Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  The mid nineteenth century, bookended by two Reform Bills extending the franchise, is also typically read as a period of intense domestic opposition, with social movements for greater internal democracy necessitating a turn inwards. In fact, insurgency in the colonies was not infrequently referenced in domestic discussions, even if it was often by way of redefining internal protest, as Ernest Jones did, in terms that made explicit comparisons to the 1857 uprising in India. Even for less radical figures like the Positivist Richard Congreve, the rebellion would force open an understanding of the scope of ‘humanism’, as we shall see in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 shifts to post-Emancipation Jamaica and the events in Morant Bay in 1865, when an uprising of freed slaves and their descendants resulted in a controversial crackdown and the hanging of an opposition politician by the name of George W. Gordon. The summary execution of Gordon and the brutality with which the uprising was suppressed generated a huge controversy back in England which came to be known as the ‘Governor Eyre affair’, famously dividing well-known politicians and intellectuals along ideological lines. While this episode is often read as a very English crisis to do with the rule of law, what is overlooked is the ways in which the positions taken were based on contrasting readings of rebel voices. Central to the controversy was the reality of black people demanding a more meaningful, self-defined freedom than the notional ‘Emancipation’ that had been bestowed on them. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the effects of contact between opponents of empire in milieus of anticolonial ferment and British political travellers of a humanitarian or liberal bent, such as Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald and Henry Nevinson. What is noteworthy here is how those travels had the effect of unsettling, and in some cases transforming, an unexamined paternalism or benevolent humanitarianism into something rather more radical. Frequently, travels to areas of ‘unrest’ turned into unexpected pedagogical journeys (the case of Wilfrid Blunt and the ‘Urabi Rebellion’ in Egypt, discussed in Chapter 3, is only one instance) in which the traveller learned something about the nature of resistance and the cultural resources it drew upon. As Frederic Harrison, influenced by Blunt, would observe, the strength of Egyptian anticolonialism was ‘not military, but civil. It lies in the great university or school of Cairo, the intellectual centre of the Mussulman world.’110 Even Donald Mackenzie Wallace, the otherwise establishmentarian Times foreign correspondent who was broadly supportive of the occupation, would find it necessary to pose the question: ‘Is our position in Egypt a legitimate one? – How long have we the right to remain there?’111

  In the twentieth century, the volume of travel in the other direction – into the heart of the Empire – increased, and this had determinate effects on metropolitan anticolonialism. The third and largest section of this book, ‘Agitations and Alliances’, considers the energizing presence of black and Asian anticolonial campaigners and intellectuals in the imperial metropolis as part of a tripartite dynamic. As Brennan notes,

  From 1880 to 1939, artists and social theorists in the European metropole, many of them foreigners, brought a new attention to the non-Western world. These regions were no longer simply artistic raw material or an ethical site for expressing sympathy with the victims of various invasive business enterprises, but an array of emergent polities populated by colonial subjects rising in arms and pressing their demands.112

  This was part of a wider process taking place in Europe, in which ‘European intellectuals learned from those outside its orbit in the colonial encounter’.113 Insurgent movements in India, Africa and the West Indies galvanized African and Asian campaigners, who in turn functioned as what I call ‘interpreters of insurgency’, putting pressure upon British criticism of aspects of empire to develop in more comprehensively radical directions. These figures played a key role in facilitating links and networks between resistance movements in the colony and dissidents in the metropole. An important consequence of this contact was the attempt to form global anticolonial networks and, within Britain itself, to foster anticolonial movements and dissident institutions which could offer a platform for radical criticism. Chapter 5 examines the influence and role of Shapurji Saklatvala, the Labour and then Communist MP, as an interpreter between Indian radicals and the British political establishment. Chapter 6 takes up the labour insurgencies in India to which Saklatvala repeatedly drew attention in the House of Commons, and the impact of the notorious Meerut Conspiracy Case in fomenting and developing an anticolonial British internationalism inspired by struggles in the colonies. An important development here is the formation in 1927 of the League Against Imperialism, which put anticolonialists from the colonies in active partnership with British and other European critics of imperialism. The emphasis on self-emancipation and the need for Western liberals and leftists to register and respond to voices from the colonial periphery is also the subject of Chapter 7, which also looks at figures such as Sylvia Pankhurst, editor of the Daily Worker, and Nancy Cunard, editor of the pioneering anthology Negro, in the interwar period, and at the partnerships they formed with black intellectuals. Both Cunard and Pankhurst made strenuous efforts to educate a Western readership about what was taking place in the colonies.

