South Asian Resistances in Britain, 1858 - 1947 1441155147, 9781441155146

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South Asian Resistances in Britain, 1858– 1947

Edited by Rehana Ahmed and Sumita Mukherjee

Contents

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Rehana Ahmed and Sumita Mukherjee Part I Violent Resistances 1 Scholarship Terrorists: The India House Hostel and the ‘Student Problem’ in Edwardian London Alex Tickell 2 ‘For every O’Dwyer … there is a Shaheed Udham Singh’: The Caxton Hall Assassination of Michael O’Dwyer Florian Stadtler Part II Working-Class Resistances 3 Littoral Struggles, Liminal Lives: Indian Merchant Seafarers’ Resistances Georgie Wemyss 4 Ghulam Rasul’s Travels: Migration, Recolonization and Resistance in Inter-War Britain Laura Tabili 5 Networks of Resistance: Krishna Menon and Working-Class South Asians in Inter-War Britain Rehana Ahmed Part III Resistances and the Elite 6 Royal Relationships as a Form of Resistance: The Cases of Duleep Singh and Abdul Karim A. Martin Wainwright 7 Herabai Tata and Sophia Duleep Singh: Suffragette Resistances for India and Britain, 1910–1920 Sumita Mukherjee Part IV Cross-Cultural Resistances

8 Metropolitan Resistance: Indo–Irish Connections in the Inter-War Period Kate O’Malley 9 Negotiating a ‘New World Order’: Mulk Raj Anand as Public Intellectual at the Heart of Empire (1925–1945) Susheila Nasta Epilogue: Salaam, Great Britain: Thinking through Resistance in an Age of Global Empire Antoinette Burton

Notes on Contributors

Rehana Ahmed is Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Teesside. She has published articles on British Asian literature and culture, and is the editor of Walking a Tightrope: New Writing from Asian Britain (Young Picador, 2004) and co-editor of Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing (Routledge, 2012). Antoinette Burton is Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA, where she teaches courses on imperial, global, postcolonial and feminist histories. Her most recent work includes Empire in Question (Duke, 2011) and, with Tony Ballantyne, Empire and the Reach of the Global (Harvard University Press, forthcoming). She was a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellow in 2010–11. Sumita Mukherjee is a historian of South Asia and the British Empire. She has taught at the London School of Economics, De Montfort University, and at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. She is the author of Nationalism, Education and Migrant Identities: The England-Returned (Routledge, 2009). Susheila Nasta is Professor of Modern Literature at the Open University and Editor of Wasafiri which she founded in 1984. Publications include Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (Palgrave, 2002) and Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk (Routledge, 2004). Director of the project ‘Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870–1950’, she is currently completing a book on ‘Asian Bloomsbury’. Kate O’Malley works for the Royal Irish Academy’s Documents on Irish Foreign Policy series. She is a graduate and associate of Trinity College, Dublin. She has written extensively on Indo–Irish relations and her book Ireland, India and Empire was published by Manchester University Press in 2008. Florian Stadtler is a research associate at the Open University. From 2008 to 2010 he worked on the cross-institutional AHRC project ‘Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870–1950’. He has published on South Asian literature in English, British Asian history and literature, and Indian popular cinema. He is Reviews Editor for the magazine of international contemporary writing Wasafiri. Laura Tabili is Associate Professor of History at the University of Arizona. She has authored ‘We Ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Cornell, 1994) and Global Migrants, Local Culture: Natives and Newcomers in Provincial England, 1841–1939 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), as well as articles about labour migration,

interracial and exogamous marriage, and the racialization of masculinity. Alex Tickell is Lecturer in English at the Open University. He has published widely on South Asian and colonial literature and is the co-editor of Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism (2004), and the editor of Selections from ‘Bengaliana’ (2005). He has also written a Routledge critical guide to Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (2007) and, most recently, a monograph, Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian–English Fiction, 1830–1947 (Routledge, 2011). A. Martin Wainwright received his Ph.D. in British History and South Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1989. He is currently Professor of History and Director of the World Civilizations Program at the University of Akron. He has authored two books: Inheritance of Empire: Britain, India, and the Balance of Power in Asia, 1938–55 (Praeger, 1994) and ‘The Better Class’ of Indians: Social Rank, Imperial Identity and South Asians in Britain 1858–1914 (Manchester University Press, 2008). Georgie Wemyss is Visiting Fellow at the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, London, and a lecturer at Tower Hamlets College, where she teaches social anthropology and South Asian studies. Her book, The Invisible Empire: White Discourse, Tolerance and Belonging (Ashgate, 2009), was begun during an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Surrey. She studied anthropology and geography at UCL and completed her MA and D.Phil. in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex.

Acknowledgements

South Asian Resistances in Britain, 1858–1947 emerged out of a seminar series held at the Institute of English Studies, London, in spring 2009, entitled ‘Making Britain: South Asian Resistances, 1870–1950’. This seminar series, in turn, arose from the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project ‘Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870–1950’ (AHRC Bid Reference No. AH/E009859/1), on which we were both working as postdoctoral researchers at the time. We would like to thank Susheila Nasta, Director of the ‘Making Britain’ project and overall convenor of the Inter-University Postcolonial Seminar series, for the opportunities and support that have led us to this stage. We are also very grateful for the support of our other colleagues on the project, Elleke Boehmer, Ruvani Ranasinha and Florian Stadtler. We drew inspiration from Rozina Visram, consultant to the project, through her rich archival uncovering in the field of South Asians in Britain, and she helped us enormously with her personal guidance. We would also like to thank all the presenters and attendees of the seminar series, from which lively discussion we were encouraged to pursue this book project. The Open University Arts Faculty Research Committee provided additional funding for the series, for which we are grateful. The seven other contributors to this collection, Susheila Nasta, Kate O’Malley, Florian Stadtler, Laura Tabili, Alex Tickell, A. Martin Wainwright and Georgie Wemyss, have been pleasures to work with and have offered rich and varied essays. Antoinette Burton kindly wrote the Epilogue to this collection, and Michael Greenwood, our editor at Continuum, has been the model of patience, supportively guiding us through the editorial and production process. Our warm thanks to all of these people for their commitment to this project. Rehana Ahmed is also grateful to the English Department and the Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies at the Open University, her institutional ‘home’ from 2007 to 2010. More recently, my colleagues in the English Section at the University of Teesside have been exceptionally supportive during the first few months of a new lectureship when this project was completed. On a personal level, I am grateful to the people who have helped care for my son during the first two and a half years of his life, enabling me to continue to work and complete this project among others. In particular, I would like to thank Anne and Haroon Ahmed, and Nicky and Stephen Adamson. My greatest debt of gratitude is, as always, to Sam Hayden, for his belief, sustenance and love, and for making it all possible – and this time, also, to Keir, for tolerating my absences with such good humour and helping me keep a sense of perspective. Sumita Mukherjee is also grateful to the English Faculty at Oxford University for their institutional support from 2007 to 2010. As ever, my biggest thanks go to Arabinda, Nita and Chiron Mukherjee who have been loyal and encouraging throughout, particularly by providing me with a study room in the past few months. Here’s another one for the mantelpiece. RA and SM, March 2011

Alex Tickell would like to thank Taylor and Francis Group for permission to reproduce material in his chapter ‘Scholarship Terrorists: The India House Hostel and the “Student Problem” in Edwardian London’ (Copyright © 2011 from Terrorism, Insurgency and IndianEnglish Literature, 1830–1947 by Alex Tickell. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa plc.)

Introduction Rehana Ahmed and Sumita Mukherjee

BRITAIN AND INDIA, 1858–1947: A HISTORY OF RESISTANCE? This collection of essays considers a range of ‘resistances’ enacted in Britain by South Asian people during the period 1858 to 1947. In 1858, the British Crown formally took over governance of India from the East India Company, a position it retained until India and Pakistan gained their independence in August 1947. During this period of high imperialism, the relationship between Britain and India was often tense and antagonistic. Anti-imperialists were resisting British rule in India by various means – whether through debate within the Indian National Congress, the main political body of Indian nationalism; mass civil disobedience actions such as Gandhi’s salt tax march in 1930; the boycott of British goods (swadeshi) in the face of the partition of Bengal in 1905; attempts at political assassinations (such as that on Douglas Kingsford in 1908); or large-scale public demonstrations such as the 1942 Quit India movement. Yet, the anti-imperialist struggle was not only taking place in the colonies: various colonial nationalists were bringing their messages to Britain. Further, people from South Asia – the countries now known as Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, as well as Burma and Nepal – were involved in multifarious forms of resistance on British soil for purposes other than to destabilize the British Empire. South Asian Resistances in Britain, 1858–1947 positions itself within a rapidly growing subsection of British history that seeks to incorporate the contribution of colonial migrants to British life. In particular, it builds on the pioneering works of historians such as Rozina Visram, Michael Fisher and Antoinette Burton which have uncovered the rich history of South Asians who were living in or travelling through Britain before the Second World War.1 This collection demonstrates that South Asians were not merely using their time in Britain to further their economic opportunities through education or employment; many were involved in political activities, campaigning for people other than themselves, frequently in collaboration with the British. We offer here some snapshots of the events and processes that were shaping the Anglo–Indian relationship between 1858 and 1947, from the burdens of a colonial history to the evolution of world ideologies and social change in Britain itself, in an attempt to enhance understanding of this connected history of resistance and frame the essays that follow. If we first consider the Indian nationalist struggle, we can trace a direct relationship between the success of this movement and activities taking place in Britain. After all, the British Parliament was the centre of British imperial rule, where many of the key decisions regarding governance in India were made. The Indian National Congress, which had its first meeting in Bombay in December 1885, was founded by a group of British and Indians, many of the latter having studied or lived in Britain (for example, W. C. Bonnerjee, Dadabhai

Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta and Badruddin Tyabji). In May 1888, William Digby set up the Indian Political and General Agency in London in collaboration with Congress to raise private and public grievances from India in the press or in Parliament.2 He also started up the Congress journal, India. The agency was disbanded in 1891, and after this, Congress worked in London through the British Committee (BCINC) under the chairmanship of William Wedderburn. This is an example of nationalist resistance that was controlled by British liberals, but soon Indians were playing a leading role in these struggles. Dadabhai Naoroji was elected as Liberal MP for Central Finsbury in 1892 and involved in the Indian Parliamentary Party which raised Indian issues in government. After Naoroji’s defeat in the 1895 General Election, this ‘moderate’ and ‘democratic’ line of resistance via Parliamentary debate and dissent was taken on by the Conservative MP for North-East Bethnal Green, Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree (1895–1905), and the Labour/Communist MP for Battersea North, Shapurji Saklatvala (1922–1929). The nationalist struggle often assumed a violent form in India and in Britain, with a number of attempted assassinations of British officials, particularly in Bengal in the first decade of the twentieth century, and then a string of killings in the 1930s: eleven officials were killed following the Writers’ Building attack in Calcutta in 1930, and three successive district magistrates of Midnapore were assassinated between 1930 and 1934.3 The politically motivated assassinations of British officials by Indians – Madan Lal Dhingra of Sir Curzon Wyllie in 1909, and Udham Singh of Sir Michael O’Dwyer in 1940 – are discussed by Alex Tickell and Florian Stadtler in this collection. In the example of ‘India House’, the society with which Dhingra was associated, founded by Shyamaji Krishnavarma in Highgate in 1905, we see Indians in Britain who were taking the nationalist fight into their own hands and were not reliant on or associated with British colleagues. Despite the exile of Krishnavarma, the arrest and extradition of V. S. Savarkar and the arrest and hanging of Dhingra, it was in Britain much more than in India that organizations such as India House had the freedom to plan and collaborate. At this time in India, there was a lack of freedom and rights for Indian citizens, the press was curtailed, and movement and opportunities were restricted. Key examples of such restriction include the amendment to the 1883 Ilbert Bill which would allow an Indian judge to preside over a trial with a European defendant only if fewer than six jury members were Indian, or the 1919 Rowlatt Act which extended wartime measures into peacetime and authorized the government to imprison suspected terrorists without trial. In Britain, by contrast, there was less surveillance and more opportunity to challenge the government. As much as violence and terrorism have dominated accounts of anti-colonial struggle, analysis of the Indian subcontinent is similarly overshadowed by the looming figure of Mohandas Gandhi and his pronouncements on non-violence. The policies of non-cooperation and Gandhi’s search for truth (satyagraha) were uniquely adapted to the Indian situation, but were also influenced by the Russian ‘anarchists’ and Irish Fenians who came before them. The largest political body of opposition to Gandhi’s Congress in India, the Muslim League, had a London branch too, founded in 1907 by Syed Ameer Ali, which operated as a lobby group. The primary Britain-based organization that lobbied for Indian nationalism in this period, though, was the ‘India League’. Originating out of the Home Rule for India League,

founded in 1916 and known then as the Commonwealth of India League, by the early 1930s it had thirteen branches in London and thirteen more around Britain, all campaigning for some form of Indian self-government. V. K. Krishna Menon, discussed by Rehana Ahmed in this volume, was the driving force of the India League, particularly after he became its Secretary in 1928. However, as Nicholas Owen has argued, in the 1920s and 1930s Indian political lobby groups were characterized by their need to collaborate with other associations in order to gain a voice and stronghold in the public political debate.4 The India League, for example, was initially founded through the efforts of the Theosophist and Irish Home Rule campaigner Annie Besant, and later it collaborated with the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and Fabian Society. These cross-political alliances gave Indian nationalists experience of and contact with a wide subsection of British society and allowed them to make a significant mark on mainstream British organizations and politics. Acts of resistance in Britain during this period often brought together diverse groups united by a common cause. Political groups such as the Indian National Congress and India League attracted an array of people with sympathies for the Indian nationalist cause, and the Indian Freedom Association, for example, included Egyptians, Somalis, West Indians and Malaysians among its members.5 South Asians were also involved in political activities that were not of direct ‘nationalist’ concern. Many, for example, were sympathetic to the Irish Home Rule movement, which worked in tandem on issues of independence from British imperialist control. The politicians Dadabhai Naoroji and Shapurji Saklatvala both collaborated with Irish nationalists inside and outside Parliament (see Kate O’Malley, Chapter 8). Naoroji also became a member of the Society for the Recognition of the Brotherhood of Man (SRBM) and sent financial support for the 1900 Pan-African Conference in London, organized by Henry Sylvester Williams.6 The West Indian Williams was founder of the African Association and had followed the BCINC closely, pursuing similar methods of lobbying and publications to highlight his cause. The alliance between South Asians and South Africans in South Africa over their human rights was often publicized in Britain – for example, when Gandhi visited London in 1906 to highlight the plight of Transvaal Indians, a concern which Mancherjee Bhownaggree had also addressed in Parliament at the turn of the century. Some Indians attempted to boycott the 1924 British Empire Exhibition in Wembley in protest against the White Paper on Kenya that year which restricted Indian settler rights there.7 South Asians in Britain became involved in other international issues during this period. The Republican cause of the 1936 Spanish Civil War received high-profile support from Jawaharlal and Indira Nehru as well as from the young writer Mulk Raj Anand, whose networks are discussed by Susheila Nasta (Chapter 9, this volume).8 Republican support was dominated by left-wing and communist sympathizers, and many Indians were attracted to and involved with communist groups in Britain. While the latter were banned and repressed in India, for example when thirty-three trade unionists were imprisoned in the 1929 Meerut Conspiracy Case, South Asians were joining the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and Marxist reading groups in London. Europeans, South Asians and Africans were brought together by this ideology in the relatively open space of Britain, although there were also

British government attempts to suppress the rise of communism there.9 Students and writers were also able to use the literary spaces of Britain to discuss these political ideas and articulate their critiques of imperialism and fascism; examples include the magazine Indian Writing (1940–1942), whose inaugural issue was edited by Iqbal Singh and Ahmed Ali, as well as mainstream British periodicals such as the Left Review and the New Statesman, where South Asians published essays, fiction and reviews.10 But South Asian resistances often diverged from the traditional anti-imperialist struggle that dominates the discourse surrounding the relationship between Indians and Britons during this period. South Asian men and women were involved in the suffragette movement in Britain and internationally. Indeed, South Asian women were active participants in acts of resistance across the political spectrum in Britain, from Madame Cama, who was associated with India House, to Sarojini Naidu, a leading member of Congress. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Indian soldiers fought on the Western Front during the First World War. Despite the growing momentum of the nationalist movement, Indians, including Gandhi, were loyal to the Allied cause. Their involvement underlined the complexities and hypocrisies of the imperial relationship, with colonial troops fighting for the British to break up another European empire. The majority came from Northern India and Nepal, although their contingents also included medics and support personnel from other major Indian cities. The Indian infantry formed half of the attacking force at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in March 1915, and large contingents were at Ypres and Loos, suffering heavy losses. Injured soldiers were sent to Britain to recuperate. Those in Brighton, at the Kitchener’s Indian Hospital, were not allowed contact with British women; medical staff had to be male and soldiers were only permitted to leave the hospital with an escort.11 Restrictions on the meeting of British women were not possible for other groups of Indian men, and there were many instances of inter-racial relationships and marriages which resisted the racial hierarchies of society and challenged conservative imperialist fears of miscegenation. Tens of thousands of South Asians also served in the British Merchant Navy. Many former lascars (seamen) were stranded or settled in British port cities, and restrictions on seamen’s movements in Britain in the twentieth century led to revolts. As Laura Tabili argues here (Chapter 4) and elsewhere, the very presence of Black and South Asian workers in Britain during this period destabilized racial hierarchies materially and ideologically; their migration defied imperial inequalities and restrictions on movement. But in addition, they became involved in struggles for rights that further challenged these hierarchies.12 The 1919 port riots were dominated by those from Africa and the West Indies but included some South Asian dissenters. They were triggered by global unrest at the end of the First World War, with severe competition for peacetime jobs and local housing shortages. Riots took place in Glasgow, South Shields, Salford, Hull, London, Liverpool, Newport, Cardiff and Barry as white working-class people targeted ethnic minority groups.13 Indian seamen were more actively involved in demonstrations against the 1925 Coloured Alien Seamen Order and the 1935 British Shipping Assistance Act. Lascars formed various union groups such as the Workers’ Welfare League of India and the Indian Seamen’s Union, and were members of the Colonial Seamen’s Association, founded in response to the 1935 Act. In 1937, the All-India

Seamen’s Federation brought together various Indian lascar unions and was instrumental in negotiating a settlement for improved pay and working conditions following the lascar strikes in 1939 and 1940 (see Georgie Wemyss, Chapter 3, for more on these strikes).14 The Second World War marked a major shift in global politics, with the onset of the Cold War, the start of decolonization of the British Empire and economic repercussions throughout the world. In India, the years following the end of the Second World War were dominated by negotiations leading to the transfer of power and independence for India and Pakistan in August 1947. The violence during the partition of the Indian subcontinent was unprecedented, with millions of people displaced and an estimated one and a half million people killed. The legacies of partition continue today in local, national and international relations. Meanwhile, in 1948 Britain introduced the National Health Service, and in the same year SS Empire Windrush disembarked in Essex with hundreds of migrants from the Caribbean. Large-scale South Asian migration was soon to follow, encouraged in particular by the 1948 Nationality Act which gave Commonwealth citizens the right to settle in Britain, and through various initiatives attracting overseas workers to work in the NHS and rebuild British industry. Although the earlier migrants have been overshadowed by the sheer numbers of newer generations, their legacies remain in organizations, networks and channels of resistance for which they laid the groundwork.

LOOKING FORWARD: CONTEMPORARY BRITISH ASIAN RESISTANCES The intellectual and activist A. Sivanandan opens his powerful 1982 essay ‘From resistance to rebellion’ by highlighting three acts of ‘black resistance’ in Britain: Udham Singh’s 1940 assassination of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, governor of the Punjab at the time of the Amritsar Massacre, in Caxton Hall, London; the 1945 Pan-African Congress, held in Chorlton Town Hall, Manchester, which pledged its commitment to the struggle for full independence for the colonies; and the 1975 hold-up of a restaurant in London’s wealthy Knightsbridge by three West Indian men who demanded funds to set up adequate schools for Britain’s black communities as well as to finance liberation struggles in Africa. 15 Sivanandan crucially draws connections across the pre- and post-independence periods of black and Asian British history, signalling the frequently invisibilized precursors to the contemporary, postcolonial acts of minority resistance that are the focus of his essay and have been the subject of more substantial documentation and analysis. Sivanandan recounts that in the aftermath of the 1979 demonstrations against the National Front in Southall, London, when white activist Blair Peach was murdered and several others injured, reports in British Asian newspapers compared the brutality inflicted on the protestors by the police to that of the colonial officials during the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, ‘of that other April in 1919’, almost exactly sixty years earlier.16 If the 1981 uprising by British Asian youths in Southall was a response to the violence of April 1979, as well as to subsequent events, a connecting thread can be drawn between this uprising and Udham Singh’s attempt to avenge the Amritsar massacre on British soil in 1940. Also linking

past to present and India to Britain, Jayaben Desai, leader of the 1976–1977 Grunwick filmprocessing plant strike in Willesden, north London, is reported to have encouraged her fellow strikers with the words: ‘We must not give up. … Would Gandhi give up? Never!’17 While these comparisons by no means imply an equivalence between these varied events, the fact that in the 1970s racist violence and anti-racist activism resonated with colonial oppression and anti-colonial resistance for British Asians themselves suggests the importance of tracing links between the Indian subcontinent and Britain and across the dividing line of decolonization when considering South Asian resistances. While Sivanandan looks back in his predominantly post-independence study, here we take a moment to look forward to suggest that the anti-racist mobilization of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries can be traced to – and might be better understood through – the stories collected here of agency and activism by South Asians during an earlier period of British history. Avtar Brah argues that media representation of the anti-racist activism of the late 1970s and 1980s ‘erase[d] the history of militant struggles of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s’;18 we wish to posit that some of the gains won for British Asians have even deeper roots. Thus the ‘lascar’ strikes of 1939 may be read as antecedents to the strikes by British Asian workers in the 1960s and 1970s, which range from the 1965 action by workers at Courtauld Red Scar Mill in Preston against employers’ demand that they work more machines for proportionately less pay, to the 1974 action at Imperial Typewriters, Leicester, and the 1976–1977 action at Grunwick.19 Similarly, the collectivism and campaigns of the Indian Workers’ Association and numerous other early twentieth-century South Asian organizations in Britain, which mobilized not just for Indian independence but also for access to adequate living and working conditions and full British citizenship (see Rehana Ahmed, Chapter 5), could be seen as the foundation on which post-Second World War groups, such as the Universal Coloured People’s Association, the Southall Youth Movement or the Pakistani Workers’ Union, were built. Indeed, the sheer tenacity of earlier South Asian migrants who sought to build new lives in harsh and frequently hostile condition, often evading or subverting discriminatory regulations or legislation in order to settle and survive in Britain, must surely be incorporated into the early chapters of any narrative of British Asian resistance (see Tabili, Chapter 4, and Wemyss, Chapter 3). Writing elsewhere, Laura Tabili has described the Colonial Seamen’s Association, which comprised ‘Negroes, Arabs, Somalis, Malays and Chinese’ as well as South Asians, as articulating and embodying a ‘multicultural Black political identity’; thus she traces the better known and more explicit anti-racist deployment of such an identity in the 1970s and 1980s back to this earlier period of empire.20 In the last two or three decades, however, an inclusive ‘Black’ identity has fractured and ‘British Asians’ have tended to identify and be identified as an independent minority group.21 More recently still, and particularly in the Islamophobic context of the ‘war on terror’ following the 9/11 attacks on the US as well as the 7 July 2005 attacks on London transport, the identity category ‘British Asian’ has been eroded by a partial splintering into faith-based subgroups, as both racism and anti-racism have become inflected by religious affiliation.22 This religious inflection can, however, be traced in earlier British Asian resistances, most notably the 1989 Bradford protests against

Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel The Satanic Verses,23 but also campaigns of the 1970s and early 1980s – for halal meat in schools, and for the right to wear the turban in the workplace or to break from duties for prayer, for example.24 Moreover, the archive yields fascinating traces of resistances that take this narrative of minority religious or cultural resistance still further back in time. In 1938, members of the Jamiat-ul-Muslimin, a working-class Muslim organization associated with the East London Mosque, marched in protest against what they perceived to be irreverent and offensive remarks about the Prophet Muhammed in H. G. Wells’ A Short History of the World, an act of dissent that has clear resonances with the Satanic Verses protests.25 A nineteenth-century example of a Muslim woman’s possible assertion of her minority faith through the act of veiling, which similarly connects with contemporary battles on the part of South Asian Muslim women to wear the hijab in Britain and across Europe, makes its way into this volume (see Martin Wainwright, Chapter 6).26 Arguably, the very establishment by these early South Asian migrants of temples, gurdwaras and mosques on British soil, as well as facilities for Hindu, Parsee, Sikh and Muslim cremations and burials,27 and indeed more everyday resources such as cafés and restaurants, may be seen as precursory to the recent entrenchment of Asian cultural practices in Britain in the face of the assimilationist agendas of successive governments. In similar vein, post-9/11 counter-terrorism legislation and discourses, which often serve to penalize Britain’s Muslim communities,28 might be contextualized through consideration of the surveillance and monitoring of South Asians in imperial Britain by the Indian Political Intelligence and the Metropolitan Police (see Tickell, Chapter 1, and O’Malley, Chapter 8). The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants’ Bill, which was a key moment in the history of British racism insofar as it served to legitimize and entrench racist discourses and practices,29 and the numerous immigration acts that have followed could be productively historicized through comparison with the 1925 Coloured Alien Seamen Order which stigmatized and even criminalized South Asians and which Tabili describes elsewhere as ‘the first instance of state-sanctioned racial subordination inside Britain to come to widespread notice’.30 To make these connections between colonial and postcolonial South Asian resistances in Britain is by no means to obfuscate the very different contexts informing the struggles of the past 150 years. For Sivanandan, Udham Singh’s assassination and the pioneering work of the Fifth Pan-African Congress are some of the ‘strands’ from which ‘black struggles in Britain have been woven’. Their ‘pattern’, however, ‘was set on the loom’ of the racial hostility that succeeded the much larger influx of migrants from Britain’s colonies and (in the case of South Asia) former colonies after the Second World War.31 Thus he underscores the increase in racist antagonism in the latter half of the twentieth century, with the loss of empire instigating a need for a compensatory assertion of superiority on the part of the white British. The formation in the 1950s of numerous far-right organizations, the series of racial attacks and murders across the post-war decades, as well as the anti-immigration legislation – in particular of 1962 and 1971 – and powerful anti-immigration rhetoric of Conservative ministers Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher, all served to propel British Asians, often alongside their African Caribbean counterparts in particular, towards more focused and

forceful organization and mobilization.32 While South Asian women such as Sophia Duleep Singh and Herabai Tata were pioneers as female agents of resistance in early twentiethcentury Britain (see Sumita Mukherjee, Chapter 7), in later decades British Asian women came to play a very different – and indeed leading – role in anti-racist struggle, heading several of the strikes of the 1970s and forming powerful organizations such as the Southall Black Sisters, still extant today. And in the twenty-first century, Islamophobic reactions to assertive Muslim identities and visible Muslim cultural practices contrast with some relatively sympathetic official responses to similar demands during the period of empire.33 While recognizing these differences, however, we assert the importance of writing these early struggles for equal rights to British citizenship into the back story of today’s multicultural Britain.

APPROACHES TO RESISTANCE In a collection that focuses on South Asians during the period of empire, the theme of resistance immediately evokes the varied strategies deployed to combat colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka. The location in Britain of the South Asian agents and acts of resistance explored here, however, re-angles the lens through which resistance is viewed. Indeed, the unusual combination of colonialism and migration as shaping the manifold resistances addressed in this volume, as well as the range of subject positions from which dissent was enacted, defies any singular methodological approach to the subject. Here, we will highlight some of the frameworks for exploring resistance that are evoked or suggested by the essays that follow, as well as signalling the limitations of existing theorizations of resistance for an investigation of a heterogeneous South Asian diaspora in imperial Britain. Explorations of resistance within the field of postcolonial studies have tended to focus on anti-colonial mobilization, illuminating and scrutinizing the writings of intellectuals and activists such as Martiniquan Frantz Fanon, Kenyan Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Guinea-Bissauan Amilcar Cabral, Trinidadian C. L. R. James and M. K. Gandhi, among others.34 For these figures, resistance had a primary focal point: national liberation. By contrast, taken together, the resistances explored here have numerous and at times competing focal points – which are, however, united by common goals of justice and equality. This said, freedom from colonial rule was a motivating force for several of the protagonists of this volume, and while their understandings and modes of resistance were shaped by their location in the metropolis, aspects of the work of some of the above thinkers still offer a relevant framework. Fanon’s advocacy of violent anti-colonial struggle as a vital means of grasping agency and gaining self-respect for the colonized, articulated in The Wretched of the Earth, might illuminate a consideration of the acts of violence committed on British soil for the cause of Indian independence. While shaped by the context of the much bloodier Algerian liberation struggle, his understanding of indigenous violence not just as a negative reaction to colonial violence but as a necessary and positive vehicle for attaining a subjecthood freed from the definitions and determinations imposed by the colonizer, rescues these acts from simplistic

condemnation.35 Much more recent postcolonial conceptualizations of violence and ‘terror’ serve a similar purpose. For example, Slavoj Žižek’s visibilization of the ‘objective’ or ‘systemic’ violence of dominant economic and political systems as a means of making sense of the ‘all-too-visible subjective violence’ (including acts of ‘terror’) which is otherwise discounted and denounced as ‘irrational’ helps contextualize South Asian metropolitan acts of ‘terror’ in the colonial violence taking place in India – partially obscured both by its selflegitimization and by its geographical distance from the ‘subjective’ responses of Madan Lal Dhingra and Udham Singh (see Tickell, Chapter 1, and Stadtler, Chapter 2).36 As Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton point out, simply labelling such acts as ‘terrorism’ echoes the dominant use of the term – by the United States and its allies in the contemporary period – as a means of obscuring the violence of imperial occupation, or the reciprocity of ‘terrorism’: ‘The discourse of terrorism … is another way of framing the anti-colonial other and legitimating the colonial self by contrast.’37 For Fanon, as well as Ngũgĩ, Cabral, Edward Said and several others, the battle for national liberation in the colonies operated also, crucially, on the level of culture. An assertion of the need to reclaim the culture and history of the colonized from the colonizer as a crucial component of resistance to mental domination was however attenuated by a simultaneous recognition of the danger of national culture becoming essentialized and stultified by a solely backward-looking approach.38 This debate, while centring on the place of culture in anti-colonial struggle, may nevertheless be productively applied in modified form to the context of diasporic imperial Britain in which the assertion of vernacular subcontinental cultural identities or practices could be seen as a form of resistance. Wainwright’s reading of Abdul Karim’s wife’s veiling while in Britain as an act of resistance resonates both with Fanon’s discussion of the donning of the veil by women in colonial Algeria in opposition to their colonial unveiling (as well as for smuggling weapons into the colonial quarter of Algiers) and with contemporary assertions of minority identities in the West through veiling, to suggest how the resistances explored in this volume may be viewed through the dual and mutually refracting lenses of colonialism and diaspora.39 Duleep Singh’s assertion of a Sikh Indian identity despite the overtures made to him by the British Crown, internationalist Saklatvala’s decision to initiate his British-born mixed-race children into the Parsee faith,40 and the numerous groups and associations formed by South Asians in Britain during this period – whether nationalist, religious, social or artistic – could be productively interrogated and illuminated by the questions raised by anti-colonial thinkers (as well as by contemporary theories of migration and diaspora)41 about how far the assertion of an autonomous cultural identity feeds mummifying, homogenizing or separatist understandings of that culture or, conversely, acts as a liberatory means of resisting the dominant culture. The notion of restoring historicity to the colonized was another motivating force for antiimperial activists and thinkers. In Culture and Imperialism, Said identifies three ‘topics’ that ‘emerge in decolonizing cultural resistance’: the first is ‘the insistence on the right to see the community’s history whole, coherently, integrally’; the second is ‘the idea that resistance, far from being merely a reaction to imperialism, is an alternative way of conceiving human

history’; and the third is a ‘pull away from separatist nationalism towards a more integrative view of human community and human liberation’.42 The notion of ‘community’ is clearly problematic for the disparate South Asian individuals and groups covered here; further, their location in Britain disturbs the idea of a ‘whole’ or ‘coherent’ history. Rather, what we aim to contribute towards here is a fracturing of the ‘wholeness’ of the dominant narrative of Britishness by inserting minority resistances within it. We offer these resistances as an ‘alternative way of conceiving’ the history of Britain which, echoing Said, ‘[breaks] down the barriers between cultures’, as well as an alternative or expanded conception of imperial resistance itself. By uncovering the voices of South Asians involved in resistance in Britain, the contributors to this volume pay a clear debt to the work of Ranajit Guha and his colleagues who produced the first Subaltern Studies collection in 1982. Subaltern Studies was a project of writing marginal and subaltern stories into South Asian history that had been occluded by the imperialist-nationalist hegemony of history writing up until that time. Subalternist histories are ones of resistance against colonial oppression, and in their methodology have read archives ‘against the grain’ to give voice to those who were largely invisibilized in official discourses, not only reading for the ‘silences’ in official papers, but also using other materials such as memoirs, folk-tales, fictional narratives and images to draw richer pictures of South Asian life. It is this interdisciplinary approach that our book embraces, bringing together historians, literary scholars and anthropologists who have used a range of archival and printed material from newspapers, government and court records, letters, diaries and fiction to pull out uncovered stories about South Asians involved in British social and political life in the imperial era. The issue of class has been a contentious one for historians of South Asia and the working classes have often been overlooked, not least because narratives frequently emphasize the dominant rural economy of the region. While the Marxist approach, favoured by Sumit Sarkar,43 can homogenize and overemphasize the working-class bonds and aspirations of South Asian workers – who have in fact experienced a multitude of conflicting ties and loyalties, be they of caste, kin, language, location or indeed trade – writing the working classes back into history remains a crucial project. In her consideration of resistance to colonial rule, Tamara Sivanandan departs for a moment from her focus on organized anticolonial nationalism to acknowledge, via James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak, the ‘myriad “everyday” forms of resistance to colonialism’. Scott underlines the importance of understanding ‘the prosaic but constant struggle between the peasantry and those who seek to extract labor, food, taxes, rents, and interest from them’ as resistance, in spite of the fact that ‘most of the forms this struggle takes stop well short of collective outright defiance’.44 Scott’s expanded notion of resistance could be productively applied to the acts of dissent of racialized colonial subjects within the metropolis, especially those of the working classes which complicate a singular understanding of resistance as explicit defiance to encompass some of its subaltern manifestations. Indeed, through its inclusion of essays that focus on working-class as well as more privileged South Asian agents of resistance in Britain, highlighting the different but overlapping focuses and strategies of their dissent, this volume explores the way in which class as well as race shapes anti-imperialism, applying C. L. R.

James’s much-quoted warning that ‘to think of imperialism in terms of race’, neglecting ‘the class question’, is ‘disastrous’ to anti-imperialism.45 Another group suppressed by history is women, their private roles in society and their high rates of illiteracy often factors in barring their entry into written accounts. South Asian women have been described as marginalized many times over, by colonial oppression, by male bourgeois-nationalists and by Western women. The ‘women’s question’ and issues of their domesticity versus the progress of modernity have inspired many historians such as Partha Chatterjee, Ghulam Murshid and Tanika Sarkar, who have discussed the importance of the status of women to Indian nationalists.46 Antoinette Burton, meanwhile, has worked at the coal-face of women’s histories by showing in her 2003 book Dwelling in the Archive how women’s writing could constitute an archive in itself, and how analysing the domestic space at home could generate as much insight into the processes of modernity, colonialism and nationalism as the public writings of male nationalists.47 Burton’s work speaks directly to this collection, as she too writes about South Asians who were located in spaces within Britain during the same period. The voices of those one might term ‘elites’ have often been obfuscated in history too. As Dipesh Chakrabarty explains, producing fragmented histories of unrepresentative middleclass, or bhadralok, Indians also constituted part of the subalternist mission to move away from sweeping narratives, and to shed light on conflicting, individual voices, in order to draw attention to the ‘politics of the people’.48 ‘Subaltern’ is a relative term and could include the wealthiest of Indians, even princes such as Duleep Singh, who were placed in an inferior relationship to the British colonial regime. Many of the migrant South Asians discussed in this volume benefited from wealth or connections that allowed them to travel to Britain, but remained subordinate to imperialist elites. In fact, the relations of subordination can be both horizontal and linear, they do not all fit into rigid triangular hierarchies; there are multiple layers of repression and thus several avenues of resistance to these sources of repression. In this collection of essays, we see a range of suppressed peoples and we see numerous faces of domination, whether of specific arms of the colonial state and government, the police, the press, or employers in the capitalist economy. Locating this work in the West may seem to be undoing the pioneering work of postcolonial practitioners such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty who have warned against the dominance of the West as subject and as comparative model for South Asian subjects.49 By placing South Asians into British public discourse and positioning them as agents of resistance, this collection moves away from binary ‘Orientalist’ models and towards broader approaches that still take the ‘local’ and ‘regional’ into account, unlike the newer trend of globalization histories and theories which favour the analysis of more expansive, universal processes on the world stage. This said, locality and home are often fluid notions for the players within this set of essays which focuses on ‘cosmopolitan’ individuals, people moving across large expanses, interacting with huge institutions, and carrying historical baggage. A brief consideration of Amitav Ghosh’s unconventional traveller’s tale, In an Antique Land (1992), in which the young Indian anthropologist travels through Egypt, reconstructing

the history of a twelfth-century slave, provides a useful means of further illuminating the expanded and cosmopolitan notion of resistance suggested here.50 Described on its back cover as ‘a subversive history’, In an Antique Land eschews the ‘grand narratives’ of history, following instead a ‘network of foxholes’ – both in its quest to piece together the slave’s story from archival documents (while acknowledging the impossibility of doing so in any coherent form), and by exploring the contemporary everyday lives of the Egyptians whom the anthropologist encounters.51 In the medieval world, the trade of the Indian Ocean is shown to transgress cultural, religious and linguistic boundaries, and to disrupt binaries of modernity versus tradition, secularism versus religion and centre versus periphery, suggesting a cosmopolitanism ‘from below’ – one that precedes European colonialism and is not confined to the privileged or elite. Conversely, in the contemporary world, these boundaries have been resurrected and cross-cultural encounters are mediated by the hierarchical relationship of ‘West’ and ‘East’. Despite the fact that Ghosh’s narrative, in line with Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, explores cultural encounters that did not involve the European world, thereby provocatively decentring the colonial relationship while at the same time recognizing its profound impact on the contemporary, it nevertheless remains pertinent to this volume in a number of ways. Its interest in ‘counter-Historical’ narratives resonates with our aim to contribute towards a ‘counter-History’ of Britain; its recognition of the impossibility of reconstructing a subaltern narrative in any linear, coherent form suggests the methodological caution which guides the archival excavation of subaltern lives that informs some of these essays; its concern with ordinary, everyday lives chimes with the space we give to more ‘prosaic’ forms of resistance including the very act of migration to and travel through Britain; and its exposure of the inequality of cross-cultural encounters in the colonial and postcolonial periods is useful for thinking through the ways in which hierarchies of empire shape the cosmopolitan activism of some of the figures considered here (see, in particular, the interactions of Indian and British suffragettes considered by Mukherjee). But Ghosh’s narrative’s disturbance of ‘neat binary margin–centre distinctions’52 is also useful insofar as it points to (albeit through exploration of a very different cultural and historical context) the way in which these essays, taken together, destabilize a binary construction of colonized versus colonizer by scrutinizing the colonial encounter played out in the metropolis and highlighting the ways in which factors of class, religion and gender complicated this encounter. Further, by bringing themes of struggle and dissent together with migratory and hybridized lives and cultural forms, South Asian Resistances in Britain might be said to articulate a politicized understanding of cosmopolitanism along the lines of what Paul Gilroy, writing about the contemporary period, terms a ‘cosmopolitical activism’.53 The resistances enacted by figures such as Sophia Duleep Singh, Shapurji Saklatvala, Mulk Raj Anand and Krishna Menon (as well as the other members of the Progressive Writers’ Association and the India League), which traversed boundaries of race and nation and were strengthened by these cultural crossings, might be considered as such (see Mukherjee, Chapter 7, O’Malley, Chapter 8, and Nasta, Chapter 9). The cross-cultural political influences of the protagonists of the revolutionary India House group, and the international networks that shaped Udham

Singh’s political consciousness, are also suggestive of this notion. While the elite members of the cast of this volume are more obviously cosmopolitan agents of resistance, the location in Britain of all of them, including the lascars and pedlars (as well as the soldiers and ayahs who do not feature in this collection), speaks to – and, arguably, helps to repoliticize – ideas of migration and hybridity.54 Combining colonialism with migration and diaspora and focusing on acts of resistance, then, politicizes, historicizes and grounds migrancy – which, as several postcolonial critics have noted, can function as a ‘kind of alibi, erected in place of a genuine confrontation with the lives of those at the receiving end of global capitalism’s polarizing action’;55 it also opens out anti-colonialism beyond narrow nationalisms to an internationalism, gesturing further towards the kind of universality which anti-colonial activists and theorists – such as Ngũgĩ and Said (note his third ‘topic’ for cultural resistance cited above) – point to.56 If, as Robert Young maintains, ‘[r]esistance to the oppression of the colony or the nation can best be broken by cutting through its boundaries and reaching out beyond them’,57 these early dissenting migrants to Britain, through their transnational anti-colonial struggle as well as by combating racial and social hierarchies within the British nation, may be considered as pioneering agents of resistance.

THE ESSAYS South Asian Resistances in Britain opens with acts of violence, the most direct expression of discontent with empire, and with student agitators, who so often spearheaded nationalist movements across the colonial world. In Chapter 1, Alex Tickell offers a nuanced account of the central figures of and influences on the India House hostel in Highgate, which was a fertile site for revolutionary ideas and tactics and an ideological ‘home’ for Madan Lal Dhingra who went on to assassinate Sir William Curzon Wyllie in 1909. Tickell’s engagement with the literature of the period, from official to fictional, provides a rich understanding of the cultural and political atmosphere in which South Asian students were interacting, as well as of imperial discourses and strategies of counter-terrorism. In Chapter 2, Florian Stadtler’s account of another assassination on British soil, this time Udham Singh’s of Michael O’Dwyer, offers a fascinating insight into the mind and motivations of an assassin and deftly elucidates the interplay between the personal and political in this violent act of resistance. Motivated by the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, during which O’Dwyer had been governor of the Punjab, Singh committed this act in the very different context of 1940, when the imperial relationship had evolved immensely; with the effect of two World Wars and developing nationalist momentum on the subcontinent loosening the empire’s grip, Singh was able to subvert imperial surveillance in a number of inspired ways. From studies of direct, violent resistance we turn to three chapters that engage with working-class South Asians. In Chapter 3, Georgie Wemyss maps the global paths that Indians working on ships have been taking for centuries as well as the barriers they confronted on the borders of Britain. In particular, Wemyss gives voice to the ‘silenced’

lascars who have been enriching metropolitan communities for decades, and discusses the complexities of the 1939–1940 lascar strikes, from which, despite the imprisonment of almost 400 Indian crew members in British gaols, ununionized Indian seamen forced concessions from their employers. She further productively connects the colonial past to the postcolonial present, showing how lascars and today’s Bangladeshi inhabitants of London’s East End have been similarly marginalized within narratives of Britishness. Also highlighting the contributions of South Asians to the creation of a multiracial British working class, Laura Tabili (Chapter 4) analyses the compatriot networks navigated by lascars and pedlars in interwar Britain, revealing the resistant nature of their migration, itinerancy and employment, as well as the ways in which this transgressive mobility paradoxically facilitated capitalist accumulation. Pedlar Ghulam Rasul provides one case study of itinerancy for Tabili, demonstrating the complexity of the relationships that such workers were building. In Chapter 5, Rehana Ahmed tracks the intersecting networks of South Asian organizations and individuals of resistance, using the ‘crossover’ figure of Krishna Menon to highlight the connections and tensions within this complex web. She focuses on the way class interacts with race and minority status to shape strategies of resistance as well as dominant discourses about them. The chapter counters constructions of working-class South Asians as politically passive and irrational, writing them back into the history of resistance. While retaining an emphasis on class, the focus then shifts from the working class to the upper classes and the ‘elite’. In Chapter 6, Martin Wainwright’s discussion of Queen Victoria’s favourites, Duleep Singh and Abdul Karim, reveals the subtleties of the relationship between resistance and imperialism in its elucidation of two individuals who remained loyal to the Crown while dissenting against the state. Wainwright explains how these contrasting South Asian figures found favour at court in the mid-nineteenth century, and how their strategic assertion of their ‘class’ enabled them to transgress barriers of race in the metropolis. In Chapter 7, Sumita Mukherjee’s account of Duleep Singh’s daughter Sophia, and her involvement with the British suffragette movement, similarly reveals the openings available to upper-class Indians in British society. In her case study of Herabai and Mithan Tata, Indian suffragettes visiting Britain, Mukherjee shows how class structures complicated and attenuated their fight for equality, with the rights of educated Indian women taking precedence over the rights of other women from the subcontinent. All of these essays explore interactions between South Asians and Britons, but the final two essays reveal wider networks of cross-cultural resistance in this period. In Chapter 8, Kate O’Malley offers a vital account of the relationship between Irish and South Asian nationalists in the inter-war period, with a particular focus on Shapurji Saklatvala who utilized international communist networks in his political career both inside and outside Parliament. Here, as elsewhere, we see the advantages that the space of the British Isles gave to South Asian migrants to learn from and influence other communities. In Chapter 9, Susheila Nasta’s innovative study of Mulk Raj Anand gives an insight into a number of other international connections that South Asians were making. Through her focus on a cosmopolitan literary personality who forged relationships with British, Irish, Caribbean and American writers and editors, and European communists, while also maintaining close links with the Indian subcontinent and the pressing nationalist struggle, Nasta opens up the concept

of anti-colonial resistance, challenging simplifying binaries of colonial versus postcolonial and highlighting the untidy nature of power struggles. These essays do not tell the whole story of South Asian resistances in Britain, and we as editors take responsibility for the omissions. It is our hope that this collection will inspire more scholars to continue exploring the lives of South Asians in Britain who were challenging dominant structures of control and subordination in innovative ways. No doubt a host of fascinating stories remains buried in the archive, awaiting excavation and analysis. Notes 1 Burton, A. (1998) At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press; Fisher, M. (2004) Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers to Britain 1600–1857. Delhi: Permanent Black; Visram, R. (1986) Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700–1947. London: Pluto Press. 2 Owen, N. (2007) The British Left and India: Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism, 1885–1947. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 31. 3 Heehs, P. (2010) ‘Revolutionary terrorism in British Bengal’, in E. Boehmer and S. Morton (eds) Terror and the Postcolonial. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 153–76. 4 Owen, British Left, pp. 199–220. 5 Fisher, M. H., Lahiri, S. and Thandi, S. (2007) A South-Asian History of Britain: Four Centuries of Peoples from the Indian Sub-Continent. Oxford: Greenwood Press, p. 137. 6 Schneer, J. (2003) ‘Anti-imperial London: the pan-African conference of 1900’, in G. H. Gerzina (ed.) Black Victorians/Black Victoriana. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, p. 177. 7 Hughes, D. L. (2006) ‘Kenya, India and the British Empire Exhibition of 1924’. Race and Class, 47 (4), 66–85. 8 ‘Spanish Civil War’, Making Britain Database (accessed 5 January 2011). 9 Mukherjee, S. (2009) Nationalism, Education and Migrant Identities: The England-Returned. London: Routledge, pp. 99–105. 10 See Making Britain Database: 11 Omissi, D. (2007) ‘Europe through Indian eyes: Indian soldiers encounter England and France, 1914–1918’. English Historical Review, cxxii (496), 371–96. 12 Tabili, L. (1994) ‘We Ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 5. 13 Jenkinson, J. (2009) Black 1919: Riots, Racism and Resistance in Post-Colonial Britain. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 14 Visram, R. (2002) Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto Press, ch. 8. 15 Sivanandan, A. (1982) A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance. London: Pluto Press, p. 3. 16 Ibid., pp. 44–5. 17 Dromey, J. (2010) ‘Jayaben Desai’. Guardian, 29 December, 30. 18 Brah, A. (1996) Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, p. 43. 19 Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, p. 72; Sivanandan, Different Hunger, pp. 15, 35–7, 42–3. 20 Tabili, ‘British Justice’, pp. 158–9. 21 Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, pp. 96–102; Modood, T. (2005) Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 27–46. 22 Manzoor, S. (2005) ‘We’ve ditched race for religion’. Guardian, 11 January. 23 For historicized readings of the Britain-based protests against Rushdie’s novel, see, for example, Modood, Multicultural Politics, pp. 103–12; Samad, Y. (1992), ‘Book burning and race relations: political mobilisation of Bradford Muslims’. New Community, 18 (4), 507–19. 24 Sivanandan, Different Hunger, p. 22; Samad, ‘Book burning’, 512–14. 25 British Library. India Office Records: L/PJ/12/614. 26 For an in-depth study of the politics of the Muslim veil, see Tarlo, E. (2010) Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith. Oxford: Berg. 27 Visram, Asians in Britain, pp. 298, 182.

