how our written work frames the significance and meaning of revolution in modern India, but also why we are drawn to this explosive and contested moment in South Asian history, especially at a time when an increasing number of scholars in the field are returning to questions of paths not taken, ideologies obfuscated, figures forgotten. These essays appear at a moment when novel historical interventions coincide with enduring debates around militancy, global politics and the nation-state form, as well as ongoing attempts by scholars and activists to think beyond liberalism and its horizons. Accordingly, the volume brings together new histories of political thought in India with evolving debates over the promise (and predicaments) of post-colonial politics, ethics and aesthetics. We move beyond an interrogation of the early anti-colonial propagandist and colonial bureaucrat to examine our own words and the reverberations of recent interventions into the lives and afterlives of revolution.

I. Incitement and Containment

In 1918, the Government of India Home Department published one of the earliest ‘histories’ of India’s nascent revolutionary movement in the form of the 226-page Sedition Committee 1918 Report. Popularly referred to as the ‘Rowlatt Report’—after the Committee’s president and principal author, the British High Court judge Sidney Rowlatt—the document was the precursor to the extension of wartime emergency legislation in the repressive ‘Rowlatt Act’, the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act of 1919.

The Committee was made up of Rowlatt and five officials from various parts of British India who worked individually and collectively over 46 meetings to produce the document.⁵ Over the course of 27 partially interlinked chapters, the Committee identified a sprawling substratum of anarchy and agitation in the colony, stretching from the hearts of major Indian cities to the peripheries of imperial territory and even within enemy states. The narrative illustrates the spectre of violence and ‘outrage’ that had occupied the minds of colonial authorities since the partition of Bengal in 1905 and the disturbances in Punjab shortly thereafter. The possibility for mutiny identified in the Report sets the terms for intelligence work in the wake of World War I—a context characterised by the emergence of M.K. Gandhi’s mass politics and the shadowy threat posed by a new, internationalist Soviet state.⁶

The Rowlatt Report evidences the fervour with which colonial intelligence officials traced constellations of dissident activity from Punjab to Bengal, and indeed across a global terrain—from mutinous ashrams in San Francisco to shadowy guesthouses in London, from seditious newspapers in Constantinople to illicit printing presses in Burma. Offering ‘true’ accounts in lurid detail, the Report may be read as a work of Victorian literature in its own right.⁷ The carefully reconstructed narratives of revolutionary conspiracy—replete with secret society intrigue, assassination outrages and taxi-cab dacoities—channel many of the literary styles of popular detective and imperialist romance novels at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, this government document might be placed in a genealogy with Philip Meadows Taylor’s 1839 bestseller Confessions of a Thug, loosely based on the true life of the infamous dacoit Syeed Amir Ali.⁸ At the same time, the Rowlatt Report wrote revolution in a particularly modernist aesthetic. Although its record of agitation officially begins in 1906, the Report moves backwards and forwards in time—from the seventeenth century to the possible future of the 1920s; from the minor mutinies of the late nineteenth century to the large-scale dacoities in 1910s Bengal. The result is a circular history that prefigures the literary experiments of the Bloomsbury Group only a few years later. This governmental document is thus caught between two Anglophone literary movements: rooted, in the first instance, in Victorian detective novels, and reflecting, in the second instance, an almost experimental concern with the proliferation of narratives, the circularity of time, and the ‘tense future’.⁹

In the space of a single paragraph, Rowlatt and his colleagues describe anti-colonial agitation as the work of ‘revolutionaries’ and ‘dacoits’,¹⁰ a move that establishes equivalence between a form of political dissent and a familiar notion of criminality. This conflation is not new to the Committee’s work. It draws on a tradition of Criminal Intelligence reporting in the Empire, as when a June 1914 report from San Francisco declared the nascent Ghadar Party to be mere ‘badmaash’, hooligans, who had allegedly swayed Leftist American hearts and minds with their calls for democracy and freedom.¹¹ Just as Bhagat Singh would, fifteen years later, contest his identification as a ‘terrorist’—first by the colonial state, but also by members of the nationalist press¹²—so, too, have revolutionary figures throughout the twentieth century sought to separate popular perceptions of criminality and selfish vendetta from militant philosophies of violence and its transformative potential.¹³ But the Rowlatt Report is much more than condescending dismissal: in the assertion of a vast, decentralised conspiracy of rebellion and subversion, channelled through secret bases in Punjab, Bengal, the United Provinces and Madras, the Committee elevates and gives legitimacy to this ‘hooliganism’ in its many forms, categorising a sequence of disparate events as a ‘widespread but essentially single movement’, part of an existential threat to the stability of British rule in the subcontinent.¹⁴

The Rowlatt Report presaged the Rowlatt Act, passed in March 1919 by the Imperial Legislative Council. The Act allowed for preventive indefinite detention as well as imprisonment without trial for those suspected of committing, or conspiring to commit, revolutionary crimes. Together, the Report and the Act demonstrate a tension at the heart of debates to define ‘terrorism’ as a legal category—the necessity of reconciling juridical norms with the uncertain spectre of action, wherein the threat of the militant group or revolutionary cell demands speculative work on the part of the law.¹⁵ Indeed, among the conclusions of the Rowlatt Committee is that it is impossible to connect the various crimes empirically, but that one must connect them imaginatively for ‘punitive’ and ‘preventative’ reasons.¹⁶ Like the great crime and spy novels of the age—from Joseph Conrad’s 1907 The Secret Agent to G.K. Chesterton’s 1908 The Man Who Was Thursday—...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: On the Form, Politics and Effects of Writing Revolution
• 2 Born Like Krishna in the Prison-House: Revolutionary Asceticism in the Political Ashram of Aurobindo Ghose
• 3 Law and Radical Rhetoric in British India: The 1897 Trial of Bal Gangadhar Tilak
• 4 Gandhi and the Terrorists: Revolutionary Challenges from Bengal and Engagements with Non-Violent Political Protest
• 5 Agyeya’s Unfinished Revolution: Sexual and Social Freedom in Shekhar: Ek Jivani
• 6 Commonplace Anti-Colonialism: Bhagat Singh’s Jail Notebook and the Politics of Reading
• 7 ‘My Heart, My Fellow Traveller’: Fantasy, Futurity and the Itineraries of Faiz Ahmed Faiz
• 8 Revolutionary History and the Post-Colonial Muslim: Re-Writing the ‘Silk Letters Conspiracy’ of 1916
• 9 Bhagat Singh’s Corpse
• 10 A Prehistory of Violence? Revolution and Martyrs in the Making of a Political Tradition in Kerala
• 11 Revolution and Revelation, or, When is History Too Soon?
• Index