Gentlemanly Terrorists

In Gentlemanly Terrorists, Durba Ghosh uncovers the critical place of

revolutionary terrorism in the colonial and postcolonial history of
modern India. She reveals how so called “bhadralok dacoits” used
assassinations, bomb attacks, and armed robberies to accelerate the
departure of the British from India and how, in response, the colonial
government effectively declared a state of emergency, suspending the
rule of law and detaining hundreds of suspected terrorists. She charts
how each measure of constitutional reform to expand Indian represen
tation in 1919 and 1935 was accompanied by emergency legislation to
suppress political activism by those considered a threat to the security
of the state. Repressive legislation became increasingly seen as a neces
sary condition to British attempts to promote civic society and liberal
governance in India. By placing political violence at the center of
India’s campaigns to win independence, this book reveals how terror
ism shaped the modern nation state in India.

Durba Ghosh is Associate Professor at Cornell University. Her research

interests focus on understanding the history of British colonialism on the
Indian subcontinent, the history of colonial governance and law, gender,
sexuality, and the tensions between security and democracy in modern
liberal democracies, such as India and the United States. Previous
works include Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire
(Cambridge University Press), Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the
Transcolonial World, co edited with Dane Kennedy, and a number of
articles and chapters for the Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism,
the American Historical Review, Gender and History, and Modern Asian
Studies.
 Critical Perspectives on Empire

Editors
Professor Catherine Hall
University College London
Professor Mrinalini Sinha
University of Michigan
Professor Kathleen Wilson
State University of New York, Stony Brook

Critical Perspectives on Empire is a major series of ambitious, cross disciplinary

works in the emerging field of critical imperial studies. Books in the series explore
the connections, exchanges, and mediations at the heart of national and global
histories, the contributions of local as well as metropolitan knowledge, and the
flows of people, ideas, and identities facilitated by colonial contact. To that end,
the series not only offers a space for outstanding scholars working at the
intersection of several disciplines to bring to wider attention the impact of their
work, it also takes a leading role in reconfiguring contemporary historical and
critical knowledge, of the past and of ourselves.

A full list of titles published in the series can be found at:

www.cambridge.org/cpempire
Gentlemanly Terrorists
Political Violence and the Colonial State
in India, 1919–1947

Durba Ghosh
Cornell University, New York
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www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107186668
DOI: 10.1017/9781316890806
© Durba Ghosh 2017
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For Robert, Ravi, and Lila
 Contents

List of Figures page viii

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xii

Introduction 1
1 The Reforms of 1919: Montagu–Chelmsford,
the Rowlatt Act, Jails Commission, and the Royal
Amnesty 27
2 The History of Revolutionary Terrorism through
Autobiography 60
3 After Chauri Chaura: The Revival and Repression
of Revolutionary Terrorism 92
4 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid: Revolutionary
Terrorism in the 1930s 139
5 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner 178
6 Revolutionary Autobiographies: Postcolonial Tellings
of Nationalist History 217
Conclusion 244

Bibliography 257
Index 270

vii
 Figures

I.1 The hanging of the young Khudiram Bose (1889–1908)

for an attempted bomb assassination, anonymous,
1940s, image courtesy of Kroch Library, Division
of Asia Collections, Cornell University Library page 25
4.1 Benoy Bose, with permission from Centre of South
Asian Studies archive, Cambridge, Tegart Collection 142
4.2 Convocation Hall where Stanley Jackson was shot,
with permission from Centre of South Asian Studies
archive, Cambridge, Tegart Collection 153
4.3 Shanti and Suniti flyer, with permission from Centre
of South Asian Studies archive, Cambridge,
Tegart Collection 154
4.4 Tombs of Europeans killed at the Chittagong Armoury
Raid, with permission from Centre of South Asian Studies
archive, Cambridge, Tegart Collection 162
4.5 Tombs of Europeans killed at the Chittagong Armoury
Raid, with permission from Centre of South Asian Studies
archive, Cambridge, Tegart Collection 163
6.1 Kalpana Dutta’s hideout with Tarakeshwar Dastidar,
with permission from Centre of South Asian Studies
archive, Cambridge, Tegart Collection 237