28 See, for example, Abbas, T. (2007) ‘Introduction: Islamic political radicalism in western Europe’, in Islamic Political Radicalism: A European Perspective. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 6–7; Dodd, V. and Travis, A. (2005) ‘Muslims face increased stop and search’. Guardian, 2 March; Dodd, V. (2009) ‘Anti-terror code “would alienate most Muslims”’. Guardian, 17 February. 29 Sivanandan, Different Hunger, pp. 12–13. 30 Tabili, ‘British Justice’, p. 114. 31 Sivanandan, Different Hunger, p. 3. 32 Ibid., pp. 3–54. 33 See, for example, the response to the 1938 protests against Wells’s book (L/PJ/12/614); see also India Office documentation of the establishment of the East London Mosque (British Library, India Office Records: L/PJ/12/468) and of the negotiation for appropriate burial facilities for Indian Muslim soldiers in the First World War (British Library, India Office Records: L/MIL/7/17232). 34 For a good overview of postcolonial theories of resistance, see Childs, P. and Williams, P. (1997), An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory. Harlow: Pearson Education. See also: Fanon, F. (1990) [1963], The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1993) Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. London: James Currey; James, C. L. R. (1980) The Black Jacobins, revised edn. London: Alison & Busby; Gandhi, M. K. (1997) Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. A. J. Parel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Incidently, Gandhi was directly influenced by a violent act that took place during a visit to London in 1909 – that of Madan Lal Dhingra – to write his seminal Hind Swaraj on the boat back to South Africa, the book that presented his vision for the nationalist struggle (see Gandhi, Hind Swaraj). 35 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 27–84; see also Gibson, N. C. (2003) Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 103–26. 36 Žižek, S. (2008) Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books, pp. 1–2. 37 Boehmer and Morton, Terror and the Postcolonial, p. 11. 38 Sivanandan, T. (2004) ‘Anticolonialism, national liberation, and postcolonial nation formation’, in N. Lazarus (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 41–65 at pp. 63– 4. 39 Fanon, F. (1989) ‘Algeria unveiled’, in Studies in a Dying Colonialism, trans. H. Chevalier. London: Earthscan Publications. 40 ‘The mark of their caste’ (1927) Daily News, 23 July. 41 See, for example, Werbner, P. (1997) ‘Essentialising essentialism, essentialising silence: ambivalence and multiplicity in the constructions of race and ethnicity’, in P. Werbner and T. Modood (eds) Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism. London: Zed Books, pp. 209–25. 42 Said, E. (1993) Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, pp. 259–61. 43 See, for example, Sarkar, S. (1983) Modern India, 1885–1947. Delhi: Macmillan. 44 Sivanandan, ‘Anticolonialism’, p. 44. 45 James, The Black Jacobins, p. 283. 46 For example, Chatterjee, P. (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Murshid, G. (1983) Reluctant Debutante: Response of Bengali Women to Modernization, 1849–1905. Rajshahi: Rajshahi University Press; Sarkar, T. (2001) Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism. Delhi: Permanent Black. 47 Burton, A. (2003) Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 48 Chakrabarty, D. (2007) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 2nd edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. xvi; Guha, R. (1982) Subaltern Studies I. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 4. 49 Spivak, G. C. (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press; Chakrabarty, Provincializing. 50 Ghosh, A. (1998) [1992] In an Antique Land. London: Granta. For an illuminating reading of In an Antique Land, see Gopal, P. (2004) ‘Reading subaltern history’, in Lazarus, Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, pp. 139–61 at pp. 150–3. 51 Ghosh, Antique Land, pp. 15–16. 52 Boehmer, E. and Chaudhuri, R. (eds) (2010) The Indian Postcolonial: A Critical Reader. London: Routledge, p. 277. 53 Gilroy, P. (2004) After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge, p. 90. 54 See, for example, Peter van der Veer’s call for an expanded notion of hybridity and migrancy that includes overtly

religious and working-class minority identities (van der Veer, P. (1997) ‘“The enigma of arrival”: hybridity and authenticity in the global space’, in P. Werbner and T. Modood (eds) Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism. London: Zed Books, pp. 90–105 at p. 103). 55 Smith, A. (2004) ‘Migrancy, hybridity, and postcolonial literary studies’, in Lazarus, Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, pp. 241–61 at p. 258. Smith is alluding to the work of Spivak here. 56 Ngũgĩ, Moving the Centre, p. xvii; see also Sivanandan, ‘Anticolonialism’, p. 65. 57 Young, R. C. (2003) Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 64.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Archival Sources British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: India Office Records, L/MIL/7/17232. British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: India Office Records, L/PJ/12/468. British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: India Office Records, L/PJ/12/614. Books and Articles Abbas, T. (2007) ‘Introduction: Islamic political radicalism in western Europe’, in Islamic Political Radicalism: A European Perspective. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 3–14. Boehmer, E. and Chaudhuri, R. (eds) (2010) The Indian Postcolonial: A Critical Reader. London: Routledge. Boehmer, E. and Morton, S. (eds) (2010) Terror and the Postcolonial. Chichester: WileyBlackwell. Brah, A. (1996) Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge. Burton, A. (1998) At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in LateVictorian Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press. — (2003) Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chakrabarty, D. (2007) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 2nd edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, P. (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Childs, P. and Williams, P. (1997) An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory. Harlow: Pearson Education. Dodd, V. (2009) ‘Anti-terror code “would alienate most Muslims”’. Guardian, 17 February. Dodd, V. and Travis, A. (2005) ‘Muslims face increased stop and search’. Guardian, 2 March. Dromey, J. (2010) ‘Jayaben Desai’. Guardian, 29 December, 30. Fanon, F. (1989) ‘Algeria unveiled’, in Studies in a Dying Colonialism, trans. H. Chevalier. London: Earthscan Publications. — (1990) [1963] The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Fisher, M. (2004) Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers to Britain 1600–1857. Delhi: Permanent Black. Fisher, M. H., Lahiri, S. and Thandi, S. (2007) A South-Asian History of Britain: Four Centuries of Peoples from the Indian Sub-Continent. Oxford: Greenwood Press. Gandhi, M. K. (1997) Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. A. J. Parel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ghosh, A. (1998) [1992] In an Antique Land. London: Granta. Gibson, N. C. (2003) Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination. Cambridge: Polity Press Gilroy, P. (2004) After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge. Guha, R. (1982) Subaltern Studies I. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hughes, D. L. (2006) ‘Kenya, India and the British Empire Exhibition of 1924’. Race and Class, 47 (4), 66–85. James, C. L. R. (1980) The Black Jacobins, revised edn. London: Alison & Busby. Jenkinson, J. (2009) Black 1919: Riots, Racism and Resistance in Post-Colonial Britain. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Lazarus, N. (ed.) (2004) The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manzoor, S. (2005) ‘We’ve ditched race for religion’. Guardian, 11 January. ‘The mark of their caste’ (1927) Daily News, 23 July. Modood, T. (2005) Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mukherjee, S. (2009) Nationalism, Education and Migrant Identities: The EnglandReturned. London: Routledge. Murshid, G. (1983) Reluctant Debutante: Response of Bengali Women to Modernization, 1849–1905. Rajshahi: Rajshahi University Press. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey. — (1993) Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. London: James Currey. Omissi, D. (2007) ‘Europe through Indian eyes: Indian soldiers encounter England and France, 1914–1918’. English Historical Review, cxxii (496), 371–96. Owen, N. (2007) The British Left and India: Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism, 1885–1947. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Said, E. (1993) Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus. Samad, Y. (1992) ‘Book burning and race relations: political mobilisation of Bradford Muslims’. New Community, 18 (4), 507–19. Sarkar, T. (2001) Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism. Delhi: Permanent Black. Schneer, J. (2003) ‘Anti-imperial London: the pan-African conference of 1900’, in G. H. Gerzina (ed.) Black Victorians/Black Victoriana. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp. 175–86. Sivanandan, A. (1982) A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance. London: Pluto Press. Spivak, G. C. (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds)

Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Tabili, L. (1994), ‘We Ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Tarlo, E. (2010) Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith. Oxford: Berg. van der Veer, P. (1997) ‘“The enigma of arrival”: hybridity and authenticity in the global space’, in P. Werbner and T. Modood (eds) Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism. London: Zed Books, pp. 90–105. Visram, R. (1986) Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700–1947. London: Pluto Press. — (2002) Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto Press. Werbner, P. (1997) ‘Essentialising essentialism, essentialising silence: ambivalence and multiplicity in the constructions of race and ethnicity’, in P. Werbner and T. Modood (eds) Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism. London: Zed Books, pp. 209–25. Young, R. C. (2003) Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Žižek, S. (2008) Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books. Web Resource Making Britain Database:

PART I

Violent Resistances

Chapter 1

Scholarship Terrorists: The India House Hostel and the ‘Student Problem’ in Edwardian London Alex Tickell

Let us examine the life of an Indian student in this country. … In his dingy digs, decorated with aspidistras, two-ply walls, and evil-smelling basement, he finds a motley and spotty-faced collection of humanity. It is probable that these include a dark-haired, red flagged British student whose one aim in life is to take a trip to Russia, whose favourite pastime is drinking too much at the local beer-house and who, on three half-bitters, has to be restrained from marching round Russell Square singing the ‘Internationale’. … Another inmate of the house in which he lives may be a young lady with dark glasses and hair cut round her neck as if by a pudding basin, who draws pictures for advertisements (sometimes) and who reads Karl Marx in bed – when she is alone. … Other occupants have probably been expelled from Germany owing to an unfortunate line of ancestors. … The life to which the Indian student is subjected in ‘digs’ naturally gives him a wrong impression of the true British character. The quiet home life and pleasant evenings that are spent in the majority of homes are unknown to him. He comes into contact with people with kinks and abnormalities, but seldom with peaceful family life. Moki Singh (1938), Mysterious India, pp. 243–7

On the eve of the Second World War, when metropolitan readers might have been expected to be worried about other things, the author Moki Singh set out to describe the malignant influences that faced the Indian student in London. Bringing together an astonishing selection of Others (people with ‘kinks and abnormalities’), he suggests that it is little wonder that Indian students become politicized and disaffected when they are faced with the inducements of communist discussion groups, young women with dark glasses and Jewish refugees. These boarding-house companions are not only a degenerate influence, argues Singh; they also obscure the healthier example of suburban home life in which the ‘true British character’ might be encountered. Moki Singh’s description of student life is notable, not because it reminds us of how little undergraduate accommodation really changes, but because it forms part of a chapter titled ‘Indian students – a burning problem’ in his genre-defying, sensational text Mysterious India (1938). Here the ‘problem’ of Indian students in Britain features as a late addition to a list of subcontinental terrors that include ‘Indian Gangsters; the Nankana Atrocities and the Horrors of Cawnpore; Secrets of the Fakirs; Secret Societies and Bomb Perverts’. Moki Singh’s work thus gathers together at least a century and a half of oriental horrors, and, as if in a last desperate pre-war attempt to misrepresent India before the British Raj is lost for ever, parades them before the reader. It is a testament to the virulence of his presentations of Indian criminal horrors that Mysterious India remains on the list of books banned by the Indian government today. Moreover, because the files of Moki Singh’s publisher have been lost, its banned status is almost all we know about the text or its equally mysterious author. Singh’s perspective on India is so unrelentingly negative, and so rarely does he voluntarily celebrate

anything about the subcontinent, that it is tempting to speculate on whether he was a European ex-colonial, possibly a retired policeman, using an Indian pen-name. Whatever his real identity, Moki Singh’s alarmist description of Indian students in Britain is interesting because it reveals how complex colonial and right-wing metropolitan discourses about migrant Indian students had become by 1938. (In fact his book is part of a sensational sub-genre of colonial writing on the Indian underworld that developed in the 1920s and 1930s.) In the rest of his chapter survey, Moki Singh derides the Indian student’s inability to fit in, reports on the antipathy he encounters from the inhabitants of suburban London, and, inevitably, reflects on his sexual exploits: ‘in the sexual field the Indian finds himself in possession of one trump card, for a certain percentage of otherwise normal girls are apt to lose their heads over Indians.’1 None of these concerns were new, and ever since the turn of the century, when Indian students started coming to Britain in fairly modest numbers to take up university scholarships and technical apprenticeships, colonial and metropolitan commentators had become increasingly concerned about their immigrant experiences and their political views. With the rise of ‘extremist’ nationalism in India at the start of the twentieth century, and the momentous influence of politicians such as the Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal, these concerns chimed with administrative anxieties about student radicalism in India and became even more focused and concentrated on the young men, mostly students, who were becoming involved with revolutionary groups in Bengal and Maharashtra and carrying out ‘terrorist’ attacks against colonial magistrates and policemen. A full account of these developments in the subcontinent is beyond the scope of this study; instead, reflecting the collection’s remit, this chapter will focus on revolutionary nationalists in the metropolis. In the pages that follow I want to construct a limited genealogy of metropolitan and colonial anxieties about Indian students in Britain, tracing these fears back to an earlier generation of migrant Indian students associated with a specific student hostel: a mansion at 65 Cromwell Avenue, in the London suburb of Highgate, known as ‘India House’ or Bharat Bhavan. India House was important because it was the first accommodation of its kind to be set up by Indians in the metropolis for themselves, and it particularly frightened the British authorities because it was seen as an organizational centre for Indian activists who had become increasingly open to ‘terrorist’ methods (methods we will explore in detail shortly). Official fears about India House were confirmed in the summer of 1909 when one of the students associated with the hostel, Madan Lal Dhingra, carried out a shocking assassination, shooting and killing the Aide to the Secretary of State, Sir William Curzon Wyllie, at a meeting of the National Indian Association at the Imperial Institute in South Kensington. As a planned assassination motivated by nationalism, the Curzon Wyllie killing was a ‘modern political act par excellence’2 and signalled the end of India House. The reputation of the hostel and the obvious growing politicization of migrant Indians led the British government to set up investigatory committees to look into the ‘student problem’ in Britain. In this chapter, a supplementary aim will be to review these official counterinsurgency discourses, taking particular note of their focus on the socially and politically threatening space of the lodging house or hostel.

THE HIGHGATE HOSTEL: FORMULATING TERROR IN THE IMPERIAL METROPOLIS As a meeting point for Indian nationalists, the India House hostel had earned its reputation in the five years preceding the Curzon Wyllie assassination by playing host to many of the most famous contemporary figures in Indian politics. Among these were Arya Samaj members such as Bhai Parmanand, future Congress leaders like Senapati Bapat, and revolutionary nationalists such as Lala Har Dyal (who would later set up a centre of his own, Yugantar Ashram, in San Francisco, from where he led the militant Ghadar party). Other residents and visitors included ‘Raja’ Sardarsingh Revabhai Rana, the linguist and political activist Virendranath Chattopadhyaya3 and the Parsee revolutionary Madame Bhikaji Cama, who famously hoisted a flag of Indian freedom at the 1907 International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart, and repeated the gesture at India House the following year, to mark the 101st anniversary of the 1857 rebellion.4 In its short history, India House was visited by other figures in the spectrum of ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’ in the national movement, including Dadabhai Naoroji, Lala Lajpat Rai and M. K. Gandhi. Indeed, Gandhi’s seminal work Hind Swaraj (‘Indian Self-Government’) written in November 1909 aboard a ship returning to South Africa after a four-month visit to Britain, must be read, partly, as a corrective to what he considered the directionless (but influential) politics of the radical ‘party of violence’ that he had encountered in the imperial capital.5 We cannot start to comprehend the metropolitan wing of this ‘party of violence’ without pausing briefly to review the strategies and so-called ‘terrorist’ methods formalized in the writings of the two principal ideologues of India House, Shyamji Krishnavarma and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. As well as acting as leaders outside India and organizing the transitory student-residents of the Highgate hostel, these men, and associates like Har Dyal, were influential editors and authors who shaped the composite text of radical anti-colonial thought before the First World War. Krishnavarma is now largely forgotten, but his younger protégé, ‘Veer’ Savarkar, went on to become a notorious founding figure of Hindu nationalism, composing his manifesto Hindutva while imprisoned on the Andaman Islands, and going on to represent the Hindu Mahasabha after Indian independence. In the period of their association, between 1906 and 1911,6 Krishnavarma and Savarkar influenced each other intellectually, and although they differed on aspects of policy their work may be read as a contiguous cosmopolitan re-imagining of Indian nationalism as a militant force. Shyamji Krishnavarma, the founder of India House, had initially set up the hostel as one of several linked educational initiatives intended to help Indian students studying in Britain. A brilliant scholar and linguist who had risen from relatively humble beginnings in the Gujarati Bhonsle community, Krishnavarma had first come to Britain as a student himself, acting as assistant to the Oxford Professor of Sanskrit, Monier Monier-Williams. He became the first Indian to take an MA at that university, and attended the Fifth Oriental Conference in Berlin in 1881, subsequently returning to India where he practised as a lawyer and became wealthy through his investments in several cotton mills. In the 1890s he took up a series of ministerial posts in the Indian princely states of Ratlam, Udaipur and Junagdh, and during this period

grew increasingly disillusioned with colonial rule. Following bitter personal disagreements with a British political agent, Krishnavarma started to support extremist nationalists like Tilak. He was further radicalized by the repressive measures of the colonial authorities during the 1897 plague in Bombay and Poona, and endorsed the subsequent assassination of the plague commissioner, Mr Rand, by Hindu nationalists. The fact that it was an ostensibly biopolitical intervention by the colonial state – in other words, an expression of sovereign power as the control and preservation of life at the level of the population – that catalysed nationalist violence in London over a decade later is highly significant, and has a direct bearing on my discussion of colonial governmental responses to student nationalists. By 1897 Krishnavarma had moved back to Britain, settling in the north London suburb of Highgate. He became an advocate of Herbert Spencer’s social evolutionism and, following the latter’s death in 1903, endowed a Herbert Spencer lectureship at Oxford and inaugurated several travelling scholarships for visiting Indian students, all of which stipulated that the recipient should not seek subsequent employment in the colonial government. He also purchased a large villa in Highgate as accommodation for his own scholarship students and other Indians studying in London. Opened in 1905, India House had room for twenty-five students and included a reading room, lecture hall and library. Its management was ‘in the hands of Indians only’, and the domestic arrangements were modelled on Oxford’s adult education institution, Ruskin College.7 Krishnavarma’s scholarships and hostel arrangements effectively repeated the trajectory of his own cosmopolitan education, but ensured a more coherent radical schooling for his students. Indeed, their combined effect was the creation of ‘counter-institutional’ sites that offered an alternative to the liberal–colonial nexus which traditionally directed the ambitions of a migrant Indian student elite.8 Krishnavarma augmented these charitable-educational measures by setting up his ‘India Home Rule Society’ in the same year (dedicated to campaigning for Indian political freedom), and also started to publish an outspoken monthly periodical, the Indian Sociologist. At this early stage, Krishnavarma’s endorsement of armed struggle was tempered by his ethical objections to violence and his intellectual sense of its use as a last resort; his main political strategy while in London was to petition British readers on the illiberal nature of colonial rule.9 He was, however, still regarded as a dangerous political agitator by the authorities and, facing recurrent police raids on the offices and presses of The Indian Sociologist, Krishnavarma left London in June 1907, to continue his editing and activism on the continent. He would spend the rest of his life as a political exile in Paris and Geneva. On Krishnavarma’s departure, the political leadership of India House passed to a 24-yearold law student and recipient of one of his travelling scholarships, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.10 Savarkar, a Chitpavan Brahmin, had been drawn to revolutionary politics while studying at Nasik and then at Fergusson College in Poona. Like Krishnavarma, Savarkar accepted aspects of Spencer’s social evolutionism, but also incorporated Bankim’s devotional cult of the motherland, a radical sense of national history, and a celebration of violent patriotic sacrifice into his political thought. These ideals were reflected in his Marathi translations of European revolutionary works such as Mazzini’s autobiography, and in revisionist histories like his account of the 1857 Mutiny, The Indian War of Independence

(National Rising of 1857) (1947). The latter, written in the British Library, became the basis for a counter-commemorative project re-imagining 1857 as the first campaign of a protracted national liberation struggle. In Poona the charismatic Savarkar had started a secret revolutionary society, the Abhinav Bharat (Young India), and later at India House he strengthened and internationalized this group, naming its London wing the Free India Society, thus filling the vacuum left by Krishnavarma’s India Home Rule Society, and reestablishing the links he had made with Irish and Egyptian nationalists. As Nicholas Owen notes, where the India Home Rule Society had a written constitution modelled on that of a Victorian public association, the Free India Society had a semi-religious oath of obedience to honour Mother India and to engage in a ‘bloody and relentless war against the foreigner’.11

To this end, Savarkar’s group smuggled pistols and bomb manuals back into India, promoted rebellion in the Indian Army and advocated direct action against the colonial authorities. Accounts of Savarkar’s activities became increasingly alarmist, and the notorious Calcutta Police Commissioner Charles Tegart claimed later that under Savarkar’s leadership India House had become a place where people not only made ‘violent speeches’ but also delivered lectures ‘on the construction of infernal machines’, and where ‘conspiracies were hatched that resulted in murders’.12 Although Madan Lal Dhingra was not living at the Highgate hostel at the time of his assassination of Curzon Wyllie, he had been closely associated with India House: he visited it soon after his arrival in Britain in 1906, lodged there for six months in 1908, and was reported attending political gatherings there a year later.13 The authorities thus strongly suspected Savarkar’s involvement in and possibly planning of the attack at the Imperial Institute. At his trial Dhingra’s nationalist motivations became clear, and he presented himself throughout as a fighter for justice and a martyr to the cause of Indian independence. According to H. K. Koregaonkar, a fellow student turned police informer, Dhingra’s hatred for the British had been nurtured before his arrival in Britain, when he endured racist abuse while working as a stoker on a P&O steamer.14 In London he had been angered further by anti-Indian articles in the popular press (with titles such as ‘Coloured Men and English Women’ and ‘Babu Black Sheep’), and he had become convinced that political conciliation was useless, arguing at political meetings that ‘Englishmen only understand force’. Before his assassination of Curzon Wyllie, Dhingra had apparently planned various terrorist attacks intended to ‘kill the largest number of Englishmen indiscriminately’, including blowing up a P&O liner and bombing the House of Commons; he had even made an abortive attempt on the life of the former viceroy, Lord Curzon, outside the Savoy Hotel. ‘The aim and object’ of the shooting at the Imperial Institute (where Dhingra’s target was the colonial civil servant Sir William Lee-Warner, or, failing him, Curzon Wyllie) was, his informer stated, ‘to create the greatest amount of sensation and establish horrorism’ among the British public. Koregaonkar also suggested that Curzon Wyllie had been targeted for his role in organizing the surveillance of Indian political activists in London.15 Because of Dhingra’s association with India House, the Curzon Wyllie killing effectively

marked the end of what the British press breathlessly called the ‘house of mystery’ at Highgate.16 Leaders of the India House group who had not already left the country were arrested, the hostel was closed by the police and its student-residents dispersed. The English printers of Krishnavarma’s Indian Sociologist were also arrested and the journal was subsequently printed in Paris. Under increased police surveillance, key figures such as Virendranath Chattopadhyaya left the country for France, followed, in January 1910, by Savarkar. Against the advice of fellow revolutionaries, Savarkar returned to London two months later, only to be arrested on his arrival at Victoria Station. The authorities were unwilling to try him in Britain where he was unlikely to face a major sentence, and obtained a warrant from the Bombay government (citing the 1881 Fugitive Offenders Act) to try Savarkar in India, under the Indian Penal Code. He was charged with arms smuggling, ‘waging war’ on the King Emperor, and, more problematically, for ‘seditious’ speeches and pamphlets written years earlier, during his student days in Poona.17 Savarkar’s extradition triggered an international scandal when he tried to escape from the ship taking him to India as it docked in Marseilles harbour. He had jumped from a porthole and swum to the quayside, but was quickly caught by the French police and handed back to his captors, even though he should have been allowed to claim asylum. Savarkar’s supporters launched an unsuccessful appeal at the Hague, and Savarkar eventually stood trial in India under colonial law, where he was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences and sent to the notorious cellular gaol on the Andaman Islands. The circumstances of Savarkar’s case underline two important details that bear on the metropolitan location of India House. The first of these has to do with the differing legal status of political radicals in the imperial centre. Krishnavarma and Savarkar both trained as lawyers and were keenly aware of disparities in the repressive legal topography of empire; in fact their greater freedom from prosecution and censorship in the metropolitan centre, beyond the powers of the Indian Penal Code, was one of the immediate attractions of a base in London. However, the legal disparities between Britain and India that made the Highgate hostel possible as a centre for radical politics also reinforced an awareness of the legal exceptionalism of colonial government.18 Consequently, one of Krishnavarma’s major political strategies in the Indian Sociologist was a sustained, often painstaking comparative legal critique of the rights of British and colonial Indian citizens, and the exposure of a colonial use of judicial loopholes and outdated legislation to contain nationalist activity. Cases like Savarkar’s deportation threw into stark relief the punitive use of outdated powers (such as the old EIC deportation rule – Regulation III of 1818),19 and issues such as equal claims to citizenship, the violation of asylum law,20 and the rights of Indians to self-defence were taken up in subsequent editorials. Krishnavarma could not stop the Indian government passing new legislation, such as the Explosive Substances Act (1908), the Indian Newspapers (Incitement to Offences) Act (1908) and the Summary Justice Act (1908), to combat increasing revolutionary nationalist activity in India, but beyond the reach of colonial law he could draw public attention to these exceptional measures, playing on liberal discomfort over the more repressive aspects of British rule in India. The fact that India House was a locus of political activity in Europe also had important

implications for the development of nationalist thought there. By the turn of the century, nationalists in India, while carrying out a profound re-examination of their own identity in its historical, ‘racial’ and spiritual guises, were also becoming more aware of their place in the global project of empire. With the growth of modern information and transport networks, travel to the metropolis and other British colonies for education and business became more common, and improved news services brought imperial politics into the consciousness of readers in India. These changes allowed Indian nationalists to enter into a cross-national dialogue with both metropolitan avant-garde movements and other anti-colonial groups (notably in Ireland and Egypt). In Edwardian London, this dialogue also took in radical European republican and revolutionary traditions, strands of liberal and social evolutionary thought, and new terrorist strategies developed by Fenian groups and anarchists in the 1880s and 1890s – tactics such as assassination and bombing which Indian activists euphemistically termed ‘Russian Methods’. As in the wider colonial perception of difference, these crosscultural political borrowings were often deprecated in a counter-terrorist rhetoric of inauthentic mimicry: for colonial commentators the speed with which Indian nationalists assimilated ‘the methods of Western revolutionists’ betrayed a lack of substance in their own politics.21 In fact, given the wider comparative emphases of anti-colonial nationalist thought in this period, it would have been surprising if new ‘terrorist’ methods had not been part of the cross-border transactions that connected different anti-colonial groups as they started to explore shared avenues of political self-determination.22

COUNTER-TERRORISM IN EDWARDIAN LONDON: THE LEE WARNER COMMITTEE Shocked as the British authorities were by the Curzon Wyllie assassination, it was not entirely unexpected. The India Office had been concerned about the political activities of Indians in Britain before 1909, and prior to his death Curzon Wyllie had, in fact, played a key role in metropolitan counter-terrorism initiatives. Like earlier colonial reactions to the potential or hidden violence of Indian society, such as thagi or insurgency, metropolitan responses to migrant Indian nationalism involved conspiracy fears and information panics. Moreover, fears about possible terrorist organizations exposed inherent weaknesses or ‘limitations in colonial power and knowledge’.23 The problem of adequate intelligencegathering was not helped by the amateurishness of metropolitan police surveillance, especially at known centres of revolutionary politics such as the Highgate hostel. Articles warning of the obvious presence of plain-clothes police posted outside India House appeared in the Indian Sociologist,24 and later the same year the Secretary of State, John Morley, denigrated the surveillance of India House when he warned Lord Minto that the ‘ordinary square-toed English constable’ was ‘wholly useless in the case of Indian conspirators’ since they could not even ‘distinguish Hindu from Mohammedan, or Verma from Varma’.25 The British government, in conjunction with the India Office, could not, however, overlook the obvious fact that revolutionary nationalism in India and Europe was spreading

through educational networks, principally among student-radicals. In order to remedy a lack of detailed information on Indian students and suggest appropriate policy measures, a government committee was formed in 1907, headed by three officials with considerable colonial experience: Sir William Lee Warner, Curzon Wyllie and Theodore Morison. The Lee Warner Committee sought to evaluate the political climate among Indian students, and collected testimonies from sixty-five Europeans and thirty-five South Asians in London, Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge. Its findings appeared in a detailed departmental report which was considered so inflammatory by the Bombay government that it was not published until 1922, as an appendix to a later official investigation into student politics (the Lytton Report). The Lee Warner Committee proceeded from two initial assumptions about Indian students: first, that young men were being radicalized before they left India; and second, that once in Britain, Indian students were becoming more rather than less discontented with colonial rule.26 While the committee report grudgingly admitted that metropolitan racism and jingoistic press opinion possibly exacerbated anti-British feeling, the prejudice encountered by Indian students in Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh was explained as a reaction to their stand-offish sensitivity and, strangely, their non-participation in team sports: ‘the social position of Indian students suffers somewhat from the fact that … they hold aloof from the athletic life of the university’, stated one Oxford interviewee. Constant ‘advocacy of pronounced opinions on political and social matters’ was also cited as a reason why Indian students were alienated from their British peers.27 On a more fundamental level, the assumption – presumably held by many Indian students – that metropolitan ideas about popular sovereignty, citizenship and democratic rights could be applied to India was also deemed problematic: ‘Young men cannot be expected to resist the current of ideas by which they are surrounded, and it is not surprising that Indian students should regard the … generalisations of English politics as immediately applicable to India’, said one interviewee, ‘but the application to India of the canons of democracy begets the opinion that India could and should be democratically governed, and thus stimulates dissatisfaction with the existing government.’28 Unable to restrict educational immigration, force Indian students to play athletic games or regulate access to ‘dangerously’ universal democratic ideas, the Lee Warner Committee fell back on informal domestic systems of control for Indian undergraduates, concentrating especially on their arrival experiences and accommodation, and couching its aims in the neutral rhetoric of information-sharing and assistance. The Lee Warner Committee’s key recommendation was that an Advisory Board and Bureau of Information be established for students from the subcontinent. Their functions would include providing information for Indian students arriving and residing in London, keeping a record of suitable lodgings and boarding-houses, and writing letters of reference. Information could, of course, flow through the Bureau in more than one direction, and its covert role would be one of paternalistic control and surveillance.29 Simultaneously the committee explored the possibility of housing more students with ‘suitable’ British families, in informal networks of guardianship. In its combination of proposals, the report presents an intriguing picture of Edwardian counter-insurgency as an often anxiety-ridden process in

which assumptions about Indian masculinity, morality and cultural difference merge with (and partially mask) security fears about the potential violence of radical Indian nationalism. Given the growing notoriety of India House, the committee’s focus on cheap lodging houses, presented as the antithesis of bourgeois domesticity, is telling. As a dangerously unregulated sexual and political space, the lodging house or hostel could encourage the wrong kinds of meetings, and, in the physiological idiom of the committee report, foster ‘unhealthy associations’ among Indian students and their hosts. Cultural-historical studies of colonial migrants in late Victorian London show that Indian visitors had to negotiate public opinion that ‘typically associated [Indian masculinity] with physical weakness and uncontrolled sexuality’,30 and similarly conflicted assumptions of innocence, vulnerability and latent threat inform the figure of the Indian student. Cast adrift in ‘Asia Minor’, the area of cheap lodging houses in Bloomsbury and Bayswater, Indian students were thought to be susceptible to the ‘low manners’ and ‘cupidity’ of ‘lodging-house keepers and other unscrupulous persons’ – fears that introduce class, and especially liaisons between workingclass women and Indian men, as another component of the ‘Indian student problem’. Characteristically, the political influence of Krishnavarma’s hostel, noted in the Lee Warner Committee report, is described in a similarly charged terminology of procurement and moral corruption. Statements reached the committee suggesting that students were being lured towards Highgate as soon as they got to London: ‘Representatives of the India House visit the railway stations at which Indian students arrive, and offer them the advantages of … cheap lodgings,’ they warned. ‘On reaching India House [new arrivals] are plied with the arguments of Mr Krishna Varma’s adherents, and are no doubt frequently converted to his views.’31 The Lee Warner Committee operated under a government secrecy order, but the number of interviewees involved meant that details were soon leaked; for instance, in October 1907 the Indian Sociologist published anonymous correspondence detailing the committee’s intentions very clearly. Disparaging the main committee members – including Curzon Wyllie – as ‘Anglo–Indian of the deepest dye – old, unrepentant foes of India’, the correspondent condemned the memorandum sent to each ‘witness’ as a ‘document of which any ordinary gentleman would be ashamed’. Noting the committee’s panoptical intent, the writer continues in a tone of moral outrage: ‘what a careful analysis of our daily life is here given! What an insight into our slightest peccadilloes! Let every Indian realise that the eye of the India Office is on him every moment, and the prestige of the “Government” will surely be enhanced.’32 Krishnavarma’s anonymous correspondent also noted that the Lee Warner memorandum invited opinion on the feasibility of a ‘residential club’ for Indian students as a ‘sort of counterblast to India House’. As it explored the possibility of starting a government-run hostel for Indian students, the Lee Warner Committee contrasted its fearful assumptions about hostels with highly positive images of the Edwardian home as the space of guardianship. In a striking reversed reflection of the representation of Anglo–Indian domestic space during the 1857 rebellion (and its topographical relationship with male violence coded as the protection of women), the committee thus dealt with the potential violence of the urban Indian revolutionary by overemphasizing the localized security of British family life. Again, the Indian Sociologist ridiculed the suggestion that formal or informal guardianship might be

an effective political measure: Pray what is this ‘guardian’ to do? Is he to be a universal censor set over gentlemen who have attained to years of discretion and [can] … take care of themselves? Is he to regulate their expenditure or watch over their movements lest they should subscribe for patriotic purposes or go in the direction of India House?33

The official emphasis on domestic guardianship introduces, on one level, the idea of a deeper assimilative cultural bond between colonizer and colonized: the Indian student is literally and figuratively disarmed in the uniquely civilizing space of the English home. Recalling the importance of filial obligation in Indian society, the committee members, who must once have staged their own ‘residential’ relations with Indian princes in similarly paternalistic terms, clearly hoped to re-create these bonds with expatriate Indian students. The guardianship scheme also had a marked biopolitical emphasis, recalling the regulation of populations through public health measures that Foucault sees as the reflection of a new kind of sovereignty, premised on preserving life rather than exercising the power of death, which complemented the disciplinary powers of government from the eighteenth century.34 Thus, while activists like Krishnavarma and Savarkar were, to some extent, radicalized by the biopolitics of colonial anti-plague measures in late nineteenth-century India, their activities in London generated a similar response in metropolitan counter-terror directives. In the Edwardian home the foreign Indian body would be ‘disciplined’ in respectable societal norms and manners; and with enough British families acting as guardians, the ‘alien community’35 of Indian radicals congregating infectiously in central London would be dispersed, harmlessly, to the suburbs. Here, as well, the deferential relationship of the Indian student to his British guardian becomes a distant correlate of the classical Greek model of father–son relations that Aristotle likens suggestively to an obligatory sovereign tie: ‘A father’s affection is also of this nature [that of a king for his subjects] … these friendships involve an excess; which is why parents are honoured.’36 It is a particular irony of the Curzon Wyllie assassination that it occurred at a National Indian Association meeting held expressly for the promotion of this kind of domestic guardianship. In the Curzon Wyllie killing we see anticolonial ‘terrorist’ violence staged both as voluntary martyrdom and as a spectacular (almost Oedipal) refusal of the colonial rhetoric of control as guardianship.

POSTSCRIPT: THE HOSTEL IN FICTION The often exaggerated press coverage of India House and the public debates about the Indian ‘student problem’ that ensued meant that metropolitan thriller and romance writers were soon introducing this topical subject into their work. The successful romance novelist F. E. Penny included revolutionary Indian students, charismatic Indian princes and nationalist politics in her fiction, notably The Inevitable Law (1907) and The Rajah (1911), and another writer, I. A. R. Wylie, went further when she drew on contemporary press reports of the Highgate hostel for descriptions of an Indian terrorist group based in a mysterious Hampstead villa called ‘Indra House’ in her romance The Daughter of Brahma (1912). The Indra House

plotters are described as ‘Chitpavan Brahmins and lesser Hindus’, who are a mixture of ‘calculating cunning’ and ‘intelligence, weakness and incalculable fanaticism’.37 Wylie even includes caricatures of Savarkar and Madan Lal Dhingra, the latter appearing as ‘a Hindu youth … of the type more commonly seen in the low resorts of the East End – a miserable figure … with hollow cheeks and wild sunken eyes. An object for pity – or of fear.’38 While they claim a topical relevance, these works owe more to a metropolitan fin-de-siècle fascination with the subcontinent as a place of mysticism and unrestrained passion than they do to any sustained engagement with the aims or idioms of the Indian nationalist movement. Wylie, in fact, had no personal experience of India, and her work is a clumsy patchwork of oriental gothic tropes organized around the stock figures of the secret Indian brotherhood, tragically fated cross-cultural love, and the Indian woman as both flawed victim and the object of (minimally reforming, exotic) desire. However, in contemporary Indian fiction in English the ‘student problem’ is presented in rather more complex terms, as we see if we look at a novel published in the same year as the Curzon Wyllie assassination by an Indian writer resident in London, Sarath Kumar Ghosh’s The Prince of Destiny (1909). Grafting together elements of the romance and the political fable, and playing on its own authenticity as a ‘presentment of India by an Indian’ that ‘draws a picture of Indian life from the inside’, The Prince of Destiny relates the coming of age and political quest of its protagonist, Prince Barath, as he inherits the Indian state of Barathpur and tries to reconcile his love for England with his loyalty to his own homeland. As well as mirroring aspects of the quest-romance and the Conradian ‘romance of integrity’,39 the novel constantly entertains the idea of a messianic future leader of India in its princely hero, the ‘New Krishna’ of the subtitle, who, having received an elite education in a public school in India, and then at Cambridge, travels back to his homeland to become an idealized power broker between colonizer and colonized. On his return, he finds that his state has been brought to the brink of anti-colonial rebellion by his contemporaries: disillusioned young men who have learned ‘other skills’ while studying in Europe and have formed a terrorist cell named the ‘House of the Serpent Gem’.40 In the end, Prince Barath sidesteps the destiny that his followers have mapped out for him, and refuses to lead a national rebellion against the British; instead, he renounces the claims of politics and devotes himself, as the ‘New Buddha’, to a life of spiritual contemplation. For our purposes, the noteworthy feature of Ghosh’s text is that it comments directly on the ‘student problem’ and develops a dialogue with some of the recommendations of the Lee Warner Committee. Early on in Ghosh’s novel, in a section dealing with his education at Cambridge, Ghosh’s princely hero catches a train to Bournemouth to visit his guardian, a retired ICS officer named Wingate. Seated by a window and alternately admiring the passing countryside and reading about English constitutional history, Barath imagines himself as a ‘participant’ in English life. Barath saw English homes and country mansions, and somehow felt himself familiar with their usages. He felt himself to be within the picture – perhaps in a room, or a garden, or some central scene in which he was a participant, not an observer.41

Barath’s dream of inclusion could be said to make an elaborate compensatory gesture for the

dispossession of Indian students in the metropolis, and in Wingate’s cottage, towards which he travels, Ghosh’s hero has, in fact, already assimilated the ‘rudimentary lessons’ of the English home, and national cultural ideals, from Wingate’s niece, Ellen.42 Barath’s secure place in this surrogate family contrasts starkly with the alienating living arrangements of the majority of Indian students in England, in the notorious space of the cheap London lodging house or hostel – the dangers of which are soon accentuated by Ghosh in an aside to his ‘English’ reader: You, my English reader, pause and consider. There are seven hundred young Indian students in London: guideless, friendless, knowing no Englishman in his home. Falling back upon their own resources in a strange country, they gather together in lodging houses – and talk politics: for where two or more Indians are gathered together there is nothing else to talk about outside their studies save politics; and from politics comes discontent, from discontent sedition. These young men must come to England for their studies … the failure of the British nation lies in not providing one more Ellen and one more Wingate [for them].43

This is familiar ground, and shows how comprehensively the idioms of counter-terrorist guardianship articulated by the Lee Warner Committee percolated into wider culture. In contrast to unhappy ‘guideless, friendless’ student-migrants, Barath’s filial bond with Wingate is emphasized throughout, presenting the implied metropolitan reader with a friendship that both represents and surpasses the civic ‘disciplining’ amity of metropolitan guardian and Indian ‘ward’. Elsewhere in Ghosh’s text the idioms of guardianship and reciprocal trust are less certain and the narrative hints at other (anti-colonial) allegiances and political possibilities. But here at least, the innocent assimilative potential of the British home – the secure antithesis to the hostel, in which contemporary counter-terrorism invested so much – remains unquestioned. Notes 1 Singh, M. (1938) Mysterious India. London: Stanley Paul, p. 245. 2 Parel in Gandhi, M. K. (1997) Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. A. J. Parel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. xxvii. 3 Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, or ‘Chatto’, was the brother of the famous Congress leader and poet Sarojini Naidu. His Marxist sympathies would eventually take him to Germany and the Soviet Union, where he later met a tragically early death, executed by a Russian firing squad (Parel in Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, p. xxix). 4 Srivastava, H. (1983) Five Stormy Years: Savarkar in London. New Delhi: Allied, pp. 13–24. 5 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, p. 134. 6 Krishnavarma and Savarkar would only work together in India House for a limited period, from 1906 to 1907, before Krishnavarma was forced to move to Paris. 7 Indian Sociologist 1 (5) (1905). 8 Kapila, S. (2007) ‘Self, Spencer and swaraj: nationalist thought and critiques of liberalism 1890–1920’. Modern Intellectual History, 4 (1), 109–27 at 115. 9 Nicholas Owen argues that, for Krishnavarma, ‘political violence was justified in the abstract and negatively, as a principle of liberal political theory which British thinkers had permitted if tyrannies could not be toppled in other ways, and which they could not consistently or fairly deny to Indians similarly placed’ (Owen, N. (2007) The British Left and India: Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism, 1885–1947. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 65–6). 10 Yajnik, I. (1950) Shyamaji Krishnavarma: Life and Times of an Indian Revolutionary. Bombay: Lakshmi, p. 250. 11 Owen, British Left, p. 67. 12 Quoted in Brown, E. (1975) Har Dayal: Hindu Revolutionary and Rationalist. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, p. 25. 13 Visram, R. (1986) Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700–1947. London: Pluto, p. 156.

14 The circumstances of Dhingra’s political radicalization bear out, in a particularly negative way, Antoinette Burton’s contention that the confined spaces of the railway carriage and the colonial cruise liner were often the first places in which Indians encountered themselves as ‘othered’ disjunctively through the eyes and reactions of the colonizer (Burton, A. (1998) At the Heart of the Empire: Indians in the Colonial Encounter in Late Victorian Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 175–6). 15 Emphasis added. See British Library, IOR: L/PJ/6/986. 16 See Sunday Dispatch, 14 March 1909. 17 Keer, D. (1950) Veer Savarkar. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, p. 73. 18 See Agamben, G. (2005) State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 19 See Brown, Har Dayal, p. 32, 20 Indian Sociologist 6 (8) (August 1910). 21 Chirol, V. (1910) Indian Unrest. London: Macmillan, p. 146; Minto in Heehs, P. (1994), ‘Foreign influences on Bengali revolutionary terrorism 1902–1908’, Modern Asian Studies, 28 (3), 533–56 at p. 533. 22 See Anderson, B. (1998) The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, South-East Asia, and the World. London: Verso; Boehmer, E. (2002) Empire, the National and the Postcolonial 1890–1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 23 Bayly, C. A. (1996) Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 171. 24 Indian Sociologist 4 (2) (February 1908). 25 Quoted in Popplewell, R. J. (1995) Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire 1904–1924. London: Frank Cass, p. 129. 26 Lahiri, S. (2000) Indians in Britain, Anglo–Indian Encounters, Race and Identity 1880–1930. London: Frank Cass, p. 123. Some interviewees estimated that up to 75 per cent of Indian students residing in Britain were imbued with ‘passionate hatred’ for the British government. 27 In his correspondence as part of the Lee Warner Committee, Curzon Wyllie complained that the Indian undergraduates at Cambridge took ‘little or no part with the English undergraduates in athletic exercises, but herd together and find their chief amusement in political discussions of a more or less disloyal character’ (IOR: L/PJ/6/845). 28 See Lee Warner Report (ch. 5). One of the central aims of Krishnavarma’s scholarship scheme – that Indian students should be able to see how the values of democracy and liberty were practised in the metropolitan centre (thus gaining a valuable lesson in the colonial denial of these rights) – justifies this concern. 29 One of the stated aims of the Bureau of Information was to act as a ‘chain of communication’ between Indian students and their parents in India (Lee Warner Report, ch. 5). 30 Burton, Heart of the Empire, p. 153. 31 Lee Warner Report (ch. 5). Although they were out of direct reach of Krishnavarma’s ‘adherents’, new Indian students at Oxford and Cambridge were given free copies of the Indian Sociologist, and invited to attend rebellion memorial celebrations. 32 Indian Sociologist 3 (10) (October 1907), p. 40. 33 Ibid. 34 Foucault, M. (1990) The History of Sexuality: Volume One, an Introduction, trans. R. Hurley. London: Penguin, p. 139; Reid, J. (2006) The Biopolitics of the War on Terror. Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 28. 35 See extracts from The Times on the foundation of the Lee Warner Committee (IOR: L/PJ/6/845). 36 Aristotle (2004) The Nichomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson. London: Penguin, p. 219. 37 Wylie, I. A. R. (1912) The Daughter of Brahma, 5th edn. London: Mills & Boon, p. 315. 38 Ibid., p. 314. 39 Stevens, J. (1973) Medieval Romance: Themes and Approaches. London: Hutchinson, p. 24, 40 Ghosh, S. K. (1909) The Prince of Destiny: The New Krishna. London: Rebman, p. 470. 41 Ibid., p. 183. 42 Ibid., p. 151. 43 Ibid., p. 158.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Archival Sources

British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: Lee Warner Committee, L/PJ/6/986. Books and Articles Agamben, G. (2005) State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anderson, B. (1998) The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, South-East Asia, and the World. London: Verso. Aristotle (2004) The Nichomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson. London: Penguin. Bayly, C. A. (1996) Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boehmer, E. (2002) Empire, the National and the Postcolonial 1890–1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, E. (1975) Har Dayal: Hindu Revolutionary and Rationalist. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Burton, A. (1998) At the Heart of the Empire: Indians in the Colonial Encounter in Late Victorian Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chirol, V. (1910), Indian Unrest. London: Macmillan. Foucault, M. (1990) The History of Sexuality: Volume One, an Introduction, trans. R. Hurley. London: Penguin. Gandhi, M. K. (1997) Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J. Parel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ghosh, S. K. (1909) The Prince of Destiny: The New Krishna. London: Rebman. Heehs, P. (1994) ‘Foreign influences on Bengali revolutionary terrorism 1902–1908’. Modern Asian Studies, 28 (3), 533–56. Indian Sociologist 1 (5) (1905); 3 (10) (October 1907); 4 (2) (February 1908); 6 (8) (August 1910). Kapila, S. (2007) ‘Self, Spencer and swaraj: nationalist thought and critiques of liberalism 1890–1920’. Modern Intellectual History, 4 (1), 109–27. Keer, D. (1950) Veer Savarkar. Bombay: Popular Prakashan. Lahiri, S. (2000) Indians in Britain, Anglo–Indian Encounters, Race and Identity 1880–1930. London: Frank Cass. Owen, N. (2007) The British Left and India: Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism, 1885–1947. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Popplewell, R. J. (1995) Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire 1904–1924. London: Frank Cass. Reid, J. (2006) The Biopolitics of the War on Terror. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Singh, M. (1938) Mysterious India. London: Stanley Paul. Srivastava, H. (1983) Five Stormy Years: Savarkar in London. New Delhi: Allied. Stevens, J. (1973) Medieval Romance: Themes and Approaches. London: Hutchinson. Sunday Dispatch (1909) 14 March. Visram, R. (1986) Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700–1947. London: Pluto.

Wylie, I. A. R. (1912) The Daughter of Brahma, 5th edn. London: Mills & Boon. Yajnik, I. (1950) Shyamaji Krishnavarma: Life and Times of an Indian Revolutionary. Bombay: Lakshmi.

Chapter 2

‘For every O’Dwyer … there is a Shaheed Udham Singh’1: The Caxton Hall Assassination of Michael O’Dwyer2 Florian Stadtler

In Rushdie’s 2005 novel Shalimar the Clown, the fictional Indian movie star Zainab Azam recalls her conversation with Shalimar: ‘“For every O’Dwyer,” he had said in excellent Urdu as she got out of the car, “there is a Shaheed Udham Singh, and for every Trotsky a Mercader awaits.”’3 Shalimar connects here the story of Udham Singh, who had waited over six years after his arrival in Britain before he assassinated Michael O’Dwyer, Governor of the Punjab at the time of the Amritsar massacre in 1919, with the assassination of Trotsky and his own pursuit of the diplomat Max Ophuls. The novel is a psychological study of the lone assassin who kills Ophuls in an act of revenge that on the surface looks politically motivated but is revealed as deeply personal. This interplay between political and personal motivation so eloquently explored in Shalimar the Clown will also be a main focal point in my analysis of Udham Singh’s act. By all accounts, Udham Singh’s assassination of O’Dwyer was politically motivated. Whereas Rushdie’s novel provides a detailed character study of Shalimar, this is unavailable in Singh’s case. Many legends surround Udham Singh, fuelled by conflicting reports in the long absence of archival documents. Only the late 1990s brought about a change with the release of some files from the India Office Records and the National Archives, Kew, which allow for a re-evaluation of the event and the case. This chapter, then, will analyse Udham Singh’s political motivation for assassinating O’Dwyer and will argue that far from being the action of a lone assassin in an unstable frame of mind, the assassination was an act of resistance that reverberated widely across different networks in Britain, India and the USA. On 13 March 1940, Udham Singh visited the India Office in relation to his passport. There he saw a notice for a lecture on Afghanistan organized jointly by the East India Association and the Central Asian Society at Caxton Hall that afternoon, which he decided to attend. He regarded the occasion as the perfect forum to stage what he describes as his intention ‘to protest’.4 After the end of the meeting, Udham Singh moved closely to the platform and at short range fired several shots. He killed Michael O’Dwyer and injured the Secretary of State for India, Lord Zetland, as well as Lord Lamington and Sir Louis Dane. The India Office speculated that Udham Singh had acquired the revolver in Bournemouth in September 1939. The charge sheet alleged that he ‘feloniously, wilfully and of malice aforethought, did kill and murder’ Michael O’Dwyer.5 On his arrest, Udham Singh gave his name as Mohamed Singh Azad, with which he also signed his police statement.

Throughout his life, Udham Singh used a number of aliases, but the use of ‘Mohamed Singh Azad’ in connection with his actions is noteworthy. It encapsulated his belief that Indian independence and freedom could only be achieved on the basis of communal cooperation between Muslims (Mohamed), Sikhs (Singh) and Hindus (Azad), the three prevalent faiths of his region of origin, the Punjab, and indeed of India itself. As Amartya Sen has suggested, complex identity formations are premised on a range of choices an individual has to make ‘about what relative importance to attach, in a particular context, to the divergent loyalties and priorities that may compete for precedence’6. In this name, then, Singh sublimates a communitarian Sikh identity in a wider notion of regional and national Indian identity as a powerful statement for unity across different communities. This is significant in the context of the O’Dwyer assassination as it reflects the intended political reverberations of Singh’s violent act of resistance on British soil against British colonial oppression in India.

THE SOCIO-POLITICAL CONTEXT OF THE O’DWYER ASSASSINATION The assassination of Michael O’Dwyer by Udham Singh highlighted for the public Britain’s increasingly fraught relationship with India. It brought back into consciousness the repercussions of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in 1919, which had led to increased questioning of the rationale for maintaining colonial rule in India. The assassination provoked, albeit briefly, debates in India and Britain around the use of violence by the colonial authorities and anti-colonial resistance movements. In this respect, as I will show, the event had the potential for more far-reaching repercussions. The authorities’ panicked but successful attempt to limit the amount of press publicity the incident received is also indicative of this. While the event and reaction to it was widely reported and discussed, the actual trial, appeal hearing and the subsequent execution of Udham Singh were a mere footnote in contemporary news coverage. Current scholarship has countered the common myth that India acquired her independence solely through Gandhi’s satyagraha movement, non-violent non-cooperation, as exemplified by the civil disobedience campaigns. Although these campaigns were an important tool, as Peter Heehs argues succinctly in his essay ‘Revolutionary terrorism in British Bengal’, four major factors contributed in combination to the success of the Indian independence movement: ‘(1) pressure exerted by public bodies, notably the Indian National Congress; (2) non-violent resistance campaigns; (3) violent resistance; and (4) global political and economic changes.’7 For Heehs, the extra mobilization for independence through violent acts of resistance helped the public independence movement, with its emphasis on non-violence, to achieve its aims.8 Heehs explains that while the first two categories mentioned above receive ample consideration in historical accounts of the Indian independence movement, the latter two receive scant attention, despite the fact that other modes of resistance were openly discussed among different groups fighting for India’s right to self-determination. Udham Singh was interested in these debates. Archival records show that he had links with the

revolutionary Ghadar party in the USA and the Indian Workers’ Association in Britain, an organization which campaigned for Indian independence and workers’ rights for South Asians living in Britain at the time.9 These contacts suggest that Singh saw different forms of direct action, including the use of violence, as legitimate tools of resistance against the injustice of colonial rule in India. The assassination of Michael O’Dwyer raises wider issues that merit further consideration in the context of the response by the authorities and the British and Indian public: was this premeditated assassination, planned to cause maximum impact, a legitimate form of resistance in the wake of the disastrous handling of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre? Was this an expression of resistance against a wider apparatus of state-led terrorism in India; or was this, as is intimated in official records, the act of a lone individual in a slightly unstable frame of mind? It is interesting to note that while speculative comments written by India Office officials often cite presumed insanity as Singh’s main motivation, psychological evaluations by prison authorities considered Singh to be of sound mind.10 Udham Singh’s assassination of O’Dwyer is exceptional. Although violent resistance, including attempted assassination, was not an extraordinary occurrence in India, such an incident in London, the capital of empire, was rare, the 1909 assassination of the former Indian Army officer Curzon Wyllie by Madan Lal Dhingra being the only other high-profile South Asian example on British soil. In both cases, the press and public opinion did not consider their actions as meaningful resistance, despite their associations with larger groups.11 Instead, their chosen forms of violent protest were explained by the assassin’s unstable mind, which raises the issue of why an individual’s act of violent resistance is often considered to be the act of a madman and not part of a wider context of resistance.12 The speculation surrounding their mental state served as an easy, shorthand way of dismissing the political motivation behind their actions and allowed the authorities to defuse political reverberations surrounding these cases. Both cases shocked the British public since they were evidence of the fact that ‘Indians felt that they were able to come to Britain and express their anger through violence on British soil’.13 Clearly, despite differences in the individuals’ motivations to assassinate their renowned victims, it was important for both to bring India’s national struggle for self-rule to the heart of the imperial metropolis. Udham Singh’s act mirrors the methods of a small group of Russian constitutionalists called Narodnaya Volya. Founded in 1878, the group came to prominence through the selective targeting of pre-eminent individuals who were perceived as representative of the autocratic and repressive tzarist system. Udham Singh’s assassination bears the hallmarks of these late nineteenth-century anarchists’ championing of individual action. This method of operation is perhaps best described by the phrase ‘propagande par le fait’ or ‘propaganda by the deed’, which the socialist Paul Brousse popularized in the 1870s in an article of the same title, published in L’Avant-Garde. Acts of ‘propaganda by the deed’ promote the use of violence against individuals, representative of repressive institutions, to galvanize mass movements or to express a broader ideological meaning. The notion of ‘propaganda by the deed’ was first articulated in the mid-nineteenth century by Italian republican Carlo Pisacane. In his view, violence functioned as a necessary tool to inform, educate and galvanize mass

movements behind a revolution. Pisacane saw in violence a didactic potential.14 It may be argued that Udham Singh pursued a similar strategy. Through his assassination of O’Dwyer and the subsequent publicity it generated he sought to highlight the injustices of continuing imperial domination of the Indian subcontinent and to unite Indians behind the common cause of Indian independence. Udham Singh’s final alias discussed above and his court statement indicate his wider nationalist and political motivation and that the assassination of O’Dwyer was premeditated to have maximum public impact. In this respect his actions need to be regarded as more complex than merely belated revenge for the Amritsar massacre. The timing of the event could not have come at a more precarious moment in Indian–British relations. The 1939 constitutional crisis was still ongoing, triggered by the Viceroy Lord Amery’s unilateral declaration of war on behalf of India, without prior consultation of Indian political parties. Britain’s own situation remained volatile, with German forces advancing through Western Europe and Britain increasingly reliant on the supply of raw materials from India as well as vital manpower to support its own troops already stationed in France. Thus, the assassination of the former Governor of the Punjab, once again raising the spectre of the 1919 Amritsar massacre, was potentially explosive.

RESPONSES TO THE ASSASSINATION OF O’DWYER According to India Office records, the swift action of the Metropolitan Police meant that news of O’Dwyer’s assassination did not leak out to the wider public until two hours after the event. However, among the press, rumours of the incident did circulate, and from 7 p.m. the India League office in Aldwych was inundated with press inquiries regarding the identity of the possible assassin. The story broke on the BBC’s radio’s nine o’clock news bulletin. Krishna Menon, the India League’s Secretary, reacted swiftly, dissociating himself from Udham Singh and expressing his condolences to Lady O’Dwyer. The Manchester Guardian printed the following statement by Menon on behalf of the India League the following day: The tragedy at Caxton Hall yesterday will be regretted and condemned universally in India. Indian national opinion abhors such acts of terrorism, which find no apologists or supporters in any section of Indian political opinion. Congress and other Nationalist circles have always condemned them. Indians in this country, students and residents, and all friends of India feel similarly.15

Menon officially regarded the assassination of O’Dwyer as an act of terrorism. He presents the India League as an organization that in this instance agrees with the position of the Government of India and the broader Congress leadership. Representatives of the India League were also present at a meeting arranged at India House, Aldwych, where the High Commissioner for India, Firoz Khan Noon, expressed abhorrence for Udham Singh’s act, support for and condolence to the wife of O’Dwyer, and sympathy for Lord Zetland, Lord Lamington and Louis Dane, who were injured in the shooting. However, the reaction of the wider Indian community in Britain remained muted. While officials noted that there had not been much approval of Singh’s action, they also remarked that ‘there has been no general condemnation of the outrage (except by some of the more prominent Indians resident in

London) because of the support which Sir Michael O’Dwyer is supposed to have given to the action at Jallianwalla Bagh [sic]’.16 Udham Singh’s assassination of Michael O’Dwyer was met with much more widespread condemnation by activists of the Indian independence movement in India, most notably Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Denouncing Singh’s action, Gandhi expressed the hope that it would not impact negatively upon British political judgement regarding its policy towards India. Gandhi went so far as to state in Harijan that ‘the news of the death of Sir Michael O’Dwyer and the injuries to Lord Zetland, Lord Lamington and Sir Louis Dane, has caused me deep pain. I regard this act as one of insanity.’17 Nehru echoed Gandhi’s sentiments. What followed were discussions in the Indian and British press about the motivation for Singh and the assassination’s potential impact on Indo–British relations. These accounts sought to give meaning to Singh’s action and to analyse its wider political implications. For example, the response in the National Herald, a newspaper largely loyal to the Indian National Congress, on 15 March 1940 maintained that the choice Britain faced when negotiating a new settlement was between an educated Indian bourgeoisie, committed to non-violent noncooperation, or a more militant group of revolutionaries, willing to use violence in order to resist continuing imperial rule in India. The article argued that the assassination of O’Dwyer made a wider case for launching a civil disobedience movement soon, ‘because of our conviction that inordinate delay in launching a non-violent struggle will strengthen the forces of violence and revive the revolutionary shootings of which there has been, thanks to Mahatma Gandhi, not a trace in the country for many years past’.18 Thus the newspaper outlined a clear choice to the British government. It called for the immediate resumption of negotiations for a settlement on Indian independence and saw the event as the crucial impetus for this if more violent acts of resistance were to be contained. The alternative was the resumption of the civil disobedience movement as a potentially successful tool in containing violence. Importantly, the National Herald highlights the interplay between violent and nonviolent acts of resistance as tools for exercising pressure on the British government. The Britain-based weekly magazine The New Statesman considered the wider political implications of the event from a British political perspective. It argued that the public would undoubtedly discuss the event in the light of the continuing stalemate about the future status of India: In the minds of Indians the name of Sir Michael O’Dwyer is ineradicably associated with Amritsar and Lord Zetland’s with a refusal to realise the justice of India’s indignation at being brought into a ‘war of freedom’ without consultation and without the promise that her own freedom will be its outcome. This murder may be a serious setback to Indian aspirations and it will be the task of sanity to see that it is not followed by panic and reaction in India. Few English people realise how large a part India plays in world opinion.19

This very forthright assessment of the event echoes more circumspect criticisms in the National Herald. It analysed pertinently how the British government ignored the grievances expressed through violent and non-violent acts of resistance at its own peril, endangering the survival of the empire. Furthermore, the government’s inaction had a detrimental impact on Britain’s reputation on the world stage, considering that Britain’s treatment of India was scrutinized by her allies and foes across the world. These editorials offered a stark warning to

the British government not to underestimate the situation. Further, they highlighted the potential political ramifications of the O’Dwyer assassination and, I would argue, allow us to consider it as an act of ‘propaganda by the deed’ in its intentions to inform, educate and potentially galvanize people for a cause. The explosive content of these editorials, then, suggests that any intimation of Singh’s unsound state of mind was used by the authorities to deflect the significance of his actions.

