Insurgent Empire
Page 62
44. HC Deb 9 July 1925 vol. 186, c. 711.
45. Cited in Meerut Prisoners’ Defence Committee, The Meerut Trial: Facts of the Case (London: Meerut Prisoners’ Defence Committee, 1929), p. 10.
46. Gene D. Overstreet and Marshall Windmiller, Communism in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), p. 17.
47. Ibid., p. 29.
48. The main contours of the arguments on either side can be found in Marika Sherwood, ‘The Comintern, the CPGB, Colonies and Black Britons, 1920–1938’, Science and Society 60: 2 (Summer 1996); and John Callahan, ‘Colonies, Racism, the CPGB and the Comintern in the Inter-war Years’, Science and Society 61: 4 (Winter 1997–98). For a sober and fuller assessment, see Neil Redfern, Class or Nation: Communists, Imperialism, and Two World Wars (London/New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2005).
49. James Klugman, cited in Sherwood, ‘The Comintern, the CPGB, Colonies and Black Britons’, p. 144.
50. Cited in ibid., p. 146.
51. Ibid., p. 160, emphasis in original.
52. Shapurji Saklatvala, ‘India in the Labour World’, Labour Monthly 1: 5 (November 1921), available at marxists.org.
53. HC Deb 9 July 1925 vol. 86, c. 706.
54. HC Deb 23 November 1922 vol. 159, c. 111.
55. Ibid., c. 114.
56. Ibid., cc. 113–14.
57. HD Deb 27 February 1923 vol. 160, c. 1835.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. HC Deb 5 July 1923 vol. 166, c. 676.
61. HC Deb 9 July 1925, c. 708.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., c. 709.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., cc. 710–11.
67. Ibid., c. 709.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., c. 712.
70. Ibid., c. 712.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid., c. 714.
74. Ibid., c. 718.
75. Maria Misra, Vishnu’s Crowded Temple: India since the Great Rebellion (London: Allen Lane, 2007), p. 188.
76. HC Deb 17 June 1927, c. 1398.
77. HC Deb 27 November 1927, cc. 2280, 2282.
78. HC Deb 17 June 1927 vol 207, c. 1388.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid., cc. 1388–9.
82. HC Deb 22 November 1927 vol. 210, c. 1642.
83. Ibid.
84. HC Deb 17 June 1927 vol. 207, cc. 1389–90.
85. HC Deb 23 Nov 1927 vol. 210, c. 1824.
86. Ibid., c. 1823.
87. HC Deb 25 November 1927 vol. 210, c. 2272.
88. Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich, p. 159.
89. HC Deb 25 Nov 1927 vol 210, c. 2283.
90. HC Deb, India Office, 17 June 1927, c. 1392.
91. HC Deb 25 November 1927, c. 2282.
92. Shapurji Saklatvala, ‘India and Britain’, Labour Monthly 9: 6 (June 1927), available at marxists.org.
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid.
95. Ibid.
96. Ibid.
97. HC Deb 23 November 1927, c. 1828.
98. Ibid. Saklatvala’s rejoinder was: ‘The Noble Lord knows all this, and he has reports in his possession showing that hundreds of thousands of the people of India approve of my plans and my policy, and they also approve of what I have been doing for India while residing in this country. If the Noble Lord would make a journey with me to India, I would be quite willing to organise open public meetings – not camouflaged and manoeuvred meetings – and he would then find that 99 people out of every 100 at those meetings would declare in favour of my authority to speak on their behalf.’ Ibid., cc. 1843–4.
99. Wadsworth, Comrade Sak, p. 59.
100. Cited in Saklatvala, Fifth Commandment, p. 332.
101. Wadsworth, Comrade Sak, p. 21.
102. Maria Misra notes: ‘Amritsar was not in fact the wholly isolated event the British liked to believe. Elsewhere the Punjab disturbances had been met with lethal force … unarmed market crowds and schoolhouses were strafed with hundreds of rounds of ammunition and then carpet-bombed.’ Misra, Vishnu’s Crowded Temple, p. 152.
103. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Letter to Lord Chelmsford’, Monthly Review (Calcutta Monthly), July 1919.
104. Owen, British Left and India, p. 125.
105. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885–1947 (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 176; see p. 199 for a list of significant strike actions during the period 1919–20.
106. Sumit Sarkar notes correctly that the combination of pressures from below and Gandhian organization acting as a ‘brake’ to such pressures created a ‘peculiar dialectic’. Sumit Sarkar, ‘Popular’ Movements and ‘Middle Class’ Leadership in Late Colonial India: Perspectives and Problems of a ‘History from Below’ (Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, 1983), p. 44.