viii
 Preface

This book is very much a history of the present and was informed by
several historical moments. I began thinking about this project in 1997,
as India celebrated a half-century of independence, and profiles of
former revolutionaries and terrorists appeared in all corners of the
vernacular press in Kolkata, where I lived for much of that year as
a PhD student. As a result of this major national anniversary, various
national and regional newspapers ran pieces about India’s struggle for
independence, often reprinting historical front pages from the 1920s,
’30s, and ’40s and profiling famous figures in the movement to rid India
of British colonial rule. Bengali-language newspapers and magazines
profiled Bengali freedom fighters who had been involved in some kind
of political violence or militant nationalism. Some of the names that
appeared in the newspapers were familiar because they were the names
of Kolkata streets and monuments: Jatin Das Park and B. B. D. Bag,
which stood for Benoy, Badal, and Dinesh, the assassins at the
Writers’ Building in December 1930. English-language newspapers,
on the other hand, focused on figures who were well-known nationalists,
Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Chittaranjan Das, and Subhas Chandra Bose
and their relatively civil and nonviolent protests against the British
colonial government. This contrast provoked me to think (again)
about why we write history and for whom we write. Because I had
been raised and educated in the United States and had learned the
history of India only in graduate school, I was struck by how little
I knew of these figures and their participation in the struggle for
India’s independence. I was surprised to learn that many of these men
and women were staples in the textbook education offered to children in
West Bengal. In Bengal, most schoolchildren know the importance of
figures such as Khudiram Bose, Prafulla Chaki, Kanai Lal Dutta, Surja
Sen, Ganesh Ghosh, Bina Das, Kalpana Dutta, and the others who
I have written about here.
Initially, I imagined that this project would attempt to reconcile these
competing narratives, between English and Bengali histories, between

ix
x Preface

textual historical accounts and public commemorations, between popular

history and academic scholarship by interrogating what is at stake and for
whom in constructing these historical narratives. What sorts of citizen-
subjects are being produced in Bengal where vernacular newspapers and
textbooks simultaneously honor Gandhi and commemorate a figure such
as Gopinath Saha, who mistakenly killed the wrong British man in 1924?
What kinds of characteristics are being valorized as crucial parts of the
Bengal past? And why did nationalist and English-language histories feel
compelled to play down the violent activities of these radical and militant
groups? The “public life” of this history turned out to be only a part of the
project.1
My imaginary of this project was utterly transformed by the events
of September 11, 2001, which changed how many of us in the United
States began to think about the relationship between violent acts of
terrorism and their growing centrality in national and international
politics, as democratic governments confronted the challenges of main-
taining civil liberties alongside widely felt anxieties about global secur-
ity. As a result of the dramatic events surrounding September 11, the
United States has been the architect of a growing number of extra-
judicial laws to limit the rights of those who are classified as “enemy
non-combatants.” America’s prolonged use of the detention camp at
Guantanamo and the inability of successive administrations to close the
camp has made Guantanamo, in the words of my late friend, Nasser
Hussain, “a shorthand for a larger set of formations.”2 In the years
since Guantanamo opened in late 2001, detainees have gone on hunger
strike, attempted and committed suicide, petitioned for better condi-
tions, been repatriated, and subjected to torture, all in the name of
a war on terror that seems to be escalating rather than subsiding.
As an American, it would be difficult not to think about the place of
political violence, known as terrorism, and how its existence threatens the
fabric of civil life as we know it. By writing this book, I do not promote
political violence or terrorism. Rather, I feel strongly that we do ourselves
a great disservice if we, as citizens of liberal democracies, continue to treat
terrorism as existing outside politics or the law, as lawmakers and mem-
bers of the security state tell us we should. By constructing a history of
revolutionary terrorism in late colonial India, I argue that the emergence
of a bundle of emergency laws spawned yet more emergency laws.
By doing so, I hope I have begun to offer an account for why we should
1
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Public Life of History: An Argument out of India,” Public
Culture 20.1 (2008): 143 68.
2
Nasser Hussain, “Beyond Norm and Exception: Guantanamo,” Critical Inquiry 33
(2007): 736.
 Preface xi