UDHAM SINGH AND NETWORKS OF RESISTANCE IN BRITAIN AND ABROAD India Office surveillance files and Scotland Yard reports provide considerable information about Udham Singh’s connections in Britain, India and the USA, which further underline my argument that his actions were influenced by and impacted upon wider networks at home and abroad. Singh’s surveillance proved to be a challenging task. He had a knack for eliding the authorities, which explains inconsistencies across different files and reports. For instance, in 1936 he claimed to be residing at an address in the East End of London, while India Office surveillance officers suggested he was living with a white woman in the West End.20 His ability to secure a passport created much consternation among officials.21 Because of his conviction of arms smuggling in 1927 and his reported links with the Ghadar movement while working in the USA, Udham Singh should not have been issued with a passport at all. However, as mentioned above, he used different aliases to avoid detection, and a simple change from Ude Singh to Udham Singh enabled him to dupe the authorities into issuing a passport. A note to India Office official Mr Silver on 22 November 1937 records that Udham Singh used successfully the names Ude Singh, Udham Singh, Sher Singh and Frank Brazil in order to travel undetected by the authorities. The note also offers further details about Udham Singh’s early life, his movements and networks up until 1937.22 An account of his movements and connections is important as they underline his affiliations that led to his action. Furthermore, they show that far from being the lone lunatic assassin, he was a highly politicized individual.23 During the early 1920s, Udham Singh worked in California for two years, developing his contacts with the resident Sikh community active in the Ghadar movement. Udham Singh formed part of a radical group of Ghadar activists that sought to achieve Indian independence through the use of violence. For Singh, association with the group was a formative experience. He later moved to Detroit, Chicago and New York, where he remained for five years. Subsequently he worked as a seaman, disguising himself as a Puerto Rican with the alias Frank Brazil, which appears on the seamen’s certificate in his possession when arrested in 1927. This pseudonym enabled him to travel to Europe on numerous occasions. He finally secured employment on the SS Jalapa as a carpenter, arriving in Karachi in July 1927 and later jumping ship in Calcutta, from where he made his way back to Punjab. There he became increasingly influenced by Bhagat Singh’s revolutionary activities. In August 1927, he was arrested and prosecuted for the illegal possession of two revolvers, ammunition and the banned paper

Ghadr di Gunj. He was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and released on 23 October 1931. These activities suggest the influence of a network of activists in the USA and India on Udham Singh’s politics and actions that was already helping to shape his intentions to involve himself directly in resistance to British colonial rule as part of Ghadar. He maintained his links with the movement until his death in 1940, evidenced by the fact that his name appeared on the mailing list of the Hindustan Ghadr and that Sikhs in California associated with Ghadar contributed substantial funds for his defence. Udham Singh moved to Britain in the autumn of 1933, having secured passport No. 52753 in Lahore on 20 March 1933.24 In 1936, he successfully applied for passport endorsements to travel to Holland, Germany, Poland, Austria, Hungary and Italy. In Berlin he applied for further endorsements to travel to Eastern Europe and the USSR, which were granted. These trips raised suspicions because Berlin, London and Moscow harboured radical activists fighting for Indian independence and arguably suggest that Singh sought to enlarge his networks there. The India Office and Scotland Yard stepped up their surveillance of his movements in view of the fact that ‘he is stated to have expressed extreme views and is reported to have boasted that he had succeeded in smuggling arms to India’.25 This intensified surveillance of Singh followed his movements throughout Europe and in Britain, and extended to South Asian activists with whom he was involved. In 1936, Singh was working as a pedlar as well as an extra alongside other South Asians from the lascar and pedlar community in crowd scenes in movies, for example, for Alexander Korda’s Denham Studios, renowned for a series of films on the theme of empire, such as Sanders of the River (1935), The Drum (1937) and The Four Feathers (1939). For a while in 1938 he circulated among Indian students while staying at the Indian Student Hostel, Gower Street, London. In July 1938 he was charged with extortion and menaces, having threatened Syed Fazal Shah, who ran an employment agency in the City of London. He first used the alias Mohamed Singh Azad in 1939, while working in Southampton as a carpenter at one of the militia camps. By September 1939 he had transferred to another camp in Dorset, where a fellow employee noted that ‘he talked somewhat wildly of associations with extremist elements in India, and a letter which he wrote suggested he was mentally unbalanced’.26 This assessment is interesting, as it alleges on the one hand a wider political network within which Singh operated and on the other an unsound mind associated with the lone assassin. Throughout 1939 Singh elided the authorities by frequently changing addresses in Britain, until he returned to London in January 1940, working at an aerodrome on its outskirts and occasionally visiting Indian friends in London’s East End. At the time of his arrest in March 1940 he was living at 8 Mornington Terrace, Regent’s Park, London. The range of Udham Singh’s movements reveal likely associations with other exiled anticolonial activists and groups, which he would have contacted on his trips to the Soviet Union, Germany and France. Through his work as a pedlar, Singh also developed networks in Britain with South Asian organizations such as the Indian Workers’ Association. In the aftermath of the assassination, the statement of Singh’s colleague quoted above led the Metropolitan Police to probe further into whether Singh acted alone or on behalf of a larger group of South Asian radical activists in Britain. The police interviewed Syed Fazal Shah, who had brought the above-mentioned court case against Singh. He testified that he

perceived Singh to be unstable, boastful and prone to threaten violence. The police inquiries also revealed that Udham Singh had contact with the well-known trade union and lascar activist Surat Alley. Singh visited him at the Indian Social Club in Poplar, east London, days before the assassination, which led to Alley being interviewed by the police and his flat being searched. Alley stated that he and Singh had met recently and discussed the political situation in India. Alley too thought Singh of unsound mind. However, Alley was unaware that Singh possessed firearms.27 The connections with Alley, a lascar and trade union activist with links to numerous organizations, including the Oriental Film Artistes’ Union, the Federation of Indian Associations in Great Britain and the Indian Workers’ Association, also suggests that Singh circulated among a wider South Asian network in Britain. While Scotland Yard had difficulties establishing any direct link between Udham Singh’s act and a particular organization or association, the police concluded that Singh ‘has given evidence of terrorist aspirations from his early days, and there is no doubt that he has for some time past nursed a plan to assassinate some prominent Englishman connected with Indian political affairs’.28 In view of this police response, it is surprising that the India Office continued to assess that ‘[Singh] … kept himself strictly aloof from political meetings in the United Kingdom and [had] few acquaintances in London’.29 The contradiction between the results of police investigations and the conclusions drawn by the India Office, which maintained that Singh’s act was an isolated incident by a man of unsound mind, is notable. It is questionable whether the India Office’s assessment is reliable, especially when considering the conflicting information in the surveillance files on Singh. I would argue that the India Office was attempting deliberately to depoliticize Singh’s act to obscure his real motivations – his anger and frustration at the injustices of continuing imperial rule in India and his view that the Amritsar massacre had not been adequately atoned. His witness statement, on the basis of which he was charged, further illustrates this: I have seen people starving in India under British Imperialism. I done it, the pistol went off three or four times. I am not sorry for protesting. It was my duty to do so. Put some more. Just for the sake of my country to protest.30

THE TRIAL OF UDHAM SINGH, POLITICAL RAMIFICATIONS AND MEASURES OF CONTAINMENT The India Office was increasingly interested in how the London-based South Asian community reacted to the Caxton Hall assassination and whether it had the potential to stage any further acts of resistance. In particular it monitored the India League and Krishna Menon as well as rival organizations in the East End of London around Surat Alley and the Sikh pedlar community. While publicly distancing himself from the O’Dwyer assassination, as discussed above, Menon played a key role in organizing Udham Singh’s defence. Menon saw it as an opportunity to capitalize on the affair politically; by giving Singh an opportunity to present his actions as ‘propaganda by the deed’ he aimed to galvanize support for Indian independence at the trial and to potentially generate much national and international press attention.

Menon involved himself in the defence of Udham Singh also with the aim of extending his influence among the pedlar and lascar community in east London, where the India League had recently opened a branch, thereby engaging in a power struggle with Udham Singh’s acquaintance, Surat Alley. Menon thought that through the defence of Singh he could consolidate his position among the South Asian working-class communities, in particular the Sikh community in London’s East End. Yet Menon did not want to take on the case himself, despite being a fully qualified barrister-at-law, for fear of jeopardizing his influence as a political lobbyist of the India League. Nevertheless, he saw the trial as a useful platform to highlight once again the deteriorating political situation in India and the need for immediate negotiations for Indian independence. Indeed, the India Office feared that Krishna Menon’s intentions in organizing the defence for Udham Singh were ‘with a view of exploiting the prisoner’s political grievances in the course of the trial’.31 Thus the India Office discussed how this could be prevented. Fully aware of the explosive potential of Singh’s trial, the India Office sought to restrict press coverage, by limiting the number of spectators in court and vetting any Indian who might attend, to prevent anyone from gaining political capital from the trial. In a note to Mr Silver, dated 18 March 1940, India Office officials communicated a number of recommendations to Scotland Yard, based on the India Office’s experience of political trials in India, to counter any attempts by Singh to use the trial as a forum for further protest. The India Office feared that ‘he is probably hoping that his behaviour in Court will receive wide publicity, partly to encourage Indians both in this country and at home to commit similar crimes and partly to impress the English public with the intensity of the popular movement in India for the removal of British rule’.32 The India Office thus recommended that only a small number of reporters should be present and that the press censor should be alerted to scrutinize more carefully messages cabled to India and the United States. Scotland Yard’s response was lukewarm, pointing out that any attempts to restrict access for the press to the trial would cause an outcry. However, it took special steps already in place to restrict the number of spectators.33 Ironically, methods of censorship commonly practised in India would be deemed outrageous in Britain, highlighting the marked difference between freedom of the press and freedom of expression in the metropolis and in the colony. The trial commenced at the Old Bailey on 4 June 1940, with St John Hutchinson, R. E. Seaton and V. K. Krishna Menon defending Udham Singh. Their strategy was to secure a manslaughter verdict, arguing that Singh wanted to highlight the plight of India but that the murder was not premeditated.34 However, the prosecution disproved this with police evidence and statements made by Udham Singh in custody, which, it maintained, ‘indicated a murderous intent’.35 The case against Singh seemed clear-cut, yet the court reporter was critical of the cross-examination of Singh. He observed: ‘Had Krishna Menon conducted the examination he would probably have obtained a much more coherent statement from the accused. Mr. St. John Hutchinson made the mistake of treating him as a witness with a good knowledge of English.’36 This seems to imply that Singh’s language barrier – a translator was in attendance at the trial – impeded his chances and if Menon had led Singh’s defence he may have argued more forcefully for Singh. Why Menon did not take this on is not clear;

however, with Menon at the helm, most certainly the trial would have been more politically charged and may have attracted more publicity as well. The jury delivered its guilty verdict after two hours of deliberations on 5 June. Udham Singh used his final statement to speak out against the injustices of British imperialism. The judge soon interrupted Singh’s speech, though a reassembled transcript exists.37 The following is a short extract: I am not afraid to die. I am proud to die. I want to help my native land, and I hope when I have gone that in my place will come others of my countrymen to drive the dirty dogs – when I am free of the country. I am standing before an English jury in an English Court. You people go to India and when you come back you are given prizes and put into the House of Commons, but when we come to England, we are put to death … I have nothing against the public at all. I have more English friends in England than I have in India. I have nothing against the public. I have great sympathy with the workers of England, but I am against the dirty British Government. Your people are suffering the same as I am suffering through those dirty dogs and mad beasts – [inaudible] – killing mutilating and destroying. We know what is going on in India – hundreds of thousands of people being killed by your dirty dogs.38

This shows that the India Office’s concerns that Singh might use the trial as a further platform to voice his protest were justified. The forcefulness of the statement led the judge to instruct that no portion of it should be published and that all files should remain closed for at least a hundred years. Singh was sentenced to death by hanging. An appeal on 15 July failed, as did representations by the Oxford Professor E. J. Thompson and Helen Peach, an activist working with Indian students in London, to the India Office for a reprieve; the former argued on the grounds of the deteriorating relationship between Britain and India, the latter on the grounds of mental health.39 By July 1940, the India Office had established a wide-ranging picture of Udham Singh’s network in Britain, with connections to Sikh pedlars in London, Coventry, Southampton, and further afield. These pedlars confirmed doctors’ assertions, regarding him ‘as mentally quite normal, though somewhat mysterious and peculiar in his habits, very conceited, given to boasting and accomplished in lying’.40 A memo of 24 July 1940 concluded that the gaol authorities’ opinion of Singh’s mental normalcy was shared by the Sikh community who knew him. His execution was seen as inevitable and the sentence was carried out at Pentonville Prison on 31 July 1940. The failure to secure a reprieve meant that he would die for the cause of Indian independence. The assassination of Michael O’Dwyer and Singh’s subsequent execution for murder led to him acquiring the status of martyr and fuelled many legends. Indeed, India Office surveillance reports of the Midlands-based Indian Workers’ Association cover in detail commemorations of events such as Jallianwala Bagh Day, marked with recitations of poems, patriotic songs and speeches, and with the flag of the Indian National Congress and a photograph of Udham Singh on display.41 After independence politicians also tried to capitalize on Udham Singh for their own aims. Indira Gandhi lobbied Britain to return Singh’s remains to India, a request that was granted in 1974.42 The networks with which Udham Singh engaged, the assassination and his subsequent trial suggest that his actions were not those of a lunatic lone individual. Udham Singh’s court statement and his witness accounts, as well as the groups with which he associated, point towards a partially successful act of ‘propaganda by the deed’. Although the assassination did

not galvanize a mass movement, yearly commemorations of Udham Singh’s action by the Indian Workers’ Association in Great Britain as part of their annual Jallianwala Bagh remembrance event and the posthumous reverence accorded to him highlight the wider impact and significance of the assassination. The memorialization of Singh also evidences that the authorities’ attempts at suppressing information about Singh had only limited success. Arguably, then, Singh’s assassination of O’Dwyer may be regarded as an act of violent resistance that responded to and highlighted in the metropolis the countless acts of state-led terrorism perpetrated under colonial rule in British India. Notes 1 Rushdie, S. (2006) Shalimar the Clown. London: Vintage, p. 30. 2 This research has emerged from the AHRC project ‘Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870– 1950’ (AHRC Bid Reference No. AH/E009859/1). I would like to thank especially Rehana Ahmed, Sumita Mukherjee, Susheila Nasta and Rozina Visram, for their helpful comments and suggestions, and also project members Elleke Boehmer and Ruvani Ranasinha. 3 Rushdie, Shalimar, p. 30. 4 National Archives, CRIM 1/1177. 5 Ibid. 6 Sen, A. (2006) Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. London and New York: W. W. Norton, p. 19. 7 Heehs, P. (2009) ‘Revolutionary terrorism in British Bengal’, in E. Boehmer and S. Morton (eds) Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 153. 8 Ibid., p. 174. 9 See British Library, India Office Records (IOR): L/PJ/12/500. 10 National Archives, MEPO 3/1743. 11 National Archives, CRIM 1/113/5. The file contains a list of exhibits produced in the trial, witness statements, and a psychiatric report on Madan Lal Dhingra. 12 This is also an integral part of Rushdie’s argument in Shalimar, where he contrasts different forms of resistance by groups and individuals; for example, French Resistance fighters in the Second World War with Kashmiri separatists. 13 Mukherjee, S. (2009) Nationalism, Education and Migrant Identities: The England-Returned. London: Routledge, p. 98. 14 See Hoffman, B. (2006) Inside Terrorism (revised and expanded edn). New York: Columbia University Press, p. 5. 15 Menon, K. (1940) ‘The India League: tragedy “regretted and condemned”’. Manchester Guardian, 15 March, 10. 16 L/PJ/12/500, ‘Reaction to the Caxton Hall outrage’. 29 March 1940. 17 Harijan (1940) ‘An insane act’. VIII (7), 23 March, 56. 18 L/PJ/12/500, ‘Seventy-sixth press summary’. 19 March 1940. 19 The New Statesman and Nation (1940) ‘The murder of Sir Michael O’Dwyer’. 19 (473), 16 March, 355. 20 L/PJ/12/500, ‘Note to Mr Silver’. 11 October 1937. 21 L/PJ/7/1775. 22 However, according to Navtej Singh, the India Office files contain errors, for example, Singh’s date of birth, which is 26 December 1899 (as suggested by other archival evidence), not, as stated, 23 August 1901 (Singh, N. and Jouhl, A. S. (eds) (2002) Emergence of the Image: Redact Documents of Udham Singh. New Delhi: National Book Organisation, p. 3). 23 In 1917, Singh served with the Indian Army in Basra for eighteen months and in British East Africa, where he worked as a carpenter for about two years in the Uganda Railway Workshops. Thus it is unlikely that he was present at Jallianwala Bagh during the massacre in 1919, disproving claims that his alleged presence there may have been his motivation to shoot O’Dwyer. 24 L/PJ/11/2/354, ‘Duplicate passport’. 25 L/PJ/12/500, ‘Note on Udham Singh’. November 1937. 26 L/PJ/12/500, ‘Mohamed Singh Azad’. 15 March 1940. 27 L/PJ/12/500, Metropolitan Police Special Branch report. 15 March 1940. 28 L/PJ/12/500, extract from New Scotland Yard report no. 163. 20 March 1940. 29 L/PJ/12/500.

30 L/PJ/12/500, ‘Statement of witness’. 23 March 1940. 31 L/PJ/12/500, 29 March 1940. 32 Ibid. 33 There was also an indication that many Indians had stayed away, since Surat Alley had warned them against attending the trial as they might subsequently become the subject of police inquiries. See L/PJ/12/500, Letter to Mr Silver. 5 June 1940. 34 L/PJ/12/500, 18 May 1940. 35 L/PJ/12/500, ‘Crown versus Udham Singh’. 5 June 1940. 36 Ibid. 37 National Archives, PCOM 9/872. 38 National Archives, HO 144/21445. 39 See L/PJ/12/500. 40 L/PJ/12/500, 24 July 1940. 41 L/PJ/12/645 and L/PJ/12/646. 42 For an interesting discussion, see Fenech, L. E. (2002) ‘Contested nationalisms; negotiated terrains: the way Sikhs remember Udham Singh “Shahid” (1899–1940)’. Modern Asian Studies, 36 (4), 827–70.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Archival Sources British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: India Office Records, L/PJ/7/1775. British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: India Office Records, L/PJ/11/2/354. British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: India Office Records, L/PJ/12/500. British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: India Office Records, L/PJ/12/645–6. National Archives, UK. CRIM 1/113/5. National Archives, UK. CRIM/1/1177. National Archives, UK. HO 144/21445. National Archives, UK. MEPO 3/1743. National Archives, UK. PCOM 9/872. Books and Articles Fenech, L. E. (2002) ‘Contested nationalisms; negotiated terrains: the way Sikhs remember Udham Singh “Shahid” (1899–1940)’. Modern Asian Studies, 36 (4), 827–70. Harijan (1940) ‘An insane act’. VIII (7), 23 March, 56. Heehs, P. (2009) ‘Revolutionary terrorism in British Bengal’, in E. Boehmer and S. Morton (eds) Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 153–76. Hoffman, B. (2006) Inside Terrorism (revised and expanded edn). New York: Columbia University Press. Menon, K. (1940) ‘The India League: tragedy “regretted and condemned”’. Manchester Guardian, 15 March, 10. Mukherjee, S. (2009) Nationalism, Education and Migrant Identities: The EnglandReturned. London: Routledge. Nehru, J. (1940) National Herald, 15 March. The New Statesman and Nation (1940) ‘The murder of Sir Michael O’Dwyer’. 19 (473), 16

March, 355. Rushdie, S. (2006) Shalimar the Clown. London: Vintage. Sen, A. (2006) Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. London and New York: W. W. Norton. Singh, N. and Jouhl, A. S. (eds) (2002) Emergence of the Image: Redact Documents of Udham Singh. New Delhi: National Book Organisation. Woodcock, G. (ed.) (1977) The Anarchist Reader. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins.

PART II

Working-Class Resistances

Chapter 3

Littoral Struggles, Liminal Lives: Indian Merchant Seafarers’ Resistances Georgie Wemyss

INTRODUCTION Alongside the Tower of London ‘World Heritage Site’ in east London, there is a memorial to those killed in the British Merchant Navy in the two World Wars. Of the 26,833 names on the memorial very few are South Asian. This is because the memorial only records those South Asians who had managed to serve on British Articles by somehow circumventing the restrictions imposed on them that sought to prevent their settlement in Britain. The majority who died served under the racially discriminatory ‘Lascar’ Articles and the names of these men are omitted from the memorial. An estimated 6,600 Indian seafarers employed on Indian Articles on British Merchant Navy ships were killed during the 1939 to 1945 War. A further 1,022 were badly wounded and 1,217 were taken prisoners of war.1 The example of the memorial illustrates the theme of this chapter: the invisibility of the individual and collective struggles of Indian seafarers, unequal subjects of the British Empire, which took place across the globe in littoral, liminal spaces. The absence of their existence and experiences in dominant narratives about Britain’s history and culture has meant that their impact on life in Britain is unknown to most Britons. Yet their histories of struggle at sea and on shore continue to be salient to life in twenty-first-century multicultural Britain.2 This chapter begins with an explanation of the meanings and significance of the littoral and liminal spaces in which seafarers lived to the working conditions, resistances and recorded histories of those men. This is followed by an introduction to a framework for the analysis of historical narratives constructed by the anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, which is later used to understand the hidden histories of Indian seafarers and account for how dominant discourses about contemporary Britain and Britishness exclude specific violent and oppressive histories of empire. In order to expose those histories, in the following section I summarize the British maritime legislation that excluded Indian seafarers from the rights experienced by their white shipmates. I then detail some covert strategies mobilized by Indian seafarers to improve their working conditions and use examples from the 1939 to 1940 Indian seafarer strikes to illustrate both the struggles that took place and their continuing invisibility in Second World War narratives. Finally, I consider the implications of the invisibility of these global struggles to contests over ‘belonging’ in modern Britain.

LITTORAL INVISIBILITY AND ENFORCED LIMINALITY Seafarers are littoral people. Littoral, as an adjective, means ‘belonging to the seashore’, and seafarers embody the fluid, porous and permeable properties of the coast. In the case of the lives of Indian seafarers I take littoral to include the shifting flood plains of the rivers and tributaries of Bengal and elsewhere in India that, in many cases, were the start of and reason for their journeys from inland smallholdings to seaports throughout the British Empire. Derived from limin, the Latin word for ‘threshold’, liminal in its most straightforward sense signifies a phase of living ‘betwixt and between’ different stages of life. In anthropology and cultural theory its meanings have been debated and defined since Arnold Van Gennep’s work on rites of passage over a century ago.3 A liminal space or period is when a person or community is between two distinct stages of life. During that liminal time, a person becomes used to new roles and responsibilities, and can experience a different type of freedom where conventional rules of society cease to apply. Belonging to spaces of ebbing tides, shifting sands and distant horizons, imagining both inland and seafaring lives where different rules of existence are followed and old ones left behind, can offer liminal status and experiences to littoral peoples. Indian seafarers employed on British ships lived in enforced liminal spaces in most aspects of their lives. This enforcement is exemplified in their classification as ‘lascars’ in racially discriminatory shipping legislation which denied them employment rights won by European crew members. They lived in liminal time and space on ships and in global dock areas; they worked industrial, strictly monitored and often violently enforced four-hour shifts on board, but onshore in Britain were expected to wait, without employment, for returning ships. They were subjects of the British Empire, forced to spend extended periods at British ports but prevented from legally settling or working in Britain. Their status contributed to the restricted ways in which they were able to individually and collectively resist the legal and illegal discrimination they experienced and ensured that they were excluded from the category of the ‘British working class’. In the following sections I expand on these points to show how their littoral and imposed liminal lives contributed to their invisibility in specific ‘moments’ that make up the ‘bundle of silences’ in narratives about South Asians in Britain, both past and present.4

THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE There is an infinite repertoire of invented and remembered ‘traditions’ that may be mobilized in remembering ‘the past’ in any local, national or global space. References to Britain’s imperial past infuse national and local commemorative events as well as ongoing political and media debates about British identity and citizenship. The historian Catherine Hall has described how during the main period of decolonization in the 1960s and 1970s, guilt and embarrassment meant the empire was either forgotten or remembered nostalgically in white England.5 Such ‘amnesia’ is recognizable in different forms in discourses associated with

many of the colonial-related events over the past decade. An example is during the 2007 anniversary of the 1807 Act to abolish the slave-trade, when the roles of the British Parliament and Royal Navy in legislating and enforcing abolition were expounded nationally while the direct and indirect involvement and profits accumulated by British institutions and social groups received less public attention.6 Similarly, in 2006, colonial commemorations were held at Blackwall, a departure point on the River Thames since the 1600s. The event remembered was the anniversary of the 1606 sailing of three ships that went on to found America’s first permanent English colony at Jamestown. The tone was one of celebration for the creation and success of the United States and its continuing ‘special relationship’ with Britain, and it was attended by the Governor of the State of Virginia, the local Member of Parliament and white descendants of those ‘first settlers’. The opening of the enormous East India Dock on the same Blackwall site in 1806, made possible through investments by British merchants as they extended their military, economic and political control and revenue collection across the subcontinent and further east, was not commemorated, despite the local borough being home to the UK’s largest British Bangladeshi population.7 Such selective loss of memory about British colonialism is one example of what I have analysed elsewhere as the ‘Invisible Empire’. The absence of some histories of the British Empire in tandem with the mobilization of others works to include or exclude different categories of people from the twenty-first-century British collectivity.8 In order to understand the significance of Indian seafarers’ lives to Britain it is important to investigate the past and the present in a global context that includes metropole and colonies in a single analytic framework. The 6,600 unnamed Indian dead, referred to above, were British subjects who, as I show below, were denied rights experienced by both Europeans, with whom they worked, and by wealthier Indians. They experienced village life in Britishruled India; on ships they lived and worked with crews from diverse East and South Asian backgrounds and were part of the cosmopolitan populations of the docksides and cities of empire. Global political and economic changes impacted upon their lives at all of these locations and they embodied the links and conflicts between different sites of empire. Ironically, as I discuss in the final section below, their centrality to these global processes has contributed to their invisibility in ‘postcolonial’ national histories. However, recent interdisciplinary work on globalization together with groundbreaking British South Asian and working-class histories and histories that focus on maritime trade and cultural connections between distant parts of the world are contributing to a greater interest in all aspects of Indian seafarers’ lives.9 That the past does not exist independently from the present and that power is constitutive of the production of historical narratives has been demonstrated by the anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot.10 His analytical framework is useful in investigating and identifying invisible histories and dissecting the competing processes involved in the production of contemporary discourses about the experiences of resistance of Indian seafarers in Britain and its empire. Trouillot describes any historical narrative as a ‘particular bundle of silences’. Each bundle is the result of a unique process which can be deconstructed and addressed through the use of a conceptual tool that identifies four significant ‘moments’:

Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of the sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of the archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of the narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).11

In his studies of Haitian and North American histories, Trouillot demonstrates how different types of silences, identified at any of the four different but often overlapping ‘moments’ of historical production, ‘criss-cross and accumulate’ over decades or centuries. In the case of Indian seafarers, silences enter the production of history at all of the identified ‘moments’ so that their experiences as subjects of violence, discrimination, resistance and struggle remain largely invisible in discourses about twenty-first-century multicultural Britain. There is, of course, plentiful archival material that may be used to tell the stories of the shipowners and colonial government, while the task of unmasking the silences of the seafarers’ lives and struggles remains enormous.12 The latter’s locations in global littoral and liminal spaces have contributed to the evanescence of their lives in the story of Britain. Indian seafarers’ resistances on land and at sea have become invisible in the present through the accumulation of silences over the decades. This chapter aims to identify some of the processes that have contributed to those silences at specific ‘moments’. I begin by summarizing the British maritime legislation that institutionalized their liminal status and subsequent invisibility.

MARITIME LEGISLATION AND PROCESSES OF EXCLUSION AT SEA AND ON LAND Indian seafarers have been travelling to London since soon after the creation of the East India Company in 1600. No ship sailing out of London would return with its original crew, since many either perished or left the ship in order to seek more lucrative opportunities. They were replaced with Indian, Chinese and African seamen whose entry and settlement in Britain were restricted by the Navigation and Merchant Shipping Acts which constructed exclusionary legal categories of Britishness.13 Ships leaving Britain for Asia were restricted to employing a maximum of 25 per cent Indian crews, leading to seafarers becoming stranded in London.14 By the early nineteenth century about 1,000 Asian seafarers (including those from South East Asia) were arriving annually at British ports.15 Hostility to their presence was a constant feature in East India Company, Parliamentary and philanthropic discourse, and became enshrined in law in the racially discriminatory 1823 Merchant Shipping Act (‘Lascar Act’). Before summarizing the effects of this legislation, it is important to contextualize the use of the category of ‘lascar’ in colonial India. From the eighteenth century East India Company and government legislators and administrators used racialized terms to describe and define different categories of labourers, subsuming their individual names, lives, histories and languages. The ‘coolie’ was the unskilled, mobile Asian labourer and the ‘lascar’ was the maritime equivalent of the

‘coolie’.16 Both terms are used in Indian languages; however, new and demeaning connotations became attached to them during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the processes of recruitment of bonded and indentured labourers transported to work on plantations and in mines and factories across India and Britain’s other colonies. The term ‘coolie’ was used in a derogatory way throughout British colonies to label those workers, and their families, who came from a range of Indian, Chinese and Malay backgrounds. The merchant seamen who transported indentured labourers as well as the goods they produced were also the subjects of discriminatory British merchant shipping legislation. In British colonial discourse, the category of ‘lascar’ did not originally describe a racialized ‘type’, since Indian seafarers, like indentured labourers, came from very diverse regional, linguistic and religious backgrounds. Rather it defined the terms of employment of maritime labourers contracted in gangs.17 The classification of ‘lascar’ forced Indian seafarers into a sealed category which ensured that they remained at the base of British Merchant Navy hierarchies. The place of the ‘lascar’ in that hierarchy was secured through British Parliamentary legislation and East India Company regulations and maintained through the racialized discourses and practices of white shipowners, white crews, seafarers’ unions and dockside populations. It therefore became a racialized category.18 The ‘Lascar Act’ extended the earlier restrictions on Indian seafarers by confirming the legal category of lascar as being outside the boundaries of British citizenship and settlement rights. Their accommodation, diet and wages remained worse than those of white, African and Caribbean seamen. The Act was not repealed until 1963 which ensured that their inferior conditions continued up until that time.19 It was almost impossible for Indian seafarers to legally become members of the expanding heterogeneous dockside working populations in Britain. The 1869 opening of the Suez Canal and the introduction of steamships led to an increase in Indian seafarers who continued to be a focus of racial hostilities and government anxiety, resulting in them being made the subjects of further exclusionary legislation. The 1894 Merchant Shipping Act bound lascars to return to India by giving shipowners enhanced powers to place them on ships heading back to India from any British port. Indian seafarers who failed to do this could be prosecuted.20 Despite the demand for their labour, working conditions for Indian seafarers remained worse than for their European counterparts. In 1914 they earned less than a quarter of the wage paid to white British seamen doing equivalent work. They were given lower quality food and were each entitled to just over half the space on board allocated to Europeans.21 Indian seamen continued to be employed in large numbers during the First World War and by 1919 made up 20 per cent of the British maritime labour force. By the outbreak of the Second World War they made up over a quarter of this workforce. They did not receive pensions because although shipowners, under the 1911 National Insurance Act, were obliged to contribute to a pension fund for lascars, seafarers who did not live in Britain were excluded from receiving the pension. Instead, white ex-seafarers benefited from the payments.22 In 1925 the Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order came into force following pressure from the Home Office, the Board of Trade and the National Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union (NSFU). The order stipulated that ‘coloured alien seamen’ must register with the

police. The aim of the order was to ‘prevent the entry’ and ‘accumulation’ of ‘coloured seamen’ who it was alleged ‘competed in the overstocked labour market’, causing ‘serious discontent’ among British sailors. Indian seafarers were legally British subjects, not ‘Aliens’, and so the order should not have been applied to them. However, it was hard for lascars to prove that they were British subjects because they were not required to carry passports. Unlike white seafarers, lascars’ official documentation, their continuous discharge certificates, were not accepted as proof of nationality, the justification being that they were often trafficked.23 The practices of shipowners and government officials ensured that they and other undocumented ‘coloured’ people living in Britain became the subjects of this racially discriminatory legislation. 24 The competing interests of those in the government, the East India Company and later the British seafarers’ unions meant that Indian seafarers, kept separate through being classified as lascars, were forced to remain in a liminal, often invisible state when in Britain. In the following section I draw on recent historical research in order to expose some of the hidden struggles of Indian seafarers on land and at sea.

INVISIBLE RESISTANCE: DESERTION, NEGOTIATION All seafarers sailing on British ships from the seventeenth through to the twentieth century were subject to harsh conditions and frequently brutal treatment from officers.25 However, owing to their status as colonial subjects and classification as lascars, Indian seafarers who attempted to improve their conditions at sea or on land, or to resist abuse, were subject to extreme levels of violence as well as imprisonment.26 Poverty at home, debt incurred in getting work on the ship, together with their shifting liminal position onshore in Britain, meant that their individual and collective resistance often took forms that were not obviously adversarial. Moreover, Indian seafarers’ resistances took place in the context of the racialized characteristics ascribed to lascars by their employers. Lascars were seen as docile and content to follow the orders of their superiors. The dominance of this construction of lascars has meant that their acts of resistance have remained invisible. However, as I show below, the perceptive reinterpretations of their practices of desertion and informal negotiation in recent research hint at how they managed in hostile environments. I begin with a discussion of the stereotyped ‘docility’ and inaptitude attributed to lascars that framed their resistances. Docility was a positive trait from the perspectives of employers who, from the 1890s, were reacting against the increasing militancy and expense of European seamen and therefore recruited more Indian, African and Caribbean crews. In 1903, Captain Hood, a retired shipmaster, wrote a report, ‘The Blight of Insubordination’, in opposition to criticism of the employment of Indian seamen by the press, unions and Parliament. He asserted that Indian seamen were ‘more completely the servants of the ship owner while under engagement than any other group of men doing similar work that ship owners have ever had to do the work for them’.27 The racial characteristics ascribed to lascars were contingent on political struggles between

the different interest groups of the government, shipowners and unions. In 1893, in an inquiry into the loss of a ship, a British captain explained lascar inaptitude by the fact that they were ‘absolutely useless in cold weather’ whereas, twenty years later, in a celebratory look at the P&O shipping line, their docility and ability to endure cold was praised and explained creatively: The Lascars are a race of sailors, and take kindly to seafaring ways. … The crew sign on for two years, and are docile and easy to handle … Lascars bear cold better than Europeans, provided they are not kept in it too long. This is due to the amount of caloric absorbed into their systems under their own tropical sun.28

The construction of lascar docility has to be understood in the context of the marginal positions that Indian seafarers were forced into through legislation and discriminatory practices.29 The anodyne phrase ‘jumping ship’ conceals the ingenuity of seafarers who took enormous risks in order to improve their situations. From the earliest records through to the 1940s, Indian seafarers escaped their bondage by ‘deserting’, despite their settlement in Britain being illegal. In some cases this would result in men taking on new identities, merging into the increasingly cosmopolitan dockside populations and building the foundations for the future settlement of greater numbers of South Asian people. In the nineteenth century some worked as street sweepers, religious tract sellers and as pedlars, selling textiles and ‘fancy goods’ the length of Britain. During the 1914 to 1918 War lascars were actively recruited by local industries acutely short of labour.30 One aim of ‘desertion’ by lascars was to get recruited on to other ships on superior British Articles.31 This is illustrated by the oral histories of Bengali seafarers born at the beginning of the twentieth century. Referring to conversations about the period from the 1920s, the community worker and oral historian Yousuf Choudhury recounted that: Most of the Calcutta based seamen had a common desire to become English article seamen but it was a lengthy process. The Indian seamen had to desert their ship first in the U.K. but the white captain of most of the ships did not allow their crews from their colonies to go ashore. Even when they managed to … desert … they only had a few places to go.32

Israel Miah recalled how he left his ship, the Clan Baxter, in 1937: It was very hard work – just like slaves we worked. When we came to Tilbury five or six people ran away from the ship. I didn’t go with them, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, now they have all gone, and they have put a watchman on the ship, so nobody can go anymore.’ I was thinking ‘How can I go now?’ Then I took some clothes in a bucket to wash with another Indian boy … they used to say the watchman and the serang going to do this and that if they catch you … but we were lucky, no watchman and we just walked out, free.33

The ‘deserters’ then had to avoid the warrants issued against them by the shipping companies as well as the enforcement of the 1925 Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order referred to above. Warrants were not always issued because key individuals such as Suna Miah (known as Ali), an ex-seafarer and seamen’s boarding-house owner who provided shipping companies with crews in London, were able to obtain exemptions for friends or relatives who had deserted. Unsurprisingly only a small minority of ‘ex-lascars’, who had the support of people such as Ali, managed to obtain the identity papers from the police or India House necessary to be recruited on British Articles. The majority worked casually in kitchens

and tailoring, remaining in Britain until the situation changed again at the outbreak of the 1939 to 1945 War, or returned to work on ships on Indian Articles. 34 Records of individual resistances on-board ship are sparse. Colonial officials recruited crews through Indian middlemen (serangs) who also had authority over Indian crews on board. European officers were unable to identify their crews and issued orders through serangs. There were, however, many examples of violence, including lashing, leading to severe injuries and deaths of Indian seafarers at sea.35 Crew members also lost wages for ‘crimes’ ranging from swearing to smuggling.36 Gopalan Balachandran has researched the seemingly politically unorganized collective resistance of Indian seafarers.37 He argues that owing to their powerlessness and lack of communication with outside agencies while at sea, this type of resistance came to a head at specific moments such as when a ship arrived at port or was about to set sail. Because of their liminal and vulnerable position, when Indian seafarers defied authority they did so after careful consideration of available options and through weighing up the probability of their success. They saw greater opportunities for effective resistance at the dockside where they were less dependent on the despotism of the captain and could be in contact with their peers and networks ashore. Indian seafarers used silence and ambiguity to ensure that they worked on their preferred vessels. British Indian mercantile marine laws at the end of the nineteenth century stipulated that ‘Indian crews could be transferred from a ship berthed at a port in Britain to another ship berthed at the same port and bound for a port in British India’.38 However, it suited seafarers to be transferred to ships sailing to Australia or the Americas because it extended their employment. It also suited the employers because it gave them access to a cheap and ‘docile’ crew. Indian seafarers did not voice any objections to transfers between British ports when employers required crews, while government officials stretched the law and ignored such illegal transfers. However, if the crews disliked the ship that they were destined for, they spoke out and used the law to refuse to transfer. The case of the SS Golconda in 1900 highlights the strategic advantages of their ambiguous treatment of the law: [The crew] refused to transfer to SS Dunera – a troop-ship for which they held a strong ‘dislike’. While they could not refuse transfer to a troop-ship, or because they ‘disliked’ the new vessel, they were within their rights to refuse to transfer to the SS Dunera since it was berthed at another port.39

The crew were charged with refusing to carry out orders, for which ‘crime’ they faced twelve weeks in prison and a fine. The magistrate found that the port officials had no right to transfer the crew and found in the latter’s favour. However, once this successful public challenge had taken place, the British Indian government changed the law so that Indian crews could legally be transferred between British ports.40 While British unions were hostile to lascar labour, Indian seafarers were not hostile to trade unions. Labour organization was hard since, although there had been attempts at union organization among Indian seafarers in Britain and India, in colonial India trade unions were not made legal until 1926. Moreover, Indian seafarers joined ships at the distant ports of Calcutta and Bombay and came from very diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds,

having been forced by poverty to seek work on ships. Where they have existed at all in historical writing, narratives about Indian seafarers suggested that they were small peasants who took to sea to supplement their incomes. The discourses of the state and of employers maintained that men arrived in Calcutta or Bombay from their villages and found work on ships through the serangs who were intermediaries in the labour market, leaders and enforcers of discipline of shipping crews on board vessels and on land at foreign ports. However, contrary to the stated views of shipping companies, the seafarers did not willingly depend on these brokers, who would take the majority of their wages. The shipping companies encouraged the serangs, since through controlling the lascars they weakened the latter’s collective bargaining power. The sailors formed a trade union in India in 1918 and went on strike for better conditions in the early 1920s.41 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Calcutta seafarers struggled to undermine the intermediaries and develop fairer systems of recruitment such as rotas based on length of time ashore in India without a ship.42 In 1936 negotiations, Indian unions’ demands for universally higher wages and a shorter working week were thwarted by the British unions which negotiated worse conditions for Indian seafarers. Indian seafarers had argued for a fifty-six hour week at sea and forty-eight hours at port for all, while the British unions supported sixty-four hours at sea and fifty-six hours on land for all seafarers. The latter also agreed on differential treatment between crews in the form of a longer transition period to the agreed working hours for Indian crews, unregulated hours on sailing days and overtime compensation given as time off rather than as monetary payment.43 The exclusion of Indian British subjects from white British seafarers’ unions contributed to the mesh of silences about their industrial activism in historical narratives about British working-class organization. British seafarers’ unions refused to accept Indian seafarers’ unions until the 1940s after the Indian seafarers had brought much of the British Merchant Navy to a halt as they instigated strikes across the empire.44

VISIBLE RESISTANCE: THE 1939 TO 1940 LASCAR STRIKES Their assumed docility and lack of agency were seen, by shipping companies and the government, to make Indian seafarers vulnerable to ‘outside agitators’ who sought to manipulate them into insubordination. Rebellions were viewed as isolated and irrational, and were not considered in the context of the long-term discrimination and frequent brutality experienced by the seafarers. The global strikes by Indian seafarers at the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 powerfully and publicly challenged the notion of the compliant and childlike lascar. Their actions forced the shipowners and British government to accommodate Indian seafarers’ demands at the same time as the government tried to isolate and control supposed non-typical ‘agitators’. In 1939 white seafarers earned £9, 12s and 6p while lascars earned £1 and 17s. Their hours, food allowances, space allowances and clothing allowances were all significantly worse than those of white sailors. Indian seafarers started demanding a 100 per cent wage rise before the war was officially declared, and three days after that declaration eight ships

were on strike. As the strike spread, some owners capitulated to the lascar demands while others prosecuted them for breach of contract. There were mass arrests of lascars who were given prison sentences with hard labour of up to twelve weeks. At the end of October 1939 forty Indian seafarers, from the Clan Alpine, were found guilty of ‘wilful disobedience of lawful commands’ and sentenced to two months in prison for protesting about the partial settlement of a claim they had negotiated in Cape Town. During the first two weeks of November 1939 lascar crews from three further ships berthed in London – the SS Britannia, SS Somali and City of Manchester – were imprisoned for striking. In contrast, striking lascar crews from two other ships – the SS Manela and City of Capetown – won their demands for wage increases and bonuses. By December 1939 almost 400 Indian seafarers were in prison, and strikes had spread to ships in India, Burma, South Africa and Australia.45 As with the supposed ‘insubordination’ of lascars in the previous century it was assumed by government and shipping companies that ‘political agitators’ and ‘foreign agents’ had instigated the strikes rather than that they were part of a wider industrial dispute over longstanding economic and political complaints. The actions of the hundreds of Indian seamen demonstrated the depth of their grievances. The case of the SS Mulbera in November 1939 provides an example. The all-Indian crew refused to go to sea without a 100 per cent pay rise, a £10 bonus and warm clothing. Four alleged ‘ringleaders’ were arrested and sentenced to twelve weeks’ hard labour. The remaining ninety-six Indian crewmen were told the case would be dropped if they went to sea. They refused and were all imprisoned for eight weeks of hard labour.46 Rozina Visram has documented many examples of strikes and arrests that took place in the first few months of the war and has also investigated the union organization, struggles, setbacks and achievements of Indian seafarers up until the end of the war and the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. Although they did not achieve conditions equal to those of white seafarers, they made substantial gains.47 As Gopalan Balachandran has argued, the 1939 to 1940 strike was pivotal to the long struggle of transforming the status of Indian seafarers in the British shipping industry. He has stated that ‘Indian seamen went into these strikes as coolies and emerged from them as workers’.48 Israel Miah, quoted above, was one of those ‘workers’. He ‘jumped ship’ in London in 1937 and then worked for tailors and in restaurants for 15 shillings a week (or £3 a month – almost twice a lascar wage). He decided to return to work on ships again after the 1939 to 1945 War had started because of the improvement in wages: Then the war was about to start, and people talking, ‘Money coming. Money coming’ … everywhere, when a war starts people’s wages go up … I knew all about what the war was about, but I had made up my mind I wanted some money … I went on a ship [to Australia] … it was hard work but hard work won’t kill you. They paid ten pounds or twelve pounds a month … not bad.49

After two trips to Australia, Israel Miah and his fellow crew left the British Merchant Navy during the war because, as he put it, there was ‘trouble with the engineer’ on their ship that had docked at Cardiff. Miah recollected that, although they were threatened with imprisonment, they escaped with a fine of 10 shillings. He went to London and was able to take advantage of the labour shortages, money he had saved, a brother who had also worked

on ships and Bengali village networks of ex-seafarers to establish a café which later expanded into several cafés and restaurants.50 In 1960 Israel Miah became the founder president of what became ‘The Bangladesh Caterers’ Association’ – which, fifty years later, represents the political and economic interests of the owners of 12,000 British Bangladeshi restaurants and takeaways. The experiences, networks and resistance to the discrimination that he had faced on-board ship had all contributed to Miah’s immersion in London life and his and others’ future prosperity.51 As the war progressed, mistreatment and strikes continued, leading to many others taking similar opportunities to leave their ships. Visram quotes an M15 officer who claimed in 1943 that there were 200 to 300 such desertions annually.52 The case of Sylheti seafarer Mortuja Ali exemplifies how the experience of striking might have encouraged and enabled desertion and settlement in the UK. Ali left home due to family poverty in 1938 and made at least four oceanic voyages between 1939 and 1942. Arriving in London with a cargo of meat and fruit from Australia, he met up with a Coventry-based cousin who encouraged him to desert, but Ali decided to return to India. The crew were told that they would be paid and released at Cochin, in southern India. However, on reaching Cochin they were informed that they would neither be released nor paid. The crew went on strike in protest and Ali recalled: The striking crew were punished with three month’s [sic] hard labour. For the first one and a half months they were to beat out coconut husks with a stone and for the last one month and half they were to make rope with the beaten coconut fibre. When the three months was over we were taken to Calcutta and released. We were paid only 45 rupees for seven months work.53

After returning home to Sylhet for three days and learning that a sister had died, Ali returned to Calcutta and obtained work on a ship bound for Liverpool where, he recounted, ‘[w]hile the ship was under repairs I quietly disappeared from the port’. After joining his cousin in Coventry, Ali went on to work as a pedlar, on market stalls, in a series of cafés, factories and shops, and as a refuse collector in Coventry, London, Birmingham and Leeds. He owned three cafés before becoming bankrupt, unemployed and receiving his pension in 1986.54 His liminal status at sea and on land meant that the experiences of Mortuja Ali – and many others like him who did not have the financial success of ex-seafarers such as Israel Miah – have remained outside the dominant narratives about post-war, working-class Britain. Dominant narratives of the 1939 to 1945 War have, unsurprisingly, excluded the histories of the lascar strikes, wartime desertions and struggles for equal rights. Using Trouillot’s concept of each historical narrative being made up of a ‘particular bundle of silences’, it is clear that silences entered the production of the histories of Indian seafarers’ strikes during the Second World War at all four ‘moments’ that he identifies. During the War (the ‘moment’ of fact creation) the strikes received little publicity. Visram has shown that the courts took evidence in the cases of strikes such as that of the SS Mulbera in camera, and did not allow Indian crewmen access to their union.55 The government was concerned about the negative propaganda of the disloyalty of strikers and the discrimination experienced by British Indian subjects, and keen to prevent information about ships being obtained by the Nazis. In the years following the war (the ‘moments’ of fact assembly and fact retrieval), as Britain conceded independence to India and Pakistan and sought compliant labour from the ex-

empire, the wartime conflicts involving lascars were subsumed in records and narratives that emphasized British heroism and a shared ‘wartime spirit’. Furthermore, the surviving lascars were not in a position to challenge the dominant representations of the war. The work of collecting and publishing the oral histories of elderly Bangladeshi seafarers, many of whom spoke limited English and could not write, by Adams and Choudhury during the 1980s, was not supported by funds from universities, museums or publishers. Therefore the experiences of the seafarers remained concealed in the national commemorations of the fortieth, fiftieth and sixtieth anniversaries of the Second World War. Neither do seafarers’ resistances to racism and discrimination or the strikes and imprisonments imposed on them by the British establishment fit comfortably with twenty-first-century constructions of cohesive, multicultural Britain. In the contemporary fourth ‘moment’ of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance), Second World War reminiscences are used to repeat and re-emphasize how colonial subjects fought loyally on the side of the British Empire for the defeat of Hitler. In the twenty-first century, following campaigns by British South Asian and African Caribbean individuals and organizations, the sacrifices of military personnel from the empire have been acknowledged in a memorial in Westminster and have begun to be examined in exhibitions. However, such one-dimensional retellings of wartime histories deny the complex and creative experiences of British South Asians and impact upon contemporary contests over national and local belonging.

INVISIBLE HISTORIES AND BELONGING Parallel to the absences of histories of resistance of Indian seafarers at sea and on land from the narratives of the Second World War is the invisibility of the histories of their lives and struggles in the construction of the category of the ‘British working class’. Due to British maritime legislation, South Asian seafarers were denied the possibility of legally settling in or bringing their families to join them as part of the dockside populations that over time became defined as ‘working class’ in sociological and political discourse. The South Asian population was overwhelmingly male, and several men had partnerships with white women – however, many remained connected with relatives thousands of miles away. Choudhury recounted how, as a child in wartime Sylhet, he observed what happened when the shipping office informed families about the deaths of seafarers: As the news came, the dead seamen’s relatives and friends would gather and begin crying and shouting … soon the bad news spread from house to house, village to village. The people became nervous, worrying that they would be next in line for the shock. The British public never heard the cry of the seamen’s widows.56

In east London, their liminal status as seafaring subjects of the empire ensured that, although South Asian men had been living in the East End for almost 400 years, those employed by British shipping companies supplying Britain and who experienced bombings at sea and on land, as with their families, did not become part of the dominant story of East End solidarity during the Second World War. I have shown elsewhere that the omission of the experience of Indian seafarers from that powerful historical narrative when it was mobilized during the

1980s and 1990s contributed to justifications for racism and the denial of entitlements to housing and other social welfare benefits for British Bengali families based on their perceived status as being ‘outside’ of the East End working class.57 The casual assumption that some British South Asians remain outside of the ‘working class’ is demonstrated through a recent example in the media coverage of the 2010 national elections. The London Evening Standard carried a report on possible voting behaviour in the Poplar and Limehouse Parliamentary constituency in London’s East End. The report presented the demographics of the area as ‘40% Muslim Bangladeshi, 40% white working class and 20% young professionals’.58 In this case, the religion of the British Bangladeshi population is used both to define their identities and to predict their political preferences, while ‘class’ is presented as the defining characteristic of white voters. The Guardian newspaper carried a report during the same election campaign that focused on the five main candidates whom they classified as ‘Bangladeshi-Muslim’. The report used the words of elderly residents, classified as ‘white working-class’, to construct two separate homogeneous categories of residents who have no shared political interests: Joyce then says the unsayable. ‘This is supposed to be a multicultural area but all the candidates are Asian. I don’t feel they represent my views.’ Her husband Bill concurs: ‘This borough has a proud history of taking in different people over the years, but we feel we’re being squeezed out.’59

These are familiar examples of how British Bangladeshis, many of whom are the extended families of seafarers, are constructed as being a homogeneous category of ‘Muslims’ in media and political discourses. They are seen as separate from and not sharing political interests with the ‘working class’, assumed to be white, in the past or present.60 These discourses are consolidated through the popular retelling of local histories where migration to London’s East End is described as a process of ‘sedimentary settlement’.61 In that narrative the Brick Lane mosque is used to tell the story of how seventeenth-century French Huguenots found refuge and built a Christian Protestant chapel, which was converted into a synagogue by Jewish refugees fleeing Europe and finally became a mosque as migrants from Bangladesh settled in the area from the 1950s. In this narrative the thousands of Indian seafarers who worked on ships that landed in London between 1616 and the Second World War are ignored. Without examining migration histories and contemporary politics in a framework that encompasses Britain and its colonies, the reasons behind lascars’ temporary, illegal and therefore largely invisible settlement are lost. Such omissions give the impression that South Asians did not share spaces and lives with other migrants from Britain and its empire, and were therefore not part of the emerging ‘working class’. Due to recent historical research such as that discussed above, there is now a greater awareness of the early presence of a small number of Indian seafarers and servants in the densely populated East End. Nevertheless, in twenty-first-century multicultural Britain, there remains a need to recognize both the importance of Indian seafarers’ global roles to Britain’s industrial development, trading empires and wartime survival, and the significance of their resistances to the discrimination and legislation that prevented their legal settlement in Britain.

