Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  Comrade Sak did not hold back in telling British labour they were wrong not to have seen that their ‘immediate task lay in levelling up the conditions of … fellow workers in India’.94 There was a tendency to act as though the Empire did not exist at all. ‘An almost conceited view was taken that the low level of the Indian was well deserved and that the higher level of the British worker was something that was permanently secure by his own merit.’95 The British labour movement had failed signally to look at ‘securing a world standard’ for labour as an act of solidarity rather than ‘an act of secondary charity from the stronger to the weaker group’.96 This, he said, would prove to be a mistake.

  For all the hostility with which he was met, Saklatvala was not without support from some parliamentary colleagues, one of whom observed that, as ‘the only Indian-born native in the House’, Saklatvala provided his fellow MPs invaluable perspective on the question of Indian opinion in India that could not be ignored any longer.97 Another pointed out that every effort had been made by the government to prevent Saklatvala from ‘visiting his own country to get in touch with Indian opinion’.98 It was indeed after much trouble getting a nervous British government to endorse his passport for travel back to his country of birth (he had already been banned by the US government from travel to that country) that Saklatvala arrived in India on 14 January 1927, for what would be his last visit. He received a hero’s welcome, with throngs gathered to see him disembark in Bombay, welcoming him with enthusiastic speeches and garlands – which he refused to wear, but deposited at the statue of Tilak on Chowpatty Beach. Whatever their reservations about his affiliation to the Communist Party might have been, Indian nationalists of various stripes clearly recognized that he ‘was a member of the British parliament fighting for them’.99 Saklatvala himself viewed the trip, rather grandiosely, in terms of an attempt to ‘pull the two working-class brotherhoods together’.100

  A British Comrade in India

  I want India to be a country where one man lives with another and not upon another.

  Shapurji Saklatvala

  During the war years, India had also witnessed something of a pacification of the anticolonial energies unleashed in the first years of the new century, during which the young Saklatvala had himself initially been politicized. Wadsworth suggests that his ‘increasingly outspoken views on home rule for India had come to the attention of the colonial authorities’, and that he was sent out of the country by displeased senior family members for that reason, recuperation from malaria providing the perfect excuse.101 The official line of the Congress was to offer support to British war efforts; there was, of course, an expectation that such assistance would bring with it the quid pro quo of large strides towards self-government. The minimal nature of the reforms which did finally come in 1919 was perceived as a particularly outrageous betrayal given the high-minded rhetoric of national self-determination that had driven British war propaganda. The treatment of the Ottoman Empire and its ‘khalif’ (‘caliph’) united subcontinental Muslims in hostility to Britain under the aegis of the pan-Islamic Khilafat movement, while inflation, famine and an influenza epidemic (nearly six million died) stoked discontent across the Raj. By the time Britain saw fit to roll out the bitterly resented and repressive Rowlatt Acts in 1919, intended to curb protests, tensions had already been stoked high, preparing the ground for a reinvigorated, sustained and far more radical resistance to the British Empire than had been seen since 1857. The infamously brutal response of General Dyer in opening fire on an unarmed and corralled crowd holding a public meeting in Jallianwala Bagh to discuss the Rowlatt Acts threw stark light on a gaping imperial divide; the response in Britain played down Dyer’s actions as isolated, while Indian public opinion read the incident as emblematic of deep structural racism and endemic colonial brutality.102 Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore famously returned his knighthood in May 1919, writing: ‘The accounts of the insults and sufferings by our brothers in Punjab have trickled through the gagged silence, reaching every corner of India, and the universal agony of indignation roused in the hearts of our people has been ignored by our rulers – possibly congratulating themselves for imparting what they imagine as salutary lessons.’103 In introducing the Rowlatt Acts, the government of India had overplayed its hand, attempting to extend permanently wartime provisions, such as trial without juries for certain political cases and internment of suspects without trial.