not think of terrorism as an anomaly in modern life. By taking political

violence seriously as a part of the Indian struggle for independence, I have
told one story about how an imaginary for a revolutionary politics con-
flicted with the liberal imaginary of the colonial government. There are
surely other versions of this story and they should be carefully histori-
cized, as I have tried to do here. In Bonnie Honig’s pithy words, it is time
to “de-exceptionalize the exception,” and consider the ways in which we
might collectively disrupt the process of claiming executive prerogative in
moments of crisis.3
As I researched and wrote, people often said to me that “one person’s
freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist.” While this may seem
a straightforward truism, it is crucial to see terrorists becoming freedom
fighters as a process about subjects who were shaped by historical pres-
sures and structured by contingencies and debates about the value of civil
liberties and norms of liberal governance.

3
Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2009), p. xviii.
 Acknowledgments

This book has been researched and written over two decades. In that
time, I’ve moved house several times, married, had two children, and
changed jobs. Throughout, I have been sustained by a small army of
family, friends, colleagues, and babysitters who have made my life as an
academic possible. It is a pleasure to finally publicly recognize how much
they have sustained me.
A dedicated group of childcare providers have given me the time to
write and research: Tara Bricker and her staff at the Belle Sherman
Afterschool Program, Lana Miller, Nicole Miller, Barrie Brandt, Jaime
Freilich, Mel Casano, Nancy Peck, Janice Beckley, Ashley Paolangeli,
and our very dear neighbors, Sylvia and Zeke Estes.
With the generous support of research funds and fellowships from
various sources, I was able to conduct a multi-sited archival project in
India, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Small grants from Wellesley
College, a grant from Mount Holyoke, and subsequent support from the
humanities research funds from the department of history at Cornell and
the Society for the Humanities supported several short trips to India and
the UK between 2004 and 2010. A senior research fellowship from the
American Institute of Indian Studies and a sabbatical fellowship from the
American Philosophical Society in 2008–2009 gave me the support
I needed to conduct research. Cornell’s Society for the Humanities
supported a research trip and then manuscript workshop for this book
in spring 2015; a sabbatical leave supplemented by a Robert and Helen
Appel fellowship for humanists and social scientists from Cornell enabled
me to revise and complete writing the book in 2015–2016.
The Society for the Humanities at Cornell, first under the directorship
of Brett de Bary, and then under Timothy Murray, has been central to the
support needed to produce this book. The society supported several Brett
de Bary writing groups with which I was involved, first on the mobility of
knowledge practices that was organized by Rachel Prentice and Marina
Welker. This group has been my mainstay at Cornell and has included
(at various times) Kathleen Vogel, Sherry Martin, Maria Fernandez,
xii
 Acknowledgments xiii