Notes 1 Visram, R. (2002) Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto Press, p. 347. 2 This is demonstrated by the involvement of young Bangladeshi people in a Heritage lottery funded project (Battle of Plassey Young People’s Project) that investigated the links between the East India Company and London’s Bangladeshi populations. 3 Van Gennep, A. (2004) [1909] The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge. 4 Trouillot, M-R. (1995) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, p. 27. 5 Hall, C. (2002) Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867. London: Polity Press, p. 5. 6 This point was made most powerfully by Toyin Agbetu in Westminster Abbey on 27 March 2007. Agbetu confronted the Queen and Prime Minister on a live BBC broadcast of a service of commemoration for the bicentenary of the British abolition of the transatlantic slave-trade. 7 Wemyss, G. (2008) ‘White memories, white belonging: competing colonial anniversaries in “postcolonial” east London’. Social Research Online, 13 (5) (accessed 24 January 2011). 8 Wemyss, G. (2009) The Invisible Empire: White Discourse, Tolerance and Belonging. Farnham: Ashgate. 9 This essay draws on the work of historians who have carried out extensive and groundbreaking research. As an anthropologist searching for hidden histories which contest dominant representations of Britishness, I am especially indebted to research by Caroline Adams, Gopalan Balachandran, Yousuf Choudhury, Michael Fisher, Shompa Lahiri, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Laura Tabili and Rozina Visram (see Bibliography for full details). While not seeking to repeat the scholarship of these historians, this chapter aims to use their research to develop arguments about contemporary Britishness. 10 Trouillot, Silencing the Past. 11 Ibid., p. 26. 12 For example, the East India Company and India Office archives at the British Library. 13 Those who were not categorized as British had no rights to settle in Britain. A consequence of this was that Indian seafarers were kept in a constant state of ‘inbetweenness’ and that any attempts to improve their situation were made in the context of their vulnerability as outsiders. The 1660 Navigation Act (Section 7) stipulated that three-quarters of the crew of an English registered ship importing goods from Asia had to be English. The Act was repealed in 1849. A majority of Indian seafarers could legally be employed east but not west of the Cape of Good Hope. In practice, for many reasons, the legal requirements were not followed and ships arrived in Britain with more than 25 per cent Indian crews. However, these regulations were suspended by the government in wartime when British merchant sailors were pressed into service on Royal Navy ships. 14 Fisher, M. (2004) Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857. Delhi: Permanent Black, p. 38. 15 Ibid., p. 66. 16 Balachandran, G. (2005) ‘From “coolies” to workers: protest and identity among Indian seamen, 1914–39’. Unpublished paper presented at ‘Middle Passages: The Oceanic Voyage as Social Process’ conference, Fremantle, Western Australia, 12–16 July. 17 Fisher, Counterflows, p. 33. 18 While remaining critical of the use of the term ‘lascar’, the remainder of this chapter uses it without inverted commas. 19 Lascars were not defined as British subjects until 1849. Lascar Articles stipulated that Indian seafarers could only be discharged and paid off in India. Any Indian seafarer convicted of vagrancy in Britain had to be repatriated by the East India Company. Visram, Asians, p. 30. 20 Ibid., p. 56; Fisher, Counterflows, p. 385. 21 Visram, Asians, p. 55. 22 Ibid., pp. 225–6. 23 Ibid., pp. 206–7. 24 The 1925 legislation was in part a reaction to the 1919 ‘race riots’ which took place across a number of seaports in the post-First World War period of 1919, 1920 and 1921, during mass demobilization from the army. White crowds attacked African, Arab and African Caribbean sailors. Indian seamen were also targeted, although their second-class legal status meant that it was hard for them to compete for jobs or housing. See Jenkinson, J. (2009) Black 1919: Riots, Racism and Resistance in Imperial Britain. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press; and Visram, Asians. 25 Davis, R. (1962) The Rise of the English Shipping Industry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Newton Abbott: David & Charles; and Rediker, M. (1987) Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the

Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 26 Fisher, Counterflows; Visram, Asians; Balachandran, G. (2003) ‘South Asian seafarers and their worlds: c.1870–1930s’. Unpublished paper presented at ‘Seascapes, Littoral Cultures and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges’ conference, American Historical Association, Library of Congress, Washington DC, 12–15 February; Lahiri, S. (2002) ‘Contested relations: the East India Company and lascars in London’, in H. V. Bowen, M. Lincoln and N. Rigby (eds) The Worlds of the East India Company. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. 27 Balachandran, ‘South Asian seafarers’, p. 3. 28 Mitton, G. E. (1913) Peeps at Great Steamship Lines: The Peninsular and Oriental, London: Adam & Charles Black, pp. 57–8. 29 Shompa Lahiri has examined how, working within that stereotype of docility, seafarers were able to pursue their own interests and resist conversion to Christianity by using cultures of hospitality and indifference to ‘mask’ resistance. See ‘Contested relations’, p. 172. 30 Visram, Asians, pp. 64–6 and 196–7. 31 Ibid., p. 347. 32 Choudhury, Y. (1993) The Roots and Tales of Bangladeshi Settlers. Birmingham: Sylheti Social History Group, p. 52. 33 Adams, C. (1987) Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers: Life Stories of Pioneer Sylheti Settlers in Britain. London: THAP Books, p. 96. 34 Choudhury, Roots and Tales, p. 52; and Sons of the Empire: Oral History from the Bangladeshi Seamen who Served on British Ships during the 1939–45 War. Birmingham: Sylheti Social History Group, p. 4 (quoting Elais Miah); Adams, Across Seven Seas, pp. 74–6 (quoting Mr Nawab Ali). 35 Balachandran, G. (2008) ‘Cultures of protest in transnational contexts: Indian seamen abroad 1886–1945’. Transforming Cultures ejournal, 3 (2) (accessed 7 July 2010). There are also many examples referred to in Fisher, Counterflows; and Visram, Asians. 36 Balachandran, ‘Cultures of protest’, p. 55. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., p. 60. 39 Ibid., p. 61. 40 Ibid., pp. 61–3. British trade unions saw lascars as a threat to wage rates and conditions, and opposed the employment of Indian seafarers on routes to North Atlantic ports. When Indian crews refused to sail on ships bound for non-Indian ports because they disliked the officers, they were able to refuse the shipowners’ orders, using the excuse that their contracts did not allow them to sail to those destinations. After threatening them with prison terms, magistrates agreed with the arguments of ‘improper transfer’ put by the Indian crews. Unlike in the case of transfers between ports in Britain, once they had lost in court the shipowners did not change the contracts due to fear of provoking the British unions. 41 Chattopadhay, S. (2008) ‘Before communism: Muzaffar Ahmad and the war years in Kolkata (1913–1919)’. 4 Pragoti (accessed 25 August 2008). 42 Balachandran, ‘South Asian seafarers’, p. 8. 43 Ibid., p. 9. 44 For a detailed account of the activism and organization of Indian seafarers see Visram, Asians, ch. 8, ‘Lascar Activism in Britain, 1920–1945’. 45 Visram, Asians, pp. 236–9 passim. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Balachandran, ‘South Asian seafarers’, p. 9. 49 Adams, Across Seven Seas, p. 101. It is not clear from the interview whether Israel Miah signed up on Lascar or British Articles. If his memory of the wages is correct it is likely that he had been able to get employed on British Articles. 50 Ibid., pp. 102–7. 51 The contributions of Miah, who later became known as Haji Shirajul Islam, are referred to in several contributions to a special edition of The Bangladeshi Cuisine published for the BCA Fiftieth Anniversary Golden Jubilee Celebration in October 2010. 52 Visram, Asians, p. 244. 53 Mortuja Ali, quoted in Choudhury, Sons of Empire, p. 34. 54 Ibid. 55 Visram, Asians, p. 238. 56 Choudhury, Sons of Empire, p. viii. 57 Wemyss, The Invisible Empire.

58 London Evening Standard, 12 April 2010. 59 Guardian, 19 April 2010 (accessed 27 March 2011). 60 This issue is discussed in more depth in Wemyss, The Invisible Empire. 61 Thanks to Julia Bard for describing it this way at the ‘Rising from the East’ history event on 15 November 2009 at Toynbee Hall.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, C. (1987) Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers: Life Stories of Pioneer Sylheti Settlers in Britain. London: THAP Books. Balachandran, G. (2003) ‘South Asian seafarers and their worlds: c.1870–1930s’. Unpublished paper presented at ‘Seascapes, Littoral Cultures and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges’ conference, American Historical Association, Library of Congress, Washington DC, 12–15 February. — (2005) ‘From “coolies” to workers: protest and identity among Indian seamen, 1914–39’. Unpublished paper presented at ‘Middle Passages: The Oceanic Voyage as Social Process’ conference, Fremantle, Western Australia, 12–16 July. — (2008) ‘Cultures of protest in transnational contexts: Indian seamen abroad 1886–1945’. Transforming Cultures ejournal, 3 (2) . Chattopadhay, S. (2008) ‘Before communism: Muzaffar Ahmad and the war years in Kolkata (1913–1919)’. 4 Pragoti . Choudhury, Y. (1993), The Roots and Tales of Bangladeshi Settlers. Birmingham: Sylheti Social History Group. — (1995) Sons of the Empire: Oral History from the Bangladeshi Seamen who Served on British Ships during the 1939–45 War. Birmingham: Sylheti Social History Group. Davis, R. (1962) The Rise of the English Shipping Industry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Newton Abbott: David & Charles. Fisher, M. (2004) Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857. Delhi: Permanent Black. Hall, C. (2002) Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830– 1867. London: Polity Press. Jenkinson, J. (2009) Black 1919: Riots, Racism and Resistance in Imperial Britain. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Lahiri, S. (2000) ‘Patterns of resistance: Indian seamen in imperial Britain’, in A. J. Kershen (ed.) Language, Labour and Migration. Aldershot: Ashgate. — (2002) ‘Contested relations: the East India Company and lascars in London’, in H. V. Bowen, M. Lincoln and N. Rigby (eds) The Worlds of the East India Company. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Mitton, G. E. (1913) Peeps at Great Steamship Lines: The Peninsular and Oriental. London: Adam & Charles Black. Rediker, M. (1987) Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press. Subrahmanyam, S. (1997) ‘Connected histories: notes towards a reconfiguration of early modern Eurasia’. Modern Asian Studies, 31 (3), 735–62. Tabili, L. (1994) ‘We Ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain. New York: Cornell University Press. Trouillot, M.-R. (1995) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Van Gennep, A. (2004) [1909] The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge. Visram, R. (1986) Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700–1947. London: Pluto Press. — (1999) ‘Kamal A. Chunchie of the Coloured Men’s Institute: the man and the legend’. Immigrants & Minorities, 18 (1), 29–48. — (2002) Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto Press. Wemyss, G. (2008) ‘White memories, white belonging: competing colonial anniversaries in “postcolonial” east London’. Social Research Online, 13 (5) . — (2009) The Invisible Empire: White Discourse, Tolerance and Belonging. Farnham: Ashgate.

Chapter 4

Ghulam Rasul’s Travels: Migration, Recolonization and Resistance in Inter-War Britain Laura Tabili

In 1914, at the height of European imperial power, fewer than sixty million of Britain’s 425 million subjects lived in the British Isles. The vast majority, some 86 per cent, inhabited Britain’s overseas empire, comprising a global and multiracial colonized workforce whose labour was mobilized in service of Britain’s elite. In the 1920s and 1930s, rough estimates suggest, colonized workers in Britain numbered a few thousand, many employed in one critical industry, the British mercantile marine. This chapter focuses on the humblest of these migrants, such as lascars and pedlars, and how they resisted official efforts to recolonize them in Britain. South Asian workers travelling to and working in Britain took part in a paradoxical duality: filling marginal occupational niches, their work enriched Britain disproportionately. Those who migrated within these formidable world-scale constraints nonetheless pursued their own agendas and made their own histories. Processes common to many industrial societies operated in the British Empire, which drained wealth from colonies not only through flows of goods and profits but also through massive and often involuntary labour displacement. South Asians were dispersed throughout the British Empire as soldiers, merchant seafarers and craftsmen.1 Workers’ mobility from the colonies to Britain itself embodied an appropriation of wealth in the form of human labour, skill and talent, sometimes characterized as a ‘brain drain’ or ‘skill drain’.2 The global labour system with England at its hub undergirded a formal and informal empire, a system simultaneously oppressive and empowering. Metropolitan parasitism on a colonized labour force nonetheless generated opportunities for personal and collective agency and resistance against exploitation.

SELF-DECOLONIZATION Colonization continued to shape and constrain South Asians’ lives and work outside India. Most Indian mariners, who made up one-fifth to a quarter of crews in British merchant vessels, remained bound by Lascar Articles, long-term labour contracts offering substandard wages and working conditions compared with those of British and European sailors on the same ships. Beginning and terminating in India, lascar contracts inhibited South Asian mariners from bargaining over the price of their labour in the global market, keeping them

instead at colonial wage levels wherever they might travel.3 South Asians and other colonized mariners resisted this occupational ghettoization, and the colonial superexploitation it enforced, by jumping ship in British and European ports. There they could seek work at prevailing wages. In this sense, leaving a ship in Europe constituted an act of self-decolonization. These implications were not lost on British maritime employers or their allies in the state. Colonized mariners and other workers thus arrived in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s seeking better wages and working conditions.4 In Britain, men reconstituted and maintained institutions and communities through global and national networks of kin, co-villagers and compatriots. Through these they maximized economic opportunities, shifting from job to job and town to town within the United Kingdom. These survival strategies and practices provoked disproportionate alarm in an officialdom bent on controlling their movements and limiting their livelihoods.

GHULAM RASUL’S TRAVELS Consider the case of Ghulam Rasul, farmer, itinerant pedlar and sometime seafarer.5 Born in 1911 in the British protectorate of Kashmir and Jammu, Ghulam Rasul migrated in 1926 at the age of 15 to the port of Bombay on the west coast of British India. There he obtained work as a trimmer, breaking up coal for the boilers of a steamship operated by the British and India Steam Navigation Company (BISN).6 Arguably, Ghulam Rasul first entered the metropolitan workforce at this point, years before setting foot on British soil, when he began selling his labour power to the BISN.7 From his perspective a bid for economic advantage, Ghulam Rasul’s choice amply profited his employers. They paid him, like other South Asians and many other colonized seafarers, a fraction of a British seaman’s wage.8 Ghulam Rasul’s labour was so cheaply bought not only due to political and economic imbalances between Britain and India, sometimes attributed to uneven development or unequal exchange, but also because he was a migrant, reared in the rural subsistence sector, relieving the industrial system of the cost of his upbringing.9 After five months, Ghulam Rasul ‘left the ship at Bombay’ and returned to the land, where he ‘took up the occupation of a farmer’. But 1929 found him once again at sea, this time working his passage from Bombay to London as a marine fireman, stoking the boilers of a German steamship. Leaving his ship in London, Ghulam Rasul began ‘travelling the country as a pedlar’. In Britain as in India, Ghulam Rasul proved highly mobile. He resided in Kircaldy on the east coast of Scotland for over two years, in Edinburgh for a year, and later in Holborn, the culturally diverse maritime district in South Shields at the mouth of the river Tyne. In August 1932 in South Shields, Ghulam Rasul obtained a pedlar’s licence, but by the following January, ‘owing to the difficult times Rasul gave up peddling’, and, according to local police, was being ‘maintained by his countrymen’.10 Ghulam Rasul then sought and obtained a Certificate of Nationality from the High Commissioner for India, protector of Indian subjects in Britain. This document affirmed his Kashmiri, thus nominally British origins, a necessary

preliminary to seeking work on a British ship.11 By May 1933, Ghulam Rasul had indeed applied to South Shields police to regularize his status as a job-seeker in the maritime labour market.12 Local officials and the Home Office in London, however, ‘deferred’ registration under the misnamed Coloured Alien Seamen Order, part of their ongoing effort to manipulate the maritime labour supply by inhibiting colonized mariners from working out of British ports.13 The Home Office argued that Ghulam Rasul was not a seafarer by trade: ‘With the exception of five months’ service in 1926 and the trip from Bombay to London in 1929 there is nothing to show that he has followed the occupation of a seaman.’ They objected, in part, that the man had not ‘arrived in the United Kingdom in a regular manner’. That is, like many mariners, colonized and otherwise, he had simply jumped ship. Further evading employers’ and state efforts at labour control, Ghulam Rasul had recently, and illegitimately in the Home Office’s view, obtained his ‘special seaman’s certificate’ from the High Commissioner.14 Thwarted in his attempt to return to sea, Ghulam Rasul returned to Fifeshire, Scotland, ‘to assist one of his countrymen who is not in the best of health’. He obtained a local pedlar’s licence on 12 August, the day after his South Shields licence expired, and by October 1933 again resided at his previous address, 188 Links Street, in Kircaldy. Local Police Inspector Paterson Fyfe reported that ‘he states he intends to take up the occupation of a seaman upon hearing from a friend in South Shields that he can get employment as such’. Shortly thereafter, Ghulam Rasul finally got registered, enabling him to work licitly on British ships, and here, at his point of absorption into the metropolitan workforce, he disappeared from the record.15 Ghulam Rasul’s picaresque story adds to accumulating knowledge about colonized sojourners, long marginalized in scholarship about mid-twentieth-century Britain. Scholars remain far from having a comprehensive grasp of where South Asians in inter-war Britain originated or lived, and what types of work they did. Sometime mariners and pedlars of Asian origin appeared in Britain from at least the mid-nineteenth century, escaping shipboard abuse and seeking higher wages.16 They found work as lodging housekeepers, street performers and beggars, dispersing from the ports to provincial towns and seaside resorts. As for their origins, mid-nineteenth-century mariners came mainly from Surat, north of Bombay, and Sylhet, north east of Calcutta. From 1849, when Punjab became part of British India, Punjabi Sikhs joined Britain’s global labour force when the military began recruiting bearers from Campbellpur, and later soldiers.17 By the century’s end, Kashmiris like Ghulam Rasul, many from Mirpur region, had begun migrating to Bombay for work on the docks and later stoking steamships.18 While South Asian labourers dispersed widely throughout the empire and beyond, some scholars attribute Punjabis’ and Kashmiris’ migration to Britain specifically to their military service in the First World War.19 Although historians have thus begun to repopulate Britain with South Asians and other colonized people, many questions remain unresolved or unexplored. Tens of thousands of South Asian lascars served in British ships in the 1920s and 1930s, yet only a few hundred men are known to have worked out of British ports.20 Indian mariners’ exploitation and marginalization aboard ship and ashore in Britain has been amply documented.21 Maritime union activism and networks supporting it stretched from London to Cardiff in Wales, then

along the west coast to Liverpool and Glasgow in Scotland, and eventually back to the Indian ports.22 Pedlars, the most visible occupational group after mariners, included Punjabis demobilized from the First World War. They allegedly pioneered twentieth-century settlements in Britain in the 1920s that gradually attracted other South Asians.23 Indians remaining in Britain after the war worked in mines and foundries until protesting native workers fearful of ‘undercutting’ spurred a shift to entrepreneurial endeavours such as peddling.24 By the late 1930s, Punjabi pedlars were found in ‘almost every British city’, and Mirpuris too had entered the trade.25 Scholars distinguish Punjabi Sikhs, mainly Jullunduris, who worked their passage with the intention of jumping ship to become pedlars, miners or factory workers, from Mirpuris, few of whom found work ashore before the Second World War unless ‘stranded’ in Britain, and Sylhetis who purportedly preferred the sea but peddled ‘as an interim measure’.26 Sylhetis, whom the East India Company originally recruited as cooks and galley workers, also opened cafés and restaurants in Britain.27 Depicting inter-war communities as ‘bridgeheads’ for post-war migration implies continuity between inter-war and post-war migration and settlement patterns.28A recent challenge to the assumption, based largely on oral histories, that Mirpuris migrated primarily as stokers, argues instead that like Punjabis most found their way into Britain’s global and imperial labour force via the military during the World Wars.29 This literature raises a number of questions. Did men of different origins pursue discrete survival strategies in the inter-war years, or did they respond pragmatically in the European context? Did Punjabis’ and Kashmiris’ work histories, and thus their strategies of resistance, differ discernibly in either India or Britain? Did migrants originate in the same parts of Asia and pursue the same paths in the inter-war as in the post-war years, indicating continuity in migration and settlement patterns, or were these migration streams discontinuous, giving the earlier history little bearing on post-1945 migration?30 Evidence about men such as Ghulam Rasul who had brushes with inter-war authorities suggests an east coast circuit of Kashmiris, some identifiably Mirpuri, linking Hull, South Shields, Newcastle and eastern Scotland, that overlapped and possibly meshed with better known west coast networks of Punjabis. Their movements jibe ill with distinctions between Sikh pedlars and Mirpuris or others who allegedly stuck to seafaring until after the Second World War.31 Instead, it suggests that South Asians in Britain developed similar and possibly intertwined networks to evade and subvert colonization and recolonization. This evidence also bears on whether pre-war settlements constituted ‘bridgeheads’ for post-war settlements, or whether discontinuities in migration patterns render them irrelevant to subsequent events. Substantial anecdotal evidence indicates that South Asian, West African, Somali, Yemeni and other colonized migrants in Britain, like migrants the world over, relied upon networks of kin, co-villagers and compatriots for access to housing, jobs, maintenance when unemployed, social services, and intercession with authorities.32 Reciprocal networks bound inter-war Yemeni mariners between the Arabian peninsula and various British and European ports.33 South Asians created similar networks between the subcontinent and Britain in the 1940s and 1950s, in the process of ‘chain migration’, through

which kin and co-villagers joined previously established migrants.34 Ghulam Rasul’s period of dependence on his compatriots in South Shields and his return to Fifeshire to attend to an ailing ‘countryman’ suggest that as early as the 1920s South Asian migrants to Britain enjoyed well-developed networks of information and personal contacts between India and Britain and within the British Isles, enabling their mobility to and within Britain. Tracing Ghulam Rasul’s movements and those of other inter-war South Asians embodies a preliminary effort to reconstruct these networks; to understand how they worked; and thereby to shed light on how they supported colonized workers’ survival and endurance in Britain despite efforts to control and exclude them.

STRANDED IN BRITAIN? Scholars and observers then and now have debated whether former mariners turned to peddling because they were unemployed and stranded in Britain, or whether they migrated with the deliberate intention of jumping ship to find work ashore.35 Ghulam Rasul’s travels and those of others suggest that both occurred. Some men indeed remained in Britain because they became stranded, unable to ship out due to maritime depression and racial discrimination by the union and employers. Kashmiri Mohamed Akbar, discharged in Hull in September 1930, journeyed to Liverpool seeking another ship, but remained there over a year later, destitute and on relief.36 Kashmiri Noah Din, in contrast, had sailed aboard vessels of the City Line, a Liverpool-based steamship company, for several voyages. In 1922, Lee Foo, keeper of the Asiatic boarding-house at 52 Duke Street, Liverpool, asked Noah Din to become a cook for Indian seamen residing in the boarding-house. Din remained there nine years later.37 Many men, however, appear to have travelled to Britain with the explicit intention of leaving seafaring for jobs ashore, thereby evading the labour and spatial control which Lascar Articles were designed to exert. Glasgow Immigration Inspector Ewen McCaskill reported to the Chief Constable that of twenty South Asians living in the city in 1925, most had ‘deserted from steamers at various ports’, including London, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow: ‘The lascars who came here first give shelter and protection to subsequent deserters, take them to mining districts where they obtain employment in mines and ironworks, and when they learn English, they apply to the Police for a Pedlar’s certificate.’38 Kashmiri Mohamed Ali became a licensed pedlar upon disembarking a City Line ship in 1929, moving immediately from Glasgow to Falkirk. Ladha Khan, also Kashmiri, ‘since his arrival followed the occupation of a pedlar’. Between 1927 and 1932, ‘[w]ith the exception of fourteen days when he worked as a fireman on the SS Dagenham’, Kashmiri Choudhri Dehroo had been ‘travelling the country as a pedlar’.39 Evidence about Kashmiris working ashore from the 1920s muddies distinctions between Punjabis and other South Asians’ occupational preferences and survival strategies, and pushes back Kashmiris’ history in Britain by at least a decade. Seafaring thus formed only one occupational niche South Asian workers filled in the metropole. Many men, although sometime seafarers, sought or obtained temporary or

permanent work ashore, prompted by the instability of employment in this notoriously casual occupation. Of sixty-three Indian working men in and around Glasgow in 1926, thirty-seven were pedlars, twenty-four labourers, and only two mariners.40 Other men made the transition to more stable occupations, working as drapers, warehousemen, and restaurant owners in Scotland, and in factories in London.41 Some men founded substantial businesses in Britain. Galaldine Bascon, subject of an Indian Native State, ‘has not been to sea since 1929 and there seems no doubt he has settled down ashore’. Galaldine had married and obtained a pedlar’s licence in Liverpool, ‘which business he carries on as opportunity affords’. Galaldine’s main business, however, was a refreshment house at 121 Park Lane in Liverpool’s southern docks, for which, in 1932, he was pursuing a boarding-house licence. Suggesting the advantage of marrying a local woman, Galaldine’s wife dealt with the police when they visited to enquire.42 Of hundreds of mariners applying to the High Commissioner for India for a Special Certificate of Nationality between 1927 and 1934, not only Punjabis but men from Northwest Frontier Province, Assam and Bengal, as well as Mirpur, had worked in other occupations ashore.43 By the 1930s, Home Office staff considered it ‘common knowledge that many of these Indians are not seamen as commonly understood. … In the case of the man who has been peddling in the U.K. for five years it is absurd … to regard such a man as a potential seaman.’44 Like Ghulam Rasul, many South Asians criss-crossed England, Wales and Scotland while moving among seafaring, peddling and other occupations.45 Men’s rapid movement from ports of disembarkation to other locales implied prior knowledge of British networks and resources. Mohamed Akbar landed in Hull but travelled to Liverpool seeking an outbound ship.46 Kashmiri mariner Nadra-Rusmat Ali registered in Cardiff in October 1926, resided in South Shields in October 1931, but by November had left his ship in Boston, Massachusetts.47 Ladha Khan disembarked in London in 1929, moving to South Shields in March 1934 and to Newcastle in June, while Mohamed Ali left a ship in Glasgow in 1929 for Falkirk in Scotland, passing through South Shields in May and June 1934 en route to Whitechapel in London.48 Towns and even addresses recurred, suggesting that particular lodging-houses offered sojourning South Asians a welcome, perhaps by compatriots. For example, the house at 1 George and Dragon Street, West Holborn, South Shields, whence Ghulam Rasul applied for his seaman’s certificate in 1933, was occupied in 1932 by Choudri Dehroo, a fellow Kashmiri and pedlar who similarly moved back and forth between South Shields and Fifeshire.49 This suggests that well-developed migrant networks antedated the Second World War.

COMPATRIOT NETWORKS Scholars of post-war South Asian migration have stressed the importance of chain migration in shaping individual men’s travels and indeed the character of whole settlements in Britain. Specific migrant chains configured each British settlement uniquely. New arrivals joined already settled kinsmen and co-villagers who found them work, often with the same firm,

provided housing and offered aid in negotiating with authorities. Extended kin and covillagers assumed enhanced centrality in migrants’ destinations, as new relationships and power relations formed, particularly between clients and providers of services such as boarding-housekeepers.50 These patterns appeared at least as early as the 1920s. Ghulam Rasul and other South Asian migrants apparently relied upon and contributed to kin and social networks ranging from Kashmir to Tyneside and Scotland. Kashmiri Mohamed Zaman deserted the SS City of Lahore in Glasgow in June 1929 with the explicit intention of becoming a pedlar. He left his seaman’s credential behind on the ship. Zaman had written instructions from a Mirpuri, Dwan Ali, whom Zaman joined at Gilburn House, Shotts, Lanarkshire, one of two major lodgings for Indians in the Glasgow area.51 For the sum of 44 rupees (about £3), Ali found him lodging there, as well as a labouring job at the Shotts Iron Company, Ltd. Dwan Ali reportedly tailored for other men and commanded ‘a certain amount of respect which allowed him to control and advise them and in many ways act as a kind of chief among them’, reported local police. Leaving Lanarkshire after seven months, Mohamed Zaman partook of an impressively far-flung compatriot network: ‘he has resided with compatriots at Rosyth, Dunfermline, and elsewhere … maintained by his cousin, a Mohamedan pedlar named Bagah Ali, who has no fixed residence but moves about between Glasgow and Falkirk.’ In the meantime, Dwan Ali returned to Mirpur.52 Not only did South Asians of diverse origins maximize their options by working ashore, but they also took seafaring jobs beyond the British Merchant Navy. Like Ghulam Rasul, who worked as a stoker on a German steamer, Choudri Dehroo worked his passage to Britain on a Dutch steamer, Kashmiri Ladha Khan deserted a Greek ship in London, and Mohamed Akbar arrived in Hull on the Finnish steamer Naxos.53 The indirect routes whereby men arrived in Britain betray traces of global movements more complex and extensive than simple two-way movement between colonies and metropole. The routes mariners followed to and through Britain illustrated how men disadvantaged by colonization used strategic flexibility to get a livelihood in a crisis-ridden global system, despite official efforts to constrain them. Discrimination in the British labour market exacerbated by inter-war shipping depression compelled men to adopt an economy of makeshift, shifting from one town to another in search of work. As significantly, men who arrived in Britain via diverse routes likewise maximized opportunities by moving in and out of maritime employment, alternating periods of sea service with other pursuits. Of those seeking ships, some found themselves ‘stranded’, but others disembarked deliberately to seek work at European wage rates. In doing so they challenged colonial wage structures and with them the barriers and hierarchies sustaining imperial appropriation. Many Indian subjects adopted peddling, an insecure and financially tenuous but entrepreneurial occupation, freeing them from direct supervision and relieving them of competing in a hostile labour market. As Inspector McCaskill’s observations suggested, by the 1930s, men appear to have worked in waged occupations only long enough to amass the capital necessary to take up peddling or other self-employment.54 Many jobs available to colonized workers in Britain arguably constituted an occupational ghetto facilitating their super-exploitation in Britain as in the colonies. Leaving seafaring for

peddling, for instance, South Asians entered a similarly mobile and disreputable trade, declining since the nineteenth century.55 Despite its advantages, peddling remained another marginal occupation, essential to social functioning but low paid and insecure. Relegation to such jobs, a legacy of colonial typecasting, facilitated the super-exploitation, that is, undercompensation, of colonized workers in Britain as in the colonies.56 Restricting them to jobs which indigenous workers might reject, employers or other elites could both obscure and justify migrants’ structural function as cheap labour. Playing off migrants against local or native workers in this way enabled employers to minimize remuneration for both groups. Still, in transgressing the geographical barriers between colony and metropole, colonized migrants not only resisted but threatened to disrupt and disarrange the economic and political inequalities that kept the imperial system profitable. Their migration provoked disproportionate alarm in the British state, which progressively restricted colonial subjects’ access to Britain in the 1920s and 1930s by manipulating regulation on aliens to compromise their status as British subjects.

RECOLONIZING SOUTH ASIANS IN BRITAIN Indian and other colonized men often landed in Britain carrying passports and other credentials recognized by local port officials as evidence of British nationality. Hull police resisted registering Kashmiri Mumtaz Khan as a ‘Coloured Alien Seaman’ as he had entered the country in 1926 with a British passport.57 They also treated Mohamed Akbar’s Indian certificate of discharge, a credential containing his work history, as proof of British nationality.58 In response, the central government, particularly the Home Office, charged with immigration affairs, and the Board of Trade, which largely acted in employers’ interests, systematically withheld or confiscated passports and other credentials from Indian and other colonized mariners. They substituted the ‘Special Certificate of Nationality and Identity’, good only for sea voyaging.59 The Passport Office refused to renew Mumtaz Khan’s passport, issued in Bombay in 1926, for instance, substituting a Special Certificate of limited validity.60 The geographical mobility that peddling, like seafaring, demanded also bothered the authorities.61 Home Office staff commented in frustration: ‘The influx of Indian pedlars … is becoming a problem … and we can under the existing law do nothing’ against those who were British subjects.62 Legal counsel remonstrated, on behalf of several Kashmiri pedlars apprehended by South Shields police for failing to report changes of address, that ‘[o]ne must appreciate that where a man is a pedlar and going from town to town, to register every time is to say the least of it, inconvenient’.63 Ghulam Rasul, Fateh Mohamed, Ladha Khan and Mohamed Ali fell foul of the authorities simply for possessing credentials for both peddling and seafaring – the reason why we know so much about them. State efforts to control workers from the colonies inside Britain embodied an attempt to extend colonial hierarchies and with them colonial levels of coercion and exploitation to workers in the metropole, a malign effect of empire. South Asians’ geographical and

occupational mobility, flexibility and pragmatism threatened official efforts to maintain labour discipline and control. Paradoxically, workers have often been urged to display more of these very traits. Yet they crossed purposes with the imperial state, which sought to block Asian workers’ access to Britain not simply for irrational, racial motives, but to minimize the cost of their labour. Compatriot networks that were illegible and impenetrable to the authorities eroded their control, as did the merging of these networks with those of other migrants and native Britons. Noah Din’s story of employment in an Asiatic boarding-house shows that South Asians took part in broader Asian institutions in Britain, where they eventually organized with other colonized workers and even native ones.64 Ghulam Rasul, during his intermittent sojourns in Kircaldy, resided consistently at the same address, with an apparently Scottish householder, Carmichael, while Mohamed Ali resided with a Mrs Black in Falkirk.65 This evidence that native Britons and other colonized people assisted South Asians in subverting official efforts at control calls for caution in treating South Asians as a discrete and bounded group, much less as ghettoized, ostracized or socially isolated. Instead, it suggests they took part in wider networks of resistance spanning geography, confession and origin.

WHY SHOULD WE CARE? Ghulam Rasul’s travels reveal that the very processes of multinational empire, extracting and attracting labour across a worldwide and multicultural empire, stimulated and even facilitated South Asian resistance. Super-exploitation, the essence of colonization, initially prompted men to travel from India to Europe. Once in Europe, South Asians used occupational and geographical mobility as a strategy that subverted official efforts to control their movements and undervalue their labour. By the 1920s, South Asians of diverse origins lived and worked in Britain. They laboured in a broad range of jobs, albeit mainly marginal ones, and their survival strategies involved geographical and occupational flexibility, regardless of their places of origin, rather than following rigid typecasting. Although South Asians’ entry into the metropolitan workforce may have originated with military service, by the 1920s migration routes to and within Britain had assumed an independent dynamic which was becoming well established. While some men worked ashore because they were stranded between sea voyages, many, Kashmiris as well as Punjabis, travelled to Britain with the intention of seeking work ashore. Their travels were facilitated by well-developed networks of information and institutions stretching from India to London to Tyneside, Liverpool and Scotland, and to continental European ports. Significant numbers of Mirpuris, who loom large in post-war Britain, lived and worked ashore in Britain even before the Second World War. Further research must explore whether this stemmed from coincidence or structural continuities, to establish whether global war and decolonization disrupted these migrant chains or whether post-war migrants built upon them. The stories of a handful of men among the millions making up the British labour force in the economically turbulent 1920s and 1930s are offered in support of the following propositions. First, the British labour force, the British working class, was global and

multiracial, and needs to be reconceptualized accordingly. Second, this proletariat was extraordinarily mobile, both across and within national borders, constituting in many instances a migrant labour force whose contributions to the imperial system proved multiple and continuous. Third, this very mobility manifested a paradoxical duality: on one hand facilitating capital accumulation on a global scale; on the other enabling forms of agency and resistance against the same processes of global economic imbalance. Ghulam Rasul’s travels may have enriched British employers and the elite, but from his perspective they were also a bid to resist and overcome the subordinate, marginal and peripheral place the imperial system and its authors had assigned him. The borders which Ghulam Rasul transgressed in leaving his ship and seeking work in Britain proved all too permeable, fluid and fragile. Employers, the state and other relative elites stood to lose control over colonized seafarers who established alternative footholds in Britain and Europe, and, as Ghulam Rasul’s travels illustrate, they often did. Ghulam Rasul’s and other South Asians’ encounters with the British authorities illustrate their survival strategies. They also reveal that structural impediments to mobility such as oceans and borders failed to contain them, yet created divisions and inequalities within a global proletariat that in practice knew no borders. Moving from the global to the particular, Ghulam Rasul’s travels served a dual and paradoxical purpose. On one hand, in working for the BISN, and in migrating to and around Britain, Ghulam Rasul participated in a global labour system in which he remained subordinate in colony and metropole alike. Still, Ghulam Rasul had his own agendas. Further investigation remains to discover how well he attained these. Notes 1 Ballard, R. and Ballard, C. (1977) ‘The Sikhs: the development of South Asian settlements in Britain’, in J. L. Watson (ed.) Between Two Cultures: Migrants and Minorities in Britain. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 22–4. 2 On ‘skill drain’, see Hoerder, D. (1982) ‘Immigration and the working class: the remigration factor’. International Labor and Working Class History, 21, 36–7. 3 Tabili, L. (1994) ‘We Ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 41–57. 4 Visram, R. (2002) Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto Press, p. 230. 5 Ghulam Rasul’s story is compiled from National Archives, UK, Home Office file HO45/15774, ‘Controversial Cases’, and British Library, India Office file L/E/9/972, ‘Seamen: Treatment by Home Office of Coloured Seamen as Aliens: Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, 1925; Certificate of Identity for Seamen’. All subsequent citations and quotes regarding this case are from these documents. 6 The BISN was one of Britain’s ‘Big Five’ cargo liner firms, owned in turn by the Peninsular and Oriental (P&O) lines. Together they held a monopoly of Asian trade. Labour Research Department (1923) Shipping Studies in Labour and Capital VI. London: Labour Publishing Company, pp. 28–9. 7 Due to exploitation and neglect, first by the Maharaja of Kashmir and later by independent Pakistan, Kashmir and Jammu remained underdeveloped and dependent on remittances from migrants into the 1990s, stimulating diasporic emigration. Ballard, R. (1990) ‘Migration and kinship: the differential effect of marriage rules on the processes of Punjabi migration to Britain’, in C. Clarke, C. Peach and S. Vertovec (eds) South Asians Overseas: Migration and Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 225–6. 8 For wage tables and for the extension of restrictive labour contracts to other colonized mariners, see Tabili, ‘We Ask for British Justice’, pp. 44 and 46, respectively. 9 On these characteristics of migrant labour as a form of movable wealth, see Meillassoux, C. (1981) [1975] Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 10 HO45/15774, William Wilkie, Chief Constable of South Shields, to the Home Office, 17 March 1933; Police Constable R. J. Hetherington to Chief Constable, South Shields, 20 April 1933.

11 For policy governing British seafarers’ nationality, see L. Tabili (1994) ‘The construction of racial difference: the Coloured Alien Seamen Order, 1925’. Journal of British Studies, 33, 54–98. 12 HO45/15774, Hetherington to Chief Constable, 20 April 1933; F. J. Adams, High Commissioner’s Office to C. E. Baines, India Office, 15 May 1933. 13 Most men subject to the Coloured Alien Seamen Order were not aliens but undocumented British subjects or Protected Persons. See Tabili, ‘We Ask for British Justice’, pp. 113–34. 14 HO45/15774, Hetherington to Chief Constable, 20 April 1933; L/E/9/972, E. N. Cooper, Home Office to Undersecretary of State for India, 4 August 1933. 15 HO45/15774, Paterson Fyfe to the Home Office, 4 October 1933; L/E/9/972. 16 Ballard and Ballard, ‘The Sikhs’, pp. 21–3. 17 Ibid., pp. 22–7; Ballard, R. (1986) ‘The political economy of migration: Pakistan, Britain, and the Middle East’, in J. Eades (ed.) Migrants, Workers, and the Social Order. London: Tavistock, p. 23; Peach, C. (2008) [2006] ‘Demographics of BrAsian settlement’, in N. Ali, V. S. Kalra and S. Sayyid (eds) A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 170. 18 Dahya, B. (1974) ‘The nature of Pakistani ethnicity in industrial cities in Britain’, in A. Cohen (ed.) Urban Ethnicity. London: Tavistock, p. 85; Ballard, R. (1983) ‘The context and consequences of migration: Jullundur and Mirpur compared’. New Community, 10, 117, 125. These regions continued to contribute the bulk of South Asian migrants to Britain. Ballard and Ballard, ‘The Sikhs’, pp. 23–4. 19 Saifullah Khan, V. (1977) ‘The Pakistanis: Mirpuri villagers at home and in Bradford’, in Watson, Between Two Cultures, pp. 64–5; Zolberg, A. R. (1997) ‘Global movements, global walls: responses to migration, 1855–1925’, in G. Wang (ed.) Global History and Migrations. Boulder: Westview Press, pp. 287–8. 20 See, for example, L/E/9/972, ‘Return of the Number of Coloured Alien Seamen Registered … 1 July 1932’. 21 Visram, R. (1986) Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700–1947. London: Pluto Press. 22 Visram, Asians in Britain, pp. 225–34, esp. 232–3. 23 Fisher, M. H., Lahiri, S. and Thandi, S. (2007), A South-Asian History of Britain: Four Centuries of Peoples from the Indian Sub-Continent. Oxford: Greenwood Press, p. 135. 24 Dunlop, A. and Miles, R. (1990) ‘Recovering the history of Asian migration to Scotland’. Immigrants and Minorities, 9 (2), 151–3, 158–60. Siu described a similar process among Chinese workers in California, in Siu, P. C. P. (1987) The Chinese Laundryman: A Study in Social Isolation, ed. J. K. W. Tchen. New York: SUNY, pp. 44–5. 25 Quote from Ballard and Ballard, ‘The Sikhs’, p. 28; Ballard, ‘Political economy’, p. 24. 26 First quote from Ballard, ‘Migration and kinship’, p. 222; also Ballard, ‘Context and consequences’, p. 125; second quote from Balachandran, G. (2007) ‘Crossing the last frontier: transatlantic movements of Asian maritime workers, c.1900– 1945’. Research in Maritime History, 33, 100; Fisher, Lahiri and Thandi, South-Asian History of Britain, p. 135. 27 Ballard and Ballard, ‘The Sikhs’, p. 24; Peach, p. 170. 28 Ballard and Ballard, p. 51; Ballard, ‘Migration and kinship’, p. 222; also Dahya, B. (1973) ‘Pakistanis in Britain: transients or settlers?’. Race & Class, 14, 244. 29 Kalra, V. (2000) From Textile Mills to Taxi Ranks: Experiences of Migration, Labour and Social Change. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 54–9, 61–2; Peach, ‘Demographics’, p. 170. 30 For the former argument, see Ballard, ‘Migration and kinship’, pp. 23–4, 51, and Dahya, ‘Pakistanis in Britain’, 244; for the latter, see Balachandran, ‘Crossing the last frontier’, 102, and Kalra, From Textile Mills to Taxi Ranks, p. 64. 31 Confusion is not eased by the fact that although Kashmir and Punjab have diverged politically and confessionally since independence, Mirpuris remain linguistically and culturally Punjabi, per Saifullah Khan, ‘The Pakistanis’, p. 59; Ballard, ‘Context and consequences’, 117. 32 Tabili, ‘We Ask for British Justice’, pp.140–2, 147. 33 Lawless, R. (1995) From Ta`izz to Tyneside: An Arab Community in the North-East of England During the Early Twentieth Century. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. 34 A particularly sensitive description of this process in the 1950s may be found in Dahya, ‘Pakistani ethnicity’; see also Ballard and Ballard, ‘The Sikhs’, p. 31. 35 Dunlop and Miles, ‘Asian migration to Scotland’, 152, 156, 149. 36 HO45/15774. 37 Ibid. 38 HO45/12314/476761/41, 10 September 1925. 39 On Ladha Khan, see HO213/242, R. J. Hetherington to South Shields Chief Constable, 27 June 1934; on Choudhri Dehroo, see HO45/15774, South Shields Chief Constable to the Home Office, 6 September 1932. 40 Dunlop and Miles, ‘Asian migration to Scotland’, 153.

41 Dunlop and Miles, ‘Asian migration to Scotland’, 153; Visram, R. (1993) ‘South Asians in London’, in N. Merriman (ed.) The Peopling of London: Fifteen Thousand Years of Settlement From Overseas. London: Museum of London, p. 172. 42 HO45/15774, CID to Liverpool Assistant Chief Constable H. Winstanley, 26 February 1932; minute on file, 2 March 1932. 43 Tabulations in progress. 44 HO231/242, Minute, May–June 1934. 45 See also Dunlop and Miles, ‘Asian migration to Scotland’, 149–150, 153. 46 HO45/15774. 47 Ibid., 26 October 1931. 48 HO213/242. 49 HO45/15774, William Wilkie, Chief Constable of South Shields, 6 September 1932. 50 Dahya, ‘Pakistani ethnicity’, passim; see also Gabaccia, D. R. (1984) From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880–1930. Albany: SUNY, pp. 58–60, 104–19, 114–15; Siu, Chinese Laundrymen. 51 Dunlop and Miles, ‘Asian migration to Scotland’, 153. 52 HO45/15774, P. S. Smith to Chief Constable, Kirkaldy Burgh Police; M. A. Keith, Chief Constable, Lanarkshire Constabulary, 24 November 1931, to the Home Office. The Chief Constable reported that Gilburn House, owned by the Shotts Model Lodging House Company and managed by Richard Robertson, had had as many as forty Indian residents at times, who had dispersed to South Shields, Cardiff, India and Glasgow. 53 Khan: HO2231/242; Dehroo and Akbar: HO45/15774. 54 On peddling, see Dunlop, A. (1990) ‘Lascars and labourers: reactions to the Indian presence in the west of Scotland during the 1920s and 1930s’. Scottish Labour History Society Journal, 25, 40–57. Thanks to Anna Clark for this article. Dunlop and Miles, ‘Asian migration to Scotland’, 151–3, 158–60; Balachandran, G. (2002) ‘Conflicts in the international maritime labour market: British and Indian seamen, employers, and the state, 1890–1939’. Indian Economic and Social History Review, 39 (1), 85–6. 55 Fontaine, L. (1996) History of Pedlars in Europe. Durham: Duke University Press. 56 On the entrepreneurial ‘immigrant economy’ as a strategy to evade native labour’s hostility, see Siu, Chinese Laundrymen, pp. xxxi, 103, 18, 44–55; Ballard, ‘Migration and kinship’, p. 224; Thandi, S. S. (2008) [2006] ‘The Brown economy: enterprise and employment’, in Ali, Kalra and Sayyid, pp. 224–6. 57 HO45/15774, Chief Constable of Hull to the Home Office, 7 March 1932. 58 HO45/15774. 59 Tabili, ‘We Ask for British Justice’, esp. pp. 122–4, 129–31, 155; and see Dunlop, ‘Lascars and labourers’ on Cardiff police destruction of these documents; Lahiri, S. (2010) Indian Mobilities in the West: 1900–1947: Gender, Performance and Embodiment. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 76–9, on efforts to control mobility through manipulating passports. 60 HO45/15574, Home Office to Chief Constable of South Shields, 28 September 1931. 61 For official qualms about ‘service nomads’, see L. Lucassen (1993) ‘A blind spot: migratory travelling groups in western European historiography’. International Review of Social History, 38, 209–35. 62 HO213/242, Minute c. May–June 1934. 63 HO213/242, Grunhut, Grunhut & Makepeace to Home Office, 30 May 1934. 64 Tabili, ‘We Ask for British Justice’, pp. 120, 136, 144, 154–5, 158–9; Byrne, D. (1976–1977) ‘The 1930 “Arab riot”: a race riot that never was’. Race & Class, 18, 261–77. 65 On Ghulam Rasul see HO45/15774, Paterson Fyfe to the Home Office, 4 October 1933; on Mohamed Ali, see HO213/242, Hetherington to Chief Constable of South Shields.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Archival Sources British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: India Office file L/E/9/972, ‘Seamen: Treatment by Home Office of Coloured Seamen as Aliens: Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, 1925; Certificate of Identity for Seamen’.

National Archives, UK. HO45/15774: Home Office file ‘Controversial Cases’. Books and Articles Balachandran, G. (2002) ‘Conflicts in the international maritime labour market: British and Indian seamen, employers, and the state, 1890–1939’. Indian Economic and Social History Review, 39 (1), 71–100. — (2007) ‘Crossing the last frontier: transatlantic movements of Asian maritime workers, c.1900–1945’. Research in Maritime History, 33, 97–111. Ballard, R. and Ballard, C. (1977) ‘The Sikhs: the development of South Asian settlements in Britain’, in J. L. Watson (ed.) Between Two Cultures: Migrants and Minorities in Britain. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 21–56. Ballard, R. (1983) ‘The context and consequences of migration: Jullundur and Mirpur compared’. New Community, 10, 117–36. — (1986) ‘The political economy of migration: Pakistan, Britain, and the Middle East’, in J. Eades (ed.) Migrants, Workers, and the Social Order. London: Tavistock, pp. 17–41. — (1990) ‘Migration and kinship: the differential effect of marriage rules on the processes of Punjabi migration to Britain’, in C. Clarke, C. Peach and S. Vertovec (eds) South Asians Overseas: Migration and Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 219–49. Byrne, D. (1976–1977) ‘The 1930 “Arab riot”: a race riot that never was’. Race & Class, 18, 261–77. Dahya, B. (1973) ‘Pakistanis in Britain: transients or settlers?’. Race & Class, 13, 241–77. — (1974) ‘The nature of Pakistani ethnicity in industrial cities in Britain’, in A. Cohen, (ed.) Urban Ethnicity. London: Tavistock, pp. 77–118. Dunlop, A. (1990) ‘Lascars and labourers: reactions to the Indian presence in the west of Scotland during the 1920s and 1930s’. Scottish Labour History Society Journal, 25, 40–57. Dunlop, A. and Miles, R. (1990) ‘Recovering the history of Asian migration to Scotland’. Immigrants and Minorities, 9 (2), 145–67. Fisher, M. H., Lahiri, S. and Thandi, S. (2007) A South-Asian History of Britain: Four Centuries of Peoples from the Indian Sub-Continent. Oxford: Greenwood Press. Fontaine, L. (1996) History of Pedlars in Europe. Durham: Duke University Press. Gabaccia, D. R. (1984) From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880–1930. Albany: SUNY. Hoerder, D. (1982) ‘Immigration and the working class: the remigration factor’. International Labor and Working Class History, 21, 28–41. Kalra, V. (2000) From Textile Mills to Taxi Ranks: Experiences of Migration, Labour and Social Change. Aldershot: Ashgate. Labour Research Department (1923) Shipping. London: Labour Publishing Company. Lahiri, S. (2010) Indian Mobilities in the West: 1900–1947: Gender, Performance and Embodiment. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lawless, R. (1995) From Ta`izz to Tyneside: An Arab Community in the North-East of England During the Early Twentieth Century. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Lucassen, L. (1993) ‘A blind spot: migratory travelling groups in western European historiography’. International Review of Social History, 38, 209–35.

Meillassoux, C. (1981) [1975] Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peach, C. (2008) [2006] ‘Demographics of BrAsian settlement’, in N. Ali, V. S. Kalra and S. Sayyid (eds) A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 168–81. Saifullah Khan, V. (1977) ‘The Pakistanis: Mirpuri villagers at home and in Bradford’, in J. L. Watson, (ed.) Between Two Cultures: Migrants and Minorities in Britain. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 57–89. Siu, P. C. P. (1987) The Chinese Laundryman: A Study in Social Isolation, ed. J. K. W. Tchen. New York: SUNY. Tabili, L. (1994a) ‘We Ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. — (1994b) ‘The construction of racial difference: the Coloured Alien Seamen Order, 1925’. Journal of British Studies, 33, 54–98. Thandi, S. S. (2008) ‘The Brown economy: enterprise and employment’, in N. Ali, V. S. Kalra and S. Sayyid, (eds) A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 211–29. Visram, R. (1986) Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700–1947. London: Pluto Press. — (1993) ‘South Asians in London’, in N. Merriman (ed.) The Peopling of London: Fifteen Thousand Years of Settlement From Overseas. London: Museum of London, pp. 169–78. — (2002) Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto Press. Zolberg, A. R. (1997) ‘Global movements, global walls: responses to migration, 1855–1925’, in G. Wang (ed.) Global History and Migrations. Boulder: Westview Press, pp. 279–307.