107. Cited in Overstreet and Windmiller, Communism in India, p. 56.
108. See Nirode K. Barooah, Chatto: The Life and Times of an Anti-imperialist in Europe (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004).
109. Sarkar, Modern India, p. 247.
110. Cited in Panchanan Saha, Shapurji Saklatvala: A Short Biography (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1970), p. 40.
111. Shapurji Saklatvala, ‘Mr Saklatwala’s Message to His Countrymen’ (message to Sarojini Naidu, president of Indian National Congress), reprinted in Bombay Chronicle, 15 January 1997, in Saklatvala Papers, British Library, MSS EUR D 1173/3.
112. Ibid. He continues: ‘The old idea of ruling castes in each nation wanting to rule the masses within their nation, has been burnt and charred in the conflagration of the last great war and cannot be revived.’
113. Ibid.
114. Wadsworth notes that, on the eve of his departure from India, Saklatvala made a ‘controversial speech’ calling for peasants and workers to rally around the Congress. Roy complained to the CPGB, saying that ‘Saklatvala was hobnobbing with all sorts of Indians who were not revolutionaries’. Ibid., p. 61. Another Indian leftist, Hasrat Mohani, claimed that the British Indian MP had become a ‘Congress victim’. Ibid., p. 62.
115. Ibid., p. 51.
116. ‘Saklatvala’s Open Letter to Gandhi’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 12 March 1927. In Wadsworth, Comrade Sak, pp. 158–9.
117. Ibid., p. 159.
118. ‘Saklatvala to Gandhi’, 1 July 1927. In Wadsworth, Comrade Sak, p. 172.
119. Wadsworth, Saklatvala to Gandhi, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 12 March 1927, p. 156.
120. Ibid., p. 157.
121. Ibid.
122. Ibid., p. 159.
123. Ibid.
124. ‘Mahatma Gandhi’s Reply’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 March 1927. Cited in Wadsworth, Comrade Sak, p. 162.
125. Ibid., p. 165.
126. Ibid., p. 164.
127. Wadsworth, Comrade Sak, p. 65.
128. ‘Saklatvala to Gandhi’, 1 July 1927. In Wadsworth, Comrade Sak, p. 173.
129. HC Deb 25 November 1927, c. 2272.
130. Ibid.
131. Ibid., c. 2273.
132. Ibid., c. 2275.
133. Ibid.
134. Ibid., c. 2277.
135. Ibid., c. 2278.
136. Ibid., c. 2285.
137. Ibid.
138. HC Deb 21 March 1928 vol. 215, c. 426.
139. Shapurji Saklatvala in HC Deb 27 September 1926 vol. 199, cc. 338–9.
140. HC Deb 20 July 1926 vol. 198, c. 1117.
141. Sir Charles Wilson, in HC Deb 27 September 1926, cc. 343–4.
142. Shapurji Saklatvala, Election Address, Parliamentary By-election, June 1930, Shuttleston Division, Bridgeman Papers, U DBN/24.
143. Shapurji Saklatvala, ‘The Indian Round Table Conference’, Labour Monthly 12: 12 (December 1930), pp. 720–4, available at www.marxists.org.
144. Saklatvala, ‘Second Indian Round Table Conference’.
145. Ibid.
146. Shapurji Saklatava, ‘The Indian Round-Table Conference: A Danger to World Peace and Social
ism’, Labour Monthly 13: 2 (February 1931), pp. 86–92, available at www.marxists.org.
147. Shapurji Saklatvala, ‘To My Countrymen’, typescript of pamphlet, Bridgeman Papers, U DBN/24.
6. The Revolt of the Oppressed World
1. Lester Hutchinson, Conspiracy at Meerut, with a preface by Harold J. Laski (London: Allen & Unwin, 1935), p. 41.
2. A useful but brief account of the Meerut Conspiracy Case can be found in A. G. Noorani, Indian Political Trials 1775–1947 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).
3. See ibid., p. 238.
4. For an excellent account of revolutionary violence in this period, see Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (London: Hurst, 2015).
5. Political Dept, File 14, June 1927, Government of Bengal, cited in Panchanan Saha, Shapurji Saklatvala: A Short Biography (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1970), p. 28. It continues: ‘the peasants are grumbling that there is no reason why they should be forced to pay rent to the zamindar or land revenue to the sarkar; in the towns the labourers are complaining that while richmen [sic] live lives of comfort and ease, they are condemned to toil, early and late, to live in miserable hovels, to go clad in rags.’ Ibid.
