An Empire of Touch

Women's Political Labor and the Fabrication of East Bengal

Poulomi Saha

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231549646
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Corruption & Misconduct
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Poulomi Saha offers an innovative account of women's political labor in East Bengal over more than a century. Through a material account of text and textile, An Empire of Touch crafts a new narrative of gendered political labor under empire.

PART I

Reading the Body Politic

1

Virgin Suicides

On September 23, 1932, Pritilata Waddedar, a twenty-year-old schoolteacher and member of the Indian Republican Army (IRA),¹ a local chapter of the larger revolutionary group Jugantar,² became the first Indian woman to die in the commission of an anticolonial attack in the twentieth century when she committed suicide after leading a raid on the Pahartali Railway Institute in Chittagong, East Bengal. Police found Waddedar’s body outside the Institute dressed in men’s clothes, with no visible injuries, and they discovered tucked into her shirt several pamphlets of her own writing, including “Long Live Revolution” and “An Appeal to Women.”³ In the latter, she had written:

Women to day have taken the firm resolution that they will not remain in the background. For the freedom of their motherland they are willing to stand side by side with their brothers in every action however hard or fearful it may be. To offer proof I have taken upon myself the leadership of this expedition to be launched today.⁴

The tract ends with the exclamation, “I boldly declare myself a revolutionary.” Her body, spectacularly stilled outside the site of her attack, offers proof of another order. Of what it offers proof, the modes of reading and memorialization it invites, and the afterlives of that body and its articulations constitute the terms of a colonial and postcolonial struggle over meaning-making. At the time, Waddedar’s dead body took on a kind of evidentiary status in the prosecution of her comrades, a colonial assertion of authority in the courtroom—a prophecy, perhaps, of how it would come again, decades later, to be the disputed object of historical narrative. Pritilata Waddedar, variously called terrorist, martyr, goddess, and dupe, herself comes to be a kind of contested territory.

What is in a name? Terrorist, the watchword of our post-9/11 times, signified for British colonial authorities resistant bodies that threatened to co-opt their claim to sovereign power and ability to decree life and death. Turning to violence to overthrow the British, in explicit repudiation of the program of civil disobedience being popularized by M. K. Gandhi at this same moment, groups like Jugantar appropriated and reversed back onto the state the modes of its control. In so doing, they revealed the antinomianism of the Raj’s claim to uncontested power. Some forms of violence—those that are state-sanctioned—are appropriate, rational, justifiable; other forms of violence—those that take the dismantling of the state as their very goal—are savage, chaotic, passionate, excessive. As Achille Mbembe has argued, “The exercise of reason is tantamount to the exercise of freedom, a key element for individual autonomy. The romance of sovereignty, in this case, rests on the belief that the subject is the master and the controlling author of his or her own meaning.”⁵ Waddedar, and the name by which she and her actions are marked in historical record and in spectral iteration, inaugurate a hermeneutics of legibility, authority, and subjectivity. For these reasons, I call her and her comrades by the name they inscribed upon their bodies and actions: revolutionary.⁶

For colonial authorities, the discovery of Waddedar’s body outside the Institute ended a months-long search and verified their suspicion that she was involved in terrorist activities following the February 1932 death of a British police officer. Moreover, her body added to the growing cache of evidence against suspected Jugantar leader Surya Sen. At his trial, Waddedar, dead for more than a year, would be resurrected as witness against and indictment of her revolutionary comrades. For those very compatriots in Jugantar and for nationalist historians after them, however, the image of her corpse outside the Institute preserved her as martyr. In the months following her death, a photograph of her face and the text “Long Live Revolution” were printed on red leaflets, distributed throughout Chittagong as revolutionary memento mori, and showered onto the grounds of the Intelligence Branch Inspector’s compound.⁷ She joined the leagues of other rare Bengali women in secret revolutionary groups, such as Shanti Ghosh, Suniti Chowdhury, and Bina Das, and was glorified above them. She gave her life in her act of anticolonial violence, while they lived. As the exceptional sacrifice, her death rendered her exemplary.⁸