Chapter 5

Networks of Resistance: Krishna Menon and Working-Class South Asians in Inter-War Britain Rehana Ahmed

In his memoirs of literary life in 1940s’ London, writer and actor Julian Maclaren-Ross offers a fragment of a hidden side of Bloomsbury, buried just beneath the surface of high culture, iconoclasm and bohemian living. When trying to locate the offices of the magazine Horizon, edited by writers Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender, Maclaren-Ross knocks on the door of the wrong building: [The door] after a stealthy pause came open, a dark face peered cautiously through a crack, then the door was banged-to in my face … I climbed higher, knocked, another Indian appeared, small and shrivelled like the first. … A third occupant, Indian also, seemed to know no English … Indians in every flat, either unable or unwilling to give any information, and the last one a woman in a sari shrank in terror when she saw me and almost slammed her door upon my hand.1

Striking here is the juxtaposition of this largely invisibilized community of working-class South Asians and their elite white British neighbours in the heart of the metropolis. Also notable is Maclaren-Ross’s representation of them as afraid, shrinking and mute, as shadowy figures almost lacking in subjectivity. Paradoxically, as well as being fearful and passive, the Indians are depicted, implicitly, as threatening. There is a sense of accumulating menace as Maclaren-Ross moves further into the building, encountering increasing numbers of Indians until, he realizes – or perhaps fears – there is one ‘in every flat’. A hint of a more recent discourse of racial ‘swamping’ can be traced. These anonymous figures contrast starkly not just with the British literati but with the other South Asian character in Maclaren-Ross’s account, also an inhabitant of Bloomsbury – the Ceylonese poet and editor M. J. Tambimuttu. Listing Tambimuttu’s many literary connections, which include T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Dylan Thomas, Maclaren-Ross also alludes to the poet’s class prejudice, particularly towards South Asian seamen: ‘Tambi for some reason loathed and despised Lascars who, though all mankind was his country, did not to him belong to mankind.’2 However, unlike Tambimuttu, there were several South Asian writers, intellectuals and students who did, to some extent, bridge the gap between Bloomsbury’s cultural elite and Maclaren-Ross’s anonymized Indians. Despite their class difference, these privileged South Asians shared cultures, religions and languages with their working-class counterparts, as well as their subordinate status as colonized subjects in Britain. The Indian writer and activist Mulk Raj Anand interacted with lascars and workers in east London while also contributing reviews to Connolly and Spender’s Horizon magazine and fraternizing with several other literary figures who showed an interest in – and in some

cases a commitment to – the creative work of South Asians and their struggle for independence.3 V. K. Krishna Menon, the editor, lawyer, councillor and activist (and later India’s first High Commissioner in Britain), was particularly effective in bridging this social divide, linking the different constituents of the South Asian ‘community’ in Britain and the various forms of resistance in which they were engaged, as well as connecting with members of Bloomsbury’s cultural avant-garde through his role as editor of The Bodley Head’s Twentieth Century Library series and founding editorship of Penguin’s non-fiction imprint Pelican Books.4 My aim in this chapter is to bring to light fragments of an extensive South Asian network of political activism that was operating in Britain during the decade preceding independence in order to explore how class interacted with race and minority status in shaping narratives and modes of resistance as well as hegemonic British representations of South Asian dissent. By locating working-class South Asians within a network – albeit one that is incomplete, fragmentary and shifting – I aim also to reconfigure them as agents of resistance operating within a wider political context, against the authorities’ tendency to detach them from such a narrative. Drawing primarily on India Office surveillance reports on Indians in Britain from the late 1930s and 1940s, I begin by placing Krishna Menon at the centre of my narrative because of his connection to a wide range of discrepant South Asian and British dissenting individuals and organizations in Britain at the time. Through his commitment to an independent India and an international socialism, Menon traversed spatial and social boundaries within the capital and beyond. He may be read as a ‘cross-over’ figure who straddled London’s Bloomsbury and its East End, publishing houses and boarding-houses, the cultural elite and the poor. His participation in a number of networks – of the India League and the Labour Party, as well as of working-class South Asian lascars and labourers – illuminates the connections across these diverse and apparently discrete networks of resistance, thereby highlighting a more complex, dynamic web of interrelations and contacts which are, however, unequal and in tension. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s understanding of space as shaped by social relations and his conceptualization of how the disempowered negotiate space, I will explore these points of contact and tension and elucidate how class complicates an understanding of minority struggle in early twentieth-century Britain.5 If we follow Maclaren-Ross’s narrative further, we discover that once he arrives at the correct address and describes his encounter to Horizon’s editor, he learns that ‘a new regulation that all Asiatics should be rounded-up had that day been passed: something to do with subversive activities and the war, and the unfortunate Indians had mistaken me for an official come to enforce the order’.6 The mute, shadowy figures suddenly acquire political agency and a hint of a story of their own; they are potential ‘subversives’, or, at the very least, engaged in evading and thereby resisting the authorities. Their resistance emerges from beneath the iconoclastic dissent of writers and intellectuals that is more usually associated with Bloomsbury. Thus, I probe beyond the better documented resistances of the more privileged South Asians who often returned to India after a short stay in Britain, to the histories of the working-class migrant Indians who generally inhabited Britain for longer periods and frequently settled there.7 In so doing, the chapter stretches the idea of resistance

to include more everyday, prosaic forms of opposition and dissent such as the struggle for equal rights and basic survival.8 Having traced the connections of Menon and his anti-colonial India League to more peripheral, working-class collectives such as the Indian Seamen’s Union, the Hindustani Social Club and the Hindustan Community House in East London, as well as the Indian Workers’ Association in the Midlands, my narrative will illuminate fragments of two stories of working-class lives, to which Menon is peripheral. The chapter will read the archive against its grain to excavate these fragments and to probe the ideological underpinnings of the government’s representation of working-class minority resistance and dissent. My aim is not so much to piece together the stories to form a coherent narrative but rather to expose a network of different and at times conflictual narratives that are incomplete but whose connections and contradictions are revealing.

LOCATING KRISHNA MENON IN THE METROPOLIS A socialist and internationalist, committed to fighting the oppression of peoples across the world as well as to the struggle for an independent India, V. K. Krishna Menon was involved in a number of different types and vehicles of resistance. Perhaps best known in inter-war Britain for his leadership of the India League which campaigned for Indian self-government, he also inhabited Bloomsbury’s world of publishers, magazines, books and bookshops, which was, for him, first and foremost a vehicle for social and political mobilization. With its core aim of making available in cheap format some of the pioneering voices and debates of the day, Pelican Books, the non-fiction, educational imprint of Penguin, which Menon cofounded in 1936, was engaged in the democratization of knowledge as a form of activism.9 A similar gesture may be seen in Menon’s inauguration of an arts festival and extension of the library service in the predominantly working-class London ward of St Pancras for which he served as Labour Party councillor from 1934 to 1947.10 He wrote articles for British literary periodicals, as well as pamphlets of his own, and reportedly had plans to establish a publishing company in Garrick Street in 1946.11 Four years earlier, he is said to have assumed control of the Indian writer and activist Sasadhar Sinha’s Bibliophile Bookshop and to have had plans to take over the anti-imperial literary magazine Indian Writing.12 His political engagement positioned him on the margins of London’s literary and cultural sphere. In correspondence between Penguin’s Allen Lane and one of his editorial team, we learn that Menon’s so-called ‘communist’ sympathies are considered dangerous for Penguin’s reputation.13 Indeed, his physical location in London reflects this peripheral position: while he had various lodgings in Bloomsbury on arrival in Britain, Menon spent the majority of his years living just beyond, in Camden Square in his ward of the St Pancras district.14 As well as bridging culture and politics, Menon brought together Britons and South Asians in the India League which sought to raise consciousness among the British people of the injustice of colonial rule in India as well as to campaign for full independence. Menon and his fellow activists mobilized through a variety of means, lobbying Members of Parliament –

several of whom spoke on behalf of the League in the House of Commons – and arranging for prominent Indians to address Parliament; producing numerous pamphlets, treatises and articles on the plight of India, as well as the League’s organs Indian News (Newsindia) and Information Bulletin; and addressing a variety of audiences at their own public meetings and at meetings of other organizations including the Labour Party, the Communist Party and the Fabian Society. With branches across London and in a range of other cities such as Bournemouth, Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Cardiff, Dublin, Hull, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield, Southampton and Wolverhampton, the League’s network extended through much of Britain. Its membership took in Parliamentarians, intellectuals, students and professionals. Surveillance reports on the League from the 1930s and 1940s name Bertrand Russell as chair (1930–1939) and Harold Laski as president (1930–1949), with the central executive committee comprising the leftist British figures Reginald Bridgeman, H. N. Brailsford and Fenner Brockway, as well as South Asians including Bhicoo Batlivala, Asha Bhattacharya, Syed Mohamedi, H. J. Handoo and Brijlal Nehru.15 A list of 180 members during the period 1930 to 1949 is striking for its mixture of British and South Asian names, with ‘Indira Nehru-Gandhi’ appearing just below one Elva Reid, and the Ceylonese writer J. Vijaya Tunga sandwiched between John and Marian Critchlow. Several South Asian writers appear on this list, suggesting that many of them combined literary interests with political activism and shared Menon’s understanding of culture as profoundly political.16 The India League, then, may be understood as creating a metropolitan forum for crosscultural contact and collaboration, which traversed boundaries of race as well as nation. West Africans and West Indians attended some League meetings, and the African American Paul Robeson was an active member.17 While centring on the plight of India, speakers, including Menon, also focused their concern on the Republican struggles in Spain and Ireland, and criticized British involvement in the affairs of Indonesia, Indo-China and Africa, inter alia.18 An India League procession in 1938 consisted of 120 Indians and fifty people of ‘other coloured races’, as well as hundreds of Britons; it displayed the flags of the Spanish Republic, Irish Republic, Indian National Congress and Sama Samaja Party, and banners with portraits of the Emperor of Abyssinia, Chiang Kai-Shek and La Passionaria, in addition to Subhas Chandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru, M. K. Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore.19 Further, Menon and his fellow speakers often highlighted the interrelationship between anti-imperial activism and a socialist, anti-capitalist struggle, thereby aligning the position of British and Indian workers. For example, in 1936, Harold Laski voiced the pressing need to make the Englishman realize ‘that the struggle of the Indian peoples was also the struggle of his own people – the universal class-war fight for economic freedom’.20 In his role as councillor for St Pancras, too, Menon demonstrated his understanding of the interdependence of colonialism and capitalism and the importance of mobilizing against both. According to his biographer T. S. George, he believed the ‘slum-dwellers living behind King’s Cross Station in St Pancras were as cruelly exploited as the oppressed in India’ and claimed that if he were elected ‘he would fight for better conditions in St Pancras as part and parcel of his other struggle – India’s independence’.21 Menon crossed social boundaries also

within the South Asian community by attempting to take the elite India League from west to east London. Located in the heart of east London, at 76 Commercial Street, above former seamen Ayub Ali’s café which served as a hub for the Indian community there, the East End branch of the India League aimed both to engage working-class Indians in the struggle for independence and to cater to their welfare needs.22 Unlike the other branches of the League, the composition of East End branch meetings was largely Indian; of the eighty people at the inaugural meeting in June 1943, ‘only three were Europeans; the remainder were mostly Indian seamen and factory workers’.23 However, surveillance reports on the meetings mention the names of a number of South Asian writers and professionals among the audience and speakers – including Mulk Raj Anand, Narayana Menon and Krishnarao Shelvankar – suggesting a degree of cross-class transaction within this embryonic minority community.24 Menon’s concern for the welfare of the working class is evident also from his involvement with the lascar strikes of 1939. He is reported to have supported mobilization for better wages by the lascar crew of the SS Clan Alpine at West India Dock, for example, liaising with Aftab Ali of the Calcutta-based Indian Seamen’s Union and taking the sailors’ grievances to Members of Parliament.25 In 1944, he is said to be drawing on his skills as a lawyer, ‘building up a fair practice in Magistrates’ Courts, defending Indians who have got into trouble of one kind or another’, and just a few years earlier, in 1940, at the same time as publicly denouncing him, he formed part of the defence team of Udham Singh who murdered Michael O’Dwyer, governor of the Punjab at the time of the Amritsar massacre, at Caxton Hall.26 In his ambivalent attitude towards Singh’s case, Menon may be seen as oscillating between different modes of resistance – legitimate and illegitimate – as well as crossing boundaries of class, with Singh attracting disapprobation from the majority of elite Indians in Britain and adulation from much of their working-class counterparts, particularly the factory workers, pedlars and ex-seamen who formed the Indian Workers’ Association.27 Struggling to maintain support for his India League in Birmingham, Menon collaborated in 1942 with the Indian Workers’ Association (originally Union), as well as the Independent Labour Party, in an attempt to reach the working-class South Asians who lived there. The surveillance reports remain sceptical about the success of a collaboration between the two organizations, however, citing their different class positions as well as comparing the League’s cosmopolitanism with the IWA’s uniquely South Asian composition.28 Indeed, Indian Political Intelligence files frequently contrast the elite India League to the IWA. In 1942 we are told that the Indian Workers’ Union has points of contact with the India League, but the two organisations have little in common. The latter comprises English sympathisers and a few educated Indians; every effort is made to gain the support of any English man or woman who is likely to wield any influence in political circles. The former is essentially a working-class movement which makes no serious attempt to attract the Indian intelligentsia or the English sympathiser.29

Similar assertions may be found throughout documentation of the East End branch of the League. While there were several branch meetings in 1943 and 1944, the reports constantly express doubts about its longevity. Further, they attribute its limited success not to Menon but to others from outside the League, such as Kundan Lal Jalie, manager of the Hindustani

Community House, who had more established links with working-class South Asian circles in the East End and could act as an intermediary for Menon, just as the ex-lascar Tahsil Miah mediated between Menon and the striking sailors.30 By contrast, Menon, we are told, ‘has no means of approach to the Indian labouring class: he cannot speak their language and at heart has little real sympathy for them’.31 His attempts to mobilize with and for the Indian working class are constantly reduced by the India Office reports to mere political opportunism – a bid to manipulate this community into bolstering League membership in exchange for ‘social work’.32 Moreover, reports suggest a significant strand of opposition to Menon, and a strong urge to mobilize autonomously, on the part of East End Indians. At one of the first meetings of the East End branch, Shah Abdul Majid Qureshi, a former lascar, is said to be ‘bitterly opposed to the League’s intrusion in East London’, wanting ‘the work in the East End to be carried on by the seamen themselves’, while another ex-seaman Abdul Hamid ‘strongly criticised Menon and said that he … did not want to see an India League office in East London’.33 Through his engagement with the South Asian working class, then, Menon enters another network of resistance, but it is the periphery of this network that he occupies. Important as it is to read the Indian Political Intelligence’s representation of Menon sceptically, the repeated allusion to his problematic location within the East End Indian community, and to his need to operate through various working-class satellites embedded within it, is noteworthy, as too is the ambivalent position he appears to occupy in relation to Udham Singh. Menon’s fraught relationship with East End Indians and their political mobilization is, arguably, partly traceable to his privileged class position. While Menon transgresses boundaries of class, he is simultaneously limited by them. In his analysis of the Bloomsbury Group, Raymond Williams traces their cultural production and political engagement to their position within ‘the social system as a whole’, arguing that the group’s resistance against ‘poverty, sexual and racial discrimination, militarism and imperialism’ was conditioned by its upper-middleclass position so that it was ‘not any alternative idea of a whole society’ or solidarity with the working classes that Bloomsbury espoused, but rather ‘the supreme value of the civilized individual’.34 Menon’s highly politicized vision of culture and his ability to identify beyond his own social class, but also the evident limits to this ability, may be traced to the ambiguity of his social position as an elite Indian in Britain. His implication in the struggle for Indian independence and his position as a colonial subject and racial ‘other’ within Britain create the potential for his ability to cross social and spatial boundaries and straddle a variety of networks, while the factor of class obstructs this potential. It is Menon’s marginal position in a number of networks that highlights their interrelationship and therefore their hierarchical relationship – so that the nodes (or subjects) on the networks are exposed within a larger network that is shaped by social relations. As theorist Henri Lefebvre maintains, spaces become abstractions when considered in isolation; they attain existence by virtue of the pathways or networks that connect them and that reveal the social relations which shape them. A figure like Menon brings different spaces, and different networks of resistance in London – cultural, political; elite, working class; British, South Asian – into contact, suggesting their unequal, dialectical relationship.35

REPRESENTING WORKING-CLASS RESISTANCES Before focusing on fragments of the stories of South Asian workers, to which Krishna Menon is peripheral, I will show how hegemonic constructions of these working-class migrants tended to detach them and their acts of dissent from a larger narrative and network, thereby divesting them of political significance or status. Maclaren-Ross’s representation of working-class South Asians as non-subjects – or at least as non-political subjects – is repeated in the records of surveillance files documenting the activities of the India League and the Indian Workers’ Association. Here is an excerpt from a report on the IWA: The Indian rank and file … work long hours and have much less time for politics than their … leaders. … If the latter could be removed from the scene of their activities by being compelled to take up employment in areas where few or no Indians congregate … the Indian worker would be relieved of the unwelcome necessity of subscribing under pressure sums of money for purposes which he often dimly comprehends. The attendance at meetings … is never so large as to indicate that the Indian community is strongly influenced by political feeling, however much a particular audience may be worked up to temporary excitement by inflammatory speeches.36

The construction of uneducated working-class Indians as manipulated, excitable pawns, apparently coerced by their leaders into subversive activity whose purpose they ‘dimly comprehend’, divests them of agency, and their political position of validity. It resonates with more recent constructions of dissenting working-class minority groups. Of the South Asian Muslims who protested against the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses half a century later, in 1989 – also based in Bradford and sharing a religious affiliation with the majority of the IWA members – Anthony Burgess claimed that few knew what they were protesting about: ‘Their Imams have told them that Mr Rushdie has published a blasphemous book and must be punished. They respond with sheeplike docility and wolflike aggression.’37 This conflictual combination of emasculation and hyper-masculinity, passivity and threat, traceable in Maclaren-Ross’s shrinking Indians and redolent of imperial constructions of the Indian male,38 emerges in a variety of forms in the India Office surveillance files on working-class organizations in Britain. Just as the IWA is described as ‘not primarily politically minded’, so the seamen and pedlars who form the East End branch of the India League are dismissed as ‘illiterate and far more concerned with their own comfort than with politics’ – unless, of course, an ‘isolated individual [is] worked up to a state of excitement by wild talk’ and seeks to emulate Udham Singh.39 Arguably, the contradictory construction of working-class South Asians as simultaneously (politically) passive and politically threatening highlights the government’s unease with these working-class subjects; their depoliticization and emasculation may be read as a strategy to deny the validity of their oppositional position and the threat that it poses. Physical examples of such a strategy of control or containment may be seen both in the suggestion of dispersal in the above description of the ‘Indian rank and file’, and in the India Office’s paternalistic proposal, in 1943, to set up ‘Indian clubs to cater for Indian needs’ in the Midlands, a key purpose being to ‘keep the Indians off the streets and prevent their forming undesirable associations’. A subsequent memorandum recognizes the unlikelihood of the clubs being used, with the ‘reserve’ or shyness of workingclass Indians being cited as the reason for this.40 The paradox of the ‘shrinking’ but

threatening Indians emerges once again. These attempts to fragment the working-class community’s network physically through dispersal or containment resonates with the ideological detachment of the community’s local struggle for better living and working conditions from the Indian nationalist struggle. Government officials repeatedly construct Indian workers as more interested in economic prosperity and ‘their own comfort’ than in ‘politics’ – a term which seems to be reduced to explicit, direct anti-colonial mobilization.41 Anxiety about frequent gatherings of industrial workers in the Midlands is defused by the assertion that the workers’ aim is primarily ‘to protect their own interests in such directions as avoiding conscription’ rather than ‘to assist the Indian Nationalist Movement’.42 The notion of actively rejecting (as opposed to passively ‘avoiding’) conscription as a nationalist, anti-imperialist gesture is occluded in this comparison, even though there are several examples in government reports of cases where Indians, from both privileged and modest backgrounds, refused conscription precisely on the grounds of ‘Indian nationalism’, arguing that ‘they should not be expected to join the British Armed Forces while India remained enslaved’.43 Similarly, constructions of Indian pedlars’ involvement in illicit traffic on the black market during the Second World War as a selfinterested bid for prosperity (rather than a political objection to the government’s exploitation of Indians) combine with contradictory reports of them being encouraged by community leaders to engage in such activities precisely as an anti-colonial gesture.44 The resistance by Indian machinists in British factories against their reallocation to unskilled labouring jobs – a protest that could be constructed as localized and focused on their welfare – is reconfigured as an act of anti-colonial resistance when we learn that this process of deskilling was motivated by the government’s fear of Indians acquiring equivalent skills to Englishmen and so undermining the rationale for British rule.45 The tension within the same file (and sometimes the same document) between the belittlement of workers’ struggle as discrete, selfish and inconsequential, and fearful reports of their resistances – whether overtly anti-colonial or more immediately locally focused – is suggestive of an anxious desire to individualize and fracture dissent in order to prevent it from forming a coherent narrative of resistance. It is in working-class forums of resistance, such as the IWA, that the connections between India and Britain, the transnational and the local, are most evident, because these workers had to negotiate the material realities of living in Britain at a much closer range than their more privileged counterparts whose trajectories through the metropolis often skirted above its surface. Arguably, these connections are particularly threatening to colonial ideology because they raise the spectre of a potent crossclass anti-colonial mobilization and upset the centre–periphery binary that keeps intact the distance between structures of oppression ‘over there’, in India, and ‘at home’, in Britain. The erosion of this distance and detachment could undermine the rationale of colonial rule as ‘civilizing’, and makes visible the potential for a powerful international resistance. The oscillation between the politicization and depoliticization of South Asian workers’ practices that is visible in the surveillance reports is also evident in their self-representation. In his retrospective narrative of life in the metropolis pre-independence, ex-seamen Shah Abdul Majid Qureshi describes the Hindustani Social Club as ‘not much political’, claiming

that ‘mostly we had social gatherings … Indian songs and all that’; similarly, the ‘First Report’ of the Hindustan Community House outlines a clear social welfare agenda, without any overtly political content.46 This contrasts starkly with a Scotland Yard report claiming that both organizations were carrying out ‘Communist and anti-British propaganda’ among Indians in Britain.47 The Indian Seamen’s Welfare League, inaugurated in east London in 1943 by the ex-seamen Ayub Ali and Shah Abdul Majid Qureshi, describes itself, in correspondence with the India Office, as ‘social’ rather than ‘political’. Indeed, it changed its name from the Indian Seamen’s Union in part because it feared that the political connotations of the word ‘union’ would alienate shipowners and attract the attention of the police. Records of meetings, however, suggest that there were tensions between those who espoused this ‘non-political’ position and those who considered the concerns of the organization to be inextricable from an anti-colonial politics, attempting, for example, to dissuade fellow Indian seamen from risking their lives bringing food to Britain in order to help sabotage the war effort.48 The varied and conflicting nature of self-representations of working-class struggle raises an issue of methodology. The subaltern historian Dipesh Chakrabarty describes the gap that can separate the set of explanatory principles that a historian employs from the corresponding set that working-class protagonists themselves use, and argues for the productiveness of this dissonance: ‘subaltern pasts … act as a supplement to the historian’s pasts … they enable history, the discipline, to be what it is and yet at the same time help to show what its limits are.’ Chakrabarty is referring to the Santal’s 1855 rebellion against the British, specifically the gap between their own understanding of God as the main force behind the rebellion and the ‘democratic-Marxist’ historian’s attribution of political agency to the Santal. Adapting his theory, the dissonance between some Indian workers’ representations of their practices in Britain as apolitical and my politicization of them here may be seen to expose the irreducible nature of these ‘minority histories’, the impossibility of reducing their diversity and multiplicity to a singular or universal narrative of anti-colonial resistance, as well as the limitations of any historical excavation of subaltern lives.49

TWO TALES OF RESISTANCE De Certeau’s metaphor of the frontier or bridge is useful to illuminate the notion of a network that both connects and detaches: he describes how the bridge ‘alternately welds together and opposes insularities. It distinguishes them and threatens them. It liberates from enclose and destroys autonomy.’50 For de Certeau the story also privileges such a logic of ambiguity; ‘it “turns” the frontier into a crossing, and the river into a bridge’. Stories are ‘delinquent’; they have the potential to displace or disrupt the order of the map.51 In view of this, in this final section of the chapter I will focus briefly on two stories – of a subaltern figure and of a subaltern act of dissent, each connected to Krishna Menon – situating each within a network of nodes that connect and detach to highlight the way class complicates resistance and to repoliticize these stories of working-class lives. Like the Indians in Maclaren-Ross’s anecdote, Indian workers did not always or

necessarily resist colonial oppression in a direct, outright manner. Their tools of defiance could be seen as ‘the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups [such as] foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on’.52 Their resistances are redolent of de Certeau’s notion of the ‘tactic’ of the powerless and weak, which takes advantage of ‘opportunities’ and depends on them, being without any base where it could stockpile its winnings, build up its own position, and plan raids … [and which] must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers.53

Indeed, following de Certeau, the very mobility and settlement of working-class South Asians within the metropolis may be seen as a tactical act of resistance – to the barriers of empire that they confronted in this space. The narrative of Shah Abdul Majid Qureshi, a Sylheti migrant who travelled to Britain as a lascar in 1936 and jumped ship at Tilbury Docks, and one of Krishna Menon’s working-class connections, is apposite here. Qureshi’s story of migration and settlement in Britain was captured by Caroline Adams in her 1987 book Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers. Further clues to his life in Britain may be traced through various India Office files.54 Upon his arrival in England, Qureshi found lodgings in Code Street, just off Brick Lane, and, with fellow Syhletis, sold chocolates in pubs to make a living. He describes the poverty of the East End, remarking that ‘when you go to look for work, there is no place to find work … never mind Indian boys, English people couldn’t get jobs’.55 Over the years, however, he finds work in Indian restaurants on Old Compton Street and Percy Street, in the heart of Bloomsbury, and shares lodgings on Old Compton Street and Green Street near Piccadilly Circus. He even owns two restaurants temporarily, the first in Windmill Street and the second just off Charlotte Street – again, both in Bloomsbury.56 Through his narrative, then, the anonymized South Asians who served the cultural elite, both British and Indian, begin to acquire subjecthood57 – and through his trade, Qureshi moves from peripheral London, the East End, to its centre, to some extent subverting the social boundaries that are materialized in space. Here, Qureshi’s trajectory brings to mind the ‘tactical practices’ of de Certeau’s disempowered ‘walker’, who lacks a place of his own and must therefore insinuate himself ‘into the other’s place, fragmentarily’, watching out for events that can be turned into ‘opportunities’ for him.58 Qureshi’s narrative also sheds light on how the various networks of South Asians in Britain overlapped and interconnected. He attended the inaugural meeting of the East End branch of the India League, crossing paths there with writers and intellectuals Mulk Raj Anand and Narayana Menon, as well as with Krishna Menon, but also objecting to Menon’s intrusion into the affairs of East End Indians, as indicated above.59 The Indian restaurant on Percy Street at which he worked was host in the late 1930s to meetings of the India League where delegates, including Krishna Menon and British figures such as Reginald Bridgeman, Michael Carritt and Agatha Harrison, discussed the lascar strikes, among other matters.60 Qureshi tells us that he used to call his Charlotte Place restaurant the ‘Indian Centre’ because it became a place where ‘Indian political workers [no doubt including Menon] and their

associates, the English gentlemen, MPs and all that’ congregated for meetings.61 Thus his restaurants are a kind of ‘contact zone’ for Britons and South Asians – and also a zone for cross-class interactions among the South Asian inhabitants of London, a space where different networks of South Asians intersect, forming a larger, more diverse network. Simultaneously, however, his narrative illuminates the very different and much more limited nature of cross-cultural contact for the South Asian working class (himself and his fellow restaurant workers) within this central London space, despite their infiltration of it, as well as the hierarchical form of the South Asian network. For example, he says: Here in this country the student community from my country – they boast that such and such a man is having high position, but at the bottom you will find that those Sylhetti people, they organized something here, they made a few restaurants at that time. And those students who came here, they always knew that … ‘we will not be without shelter, because there are some … men of the same country’ … so fellow feeling was there.62

Thus he underlines both the interdependence of South Asians in Britain and the social hierarchies that divided them. Just as for Menon, so too for Qureshi contact across South Asian London is mediated or circumscribed by class. The nodes of contact are also points of division. This tension between contact and division is also evident in a 1943 dispute between the Jamiat-ul-Muslimin, a working-class Muslim organization based at the East London Mosque, and the executive committee and trustees of the mosque who were, by contrast to the members of the Jamiat, all elite figures. They included Sir Hassan Suhrawardy, Muslim adviser to the Secretary of State for India, as well as former officials of British India, such as Sir John Woodhead and Sir Ernest Hotson.63 The trustees had handed over the management of the affairs of the mosque to the Jamiat at its inauguration. In autumn 1943, however, Suhrawardy, on behalf of the trustees, terminated their role. The reasons for this termination are unclear. The documentation alleges that the Jamiat attempted to gain total control of the mosque, and their refusal to accept the trustees’ intervention led to their dismissal from the premises and subsequent meeting of protest at London’s Conway Hall in Red Lion Square. The latter was attended by 400 people, largely Punjabi and Bengali Muslims – many of whom would have, like Qureshi, transgressed socio-spatial boundaries to make their way from east London to its centre, to some extent laying claim to this space, if fleetingly. While there was no disorder, there was, according to the report, an ‘atmosphere of suppressed excitement – and little encouragement would have been needed to inflame the passions of those present’.64 The language used here typically constructs the protesters as hot-headed, irrational and susceptible to the machinations of their better educated leaders, and once again resonates with Burgess’s much more recent constructions of the working-class British Muslim protesters against Rushdie’s controversial novel. While Menon was not present at this protest, he would have crossed paths with members of the Jamiat-ul-Muslimin, and was an associate of Said Amir Shah, leader of the protest, with whom he collaborated in a 1941 attempt to mobilize East London Indians against colonial rule. Shah was a key figure in the East End South Asian community, and was particularly involved in the pro-Congress Committee of Indian Congressmen, led by Subhas Chandra Bose’s nephew, Amiya Nath Bose.65 Some of Menon’s fellow elite, non-Muslim

anti-colonial activists were also there, including K. S. Shelvankar, Dr C. B. Vakil, I. G. P. Singh, A. N. Bose and Tarapada Basu, well-known representatives of various political organizations such as the Committee of Indian Congressmen, the Communist Party of Great Britain, Swaraj House and the India League.66 Divesting the working-class dissenters of agency in a familiar gesture, the report claims that ‘the Jamiat have for some time been making themselves difficult having got into the hands of Congress minded Moslems’. It goes on to state that the ‘non-Muslim extremists’ who attended the protest were not present ‘out of any kindly interest in the welfare of the East London Mosque’ – the implication being that their motivation was purely an opportunistic bid to secure more support for their organizations.67 While the report seems to occlude the possibility of a combined religious interest in the mosque and political interest in agitating against colonial rule (or political ‘extremism’, as the government officials term it), its description of the speech Shah made at the protest meeting, read against the grain, inadvertently ties these interests together in a revealing manner. We are told that Shah implied in his speech that the India Office ran the affairs of the Mosque through its representatives, the Trustees. [Shah] did not consider the Muslim trustees as good Muslims, declaring that they put the interests of the British Government before their duty to Islam. He mentioned the name of Sir Hassan Suhrawardy whom he alleged never came to the Mosque merely to pray – there was always a sinister motive for his casual visits. Then there was Sayeedulla, the secretary of the Executive Committee, who rarely put in an appearance at the Friday prayer meetings. These were the type of Muslims on the London Mosque Fund whom the Jamiat wished to have replaced by conscientious and trustworthy Muslims.68

Especially when read through the lens of contemporary hegemonic constructions of British Muslims, these assertions by Shah, coupled with his colleague Sahibdad Khan’s objections to the presence of non-Muslims on the board of trustees, might position him and his organization as separatist, exclusionary and zealous. However, Shah’s suspicion of the progovernment, elite trustees underscores the very different political interests of the Jamiat and its members (implicitly working class and anti-colonial). It links their desire to practise their faith autonomously to a rejection of colonialism and thereby locates their protest within a political framework. The members of the Jamiat may then be reconfigured as autonomous agents of resistance, objecting to the paternalistic involvement of the officials – just as Qureshi and his associates objected to Menon’s intrusion into their East End community – rather than as zealous separatists. The presence of non-Muslim anti-colonial activists such as Shelvankar and Vakil at a ‘Muslim’ protest is further suggestive of the cross-over between a Muslim – or religio-cultural – organization and an anti-colonial stance. By tracing the connections between the religious or more broadly cultural and the political, between a local concern and a transnational anti-colonial politics, between professional South Asians who interacted with white British writers and activists in west-central London and their working-class counterparts who lived more culturally autonomous lives in the East End, a local working-class protest may be reconfigured as a complex political act of resistance and a migrant restaurant worker as an agent of resistance, in contrast to the individualizing and depoliticizing hegemonic representations of the time. Despite the economic and social hardship which these pedlars and labourers experienced in Britain, many of them were concerned with and active in the struggle for Indian independence, as well as being pioneers

in the struggle for equality of citizenship and minority rights. This is not to say that the protagonists of these struggles – whose voices we have limited access to and are always inevitably mediated – would necessarily have perceived their concerns and practices in this manner. Following Chakrabarty, my aim is not to speak for them, but rather to piece together fragments of their lives from the archive and place them within a network of narratives that is productively incomplete and disjointed, and breaks down the stereotypes that can often work to freeze dissenting subaltern figures into the excitable pawns of India Office surveillance reports or indeed media representations of more contemporary minority protests in Britain. Notes 1 Maclaren-Ross, J. (1984) [1965] Memoirs of the Forties. London: Alan Ross, p. 61. 2 Ibid., p. 145. A Tamil from an affluent English-speaking Roman Catholic family, M. J. Tambimuttu (1915–1983), travelled from Ceylon to Britain in 1938 and co-founded the magazine Poetry London (1939–1951) the following year. See Williams, J. (ed.) (1989) Tambimuttu: Bridge Between Two Worlds. London: Peter Owen; Ranasinha, R. (2007) South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 3 For more on Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004), see Susheila Nasta (Chapter 9, this volume). For his association with Indian lascars and workers, see, for example: British Library. IOR: L/PJ/12/454, ‘Meetings’, 4 February 1942; L/PJ/12/455, ‘India League’, 23 June 1943; L/PJ/12/456, ‘India League’, 26 April 1944. 4 For further biographical details on V. K. Krishna Menon (1896–1974), see Arora, K. C. (1998) V. K. Krishna Menon: A Biography. New Delhi: Sanchar Publishing House; George, T. G. S. (1964) Krishna Menon: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape; Lengyel, E. (1962) Krishna Menon. New York: Walker & Co; Visram, R. (2002) Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto Press, pp. 320–40. 5 De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. 6 Maclaren-Ross, Memoirs, p. 62. 7 For narratives of working-class South Asians who migrated to Britain pre-independence and settled there, see, for example, Adams, C. (ed.) (1987) Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers: Life Stories of Pioneer Sylheti Settlers in Britain. London: THAP. 8 Scott, J. C. (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 29. 9 For the disputed story of Menon’s role in founding Pelican Books, see Lewis, J. (2005) Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane. London: Viking, pp. 113–14. 10 Arora, Krishna Menon, pp. 65–7; George, Krishna Menon, pp. 88–9; Visram, Asians, pp. 331–3. 11 L/PJ/12/646, ‘Indian societies in the UK’, 6 June 1946. 12 L/PJ/12/646, ‘Indian notes’, 7 April 1942; L/PJ/12/455, ‘Indian notes’, 13 April 1943. 13 Penguin Books Archive. 1819: Allen Lane Filing Cabinets, 26/1, Letter from Ethel Mannin to Allen Lane, 16 August 1938. 14 Visram, Asians, p. 325; see also Lengyel, Krishna Menon, p. 78. 15 Visram, Asians, pp. 321–7; L/PJ/12/450–4. 16 Arora, K. C. (1992) Indian Nationalist Movement in Britain, 1930–1949. New Delhi: Inter-Indian Publications, pp. 211– 15. 17 L/PJ/12/455, ‘India League meetings’, 20 January 1943; Visram, Asians, p. 330. 18 L/PJ/12/450, ‘India League’, 20 May 1936; L/PJ/12/452, ‘India League’, 8 February 1939; L/PJ/12/456, ‘India League’, 21 November 1941. 19 L/PJ/12/451, ‘India League – Indian Independence Day celebrations’. 20 L/PJ/12/450, ‘India League’, 20 May 1936, 29. 21 George, Krishna Menon, p. 87. 22 Ibid., pp. 80–2. 23 Ibid., p. 80; L/PJ/12/456, ‘India League’, 16 August 1944. 24 L/PJ/12/455, ‘India League’, 23 June 1943; ‘India League’, 5 July 1944. 25 L/PJ/12/630, Memo to Mr Silver, 4 November 1939; ‘V. K. Menon and the India League’, 7 November 1939; ‘Unrest among Indian seamen’, 16 November 1939.

26 L/PJ/12/500. 27 Menon, K. (1940), ‘The India League: tragedy “regretted and condemned”’. Manchester Guardian, 15 March, 10; L/PJ/12/500, 29 March 1940; see also Florian Stadtler (Chapter 2, in this volume). 28 L/PJ/12/454, ‘The India League and other Indian activities in the United Kingdom’, 10 March 1942. 29 L/PJ/12/645, ‘The Indian Workers’ Association’, 14 April 1942. 30 L/PJ/12/646, ‘Indian activities: June–July 1943’; L/PJ/12/630, ‘V. K. Menon and the India League’, 7 November 1939. 31 L/PJ/12/455, ‘India League’, 13 April 1943. The linguistic barrier was of course a real one – but it could also be read metaphorically. 32 L/PJ/12/646, ‘Indian activities: June–July 1943’. 33 L/PJ/12/455, ‘India League’, 23 June 1943. 34 Williams, R. (1980) Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays. London: Verso, pp. 158, 165. 35 Lefebvre. H. (1991) The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 89–90. 36 L/PJ/12/645, ‘The Indian Workers’ Union’, 17 December 1942. 37 Burgess, A. (1989) ‘Islam’s gangster tactics’. Independent, 16 February. 38 Burton, A. (1998) At the Heart of the Empire: Indians in the Colonial Encounter in Late Victorian Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 153–5; Young, P. (1944), Report on Investigation into Conditions of the Coloured Population in a Stepney Area. See also Alex Tickell (Chapter 1, this volume). 39 L/PJ/12/646, ‘Indian activities in the United Kingdom’, 22 January 1944; ‘Indian Workers’ Union’, 3 March 1943. 40 L/PJ/12/645, Memo to Mr Silver, 20 January 1943. 41 L/PJ/12/645, ‘The Indian Workers’ Union’, 17 December 1942; L/PJ/12/646, ‘Indian activities: June–July 1943’. 42 L/PJ/12/454, ‘The India League and other Indian activities in the United Kingdom’, 10 March 1942. 43 L/PJ/12/645, ‘The Indian Workers’ Association’, 14 April 1942; ‘Indian activities in the United Kingdom’, 8 March 1944; L/PJ/12/658, ‘Conscription of Indians resident in Great Britain’, 16 February 1944. 44 L/PJ/12/645, ‘The Hindustani Majlis’, 1 May 1944. 45 L/PJ/12/645, Memo to Mr Silver, 1 January 1942; ‘Indian Workers’ Union’, 22 February 1942. 46 Adams, Across Seven Seas, p. 158; Hindustan Community House: First Report, April 1940. 47 L/PJ/12/630, ‘Communist and anti-British propaganda amongst East End Indians’, 13 December 1939. 48 L/PJ/12/630, ‘Indian Seamen’s Union’, 23 June 1943; ‘Indian Seamen’s Welfare League’, 7 July 1943. 49 Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, pp. 97–113 at p. 112. 50 De Certeau, Everyday Life, p. 128. 51 Ibid. 52 Scott, Weapons of the Weak, p. 29. 53 De Certeau, Everyday Life, p. 37. 54 Adams, Across Seven Seas, pp. 140–77; L/PJ/12/455–6, 630, 646. 55 Adams, Across Seven Seas, p. 158. 56 Ibid., pp. 154–5, 159, 163. 57 Penguin Books Archive. Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, Letter to Anand dated 31 July 1945. 58 De Certeau, Everyday Life, p. xix. 59 L/PJ/12/455, ‘India League’, 23 June 1943. 60 L/PJ/12/452. 61 Adams, Across Seven Seas, p. 163. 62 Ibid., p. 153. 63 L/PJ/12/468, ‘East London Mosque’, 7 October 1943. 64 Ibid., ‘The Jamiat-ul-Muslimin in Great Britain’, 30 October 1943; ‘East London Mosque’, 14 October 1943. 65 ‘The Jamiat-ul-Muslimin in Great Britain’, 30 October 1943. Despite its claims of allegiance to the Indian National Congress, counter-allegations on the part of British government officials suggested that the Committee of Indian Congressmen declared this allegiance in order to conceal its true support for the pro-Axis Subhas Chandra Bose (see L/PJ/12/646). 66 ‘East London Mosque’, 14 October 1943. 67 ‘East London Mosque’, 7 October 1943; ‘East London Mosque’, 14 October 1943. 68 Ibid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Archival Sources British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: India Office Records, L/PJ/12/450–6, India League reports. British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: India Office Records, L/PJ/12/468, ‘Aid for the establishment of the East London Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre’, July 1927 to June 1946. British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: India Office Records, L/PJ/12/500, ‘Udham or Uday Singh: activities outside India; assassination of Sir Michael O’Dwyer; trial, appeal and execution in London’, 28 May 1936 to August 1940. British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: India Office Records, L/PJ/12/630, ‘Indian seamen: reports on unrest, welfare and union activities’, November 1939 to January 1945. British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: India Office Records, L/PJ/12/645, ‘Indian Workers’ Union or Association: reports on members and activities’, January 1942 to July 1947. British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: India Office Records, L/PJ/12/646, ‘IPI notes on Indian organisations in UK’, April 1942 to June 1946. British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: India Office Records, L/PJ/12/658, ‘Swaraj House, London: activities of members and meetings’, November 1942 to July 1947. Penguin Books Archive, University of Bristol. 1819: Allen Lane Filing Cabinets, 22/3 and 26/1. Penguin Books Archive, University of Bristol. Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable. Books and Articles Adams, C. (ed.) (1987) Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers: Life Stories of Pioneer Sylheti Settlers in Britain. London: THAP. Arora, K. C. (1992) Indian Nationalist Movement in Britain, 1930–1949. New Delhi: InterIndian Publications. — (1998) V. K. Krishna Menon: A Biography. New Delhi: Sanchar Publishing House. Burgess, A. (1989) ‘Islam’s gangster tactics’. Independent, 16 February. Burton, A. (1998) At the Heart of the Empire: Indians in the Colonial Encounter in Late Victorian Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. George, T. G. S. (1964) Krishna Menon: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape. Lefebvre. H. (1991) The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell.

Lengyel, E. (1962) Krishna Menon. New York: Walker & Co. Lewis, J. (2005) Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane. London: Viking. Maclaren-Ross, J. (1984) [1965] Memoirs of the Forties. London: Alan Ross. Menon, K. (1940) ‘The India League: tragedy “regretted and condemned”’. Manchester Guardian, 15 March, 10. Ranasinha, R. (2007) South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Scott, James C. (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Visram, R. (2002) Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto Press. Williams, J. (ed.) (1989) Tambimuttu: Bridge Between Two Worlds. London: Peter Owen. Williams, R. (1980) Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays. London: Verso. Young, P. (1944) Report on Investigation into Conditions of the Coloured Population in a Stepney Area.

PART III

Resistances and the Elite

Chapter 6

Royal Relationships as a Form of Resistance: The Cases of Duleep Singh and Abdul Karim A. Martin Wainwright

At the height of Britain’s occupation of India, two South Asians, the Maharaja Duleep Singh and Munshi Hafiz Abdul Karim, enjoyed unprecedented access to the person embodying the symbolic and social pinnacle of the British Empire – Queen Victoria. The relationships of these men with the Queen-Empress present some of the most unusual and interesting examples of South Asian resistance in nineteenth-century Britain. Yet to interpret events in these relationships as acts of resistance is problematic, because only one act, namely Duleep Singh’s attempt to raise a rebel army to liberate Punjab, fits the classic definition of overt opposition to foreign rule. Moreover, the pre-national, dynastic quality of both men’s allegiance to Victoria identified the targets of their resistance as the British government and bureaucracy rather than the Queen-Empress herself. Indeed, much of the opposition that Duleep and Karim displayed towards the British government allied them with Victoria’s efforts to maintain and enhance the monarchy’s role in the governance of the British Empire in opposition to Parliament’s efforts to restrict its influence. In the peculiar context of royal relations, therefore, many of Duleep’s and Karim’s actions were simultaneously acts of resistance against the British government and collaboration with the Queen-Empress. Like Victoria, they regarded the elected government as an impediment to the monarch’s more enlightened approach to ruling the empire. These less obvious manifestations of South Asian agency in the imperial court deserve closer scrutiny in the light of scholarship on resistance.

DEFINING RESISTANCE A key problem in assessing Duleep’s and Karim’s actions is the extent to which they constituted resistance at all, a problem made all the more difficult by scholarly disagreement, much of it within the disciplines of social anthropology and political science, concerning the definition of resistance. In their survey of the relevant literature, Jocelyn Hollander and Rachel Einwohner posit a seven-part typology, shown in Table 6.1,1 based on whether a particular act appears to be resistance to one or more of three different parties: the actor, the target and the observer. Table 6.1 Hollander and Einwohner’s Typology of Resistance Is an act intended as resistance by actor?

Is an act recognized as resistance by

target?

observer?

1 Overt resistance

Yes

Yes

Yes

2 Covert resistance

Yes

No

Yes

3 Unwitting resistance

No

Yes

Yes

4 Target-defined resistance

No

Yes

No

5 Externally defined resistance

No

No

Yes

6 Missed resistance

Yes

Yes

No

7 Attempted resistance

Yes

No

No

Source: J. A. Hollander and R. L. Einwohner (2004) ‘Conceptualizing resistance’. Sociological Forum, 19, 544.

The most obvious examples of overt resistance are open rebellions, but non-violent resistance on the Gandhian model also qualifies. Covert resistance covers a much wider set of activities that, as James Scott observes, are ‘the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, sabotage, and so forth’.2 A common example is the deliberate sabotage of farm implements by slaves who then claim the damage resulted from an accident. For the actors to acknowledge openly that the sabotage is resistance is too risky, because the slave-owner’s retaliation would be too severe, but the act itself builds morale among the perpetrators and other slaves who know about it. In this vein Karen Sanger argues that spirituals also constituted covert resistance.3 It is possible, however, for a person to perform unwitting resistance, an action that the actor does not intend as protest, but which both the target and observers interpret as such. In this case the target is self-defined. Lynn Carr has identified ‘tomboy’ behaviour in girls as unwitting resistance.4 Their challenge to gender conventions does not necessarily arise from a desire to challenge authority. Nevertheless, society sees it as such. In situations of extreme oppression, such as within prisons, ‘target-defined’ resistance may lack observers. Similarly, secret societies may intentionally resist authority but without gaining the support of observers, a situation that Hollander and Einwohner dub ‘missed resistance’. Many subtle acts of resistance may appear as merely self-indulgent behaviour, yet highlight larger social and political issues that they seek to undermine. Scott points out: A peasant soldier who deserts the army is in effect ‘saying’ by his act that the purposes of this institution and the risks and hardships it entails will not prevail over his family or personal needs. A harvest laborer who steals paddy from his employer is ‘saying’ that his need for rice takes precedence over the formal property rights of his boss.5

Indeed, much Indian national resistance arose initially from the efforts of middle-class Indians to overcome racial obstacles to purely personal career ambitions.6 Seeking to delegitimize resulting protests, British authorities often portrayed acts of resistance as nothing more than personal pique. In such situations resistance may arise unintentionally and be rejected as such by the target. Yet in the long run observers will recognize it as resistance, thus making it externally defined. Since many Indians came to resent British rule in the

context of pursuing professional advancement while in Britain, such examples are particularly relevant in assessing the extent to which the actions of Duleep and Karim constituted resistance. For as Hollander and Einwohner point out, ‘resistance is not always pure. That is, even while resisting power, individuals or groups may simultaneously support the structures of domination that necessitate resistance in the first place.’7 Therefore, even if Duleep’s attempted rebellion is the only action that fits the first form of resistance, other actions of his and Karim’s may fall somewhere under the criteria of the second through fifth. There is, however, no evidence to suggest that the actions of either man met the criteria of either missed or attempted resistance. Such expansive definitions of resistance have not escaped criticism. Claiming that ‘the indiscriminate use of resistance and related concepts undermines their analytical utility’,8 Michael Brown criticizes the reductionism implicit in finding resistance in every act, and power in every relationship. Certainly discussions of power are complicated when examining the ‘oppression’ of someone with the social standing of a maharaja, or indeed any friend of the Queen-Empress. Yet even if power did not enter into the relationship between every Indian and Briton during Britain’s occupation of India, it surely entered into those between Victoria and each of these men, one having lost his kingdom to British arms and the other having begun residence in England as a table servant. Nevertheless, the subaltern status of each man’s social relationship with Victoria did not preclude opportunities to use that relationship to his own advantage. For Duleep and Karim both framed their resistance to British rule in the context of the monarchy’s resistance to the erosion of its power and consequent relevance in British political life.

THE ROYAL HOUSEHOLD AS A ZONE OF ENCOUNTER In the wake of a rebellion in 1891 in the Indian city of Manipur, Queen Victoria complained about the character of British rule over the subcontinent: Our system of sending out … people who merely get appointed for passing an examination must be altered, or we shall have some much more serious trouble in India. There is no doubt, from what the Queen hears from many sides, that the natives (though they are very loyal to the Queen-Empress and Royal Family) have no affection for the English rule, which is one of fear not of love, and this will not answer for a conquered nation. One of the Royal Family ought, if possible, to be constantly there to encourage the good feeling and loyalty of the people, which no private individual could in the same way, and certainly not people like many of those who are now in Indian employment.9

These remarks, coming late in Victoria’s life, illustrate the three main themes of her behaviour towards India and Indians throughout most of her reign. One such theme was Victoria’s belief that the Government of India, by drawing on Britain’s professional class, was ruling the subcontinent badly, exhibiting destructive racist attitudes towards its population. By contrast an independently wealthy elite, educated in British public schools and holding offices in the Indian Civil Service (ICS) from a sense of social duty rather than financial need, would treat India’s inhabitants with the requisite noblesse oblige that the imperial mission demanded. Victoria was not alone in this view. It

was, in fact, the purpose behind the 1853 reforms creating competitive examinations for the ICS. Yet few members of the gentlemanly class showed interest in the service, which instead became the focus of competition among middle-class men seeking a level of income and prestige in the Indian Empire that they could not so easily achieve at home.10 Victoria’s complaint about India’s colonial governing class, however, also supported the political agenda implicit in her memorandum: that her son Arthur, Duke of Connaught, should be Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army. This initiative was part of the second theme of Victoria’s relationship with India and Indians: the subcontinent’s role in the royal family’s ongoing campaign to ensure their political relevance in an era of increasing nationalism and democratization in Britain. In order to do so the Queen asserted the monarch’s position as the unifying authority over all British subjects no matter the colour of their skin. As part of this effort, Victoria and her husband Albert helped draft the act establishing India’s new government in the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857–1858. At their insistence, the British Army in India remained under the unified command of the Army at home, the monarch saw all official correspondence relating to India, and a system of honorific titles and medals was established for Indian princes.11 These measures created a quasi-feudal relationship between monarchy and princes in which the sudden disappearance of the former would undermine Parliament’s claims to authority over the latter. Although such measures strengthened the monarchy, or at least slowed its decline, they also served the government by creating ambiguities regarding British and Indian citizenship which avoided an openly racial definition likely to inflame opposition to British rule. Daniel Gorman argues that this ‘weak, or soft sense of imperial citizenship’, known as ‘loyalism’ and based on ‘a personal relationship to the sovereign … provided the Empire with stability and cohesion’.12 Thus, when in 1858 Victoria declared ‘[w]e hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territories by the same obligations of duty which bind us to all our other subjects’,13 she asserted not only the equality of all who fell under Britain’s jurisdiction, but also her essential position at the centre of that jurisdiction. The final theme was Victoria’s romantic notions about ‘the orient’ and her antipathy to ‘racial prejudice’. The two sentiments co-existed uneasily, since the presence of people of colour in Victoria’s court, and the Queen’s tendency to highlight their exoticism through ceremony, portraits and tableaux vivantes, had the effect of making them exhibits in what Bernard Cohn has described in similar contexts as a ‘living museum’. Adrienne Munich observes: ‘She respected the Indians’ right to maintain their indigenous religions and respected subjected people’s autonomy, but in safeguarding their religions and customs, Victoria also appropriated their exotic bodies for aesthetic as well as territorial pleasure.’14 However valid these criticisms are, they should not obscure the fact that Victoria’s relations with South Asians occurred in a context steeped in symbolism. All the members of the royal family were in a sense exhibits, as the political context of Britain’s constitutional monarchy demanded. The requirement that the Queen exhibit herself to the British public became apparent in the negative reaction to her decision not to do so during her self-imposed extended period of mourning following Albert’s death in 1861. Victoria’s court should therefore be understood as a zone of encounter in which South Asians, such as Duleep and

Karim, advanced their own personal interests, and those of the ethnic groups with which they identified, by navigating through the ceremony and exhibition that British society demanded of the setting.

