The focus of this sniping was Shapurji Dorabji Saklatvala, the lone Communist member of the House. Saklatvala was a Parsi from Bombay, who had first come to Britain in 1905 in his late twenties for medical treatment. After marrying an Englishwoman, Sally Marsh, he had settled down in London, where the couple would raise a large family. Saklatvala was indeed related to the great industrial dynasty inaugurated by Jamsetji Tata, and had worked for several years in the family concern.24 He was not quite culpable of being an ‘heir of the industrial system which he attacks’, however, having been a paid employee and a poor cousin rather than a direct descendant of the main branch of the business dynasty. Responding to Pilcher’s broadside, Saklatvala replied simply that he had no greater stake in defending his own natal community than he had in attacking Bombay’s elite European milieu: ‘The Parsee capitalist class is just as abominable and as much to be avoided as the class to which the hon. Member and his friends belong in this country’. Responding to Winterton’s charge that he was not taken seriously by any Indian organizations, he pointed out that he, who had been officially welcomed in nine Indian cities during a recent tour, could speak of matters Indian with far greater legitimacy than the ‘unrepresentative Indian Princes on the League of Nations’ placed there by the earl in his capacity as colonial secretary. At this point, Saklatvala had been in the House for three years, elected first in 1922 as a Labour MP, and then again in 1923 as a Communist (after the Labour Party expelled Communist members). So he noted that while he spoke in this debate as ‘one of the conquered and enslaved subject races’, he was also ‘representing the interests of the British electors who sent me’.
It is this sense of carrying a dual but intertwined representational responsibility – and his persistence in identifying common ground between the two sides – which makes Shapurji Saklatvala a figure of transnational significance in thinking about the relationship between colonial insurgencies and British anticolonialism in the interwar period. Deemed ‘one of the most violent anti-British agitators in England’ by state espionage agencies, Saklatvala sought actively to forge a language of opposition to empire that would at once undo the pretences and prevarications of gradualist reformism and make clear that resistance to empire was in the interests of both the Indian and British working classes.25 Where Hardie, MacDonald and others who visited India during the Swadeshi years came back to make the case for reforms that might defuse the ‘unrest’, Saklatvala was arguably the first MP to make a sustained case in parliament against reformism and ‘liberal’ approaches to colonial governance in themselves. His biographer, Marc Wadsworth, argues that Saklatvala was also responsible for putting empire and anti-imperialism firmly into the view of liberals and progressives at a time ‘when the British left was by no means committed to anti-imperialism’; he invited campaigners from the colonies to speak at meetings and wrote on the topic in such organs as the Labour Leader.26 At meetings of the Independent Labour Party, which he joined in 1909, ‘Saklatvala raised the issue of Indian independence and chided the ILP on the need to be more internationalist’.27 The subject of three biographies – one by his daughter, Sehri – Saklatvala, Britain’s third Indian MP after fellow Parsis Naoroji and Mancherjee Bhownagree, is usually mentioned only in passing in studies of early twentieth-century relationships between English dissenters and Indians, which have tended to focus on more reformist figures such as Annie Besant, C. F. Andrews and Mirabehn (Madeleine Slade), who appear less Manichean in their approach to colonial questions.28 Yet Saklatvala – who described the likes of Besant as ‘white men and women’ who ‘pass as India’s friends and pretend to be almost Indianised’ – himself emerges in some ways as the consummate hybrid, deeply rooted in British political and social life while equally committed to the Indian anticolonial struggle. To the later dismay of the British Communist Party, he was also committed to retaining something of his Parsi cultural and religious heritage.29 Described later by George Padmore as the ‘most independent-minded Communist ever’, during his parliamentary career Saklatvala produced the first truly uncompromising refutation of imperialism in the House, one which put in place an unbridgeable antagonism between empire and democracy, refused to accept that reforms or ‘trusteeship’ were possible in the context of political subjugation, identified the centrality of capitalism to the imperial project, and stressed the revolutionary agency of the oppressed out of which common ground would emerge.30
In doing so, ‘Comrade Sak’ crafted a unique political voice for himself, at once Indian and British, speaking out candidly and passionately on many causes, but most especially against imperialism, which, for him, was inextricable from capitalism. Known for ‘a striking and original manner of speaking’, he would tell his British audiences that ‘he could not help it that his accent was a little foreign but his heart was not foreign’.31 One contemporary, the journalist Herbert Bryan, described Saklatvala as possessed not of ‘the mock eloquence of the demagogic wind-bag, but the deep sincerity of the man finding expression in flaming words’, also noting: ‘His command of English is infinitely superior to that of the average Englishman.’32 The over 500 interventions he made in the House of Commons during a relatively short but packed parliamentary career certainly ranged over domestic issues such as housing conditions, unemployment, wages and trade unionism, but the majority were on India and imperial matters, earning him the sobriquet of ‘Member for India’.33 While it is true that he ‘was only one of many personalities operating in the West from a variety of Indian political tendencies’, few were able so deftly to negotiate – and make a polemical virtue of – colonial subjecthood as a form of dual citizenship.34 The fact that Saklatvala was at once influential and reviled had much to do with his ability to navigate artfully – though never without integrity – between the pronouns ‘you’ and ‘we’ when addressing British politicians and lawmakers; the ‘you’ was a source of irritation to his political opponents. Unsurprisingly, not a little racism came his way, with some on the ‘pink’ left allegedly wanting to get ‘this bloody nigger off our backs’.35
