Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  Based on articles he wrote for the Independent Labour Party’s paper, the Labour Leader, Keir Hardie published a volume entitled India: Impressions and Suggestions, which, despite its indeed impressionistic mode, embodies some of the shifts and tensions I am talking about here. Though a socialist, this Labour Party pioneer was not – as indeed most British socialists at the turn of the century were not – a natural-born critic of the British imperial project. India: Impressions and Suggestions moves symptomatically between a deep-seated paternalism which urges liberal treatment of colonial subjects in the interests of empire, vouching repeatedly for their loyalty, and a more sombre sense that the disaffection with imperial rule is deep-rooted enough to warrant greater convulsions. Published jointly by the ILP and the Home Rule for India League, the book was influential, one of Hardie’s biographers notes, making ‘a considerable impact’ and playing ‘a major role in educating British liberal opinion on Indian affairs’.73 Contradicting the colonial claim that only the educated Indian middle-classes were challenging the Empire, Hardie quickly came to the conclusion that resistance was not confined to any particular class or community, and that there was in fact a widespread dissatisfaction with British rule underlying the boycott movement. ‘Everything in India is seditious’, he noted accurately, ‘which does not slavishly applaud every act of the Government.’74 The extent of agitation also becomes clear through the depth of repression. Publishers were convicted of sedition for merely noting that Europeans who murdered Indians were given very slight sentences, and the likes of Lajpat Rai, the ‘agitator who voiced the grievance of the heavily-burdened peasants’, deported without trial to Burma.75 In this siege-like context, ‘The Swadeshi movement grows and spreads on every hand.’76

  If Hardie also propagated the familiar colonial claim that Indians were largely loyal to the Empire – it remains unclear what he based it on, unless he was deliberately misled by the Swadeshi activists who guided him through his travels – the agitation he witnessed was serious enough for him to understand the situation in terms of the breaking of ‘limits even to Hindu endurance’ among the ‘loyal, patient, and long-suffering’.77 (We might recall here Douglass’s famous assertion that the limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.) A great deal of Hardie’s narrative is taken up with registering what he had perhaps not anticipated: the breadth of ‘resentment, deep and bitter, against the partition’.78 Criticizing the familiar colonial canard that only the anglicized ‘Babu’ was involved in agitation, Hardie points to the long-suffering tenant farmers or ryots who had been agitating against unfair revenue settlements and taxes and the conscription of labour. Although Hardie ostensibly offers his suggestions towards India being pacified and kept loyal to the Raj, a great deal of his narrative is in fact devoted to showing ‘that the condition of the Indian peasant has worsened’ under British rule, and that, despite being ‘slow to anger’, the rural poor have been agitating against their conditions.79 Travelling in India – from Bengal and Madras to Bombay, Poona, Delhi and the Punjab – and witnessing disaffection at first hand brought Hardie to the realization that the situation had little to do with individual colonial administrators or their goodwill, which he never doubts. It was ‘the system now at work’ which had produced grinding conditions: ‘Everywhere these kindly, simple people are full of discontent; they find themselves in the grip of a set of circumstances which they do not understand and which they cannot break through.’80 Scandalously, for colonial bureaucrats, ‘the people of India are but so many seeds in an oil mill, to be crushed for the oil they yield’.81 As Jonathan Hyslop notes, Hardie’s early Christianity had sown in him a ‘profound moral commitment to a sense of human equality’ which underlay his ethical socialism, but it is clear from his narrative that the scale of both suffering and resistance in the Raj was not something he had reckoned with.82 Like Blunt some years earlier, Hardie avers that the answer to the ‘gathering volume of unrest’ must lie in self-government – ‘the solvent to which we must look for dissolving a difficulty rapidly becoming unbearable’.83

  In the final analysis, Hardie’s narrative does not resolve the tension between insisting that India and Indians (Hindus in particular) have ‘no higher ambition in life than to live loyal under the British flag’ and, given the wider context of insurgency in Asia, worrying that ‘if unrest spreads throughout India a conflagration may one day break out in China, Japan, or even nearer home, which will set India ablaze and burn up the last vestige of British rule’.84 In other words, although the idea of a full and immediate break for India from the British Empire eluded him, as it did other metropolitan critics of empire, it certainly took the form of a violent possibility. Hardie ends his narrative with a clear sense that there can be ‘no real pacification, no allaying of discontent’, failing some effective form of self-government, and it was this partisan conclusion to his dispatches from India that had Punch satirizing Hardie wearing a Scottish miner’s suit and waving a firebrand labelled ‘sedition’.85 In the wake of Hardie’s visit, one biographer avers, ‘public attention had been focussed on the question of the government of India as it had never been since the days of the Mutiny.’86 In his limited and somewhat muddled way, Hardie also brought into the frame the question of India’s long history of achievements – indeed, its ‘historical precedence over Western civilization’. This, despite some patently absurd ‘racial nonsense’ on shared Aryan heritage, did ‘put him firmly at odds with the emphasis on Indian incapacity which permeated contemporary British political discourse’.87 Those who followed him to India, like Nevinson and McDonald, would pick up the question of India’s capacity for ruling itself, identifying the cultural resources the nation-in-waiting could draw on to do so.