  Labour uprisings in the Caribbean form the background to the emergence of figures such as George Padmore, C. L. R. James and Amy Ashwood Garvey, among others, who would become enormously influential in the emergence of pan-Africanism. Engagement with them and with pan-Africanism more broadly – particularly in the wake of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1938, which galvanized black anticolonialism in Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean – would shape the views of many British liberals and radicals with whom the former had close but often contentious relationships. The formation of the International African Service Bureau in the wake of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 is at the heart of Chapter 8, which examines the powerful anticolonialism articulated in the pages of its journal, International African Opinion. Another British journal, the New Leader, which would become distinctly more radical on colonial matters under the influence of George Padmore, is the subject of Chapter 9, which also examines Padmore’s work and its impact in the years immediately leading up to and following the pioneering Pan-African Congress held in Manchester in 1945. Chapter 10 explores the impact of one of the last major anticolonial rebellions, the so-called Mau Mau uprising and the Kenyan Emergency, in fomenting public controversy and crisis in Britain; nearly a hundred years after the 1857 uprising, the British political and intellectual milieu was once again torn between denouncing the barbarism of the insurgents and supporting brutal repression, on the one hand, and, on the other, blaming the colonial government and settlers for causing the unrest. This chapter also considers the Movement for Colonial Freedom, established in London in 1954 with Brockway at its helm, which connected anticolonialism to movements across the world for the rights of ordinary people.

  Insurgent Empire does not aspire to achieve anything like comprehensive coverage of anticolonial insurgencies, bearing in mind that the Empire was subject to almost constant challenge. It also does not attempt to survey the whole terrain of British dissent on imperial matters. The maps of anticolonial insurgency and dissidence are vast and varied. Instead, my focus is on what I identify as exemplary crises of rule and engagement that helped create a tradition of dissent on the question of empire, looked outward to the colonial world, and sought to effect transformation as much in Britain as beyond. This book seeks to be capacious without pretending to be comprehensive. Even so, certain lacunae require explanation – in particular, the Second Anglo-Boer war (1899–1902), which fomented a great deal of anti-war sentiment (and a certain kind of criticism of imperialism), and was most famously denounced by figures such as J. A. Hobson and Gilbert Murray. I have also not engaged with the many important crises generated by Irish resistance through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Apart from the fact that the impacts both of the Boer War and of Anglo-Irish engagement have been worked on extensively, my interest here, for reasons already discu
ssed, is in the specific impact of resistance that emerged from non-European contexts – of black and Asian subjects – on metropolitan dissent. There are also, of course, gaps even where these are concerned: events and engagements I simply did not have the time or space to incorporate. These include Queen Victoria’s ‘little wars’ (the Afghan, Opium, Ashanti, Zulu and Maori wars); the revolt in Palestine in 1937; the crises of decolonization in Suez, Malaya and Cyprus; and resistance in West Africa in the first half of the twentieth century.114 The relative absence of black and Asian women is also a matter of justifiable concern – and, for me, great regret. They are very much there, of course, in the form of both organizers and foot-soldiers, active participants in resistance. When it comes to voice, the connecting strand of this study, however, unsurprisingly the most prominent and influential are gendered male. The recovery of marginalized non-male voices in this context is work that lies ahead of us. Nor are Gandhi and Indian nationalism, including the Quit India movement, discussed in any depth; they too constitute an overrepresented topic in discussions of anticolonialism, often at the expense of other conceptions and strategies of resistance (see Chapter 6).115 While my aim has not been to offer a comprehensive overview of all relevant figures and ideas, my principles of selection may of course be subject to debate. I make no claims to writing a history; indeed, the methodological principles that have guided my research and writing are enthusiastically generalist. The book is structured as an ensemble of accounts, disparate in many ways yet vitally connected in others, gaining in its amateur ‘sense of excitement and discovery’, I hope, what it might not offer in specialist terms.116 Its guiding literary model, similarly, is more akin to the short story than to the novel; but these are stories that emerge, of course, from an epic canvas. My hope is that this book will contribute to and advance lines of enquiry and discussion, including in other imperial contexts, to which other scholars will also contribute in future.