6. Hutchinson, Conspiracy at Meerut, p. 117.
7. Cited in Fredrik Petersson, ‘The “Colonial Conference” and the Dilemma of the Comintern’s Colonial Work, 1928–29’, in Vijay Prashad, ed., Communist Histories (New Delhi: Leftword, 2016), p. 106.
8. Pramita Ghosh, Meerut Conspiracy Case and the Left Wing in India (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1998), p. 93.
9. ‘The Speech of the Prosecutor in the Meerut Case’ (Part 1), Labour Monthly 12: 1 (January 1930), available at marxists.org.
10. ‘The Speech of the Prosecutor in the Meerut Case’ (Part 2), Labour Monthly 12: 2 (February 1930), available at marxists.org.
11. ‘Speech of the Prosecutor’ (Part 1).
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Cited in Noorani, Indian Political Trials, p. 254.
15. Cited in Ghosh, Meerut Conspiracy Case, p. 110. For a slightly longer account of Gandhi’s relationship with communism as it pertained to this case, see Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah, ‘Meerut and a Hanging: “Young India,” Popular Socialism, and the Dynamics of Imperialism’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33: 3 (2013). They describe Hutchinson as ‘one of the more coherent and biting critics of Gandhi and of Gandhian politics within youth league circles’ (p. 375).
16. Ghosh, Meerut Conspiracy Case, p. 111.
17. Hutchinson, Conspiracy at Meerut, p. 118.
18. Roy and Zachariah, ‘Meerut and a Hanging’, p. 360.
19. Ibid., p. 363.
20. HC Deb 25 March 1929 vol. 226, cc. 2041–3.
21. Hutchinson, Conspiracy at Meerut, p. 179.
22. Harold J. Laski, ‘Preface’, in Hutchinson, Conspiracy at Meerut, p. 7.
23. Cited in Ghosh, Meerut Conspiracy Case, p. 155.
24. ‘The Meerut Case’, The Manchester Guardian, 5 August 1933.
25. Meerut: Release the Prisoners! A Statement upon the Meerut Trial and Sentences, London: issued by the National Joint Council, representing the Trades Union Congress, the Labour Party and the Parliamentary Labour Party, 1933.
26. Hutchinson, Conspiracy at Meerut, p. 179.
27. Cited in Ghosh, Meerut Conspiracy Case, p. 159.
28. Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich, p. 147.
29. ‘Meerut Conspiracy Prosecution,’ Manchester Guardian, 10 December 1929.
30. Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich, p. 171.
31. The Meerut Prisoners and the Charge against Them (London: Modern Books, 1931).
32. Ibid., p. 6.
33. Ibid.
34. The provincial Workers and Peasants Parties (a plurality across India although run by the same organisation) were part of a tactic initiated by the Indian communist M. N. Roy. They were legal parties – ‘established at a time when the British government of India was arresting anyone remotely connected to communism on charges of an international conspiracy’. They were looked upon askance by both the Comintern and, in particular, the CPGB, which called for them to be disbanded. For a fuller account, see Wendy Singer, ‘Peasants and Peoples of the East: Indians and the Rhetoric of the Comintern’, in Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe, ed., International Communism and the Communist International, 1919–1943 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 276.
35. The Meerut Prisoners, p. 8.
36. Ibid., p. 18.
37. Ibid., p. 12.
38. Ibid., p. 42.
39. Ibid., p. 26.
40. Ibid., p. 29.
41. Ibid., p. 33.
42. Ibid., pp. 44–5.
43. Ibid., p. 5.
44. Meerut: Workers Theatre Movement Play, available at wcml.org.uk.
45. Charlie Mann, ‘How to Produce Meerut (1933)’, at ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Jimmie Miller, ‘Red Megaphones’, available at wcml.org.uk.
49. Romain Rolland, ‘For the Meerut Prisoners: Against Imperialist Terror’, in Meerut Conspiracy Case, Specially Written by a Barrister-at-Law (London: Meerut Prisoners’ Release Committee, 1933). Published in French as ‘Pour les condamnés de Meerut’, first published in L’Humanité, 18 March 1933.