  ‘In politics there is no benevolence’: Tilak and Empire

  For over a generation we were groping in the dark, begging at the bureaucracy’s doors, beseeching England to grant us what no nation can grant to another, what every nation must achieve for itself – Swaraj … A People must work out its own salvation! That is the meaning of the New Movement, as I understand it.

  T. L. Vaswani

  The most significant aspect of the post-1905 fracture in Indian nationalism was the emergence of a new type of leader who would theorize and more widely propagate the idea of India as a nation with a distinct ‘national self’. Swaraj, or self-rule, in this paradigm was to be based not on ‘an Indian use of the British forms of the state’, but on a ‘revolutionary recasting of those forms to accord with Indian civilization’s value system’.88 What is important for our purposes is the corollary insistence on a very different mode of engagement with the British presence in India. Prominent among its key theorists was Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who was one of the organizers of Hardie’s journey. Tilak told Hardie that his side of the Congress – the ‘New Party’, as it was known – ‘is not going to depend any longer on the Liberals or other political parties in England to achieve its objective of Swaraj’, even as he urged the British politician to make the case for Indian self-rule to his electorate.89 A monumental 1907 speech by Tilak in Calcutta gives us a flavour of the views he is likely to have communicated to the political travellers who engaged with him. In it he laid out with clarity the radical break from past modes of resistance, while noting that the terms ‘Moderates’ and ‘Extremists’ were necessarily subject to change over time. The idea of benevolent imperial rule was itself contradictory, for ‘in politics there is no benevolence’.90 This meant that appealing to and depending on liberal politicians for concessions were inherently futile, not least because empire routinely turned political liberals into de facto conservatives. Entirely new methods were now called for: ‘The Old party believes in appealing to the British nation and we do not.’91 In words reminiscent of Afghani’s call to the fellahin, and indeed the admonitions of the Morant Bay agitators to their fellow blacks, Tilak defined freedom as an act of agency, entirely constituted by the actions of those who would be free: ‘What t
he New Party wants you to do is to realise the fact that your future rests entirely in your own hands. If you mean to be free, you can be free; if you do not mean to be free, you will fall and be for ever fallen.’92 Words were not to be dispensed with entirely, but wielded differently than by those who would plead, pray and petition; this time, the ‘self’ asserted itself by withdrawing cooperation, refusing to be ‘willing instruments of our own oppression in the hands of an alien Government’.93 In one sense, Tilak’s point was sharply materialist: only attacks, like boycott, directly on ‘their pocket or interest’ would have any impact on a British electorate, for it ‘must be a fool indeed who would sacrifice his own interest on hearing a philosophical lecture’.94 At another, it was that freedom constitutively required self-liberation. Empire was a machine, he would note in another speech, this time given in Marathi, in which he reminded his audience of their own role in sustaining the Raj as ‘the useful lubricants which enable the gigantic machinery to work so smoothly’.95 Economic force could give radical words their bite, rendering them less easily dismissed as the ‘howl’ of ‘a few agitators’.96

  The Justice of Indian Disquiet: Henry Nevinson’s ‘New Spirit’

  Not long before he was sentenced to transportation in 1908 for ‘sedition’, Tilak was also one of the first major Extremist figures whom the journalist Henry Woodd Nevinson met after he arrived in India in late 1907. Nevinson was a well-known war correspondent who had achieved a measure of fame for his reporting from the Graeco-Turkish war in 1897, and then the Second Boer War. His brief for the Manchester Guardian and the Glasgow Herald was to examine and report on the Swadeshi agitation and ‘the movement in India known as “unrest” [which] was becoming continually more urgent or more dangerous in its demands and actions’.97 Once in India, he would travel extensively, covering famines and plagues, and talking in depth with Moderate leaders like Gopal Krishna Gokhale – who introduced him to others as a sympathizer – as well as the Extremists, Tilak, Aurobindo and Bipin Chandra Pal. In addition, Nevinson attended, and sometimes gave speeches at, several political meetings, and was present with Rutherford at the eventful annual Congress conference in Surat that year, which resulted in an historic fracture that would not be mended until 1916. Uneasy at the extent of his engagement with oppositional figures and his presence at ‘seditious’ political events, the British Indian government became progressively colder to Nevinson, Viceroy Minto describing the fifty-one-year-old as ‘a dangerous sort of young gentleman’.98 Nevinson’s account of this insurgent conjuncture in India, collated in his book The New Spirit in India, makes for absorbing reading as a combination of travelogue, political history, colonial discourse analysis and memoir. Illustrated with arresting photographs of both high-profile figures and ordinary people, as well as landscapes, the evocative narrative takes Nevinson’s reader across vast tracts of the country that he traversed over a few months. Its accounts ranging from personal conversations, interviews and private encounters to public meetings, religious processions and Congress conferences, with hefty doses of historical and geographical information stirred in, the book ends with a summary of the political situation and a series of recommendations for remedial measures.99 Along the way, it develops a sharp critique of British rule in India, drawn substantially from what Nevinson witnessed and learned during his journey – which was also one of witnessing, appalled, how his fellow Britons behaved with their pith helmets on. If, at one level, The New Spirit is an attempt to render the adversarial Indian ‘new spirit’ legible to a British readership, at another it is also an acknowledgement of the difficulty of doing so given both the recalcitrance of this spirit itself and, to no small extent, the unfamiliarity and opacity of its Hindu moorings. Even as Nevinson appears to come up with a set of legible measures to address the situation, his narrative is unable to shake off the sense that the Empire is up against intractable opposition that will, in due course, bring it to an end. It is likely that Nevinson approached the task of writing The New Spirit with ‘distaste’ and ‘uncertainty’ not because he was repelled by the rise of Extremism, as his biographer Angela John infers, but because he found himself unable to deploy familiar liberal categories with customary surefootedness.100 It is certainly of some significance that a book originally to be titled India in Unrest (from the Raj’s point of view) would change its title to reflect instead how many in India now felt about the Raj.