Saklatvala’s synchronic identification with both fellow Indian colonial subjects and ordinary British citizens appears to have been completely sincere; certainly there is nothing in either his private communications or his public pronouncements to suggest otherwise. Indeed, the insight that subjects of the British Empire and ordinary Britons had more in common with each other than with their respective ruling classes was one that he attempted to elaborate from his earliest years in British politics, and which he later parlayed into the language of communist internationalism. Intervening in Commons debates and playing an active role in organizations ranging from the British Socialist Party and the Independent Labour Party to the Workers’ Welfare League of India and the League against Imperialism, Saklatvala made significant public contributions that tell us something about how British criticism of empire was shaped and reformulated, particularly after the October Revolution, by the growing presence and pedagogical impact of Asian and African campaigners and intellectuals in the imperial metropolis. Certainly, he was responsible for adamantly bringing resistance to the imperial project – particularly, though not only, in India – firmly into both parliamentary view and public hearing, which was no mean feat. Close readings of his speeches and writings indicate the extraordinary extent to which Saklatvala was preoccupied with the project of channelling a democratic ‘voice’, both for the subjects of colonialism and for ordinary Britons; he also wanted each of these constituencies to hear the other. Later in his political career, Saklatvala, with what fellow MP Philip Snowden described as ‘volcanic eloquence’, would also become a prominent spokesman in Britain for another juridical crisis of empire that became a cause célèbre in Britain – the infamous ‘Meerut Conspiracy Case’.36 Both Saklatvala’s political career and the Meerut campaign, which are explored in Chapter 6, are significant moments in the history of metropolitan anti-imperialism in the interwar period.
India in Britain: Th
e War Years and Beyond
The war years, from 1914 to 1918, had not been especially active campaigning years in relation to imperial matters in Britain. They witnessed an unfolding tussle – between the Congress in India, which would come under Gandhi’s leadership after the war, and the British Committee of the Indian National Congress – over who would speak for India and control the direction of agitation on Indian matters in Britain. Wartime powers had enabled the colonial government in India to ban political demonstrations and repress the Home Rule agitation, Besant herself being imprisoned in 1917. In Britain, the British Auxiliary to the Home Rule Leagues undertook some activism, which included meetings, petitions and court cases that brought in supporters including ‘many of the organisations dedicated to socialism, democratic control and the protection of civil liberties which the war had thrown up and which had responded vigorously to Besant’s arrest’.37 Certainly, this form of engagement had worked to garner more British public support for a moderate and gradualist programme, whereby India would be ‘given’ Home Rule and perhaps dominion status. Meanwhile, a bitter divide between Besant and Tilak also emerged, the former calling for the Congress to accept the extremely modest ‘Montagu–Chelmsford reforms’, while the latter adhered to the more advanced insistence on dominion status. The spectrum of options nonetheless remained relatively narrow, and on the whole reformist rather than radical. In the immediate post-war period, partly due to Gandhi’s reluctance to encourage foreign propaganda, campaigners for Indian freedom in London were a muted voice.38
Saklatvala would be something of an exception, and an important one, as he positioned himself assertively as an interpreter between India’s resisting colonial subjects and Britain’s governing classes. A prolific campaigner for the causes he espoused, Saklatvala did not leave behind a collated body of work. His views, analyses and arguments have to be reconstructed from his frequently lengthy parliamentary speeches and interventions, addresses to rallies, and journalistic contributions to a range of political organs, including the Labour Leader, the Labour Monthly, the Daily Worker and the Anti-imperialist Review.39 The focus in this chapter will be largely on his parliamentary years and the powerful critique of the British Empire in India that he articulated in his Commons interventions. Even before he took up democratic office, however, Saklatvala challenged paternalism both in the usual imperial quarters and on the left of the British political spectrum. In July 1919, when he submitted a statement to the India Office on behalf of the Workers’ Welfare League of India, established in 1917, Saklatvala commented on the assumption that the franchise had to be withheld from Indian workers on account of their illiteracy. Noting that many illiterate Britons had in fact been enfranchised in the course of the Reform Acts, he observed:
The Indian village worker, though illiterate, is far from being uncultured. The latest revolution in Russia proves at least one thing, that an illiterate Asiatic when given a vote and voice in State affairs, is capable of appreciating and enjoying it to the extent of living up to it, fighting for it, and dying for it, as ardently as his literate European comrade.40