  Onto the stage of empire now entered Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, coordinating non-violent direct action in the form of the Non-Cooperation movement. While Gandhi propounded satyagraha – the ‘offering of truth’ – as the core of his theory of passive resistance, events frequently exceeded his control in the years following the commencement of the Non-Cooperation movement. Rallies and demonstrations called in his name were often ‘characterised by the rowdy, undisciplined energies of the peasantry and the rural poor’, fleshing out anticolonialism beyond the colonizer–colonized binary to ask questions of other forms of oppression.104 Some of the many struggles during this period that exceeded Gandhi’s initiatives included the famous Mappila (‘Moplah’) Rebellion of 1920–21, when Shia Muslim peasants took control of parts of the Malabar Coast away from the British – and Hindu landlords – to declare ‘Khilafat republics’. Some took the form of ‘depressed-class’ and oppressed-caste mobilizations that were critical of Gandhi’s paternalist vision, papering over a serious caste hierarchy, of a seamlessly united Hindu community. Anti-landlord rent boycotts and no-tax campaigns were no part of Gandhi’s vision, but such mobilizations were frequent and often undertaken in his name. As Sumit Sarkar has noted, while economic deprivation was key to the several food and agrarian riots that took place from 1918 onwards, ‘what was happening in India was in the broadest sense a part of a world-wide upsurge, anti-capitalist in the developed countries and anti-imperialist in the colonies and semi-colonies’.105 The Russian Revolution of 1917 played no small part in influencing events from afar, having taken place in another largely agricultural economy; it was all the more appealing to Indian insurgents for the patent unease it was causing their British rulers. In the early 1920s, directed partly by M. N. Roy, who was based in Mexico and then Europe, the Indian communist movement began to gather strength, choosing in the first instance to work as a pressure group with the Indian National Congress. Historians of India have tracked the myriad ways in which Gandhi and the Congress were both subject to pressures from below and adept at containing, marginalizing or compromising with radical energies.106

  In 1922, as Roy would note bitterly, Gandhi accomplished in one fell swoop what the British government, with its huge repressive apparatus, had not been able to achieve, simply because of his ‘dread of the popular energy’.107 Following the burning down of a police station in Chauri Chaura by protesters in February of that year, Gandhi abruptly and unilaterally suspended the Non-Cooperation movement, which proceeded to collapse. What followed, and continued for the better part of the 1920s, was a scenario of fragmentation and multiplicity with episodic bouts of popular militancy and the emergence of a range of political organizations – not least the Communist Party of India. Several organizations and individuals in the Indian diaspora in Europe and the United States also worked diversely for the Indian cause, among them the Home Rule Leagues, of which Saklatvala was a member; the Ghadar Party in the United States; the Berlin Committee, led by the communist Virendranath ‘Chatto’ Chattopadhyaya and other groups associated with the Comintern.108 It was out of this energetic, often fractious, Indian and global context that Shapurji Saklatvala had emerged as one of the most stentorian voices of Indian anticolonialism in Britain, representing not the Gandhian brand of nationalism but rather the many ‘disillusioned revolutionaries’, including peasants and labour activists, who were critical of Gandhian methods, and ‘sought new roads to political and social emancipation’ that might, in some cases, involve revolutionary violence.109 In the latter part of the 1920s, several British trade unio
nists and labour leaders, including Saklatvala, also arrived in India to assist with organizing (though these were also resented by some Indian communists – most famously M. N. Roy, who saw their participation as continued imperial control from London).

  Shapurji and Sarah Saklatvala (née Marsh) profiled in a British newspaper article, 1922, titled ‘The Indian MP and His English Wife’. Also included was his election manifesto.