Her name became a synecdoche for blazing female heroism: Agnikanya Pritilata (“Firebrand Daughter” Pritilata).⁹ For nationalists and historians alike, Waddedar’s memory has been distilled to the iconicity of a single name, “Pritilata,” as she is called in films, recollections, and (consistently) academic texts. The assumption of a first-name identification represents a claim of intimacy that sits uneasily with my own explicitly feminist approach here, which aims to trace the unstable legibility of a form of political protest that depends on the destruction of life. This is not to suggest that to call Pritilata Waddedar by her last name as a scholarly practice is a recuperative or neutral gesture. Rather, by so doing, it is to insist upon careful attention to the gendered engine of memorialization that produced her as familiar and accessible to our touch across time (distinct from that by which Surya Sen also comes to have a single-name afterlife as “Masterda”). Compounding the authoritative proper noun “Master,” which denotes both his career as schoolteacher and his eminence, the honorific suffix da (“older brother”) familializes but does not familiarize Sen in a professionalized memorial. However, references to Waddedar by her first name serve as a discursive fixing, rendering her at once exemplary and familiar, heroic and ancillary, relic and ruin. This cohering function is made possible by her gender and the mode of her death, a form of representational violence that leaves her open to scrutiny and to narrativization.

I. Curated Fragments

This chapter follows Pritilata Waddedar’s body and memory as they are incarnated into legal, historical, and cultural evidence—made to speak, silenced, destroyed, and reimagined—by colonial authorities and nationalists alike. In the particular forms and terms of her sacrifice, Waddedar both augurs and undermines these future rewritings, offering her dead body as “proof” to systems of evaluation that it calculatedly confounds. The chapter traces the development of two legal apparatuses—one concerned with the construction of the female subject under law and the other with the identification and regulation of extrajudicial bodies—to demonstrate the imbrication of imperial technologies of consent and capture against which she made herself known. Cloth, materially and symbolically featured in each of the four chapters that follow, appears spectrally: it is the recalled but untouched envelope within which Waddedar’s body is preserved in the archive and opens up a mode of reading surfaces and their contiguities. This chapter keeps at the fore of its attention the materiality of historical encounter with Waddedar, mediated through, and by, the colonial archive; it concerns itself with the artifacts of a revolutionary action and what they reveal about the limits of what can be preserved, narrativized, and imagined of a female political subject. For this reason, it is structured in time with the stops and starts of Waddedar’s own archival appearance. It follows both letter and form of Waddedar’s articulations in order to argue for the extant expression of her intent and, by the same stroke, against fantasies of her containment and linearity. The legacy of the Chittagong uprising, often marked as peripheral to a nationalist narrative of modern India that presupposes its current form, reorients our conception of an anticolonial imagination because Jugantar’s intent to liberate the motherland was as much a local project of imagining Chittagong outside the purview of imperial rule as it was part of a broader program of anticolonial resistance.

The Chittagong Armory raids, like other armed insurgencies in twentieth-century British India, have come to be marginalized in the history of the region by virtue of their apparent failure to produce the goal of independence. It is tempting, then, to position the raids and Pritilata Waddedar in historiographic obscurity, and this as an excavation. But in the 1930s, when the future of an India and a Bengal free of British rule was not yet clear and certainly had not yet taken the form of a Bengal divided between the independent nation-states of India and Pakistan, independence was an ideological and aspirational category of affiliation and community. Bengal was the object of anticolonial insurgency even as a more expansive sense of India as a political figure had taken hold. In the near-century since the Armory raids, their memorialization has largely been partitioned along the lines drawn by Cyril Radcliffe in 1947, while the rhizomatic root system of Indian independence stretches across the territory that would become Pakistan and then Bangladesh. However, in recent years, a renewed interest in anticolonial organizations has drawn the events of Chittagong back across the border to India in the form of historical fiction and three feature films. This is a curious reinscription of a place and a moment outside of Indian national time. Indeed, it must ignore the local fidelities of Jugantar to be retrospectively incorporated into two nationalist histories. Drawing on the colonial, pre-Partition national form of British India, the Chittagong insurgency has become the object of a nationalist etiology that transcends postcolonial nation-states.