The league’s ‘Statement of Principles’ also notes that, where the Labour Party was concerned, ‘instead of a voice from India we are confronted by a dumb people’.41 Saklatvala’s influence is unmistakable in this document’s observation that such a constructed ‘dumbness’ makes it possible for all manner of reformist declarations to be made in India’s name, including assertions that ‘this or that trifling change is not only necessary but sufficient to satisfy India’s needs’.42 Repeatedly invoked in his writings, this emphasis on ‘voice’ was clearly derived from the exposition of the national ‘self’ as it emerged in Swadeshi and swaraj ideologies of self-determination – Saklatvala would refer to himself at one point as ‘a Tilakite extremist’ – but, over time, it took on a more specifically communist dimension.43 Indian resistance, much like Indian opinion, was not homogeneous, and resistance took varied forms. Similarly, Saklatvala repeatedly underlined the fact that all countries and cultures had traditions of resistance embedded in them: ‘You have had your struggles, and we have ours, and shall still have them.’44
In post-war India, some of these struggles took the form of labour rebellions. As the Royal Commission on Labour in India pithily put it, by the late 1920s there had grown a reasonably widespread ‘realization of the potentialities of the strike’.45 From 1925 onwards, left-wing and communist activities in trade unions – and trade union membership itself – began to increase, as a wave of strikes once again paralysed the country. Where ‘Gandhi preached a philosophy of class peace and collaboration and opposed any appeal to class interest’, communists were able to address a lacuna, appealing to ‘the self-consciousness and organization of the proletariat or the peasantry’.46 For all its power as a mobilizing force, then, the Congress in the 1920s was ‘not without a certain vulnerability to political ideologies not its own’, and the question of class and labour, which it generally evaded under Gandhi, was brought firmly into view by socialists and communists. Beyond that, of course, Lenin, in oppositional debate with M. N. Roy, had famously arrived at a formulation for colonial policy to be adopted by the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920: ‘All Communist Parties must give active support to the revolutionary movements of liberation, the form of support to be determined by a study of existing conditions, carried on by the party wherever there is such.’47
The background of British interwar communism is important here. Saklatvala left the Independent Labour Party in 1919 after joining the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which was constituted by the merging of various small left-wing groupings, the most consequential of which was the British Socialist Party. He became a member of the CPGB’s Colonial Committee as well as a group calling itself the Indian Bureau, both set up to follow the Comintern’s directive that there should be close collaboration between the CPGB and emergent communist movements in various parts of the British Empire, including India and Egypt. There has been considerable debate about the extent to which the CPGB did in fact engage with the question of colonialism.48 Certainly there is some merit to the argument that India was something of an exception to a wider CPGB indifference to, or at least ineffectiveness on, colonial questions. In a very critical but important article, the historian Marika Sherwood has claimed, for instance, that the CPGB ignored black workers and issues of racism despite instructions from the Comintern to engage with colonial matters. Claims that the party ‘pioneered the analysis of and sponsored discussions of imperialism in colonial and semi-colonial lands’, she argues, were exaggerated, as was the insistence that the ‘party stressed the growth and importance of the anti-imperialist struggles of the working peoples of the countries of the British Empire’.49 Sherwood cites Saklatvala himself as expressing disappointment as late as 1934 with the CPGB’s record on colonialism:
the fundamental sense of the Party members’ duty towards colonial problems [does] not exist … the Party as a whole has not been keenly live to it … There has been a tendency to treat the colonial problem as a mere side issue and nobody’s problem in particular … the condition of indifference and suspicion between the Party and their colonial nationals is deplorable.50
This is not the place to revisit the frequently bitter discussion about the role of the CPGB as a whole in relation to imperial questions, but it is worth noting that Saklatvala was certainly the most prolific and noteworthy of high-profile figures associated with the CPGB to speak on them. While not the only party member who wrote on empire per se – Rajani Palme Dutt’s writings on India come to mind – he was certainly the most committed to attacking reformism and gradualism, while emphasizing the insurgent agency of the colonized masses.
‘Does a communist have to witness oppression in order to take up the struggle?’ Sherwood has asked in the context of her analysis of the CPGB’s treatment of colonial issues and its inadequacies in engaging with anticolonial resistance movements in the Carib
bean and Africa.51 Even as the answer must be in the negative, there seems little doubt that the power animating Saklatvala’s speeches and writings on colonial matters drew significantly upon his experiences of life in the Raj, as well as his continued close engagement with real struggles there after he had moved to Britain. Even where India was concerned, Saklatvala was distinctive not only in the extent to which he engaged with colonial questions, but also in how he approached them. He was, for one thing, direct in identifying the pressing need for the British labour movement to engage with colonial issues: ‘If by any chance continued unwisdom, apathy or arrogance on the part of British Labour drives the Indian Labour or mass movement into open hostility against them, British Labour will have to be prepared for evil days.’52 As Saklatvala would note on many occasions, the resistance to British imperialism in India both exceeded and challenged the limits of bourgeois nationalism. Genteel parliamentary discussions about ‘reform’ served to obscure far more fundamental questions about empire which were being posed by resistance on the streets and in the factories of India. Saklatvala would put them to parliament.
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