  Just as he had in parliament and other political arenas in Britain, in India too Saklatvala assumed the pedagogue’s mantle in his public addresses. Freely describing himself as an ‘extremist’ and an ‘agitator’ at the nationalist and trade union meetings that he addressed, Saklatvala called on young activists to go to agricultural and industrial areas to do the same hard and unpleasant work as peasants and workers and share their precarious existence, but then lead them to self-assertion. His tone friendly but often didactic, Saklatvala returned in these speeches to his favourite themes: the futility of reforms in the context of imperialism, and the folly of engaging with British politicians and officials in a spirit of negotiation or compromise. Just as he had explicated India to his parliamentary colleagues, he would explain to his Indian audiences the need to read ‘the West’ in differentiated terms: ‘There are two distinctly separate, contrary Wests – one dominating, commanding, exploiting, monopolising West, and the other suffering, dictated, exploited and dispossessed West.’110 If, back in the metropole, he was an interpreter of anticolonial resistance to the British governing classes, in India Comrade Sak positioned himself as exponent of revolutionary communism to the nationalist leadership. He was not unaware of the awkwardness, or even hostility, with which this might be received: ‘I can hear your voices now. “We like Saklatwala [sic], we approve of so much that he says and does, but of course we totally disagree with his politics, and condemn his party, if not from our hearts, from our sense of political expediency.” ’111 His speeches prefigured a point now familiar to us through Frantz Fanon, among others, who cautioned against simply replicating the structures of colonial rule, as he urged the Congress not to ‘copy phrases’ from the statute books of the self-governing dominions, which enjoyed very different conditions:

  Mere change of political names and legislative phraseology do not constitute a communal self-rule … These conditions are absent in the association of Great Britain with India, China, and other Eastern countries. You cannot remain blind to these differences and pretend there is a parallel association by printing a law book in which you copy phrases taken from the constitutions of self-governing dominions.112

  In being inveigled by the putative virtues of dominion status, established Indian nationalists were potentially being misled by ‘advice from sentimental and emotional British friends’.113 Their own duty, meanwhile, was also to democratize the nationalist movement, and to become accountable to masses rather than individuals.

  In rehearsing this point in India, Saklatvala was also walking knowingly onto a minefield upon which Gandhi’s authority had been stamped. The British-Indian communist sought to chide Gandhi – now firmly back in the driving seat – into radicalizing the nationalist movement. Unlike Roy, India’s most prominent communist, whom he managed to annoy by hobnobbing with less than revolutionary sorts, Saklatvala viewed Gandhi, for some time at least, as a necessary ally – one who had obviously succeeded in forging a mass movement of sorts, for all its doctrinal deficiencies.114 This view of a necessary alliance was of course consistent with the Comintern’s ‘united-front’ thinking at that juncture. Saklatvala attempted valiantly – perhaps even somewhat foolhardily – to engage with Gandhi publicly on the question of self-assertion and democratization. The agonistic engagement – in which he was more or less bested by Gandhi, a cannier rhetorician – was based on Saklatvala’s not unjustified apprehension of the ways in which, as one historian puts it, ‘Gandhian restraints inhibited the process of mobilisation for the anti-imperialist cause of large sections of the poor peasantry, tribals and industrial workers’.115 In his famous open letter to Gandhi, published in the Amrita Bazar Patrika newspaper, unyielding, cranky and unusually humourless in tone, Saklatvala called on the national eminence to abandon an ‘injurious’ method of campaigning which encouraged submission to his own influence:

  You now complain that the masses are not ready for any such self-assertion, but even if that were so, your whole procedure is certainly not making them more ready for it … You are preparing the country not for mass civil disobedience but for servile obedience and for a belief that there are superior persons on the earth and Mahatmas in this life at a time when in this country the white man’s prestige is already a dangerous obstacle in our way.116

  There was, of course, a tension between Saklatvala’s insistence that the people needed to be approached ‘on terms of absolute equality’ and his own emphasis on the need for more knowing organizers to take charge of the project of ‘developing’ political consciousness. Even so, he was able to lay bare the contradictions of Gandhi’s own positions, with a view, certainly naive, to persuading the older leader to change both his tactics and his allegiances in more radical directions. Saklatvala wanted Gandhi to abandon his hostility to labour organization: ‘You actually and deliberately fraternise and cooperate with the master class, so as to make the task of labour organisers not only difficult but almost unjustifiable in the eyes of poor workers.’117 Using the pronoun ‘us’ now with reference to India and Indians, Saklatvala did, in a later missive, identify points of agreement, such as the insight that ‘labour should be so organised as to remain self-conscious, self-reliant and self-existing, evolving its own leadership and aim’.118 Given this, Gandhi’s ‘confusion’ in refusing to help with trade union organization and ‘timidity’ in defining the rights of labour were betrayals.