  Although, as Owen argues, Nevinson was uneasy from the start with the acquiescence and ‘over-politeness’ he perceived in Indians, he did not in fact arrive in India ready, ‘from a comfortable position of invulnerability to the raj, to urge defiance upon those in a much weaker position’.101 There is little in this memoir to indicate that Nevinson toured India with a prefabricated radical position which he then enjoined upon his interlocutors. What took place, firstly, was that Nevinson saw for himself the manifold problems and resentments generated by the Raj’s misrule: ‘It is difficult to define how far the most paternal of Governments is responsible for the excesses of its children, to whom it refuses the common rights of grown men.’102 He also noted that paternalism, indeed even mere ‘sympathy’, would no longer cut it: ‘It might be that, in old days, the Englishman found it easier to be sympathetic with natives whom he could treat as dear good things. But educated Indians had come to detest such sympathy as only fit for pet animals, and both races were beginning to notice the change.’103 Secondly, not least but not only as a consequence of pondering the religious grammar and iconography of the Extremists via Tilak and Aurobindo, Nevinson engaged with everyday Hinduism and Hindu worship traditions. He did not study them in the way that Blunt did Islam, or come to consider himself either an Indian or a Hindu, but he did find himself pondering both identity and difference at the intersection of political ferment, religious revivalism and bitter divisions on the question of resistance. He experienced no dramatic political conversion in the manner of Blunt, departing India as the leftish liberal he had arrived as, but one whose sense of where change would come from had been nonetheless reconfigured.

  Nevinson’s account of his own passage to India, not unlike his friend E. M. Forster’s novel of that title, is a narrative about encountering and attempting to come to terms with difficulty in a milieu shaped by resistance.104 Both texts end with the aspiration to conciliation undermined by an awareness of present intractability. Nevinson’s delineation of a spirit that is both new and notably difficult is considerably more thoughtful, and at times more radical, than his memoir’s ending might suggest. Indeed, Nevinson’s titular phrase and central insight is one that Forster appears to echo a few years later when writing his justly famous novel of India, in which the narrator observes that ‘a new spirit seemed abroad, a rearrangement, which no one in the stern little band of whites could explain’.105 Here we must distinguish the inability to ‘explain’ from the ambivalences and uncertainties that are familiar to us from much colonial discourse analysis. Neither Forster nor Nevinson uphold uncertainty for its own sake (indeed, Nevinson does his best, clumsily, to override his). Rather, what emerges is a radical disruption of liberal pieties without an abandonment of the imperative to learn – to know more and know better. Benita Parry’s illuminating reading of Forster’s text argues that A Passage to India is a novel which exceeds its generally cautious critique of empire and basically liberal politics in a more profound dissidence. This emerges specifically in the novel’s reconfiguring of India ‘as a geographical space and social realm abundantly occupied by diverse intellectual modes, cultural forms, and sensibilities’.106 It is fair to say that The New Spirit’s ‘dissident place’ also lies less in its critique of the colonial situation – though that is not insignificant – than in its recognition of the existence of ‘cognitive traditions … inimical to the British presence’.107 This mainly takes the form of grappling with the difficulties of understanding Hindu religious thought, for, like Forster, Nevinson sidelines India’s ‘long traditions of mathematics, science and technolo
gy, history, linguistics, and jurisprudence’.108 Unlike Forster, Nevinson gives Islam and the Islamic presence in India short shrift, restricting his interviews to just one Muslim nobleman. Both Nevinson and Hardie are culpable of engaging somewhat uncritically with the Hindu chauvinism of Tilak and some of his adherents, particularly their claims about Hindu victimization at the hands of Muslims. Nonetheless, Nevinson’s apprehension of the political possibilities embedded in certain forms of (more egalitarian and ecumenical) everyday Hinduism identify these as providing the adversarial basis for a more complete resistance to colonial rule and its corollaries. His is a text which engages, like Forster’s, with colonial India ‘as an agent of knowledge and an adversary to imperial rule’, disrupting British colonial self-representation in the process.109