DULEEP SINGH Like many who were connected with the royal family, Duleep Singh has received considerable attention, both scholarly and popular. To many Sikhs he is also a national hero.15 His threat in 1886 to 1888 to raise an army to liberate Punjab from British rule is one of the most famous examples of resistance among South Asians living in nineteenth-century Britain. Other episodes in Duleep’s life, however, deserve scrutiny in the light of the scholarship on resistance mentioned above. These earlier acts of resistance show a pattern of resentment that gradually built up from personal frustration to a general anger at British rule over India. Although Duleep became one of the most privileged South Asians living in Victorian Britain, early on in life he was perhaps India’s best-known victim of British imperialism. Assassination and palace intrigue following the death of Ranjit Singh led to Duleep’s elevation to the throne of Lahore in 1843 at the age of 5, with his mother serving as regent. Internal political instability had shifted power from Punjab’s royal family to its military. The East India Company seized the opportunity to expand into Punjab. As a minor, Duleep played no decision-making role in the resulting Sikh Wars of 1846 and 1848–1849. Nevertheless, he paid the price with his throne, which he yielded to the Company. The East India Company also assumed guardianship of the deposed maharaja, through its former Scottish medical officer John Login. Surrounded by British authority figures, Duleep converted to Christianity in 1853. With the encouragement of Login and Governor-General Lord Dalhousie, Duleep sailed to England the following year, where he met Queen Victoria. In order to understand the causes behind Duleep’s later open resistance to the British government, it is important to appreciate the central role of his social status in framing the grievances he bore. Like many South Asians who later directed their anger at British rule politically, Duleep’s grievances began at a personal level. Although Duleep had lost his kingdom, he had lost neither his title nor all the perquisites that accompanied it. Most important among these was his pension of roughly £40,000 and the promise to treat him ‘with respect and honour’.16 In keeping with their desire to serve as the apex of an imperial social pyramid of which India’s aristocracy formed an essential part, the Queen and Prince Consort paid considerable attention to the status that Duleep should occupy in royal ceremony. Since Duleep was the highest-ranking Indian ever to have visited Britain, the announcement of his impending arrival presented a conundrum for British officials interpreting his social and political rank into a more familiar European equivalent. Lord Hardinge, Governor-General of India during the First Sikh War, argued that the maharaja ranked third in Indian society, after the Mughal emperor and the Nizam of Hyderabad. Duleep’s status was murkier, however, since it was unclear whether he was a foreign dignitary, as were the Mughal emperor and the Nizam, or a British subject with an exotic

title. Charles Wood, President of the East India Company’s Board of Control, argued the latter, since Duleep pledged allegiance to the British monarch and no longer ruled any territory. Charles Phipps, Prince Albert’s private secretary, pressed for recognition of Duleep’s high rank at official functions whatever his nationality: ‘Is he a British subject? If he is, then the highest gentleman’s rank after an Ambassador, but before Dukes and other Foreign Ministers might be given him? … If the Maharajah is not a British Subject then clearly he must be treated as a Foreign Prince.’17 The Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen, took the latter approach. Describing ‘maharajah’ as a ‘sovereign title’ he declared: ‘I should be disposed to regard the Maharajah in the light of a deposed, or abdicated sovereign, and in such a case, must depend on personal inclination in giving the amount of honours to be paid.’18 This early correspondence sets the social context to Duleep’s later open resistance to British rule. Out of a combination of personal sympathy and a desire to maintain monarchical institutions generally, Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their advisers insisted that Duleep be treated as royal and receive an income commensurate with his rank. These concerns arose in the Queen’s correspondence with Foreign Secretary Lord Clarendon: ‘There is something too painful in the idea of a young deposed Sovereign, once so powerful, receiving a pension, and having no security that his children and descendants … should have any home or position.’19 The royal family, therefore, encouraged the ambiguities that surrounded Duleep’s status both socially and politically. He was a king without a kingdom, and a sovereign dependent on a British pension and by treaty loyal to the British Crown. To a great extent he assimilated into the highest levels of British society: he bought estates staffed with British servants and hunted with British aristocrats, including the Prince of Wales. In all these activities Duleep received royal approval and support. Yet Duleep’s high if anomalous rank in British society made the glaring exceptions to his royal treatment all the more galling when they occurred. Two issues in particular demonstrated the limits of his acceptance into Britain’s aristocracy, and therefore became the occasion for what are arguably acts of resistance. One was marriage. Lady Login observed that Duleep was ‘fully alive to the difficulties in his way of marrying an Englishwoman of the birth and rank to suit his position’.20 The only solution appeared to be marrying an Indian of similar rank. But the sole Indian Christian princess was Victoria Gourama of Coorg. While still a Sikh living in India, the young maharaja had approached the former Raja of Coorg, requesting betrothal to his eldest daughter. Since then both he and the princess had converted to Christianity and emigrated to Britain. In 1859 Victoria encouraged the two to marry, but Duleep found Gourama too flirtatious and felt he could not trust her. She ultimately married a British colonel, the brother-in-law of the maharaja’s guardian. Frustrated in his effort to find a suitable wife and finding British aristocratic women uninterested in marrying a man of colour, whatever his title, Duleep turned his back on high society women in Britain generally, framing his decision in religious terms. According to the records of an American mission in Cairo to which he wrote, ‘he desired … a young girl who loved the Lord in sincerity and truth’.21 It was through this mission in 1863 that the maharaja picked his wife, Bamba Müller, whom he met while travelling back to England after returning his recently deceased

mother’s remains to India. The 15-year-old ‘illegitimate’ daughter of a German banker and his Abyssinian servant, Bamba ranked far below the maharaja socially. Bemoaning Duleep’s ‘haste’ in marrying the girl, James Oliphant, former Chairman of the East India Company’s Court of Directors, framed the maharaja’s decision as a possible protest against racial prejudice he had encountered in Britain: ‘I have reason to think that he had come to the conclusion that (as he termed it) a “foreigner like himself” was distasteful to our Country women, and it is not impossible that some such feeling urged him on so hastily to the step he has taken.’22 Marrying a woman of colour, from a relatively low social background, was therefore an act of resistance. Duleep appeared to some of his acquaintances to be spurning Britain’s high society women in general, whom he had already criticized for what he perceived as their frivolity. His desire to marry a ‘sincere’ Christian insinuated that similar prospects were not available in Victorian polite society. Whether this act constituted overt or covert resistance depends on the identity of the target. If the target was Queen Victoria and her household, the resistance was overt, because she and her closest associates understood the statement implicit in the marriage. Surinder Kaur Anand traces this resistance to the maharaja’s earlier ‘rejection of Princess Gouramma of Coorg as a prospective wife in spite of the fact that she was [sic] queen’s goddaughter’, which she argues was his ‘first noticeable act of assertion’.23 Since Victoria was a sympathetic observer, however, the target may have been British high society, in which case the resistance may have been covert, because it is uncertain how much the rest of society understood the message. Yet it is difficult to see Duleep’s flouting of class conventions as other than a public protest of his ostracism from the marriage market of Victorian polite society. Duleep’s most open acts of resistance, however, arose over the level of his income, that other major limitation on his assimilation into British society at a rank commensurate with that of maharaja. For Duleep’s dependence on the British government for his prosperity served as a constant reminder of the lands he had lost with his kingdom. Following its annexation of Punjab, the East India Company had unilaterally decreased the income it had agreed to award the maharaja, providing him with an annual stipend of £25,000 rather than the minimum of £40,000 upon which it had originally agreed. Queen Victoria repeatedly advised the Government of India to honour its original agreement, or better yet restore the estates (valued at £130,000) on which Duleep’s prosperity depended. Nevertheless, the India Office, which following the Indian Rebellion succeeded the Company as the disburser of Duleep’s income, refused to comply. It was in this context that the ambiguities of Duleep’s loyalties became apparent. For Duleep clearly considered his allegiance as being to the persons of Queen Victoria and her successors rather than to the British government. The dynastic nature of this allegiance allowed him to retain his Indian title and culture, while operating within British society. The temptations for Duleep to shed his Indian title in exchange for a formal British identity were considerable, especially during the 1870s when he received much encouragement to do so. Duleep’s aristocratic connections earned him membership in the prestigious Carlton Club in 1873, and that same year his influential friends encouraged him to contest the Parliamentary seat of Whitby, which Prime Minister William Gladstone’s son

currently held. Queen Victoria, however, objected primarily on the grounds that a seat in the House of Commons was beneath the maharaja’s social rank. Instead, she argued, according to Sir Thomas Biddulph, her keeper of the privy purse, ‘that a seat in the H. of Lords would be far more suitable’.24 But Gladstone baulked at the proposal, fearing the implication that he was agreeing to Duleep’s peerage only to remove him from competing against his son. Duleep ultimately decided not to contest the Whitby seat, but the Queen continued to pursue the possibility of membership in the House of Lords, this time to ensure the lineage of the maharaja’s sons. According to Duleep’s parish rector, in 1880 the former Viceroy, the Duke of Argyll, raised the possibility of giving the maharaja’s sons peerages. Duleep replied: ‘I thank her Majesty … most heartily and humbly convey to her my esteem, affection and admiration. Beyond that I cannot go. I claim myself to be royal; I am not English, and neither I nor my children will ever become so.’25 This reply was itself an act of resistance since it spurned the potential offer to his family of official assimilation into the highest echelons of British society. After a generation of living among Britain’s aristocracy, Duleep still considered himself a deposed Indian monarch. Not surprisingly, therefore, when in August 1882 Duleep embarked on open resistance by publicizing his grievances in a letter to The Times, he presented them in the political terms of a deposed foreign monarch, ‘unjustly deprived of my kingdom’. Moreover, he compared his case to that of Tawfiq Pasha, Khedive of Egypt. British forces had recently supported Tawfiq against Ahmed ‘Urabi’s reformist military coup, which aimed to remove British and French influence behind the hereditary ruler. Duleep pointed out that at the time of Punjab’s annexation he was a child supposedly under British protection through the 1846 Treaty of Bhyrodhwal and that as with ‘Urabi, his generals acted against his interests in provoking a war with the British. Claiming to be ‘still lawful Sovereign of the Punjaub [sic]’, he argued, therefore, that his ‘case at that time was exactly similar to what the Khedive’s is at this moment’.26 The Times’ editors dismissed the maharaja’s arguments as an attempt at dressing up the complaints of a pampered aristocrat regarding the limitations of his already lavish pension.27 In effect they sought to delegitimize the maharaja’s resistance by treating it as self-indulgence in a manner similar to the way they dismissed the protests of middle-class Indians barred from professional advancement. Duleep, however, considered his personal financial problems to be a direct result of the political injustice he had received and continued to receive at the hands of the British government. The latter’s failure to address the maharaja’s grievances only further politicized them from his perspective. The ensuing events – Duleep’s contact with Sikh nationalists, his reconversion to the religion of his birth, his formal break with Britain, his failed attempt to raise a rebel army, and his receipt of a royal pardon shortly before his death in Paris in 1893 – flowed logically from his earlier, more subtle forms of resistance. In hindsight, however, the earlier episodes of resistance illustrate Duleep’s growing recognition that he had neither the ability nor the desire to participate fully in a society with racial barriers, no matter how informal, that he could not overcome. Nor could he ever truly feel loyal to a government that had through force of arms deprived him of his inheritance.

ABDUL KARIM As Duleep Singh was spending his final years in exile from both Britain and India, another South Asian, Abdul Karim, was using his relationship with Queen Victoria to advance his own career and the interests of his co-religionists. To the extent that this constituted a form of resistance, however, it was never as overtly political as Duleep’s became. Rather it occurred entirely in the context of Karim’s personal influence over the Queen. As with Duleep Singh, the basic outline of Karim’s relationship with the Queen is well known, although it is less discussed in scholarly literature.28 The son of an Indian army hospital assistant, Karim travelled extensively in India and became acquainted with Urdu and Persian literature as well as Islamic doctrine. After serving in an administrative position for an Indian prince, he became a clerk at Agra gaol where his father was currently working. Karim’s extended family owned five acres of land in the Agra area. Therefore, while Karim’s background was humble, it was not poor. Nevertheless, he jumped at the opportunity, provided by the gaol’s superintendent, to serve in England as Queen Victoria’s table servant during her 1887 Golden Jubilee. The presence of Indians of humble rank would further solidify the image Victoria sought of the unifying sovereign of all her subjects, regardless of ethnicity or class. Karim soon befriended the Queen, teaching her Urdu and telling her about his homeland. Upon learning of his father’s medical training, which Karim appears to have exaggerated, Victoria concluded that Karim’s social background was too respectable for him to wait tables. She therefore promoted him to a new position, that of her ‘Indian adviser’ or ‘munshi’. Karim now became a valued (by the Queen) and sometimes detested (by other staff) member of the Queen’s household, partaking in holiday celebrations, vacations on the continent, and tableaux vivantes and plays (always in oriental roles) for Victoria. This basic outline of Karim’s career appears to position him more as a collaborator than a resistor, and his story provides no open defiance of the British government in contrast to Duleep Singh’s. Indeed, the Queen’s ‘munshi’ shared her disapproval of the maharaja’s open opposition to British rule, and Karim’s demeanour was that of a willing exhibit in the Queen’s imperial ‘living museum’. Nevertheless, some of the munshi’s actions qualify as resistance. One surrounds the arrival at Windsor Castle in 1893 of Karim’s wife and mother, both of whom veiled themselves in public. Their practice of purdah fascinated the Queen, who referred to them as ‘Mohammedan ladies’ in her correspondence. However, according to the royal physician, Karim’s former supervisor in Agra claimed that he ‘had constantly seen the Munshi’s wife and female relations in India, as they were never shut up there from public gaze, belonging as they do to quite a low class; and that the idea of their being in purdah was never dreamt of until they came to England to pose as ladies’.29 Recent scholarship on purdah’s role in encounters between Islamic and Western cultures suggests that it sometimes serves as a statement of ethnic identity in defiance of European and American hegemony.30 While Karim’s wife and mother may have been dressing up in Indian terms as a means of asserting their upper-middle-class rank, they were doing so in a way that simultaneously declared their Islamic Indian identity amid Western society. Two years before their arrival,

the Queen echoed the perspective of her ‘young Mohammedan Munshi’ when she told the wife of the Governor of Bombay that regarding ‘the Mohammedan widow … no attempt should be made to induce them to alter their mode of living or to interfere with their religion, which when well known and understood, contains so much that is fine and to be respected and admired’.31 However, the issue that caused consternation in governing circles was Karim’s advice to Victoria on matters of state. Much of this counsel became evident in the Queen’s correspondence regarding clashes between Muslims and Hindus, particularly in her impractical suggestion to the Viceroy concerning the Muslim observance of Muharram: ‘It only comes once a year, whereas the Mohammedans complain that the Hindus, who have many religious feasts, try to have their own at the very same time, hence the quarrelling. Could not the Viceroy arrange that the Hindus held no feast during the thirteen days of Moharram?’32 Similarly regarding riots in Poona: ‘The Queen-Empress … cannot help feeling that the Brahmins are those who irritate the people against us, and that the Mohammedans are the real supporters of the British rule.’33 Perhaps the most controversial proposal that arose from Victoria’s friendship with Karim was that the munshi’s friend, Rafiuddin Ahmed, should be appointed Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Rafiuddin was a barrister and journalist, who in 1892 published a flattering article in the Strand Magazine about the Queen’s interest in India. He had neither the class background nor social connections to recommend him for such a position in contemporary governing circles. Prime Minister Lord Salisbury’s response to the Queen’s proposal, however, cast doubt on the loyalty of a Muslim serving in Constantinople: ‘At an Oriental Court his Moslem co-religionists would do their utmost to tamper with him; and they would know how to work on him better than we do.’ Moreover, in a manner typical of the age, Salisbury used the anticipated racism of others as a reason to become an accessory to discrimination. If among a British Muslim ambassador’s colleagues or subordinates ‘there was any serious danger of strong racial animosity being shown, such a measure would be perilous’.34 On its surface Karim’s influence over the Queen would hardly seem to qualify as resistance. To British officials it was merely annoying. One, writing on behalf of the Secretary of State for India, H. H. Fowler, informed Viceroy Lord Elgin: Of course, those who correspond with the Queen on Indian matters must reckon with the fact that he [Karim] will probably see their letters. This is a bore, but if you and the Secretary of State know it beforehand, you can write accordingly.35

Yet if Victoria was an observer of Karim’s attempt to influence British policy and the British government was the target, then his involvement might constitute covert resistance. Moreover, the fact that Karim’s suggestion interfered with matters of state might classify it as overt. For as Karim pursued his own agenda of self-promotion, he also challenged the boundaries of race and class in the British Empire. That he did so knowingly is evident in the religious framework within which his challenges occurred. These actions all favoured the Islamic community in some way, whether in Hindu–Muslim clashes in India or in

representing the British Empire’s Muslims in its embassy to the world’s greatest Islamic power. Karim’s advice and actions were not nationalist, but they were the resistance of a selfconsciously Muslim subject of the Queen. In resisting the subordinate position of Indian Muslims in the British Empire, Karim was quite willing to diminish the position of Hindus. The willingness to seek advantage for one’s own subaltern group at the expense of another is a common aspect of subaltern resistance. As Hollander and Einwohner observe: ‘Actors may also challenge their own positions within a particular social structure, while not challenging the validity of the overall structure.’36 Indeed, in its lobbying for the rights of Indians in South Africa, even the British Committee of the Indian National Congress drew the distinction between ‘ignorant and lawless Kaffirs’ on the one hand and ‘educated and highly civilised Indians’ on the other.37 Thus even overt Indian nationalism sometimes perpetuated the legitimacy of a Western-defined hierarchy of cultures. As for Victoria, she was Karim’s willing ally, albeit with slightly different goals. She also wanted to challenge the boundaries of class and race in order to establish direct links with her subjects throughout the empire. Clearly, she could not befriend all her subjects, but for her Karim represented India, or at least Islamic India, and their relationship was a symbol of her direct connection with its people. For the British government, this attempt at circumventing the bureaucracy did not so much threaten to restore an activist executive monarchy as it undermined an imperial establishment that maintained a racial stranglehold over government appointments. In her apparently autocratic and undemocratic way, Victoria was lobbying for greater Indian participation in the governance of the empire. Ultimately, Karim was more successful in promoting himself than India’s Islamic community. Although Edward VII, who resented the munshi’s influence over Victoria, forced him into retirement upon her death, Karim nonetheless spent the rest of his days in relative prosperity because of land he had received at Victoria’s behest. His fourteen years of influence at the highest levels of British society and government was out of all proportion to his social background. His challenges to Britain’s racial and class hierarchy depended entirely on his relationship with the Queen, but the relationship was mutually beneficial.

CONCLUSION Although Duleep’s and Karim’s resistances occurred in the context of their personal relationship with Victoria, their actions were not solely efforts at personal promotion. When they involved marital relations, they either served as a protest against British society’s informal racism, as in the case of Duleep’s marriage to a woman of colour well beneath his social rank, or they asserted the respectability of women in ways that proudly proclaimed their religious identity, as with Karim’s wife and mother. More political acts, such as Karim’s advocacy of Muslim perspectives on communal violence and ambassadorial appointments, and Duleep’s refusal of peerages for his sons, targeted Britain’s governing bureaucracy rather than the Queen. Both men understood that in Britain’s constitutional monarchy the Queen’s views and government policy often differed, and they separated the two in their recognition

of authority, emphasizing their personal loyalty to Victoria over their allegiance to the British government. In the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion, Britain’s rulers found such prenational, dynastic ‘loyalism’ useful in asserting authoritarian control of India. However, this model of British identity empowered Duleep and Karim to use their royal relationship to advance their own agendas and those of the religious communities with which they identified. Notes 1 Based on Table 1 in Hollander, J. A. and Einwohner, R. L. (2004) ‘Conceptualizing resistance’. Sociological Forum, 19, 544. 2 Scott, J. C. (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 29. 3 Sanger, K. L. (1995) ‘Slave resistance and rhetorical self-definition: spirituals as a strategy’. Western Journal of Communication, 59, 179. 4 Carr, L. C. (1998) ‘Tomboy resistance and conformity: agency in social psychological gender theory’. Gender and Society, 12, 543. 5 Scott, Weapons of the Weak, p. 301. 6 Herz, N. (1998) ‘It’s personal before it’s political: ambition and angst in the lives of Indian civil servants, 1880–1950’. Essays in History, 40, 1–11. 7 Hollander and Einwohner, ‘Conceptualizing resistance’, 549. 8 Brown, M. F. (1996) ‘On resisting resistance’. American Anthropologist, 98, 730. 9 Memorandum by Queen Victoria, in G. E. Buckle (1930) The Letters of Queen Victoria. A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence and Journal Between the Years 1886 and 1901, Series 3. New York: Longmans, Green, ii, p. 26. 10 Compton, J. M. (1968) ‘Open competition and the Indian Civil Service, 1854–1876’. English Historical Review, 83, 266; Dewey, C. J. (1973) ‘The education of a ruling caste: the Indian Civil Service in the era of competitive examination’. English Historical Review, 88, 283. 11 Taylor, M. (2004) ‘Queen Victoria and India, 1837–61’. Victorian Studies, 46, 270–1; Longford, E. (1964), Victoria R. I. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, p. 281. 12 Gorman, D. (2006) Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging. Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 19. 13 ‘Proclamation by the Queen to the princes, chiefs, and the people of India, 1 November 1858’, Moving Here (accessed 16 July 2010). 14 Cohn, B. (1983) ‘The context, performance, and meaning of ritual: the British monarchy and the “invention of tradition”, c.1820–1977’, in E. J. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds) The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 101–64; Munich, A. (1996) Queen Victoria’s Secrets. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 143–4. 15 Biographies include Alexander, M. and Anand, S. (1980), Queen Victoria’s Maharajah, Duleep Singh, 1838–93. New York: Taplinger; Bance, P. (2009) Sovereign, Squire and Rebel: Maharajah Duleep Singh & the Heirs of a Lost Kingdom. London: Coronet House. 16 Alexander and Anand, Queen Victoria’s Maharajah, p. 12. 17 Royal Archives, Windsor, RA VIC/09/9: Lord Hardinge to Thomas Middleton Biddulph, 1854; authorship of this memorandum and the marginal comments it contains is evident in RA VIC/09/9a: Charles Wood to Charles Beaumont Phipps, 1854. These and subsequent documents from the Royal Archives are cited with permission of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 18 RA VIC/09: Lord Aberdeen, ‘Memorandum’, 1854. 19 Queen Victoria to the Marquess of Dalhousie, 2 October 1854, in A. C. Benson (ed.) (1907) The Letters of Queen Victoria. A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence Between the Years 1837 and 1861, Series 1. New York: Longmans, Green, iii, p. 59. 20 Alexander and Anand, Queen Victoria’s Maharajah, pp. 76–7. 21 Ibid., p. 99. 22 Ibid., p. 105. 23 Anand, S. K. (1995) ‘Maharaja Duleep Singh: a psychoanalytical study’, in P. S. Kapura et al. (eds) Maharaja Duleep

Singh: The Last Sovereign Ruler of the Punjab. Amritsar: Shiromani Gurudwara Parbandhak, p. 83. 24 RA VIC/010, Thomas Middleton Biddulph to James Oliphant, 1873, fo. 10. 25 Sutherland, B., Preface to Frederick Duleep Singh (1928) Portraits in Norfolk Houses. Norwich, Jarrold, i, p. xiv. 26 The Times, 28 August 1882, 5. 27 The Times, 31 August 1882, 5. 28 Biographies include Anand, S. (1996) Indian Sahib: Queen Victoria’s Dear Abdul. London: Duckworth; Basu, S. (2010) Victoria and Abdul: The True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant. Stroud: History Press. 29 Reid, M. (1996) Ask Sir James: The Life of Sir James Reid, Personal Physician to Queen Victoria. London: Eland, p. 142. 30 See, for instance, El Guindi, F. (1999) Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance. Oxford: Berg. 31 Queen Victoria to Lady Harris, in Letters, Series 3, iii, p. 68. 32 Queen Victoria to the Marquis of Lansdowne, 18 July 1889, in Letters, Series 3, i, pp. 513–14. 33 Queen Victoria to the Earl of Elgin, 10 September 1894, in Letters, Series 3, i, p. 426. 34 The Marquis of Salisbury to Queen Victoria, 16 October 1895, in Letters, Series 3, i, pp. 566–7. 35 Basu, Victoria and Abdul, p. 126. 36 Hollander and Einwohner, ‘Conceptualizing resistance’, 549. 37 Schneer, J. (1999) London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 194 and 195.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Archival Sources Royal Archives, Windsor. Queen Victoria’s Papers. Books and Articles Alexander, M. and Anand, S. (1980) Queen Victoria’s Maharajah, Duleep Singh, 1838–93. New York: Taplinger. Anand, S. (1996) Indian Sahib: Queen Victoria’s Dear Abdul. London: Duckworth. Bance, P. (2009) Sovereign, Squire and Rebel: Maharajah Duleep Singh & the Heirs of a Lost Kingdom. London: Coronet House. Basu, S. (2010) Victoria and Abdul: The True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant. Stroud: History Press. Benson, A. C. (ed.) (1907) The Letters of Queen Victoria. A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence Between the Years 1837 and 1861, Series 1. New York: Longmans, Green. Brown, M. F. (1996) ‘On resisting resistance’. American Anthropologist, new series, 98, 729–35. Buckle, G. E. (1930) The Letters of Queen Victoria. A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence and Journal Between the Years 1886 and 1901, Series 3. London: John Murray. Carr, L. C. (1998) ‘Tomboy resistance and conformity: agency in social psychological gender theory’. Gender and Society, 12, 528–53. Compton, J. M. (1968) ‘Open competition and the Indian Civil Service, 1854–1876’. English Historical Review, 83, 265–84. Dewey, C. J. (1973) ‘The education of a ruling caste: the Indian Civil Service in the era of

competitive examination’. English Historical Review, 88, 262–85. Duleep Singh, F. (1928) Portraits in Norfolk Houses. Norwich: Jarrold. El Guindi, F. (1999) Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance. Oxford: Berg. Gorman, D. (2006) Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Herz, N. (1998) ‘It’s personal before it’s political: ambition and angst in the lives of Indian Civil servants, 1880–1950’. Essays in History, 40, 1–11. Hobsbawm, E. J. and Ranger, T. (eds) (1983) The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hollander, J. A. and Einwohner, R. L. (2004) ‘Conceptualizing resistance’. Sociological Forum, 19, 533–54. Kapura, P. S. et al. (eds) (1995) Maharaja Duleep Singh: The Last Sovereign Ruler of the Punjab. Amritsar: Shiromani Gurudwara Parbandhak. Longford, E. (1964) Victoria R. I. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Reid, M. (1996) Ask Sir James: The Life of Sir James Reid, Personal Physician to Queen Victoria. London: Eland. Sanger, K. L. (1995) ‘Slave resistance and rhetorical self-definition: spirituals as a strategy’. Western Journal of Communication, 59, 177–92. Schneer, J. (1999) London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, J. C. (1985), Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Taylor, M. (2004), ‘Queen Victoria and India, 1837–61’. Victorian Studies, 46, 264–74. Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, ‘Proclamation by the Queen to the princes, chiefs, and the people of India, 1 November 1858’, Moving Here .

Chapter 7

Herabai Tata and Sophia Duleep Singh: Suffragette Resistances for India and Britain, 1910–1920 Sumita Mukherjee

Women were given the vote in 1918 in Britain. They had to be over 30 years old and live in a property that was more than £5 in value, but this was a significant victory for the suffragette movement. It was in 1868 that the National Society for Women’s Suffrage was founded, and then in 1897 the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), but the Union, and suffragettes generally, had more than ‘national’ interests. They had concerns for their imperial ‘sisters’ and the status of women worldwide. The British female suffrage movement influenced and was connected to India and Indians in multiple ways. Indians, including Sophia Duleep Singh, were members of the suffrage movement in Britain in the 1910s. The nationalist leader, M. K. Gandhi, was inspired by some of the early tactics of the movement to reinforce his ideas of non-violence and non-cooperation. Herabai Tata, a suffragette from Bombay, travelled to Britain in 1919 to talk to and win support from British women’s organizations and suffragettes for the Indian cause. The Women’s Indian Association (WIA) was founded in Madras in 1917 by Annie Besant, Margaret Cousins and Dorothy Jinarajadasa, campaigning for women’s rights in India; and prominent suffragettes Millicent Garrett Fawcett, President of the NUWSS, and Eleanor Rathbone had been vocal supporters in Britain for Indian female suffrage. The suffragettes contested the received notion of a patriarchal society and the inherent gender imbalance within society. They campaigned for universal suffrage and an equal voice in political life. Although there were divisions on tactics and the aims of their movement, and debates on whether the biological difference between men and women necessitated different roles within society, these activists were involved in a juggernaut of resistance. Not only were they resisting the received ideas of gender roles in society, they were challenging British political institutions and how they were run. The suffragettes were also involved in bringing new and innovative modes of resistance into public consciousness through hunger protests, tax resistance and sit-ins. Their interactions with Indians and the influence they exerted upon them strengthened Anglo– Indian relations but also reinforced imperial dependencies. Largely in favour of empire, their relationships with South Asians did, however, bear a mark on anti-imperial and nationalist resistances that took place in Britain and in the Indian subcontinent. Their friendships and collaborations with Indian men and women reveal the ways one can be resistant through complicity, i.e. challenging the inherent racial hierarchies of the British Empire that tried to bar these relationships; their networks of friendship breaking down the political and racial

barriers of society as well as the gender walls that were their primary target. Far too often studies of the relationship between feminism and imperialism have concentrated on the stories of British women in describing their encounters with India, whether physical or rhetorical. Antoinette Burton has pointed out how British suffragette involvement with India was sometimes part of a British feminist agenda keen to give the impression of an imperial sisterhood. British women assumed dominance by depicting Indians as weaker counterparts.1 The idea that Indian suffragettes needed to collaborate with British groups and even travel to London to further their cause corroborates this idea of the superiority of the British imperial motherland. Although British suffragettes were guilty of utilizing Indian women for their own advantage, for example, by involving them in suffragette processions through London in 1911, the very presence of Indian women in these activities was a challenge to the idea that they were passive or enslaved.2 This chapter highlights Indian women who were also acting as agents in their own struggle for freedom, often alongside British women but not always through the authority or guidance of the British. Indian women needed to challenge a patriarchal imperial structure and a maledominated nationalist movement, and, by working with imperialist suffragettes or male nationalists, they may not have confronted these hierarchies far enough but were making great political and social strides. They were bringing women’s voices, bodies and rights to the forefront of a public political discourse.

GANDHI AND INDIAN WOMEN Mohandas K. Gandhi is known for advocating non-violent methods and non-cooperation tactics in the Indian nationalist movement. Although Gandhi did not agree that men and women should have equal roles in society, he was vocal about the need for social reform in India such as abolishing child marriage and encouraging widows to remarry. He also involved women in the nationalist struggle, particularly through non-temperance and khadi (spinning) agitations, albeit arguing that women should occupy a separate political sphere to men. James D. Hunt has argued that Gandhi was influenced, mostly indirectly, by the British suffragette movement’s tactics, particularly from his visits to London in 1906 and 1909. Gandhi was inspired by the ways in which they conducted their early demonstrations against the government and the very fact that these organizations were challenging the authority of the British Parliament. Gandhi travelled to London from South Africa in 1906 in relation to a petition for the Transvaal Indians. While he was in London, he was able to read the press and hear about the British suffragettes, who three days after he arrived held a demonstration in the House of Commons’ lobby. Eleven women were arrested and refused to pay the fines levied and so were sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. Gandhi was hugely impressed by the manner in which these ‘very well-educated’ women from ‘respectable families’ displayed courage to remain in gaol.3 These women emphasized their determination to stand by the principles of their ideology in that they refused to accept the authority of the government until women

were allowed a voice in the manner in which the country was run. Indeed, the significant influence of imprisonment for galvanizing a political movement and providing cohesion was seen in the 1930s with the incarceration of various Indian nationalists including Gandhi, and in other struggles such as the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa decades later. In 1909 Gandhi was in Britain again and met with members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and Women’s Freedom League (WFL), including Emmeline Pankhurst, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and Charlotte Despard. However, as the WSPU became more violent in their methods of protest, for example, throwing stones at Parliament on 12 July 1909, Gandhi became more critical of their methods. With the murder of Curzon Wyllie by the Indian student, Madan Lal Dhingra, on 1 July 1909, Gandhi feared the increase of violent forms of resistance. Gandhi was determined not to allow violence to creep into the Indian fight in the same way as it had for British women. Gandhi and Indian nationalists could identify with the plight of British suffragettes. British women and Indians were both generally excluded from representation in government. The British Parliament represented a patriarchal structure of domination to both resisting groups. They were both fighting the same government, one which was at once a domestic Parliament and an imperial Parliament. Yet, these women and these Indians wished to have a say in the laws of their country and did not attack the idea of representative government. Therefore they needed to find ways to challenge the structures of the institution to which they wished to gain access without totally destroying it. This is why non-violent resistance in the form of demonstrations, petitions, sit-ins and hunger strikes was so popular. These were public acts that would attract notice and require action but were not causing anarchy.

SOPHIA DULEEP SINGH It was an Indian princess who had a more direct and long-term involvement with the British suffragette movement. Sophia Duleep Singh was not only a descendant of the royal family of Punjab, but also the god-daughter of Queen Victoria. Despite her background, Sophia became actively involved in social welfare. Female suffrage was one part of this portfolio. Her involvement in the women’s suffrage movement reveals the elitist nature of Indian involvement in British female suffrage. It was only educated, wealthy Indian women who were able to converse and socialize with British social reformers. Sophia’s involvement with the WSPU and Women’s Tax Resistance League (WTRL) was advantageous for these organizations. She could raise the profile of their cause through her social status. Her ability to refuse to pay taxes, a product of her aristocratic wealth, highlighted the arguments of the WTRL and was important. In July 1911, when Sophia refused to pay just six shillings in taxes, a warrant was produced to impound certain goods until she paid the arrears. The item chosen for bail was a seven-stone diamond ring, which was then bought back for her by her fellow suffragettes in a public auction.4 Sophia Duleep Singh, born in 1876 in Norfolk, was the fifth of six children of the Maharaja Duleep Singh. He had become the Maharaja of Punjab in 1843 when he was just 5 years old, but the Punjab was annexed in 1849 and he was exiled from India. Duleep Singh

converted to Christianity and eventually settled in England, becoming a naturalized British citizen and favourite of Queen Victoria. In 1896, Queen Victoria gave Sophia, her goddaughter, Faraday House in Hampton Court as a ‘grace and favour’ home. Sophia joined the WSPU at the home of Una Dugdale in 1909 and became an active campaigner at the Richmond, Surrey, branch. On 18 November 1910, Sophia took part in the first suffragette deputation, known as ‘Black Friday’, to the House of Commons. Sophia joined Emmeline Pankhurst, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and nearly 300 other campaigners to urge Asquith’s government to pass a limited suffrage bill, but the protest soon descended into police brutality and arrests. Sophia was not arrested on Black Friday but became actively involved with the Women’s Tax Resistance League. The WTRL’s main form of resistance was to refuse to pay any taxes, ranging from income tax or property tax to dog tax or carriage licences. They argued that as women did not have the vote they should not have to pay taxes. Bailiffs would impound objects from those who refused to pay taxes and then WTRL members would buy back the items at public auctions amid huge publicity. The WTRL was founded in October 1909 and disbanded five years later with the onset of the war. More than 220 women took part in tax refusal but Sophia was certainly one of their more notable members on account of her parentage and royal connections. In May 1911, Sophia’s refusal to pay licences for her five dogs, a carriage and servant led to a fine of £3. In December 1913, she was fined £12 and 10s for refusing to pay for the licences for two dogs, a carriage and a servant.5 Hilary Frances has pointed out evidence of class discrimination in the judiciary’s response to tax resistors. Relatively little was done about Sophia’s refusal to pay her licences, although she did have to appear in court in December 1913, whereas a Miss Andrews of Ipswich was imprisoned for a week for refusing to pay one dog licence. Furthermore, Emma Sproson of Stratford was gaoled for six weeks for the same offence and her dog was shot by the police.6 These comparisons reveal how South Asians were, in some instances, incorporated into British class categories and treated accordingly. Despite Sophia’s high-profile involvement with the women’s cause, her letters to members of the Richmond WSPU in 1911 reveal her reluctance for public speaking. Sophia explained to Miss Newsome that she refused to chair their next meeting because she was ‘quite useless for that sort of thing’ and told Miss Grant that she would only speak ‘5 words’ if nobody else would support the forthcoming resolution.7 Her natural inclination to keep a low profile and shun public addresses must have been overcome for the ‘greater good’ of the women’s cause as she did go on to chair a number of local meetings. She allowed WTRL members to make a big event out of the auctions of her impounded goods. She was committed to raising funds and subscriptions and actively sold the newspaper, The Suffragette, willing even to be pictured selling copies outside Hampton Court Palace.8 Sophia’s royal position and Hampton Court address did not prevent the authorities from making an example of her and impounding goods, as discussed above, but she was certainly well treated compared to fellow suffragettes. Sophia did not take a public royal position in British society, but her social status protected her. Ada Wright, a prominent suffragette who was imprisoned on numerous occasions and

involved in hunger strikes, remembers an incident with Sophia Duleep Singh and the police in 1914: The first arrest, my seventh, was near Notting Hill Gate and the Princess Sophia Duleep Singh and I were both knocked down together by the police. The Princess was not convicted, but I was and was sentenced to a fortnight’s imprisonment. I was in the cells awaiting my removal to Holloway when the door was flung open and I was told that my fine had been paid. The Princess and someone else had joined in paying it.9

The fracas with the police had occurred because Christabel Pankhurst had escaped from a nursing home in Campden Hill, where she had been recovering from a hunger strike in prison, and arranged an open-air meeting.10 It is not clear why Sophia was not imprisoned at this gathering, as it appears that she was apprehended by the police along with Wright. Perhaps it was Wright’s reputation and previous arrests that counted against her in this instance, or as indicated above, Sophia’s class background may have worked in her favour. Again, Sophia’s wealth was advantageous for the British suffragette movement as she was able and willing to pay Wright’s fine. Sophia worked for equal rights outside of the suffrage cause. She was involved in bringing public attention to the contribution of Indian soldiers in the First World War. She visited wounded Indian soldiers in Brighton, having worked as a nurse in a military hospital, and organized Flag Days to raise money for these soldiers. Beginning in 1916, British and Indian women would sell flags and other souvenirs such as miniature elephants through which they raised funds and could also show appreciation for the Indian effort.11 Sophia entertained Indian soldiers who were part of the peace contingent at Faraday House in September 1919. Yet, in 1934 she listed as her only interest ‘The Advancement of Women’ for the Women’s Who’s Who.12 Sophia joined the Suffragette Fellowship after the First World War and remained a fellow until her death in August 1948. Sophia’s involvement in the suffragette movement is an interesting example of resistance. Born in Norfolk, to an Indian prince and a mother from Egypt with German heritage, Sophia was heavily involved in a domestic struggle, and clearly identified herself as ‘British’. Although the suffragettes were also interested in women’s rights internationally, especially in the colonies, they were, in the first instance, concerned with the vote in Britain. Yet, Sophia also identified with her Indian ‘heritage’; she worked with Indian soldiers and participated in Indian Flag Days. And so, Sophia as an individual resisted notions of a single nationality or allegiance, and had sympathies with various countries and countrymen. Furthermore, as a ‘Princess’, Sophia’s activities are particularly noteworthy. She capitalized upon the title of ‘Princess’ even though there was no longer any land or position to which her father or brother could lay claim. Perhaps the use of her title was merely politically strategic but Sophia did not make any pronouncements or take any action that resisted class hierarchies within society despite her deep conviction of the need for equal rights for women. As seen in Ada Wright’s account above, the suffragettes emphasized and capitalized upon Sophia’s title as ‘Princess’ too, reinforcing class structures. Indeed, the suffragettes, particularly in their early incarnations, attempted to challenge the structures of British society through dissent within public institutions rather than by advocating the dismantling of these institutions. Newspapers and public meetings were integral to their method of resistance.

However, their methods to confront the patriarchal structure of the House of Commons also included tactics that were not merely about petition. They caused disruption and confusion through their protests; they tried to create an atmosphere of moral outrage through their imprisonment and hunger strikes; they challenged authority by refusing to pay taxes. Through the example of Sophia Duleep Singh’s involvement in the years 1911 to 1914, we can see the many contradictions in the activities of the British suffragettes. Yet they were successful, perhaps in spite of their methods, in taking the first step towards universal suffrage in 1918. Meanwhile, women in several other countries were still languishing behind their male counterparts.

HERABAI TATA Herabai Tata was born in Bombay in 1879. At the age of 16 she married into the Tata family of industrialists, and gave birth to her daughter, Mithan, a year later. In 1909, Herabai became a theosophist and met Annie Besant at a theosophical convention in Benares in 1912.13 Herabai later became Honorary Secretary of the Women’s Indian Association (WIA) in Bombay. The WIA had been founded in 1917 in Adyar, where the Theosophical Society also had its headquarters. The organization was sectarian but, through Besant and the town of Adyar, utilized the networks of the Theosophical Society. Herabai Tata’s involvement with the Bombay Theosophical Society facilitated her involvement with the WIA and then her journey to Britain.14 In August 1919, she was sent as their representative to Britain with her daughter Mithan and Sir Sankaran Nair to present a memorandum on women’s franchise to the Joint Select Committee at the House of Commons. Intending to stay only until the end of 1919, she was very active in meeting with and drawing support from women’s organizations in Britain. Ultimately she stayed on in Britain for the next four years as Mithan received a place on a postgraduate course at the London School of Economics. Herabai’s interest in a public role to advance the right of women was aroused by a meeting with Sophia Duleep Singh in 1911. Her daughter Mithan, who was 13 at the time, remembers the holiday they took in Srinagar, Kashmir, where they met Sophia. She always wore a small green, white and yellow badge with ‘votes for women’ inscribed on it. Naturally, my mother’s attention was drawn to it, and as we got friendly, she informed us that she was a member of the ‘Women’s League for Peace and Freedom’ in Britain. … Thus her talks with Princess Sophie [sic] and the literature she sent immediately roused mother’s interest. Thereafter, she became a firm believer and worker for the cause of women’s suffrage.15

Sophia’s visit to Kashmir helped further the cause of female suffrage in India. Mithan’s recollection of the badge that Sophia always wore reiterates how important the female vote was for Sophia not only in Britain but also internationally. The groundwork for the journey to Britain began in 1917 when a deputation of women convened to present the demand to the Government of India that women be included when the new Franchise Bill was considered. In 1919, the government appointed a Royal Commission on Indian Reforms chaired by Lord Southborough. In India, Southborough’s Committee received deputations but decided not to put female suffrage on the agenda.

Meanwhile, a Joint Select Committee on the 1919 Government of India Bill met in England over June and July. The Committee heard the evidence of Annie Besant and Sarojini Naidu in England, and the Bombay Women’s Committee decided to send a representative to submit a memorandum. Sir Sankaran Nair, the only Indian member of the Viceroy’s Executive Committee, agreed to present the Bombay women’s demands to the Joint Select Committee and it was decided that Herabai and her daughter should accompany him. In the interviews which the Joint Select Committee held with Annie Besant (29 July 1919) and Sankaran Nair (14 October 1919), the issue of female suffrage was not raised. Besant was interviewed as representative of the National Home Rule League and Sankaran Nair spoke more generally about granting the vote to the Indian ‘masses’. Naidu, however, positioned herself as representative of the women of India when she met the Committee on 6 August. She presented a memorandum entitled ‘A Plea for the Franchise of Indian Women’ in which she questioned why high-profile women such as Pandita Ramabai, Kamala Satthianandhan or Cornelia Sorabji (among others) were denied the vote. As in Britain, Indian suffragettes found it difficult to refrain from utilizing class hierarchies to further their arguments, here emphasizing the greater need to give votes to educated women. The Joint Statement by Herabai and Mitibai (Mithan) Tata was received by the Committee on 13 October. The Tatas described themselves as representatives of the ‘Bombay Women’ and the Women’s Indian Association. They argued that Indian women were treated equally over 5,000 years ago and that in the past few decades, with the rise of female education, their stock was rising again. They noted the continued existence of purdah in some communities but did not see this as a bar to female suffrage, and cited examples where women had been given the vote in municipal elections to demonstrate female capacity to use their vote intelligently. They vehemently criticized the Southborough Committee for their total rejection of women from the electorates and for listening to base prejudices about women’s inferiority. In their argument for the vote, the Tatas referred back to British history: The Government ought not to commit the same mistake as was made in England at the time of the Reform Bill of 1832 and the later Bills, of excluding women from political life, a course which led to very great bitterness, and created great disparity between the political education of men and women. We in India are now in the happy position of being able to start our political education on terms of equality.16

The Joint Statement by Herabai and Mithan Tata pointed out that many Indian women were demonstrating a keen interest in political affairs, and that conceding the vote to women would be a spur to female empowerment. They also pointed out that granting suffrage did not mean that all people would exercise their right to vote as an attempt to reassure the government that it would be mainly educated, upper-class women taking to the polling stations. Experience of all countries shows that when the franchise is extended to new electorates it takes some years before they get into the habit of exercising the right. It will be the same in India; there is no reason why the Committee should conjure up vague fears about women’s franchise ‘not being a reality’ – in a few years the women will get used to it. Even in enlightened England all women do not exercise the vote.17

They further remarked that even in Britain there had been Conservative opposition to the

extension of the franchise to women up until 1917. With their focus on women who were demanding the vote, the Tatas were not excluding less educated or politically minded women, but educated urban women appeared to take precedence. Mithan Tata had drawn comparisons between the Indian and British female suffrage movements a year earlier in an article for Stri Dharma, published in May 1918. Using similar points as the memorandum submitted to the Joint Select Committee, Mithan argued that Indian men and women should be receiving the same democratic rights together: We have seen that it has taken English women more than 80 years of bitter agitation to get their rights. Surely, if we call ourselves human and rational beings, we ought to beware, and not make the same mistake as the English people. At all times and in all places there are reactionaries who decry new movements, but we must not heed them. All the vague fears which were conjured up about woman’s suffrage in England have proved to be illusions. So also will our Indian reactionaries see that their fears about granting women the vote are made of soap-bubble material.18

Comparisons with British women did not always help the Indian cause. In May 1919, an Indian woman, probably Cornelia Sorabji, argued in the British journal The Common Cause that English women should not be advocating for Indian female suffrage because Indian women were not yet equal to the status that English suffragettes were when they began their fight.19 Her arguments that education and other social issues were more pressing than the vote, and that Indian women should be understood in the ‘vernacular’ rather than as part of a universal womanhood, demonstrate how the discourse of opposition against suffrage often brought in those progressive arguments in favour of other pressing national and social concerns. However, Mithan also drew upon differences between the status of Indian and British women in the past. She drew upon (Hindu) nationalist arguments about the glory of ancient India, arguing that in ‘olden days’, Indian women were rulers, philosophers and took part in village councils. The Tatas, in dialogue with the nationalist discourse of India, were resisting notions of female inferiority as endemic and permanent by harking back to myths about the past that were specifically ‘Indian’ to challenge imperial rule. Herabai Tata’s public addresses and motions before the House of Commons were an active form of resistance. Her demands were couched within nationalist sentiments, insisting that Indian men and women be heard, particularly as the debates she participated in were also extended to the degree of representation Indian men might receive with the new reforms. Herabai expressed resistance to the stereotypical images of Indian women that were being allowed to fester in government minds and which gave them an excuse to avoid conceding further reform. As reported in an article written by E. Knight for The Vote, Herabai Tata wrote: India has already spoken, and yet she is to be made to wait. … All the deputations which came to give evidence from India, composed of educated men, without exception have shown their desire to enfranchise Indian women. The educated classes of India of all the various communities have already expressed their desire in favour of the enfranchisement of Indian women, in response to the Requisitions sent by women to their respective provincial conferences held in various parts of India.20

There were, however, various ways in which Herabai and the Indian fight for women’s franchise did not challenge gender roles and patriarchal society to the limit. They depended upon the support of Indian men and, as indicated, were mainly only espousing the interests of

educated Indian women. Herabai Tata’s letters to Jaiji Petit, Chair of the Bombay Women’s Committee for Women’s Suffrage, about her activities in Britain in the last quarter of 1919 reveal the amount of support Tata received. Her letters recount the large number of organizations she spoke to, with Mithan, across London and other British centres. On 28 October 1919, Herabai and Mithan Tata began their day by speaking at the Legislative Council meeting of the National Union of Women of Great Britain and Ireland. In the afternoon they spoke at a Mothers’ Meeting in Finsbury, sponsored by the Quakers’ Friends’ Mission. They then took a train to Brighton and on the same day addressed a meeting at the Clifton Road Congregational Church Institute.21 Other organizations they visited during the rest of October and in November include: Social and Political Union of Bedford College; Council of the Women’s International League; Westfield Ladies’ College; Unity Hall, Wood Green; Adult School, Wesleyan Mission; Women’s International League, Croydon; Holloway Women’s Co-operative Guild; British Dominions Women Citizen’s Union. This is a list of diverse groups, but the very obscurity of some of the locations attests to the notoriety and support the Tatas were gaining, and how they were making their presence felt beyond the metropolitan centre, influencing British political discourses as well. Mithan’s article on the Indian women’s struggle was featured in Jus Suffragi, the monthly journal of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, presided over by Millicent Garrett Fawcett, in November 1919.22 Furthermore, Mithan’s address to the Women’s Freedom League (WFL) at the Minerva Café in London was promoted heavily in The Vote, the WFL’s journal, which included a summary of her talk in the 12 December edition. Mother and daughter visited various towns and cities to spread the message of Indian women, including Birkenhead, Bolton, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Harrowgate, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle. Herabai and Mithan were successful in enlisting the active support of British women. Harriet Newcomb, Secretary of the British Dominions Women Citizens Union, sent a letter to the Joint Select Committee on behalf of the Union’s members appealing to a sense of imperial solidarity. Newcomb also drew attention to the principles laid out by the League of Nations on equality and urged the government and ‘British Empire’ not to take a ‘lower moral stand’ than the League.23 Charlotte Despard, President of the WFL, spoke out at a WFL fair in Westminster on 28 November 1919, once it was clear that the Joint Select Committee would not grant equal voting rights to women. Despard appealed to the ‘order of Nature’ as a reason why men and women should be granted equal rights.24 Despite the high-profile support for the female Indian cause, including those of all the major political parties in India, members of the Joint Select Committee were unable and unwilling to concede the right to vote to women. Stymied by concerns about antagonizing Indians by pushing through a reform that challenged perceptions about the role of Indian women in society and also confused by arguments about the illiteracy of Indian women, the Committee decided to absolve themselves of any responsibility on the female suffrage issue. The 1919 Government of India Act did, however, allow for more Indian representation in government. It should be remembered that at this stage not all Indian men had the vote, and that their vote was often not of direct consequence to the imperial government. The 1919 Act

devolved some elements of administration (education, agriculture and health) to provincial legislatures and gave them autonomy to decide whether they would give the vote to women in their provinces. The first provinces to extend the right to vote to women were Bombay and Madras in 1921. This was thus a success of some sort for Herabai Tata as she represented women from Bombay. Like Indian men, they had to pass the property qualification to vote and so only an extremely small percentage was able to do so. It was only in 1950, when the Constitution of India was introduced, that all men and women over the age of 18 were given the vote. It is also important to remember that there were other sections of society in India, such as Dalits, that were excluded from the franchise in the first half of the twentieth century. As Herabai decided to stay on in Britain while Mithan pursued her postgraduate course in economics at the LSE and trained for the Bar, they both continued to meet with prominent women activists over the next four years. They remained particularly friendly with Millicent Garrett Fawcett. They also joined the Ladies’ Lyceum Club in Piccadilly, meeting various men and women at the Club’s monthly dinners. Agnes Smedley, who had been romantically involved with the exiled Indian revolutionary Virendranath Chattopadhyaya in Germany, was President of the Lyceum Club at the time. In addition, Herabai became involved in a committee to open a hostel for female Indian students in London. She took courses at the LSE from 1920 to 1922 in social science and administration, and economic theory and history, and was approached by the Eugenics Society to translate some of their pamphlets into Gujarati.25 In 1920, Herabai and Mithan met Madame Cama, one of the earliest campaigners for Indian independence, in Paris, and then attended the International Women’s Alliance Conference in Geneva. In January 1920, the Inns of Court were opened to women. Mithan was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn in April 1923, the first Indian woman barrister and one of the first ten women in the UK to be called to the Bar. The Tatas returned to Bombay in December 1923. Mithan was the first woman to practise in an Indian High Court when she enrolled in the Bombay High Court in January 1924.26

CONCLUSION: WOMEN’S RIGHTS AND NATIONALISM The British suffragette movement’s methods ranged from the peaceful to the violent, but British women took more than twenty years to receive the vote. The suffragettes encountered a great deal of opposition and the fight for female suffrage descended into rivalries and splinter groups. The suffragette movement in India did not descend into violence and was more unified, but also faced opposition from unexpected quarters. In an article in Gandhi’s Young India in 1920, Herabai Tata was criticized for enlisting the help of Mrs Chapman Catt, President of the International Women Suffrage Alliance, and for modelling the Indian fight on that in Britain.27 Young India argued that the priority in India was to fight the British first rather than cooperate with them by demanding representation within an imperial Parliament. British and Indian women had fought to have a voice within a structure that was patriarchal, imperial and conservative. They did not put forward a coherent plan to dismantle the institutions that had been suffocating them for so long.

But Indian women were finding ways of resisting the patriarchal structures that constrained them, whether through public voice or on a smaller scale in the household. The growing independence of Indian women and demand for a vote should be seen as part of a wider process of reclaiming their bodies through reforms such as raising the age of consent in 1891 and the age of marriage in 1929. The growth of female education that saw women writing in periodicals and novels was another indication of the growing independence of some Indian women. And yet, the nationalist movement was dominated by men and a masculinized struggle against the British that prioritized capture of the state over social equality. Indian suffragettes were participating in this ideology as they too wished to play a part in this masculine nation-state at a time when the majority of the female population did not have access to education or independent employment opportunities. The fight for equality continued well beyond the 1920s, and even beyond independence from the British in 1947. In the meantime, the British and Indians worked together for women’s rights. Sarojini Naidu and Dhanvanthi Rama Rau travelled to London in the 1920s and 1930s, keeping Indian women in the political spotlight. Eleanor Rathbone organized a conference in London in October 1929 for the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship which included Indian delegates. However, in this case Indian delegates felt marginalized, with Anglo–Indian relations deteriorating following the publication of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India in 1927 which had tarred Indian men and women as uncivilized. Dhanvanthi Rama Rau was one of the people who criticized Rathbone and the conference for their imperialist sentiments towards India, and marked the growing independence of the Indian suffrage movement away from collaboration with British feminists. The further expansion of Indian women’s organizations in India took the franchise fight to localities within India rather than to the imperial motherland. Discourses on Indian nationalism of the early twentieth century regularly examine the position of women in Indian society and evaluate the role of gender politics. For example, they often discuss the gendered idea of the nation, modelled on the Hindu personification of India as motherland, or the way in which the private ‘spiritual’ sphere at ‘home’ was the preserve of women while male nationalists dominated the public sphere. Yet this chapter has shown that women’s rights were discussed in the modern Indian public sphere and were not always dependent upon the support of men. For example, Herabai Tata used the advantages of modernity to travel to Britain and live in London alone with her daughter, while pursuing an education and submitting petitions to Parliament. Partha Chatterjee has argued that women were still not autonomous from patriarchy, but that the ‘new constitution of independent India gave women the vote without any major debate on the question and without there ever having been a movement for women’s suffrage at any period of nationalist politics in India’ because the terms of the old patriarchy of tradition had been transposed by this time.28 However, there were public attempts to bring women’s suffrage, albeit limited, to the forefront of the nationalist agenda, as seen in the examples of Sarojini Naidu and Herabai Tata. This chapter has focused on the transnational, global and imperial spheres in which these women were communicating. It was participation in these networks that allowed Sophia Duleep Singh and Herabai Tata to resist patriarchal imperial supremacy on British soil itself.

