Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T13:46:13.090Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Terrorist and his Jailor: The Conundrum of Friendship and Intimacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 April 2018

Durba Ghosh
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Through the framework of “friendship” defined by Judith Butler, Leela Gandhi, and Vanessa Smith, this essay tracks the relationship between Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty, a Bengali revolutionary terrorist who spent three decades in British jails in colonial India and Francis Lowman, a police officer who was responsible for his imprisonment. Informed by Chakrabarty’s autobiography, the essay shows that terrorism and intimacy were closely linked. Even though the revolutionary terrorist and jailor opposed one another in violent ways, these relationships were grounded in mutual recognition and built on what (following Butler) is called the “fundamental sociality of colonialism.”

Keywords

BritainIndiaterrorismintimacyfriendship
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 42 , Special Issue 1: The Private Lives of Empire: Emotion, Intimacy, and Colonial Rule , April 2018 , pp. 102 - 119
Copyright
© 2018 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Durba Ghosh is a Professor in the History Department and the Director of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919-1947 (2017), Sex and the Family in Colonial India: the Making of Empire (2006) and with Dane Kennedy, the co-editor of Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (2006).

References

Arnold, David. “The Self and the Cell: Indian Prison Narratives as Life Histories.” In Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History, edited by Arnold and Stuart Blackburn, 29–53. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” In The Location of Culture, 85–92. London: Routledge, 1990.Google Scholar
Boehmer, Elleke. Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bose, Subhas Chandra. The Indian Struggle, 1920–1942, edited by Sisir K. Bose and Sugata Bose, 1964. Reprint New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. “Giving an Account of Oneself.” Diacritics 31:4 (2001): 22–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cakrabartī, Trailokya Nātha. Jele Triśa Bachara O Pāka Bhāratera Svādhīnatā Saṃgrāma, 1946. . Reprint Kāpāsātīẏā: Jilā Maẏamanasiṃha, 1968.Google Scholar
Cakrabartī, Trailokya Nātha. Thirty Years in Prison: Sensational Confessions of Revolutionary. Translated by Nirod Datta. Calcutta: Alpha-Beta Publications, 1963.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Manini. Do and Die: the Chittagong Uprising, 1930–34. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1999.Google Scholar
Chaudhuri, Nirad. Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. New York: Macmillan, 1951.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dutt, Kalpana. Chittagong Armoury Raiders: Reminiscences. New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1979.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963.Google Scholar
Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Gandhi, Mohandas K. An Autobiography: Or the Story of My Experiments with Truth. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust, 1940.Google Scholar
Ghosh, Durba. Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Griffiths, Percival. To Guard the People: the history of the Indian Police. London: Benn, 1971.Google Scholar
Maclean, Kama. A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text. London: Hurst, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Majeed, Javed. Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Majumdar, R. C. The Revolutionary Movement in Bengal and the Role of Surya Sen. Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1978.Google Scholar
Nehru, Jawaharlal. Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru. London: John Lane, 1936.Google Scholar
Plamper, Jan. “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenswein, and Peter Stearns.” History and Theory 49:2 (2010): 237–265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Popplewell, Richard J. Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire, 1904–1924. Portland: Frank Cass, 1993.Google Scholar
Reid, Robert N. Years of Change in Bengal and Assam. London: Benn, 1966.Google Scholar
Sewell, William. Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Sharma, I. Mallikarjuna. Easter Rebellion in India: The Chittagong Uprisings. Hyderabad: Marxist Study Forum, 1993.Google Scholar
Smith, Vanessa. Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange, and Pacific Encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stoler, Ann. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann, ed. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolfers, Alex. “Born Like Krishna in the Prison-House: Revolutionary Asceticism in the Political Ashram of Aurobindo Ghosh.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 39:3 (2016): 525–545.Google Scholar
Wynne, Martin, ed. On Honourable Terms: The Memoirs of Some Indian Police Officers, 1915–48. London: BACSA, 1985.Google Scholar