In 2010, Indian filmmaker Ashutosh Gowariker released Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey (We Play with Our Lives), a Hindi feature film on Chittagong focusing on Sen, who, according to the trailer, “trigger[s] a revolution.” The determinedly local violence of the Chittagong uprising in the cinematic retelling is not only a national memorialization but also an origin story for a nation that effectively does not exist. The incorporation of Chittagong back into the body of India reimagines the relationship between anticolonial resistance and postcolonial nationalism, refusing to acknowledge the multiple ruptures by which those two sites have been geopolitically separated from one another. The film capitalizes on resurgent nationalist sentiments and fantasies of an inviolable, transcendent state. While Chittagong might have become part of a separate nation-state, the events of the 1930s can be coalesced within a narrative of incipient Indian independence, their telos redirected ex post facto.¹⁰

By turning to the outbreak of anticolonial violence in Chittagong, the major port of the Bay of Bengal, in a moment at which the popular face of nationalism in British India was that of Gandhi, his salt march, and his hunger strike, this chapter offers a response to enduring questions of postcolonial studies: Who is a revolutionary? And what is a revolution if it brings no liberation? Whither the post of the postcolonial? The apparition of the 1857 Mutiny, in which sepoys in the Bengal Presidency Army raised a revolt against the British East India Company to set off rebellions across north and east India, has been manifested in moments of political upheaval for nearly a century as the anti-originary revolution. As that which ultimately resulted in the transfer of administrative control to the British crown and the advent of formal colonial rule, 1857 is the phantom of possibility to which each iteration of revolution returns, to which perhaps Pritilata Waddedar responded in her final declaration of herself. Waddedar is, for the purposes of this book, both a historical figure and a theorist of her own historicity. She argues, in her writing and with her body itself, for a form of self-memorialization that preserves rather than effaces the illegible and the unrepresentable. In those textual and bodily articulations, she resisted and undermined the very processes by which she has come to be known under the sign of a single name. Nevertheless, she left herself to be read. She declared herself and her political commitment. As she cited the apparitional revolution, let us then read that declaration alongside the terms by which she described her actions and their intent.

In her diary, Waddedar describes Surya Sen’s final words to her: “Women, regarded as a race of mothers in the Bengali households, also are enraged now in the display of valour but this chapter of history is yet to be recorded. Let the chapter be composed through your success or through your self-immolation.”¹¹ Waddedar makes the curious counterfactual assertion that her participation in the attack on the Railway Institute and her potential death would be self-immolation. Though she cites Sen for her iteration of “self-immolation” as history-making and community-building, she does not imagine the act of immolation as instructive; hers was instead to be the spectacular offering of her body to their shared cause, a signal flare of community. She writes that, for Sen, whether or not she survived was ancillary to the pedagogical and illustrative potential of her spectacular violence and apparent obedience. Her self-sacrifice was intended to compose a history that the valor of her fellow women could not. It insisted that the destruction of the individual body forms the body politic. It wrote a corporeal history that could only come to be in the absence of Waddedar as living, speaking actor. Waddedar’s evocation of self-immolation as a historically self-conscious semiotic practice draws on and resignifies the common form by which female self-immolation is figured: sati, the Hindu practice of burning living widows on the pyre alongside the corpses of their husbands.

The language of self-immolation, with its attendant specter of the act of sati, remarkably appears throughout the writings of women who participated in anticolonial violence of the period. It is a startling departure from the heroic lingua franca of revolutionary communities, as the practice of widows being cremated with their deceased husbands was largely disavowed and vilified in Bengal by the twentieth century. Despite the heterogeneous composition of groups like Jugantar, the women who participated in anticolonial violence in particular were marked by commonalities of background and education. Many, like Waddedar, were well educated, came from progressive middle-class families, and held leftist political views. Within this political community, sati was far from a naturalized contemporary cultural phenomenon; rather, it was seen as atavistic and distinctly unmodern. What is it about the language of self-immolation that offers such fugitive possibility for these women? This is a naming tha...