At times race and class hierarchies worked together in resistance and at other times they were in tension. Sophia and Herabai saw some success from their agitations in Britain, but it was their very presence and involvement which was most significant in challenging our ideas of the political agency of Indian women in the early twentieth century. Notes 1 Burton, A. (1991) ‘The feminist quest for identity: British imperial suffragism and “global sisterhood”, 1900–1915’. Journal of Women’s History, 3 (2), 46–81. 2 See Visram, R. (2002) Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto Press, pp. 162–4. Visram notes the name of Mrs P. L. Roy in the 1911 procession and the involvement of the Maharani and Gaekwad of Baroda. 3 Gandhi, M. K. (1906) ‘Deeds better than words’. Indian Opinion, 24 November, quoted in J. D. Hunt, ‘Suffragettes and Satyagraha: Gandhi and the British Women’s Suffrage Movement’. Presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion at St Louis, Missouri, 29 October 1976. Many thanks to Rozina Visram for this reference, her pointers to material in the Women’s Library, and for her helpful comments on the whole chapter. 4 See Museum of London. Suffragette Fellowship Collection: Warrant on Sophia Duleep Singh, 15 July 1911. 5 Visram, Asians in Britain, pp. 167–8. 6 Frances, H. (1998) ‘ “Pay the piper, call the tune!’ ”: the Women’s Tax Resistance League’, in M. Joannou and J. Purvis (eds) The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 71–2. 7 Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University. Women’s Suffrage Autograph Collection, 9/01: Letters to Miss Newsome and Miss Nancy Grant, 1911. 8 Museum of London collection. 9 Museum of London. SFC: Manuscript of biographical account by Ada Wright. 10 Crawford, E. (1999) The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928. London: UCL Press, p. 760. 11 See, for example, Asiatic Review, 15 (44), October 1919, 562–3. 12 Crawford, Women’s Suffrage Movement, p. 639. 13 British Library, IOC: Mss Eur F341/147: Lam, M. J. ‘Autumn Leaves: Some Memories of Yesteryear’. 14 Pearson, G. (1983) ‘Reserved seats: women and the vote in Bombay’. Indian Economic and Social History Review, 20 (1), 47–65 at 50. 15 Lam, ‘Autumn Leaves’. 16 IOC: Mss Eur F136/54. Joint Select Committee on the Government of India Bill. Vol. III. Appendices (1919). 17 Ibid., p. 135. 18 Tata, M. A. (1918) ‘Why Indian women should have the votes’. Stri-Dharma, May, 37. 19 An Indian Correspondent (1919) ‘The position of women in India – I’. The Common Cause, 9 May, 36–7. 20 The Vote, 28 November 1919. 21 Nehru Memorial Library, Delhi. Misc. Items Acc. no. 612: H. Tata to J. Petit, 1 November 1919. 22 Tata, M. (1919) ‘Indian women and the vote’. The International Woman Suffrage News, November, 18–19. 23 Jus Suffragii, December 1919. 24 The Vote, 5 December 1919. 25 Tata to Petit, 21 January 1920. 26 Lam, ‘Autumn Leaves’. 27 ‘Women and vote’ (1920), Young India, 24 November, 4. 28 Chatterjee, P. (1991) The Nation and its Fragments. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 131.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Archival Sources British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: Mss Eur F341/147. Lam, M. ‘Autumn Leaves: Some Memories of Yesteryear’, manuscript memoir.

British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: Mss Eur F136/54 (1919). ‘Joint Select Committee on the Government of India Bill’. Museum of London. Suffragette Fellowship Collection Microfilms held in Social Sciences Library, University of Oxford. Nehru Memorial Library Archives, New Delhi. Misc Items. Acc. No. 612. ‘Correspondence by Mrs Herabai A. Tata to Mrs Jaiji J. Petit, Chair of Bombay Women’s Committee for Women’s Suffrage, and work done in England by Mrs Tata at the time of the First Indian Reform Act, Dec. 1919’. Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University. Women’s Suffrage Autograph Collection: 9/01. Newspapers Jus Suffragii The Vote Young India Books and Articles Alexander, M. and Anand, S. (1980) Queen Victoria’s Maharajah: Duleep Singh 1838–1893. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. An Indian Correspondent (1919) ‘The position of women in India – I’. The Common Cause, 9 May, 36–7. Bance, P. (2004) The Duleep Singhs: The Photograph Album of Queen Victoria’s Maharajah. Stroud: Sutton Publishing. Burton, A. (1991) ‘The feminist quest for identity: British imperial suffragism and “global sisterhood”, 1900–1915’. Journal of Women’s History, 3 (2), 46–81. Candy, C. (1994) ‘Relating feminisms, nationalisms and imperialisms: Ireland, India and Margaret Cousin’s sexual politics’. Women’s History Review, 3 (4), 581–94. Chatterjee, P. (1991) The Nation and its Fragments. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Crawford, E. (1999) The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928. London: UCL Press. Forbes, G. (1998) Women in Modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frances, H. (1998) ‘ “Pay the piper, call the tune!”: the Women’s Tax Resistance League’, in M. Joannou and J. Purvis (eds) The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hunt, J. D. (1976) ‘Suffragettes and satyagraha: Gandhi and the British women’s suffrage movement’. Presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion at St Louis, Missouri. [In Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University, London]. Pankhurst, E. S. (1926) India and the Earthly Paradise. Bombay: Sunshine Publishing House. Pearson, G. (1983) ‘Reserved seats: women and the vote in Bombay’. Indian Economic and Social History Review, 20 (1), 47–65. — (2004) ‘Tradition, law and the female suffrage movement in India’, in L. Edwards and M.

Roces (eds) Women’s Suffrage in Asia. London: Routledge, pp. 195–219. Sinha, M. (1999) ‘Suffragism and internationalism: the enfranchisement of British and Indian women under an imperial state’. Indian Economic and Social History Review, 36 (4), 461– 84. Tata, H. (2002) ‘A short sketch of Indian women’s franchise work’ (n.d.), in E. de Souza and L. Pereira (eds) Women’s Voices: Selections from Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Indian Writing in English. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 127–34. Tata, M. (1918) ‘Why Indian women should have the votes’. Stri-Dharma, May, 37. — (1919) ‘Indian women and the vote’. The International Woman Suffrage News, November, 18–19. Visram, R. (2002), Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto Press.

PART IV

Cross-Cultural Resistances

Chapter 8

Metropolitan Resistance: Indo–Irish Connections in the Inter-War Period Kate O’Malley

The South Asian community was one of many immigrant communities in Britain that struggled to ‘settle in’ during the age of empire. Imperial citizenship, even for those who were proud of being part of the British Empire, did not bring with it the promise of a warm welcome for those who ventured to its very heart, be they Indian, African or Caribbean. Neither was the reception particularly convivial for a group much closer to the centre, the Irish, who arrived in much greater numbers in the nineteenth century in the wake of the Great Irish Famine. Members of these migrant communities would experience a great sense of alienation in their new home, a sense of physical and cultural distance from their birthplace. This was especially true of South Asians, and was also acute for many Irish in Britain. Britain was often the last and cheapest option for reluctant Irish settlers unable to afford the more attractive passage to America. It was geographically so close, yet metaphorically and culturally too far. Many would never return home. The Irish immigrant community in Britain is often compared to the Jewish community,1 perhaps because both consisted of white settlers, but this is not an altogether accurate comparison. On closer examination the Irish and Indian settlers had much more in common; at least politically they were both marching to the same irregular intra-imperial drumbeat. They could provide a ready ear to each others’ grievances and help drive each others’ agendas. Indo–Irish political collaboration in London was evident in the nineteenth century with the resurrection of the Indian Parliamentary Committee in 1893, which had substantial Irish involvement; and recent research has also highlighted Irish nationalist Alfred Webb’s Indian contacts, most notably with Dadabhai Naoroji.2 Webb went on to become President of the Indian Congress in 1894. This chapter will look at Indo–Irish resistances established in the twentieth century in London, and at the British authorities’ monitoring of them. It should be borne in mind more generally, however, that during the first half of the twentieth century in particular an affinity between Irish and Indian nationalists blossomed on the strength of their respective independence movements. A subtle type of intra-imperial and contra-imperial discourse of resistance emanated from this relationship. Comparisons and connections influenced the respective revolutionary activists. Keen friendships developed among a variety of agitators from both sides, embracing many of the leading political and literary figures of the day from both countries. Crucially, much of this happened at the very heart of empire, in London. The Indian–Irish narrative is not merely an anti-imperial one. In modern times Irish and Indian people both undermined and sustained the British imperial system, with many more

Irish than Scottish or Welsh doing so in India during the British Raj era. However, the period 1916 to 1919 was a turning point for both countries’ histories. With Britain in the midst of the First World War, Irish nationalists availed themselves of an opportune moment and staged the 1916 Rising. This was followed by the bloodier War of Independence, the Civil War and the foundation of a precarious Irish Free State. It was granted dominion status and remained, albeit hanging by a thread, within the Commonwealth. In 1919, and still merely a colony, India suffered the gruesome Amritsar massacre in which a significant part was played by a loyal Irish servant of the Crown, Michael O’Dwyer. Events at Jallianwala Bagh brought in their wake the successful non-cooperation movement. While the British authorities perceived these events as hitches in the imperial sphere, they were in fact crucial moments on the peripheries, events which both prefaced and beckoned the unavoidable course of the demise of the British Empire. British authorities became concerned by what they perceived as a radicalization of Indian nationalists abroad as a result of these developments at home. This became all the more urgent during the First World War as the activities of the revolutionary Ghadar Movement in the United States and Canada became apparent.3 The formal establishment in 1921 of Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) shows just how anxious the British government were about such developments.4 IPI was a separate and non-avowed intelligence agency (although it worked closely with MI5 and SIS). Its role was essentially a ‘catch-all’ coordination of information about anything relating to India and to Indians within the empire but increasingly in America and Europe also. The existence in London and other urban centres of Irish and Indian migrant communities presented radicals from both communities with opportunities to interact and exchange ideas. This is something that, up until recently, has not been addressed in either Irish or Indian historiography; it was in fact a significant anti-imperialist network of which the authorities at the time gradually became aware, and an association of activists that they increasingly thought warranted monitoring.

SAKLATVALA: RESISTANCE PERSONIFIED The formidable Indian politician Shapurji Dorabji Saklatvala, who would become a leading member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), warranted quite a lot of attention in England. He had many connections with Irish nationalists based in the UK. Saklatvala was born into a wealthy Parsee family in Bombay in 1874. They had established the famous Tata Industries group, which was originally based on textiles, iron and steel but is now better known as a car manufacturer. Saklatvala travelled to England in 1905 where he joined Tata’s London office. It did not take long, however, for him to become involved in left-wing politics and in 1910 he became an active member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP).5 In 1917 he was one of the founders of the Workers’ Welfare League, and in 1918 he joined the People’s Russian Information Bureau. Saklatvala became a CPGB member in 1921.6 He later served as MP for North Battersea, from 1922 to 1923 (as a Labour candidate, when communists were still allowed to be members of the Labour Party), and again from 1924 to 1929, when he stood openly as a communist. However, it was primarily his activities outside the House

of Commons that were of concern, since Saklatvala was a tireless political activist in a seemingly endless number of organizations. As early as 1920 MI5 described him as follows: Since 1916 up to the present time he has been one of the most prominent of Indian agitators in England, and he has been connected with all the principal Socialist, Bolshevik and anti-British societies … he [is] considered one of the most violent anti-British agitators in England.7

Saklatvala was different to other Indian communists during this period in that he had no apparent history of involvement in the Indian nationalist movement prior to his coming to England; his socialist leanings coupled with his nationality were what induced the authorities to have a closer look at him. Yet what sorts of activities justified such an extreme statement? And could connections that he began to cultivate upon his arrival in England, like those with the Irish nationalist community, have brought him under closer scrutiny by Scotland Yard? It seems that the answer is a resounding ‘Yes’. Saklatvala had many contacts with Irish activists throughout his career. In December 1918 the Labour Leader reported how at a meeting organized by Saklatvala in Motherwell Tom Johnson, Cathal O’Shannon and [Tom] Farren of the Irish Transport Workers; came over from Dublin and put in a strenuous week, conveying the real message of Liberty Hall and Sinn Féin [and] Saklatvala … [exposed] the perils of Indian cheap labour and heavy industries.8

He also invited the major Irish left-wing figure Jim Larkin Jr over to talk on platforms in the 1920s and 1930s. However, Saklatvala had other Irish colleagues who were based in London, as revealed in late 1920 when the authorities raided his house and seized his papers. In the wake of the raid MI5 noted how ‘altogether he is in a highly nervous state. … He appears to be a little frightened and is afraid of visiting Art O’Brien (the English Sinn Féin leader).’9 The report also noted how he had been attempting to form an ‘English League for an Irish Republic’.10 This was backed up in correspondence between Saklatvala and Art O’Brien. In April of that year Saklatvala suggested to O’Brien that ‘now is the opportune moment to challenge British thought in each individual mind. I want to form a “British Society for [an] Irish Republic” open to born British subjects only.’11 The reasoning behind what might seem like an unusual approach is apparent when we look further into some of this correspondence. Saklatvala thought that Irish and Indians activists still had to ‘convert’ some of their closest left-wing British cohorts to their line of thinking; they were simply not radical enough. He shared his sense of disillusionment with O’Brien: One entirely fails to realise what the people in this country mean. The most heroic sacrifices and even successes of other people will not stir them, to actions and even to practical co-operation. The so-called Democrats, Socialists, Left-wing British workers, very vociferous in meetings or private conversation, are at every real crisis when put to actual test of action [sic] prove to be selfish conceited golliwogs12 and turn back with all subterfuges and a variety of dialectic arguments.13

He continued by telling O’Brien that the only option they had, as he saw it, was to awaken a ‘sense of conscious shame in some of them when certain events happen outside the British Isles. Then with this few I hoped [sic] we should have converted the many.’14 Saklatvala then went on to discuss ways in which the Irish and Indian communities could help each other in a

most pragmatic way on the ground in Britain, by voting for each other. As we shall see, this was carried out to great effect in 1922 when Saklatvala was first elected to Parliament, but here we see him raise the idea with O’Brien two years earlier: ‘I need not worry you with the details but I know that if appealed through proper channels, out of hundreds of thousands of Irishman here I can get a few thousand to help me (with their votes).’15 Saklatvala regularly spoke out about Ireland at public meetings and in various publications, and he often attended meetings of Sinn Féin in Great Britain. It was noted with much interest in his MI5 file how he addressed a meeting of the Roger Casement Sinn Féin Club on Blackfriars Road on 5 October 1921. The topic of his speech was ‘The Fall of the British Empire’. There were, it seems, a few important things to note from the meeting other than the contents of Saklatvala’s speech: some of the Sinn Féiners in this club are anxious that the Indians should follow in the footsteps of Sinn Féin and do all they can to make British rule impossible in India … Art O’Brien who is President of this club was present at the meeting.16

The emergence of Sinn Féin as a political force in Ireland had a huge impact on Indian nationalists. As early as 1907 Jawaharlal Nehru while studying in England had written home to his father Motilal, asking: Have you heard of the Sinn Fein in Ireland … it is a most interesting movement and resembles very closely the so-called extremist movements in India. Their policy is not to beg for favours but to wrest them. They do not want to fight England by arms, but to ‘ignore her, boycott her and quietly assume the administration of Irish affairs’ … this movement is causing consternation. They say that if its policy is adopted by the bulk of the country, English rule will be a thing of the past.17

Throughout his career Nehru maintained an avid interest in Irish affairs, and detailed writings on the development of the Irish situation throughout the 1920s and 1930s may be found in his Glimpses of World History, first published in 1934. He also said of the 1916 Rising: The Easter week Rising … by its very failure attracted, for was that not true courage which mocked at almost certain failure and proclaimed to the world that no physical might could crush the invincible spirit of a nation.18

In the previous July Saklatvala was reported to have ‘intend[ed] going to Ireland in August to address the Irish Trade Union Congress. He was however keeping his proposed visit very quiet.’19 MI5 also noted his friendship with P. J. Kelly, President of the Irish SelfDetermination League: ‘They have a common ground in working for the independence of both countries from the domination of England.’20 Saklatvala was in contact with P. J. Keating as well, also of the Irish Self-Determination League, and a Home Office Warrant (for interception of post) in relation to the latter somehow found its way into Saklatvala’s MI5 file. Keating was using an alias of J. W. Hey and was one of the partners of a trading firm with a London address. He was evidently involved in arms smuggling and trafficking in Britain, deals in which thousands of pounds were changing hands. Saklatvala was guilty by association here, and more than likely little else, since all that was said of the Indian was that Keating was a known supporter of his.21 Clearly Saklatvala did not want the authorities to become aware of his Irish contacts, especially if he was au fait with such activities.

His Irish connections, however, were to be useful in the run-up to his first successful election campaign in 1922 where we can see clear evidence of the tangible benefits of Irish– South Asian London-based networks. He had the support of Battersea’s previous candidate, the eccentric Anglo–Irish suffragette and Irish republican Charlotte Despard.22 She lobbied on his behalf, and his election leaflet quoted her as follows: I appeal to my Irish fellow countrymen and women in North Battersea – support the Party and support the man, Saklatvala – that will be on your side in the great struggle which is bound to come. Saklatvala spoke for us, as a fraternal delegate, in the last Irish Labour Congress, and his courage, wisdom and determination impressed us all.23

PARLIAMENTARY RESISTANCE On 20 November 1922 Saklatvala took his seat as a Member of Parliament. A few days later he made his maiden speech to the House of Commons. Irish affairs predominated it. Saklatvala addressed the Commons in quite a menacing tone: ‘In reference to Ireland, I am afraid that I shall strike a jarring note in the hitherto harmonious music of this house.’ He went on to speak at length about the Anglo–Irish Treaty24 of the previous year: As a House we may say that we are giving this Irish Treaty with a view of bringing peace to Ireland, but we know that it is not bringing peace. Either we are actuated by the motive of restoring thorough peace in Ireland or we are doing it as partial conquerors of Ireland. Everyone knows that the Treaty has unfortunately gone forth as the only alternative to a new invasion of Ireland by British troops … the people of Ireland have a right to say that the very narrow majority which in Ireland accepted the Treaty at the time, accepted it also on this understanding – that if they did not accept it the alternative was an invasion by the Black-and-Tans of this country … As in 1801 England gave them a forced Union, so in 1922 England is giving them a forced freedom.25

Such an outspoken view on the matter of Ireland was significant for many reasons. There were few other members of the House of Commons who would have held such a vigorously anti-Treaty outlook and Saklatvala was going against the Labour Party line by voicing such views. In addition, it was particularly mischievous as the House was trying earnestly to go ahead with the second reading of the Irish Free State Constitution Bill, so he had a captive audience. Saklatvala, however, felt that he owed it to his constituents, and to his fellow Irish activists, to take the bull by the horns, and in so doing cemented UK-based Indo–Irish bonds. He said he was putting forward the views of 90 per cent of the Irishmen who were his electors. They pointed out to him that Irishmen who are living in Great Britain had, by a tremendous majority, voted against it. He concluded by saying that ‘the Irish Treaty is not going to be what we – in a sort of silent conspiracy – have decided to name it. The reality will not be there. The reality is not there.’26 Four days later the debate on the Irish Free State Constitution Bill began. Approval of the Bill was considered a fait accompli with the Labour leader of the Opposition, Ramsay MacDonald, setting the tone: ‘the less said about the Bill the better. Criticism is useless, sympathy is dangerous.’27 Then, much to everyone’s astonishment, the neophyte Saklatvala rose to his feet and struck a blow against the Bill’s effortless amble though the House in the form of an amendment: ‘I realise the unpopularity I am courting in taking this step, but it was

distinctly understood between my electors and myself that they did not wish me to back up a Treaty which was based upon coercion, and was signed under duress.’ He went on to describe the distinct differences between the situation in Ireland and the rest of the empire: We have heard today quotations and illustrations of similar enactments for colonies and dominions of the Empire. Is there any real parallel? Was Australia not rejoicing and waiting almost to a man and woman for the day when her Constitution would be confirmed by the House? Was not South Africa, after a great war and defeat, gratefully awaiting the day when the Treaty would be passed. … The people of Canada, too, were determined to have their Constitution and to work it. The case of Ireland is different. It is no use our pretending that it is not so. We cannot adopt the policy that by driving deeper into the soil the roots of a cactus, and by carefully covering it with soil, roses will grow later on.28

He went on to describe the bleak conditions that he believed would prevail in Ireland upon the passing of the Bill, telling his listeners: ‘Ireland was … prepared to receive this Constitution, not with joy and flags and illuminations, but with martial law, penalties and threats, imprisonment and ships waiting to depopulate the country.’29 He concluded in a dramatic manner: For 120 years that Act of Union has only produced distress to Ireland and disgrace to this country. I, as your friend – not as your critic or as your opponent – feel that I am conscious bound not to be a party to a bigger and greater mockery. … Instead of merely expressing a pious opinion, I take my courage in my hands and, true to my convictions, I move this Amendment in order to create an opportunity for myself to vote against this Bill.30

Saklatvala’s stance was courageous: he spoke out clearly, voicing not only his own concerns but also those of his Irish constituents when barely a week in the House of Commons. However, it was to no avail. His attempt to introduce his amendment, described in the press as irresponsible, was decisively beaten, and the Irish Free State Constitution Bill received its second reading without challenge. A few months later, in March 1923, Saklatvala again spoke out in the House of Commons, this time in relation to the Irish community in Britain. As a result of pressure from the newly instated Irish Free State government and after information had reached the British authorities that increased attempts were being made to revive the Irish Republican Army (IRA) there, Scotland Yard arrested and deported over a hundred suspects from cities throughout England and Scotland. They were transported to Dublin on the British cruiser Castor, and interned in Mountjoy Prison.31 However, the British government found themselves in something of a legal quandary as many of those deported, although of Irish parentage, were in fact British citizens. Saklatvala and some left-wing cohorts, most notably George Lansbury, vigorously tackled the issue in the House of Commons.32 Among those arrested was Saklatvala’s Irish associate, Art O’Brien. The Home Secretary William Bridgeman defended the arrests: ‘there has lately been a progressive increase in Irish Republican activity here. We are in possession of material clearly indicating the existence of a quasi-military organization.’33 O’Brien wasted no time in availing himself of Saklatvala’s camaraderie, and letters of protest addressed to Reginald Bridgeman and signed by many of the internees were soon being sent to Saklatvala from the ‘C’ wing of Mountjoy Prison. Saklatvala succeeded in having the letters publicized in the Daily Herald under the heading: ‘Deportees Challenge Home Secretary. Imprisoned Men Say Statements Are Deliberate And Contemptible Falsehoods.’34 It was not long before the action was

deemed illegal by the British courts, and the British government had to ask for the return of the internees ‘with the exception of [those] … against whom criminal proceedings are contemplated’.35 Many years later, in 1937, after Saklatvala’s death, his son Beram published a letter in the Daily Herald asking for anyone with relevant recollections of his father and his career to contact him. Among the hundreds of letters he received was one from Delia McDermott, of Bloomsbury, London, which read: I noticed your letter recently in the Daily Herald … I wish to say [your father] took the first step to offer help in the case of the Irish deportees who were wrongfully arrested and sent to Ireland. … My sister was amongst them and in attending to her affairs when she was imprisoned, I received your father’s circular letter sent to her address. To me it was the first ray of hope in a very difficult situation.36

The help that came from a somewhat unexpected source, an Indian communist MP, was greatly appreciated by many others among the Irish community in London who had been affected.

UNDERGROUND INDO–IRISH RESISTANCES Saklatvala continued to support the Irish nationalist community through the many political organizations with which he was involved throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In November 1924, along with the eccentric English socialist Arthur Field, he revived a moribund society which had been active during the First World War called the East–West Circle. Its aims were to ‘bring East and West together, and use efforts to thwart the imperialist spirit … so flagrantly apparent in England’.37 It was revived primarily as a centre for communist and Bolshevik activity. A Scotland Yard report noted how at a meeting of this new group it was said that ‘if Labour was to succeed it was by adopting, not a weak and peaceful policy, but a red-hot communist attitude’, and not by ‘waving a tiny red flag and going about in a motorcar’.38 The use of such rhetoric meant that the authorities were hot on the ‘red’ heels of the East–West Circle. It was not long before Field was appointed Secretary of the group and Saklatvala its President; Art O’Brien also became a member, and his influence is apparent in some of their pamphleteering appealing ‘for subscriptions to a “Special November Collection of the Irish Language Fund” and a “Connemara Relief Fund”’.39 It is more than likely that money raised for these particular collections ended up with Sinn Féin.Saklatvala by now had acquired something of a name for himself as an Irish supporter. In 1926 during a ‘mysterious two days’ visit to London under an assumed name’, Eamon de Valera was to attend a secret late-night meeting held at Saklatvala’s home.40 This was shortly after the formation by de Valera of the Fianna Fáil party in Ireland, and de Valera had been making increased efforts to travel and fundraise. This is a prime example of the subversive, underground nature of Indo– Irish resistance at this time, with encounters between prominent activists not being publicized yet gaining the attention of the British authorities. It seems that Scotland Yard were concerned for the agent involved as they stated in a report that they were ‘a little worried about this case as it might be awkward both for yourselves and for us if the informant were

denounced as a Police spy’.41 The meeting was brought to the attention of Scotland Yard by Major Phillips of MI5 and it appears that someone close to Saklatvala had tipped off the authorities. This is a tantalizing snippet of information. It also demonstrates how aware and concerned the security services were about developing Indo–Irish contacts, especially as a partnership that might have appeared to them to be merely at a grassroots level was now reaching the Irish nationalist elite. Throughout the following years Saklatvala continued to mix in Irish political circles and, as far as the authorities were concerned, these connections became more radical. Saklatvala was in regular contact with the Revolutionary Worker’s Group, a workers’ party which had been founded in Dublin in 1930 and which was under Comintern control. His old friend and ex-Battersea representative Charlotte Despard was affiliated with the organization, and she allowed the establishment of a Workers’ College at her house in Dublin, which doubled up as the headquarters of the Irish section of the Friends of Soviet Russia. Saklatvala’s increased revolutionary activities became all the more proficient with the formation of the League Against Imperialism (LAI),42 an organization which was of great concern to the British authorities. Saklatvala made regular trips to Ireland in the early 1930s to help with the promotion of the newly founded Saor Éire group, which had LAI connections. As has been discussed elsewhere, the short-lived Saor Éire group was a salient example of the widening appeal of communism among nationalists more generally in the inter-war period.43 The organization was arguably a more tailored version of the LAI, designed to encompass the IRA and cater to Ireland’s more specifically nationalist radical needs. At the helm was Peadar O’Donnell, a well-known left-wing Irish republican, who had clearly learnt much from his involvement in the LAI in the years preceding the formation of Saor Éire. The constitution adopted pledged Saor Éire to the overthrow of British imperialism and Irish capitalism, to bring wealth under the control of the workers and working farmers, and to restore Gaelic culture. In the autumn of 1931 Saklatvala joined Peadar O’Donnell in a series of meetings held to organize local branches throughout Ireland.44 The following February he crossed the Irish Sea again for the general election of 1932 when he campaigned for Jim Larkin Sr, who was contesting the election in the North Dublin constituency as a communist.45 Later on, and as a result of his work with the LAI, Saklatvala’s visits to Ireland increased. One such trip to Dublin in 1934 is noteworthy. Early that year a new Indian political group, the Indian Independence League (IIL), had been formed in London with Saklatvala at the helm. It comprised Indian activists, most of whom were already LAI members, the distinction being that it presented them with an opportunity to concentrate more specifically on all things relating to India. At an IIL meeting held on 27 September 1934, one item discussed was sending delegates to the first Irish Republican Congress, which was to take place in Rathmines Town Hall in Dublin later that week. Saklatvala was elected as a delegate from London. Indulal Yajnik46 was to accompany Saklatvala on his trip to Dublin.47 Saklatvala received some publicity during this trip, not as a result of his associations with the Republican Congress but because he was still making public declarations against the Treaty, something for which the Fianna Fáil party organ, the Irish Press, readily found space. He is reported to have said that

He was the only member in the British Parliament who had foreseen the result of granting a Free State to the Irish people. He had strongly opposed the Bill for that purpose, holding that those responsible for giving the concession were only a band of thieves. The Treaty was merely subterfuge on the part of British capitalists who wanted to stifle the clamour of the Irish people for freedom.48

Interestingly, considering that this meeting had such a negative outcome for the Republican Congress itself, with a split among left-wing republicans occurring, Saklatvala was most enthusiastic upon his return to London.49 He met with Reginald Bridgeman and Ben Bradley to discuss the proceedings and the resolutions passed at the meeting. He informed them that the leading members of the Irish republican movement were very sympathetically inclined towards the ideal of an India completely free from British rule and influence, and that six Irish republicans had promised to attend an upcoming Indian political conference.50 By tracing Saklatvala’s Irish connections it becomes evident that, some twenty-four years after the British authorities began monitoring him, accurate and up-to-date material regarding his activities was still being accumulated by the British authorities on a regular basis, much of which contained information about his many Irish contacts.

EVOLVING RESISTANCES By 1936 relations among Indian activists in London had become strained. This was primarily as a result of many non-communist Indian nationalists becoming increasingly uneasy with Saklatvala’s extreme left leanings, and it was accentuated by the November 1935 visit to London of Gandhi’s apparent heir and protégé, Jawaharlal Nehru. There ensued a clamour for his approval from various competing Indian factions. Despite Nehru’s visit, Saklatvala remained an active and adamant communist campaigner, and indeed attended and organized meetings in the last days of his life. On 15 January 1936 he died of a heart attack.51 Philip Vickery of IPI recounted the circumstances surrounding his death in somewhat reminiscent and respectful tones: At the height of the fray, Saklatvala who had fanned the flames, if he had not actually kindled the spark, succumbed, tragically enough, to a heart attack brought on by his excessive exertions, and the warring factions coalesced, at any rate temporarily, to do him honour in his obsequies. It may be remarked en passant, that the irony of Saklatvala’s death lies in the fact that his removal from the political arena may easily do more to further Indian unity than anything that intrepid and undoubtedly sincere warrior was able to achieve in his lifetime.52

Saklatvala’s death left a void in left-wing Indian circles in London that was soon filled by V. K. Krishna Menon. Menon was a latecomer to London’s political scene, arriving in 1926 but coming to the notice of IPI in 1932 as Secretary of the India League. The monitoring of Menon demonstrates the difficulty the British authorities had in distinguishing between leftwing Indian nationalists and communists. Indians of all political persuasion in Britain naturally interacted with each other and it is fair to say that with the exception of Saklatvala, who was undoubtedly motivated by communist doctrine, most other Indians were nationalist agitators who would have had only incidental contact with Moscow. Yet Menon’s IPI file is scattered with observations and suspicions as to his possible communist leanings. Menon was

in fact something of a travelling envoy for the Indian National Congress in Europe, a position that he secured as a result of his close links with Nehru.53 What IPI and the British government clearly feared was the possibility that Menon would lure the powerful Nehru even further down the leftist road. Menon, like Saklatvala, saw the potential in building links with the Irish community and like many other politically active Indians in the UK had, in fact, long-established Irish contacts. Menon filtered and scrutinized Britain’s Irish policy on an ongoing basis and was quick to vocalize his opposition to it. It is also fitting that he would go on to become India’s first Ambassador to Ireland in 1949.54 It is hardly surprising that when monitoring Indian radical activity in the inter-war period IPI’s agents’ ears pricked up when anything Irish was mentioned. Perusal of IPI files reveals radical contacts and networks of Indo–Irish collaboration in the UK and Europe during the inter-war period. What is surprising, however, is that up until recently many historians of Indian, imperial and Irish history have been unaware of the tangible and effective nature of this Indo–Irish anti-imperialist collaboration.55 Those who have drawn attention to it have merely done so with fleeting references. British intelligence files dating from the 1920s and 1930s disclose considerable unease with the activities of left-wing Indian activists in Britain and Ireland and on the continent. Apprehensions existed about their exact relations with established communist parties and their possible contacts with Moscow. The records also show that left-wing collaboration was established between Indian and Irish subversives which undoubtedly increased as the years passed. However, even though many of those concerned were indeed communists, like Saklatvala, it is not possible to conclude that it was this particular common ideology that brought them together. Although the Comintern made increased efforts to incorporate strong aspects of anti-imperialism into its doctrines in an effort to win over nationalist revolutionaries in the colonies (via the LAI), in the case of Indian and Irish activists, national liberation was too strong an inherent principle to leave by the wayside. IPI files from this period indicate that the British authorities had in the inter-war period an understandable preoccupation with communism; yet it was more simply nationalism, anti-colonialism and the common experience of estrangement in their newfound home that drew activists from the Irish and Indian immigrant communities together. Ironically, these Indo–Irish liaisons, which contested the nature of imperial power, were facilitated at the very heart of the British Empire. In the final analysis it is clear that both communities took much inspiration from each others’ independence movements and that only the most astute of British observers were aware of it. Notes 1 See, for example, Schneer, J. (1999) London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 172–3. 2 Regan-Lefebvre, J. (2009) Cosmopolitan Nationalism in the Victorian Empire: Ireland, India and the Politics of Alfred Webb. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 3 For British monitoring of the Ghadar Movement in the United States during the First World War see Popplewell, R. J. (1995) Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire, 1904–1924. London: Frank Cass. It is worth noting that Irish nationalist Eamon de Valera, who would later become Ireland’s longest serving Taoiseach, met with members of the Revolutionary Ghadar Movement in San Francisco in 1919. See Silvestri, M. (2009), Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 36–7.

4 For further information on the formation and workings of IPI see O’Malley, K. (2006) ‘Indian Political Intelligence (IPI): the monitoring of real and possible danger?’, in E. O’Halpin, R. Armstrong and J. Ohlmeyer (eds) (2006) Intelligence, Statecraft and International Power. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. 5 Saklatvala, S. (1991) The Fifth Commandment: Biography of Shapurji Saklatvala. Salford: Miranda Press, pp. 1–34; Bellamy, J. M. and Saville, J. (eds) (1982) Dictionary of Labour Biography, vol. VI. London: Macmillan, pp. 236–7. 6 Saklatvala, Shapurji, pp. 82–110. 7 Extract from National Archives, UK, records of the Security Services (hereafter KV), 2/611, MI5 Black List, vol. XXI (Indian Volume), n. d. (possibly 1921). 8 Extract from the Labour Leader, 18 December 1918, contained in KV, 2/611. 9 Art Ó Briain (more often referred to as O’Brien, the anglicized spelling of his name) (1872–1949): prominent Irish nationalist based in London; President of the Gaelic League in London (1914–1935); President of the Sinn Féin Council of Great Britain (1916–1923); co-founder of the Irish Self-Determination League of Great Britain; opposed the AngloIrish Treaty and was later appointed Irish Minister to France (1935–1938) after Eamon de Valera came to power. 10 KV, 2/613, Report of the search of Saklatvala’s rooms, 1 December 1920. 11 National Library of Ireland, MS 8427/16, Art Ó Briain Papers, Saklatvala to O’Brien, 21 April 1920. 12 Although it might strike the reader as an unusual choice of description, this was written in 1920, before racist appropriations of the word. We can presume he was attempting to call them childish, rude or mischievous. This is how the author Florence Upton depicted the golliwog in the late nineteenth century. 13 MS 8427/16, Saklatvala to O’Brien, 21 April 1920. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 KV, 2/614, Extract from Scotland Yard report on Sinn Féin in Great Britain, 27 October 1921. 17 Jawaharlal to Motilal, 12 September 1907, cited in Norman, D. (1965) Nehru: The First Sixty Years. Volume I. London: The Bodley Head, p. 12; see also Gopal, S. (1975) Jawaharlal Nehru. A Biography. Volume I: 1889–1947. London: Cape, p. 22. 18 Sen, A. (2007) ‘The proscription of an Irish text and the Chittagong rising of 1930’. Indian Historical Review, 34 (July), 97–121 at 105. 19 KV, 2/613, Report on Saklatvala, July 1920. This is a reference to the Irish Labour Party and Trades Union Congress (ILPTUC) which he did attend. 20 KV, 2/614, Extract from Scotland Yard report on Irish Self-Determination League, 16 March 1922. 21 KV, 2/614, Home Office Warrant ‘taken out by Scotland Yard on J. W. Hey or P. Keating’, 24 June 1922. 22 Charlotte Despard (1844–1939): Anglo-Irish suffragist, Irish nationalist and novelist; sister of Field Marshal John French, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; radicalized by her experience of the conditions in the London slums; moved to Ireland in 1910; member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and several Indian societies in London; became a member of the Communist Party of Ireland in the 1930s. 23 Saklatvala, Shapurji, pp. 144–5. 24 The Anglo–Irish Treaty of 1921 (commonly known as ‘the Treaty’) concluded the War of Independence and established the Irish Free State as a self-governing dominion within the British Empire. It contained provisions which enabled the six counties of Northern Ireland to opt out of the Irish Free State. The Irish Civil War broke out in the aftermath of the signing of the Treaty. For further reading on the Treaty see Longford, F. P., Earl of (1972) Peace by Ordeal: An Account from First-Hand Sources of the Negotiation and Signature of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, 1921. London: Sidgwick & Jackson. During the negotiation of the Anglo–Irish Treaty Michael Collins met with Saklatvala and other Indian activists in London. Plans were put in place to send an Irish nationalist to India on a fact-finding mission with a London-based Indian cohort. The ensuing Civil War meant that the mission did not take place. See correspondence in the Art Ó Briain Papers relating to ‘the Indian case’, MS 8461/4 and MS 8446/31. 25 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, vol. 159, 23 November 1922, cols 115–16. 26 Ibid. 27 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, vol. 159, 27 November 1922, cols 359–63. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 O’Halpin, E. (1999), Defending Ireland: The Irish State and its Enemies since 1922. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 22; Saklatvala, Shapurji, pp. 201–2. 32 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, vol. 161, 12 March 1923, cols 1043–8. 33 Ibid., col. 1044.

34 Saklatvala, Shapurji, pp. 219–20. 35 O’Halpin, Defending, p. 22. 36 British Library (hereafter BL), India Office Records (hereafter IOR), MSS EUR D 1173: Shapurji Saklatvala Papers, McDermott to Beram Saklatvala, 20 February 1937. 37 BL, IOR, Indian Political Intelligence files, L/PJ/12/226: Extract from Scotland Yard Report, 19 November 1924. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 KV, 2/515, Scotland Yard to Vernon Kell of MI5, 14 December 1926. 41 Ibid. 42 The League Against Imperialism was a Moscow-controlled organization. It initially solicited broad-based left-wing support from non-communist nationalist agitators throughout Europe. For further reading on Indo–Irish collaboration within the LAI see O’Malley, K. (2008) Ireland, India and Empire. Indo–Irish Radical Connections, 1919–64. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 43 O’Connor, E. (2004) Reds and the Green: Ireland, Russia and the Communist Internationals, 1919–43. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, p. 171. 44 Ibid., p. 173. 45 Ibid., p. 175. 46 Indulal Kanayalal Yajnik, along with V. J. Patel, was instrumental in the formation of the Indian Irish Independence League in Dublin in 1932. See O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire, pp. 74–8. 47 For further reading on the Irish Republican Congress movement see English, R. (1994) Radicals and the Republic: Socialist Republicanism in the Irish Free State, 1925–37. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 48 Irish Press, 5 October 1934. 49 The characteristic of a propensity towards schism in Irish left-wing nationalist circles was also evident among Indian nationalist groups in London. See Owen, N. (2007) The British Left and India. Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism, 1885– 1947. Oxford: Oxford University Press, ch. 7. 50 IOR: L/PJ/12/372: Extract from Scotland Yard report, 11 October 1943. 51 Saklatvala, Shapurji, pp. 476–82. 52 IOR: L/PJ/12/323: Report on Nehru’s visit to London, 12 February 1936. 53 French, P. (1997) Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division. London: HarperCollins, p. 99. 54 O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire, pp. 171–3; for Menon’s Irish connections see pp. 133–7. 55 See, for example, Owen, The British Left and India, p. 231.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Archival Sources British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: India Office Records. British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: Indian Political Intelligence files. British Library, St Pancras. India Office Collections: Shapurji Saklatvala Papers. Hansard Parliamentary Debates. National Archives, UK. Security Services files. The National Library of Ireland, Dublin. Art Ó Briain Papers. Newspapers Irish Press Labour Leader Books and Articles

Bellamy, J. M. and Saville, J. (eds) (1982) Dictionary of Labour Biography, vol. VI. London: Macmillan. English, R. (1994) Radicals and the Republic: Socialist Republicanism in the Irish Free State, 1925–37. Oxford: Clarendon Press. French, P. (1997) Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division. London: Harper Collins. Gopal, S. (1975) Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography. Volume I: 1889–1947. London: Cape. Longford, F. P., Earl of (1972) Peace by Ordeal: An Account from First-Hand Sources of the Negotiation and Signature of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, 1921. London: Sidgwick & Jackson. Norman, D. (1965) Nehru: The First Sixty Years. Volume I. London: The Bodley Head. O’Connor, E. (2004) Reds and the Green: Ireland, Russia and the Communist Internationals, 1919–43. Dublin: University College Dublin Press. O’Halpin, E. (1999) Defending Ireland: The Irish State and its Enemies since 1922. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Halpin, E., Armstrong, R. and Ohlmeyer, J. (eds) (2006) Intelligence, Statecraft and International Power. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. O’Malley, K. (2008) Ireland, India and Empire: Indo–Irish Radical Connections, 1919–64. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Owen, N. (2007) The British Left and India: Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism, 1885–1947. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Popplewell, R. J. (1995) Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire 1904–1924. London: Frank Cass. Regan-Lefebvre, J. (2009) Cosmopolitan Nationalism in the Victorian Empire: Ireland, India and the Politics of Alfred Webb. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Saklatvala, S. (1991) The Fifth Commandment: Biography of Shapurji Saklatvala. Salford: Miranda Press. Schneer, J. (1999) London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sen, A., (2007) ‘The proscription of an Irish text and the Chittagong rising of 1930’. Indian Historical Review, 34 (July), 97–121. Silvestri, M. (2009) Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 9

Negotiating a ‘New World Order’: Mulk Raj Anand as Public Intellectual at the Heart of Empire (1924–1945) Susheila Nasta

Although Mulk Raj Anand spent twenty years of his long, distinguished life in Britain, there is remarkably little evidence of his presence in British literary and cultural histories. By the time he returned to India on a trooper ship in 1945, there is no question that his various voices – whether as novelist, political activist, cultural critic, essayist, literary editor, publisher or BBC broadcaster – were well known. There is little doubt too that Anand’s sojourn in Britain, like that of others who ‘voyaged in’ to the dynamic ‘contact zone’ at the heart of the colonial metropolis, was crucial to his political and cultural formation.1 For, as I argue elsewhere, it was in the radical anti-colonial atmosphere of inter-war London that he began to articulate an evolving but highly prescient global alternative to a predominant EuroAmerican vision of modernity, carving out a space to locate himself as well as his Indian subjects in history.2 It was in London too that Anand gained the skills – as both an Indian and a British citizen of empire – to lay claim to, and use against itself, a ‘metropolitan discourse of rights and self-assertion’.3 Drawing on his wide knowledge of Eastern and Western enlightenment philosophy, he created a distinctive, authoritative, secular voice, well able to expose the absurd contradictions that were blocking, even among left-leaning metropolitan anti-imperialists, the case for Indian independence. As this chapter will demonstrate, Anand exploited a number of self-conscious rhetorical, interpersonal and politically nuanced strategies to attempt to inscribe himself as a public intellectual into twentieth-century British literary history. In straddling numerous uneven and often competing political and cultural platforms on the Western literary stage, he was aware from the outset of the need to manipulate his multi-voiced position as insider and outsider, to be both authoritative informant and interlocutor, who could not only infiltrate and mediate but also change and subvert the orthodoxies of the implicitly imperialist ‘structures of relationship and feeling’ that surrounded him.4 There is no doubt that Anand was an adept cultural translator, an accomplished go-between, who despite his oblique location in the imperial metropolis had the benefit of double vision. As George Orwell, close associate and colleague at the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1945, once wrote, Anand was simultaneously ‘interpreter of Asia for the West’ and a ‘Westernising’ influence among his Indian friends.5 Crucial, too, was Anand’s dexterity in deploying English as a shared cultural resource, a tool of productive exchange and a medium more powerful than any other weapon to show that ‘the other’s viewpoint [always] exists’.6

Many of Anand’s writings have drawn attention to the competing historical, cultural and political forces which shaped his ambivalent location as the split subject of an Indian modernity, a ‘kind of bridge trying to span, symbolically, the two worlds of the Ganga and the Thames’.7 In a series of letters to Herman Ould, the then Secretary of British PEN, written between 1941 and 1943 while he was struggling to compose an early version of his 1946 historical memoir Apology to Heroism, ‘I Believe in Man’, Anand begins to make a prophetic case for what we today might call (following Paul Gilroy) a post-national, ‘planetary humanism’.8 Arguing that all histories co-exist within the same world, Anand implies (anticipating later cultural theorists such as Frantz Fanon and Edward Said) that Britain needs to think its history as one that is not separate from but intellectually and culturally integrated with its colonies.9 For, as Anand expresses it to Ould, ‘[t]he seas’ currently dividing ‘nations and continents’ should not be seen as ‘barriers’ but rather as ‘connecting links’ creating the foundations for a ‘new world’.10 He makes it abundantly plain in both this unpublished correspondence and what later becomes his Apology that he perceives the cosmopolitan bilingualism of his cross-cultural Indian inheritance to be a privileged ‘vantage-point’ from which to critique the ‘wastelands’ of the broken West, where it was obvious that ‘the towers of London, Vienna and Paris were about to fall’.11 Moreover, alongside the strident voice that comes through on the pressing issue of independence and cultural freedom is a narrative which makes a convincing case for a global interpretation of the ‘modern’, what Anand calls the possibilities offered by a transformative ‘new humanism’, articulated from a specifically Indian ‘sense of locality’.12 Arguably, then, as early as the 1940s Anand was already beginning to map out what we might now term in the age of theory a transnational aesthetic for a ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’;13 positing a view of ‘culture’ as the ‘efflorescence of all the contradictory impulses of civilisation’.14

REVISITING ANAND Despite Anand’s many accounts of the mixed range of artistic and intellectual networks with which he engaged, the trajectory of his time in Britain has often been represented by readings which refuse to allow Anand to step outside the borders of predictable critical frames.15 It is often alleged that it is after his ‘ill-fated’ adventures as a young student of Western philosophy at University College London, where he fraternized on the edges of Bloomsbury with the likes of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell and D. H. Lawrence – a period Anand himself ironically reconstitutes, critiques and complicates in his retrospective autobiographical recollections Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981) – that he rejects the purist sanctuary of the modernist project in favour of ‘a hard-driven [social] realism’ which enables a more authentic representation of ‘the lives of the Indian poor’.16 Typically and reductively, then, Anand appears either as a collaborative and ultimately complicit ‘babu’ figure, or as a revolutionary Marxist renegade who, in writing back to empire, alienated the majority of his metropolitan English friends. Even recent attempts to

bring Anand ‘back to Bloomsbury’17 and to expand the limited parameters of canonical modernism have not yet fully risen to the challenge presented by Anand’s complicatedly interwoven and extensive network of social and political relations. Kristin Bluemel has, for example, provided one of the most insightful readings of the complexity of Anand’s position and his relationship to inter-war British culture through the wider angled lens of ‘intermodernism’.18 In setting up a new critical compass which locates Anand off-centre as ‘radical eccentric’ – a figure who, like George Orwell and his less wellknown friends Stevie Smith and Inez Holden, sits more comfortably outside the historiography of prevailing critical orthodoxies – Bluemel’s bold reading still tends to chart Anand’s formation according to a developmental ideological pattern. In other words, Anand moves from what Bluemel calls a ‘radical’ yet still ‘collaborationist’ ‘intentionality’ in his early 1930s fictions to a more fully realized, less ambiguous and more polemical articulation of his actual political stance in his later and non-fictional works of the 1940s. According to Bluemel, it is in Letters on India (1942) and Apology to Heroism (1946) that we first witness a decidedly ‘unapologetic’ and vociferous Anand who announces the rationale for his separation from the ‘politics of mainstream English culture’ and the sympathies of his former Bloomsbury and 1930s English friends.19 In light of this, it is perhaps not surprising that far less consideration has been paid to the competing voices, range of genres and transverse contexts underlying the large volume of non-fictional works Anand published in Britain than to his early fiction. In fact if Anand’s role as cultural critic and public intellectual is discussed at all, he is rarely investigated as a multi-voiced polymath who, by strategically straddling the discourses of numerous different and often competing political constituencies, could re-inflect thinking on the cultural histories of both India and Britain. This omission is significant and regrettable on a number of counts. First, it is in and through Anand’s non-fiction that we can best trace the close affiliations which existed between the various European, British and Indian networks that drove both his activism and his not insignificant role in contributing to and shaping debates in British and Indian periodicals. It is also, arguably, only in this thicker context that we witness the many differently inflected voices Anand navigated as cultural critic and activist, building on what he called the creative synergies of ‘living together’ as part of an ‘international fraternity’.20 Second, it is in this variegated, uneven cultural landscape, often eclipsed behind the composition and production of Anand’s works, that the convergences and shared cultural milieu connecting Anand to a range of British intellectuals and divergent political causes and aesthetic movements can be most substantially appreciated. Third, it is only once the significance of these reciprocal relations and textured cultural circuits are recognized that we can read his already well-known and celebrated fictional works in their conjoined fullness and complexity. Attempts to stage Anand’s anti-colonial resistance in starkly linear and instrumental terms do not always take adequate account of the fact that even his earliest novels were engaged in extending and subverting the canonical discourse of ‘modernism’ against itself. An appreciation of Anand’s encounters with Irish writers such as A. E. Housman, W. B. Yeats or Sean O’Casey in the late 1920s when he visited Ireland, and his subsequent identification

(like many other Indians) with Irish anti-colonial politics, enables a more nuanced reading of the influence of a Joycean modernist aesthetic on The Untouchable (1935) as Anand engages with the uncomfortable introduction of modernity to late colonial India. Besides, Anand graphically signals this ‘arc of a hyphenated international trajectory’ on the book’s final page, where the mobile context of its inception, ‘Simla – SS Viceroy of India – Bloomsbury’, points ironically to its mixed cultural genesis, as well as its subversive political intention in inscribing the ‘colonial margin’ ambivalently ‘in the aesthetic heart of the centre’. Importantly, too, Anand’s enigmatic authorial inscription is dated 1933 and clearly situates the novel (given its publication date in 1935) between the proposals for Indian constitutional reform outlined in the 1933 White Paper, and the 1935 Government of India Act. Reaction by Indians to the continuing injustices of what were perceived to be half-baked promises for a semblance of democratic autonomy in an India still controlled by the dictates of the British imperial government was extreme, and Anand himself takes up this banner directly seven years later in Letters on India. Yet already here, in this first novel, Anand is self-consciously situating its content ‘in relation to both the high politics of imperialism and … diasporic anticolonial activism’.21