50. Ibid., p. 1.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., p. 2.
53. Ibid., pp. 2–3.
54. Ibid., p. 3.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., p. 4.
58. Cited in Ghosh, Meerut Conspiracy Case, p. 167.
59. See Muzaffar Ahmad, ‘Introduction’, in Ahmad, ed., Communists Challenge Imperialism from the Dock (Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1967). Other documents pertaining to the case have been digitized and are available at ‘Indian Communists and Trade Unions on Trial: The Meerut Conspiracy, 1929–1933’, British Online Archives, at microform.digital.
60. Hutchinson, Conspiracy at Meerut, p. 81.
61. Ibid., p. 75. See also Ahmad, ‘Introduction’.
62. Nicholas Owen, The British Left and India: Metropolitan Anti-imperialism 1885–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 210.
63. Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. xvii.
64. Nikolai Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder (London: Communist Party of Great Britain, n.d. [1923?]), p. 7.
65. John Riddell, ed., To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920 – First Congress of the Peoples of the East (London/New York: Pathfinder, 1993), p. 27.
66. McDermott and Agnew, Comintern, p. 217.
67. For an engaging account of the discussion, see John P. Haithcox, ‘The Roy–Lenin Debate on Colonial Policy: A New Interpretation’, Journal of Asian Studies 23: 1 (November 1963), pp. 93–101.
68. ‘Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International, Fourth Session, July 25’, available at marxists.org. Also available in McDermott and Agnew, Comintern, pp. 223–4.
69. Pennybacker describes Arthur Creech-Jones, one of many ‘cautious critics of empire’ who would become the head of the liberal-imperialist Fabian Colonial Bureau, and later colonial secretary, as ‘implacably hostile to any notion of Indian agency’, insisting that ‘unlike their comrades in the West the workers in India are mainly the illiterate, and are dependent almost entirely for their organization … upon persons who are not themselves workers’. Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich, p. 174.
70. Hutchinson, Conspiracy at Meerut, p. 188.
71. Lester Hutchinson, Meerut 1929–1932: Statement Given in His Own Defence at Meerut Court, India, against a Charge of ‘Conspiracy against the King’ (London: Meerut Defence Committee, 1932), p. 57.
72. Ibid., p. 57.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid., pp. 58–9.
75. Robert
Page Arnot, ‘The Meerut Sentences’, Labour Monthly 15: 2 (February 1933), available at marxists.org.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid.
80. ‘Meerut and the Colonial Struggle,’ Daily Worker, 20 January 1933.
81. ‘Meerut Sentences Arouse Anger’, Daily Worker, 18 January 1933.
82. ‘League against Imperialism Active to Release Meerut Prisoners’, Daily Worker, 21 January 1933.
83. Petersson, ‘The “Colonial Conference” ’, p. 106.
84. ‘LAI British Section, Report of 2nd Annual Conference Held May 21st and 22nd, Friars Hall, London’, p. 1, Bridgeman Papers, Hull University Archives, U DBN25/1.
85. The LAI’s Meerut activities, reported by Bridgeman to the British Section’s Second Annual Conference in 1932, included meetings, demonstrations, fundraising for the Prisoner Relief Fund, and publishing pamphlets, petitions and open letters.
86. Reginald Bridgeman, ‘The Meerut Conspiracy Case: Open Letter to Delegates of the 31st Annual Conference of the Labour Party (5–9 October 1931)’, dated 29 September 1931, Bridgeman Papers, Hull University Archives, U DBN19/1. The document dwells at some length on the resistance put up by Indian workers through strikes and agitation in the period 1920–29.
87. Ibid.
88. ‘A Socialist Dandy’, Evening Standard, 15 January 1929, Saklatvala Papers, D1173/3.
89. John Saville, ‘Reginald Bridgeman’, in Joyce M. Bellamy and John Saville, eds, The Dictionary of Labour Biography (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 1972).
90. Daily Star, ‘An Aesthetic Socialist’, 23 November 1927; no title, clipping from Daily Record and Daily Mail, 25 November 1927, Bridgeman Papers U DBN 6/1.
91. A recent two-volume history offers a compendious and painstaking account of the inner workings of the LAI over its short lifespan. See Fredrik Petersson, Willi Münzenberg, the League against Imperialism and the Comintern, 1925–1933, 2 vols (Lewiston: Queenston Press, 2013).
92. Stafford Cripps, Empire (London: India League, 1938), p. 11, Bridgeman personal copy, Bridgeman Papers U DBN 27/5.
93. Bridgeman to Noel Baker, 3 December 1938, Bridgeman Papers, U DBN 27/4.
94. See Bridgeman Papers U DBN/22, which contains papers pertaining to his speaking engagements.