  The charge against Gandhi of undermining mass movements was not, of course, unique to Saklatvala; it had been made by other justifiably disenchanted anticolonial campaigners in India. Referring to Gandhi’s controversial decision to call off the Non-Cooperation movement in 1922, Saklatvala asked the Indian leader why he sought to create a psychology of resistance ‘if you did not intend immediately to form men and women into an organisation for a definite material object … before that influence passes away’.119 He noted too that a move away from liberal mendicancy towards open resistance had preceded Gandhi’s mobilization: ‘By the year 1900 the masses of men got tired and sick and their hearts began to burn with fire.’120 Gandhi, he acknowledged, was able to ‘express boldly and fearlessly the unexpected voice of the people’, but he had allowed a mystical cult of ‘the Mahatma’ to develop around him that was in danger, paradoxically, of eclipsing that voice.121 Like other radical critics of Gandhi, including the Dalit leader Dr B. R. Ambedkar – whom Saklatvala singled out for praise – he was forceful in his attack on what he clearly saw as Gandhi’s own problematic paternalism, a damnable ‘touchability’ with regard to the ‘uplift’ of ‘Untouchables’.122 Gandhi needed to halt the cult of worship and ‘servile obedience’ surrounding him: ‘a man of the depressed class worshipping the feet of his deliverer is a more real individual depression and degradation of life … I must call upon you to stop this nonsense’.123

  Gandhi’s reply to Saklatvala, written in a tone that characteristically embodied both self-deprecation and an adamantine insistence on his own rightness, yielded nothing to the younger man. While sharing a commitment to ‘the good of the country and humanity’, Gandhi agreed, they differed widely in their approach to modernity, defined as ‘the multiplication of wants and machinery’, which, to the Indian leader’s mind, was ‘satanic’ and ‘baneful’.124 While agreeing with Saklatvala’s critical analysis that he, Gandhi, did not ‘regard capital to be the enemy of labour’ and believed that the interests of both could be harmonized, he was not hostile to labour organization per se, but rather wanted it, in a telling conflation, to be ‘along Indian lines or, if you will, my lines’.125 While Gandhi’s response was predictable,
he was able to suggest, not entirely without justification, that Saklatvala had failed to appreciate the specificity of the Indian context in his patently urban bias, unexamined advocacy of a Western model of trade unionism, and unwillingness to examine ‘modern civilization’ critically as it functioned in India. The ‘impatient communist’ whose model was explicitly derived from what he called ‘the advancing and powerful countries of the world’ had indeed clearly underestimated, at the very least, the symbolic power of spinning and self-sustaining cloth manufacture.126 Saklatvala also did not appear to recognize, as Gandhi pointed out, that spinning provided a concrete means of organizing politically around a traditional cooperative activity. As Wadsworth, a sympathetic biographer, also notes of Saklatvala, there was in his assessment of Gandhi ‘an impatience with the moral/cultural dimensions of Gandhi’s appeal to a traditionally minded peasantry’ which obscured some of the organizational possibilities inherent therein.127 In their exchanges, neither Gandhi nor Saklatvala was willing to concede an inch, but each was able to cast some critical light on the weaknesses of the other. Unlike his more unyielding comrade, M. N. Roy, Saklatvala did, however, see that Gandhi might in theory use his influence to ‘render easier the otherwise stupendous task of organising an illiterate, overawed and semi-starved population’.128 In his belief that Gandhi and the Congress needed not to be rejected but radicalized, Saklatvala was in line with Comintern thought at the time but at odds with some on the Indian communist left, whom he also criticized in the course of his journey there. As we shall see in the next chapter, it was from within this left that the next great crisis of empire would emerge – one that would also galvanize British anti-imperialism and recharge Saklatvala’s crusading energies.