  PART I

  CRISES AND

  CONNECTIONS

  1

  The Spirit of the Sepoy Host:

  The 1857 Uprising in India and

  Early British Critics of Empire

  Our rule has been that of the robber and the bandit and we are suffering from the natural result – insurrection.

  Malcolm Lewin, Judge in the East India Company

  Despite the enduring myth of a nineteenth-century Pax Britannica, British rule in India and across the empire was punctuated by revolts, rebellions, insurrection and instability. So endemic were such challenges to British imperial rule that the events of the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857 have been described as ‘unique only in their scale’.

  Andrea Major and Crispin Bates, Mutiny at the Margins

  In 1925, nearly three-quarters of a century after the event, the writer Edward Thompson addressed the topic of what he called ‘Indian irreconcilability’ – the ‘unsatisfied, embittered, troublesome’ attitude that marred Britain’s relationship with the jewel in the imperial crown.1 Like almost any other colonial writer, Thompson was confirmed in his belief that British rule had done India a great deal of good. Yet it was impossible to deny that in that country the British name aroused a great deal of hatred, a ‘savage, set hatred’ that could only be accounted for through widespread popular memories which, at any time, could flare up again in the face of resurgent discontent with colonial rule in India.2 What accounted for ‘the real wall, granite and immovable’, which the Englishman encountered in India?3 The answer, for Thompson, lay in the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, a fountain that was ‘sending forth a steady flood of poisoned waters’:

  This case, unfortunately, is that of the one episode where we were really guilty of the cruellest injustice on the greatest scale. If we desire to eliminate bitterness from our controversy with India, we certainly have to readjust our ideas of this episode – the Mutiny … Right at the back of the mind of many an Indian the Mutiny flits as he talks with an Englishman – an unavenged and unappeased ghost.4

  While Thompson repeats the familiar colonial canard that ‘Indians are not historians’, adding for good measure that ‘they rarely show any critical ability’,5 he also notes that the English interpretation of the events of 1857 has had an unjust sway on history; no other significant episode had been ‘treated so uncritically or upon such one-sided and prejudged evidence’.6 He was largely right, of course, about the dominance of one-sided readings of the two-sided brutalities of 1857, and the powerful hold they exercised upon the British imagination well into the twentieth century. The vast majority of British accounts of the revolt in its aftermath were steeped in sanguinary patriotism, a sense of imperial destiny saved from peril. Public opinion was, we know, similarly shaped by retaliatory bloodlust and outrage, fuelled by a ceaseless raking up of Indian brutalities. Thompson, no ‘extreme’ critic of the imperial project as he repeatedly stresses, nonetheless reads the uprising as ‘another of the world’s great servile revolts’,7 on par with those in Demerara (1823) and Jamaica (1865), and one which drew an equally harsh retaliatory response that has never been subjected to critical historical scrutiny. For him, subsequent colonial severities were a consequence of this lamentable failure.

  We know that Thompson was also correct about the overwhelmingly racialized British response to the 1857 uprising that told the story in the Empire’s favour. A ‘great crisis in our national history’, as one of its earliest and most famous historians put it, the uprising in 1857 produced, in the first instance, conflicted and diverse responses in Britain, often along party lines.8 Relatedly, there was plenty of criticism of the follies and failures of the rule of the East India Company, which of course ended after the uprising and the takeover of India by the Crown in 1858. There was also a substantial amount of public agonizing on causation – on what had gone wrong and whether the unexpected scale and bloodiness of the uprising spoke to a lethal failure to understand India and Indians. One consequence of the uprising – and the crisis of rule that it undoubtedly provoked – was a debate about how best to undertake and manage the project of empire in India so as to minimize the possibility of revolt. The sanguinary horrors routinely evoked by accounts of the ‘Mutiny’ were not generally warnings against imperial rule, but cautionary notations about its dangers. Jill Bender has noted that the uprising in India also came to constitute a master-narrative, providing ‘a model for understanding and responding to subsequent crises’.9 Explicit comparisons were made between, for instance, the rebels of Morant Bay eight years later, and the ‘treacherous’ sepoys of north India. It remains, then, an unavoidable starting point for any examination of nineteenth-century crises of rule and their implications for Britain.

  Much of the historical scholarship on 1857 appears to agree that the moment ‘would mark the decisive turning away from an earlier liberal, reformist ethos that had furnished nineteenth-century empire its most salient moral justification’.10 The distinguished historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee, among others, has argued that one of the consequences of 1857 was that the ‘velvet glove of liberal rhetoric had to be abandoned for the mailed fist’.11 Certainly, relations between British colonial representatives and Indian subjects on the whole manifested a hardening of racial, religious and cultural boundaries, with extreme otherness re-inscribed on the bodies of the ‘fanatical’ insurgents. In place of liberal policies, ‘the principle of complete non-interference in the traditional structure of Indian society’ would be enshrined alongside a clear racial hierarchy.12 After the uprising was brutally crushed by early 1858, the British in India ‘were able to dictate a settlement from a position of unquestioned mastery, and to enforce their will upon a subdued and chastened people’.13 At the same time, not least for fear of further insurrection, they would, in the words of Queen Victoria’s 1858 Proclamation, ‘disclaim alike the right and the desire to impose Our convictions on any of Our subjects’. Post-rebellion unease, Christine Bolt has argued, produced ‘a new awareness of the difficulties involved in understanding the Indian mind�
�.14

  The ‘Indian’ or ‘native’ mind’ was of course at the very heart of the question of the future of British India, and relevant too to the more general question of how the multihued subjects of the Empire were to be dealt with. The liberal and humanitarian position – steeped in principles of paternalist tutelage or ‘improvement’ – was that Indians, while not exactly equal, could be educated into self-government, or at least the native elites could be. For others, the mistaken view of political liberals – ‘that all men were alike, entitled to identical rights and fit to be governed identically’ – was itself culpable of having inspired the revolt, and had to be decisively repudiated in the post-1857 era.15 There was, however, a third possibility, explored by a small number of thinkers, which came into view for a time. Reading the rebellion as a text, against the grain of discourses of counter-insurgency that dominated the British public sphere, this minority asked a different set of questions. What if neither the racial alterity touted by the hard-line approach nor the assimilative paternalism of the liberal tutelage model constituted the right response? Might there be a way to think about relations with India and its inhabitants that steered a course outside of this binary? For some in Britain, the rebellion presented itself as a text that necessarily asked for a different kind of reading, one that threw open other, more dialogical possibilities. If the dominant political shift, as Karuna Mantena has it, was from ‘a universalist to a culturalist stance’, those who undertook more self-reflexive and critical assessments of the British presence in India did not so much reject universalism as express their sense that the relationship between the universal and the particular was a complex one.16 Could it be that universals were not so much for export from Britain to its colonies as necessarily and already embedded in the particular? Moreover, what might Britain (or, more frequently, ‘England’) learn from, and how might it reconstitute itself in response to, the rebellion? In some of the most thoughtful metropolitan engagements with the rebellion, resistance was read as self-assertion, which opened up possibilities for a more reciprocal – and incipiently egalitarian – form of engagement with distant peoples who were making claims upon and against Britain. In these readings, Britain’s subjugated Indian subjects could neither be relegated to pure otherness, as they were in the absolutist conservative response, nor simply yoked to the project of reformist improvement, in the liberal mode. For dissident English writers like the Chartist Ernest Jones and the Positivist Richard Congreve, the rebellion prompted a rethinking of their own premises and manner of engagement with the non-European; they invited their readers to think through the possibility that the cultural-particular and the humanist-universal were not entirely at odds with each other. The text of insurgency, in other words, threw open the problematic of engaging with subjugated others with whom common ground might be forged without eliding differences. If, for the official mind, one consequence of the uprising of 1857 was that a professed universalism ‘easily gave way to harsh attitudes about the intractable differences among people, the inscrutability of other ways of life, and the ever-present potential for racial and cultural conflict’, for some of a more dissident bent, it opened up rather more dialogical possibilities.17 The native-in-revolt, as we shall see, was not always figured as inscrutable or irrational, but rather as staking claims upon a history they intended to make themselves, if in circumstances not of their own choosing. Partly in response, a small but distinct body of dissident discourse developed in Britain which sought to invoke a degree of sympathetic understanding for the rebellion, as well as a critical disposition towards the imperial project.