TRANSVERSE CONNECTIONS It is as a direct consequence of Anand’s physical proximity in London to a large international community of editors, writers and publishers (he lived first in Hendon, then at several different addresses in Bloomsbury, and later in Primrose Hill) that he was able to impact in a variety of ways upon the heated debates of an active, vocal and wide-ranging imaginary community. It was here too as a young writer that he was able to flex his literary muscles as an artful ventriloquist and to make the necessary contacts to seize opportunities to re-angle orientalizing stereotypes and ‘open the world a little more’ (as Salman Rushdie was much later to put it) to the complex historical formations of Indian culture. Anand’s standing was of course strengthened by the impressive range of his intellectual credentials. His wide knowledge of European, Russian and Indian literatures and a thorough grounding in Western enlightenment thinking was combined with his attraction in the metropolis as a ‘native informant’; one who, as an Indian, had direct experience of and the authority to comment on the suffering caused by restrictions on human rights and cultural freedoms brought about as a consequence of British imperialism. At times deliberately manipulating this perspective, he tapped into the fears engendered by the growing threat of fascism in Europe, the fall-out from the Japanese aggression in Manchuria in 1931 and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Building on a new-found sense of equality with European intellectuals and a close identification with the activism of wider international movements, he ensured that the parallel case for Indian independence came to the fore. For Anand and other anti-colonial activists like him – such as C. L. R. James, George Padmore or Cedric Dover – the virtual spaces of the national and periodical press ‘manufactured a … public sphere as powerful as any physical place’, providing a forum with wide impact ‘in which imperial coercion’ as well as ‘resistance to that coercion could take

place’.22 Significantly, too, as Julie Codell argues, the possibilities offered by such interventions enabled participation in a mutually transformative dialogic cultural space where divisions between ‘centres and peripheries’ might be ‘vanquished’ and differences ‘juxtaposed’.23 We must not forget however that gaining entrance to the world of British letters was also at times a restrictive process. The press and the publishing industries were harsh arbiters, as is evident from the nineteen rejections Anand received from publishers when attempting to get Untouchable into print.24 Even a brief survey of the material traces of Anand’s presence in Britain – evident in the pages of a wide range of periodicals, adverts from publishers as well as letters, diaries, reviews and archives at the BBC – makes visible the fact that he not only interacted with but sustained affiliations and friendships with an enormous spectrum of local and global networks. From 1935 his main fictions were regularly reviewed in the mainstream press, gaining frequent coverage in the columns of the Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman, Time & Tide, Life & Letters, The Mercury, Left Review and New Writing. On the other hand, Anand often subtly modified his critical voice to engage with major works by British writers, as he earned a living by reviewing and writing sharply angled critical commentaries on the works of Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Edward Thompson, E. M. Forster, Lionel Fielden, Stephen Spender and George Orwell. Often in the dual role of both stranger and insider, he helped promote key Indian publications such as the second edition of Gandhi’s An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments with Truth (1940) or Nehru’s An Autobiography (1936), and significantly raised public awareness of the cultural background informing the writings of familiar Indian poets Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu and Mohammed Iqbal.25 He was prominent as well in several other ventures, at times producing Indian editions of British journals and writing for specialist interest groups such as Indian Art and Letters (the publication of the India Society led by artist William Rothenstein), The Tribune, Labour Monthly (organs of the Labour Party) and the Asiatic Review. In much of his journalism, he was committed not only to synthesizing and enabling a ‘two-way traffic’ between East and West but also to proactively creating specific publishing platforms for lesser known Indians to voice their own interpretations of Britain. Keen to debunk the powerful trope of Rudyard Kipling’s often rehearsed dictum ‘never the twain should meet’, Anand commissioned several essays on topical issues which would appeal to a wide audience, such as a piece on Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘campaign for civil liberties’ for Left Review. He also contributed to selecting the contents for Indian Writing – a magazine linked closely to the India League as well as the Progressive Writers’ Association, and published intermittently from the Bibliophile bookshop in Great Russell Street, WC1, from 1940 to 1945.26 As signatory, with over 200 other major British writers, to Nancy Cunard’s ‘Authors Take Sides’ – a petition which reached an audience of over 3,000 in Left Review – Anand joined forces with communist activists Ralph Fox, Christopher Caudwell and John Cornford to fight the Republican cause in Spain. From another perspective again, Anand as self-appointed war correspondent from Madrid wrote a four-part series for the Congress Socialist, drawing stark parallels between the predicament of the Spanish peasants under Franco and that of the

agrarian castes in India, still entrapped by imperialism.27 The range of Anand’s strategies as an essayist becomes obvious if one begins to examine the various means by which he promoted an agenda for cultural resistance while at the same time seeming to comply with the expectations of the specific audiences he addressed. In ‘The Poetry of Sir Muhammad Iqbal’ (based on a talk he gave to the India Society in 1931) Anand is obviously highly aware of the fascination with Indian art and culture among his largely sympathetic British audience of Indophiles and draws them directly into his subject matter by referencing debates recently sparked in press reviews of Reynold Nicholson’s translation of Iqbal’s Asar-i-Kundi (‘The Secrets of the Self’). Deliberately placing the Persian names of Iqbal’s poems in front of their English equivalents, Anand provides an erudite analysis of the mixed cultural influences informing Iqbal as poet, at the same time offering his own substantial English translations of the works he cites. Importantly, he makes a passionate case here for an Indian modernity, not separated from Iqbal’s role as visionary philosopher and ‘national prophet’ but which had long preceded T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Wasteland in seeing that ‘a suicide’s death awaits [Western] civilisation’.28 Diplomatically pinpointing the intertextual influences on Iqbal’s art, Anand thus maps Iqbal’s evolution as Indian modernist with reference to the works of major Western figures such as Goethe, Hegel, Cowper, Emerson and Whitman. Anand’s performative engagement with and negotiation across various coteries is evident also in the background to his several substantial books of cultural criticism and the many talks he delivered to different institutional bodies which were all engaged – whatever the gradations of their political colours – in the defence of cultural freedoms.29 Persian Painting (part of T. S. Eliot’s Faber Criterion Miscellany series) was published to coincide with the 1931 exhibition of Persian art at Burlington House and describes Anand as a ‘distinguished Oriental critic’. It also acknowledges the input of Laurence Binyon who, along with the Ceylonese art critic Ananda Coomaraswamy, had inducted Anand into the aesthetics of Hindu art as well as the contents of the Asiatic collections at the British Museum. Alternatively his Curries and Other Dishes (1932), based on his time earning a living as a cook’s assistant in various curry houses in London, was addressed primarily to the English housewife. Providing a populist guide to numerous spice shops and Indian restaurants in London, it highlights the extent to which Indian culinary traditions had already permeated the culture of the city.30 It was soon followed by The Hindu View of Art (introduced by sculptor Eric Gill in 1933) and Anand’s scholarly introduction to five poets of the new India, The Golden Breath (one of John Murray’s highly successful Wisdom of the East series). His impassioned speech, ‘The Place of India’ (delivered to the XVIIIth International PEN conference in London in 1941), was anthologized on the other hand in Writers For Freedom, a volume introduced by Herman Ould, which included companion pieces by Storm Jameson, J. B. Priestley, E. M. Forster, Rebecca West, Arthur Koestler, Hsiao Ch’ien, Erika Mann and Alfred Kerr. The variety of registers, subjects and audiences with which Anand came into contact not only demonstrates the complexity of his affiliations but also complicates a schematic framing of him first as Bloomsbury disciple and then as increasingly vociferous Indian rebel. In fact,

the reciprocity of intellectual companionship, as witnessed across the production and transmission of his non-fictional writings, indicates a far more engaging if untidy dynamic of cultural and political exchange. Recounting, for example, his early association with Eric Gill, the sculptor who introduced The Hindu View of Art, Anand says, it ‘was an equal friendship … I gave to Gill, [what he] wanted to know about Indian art. He was … fascinated with Indian sculpture.’ They ‘began to write a book’ together ‘because he had the notion that the medieval idea of the craft guilds’ was linked in some important way to India. This ‘was a collaboration and a creative act’.31 And notably, while Herbert Read in a 1933 review in The Listener makes distinctions between the two artists in terms of agenda and cultural perspective, he also makes connections, emphasizing that not only did Anand and Gill share ‘the same world’ but Gill’s voice is ‘stretched like a hurdle’ across Anand’s study.32 Similar points could be made concerning Anand’s writerly convergences in a whole range of other publications, including E. M. Forster’s famous Preface to Untouchable, which has most typically been perceived as a liberal humanist form of patronage, enabling the struggling and then unknown colonial writer Anand to be ‘lifted up’ into print. A more informed reading of the proximity of these two voices together in print in 1935 might witness the beginnings of an extended exchange between ‘European and non-European writing’ which helped both Forster and Anand, who continued their dialogue as colleagues at the BBC well into the mid1940s and beyond to push the frontiers of European ‘modernism outside of itself’.33 A still different relationship is configured in Anand’s 1944 Preface to Ralph Fox’s posthumous study The Novel and the People, first published in 1937, soon after Fox’s tragic death in the Spanish Civil War. In celebrating Fox’s memory, Anand talks of their mutual participation at radical reading groups on the Gray’s Inn Road, their joint involvement in the international movement against fascism in the 1930s, and their shared politics and commitment to action in the fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. It was the fundamental dynamic of equality and exchange which consolidated the close friendship between the two as they spent long hours comparing ‘notes on Flaubert and Meredith, on Hardy and Tolstoy, on L. H. Myers … the new Russians and almost everyone else’.34 Although Anand never signed up formally to any political movement and did not join Fox as member of the British Communists, it is clear from numerous intertextual echoes that their thinking was closely embroiled at the time.35 Where Anand speaks, for example, of his desire to write an ‘Indian epic’ devoted to the ‘inner forces which condition human experience’,36 Fox claims the novel as the main vehicle for an ‘epic of the struggle of the individual against society, against nature’.37 And when Anand praises what he calls the broad imaginative sweep of Fox’s ‘revolutionary socialism’, an ‘intense preoccupation with ideas’ communicated without using ‘the methods of the platform propagandist’ and offering a vision of ‘historical man’ caught in the full ‘gamut of inner and outer conflict’, he is no doubt also commenting indirectly on his own frustrations at being circumscribed as a ‘social realist’ who, wedded to an instrumental politics of liberation, could seldom succeed in moving away from reportage or the political tract.38 Importantly, traces of the exchange between Fox and Anand are not only limited to the platforms they shared in print. To be sure, they were both closely associated with Left Review

which published from Red Lion Square in WC1 and already by the end of 1935 had achieved a circulation surpassed by only one literary monthly in England.39 Set up initially as the journal of the British Section of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, it marked the shifting terrain of a much wider literary and political movement, providing ‘a popular, intellectual and artistic alliance’ that defended human culture in the face of ‘Fascism, imperialism and war’.40 Fox, along with Randall Swingler (another friend and one of the editors of Left Review), was key to the formation of the London branch of the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association, proactively addressing several early meetings and drawing links with the wider political situation in Europe.41 And notably linked to this group was a further Left Review editor Edgell Rickward, who was instrumental, with E. M. Forster, in getting Anand’s first novel Untouchable into print. Much scholarly attention has already been paid to the unique convergence of historical and cultural factors which led to the formation of the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) in London in November 1934.42 It is not my intention here therefore to rehearse the details of that wider history but rather to focus on some distinct cultural and political contexts which impacted upon its direction at this particular moment in time. By all accounts, the group was formally constituted in an ‘unventilated’ rented back room of the Nanking Chinese Restaurant in Bloomsbury and attended by around thirty-five Indians, mainly drawn from university circuits across Britain. It was during this first meeting that Anand was elected President of the Association and asked to draft its manifesto. The first draft was edited down by Sajjad Zaheer and Dr Jyotirmaya Ghosh (both co-founders) and published in Left Review in February 1936.43 Despite the India Office’s constant surveillance and deep mistrust of the political ethos of the group, the formation of the London branch of the PWA was accompanied by several positive notices in the British press. As a ‘News Reel’ in Life & Letters notes in 1939, from a small beginning, the Association has become ‘one of the largest blocs for the defence of culture in the world’ today. Moreover, as Zaheer, one of the key forces, recounts, the 1935 inauguration ‘was the seed’ out of which developed a ‘great’ vernacular movement in India. Our vision spread ‘to almost all the … languages’ and was fully supported by major political and literary figures such as Sarojini Naidu, Rabindranath Tagore and Premchand.44 Fox’s influence on the group was crucial. It was Fox, as Zaheer remembers, who consistently ‘warned us … that our enthusiasm for progressivism must not degenerate into sectarianism and prejudice’.45 And while Anand saw the moment as an important political turning point in ensuring that Indians were finally accepted ‘as equals … in England’, he, like Fox, was keen to stress that the PWA was not a regimented group, ‘a clique or … new coterie’, but rather a ‘collection of readers and writers, groping together, in spite of our different individualities towards the realisation of certain facts’.46 It is important to recognize that while the PWA was closely affiliated with some individual members of the Communist Party in Britain, this was by no means its only significant interaction. It is also worth remembering that both Anand and Zaheer were significantly inspired by the powerful spirit of the International Congress for the Defence of Culture in Paris which they attended as members of the audience in June 1935. Here they encountered an enormous

congregation of major writers from over thirty-eight countries who had come together for five days to debate how active measures could be taken to defend ‘the perils confronting cultural freedom’ worldwide. Invited delegates from Britain included figures from across the political spectrum and ranged from Virginia Woolf to E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Storm Jameson and Herbert Read. Significantly, too, French writers Andre Gide, Henri Barbusse and Romain Rolland, the organizers and intellectual force behind the convention, already had close connections with India. Gide was the French translator of Tagore’s Gitanjali; Barbusse helped the wife of the ‘then deported M. N. Roy … to agitate for a reversal’ of the expulsion order which had exiled Roy in Luxembourg; and Rolland, already with long literary and political links to India, had been key in inviting Tagore to sign the ‘Declaration of Independence of the Spirit’ in June 1919 following the atrocities at Amritsar.47 Importantly, E. M. Forster’s formal address, ironically entitled ‘Liberty in England’, not only made explicit his support for an anti-imperialist politics but also critiqued, in terms not that dissimilar to those of Anand, what he called a latent ‘Fabio-Fascism’, an insidious, apparently liberal discourse which had a ‘dictator-spirit’ working ‘quietly behind the façade of constitutional forms, passing a little law (like the Sedition Act) here … emphasizing the national need for secrecy elsewhere, and whispering and cooing the so-called “news” every evening over the wireless, until opposition is tamed and gulled’.48 Both Anand and Zaheer were to maintain contact individually with Rolland, Barbusse and Gide, and it was their example of finding a vehicle to transform intellectual commitment into political action that was to inspire their own activism in formulating the manifesto for the PWA. Soon after the Paris convention, Anand participated as invited speaker in a number of other international congregations. Indian representative at the second conference of International Writers in Defence of Culture in London in June 1936, he also went to Belgium that autumn with friend and fellow writer, Cedric Dover, to participate in the Brussels World Peace Congress. As vocal advocate for coloured unity and a global anti-racism, Dover connected Anand at this Congress with the activism of a much ‘wider coloured movement’, one which straddled several nations and linked ‘Indians, Chinese, Eurasians, Indonesians, American Negroes, West Indians, Africans, Tunisians, Arabs, Jews and other subject peoples’ in the worldwide fight for equality.49 Already well acquainted with Nancy Cunard’s anthology of black writers Negro, as well as her essays denouncing the ‘colour bar’ in Left Review, Anand and Dover joined forces to compose a written memorandum which precipitated the later consolidation of a wider pan-African global movement already well advanced by Dover with leading black colonial radicals George Padmore and C. L. R. James, and the League of Coloured Peoples. Notably, the signing of this formal memorandum in 1936 was to lead eventually to the organization of an Asian–African conference, held in Bandung eighteen years later with the support of Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister of a then independent India.

PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL AT WORK

These brief glimpses of Anand’s networks and political alliances cannot do full justice to the wealth of resources forming the wider context of his activism or the full range of his writings. They do, however, offer a sense of the variegated contours of the landscape as well as the remarkable density of exchange that not only characterized these encounters but contributed to his wider literary, political and cultural project. I want to return briefly now to the early 1940s when Anand was commissioned to write Letters on India, an invitation which came from Herbert Read at Routledge while Anand was working along with Read, George Orwell and an eclectic mix of other intellectuals for the British war cause at the BBC Eastern Service. Anand had initially refused Sir Malcolm Darling’s invitation to join the BBC in March 1941 due to his ‘conflicting loyalties’, his intimate engagement with Congress and his difficulties in accepting Britain’s internment of ‘hundreds’ of his ‘compatriots’ including leading Congress members such as Nehru. Yet three months later, after Hitler invaded Russia, he agreed to join. It is worth looking here at some of the often eclipsed contexts informing Anand’s composition of his Letters on India if only to open up the terrain of interpretation and reconsider how this final phase of Anand’s time in Britain has been represented to date. For, contrary to common consensus, this phase could also be read as the apex of Anand’s career as a public intellectual in Britain, a moment when, as Edward Said puts it in Representations of the Intellectual, Anand seized the opportunity to ‘explicitly … universalise the [Indian] crisis, to give human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered’ and ‘to associate that experience with the sufferings of others’.50 Written in an epistolary form and addressed (not without irony) to one ‘Tom Brown’, an ordinary English working man, Letters on India was controversially introduced by Leonard Woolf, who, sympathetic in principle to Anand’s blatant anti-imperialism, openly condemned what he regarded to be Anand’s misjudged and blinkered Congress stance. There is no doubt that Anand’s polemical stance was unequivocal in its critique of Britain’s continuing hypocrisies in its treatment of India; or that the seventeen letters, with their bold, accusatory tone, were specifically framed to highlight what Anand calls the ‘Messrs facing-Bothways’ double-speak of British politicians. Anand is certainly not afraid to voice outspokenly his condemnation of the Cripps mission to India in 1942 and the continuing refusal of the British to offer India (still under the rule of the Viceroy) any real promise of democracy. Furthermore, he alleges that the British are not only culpable for the violence they inflicted on India but reprehensible for maintaining this indefensible defiance of the human rights declarations of the Atlantic Charter with a heedless arrogance. Carefully framing Tom Brown’s questions to suit his own purposes, Anand, as friendly but not impartial Indian expert, enlightens the British worker on the gruesome facts that have caused India’s current social and economic plight. Consistently detailing an argument to show that British and Indian histories are inextricably intertwined, Anand points out that while ‘India’ may be seen as a colonial ‘suburb’ of London, it has also always been a key ‘bedrock of the whole financial, economic and political structure of the … Empire’.51 As Tom Brown says at one point, expressing his urgent desire to discover the ‘real’ history of India: ‘Now, you know, as we of the British working-class movement know, that there is widespread ignorance in this country of the history of British imperialism in India, as it could be told by the subject peoples of Empire.’52

It is often argued that the critical tone of Leonard Woolf’s introduction marked a symptom of Anand’s increasing distance from his British leftist friends. And, to some considerable degree, Anand himself was keen to advance this view. As Saros Cowajee claims, by the mid1940s and certainly after the publication of Apology to Heroism, ‘Anand’s attitude towards his [British] contemporaries’ had changed and was ‘chiefly determined by their stand on … Indian freedom’.53 To be sure, Woolf’s Preface (also written as a letter beginning ‘Dear Anand’) was not, as he puts it, ‘the usual kind … which seems to me nearly always impertinent’, where ‘a distinguished or undistinguished person irrelevantly pats the author on the back’. For although Woolf, throughout his career, had long denounced imperialism ‘for the harm it does both to the imperialist and the subject peoples’, he could nevertheless not accept what he calls the ‘dangerously biased’ politics of Anand’s Congress case, or the blackness of his portrait of the British in India.54 The content of Woolf’s introduction generated a flurry of further exchanges. Anand himself expressed great shock at Woolf’s shift away from their shared socialist vision, accusing him of having almost gone ‘to the Amery extreme’ in warning ‘Tom Brown against my one-sidedness’.55 He denied he had ever asked Woolf to write the Preface and insisted his reply (also a letter) was printed alongside Woolf’s Introduction in the Labour Book Service edition. This was followed by a lengthy Tribune review by Orwell who not only denounced the hypocritical blimp-like ‘sentimentalism of the [British] left’ but launched an attack on the refusal of enlightened people everywhere to perceive the dangers of a narrowly conceived and often dangerously patriotic ‘nationalism’.56 The injured Woolf soon penned a reply to Orwell (also published in the Tribune), which accused Orwell of completely misrepresenting his politics as well as his so-called ‘anger’ at Anand’s outspoken Congress case. He had long supported Anand and was in favour of Indian independence. His main bone of contention was that Anand was in danger of playing into the hands of the British imperialists by suggesting that the problem of the Muslims did not exist.57 If seen in a wider context, these high-profile exchanges, while acrimonious, were exactly what Anand desired in drawing public attention to the complexity of the Indian situation. They also, paradoxically, affirm the high level of Anand’s confidence, his closeness to Woolf (in being able to argue with him and publicly challenge his views), as well as his increasing sense of an equal status with mainstream British intellectuals. When Letters on India appeared, Anand had already anyhow gained much applause in airing a similar perspective to a very different audience of writers gathered together at the widely attended London International PEN conference in 1941. In his talk ‘The Place of India’ Anand stresses, as in Letters on India, that ‘India is an integral part of the modern world’ and that ‘culture and civilisation are not the monopoly of any nation’.58 Almost anticipating Woolf’s later critique of his supposedly blinkered Congress stance, Anand makes it clear that there are not only many human versions of ‘truth’ but many ‘nationalisms’; moreover, these ‘nationalisms’ vary markedly in context and purpose: There is the aggressive, predatory nationalism of the [European] Fascist State which has plunged the world in the black hell of this night of history. … Our nationalism is rather the urge to be free, the aspiration to live as a part of the human family, with a clear recognition of our responsibilities in the economic, social interdependence of the world. … We have

long put our faith in that ideal of nationalism as a corollary of internationalism which Rabindranath Tagore has defined.59

He continues: if the ideals of Freedom and Democracy are good enough for the ninety million Czechs, Poles, Dutchmen, Belgians, Norwegians and the other conquered peoples of Europe, why is it not thought fit to apply them to the four hundred odd million peoples of India?60

Interestingly, in a private letter written to Herman Ould, also in 1942, Anand insists that it is his role as an intellectual to facilitate a dialogue between Britain and India that is most important. Suggesting that he follow up his Letters on India with a more culturally focused publication entitled ‘A Letter to an Englishman of Letters’, he adds the important proviso that ‘as I happen to have two countries, I can’t talk of one without involving the other’.61 It would seem then that Anand was not as isolated in his standpoint as has sometimes been suggested. Over 300 people attended the 1941 PEN conference and India was also a hot topic at the time in the British press review columns. Several other controversial books debating the future of India appeared around the same time – whether K. S. Shelvankar’s radical Penguin history The Problem of India (1940) which was banned from circulation, or Lionel Fielden’s more moderate Beggar My Neighbour (1943). Both of these had also excited inflammatory reviews. Robert Herring captures the mood in his editorial to the 1942 Indian edition of Life & Letters: This long-prepared Indian number coincides with the belated interest which is now replacing previous indifference towards India. … We ourselves may not find it paradoxical that we stand as champions in Europe of a unity we refused India; we ourselves may cheerfully endure our own habits of belated and makeshift compromise; but they are not necessarily endearing to a race of another cast of mind.62

It is not surprising given this public context that Anand’s confidence was running high when his Letters on India appeared. Although his war novel Across the Black Waters (1940) had offended many by its seemingly inappropriate and insensitive subject matter which highlighted the atrocities inflicted on Indian sepoys during the First World War, his publications also gained many complimentary notices as evidenced in several of E. M. Forster’s radio talks.63 And it was George Orwell, a close friend, who was to suggest the title for his novel The Sword and the Sickle (1942) while walking across Primrose Hill, close to Anand’s flat in St George’s Mews, during a blackout. Anand was also boosted in his fight to lift the ban on books in India during this period by the support of the large constituency of Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club as well as the friendship of Michael Foot (then Labour MP) who led a petition to include India within the scope of the Atlantic Charter.64 Still centrally involved in promoting the works of the Progressive Writers, Anand expanded the networks of the newly launched Indian Writing, consolidating already existing connections with John Lehmann’s New Writing and his Hogarth Press publications. Besides this, Anand was energetically setting up (at the request of Orwell) a whole range of different programmes for the BBC Eastern Service aimed at very different target audiences. Commissioned to write witty, discursive pieces on individual writers such as Bernard Shaw or H. G. Wells, he also offered several contributions,

sometimes as sole broadcaster, to series such as ‘New Weapons of War’, ‘Books That Changed the World’ and ‘Meet My Friends’. Perhaps most importantly he was centrally involved in the innovative and influential ‘Voice’ programme, a six-part poetry magazine for radio. Anand not only helped to produce this programme but was also engaged in commissioning for it, ensuring that proper space was attributed to Indian poets, such as Tagore and Iqbal, alongside their European contemporaries. It seems highly likely that it was the influence of his broadcasting work on the BBC ‘Open Letters’ series that partially determined the form of his own Letters on India, the dialogic nature of the genre being a useful ‘peg to hang one’s narrative on’.65 Finally, there is no doubt that Anand’s own profile in Britain benefited from the platform he shared on the prestigious ‘Voice’ programmes with key British, Indian and colonial intellectuals – Edmund Blunden, William Empson, Herbert Read, T. S. Eliot, Narayana Menon, Una Marson, Stephen Spender and Tambimuttu – as well as from the ‘extraordinary prestige’ that was, as W. J. West points out, ‘attached to radio in those days’.66 Perhaps not unsurprisingly given this context, several more invitations for lectures, talks and commissions from publishers followed prior to Anand’s departure from Britain in the autumn of 1945.67

COMPLICATING RESISTANCE It is difficult to explain why Anand’s influential and highly visible presence as a public intellectual in Britain has so often not been recognized. Perhaps his ‘disappearance’ may be accounted for by the regrettable flattening out of the rich power struggles that marked the conflicted historical terrain of modernity in the pre-independence period. As Amit Chaudhuri notes, such struggles were most typically characterized by a ‘robust, often contradictory creative opportunism’; defined, in other words, less by stark resistances than by the creation of cosmopolitan and often ‘vernacular’ trade routes, creating convergences which are at times considerably ‘simplified’ by the binaries of an overly oppositional ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ divide.68 The hasty ‘imposition of fashionable critical/theoretical discourses onto texts existing outside the boundaries of fixed national traditions’ can at times ‘stultify’ our ‘reading practices’, obstruct our vision and prevent us from recognizing the importance of sometimes eclipsed but nevertheless proximate intellectual synergies.69 It is important, when reading resistance backwards in time, to remember that the colonial encounter was always a mutually constitutive ‘transaction’, a two-way process, built on ‘complex negotiation and exchange’.70 While resistance often acts as the main framework for the broader project of the postcolonial, there are many forms of resistance and these can be complicit and oppositional at the same time. Moreover, such resistances, whether colonial or postcolonial, do not necessarily sit easily within what Anuradha Needham calls an ‘autonomous, uncontaminated space’ which announces ‘the “truth” of its pure opposition to the West’ but ignores ‘those articulations … that emphasise’ their ‘multi-layered, mixed … historical formations’.71 It is my hope that future readings of Anand’s formative years in Britain will focus on precisely those messy, contradictory and often unresolved elements of

his competing allegiances. In investigating such transverse marks of affiliation, one may gain more insight into the ways in which Anand was able to articulate his politics as anti-colonial Indian radical, writer and public intellectual in a period of major political and cultural change. Notes 1 See Nasta, S. (2004) ‘Voyaging in: colonialism and migration’, in L. Marcus and P. Nicholls (eds) Twentieth Century English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 563–85; Snaith, A. (2010) ‘Conversations in Bloomsbury: colonial writers and the Hogarth Press’, in L. Shahriari and G. Potts (eds) Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury, Volume 2. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 138–55. 2 Nasta (2002) Home Truths; Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 15–55. 3 Boehmer, E. (2002) Empire, the National and the Postcolonial. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 21. 4 Williams, R. (2001) ‘Tragedy and revolution’, in The Raymond Williams Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 96. 5 Orwell, G., Orwell, S. and Angus, I. (eds) (1970) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: My Country Right or Left 1940–1943. Volume 2. Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 253. 6 Orwell, G. and Davison, P. (eds) (1998) ‘Review of Letters on India by Mulk Raj Anand’, in The Complete Works of George Orwell. Volumes 12–14. London: Secker & Warburg, pp. 173–5. 7 Anand, M. R. (1972) Roots and Flowers. Karnatak: Dharwar, p. 15. 8 Gandhi, L. (1998) Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 122–40. 9 Codell, J. (ed.) (2003) Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press. London: Associated University Press, p. 18. I am grateful here to Codell’s argument on co-histories which derives from Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. 10 Letter from Anand to Herman Ould (30 November 1942), quoted courtesy of University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives: PEN Archive. 11 Anand (1949) ‘Prologomena to a new humanism’, in Lines Written to an Indian Air. Baroda: Nalanda Publishing, p. 4; this essay is dedicated to E. M. Forster and draws on his BBC talk, ‘The world I hope for no. 4’, 28 October 1943 (BBC Written Archives, Caversham, Reading, BBC Eastern Service). 12 Anand (1946) Apology for Heroism: An Essay in Search of Faith. London: Lindsay Drummond, p. 55. 13 Appiah, K. A. (2006) Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton; Berman, J. (2006) ‘Comparative colonialisms: Joyce, Anand and the question of engagement’. Modernism/Modernity, 11, 465–85. 14 Anand, Apology, p. 63; emphasis added. 15 See Berry, M. (1971) Mulk Raj Anand: The Man and the Novelist. Amsterdam: Oriental Press, pp. 1–40; Bald, S. R. (1974) ‘Politics of a revolutionary elite: a study of Mulk Raj Anand’s novels’. Modern Asian Studies, 8 (4), 473–89. These focus primarily on Anand within a Marxist radical context. See also my discussion of more recent versions of critical framings, which exclude Anand’s role in the formation of a global modernism, in Home Truths, pp. 25–9; a reading enhanced by a recent dialogue with Alison Donnell to whom I am also grateful for her reading of this chapter. 16 Gikandi, S. (2006) ‘Preface: modernism in the world’. Modernism/Modernity, 13 (3), 423. 17 Marcus. J. (2004) Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, p. 5. A similar observation is made by Snaith in ‘Conversations in Bloomsbury’, p. 138. 18 Bluemel, K. (2004) George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 1–18. 19 Bluemel, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics, p. 91. A similar line of argument is followed in Cowasjee, S. (1977) So Many Freedoms: A Study of the Major Fictions of Mulk Raj Anand. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 19–30. 20 Fisher, M. (1974) ‘Interview with Mulk Raj Anand’. World Literature Written in English, 13, 116. 21 Baer, B. C. (2009) ‘Shit writing: Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, the image of Gandhi, and the Progressive Writers Association’. Modernism/Modernity, 16, 576; emphasis added. 22 Codell, Imperial Co-Histories, p. 21. Codell makes the important point that the press was frequently a restrictive force and arbiter which blocked the participation of Indian colonial writers. In this context, it would be worth examining the many periodicals Anand did not publish in such as Horizon, despite his relationship with the editor, Cyril Connolly, and some of its regular contributors. 23 Ibid., p. 17. 24 Nasta (2009) ‘Between Bloomsbury and Gandhi? The background to the publication and reception of Mulk Raj Anand’s

Untouchable’, in R. Fraser and M. Hammond (eds) Books Without Borders. Volume 2. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 151– 70. 25 See ‘Mulk Raj Anand’, Making Britain Database for further information. 26 See, for instance, ‘Nehru’s campaign for civil liberties’ (1936) Left Review, September, 624; ‘Mr Eliot’s Kipling’ (1942) Life & Letters, 32, 167–70; Indian Writing (1940–1942), 1–2, 1–4. Notably, a number of Indian writers associated with the PWA published regularly in this periodical including Iqbal Singh, K. S. Shelvankar, Ahmed Ali, Attia Hosain, Sasadhar Sinha (who ran the bookshop), Jawaharlal Nehru, Cedric Dover and Alagu Subramanian. 27 Anand (1937) ‘Homage to Spain’. Congress Socialist, 1 May, 11 May, 15 May; 9–10, 11–14, 9–10. 28 Anand (1931) ‘The poetry of Sir Muhammad Iqbal’. Indian Art and Letters, 5 (1), 28. 29 Between the early 1930s and 1945, Anand was a member of a wide range of different associations. These include the Workers Educational Association, the India League, PEN, the National Council for Civil Liberties, the PWA, the Ralph Fox Writer’s Group, the International Writers in Defence of Culture, the Left Book Club, and Friends of India. Anand also scripted a play, Famine, performed at the Unity Theatre in Bloomsbury in 1942 in aid of Indian famine relief. See Packham, G. (1978), ‘Mulk Raj Anand and the thirties movement in England’, in K. K. Sharma (ed.), Perspectives on Mulk Raj Anand. Ghaziabad: Vimal, p. 58. 30 Anand regularly invited his friends for lunch at Shafi’s Restaurant at 18 Gerard Street, W1. He had lunch there with Herman Ould of PEN before his departure in 1945. 31 Fisher, ‘Interview with Mulk Raj Anand’, 117. 32 Read, H. (1933) ‘The Hindu view of art’. The Listener, 30 August, 318. 33 Singh, A. (2006) ‘The lifting and the lifted: prefaces to colonial modernist texts’. Wasafiri, 21 (1), 1–3. 34 Fox, R. (1944) The Novel and the People. London: Cobett Publishing, p. 10. 35 See Croft, A. (2003) ‘The Ralph Fox writer’s group’, in A. Shuttleworth (ed.), And In Our Time: Vision, Revision and British Writing of the 1930s. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, pp. 165–70. 36 Anand, Apology, p. 61. 37 Fox, The Novel and the People, p. 82. 38 Ibid., p. 15. I am indebted here to the argument in Packham, ‘Mulk Raj Anand’, p. 56. 39 ‘Editorial’ (1937) Left Review, 2, 958. 40 Brooker, P. and Thacker, A. (eds) (2009) The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Volume 1: Britain and Ireland, 1880–1955. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 634. 41 ‘Newsreel’ (1939) Life & Letters, 20, 3. 42 See Ahmed, T. (2009) Literature and Politics in the Age of Nationalism. Delhi: Routledge, pp. 10–37; Coppola, C. (1974) ‘The All-India Progressive Writers Association: the European phase’, in Coppola (ed.) Marxist Influences and South Asian Literature. Michigan: Michigan State University Press, pp. 1–34; Gopal, P. (2005) Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence. London: Routledge, pp. 1–27. 43 Anand (1936a) ‘Manifesto of the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association, London’. Left Review, 2 (5), 240. 44 Zaheer, S. (1965) ‘Mulk Raj Anand’. Contemporary Indian Literature, 5, 11–12. 45 Zaheer (1979) ‘Reminiscences’, in S. Pradhan (ed.) Marxist Cultural Movement in India.Calcutta: National Book Agency, p. 37. 46 Anand, ‘On the Progressive Writer’s movement’, in Pradhan, Marxist Cultural Movement, p. 2. 47 Coppola, ‘The All-India Progressive Writers Association’, p. 13. 48 Ibid., p. 16. 49 Slate, N. (2009) ‘A coloured cosmopolitanism: Cedric Dover’s reading of the Afro-Asian world’, in S. Bose and K. Manjapra (eds) Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas. Basingstoke: Palgrave, p. 220. 50 Said, E. (1994) Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Pantheon Books, p. 44. 51 Anand (1942b) Letters on India. London: Labour Book Service, p. 28. 52 Ibid., pp. 29–30. 53 Cowasjee, So Many Freedoms, p. 30; see also Bluemel, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics, pp. 86–9. 54 Woolf, L. (1942) ‘Introduction’, in Anand, Letters on India, p. viii. 55 Anand, Letters on India, pp. x–xii; Woolf’s introduction was removed upon Anand’s request from subsequent trade editions of the book. 56 Orwell, ‘Review of Letters on India by Mulk Raj Anand, 19 March 1943’, in Orwell and Davison (eds), Orwell and Politics, pp. 173–6. Orwell addresses his review/letter to his friend ‘Dear Mulk’. 57 Ibid., p. 176. Davison is referring here to Leonard Woolf’s reply in Tribune, 2 April 1943.

58 Anand (1942a) ‘The place of India’, in H. Ould (ed.) Writers in Freedom. London: Hutchinson, pp. 128–30. 59 Ibid., p. 130. 60 Ibid., p. 131. 61 Letter from Anand to Ould (30 January 1942) in University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library: PEN Archive: Mulk Raj Anand Letters. 62 Herring, R. (1942) ‘Editorial’. Life & Letters To-Day, March, 158. 63 E. M. Forster regularly lauded Anand in his BBC broadcasts. See Lago, M., Hughes, L. and Walls, E. M. (eds) (2008) The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster 1929–1960. London: University of Missouri Press; Muir, E. (1942) ‘New novels’ (review of The Sword and the Sickle). The Listener, 7 May, 602. 64 Morgan, K. (2007) Michael Foot: A Life. London: HarperCollins, pp. 44–5. Foot led a campaign to send a deputation to Churchill to advocate for India’s inclusion in the Atlantic Charter. He knew and admired Anand. 65 Cowasjee (1973) ‘Mulk Raj Anand and the BBC’. Indian and Foreign Review, March, 20. Anand’s BBC ‘Letter to a Chinese Guerilla’ was later published by Orwell in his 1943 BBC collection, Talking to India by E. M. Forster, Ritchie Calder and Others. 66 Orwell, G. and West, W. J. (eds) (1985) Orwell: The War Broadcasts. London: Duckworth, p. 18. See Ranasinha, R. (2010) ‘South Asian broadcasters and the BBC’. Journal of South Asian Diaspora, March, 57–71, for a fuller discussion of the many individuals involved in the diasporic networks at the BBC. 67 Of note in particular was Anand’s dinner speech to PEN (8 May 1945) and a wide constituency of international writers. He describes London as a ‘second home’ but also points out the major contribution that the Indian intelligentsia has made to the ‘re-assertion of the dignity of man as against the moral cynicism of the fascists’, in the PEN Archive: Mulk Raj Anand Letters. 68 Chaudhuri, A. (2009) ‘Cosmopolitan’s alien face’. New Left Review, 55, 1–5. 69 Nasta, ‘Between Bloomsbury and Gandhi?’, p. 152. 70 Trivedi, H. (1993) Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India. Calcutta: Papyrus, p. 15. 71 Needham, A. D. (2000) Using the Master’s Tools: Resistance and the Literature of the African and South-Asian Diasporas. New York: St Martins Press, p. 28; see also Snaith, ‘Conversations in Bloomsbury’, pp. 138–57. Snaith puts forward a similar argument complicating how the affiliations Anand formed in ‘Bloomsbury’ have been seen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Archival Sources BBC Written Archives, Caversham, Reading. BBC Eastern Service: M. R. Anand, ‘The world I hope for no. 4’, 28 October 1943. The University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library: Department of Special Collections and University Archives. The PEN Archive: Mulk Raj Anand Letters. Books and Articles Ahmed, T. (2009) Literature and Politics in the Age of Nationalism. Abingdon: Routledge. Anand, M. R. (1930) Persian Painting. London: Faber & Faber. — (1931) ‘The poetry of Sir Muhammad Iqbal’. Indian Art and Letters, 5 (1), 19–39. — (1932) Curries and Other Indian Dishes. London: Desmond Harmsworth. — (1933a) The Golden Breath: Studies in Five Poets of the New India. London: John Murray. — (1933b) The Hindu View of Art. London: Allen & Unwin. — (1935) The Untouchable. London: Wishart. — (1936a) ‘Manifesto of the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association, London’. Left Review, 2 (5), 240. — (1936b), ‘Towards a new Indian literature’. Left Review, September, 613–26.

— (1937) ‘Homage to Spain’. Congress Socialist, May-June, 9–10, 11–14. — (1938) ‘The culture of India’ (review of H. G. Rawlinson’s India: A Short Cultural History). London Mercury, 37 (220), 462. — (1940) Across the Black Waters. London: Jonathan Cape. — (1942a) ‘The place of India’, in H. Ould (ed.) Writers in Freedom. London: Hutchinson. — (1942b) Letters on India. London: Labour Book Service. — (1942c) The Sword and the Sickle. London: Cape. — (1942d) ‘Mr Eliot’s Kipling’. Life & Letters To-Day, 32 (5), 167–70. — (1946) Apology for Heroism: An Essay in Search of Faith. London: Lindsay Drummond. — (1949) Lines Written to an Indian Air. Baroda: Nalanda Publishing Company. — (1972) Roots and Flowers. Karnatak: Dharwar. — (1981) Conversations in Bloomsbury. London: Wildwood House. Appiah, K. A. (2006) Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton. ‘Authors take sides on the Spanish Civil War’ (1935) Left Review. Baer, B. C. (2009) ‘Shit writing: Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, the image of Gandhi, and the Progressive Writers Association’. Modernism/Modernity, 16, 575–95. Bald, S. R. (1974) ‘Politics of a revolutionary elite: a study of Mulk Raj Anand’s novels’. Modern Asian Studies, 8 (4), 473–89. Berman, J. (2006) ‘Comparative colonialisms: Joyce, Anand and the question of engagement’. Modernism/Modernity, 11, 465–85. Berry, M. (1971) Mulk Raj Anand: The Man and the Novelist. Amsterdam: Oriental Press. Blair, S. (2004) ‘Local modernity, global modernism: Bloomsbury and the places of the literary’. English Literary History, autumn, 813–38. Bluemel, K. (2004) George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Boehmer, E. (2002) Empire, the National and the Postcolonial. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brooker, P. and Thacker, A. (eds) (2009) The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Volume 1: Britain and Ireland 1880–1955. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chaudhuri, A. (2009) ‘Cosmopolitan’s alien face’. New Left Review, 55, 1–9. Codell, J. (ed.) (2003) Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press. London: Associated University Press. Coppola, C. (1974) ‘The All-India Progressive Writers Association: the European phase’, in C. Coppola (ed.) Marxist Influences and South Asian Literature. Michigan: Michigan State University Press. Cowasjee, S. (1977) So Many Freedoms: A Study of the Major Fictions of Mulk Raj Anand. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Cowasjee, S. (1973) ‘Mulk Raj Anand and the BBC’. Indian and Foreign Review, March, 19–21. Croft, A. (2003) ‘The Ralph Fox writer’s group’, in A. Shuttleworth (ed.) And In Our Time: Vision, Revision and British Writing of the 1930s. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Dover, C. (1943) Hsiao Ch’ien and Others. London: Allen & Unwin.

Fisher, M. (1974) ‘Interview with Mulk Raj Anand’. World Literature Written in English, 13, 109–22. Forster, E. M. and Husain, S. H. (eds) (1979) Only Connect: Letters to Indian Friends. London: Arnold-Heinemann. Fox, R. (1944) The Novel and the People. London: Cobett Publishing. Gandhi, L. (1998) Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gandhi, M. K. (1927) An Autobiography, or the Story of My Experiments with Truth. Ahmedabad: Navijan Publishing House. Gikandi, S. (2006) ‘Preface: Modernism in the world’. Modernism/Modernity, 13 (3), 419– 24. Gopal, P. (2005) Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence. London: Routledge. Herring, R. (1942) ‘Editorial’. Life & Letters To-Day, March, 157–8. Lago, M., Hughes, L. and Walls, E. M. (eds) (2008) The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster 1929– 1960. London: University of Missouri Press. Marcus. J. (2004) Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Morgan, K. (2007) Michael Foot: A Life. London: HarperCollins. Muir, E. (1942) ‘New novels’ (review of The Sword and the Sickle). The Listener, 7 May, 602. Nasta, S. (2002) Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave. — (2004) ‘Voyaging in: colonialism and migration’, in L. Marcus and P. Nicholls (eds) Twentieth Century English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 563– 85. — (2009) ‘Between Bloomsbury and Gandhi? The background to the publication and reception of Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable’, in R. Fraser and M. Hammond (eds) Books Without Borders. Volume 2. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 151–70. Needham, A. D. (2000) Using the Master’s Tools: Resistance and the Literature of the African and South-Asian Diasporas. New York: St Martins Press. Nehru, J. (1936) An Autobiography. London: The Bodley Head. Orwell, G. (ed.) (1943) Talking to India by E. M. Forster, Ritchie Calder and Others. London: Allen & Unwin. Orwell, G. and Davison. P. (eds) (1998) The Complete Works of George Orwell. Volumes 12– 14. London: Secker & Warburg. Orwell, G. and Davison. P. (eds) (2001) Orwell and Politics. London: Penguin. Orwell, G. and West, W. J. (eds) (1985) Orwell: The War Broadcasts. London: Duckworth. Orwell, G., Orwell, S. and Angus, I. (eds) (1970) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: My Country Right or Left 1940–1943. Volume 2. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Packham, G. (1978) ‘Mulk Raj Anand and the thirties movement in England’, in K. Sharma (ed.) Perspectives on Mulk Raj Anand. Ghaziabad: Vimal, pp. 52–63.

Pradhan, S. (ed.) (1979) Marxist Cultural Movement in India. Calcutta: National Book Agency. Ranasinha, R. (2010) ‘South Asian broadcasters and the BBC’. Journal of South Asian Diaspora, March, 57–71. Read, H. (1933) ‘The Hindu view of art’. The Listener, 30 August, 318. Said, E. (1994) Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Pantheon Books. Shelvankar, K. (1940) The Problem of India. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Singh, A. (2006) ‘The lifting and the lifted: prefaces to colonial modernist texts’. Wasafiri, 21 (1). Slate, N. (2009) ‘A coloured cosmopolitanism: Cedric Dover’s reading of the Afro-Asian world’, in S. Bose and K. Manjapra (eds) Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Snaith, A. (2010) ‘Conversations in Bloomsbury: colonial writers and the Hogarth Press’, in L. Shahriari and G. Potts (eds) Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury, Volume 2. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Trivedi, H. (1993) Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India. Calcutta: Papyrus. Williams, R. (2001) ‘Tragedy and revolution’, in The Raymond Williams Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Zaheer, S. (1965) ‘Mulk Raj Anand’. Contemporary Indian Literature, 5, 11–12.

Epilogue: Salaam, Great Britain: Thinking through Resistance in an Age of Global Empire Antoinette Burton

When W. C. Bonnerjee, the first President of the Indian National Congress, was starting his career as a barrister in Calcutta, his family lived off and on in suburban London because he wanted his sons and daughters to have the benefit of an English education. As a result, his wife Hemangini and their three older children were boarders in the home of a Colonel and Mrs Wood. Bonnerjee’s daughter Nellie had vivid memories of the experience, which was a terrible one for her, especially when her mother left them temporarily to go to Calcutta, leaving them completely in the Woods’ care. ‘I was frightfully severely punished as they thought I was willfully obstinate and stubborn … I bear the marks of being pushed under an iron bed which cut open my head … [and] I used to be locked up in dark cupboards.’ Just as traumatic as this punishment was Nellie’s memory, some fifty years later, of the Woods’ racism, expressed primarily by the Wood children: They despised [Mamma] for being an Indian, for not knowing the language well etc., and she never retaliated. They were decent to my father because he held the purse-strings. I blame Mrs. Wood a great deal. I think she used to, in great moments of irritation, say things against Mamma and the rest of us, and the children used to let it out. I know it was always impressed upon us that we being Indians were inferior, that our parents paid too little for us in return for what we got, that our hands could not be clean being dark-skinned etc etc. They thought that their parents being Army and Official People were humiliated having to take ‘natives’ into their house.1

What is striking here is Hemangini’s stoicism in the face of such outrages. What might she have gained by calling the Woods on their behaviour? Nothing, perhaps, but more violence and humiliation. In the end Hemangini got her revenge, though not, as far as we know, by standing up to her landlady. Instead, she got her own house, her own servants and – as the heart and soul of the Bonnerjees’ kitchen-table nationalism in Britain – her own non-trivial role in the making of modern geopolitical history.2 Although many of their compatriots undoubtedly suffered from overt as well as covert racial prejudice, the Bonnerjees’ experience was hardly typical of Indians in Britain, not least because of the fame of their father and the mobility of their extended household: both signs of a class status that was not shared by the majority of colonial subjects moving to or through the United Kingdom in the years between the Indian Mutiny and independence/partition.3 Yet Hemangini models just one of the many forms of resistance on offer in this remarkable collection, which chronicles the wide variety of political, economic, social and cultural experiences Indians had as they navigated the brave new world of modern imperial mobility that the Raj – that vast and tentacled beast – helped sponsor. Writers and workers, local councillors and assassins, suffragettes and Sinn Feiners, MPs and maharajas and munshis

circulated upstairs and downstairs, some surreptitiously, some namelessly, some infamously. Although it is possible to reconstruct biographies for many, if not all of them, each of the contributors to this volume is at pains to suggest the rhizomal networks that linked them not just to India and Britain but, in spatial and imaginative terms, to global landscapes of anticolonial nationalism, communist revolution, labour solidarity and literary cosmopolitanism as well. In this sense, Ahmed, Mukherjee and the scholars they have brought into dialogue here map not simply a set of metropolitan contact zones through which new ‘Anglo–Indian’ identities were forged and contested, but a series of interdependent terrains that add up to a kind of global South Asian episteme-in-the making.4 This is in part because even when they draw on it, they ultimately move beyond the analytical frame of the ‘contact zone’, Mary Louise Pratt’s powerful interpretive tool for capturing the asymmetries of imperial engagement – a tool with a long and productive life in colonial and postcolonial studies.5 Yet for all its use-value, especially for rematerializing unlooked-for spaces of connection and rupture, the contact zone feels insufficient to the task of historicizing the multiple vectors of power thrown into play by the actors we see here; it tends to flatten out the multidimensionalities that we know have shaped ‘encounters’ in the context of colonial modernity. The focus on resistance is, frankly, key to moving anti-imperial histories of British imperial power forward, and beyond the sphere of empire per se. To borrow from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, an emphasis on South Asian resistance does more than deterritorialize critiques of imperial power. It reterritorializes colonial subjects as agents of historically emergent and politically convulsive global communities.6 Britain’s role in the formation of those communities derived from its aspirations to global empire, of course, and especially from the role of India in it. But if Gandhi and Nehru were the Raj’s most recognizable figures, iconically so by the 1930s, this volume draws attention to dozens, if not hundreds of lesser men and women of South Asian descent, some of whom were celebrities in their own time but who have been dwarfed by statesmen and martyrs better known on the world stage thanks to the continued seductions of the great-man theory of history (a foible of postcolonial and imperial histories alike, alas). So we learn about the artful dodger Udham Singh, whose shape-shifting allowed him to elude imperial surveillance and strike a blow against imperial power by assassinating Michael O’Dwyer in Caxton Hall. We follow Ghulam Rasul and other working men who knew the undersides of imperial political economy and struck their own blows, via collective protest, against capital and its racial and ethnic hierarchies. And we move from Sophia Duleep Singh to Herabai Tata and her daughter Mithan, whose lives illuminate the tangled web of class, gender and race in nationalist politics – and the centrality of the woman question to them – in the inter-war years. In Mulk Raj Anand and Krishna Menon we see with particular vividness how the rifts and fissures inside South Asian communities and anti-imperial politics shaped the lives and careers of two of the twentieth century’s most influential figures, how those divisions travelled beyond Britain and what that meant for Indian nationalism as a political project as well as a cultural form in the years leading up to 1947. We even come to recognize how Indians close to the monarchy used their proximity to the imperial sovereign to make headway for their own causes – and to shape the destiny and perhaps even the character of a queen in the process.

In many cases, the contributors follow on from the pioneering work of Rozina Visram, whose 1986 Ayahs, Lascars and Princes laid an encyclopaedic foundation upon which historians and literary critics have been profitably building for a quarter of a century.7 But again, the focus on resistance here is distinctive, allowing readers to consider the many contexts in which Indians engaged with institutions, agents and cultures of power – and when and where they were able to intervene to change them and, with them, the direction of imperial history itself. Although Visram exhumed an extraordinary number of instances of Indian presence and moved with unprecedented dexterity across a range of political, cultural, social and economic domains in the process, in this generation of scholarship we have occasion to assess the sheer density of relationships that threaded Indians to each other and to a wider world, as well as the chasms of class, caste and community that could separate them even when they travelled beyond the pale of empire per se. For me the sense of exhilaration I felt on reading Visram for the first time is matched by an appreciation of the dizzying possibilities – empirical, methodological and pedagogical – her early work has enabled, and which are on offer here. For all the emphasis on individuals and their networks, space emerges, unsurprisingly, as a major interpretive category and a crucial indicator of resistance as well. Contributors offer glimpses into the recesses of various living quarters, student and otherwise; they open up the streets and neighbourhoods of London especially, revealing who lived near whom and how that shaped radical connection and political affiliation; they shed light on the geographies of labour and worker agitation, suggesting anew how impossible it should be to think of Britain’s working class as white or untouched by anti-colonial resistance; and they insist on the inseparability of literature and politics in the precincts, imaginative and real, of colonial modernity at the heart of the empire. Some of this work has been enabled by the collaborative project, ‘Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870– 1950’, of which the editors and a number of the contributors were an integral part in 2007 to 2010. That project produced a major conference at the British Library in September 2010 and an invaluable research tool, the interactive ‘Making Britain’ database (http://www.open.ac.uk/makingbritain/), which acts as both an archive and a guide to archives about South Asians’ interactions with Britain and Britons at the height of the Raj. ‘Location’ is a key directional in the database, which tracks individual sites of Asian presence and shows the density of Indian diasporic experiences beyond London and across Britain. If the essays in the collection evoke the multi-dimensionality of South Asian resistances – their relationships in time and to space – the database plots them on a visual grid alongside the life and times of ordinary and extraordinary Indians in Britain in ways that offer new possibilities for apprehending the entirety of British history during this period. Readers who want a hands-on experience of where resistance occurred, who knew whom and how far the archives allow us to trace their networks and lives will find, literally, a whole new universe of possibility at the touch of a button. The urgency of such interactive scholarship – scholarship that draws on interdisciplinary research and promises histories that address major issues in national, imperial and postimperial life that are accessible to both scholars and the general public alike – has, arguably, never been greater. This book goes to press as faculty and students of history, literature and

the arts (and their allies) take to the streets in Britain to protest the draconian cuts to humanities research and teaching in British institutions of higher learning. In no small sense, such protests are part of a long history of public, collective resistance to which the work in this volume offers a complex and nuanced genealogy. Such protests are also part of a long history of multiracial experience and struggle which, despite its undeniable impact on contemporary politics and society in the UK and the world at large, remains subordinated to, if not invisible in, dominant histories of both the nation and the empire and in the national curriculum writ large – a storied past that is arguably in danger of disappearing altogether in the newly privatized British state. Beyond accounting for the lives and work of the famous and the anonymous, South Asian Resistances in Britain puts paid to assumptions that the pathway to multicultural society at home was exclusively assimilationist, even as it demonstrates how much work still needs to be done to specify the dialectic – or what Jasbir Puar calls the conviviality – between the quest for belonging and the exigency of critique.8 These are problems, political and sociological, academic and practical, for which we need multivocal histories of the kind that humanistic inquiry is uniquely poised to offer, especially when it is the fruit of interdisciplinary collaboration of the kind we have here. As pressing and as provocative for the contemporary moment is the argument the book implicitly makes about the boundaries of state power and the role of colonial subjects in marking out the limits of imperial supremacy in an age of global mobility and migration. Far from being hegemonic, British leaders across the whole of this period struggled to stay ahead of the unrest generated by imperial capital and governmentality, and to contain the spill-over of anti-colonial nationalism in its most subversive forms ‘at home’. Despite the variety of administrative and legal remedies that were mobilized – from the passport to police presence to state-sponsored execution – resistance in its most overt forms could not be quelled. Even in the hallowed halls of Parliament, interracial alliances between enemies of empire (witness Saklatvala and Ireland) were formed out of ideological solidarity and via travel, in his case to Dublin to consolidate ties and develop shared commitments. How and whether Indians in Britain collaborated with other colonial subjects, breaching the brown–black colour line as well as the brown–white one, remains to be fully accounted for in histories of anti-imperial resistance, at home and abroad, during this period. Meanwhile, taken together, the cases in this volume add up to a decidedly unstable, insecure picture of social, political and economic life in the context of the Raj and its world-historical contiguities. Indeed, beyond its recuperative function, the emphasis on South Asian resistances challenges the Pax Britannica model of imperial power, reminding us what a powerful fiction that was – and is – and offering highly portable methods for ongoing research around questions germane to world order, postcolonial demography, and global security as well. Last but not least, Ahmed and Mukherjee have provided an invaluable teaching resource for courses that deal with diaspora, empire, migration, South Asia, nationalism, politics, geography, agency and global history at several curricular levels. In an age of higher education under siege, this may be the site of the book’s most significant impact. For what these essays put forward is evidence of a rich and deep past of Anglo–Indian connection; of complex political entanglements; of racism and orientalism in all its classed and gendered variations; of principled rejection of ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentalities; of the continual,

heterogeneous flow of ayahs, lascars and princes to and from the shores of the United Kingdom; and of how such migrants contested the micro- and macro-politics of empire with a challenge in their eye.9 What students will take away when they grapple with these questions in the context of twenty-first-century Britain is, hopefully, an informed appreciation for the urgency of critically engaged diaspora studies and for the indispensability of interdisciplinary research to the contemporary political challenges of writing and teaching multiracial history. That, in addition to some rollicking good stories of people and communities who challenged imperial power, left an indelible mark on its postcolonial histories, and continues to inspire new modes of inquiry, agency and resistance in their wake. Notes 1 Majumdar (nee Bonnerjee), J. A. P. (2003) Family History. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 53–4. 2 For a detailed account of this see Burton, A. (2003) Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India. New York: Oxford University Press. 3 For some examples contemporaneous to the Bonnerjees see Lahiri, S. (2000) Indians in Britain: Anglo–Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 1880–1930. London: Frank Cass. 4 This is akin to, but not identical with, what Judith Brown outlines in her 2006 book, Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in part because Brown does not perforce place Britain at its centre. See Metcalf, T. (2007), Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press; Lahiri (2010), Indian Mobilities in the West, 1900–1947: Gender, Performance and Embodiment. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; Gupta, P., Hofmeyr, I. and Pearson, M. (eds) (2010) Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean. Pretoria: Unisa Press. 5 Pratt, M. L. (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. 6 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2004) Anti-Oedipus. London: Continuum. 7 Visram, R. (1986) Ayahs Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700–1947. London: Pluto Press; (2002) Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto Press. 8 Puar, J. K. (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalisms in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press, p. xiv. 9 This is an echo of Rajkumari Singh’s homage to the Indo-Guyanese woman coolie ‘Per-Ajie’, where the line is ‘The Challenge/In thine eye’. Quoted in M. Carter and K. Torabully (eds) (2002) Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora. London: Anthem, p. 114.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brown, J. M. (2006) Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burton, A. (2003) Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India. New York: Oxford University Press. Carter, M. and Torabully, K. (eds) (2002) Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora. London: Anthem. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2004) Anti-Oedipus. London: Continuum. Gupta, P., Hofmeyr, I. and Pearson, M. (eds) (2010) Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean. Pretoria: Unisa Press. Lahiri, S. (2000) Indians in Britain: Anglo–Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 1880– 1930. London: Frank Cass.

— (2010) Indian Mobilities in the West, 1900–1947: Gender, Performance and Embodiment. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Majumdar, J. A. P. (2003) Family History. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Metcalf, T. (2007) Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pratt, M. L. (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Puar, J. K. (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalisms in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press. Visram, R. (1986) Ayahs Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700–1947. London: Pluto Press. — (2002) Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto Press.

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© Rehana Ahmed and Sumita Mukherjee, with Contributors, 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission from the publishers. First published 2012 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978–1–4411–5514–6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN