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Whither India? 1919 and the Aftermath of the First World War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2019

Durba Ghosh
Durba Ghosh*
Affiliation:
Durba Ghosh ([email protected]) is Professor of History and Director of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University.
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Extract

As diplomats across the world gathered in Paris in spring 1919 to discuss the peace process, observers asked “Whither India?” Critics wondered how the British government could enact emergency laws such as the Rowlatt Acts at the same time as it introduced the Government of India Act of 1919, which was intended to expand Indian involvement in governing the British dominions on the Indian subcontinent. Because Britain presented itself as a liberal form of empire on the international stage, its willingness to suspend rule of law over its subjects appeared contradictory. India's support of the Allied powers allowed Indian moderates to represent India in Paris; during the war, Indian subjects had contributed over one million soldiers and suffered influenza, plague, and famine. The possibility of a new relationship between those governing and those being governed led many Indians to demand an adherence to the rule of law, a guarantee of civil liberties, and the foundations of a government that was for and by the Indian people. In a time of revolution in Russia, and assassinations by anarchists in Italy and France, it seemed foolhardy to repress radicals by censoring the press, preventing the right of individuals to assemble, or detaining suspects before they had committed any crimes. Lala Lajpat Rai, an Indian political activist who had been part of the progressive wing of the Indian National Congress, wrote from the United States, “India is a part of the world and revolution is in the air all the world over. The effort to kill it by repression and suppression is futile, unwise, and stupid.”

Keywords

colonialismDefence of India Act of 1915GandhiGovernment of India Act of 1919IndianationalismNehruRowlatt ActsWorld War I
Type
Forum—Anti-Colonialism in Asia: The Centenary of 1919
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 78 , Issue 2 , May 2019 , pp. 389 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2019 

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References

1 For a few examples, see “Whither in India?” The Nation, August 30, 1919, 632; Nihal Singh, “Whither Drifts India?” Contemporary Review, January 1, 1919, 620–27.

2 Long, Roger D. and Talbot, Ian, eds., India and World War I: A Centennial Assessment (London: Routledge, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Omissi, David, ed., Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–1918 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Singh, Gajendra, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy (London: Bloomsbury, 2014)Google Scholar.

3 Ambica Charan Mazumdar, “The Indian Unrest and Its Remedy,” Indian Review 6 (1915): 505–18. Mazumdar was president of the Indian National Congress in 1916.

4 Rai, Lala Lajpat, The Collected Works of Lala Lajpat Rai, 15 vols. (New Delhi: Manohar, 2003), 8:39Google Scholar.

5 For details on the bills and the amnesty that followed, see Ghosh, Durba, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 1.

6 British Library, Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collection, Mss Eur D 523/3, Montagu Papers, letter dated March 8, 1919, from Montagu to Chelmsford, p. 72. There were further echoes of these concerns in Ramsay Macdonald's Government of India and the views of the Marquess of Reading, who was appointed viceroy of India after Chelmsford. See Mss Eur E 238/3, Reading Papers, pp. 147–50, letter dated October 18, 1921, to Montagu, secretary of state for India; Mss Eur E 238/7, p. 122, letter dated July 31, 1924, to Baron Ramsden, secretary of state for India.

7 Ibid., Mss Eur D 523/3, pp. 66–70.

8 For tables that illustrate how the system operated, see Legg, Stephen, “Dyarchy: Democracy, Autocracy, and the Scalar Sovereignty of Interwar India,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 36, no. 1 (2016): 44–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 45 and 53.

9 Peter Robb, The Government of India and Reform: Policies toward Politics and the Constitution, 1916–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), chap. 3; Richard Danzig, “The Announcement of August 20th, 1917,” Journal of Asian Studies 28, no. 1 (1968): 19–37; Hugh Tinker, “India in the First World War and After,” Journal of Contemporary History 3, no. 4 (1968): 89–107. For exclusions built into the act, see Arvind Elangovan, “Constitutionalism, Political Exclusion, and Implications for Indian Constitutional History: The Case of Montagu Chelmsford Reforms (1919),” South Asia History and Culture 7, no. 3 (2016): 271–88; Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 42–54.

10 British Library, Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collection, Mss Eur D 523/8, p. 67, letter from Chelmsford to Montagu, March 12, 1919.

11 Mohandas K. Gandhi, “The Satyagraha Pledge,” February 24, 1919, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1965), 17:297; see also “Telegram to Private Secretary to Viceroy,” February 24, 1919, in ibid., 17:298.

12 Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Letter to C. F. Andrews,” February 25, 1919, in ibid., 17:300; see also “Speech on Satyagraha, Madras,” March 20, 1919, in ibid., 17:340; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 125–28.

13 Jawaharlal Nehru, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1972), 1:140–44.

14 C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 311. In the 1920s and 1930s, the nonviolent Congress was in constant contact with members of revolutionary groups: Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (London: Hurst & Co., 2015).

15 Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); Judith M. Brown, Gandhi's Rise to Power: Indian Politics, 1915–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Haridas Mukherjee and Uma Mukherjee, “Revolutionary Activities in Post-War India, 1919–1930,” in Militant Nationalism in India, 1876–1947, ed. Amitabha Mukherjee (Calcutta: Institute of Historical Studies, 1995), 391–428; Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh: Class, Community and Nation in Northern India, 1920–1940 (London: Anthem Press, [1978] 2002).

16 John Gallagher, “Nationalisms and the Crisis of Empire, 1919–1922,” Modern Asian Studies 15, no. 3 (1981): 355–68; Robb, Government of India and Reform, op. cit., note 9.

17 For example, Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2005); Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). More recently, see Partha Chatterjee, “Nationalism, Internationalism, and Cosmopolitanism: Some Observations from Indian History,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 36, no. 2 (2016): 320–34.

18 Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 2012); Jeanne Morefield, Covenants without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the Global World Order, 1916–1931 (New York: Viking, 2014).

19 Sinha, Specters of Mother India, op. cit. note 9, 11, 12–16.

20 Nasser Hussain, “Towards a Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law,” Law and Critique 10, no. 2 (1999): 93–115; Vinay Lal, “The Incident of the ‘Crawling Lane’: Women in the Punjab Disturbances of 1919,” Genders 16 (1993): 35–60; Derek Sayer, “British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre, 1919–1920,” Past and Present 131, no. 1 (1991): 130–64; Taylor C. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (London: Routledge, 2010), chap. 2; Kim A. Wagner, “‘Calculated to Strike Terror’: The Amritsar Massacre and the Spectacle of Colonial Violence,” Past and Present 233, no. 1 (2016): 185–225.

21 British Library, Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collection, Mss Eur D 523/27, “Letter from Mr. Montagu to Lord Ronaldshay, Governor of Bengal,” dated May 20, 1919; West Bengal State Archives, Home Political, File 223/19, “Calcutta Disturbances,” serial 1–6.

22 Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, eds., Empires at War: 1911–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

23 “Introduction,” by Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, and Durba Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal: Imperial Strategies of Political Violence and Its Containment in the Interwar Years,” in Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World, eds. Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2006); Shereen Ilahi, Imperial Violence and the Path to Independence: India, Ireland, and the Crisis of Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016); Heather Streets-Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), chap. 2; Ramnath, Haj to Utopia, op. cit. note 17, chaps. 3–5.

24 C. L. R. James, World Revolution, 1917–1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, [1937] 2017).

25 Choi Chatterjee, “Imperial Subjects in the Soviet Union: M. N. Roy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Re-thinking Freedom and Authoritarianism,” Journal of Contemporary History 52, no. 4 (2017): 913–34; Harald Fischer-Tiné, “Indian Nationalism and the ‘World Forces’: Transnational and Diasporic Dimensions of the Indian Freedom Movement on the Eve of the First World War,” Journal of Global History 2, no. 3 (2007): 325–44; Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), chap. 4; Tyler Stovall, Paris and the Spirit of 1919: Consumer Struggles, Transnationalism, and Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

26 Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, “Moderating Revolution: V. S. Srinivasa Sastri, Toussaint Louverture, and the Civility of Reform,” Comparatist 41 (2017): 133–52; Sanjay Seth, Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics: The Case of Colonial India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995), 44–51.

27 Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, op. cit. note 12, 43.

28 Pedersen, The Guardians, op. cit. note 18.

29 Between 1922 and 1926, the Interdepartmental Committee on Eastern Unrest convened representatives from these different parts of Britain's bureaucracy in London. Public Records Office, Kew, Great Britain, (PRO) CO 537/835, 838, “Report of the Inter-departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest.” See also British Library, Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collection, L/P&J/12/120.

30 Richard J. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire, 1904–1924 (Portland, Ore.: Frank Cass, 1995); Michael Silvestri, “‘An Irishman Is Especially Suited to Be a Policeman’: Sir Charles Tegart and Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal,” History Ireland 8, no. 4 (2000): 40–44.

31 Manu Goswami, “Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms,” American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012): 1461–85.

32 Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), chap. 5; Kris Manjapra, “Communist Internationalism and Transcolonial Recognition,” in Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas, eds. Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 159–77; Carolien Stolte and Harald Fischer-Tiné, “Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (ca. 1905–1940),” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 1 (2012): 65–92.

33 Michele L. Louro, Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), introduction.

34 Rai, The Collected Works, op. cit. note 4, 8:39–67.

35 Rai, The Collected Works, op. cit. note 4, 8:189–90; Isabel Huacuja Alonso, “M. N. Roy and the Mexican Revolution: How a Militant Indian Nationalist Became an International Communist,” South Asia 40, no. 3 (2017): 517–30.

36 Manjapra, Kris, M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge, 2010), 40–52Google Scholar.

37 Nehru, Jawaharlal, Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru (New York: John Day, 1941), 50Google Scholar; “Notes on the Occurrences in the Punjab,” in Nehru, Selected Works, op. cit. note 13, 1:130–40.

38 Binda Preet Sahni, “Effects of Emergency Law in India 1915–1931,” Studies on Asia, ser. 4, 2, no. 2 (2012), 146–79, 165.

39 Bose, Sugata, His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle against Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 2.

40 West Bengal State Archives, Intelligence Bureau, File 66/20, “Monetary aid to ex-detenus and state prisoners.”

41 For more details, see Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, op. cit. note 5, chap. 3.

42 West Bengal State Archives, Intelligence Bureau, File 518/25, “Enquiries in Burma regards to Dakhineswar bomb conspiracy”; ibid., File 286/25, “Revolutionary connections of the Hindustan Republican Association with other provinces and places abroad”; ibid., File 904/30, “Notes on the growth of the Bengal revolutionary movement in Burma from 1922–1930.”

43 Bayly, Recovering Liberties, op. cit. note 14, chap. 10; Elangovan, “Constitutionalism,” op. cit. note 9.

44 Gandhi, Collected Works, op. cit. note 11, 17:297; see also 130, 300, 316.

45 Sinha, Specters of Mother India, op. cit. note 9.

46 Ghosh, Durba, “Gandhi and the Terrorists,” South Asia 32, no. 3 (2016): 560–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar, see esp. 567–68.