TJ Hinrichs, Wendy Wolford, Stacey Langwick, and most critically, my

fellow historian, Sara Pritchard. Their collective imprint is on every page
of this book because they have read its various iterations with great care
over the years. Other writing groups included one on revolutionaries led
by Ray Craib and Barry Maxwell, with Bruno Bosteels, Karen Benezra,
Pinar Kemerli, Camille Robcis, and my local expert on theories of terror-
ism, Claudia Verhoeven. Claudia’s many suggestions on readings and
language immeasurably improved the manuscript. Finally, a group on
alternative colonialisms in the global south led by Ernesto Bassi and
Ananda Cohen Suarez, that included Mostafa Minawi, Rishad
Choudhury, and Natalia diPietrantonio enhanced the chapters on revo-
lutionary autobiography. Tim Murray invited me to give the society’s
annual faculty invitational lecture in 2015, which made me think about
the wider implications of the project.
Colleagues at Cornell have provided a great deal of intellectual engage-
ment. Successive department chairs, Sandra Greene, Vic Koschmann,
Barry Strauss, and temporarily, Itsie Hull and Larry Moore, found ways
to support my research while finding administrative jobs to which I was
well suited. Our staff, Barb Donnell, Katie Kristof, Kay Stickane, and
Judy Yonkin, do a marvelous job of keeping us all humming along.
Bronwen Bledsoe saved the day with the cover image. It is used courtesy
of the Kroch Library, Division of Asia Collections, Cornell University
Library. My colleagues in the history department, primary among them,
my fellow Asianists, Sherm Cochran, TJ Hinrichs, Vic Koschmann,
Tamara Loos, and Eric Tagliacozzo, have been role models of the highest
order. All of them, through their work, their daily presence, and basic
humanity have set a high standard for collegiality and intellectual rigor.
Other colleagues, Judi Byfield, Holly Case, Derek Chang, Duane Corpis,
Paul Friedland, Maria Cristina Garcia, Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Fred
Logevall, Mary Beth Norton, Suman Seth, and last (alphabetically), but
definitely not least, Rachel Weil have all provided good counsel and
encouragement along the way. The company of Liz Anker, Jason Frank,
Rayna Kalas, Stacey Langwick, Jenny Mann, Guy Ortolano, and Lucinda
Ramberg has reminded me of the fun of working in a big university with
really smart people.
A day-long manuscript workshop with three of the smartest women
I know pushed the book to a higher level: Susan Pedersen, who has been
a guiding force since she introduced herself to me when I had just finished
my PhD. She has given me the most sage (and direct) advice in the years
since. Manu Goswami always seems to make my work seem more inter-
esting and important than I think it is; she rightly urged me to think bigger
about the stakes of this project. Itsie Hull, my colleague and friend, was
xiv Acknowledgments

intrepid in plunging into reading about the law in a different context; her
work has long been an inspiration to me and her support has provided me
with whatever backbone I’ve developed.
I have long been encouraged in this project, first by Minnie Sinha and
Kathleen Wilson, co-editors of the series in which the book appears.
Among the best imperial historians of their generation, they and
Antoinette Burton continue to inspire me, as well as multiple cohorts
that have come along. And to Tom and Barbara Metcalf, with whom I
started the journey of thinking about liberalism and colonialism.
The project has benefited from many audiences who listened as I worked
out half-baked ideas. Two early seminars in the South Asia Program at
Chicago, and conversations with Rochona Majumdar and Dipesh
Chakrabarty, focused my research questions. Talks in Kolkata, at the
Centre for the Studies in Social Sciences, the Institute of Historical
Studies, and Jadavpur University were helpful in reminding me of the
importance of the local context for this history. In Kolkata, conversations
with Rosinka Chaudhuri, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Partha Chatterjee,
Gautam Bhadra, Lisa Armstrong, and Vijay Prashad were invaluable.
In Delhi, Seema Alavi has been my guardian angel. A fellowship at Clare
Hall, Cambridge, in spring 2009 was crucial to extended access to archival
sources in the UK. In particular, Joya Chatterji’s interventions and a seminar
in the Centre of South Asian Studies in Cambridge helped me to clarify my
terms. A presentation at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the
University of London, when I was hosted by Shabnum Tejani, Sunil
Kumar, Daud Ali, and Peter Robb, helped me to better work out what
I should argue. A presentation at Amherst College, hosted by Krupa
Shandilya, reminded me that bright undergraduates ask the toughest ques-
tions. Once again, Amrita Basu asked the right question at the right time.
Subsequent presentations at Yale, the New School, and the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill opened up the project to the scrutiny of
political theorists and folks interested in the imperial side of the story.
An extended visit to New Zealand and Australia in 2012 solidified many
of the ideas about the relationship between nonviolence and violence under
colonialism. The support of Tony Ballantyne, Mike Stephens, and Hilary
Radner, which came as I felt stalled on the project, was very generative.
Kama Maclean’s support and guidance has been an important mainstay of
this project over several years, as her own work shows the way toward
engaged cultural history that is both sensitive and empirically rigorous.
A conference on the enlightenment at Minnesota, hosted by the inimitable
Michal Kobialka, brought me to thinking about revolutionary and liberal
time; Keya Ganguly offered some important interventions, as did Ajay
Skaria, whose work on Gandhi has informed my understanding. A trip to
 Acknowledgments xv

Capetown, South Africa, at the invitation of the thoughtful Will Jackson,

crystallized my thoughts about the intimacy of terrorism.
I have learned a great deal from my graduate students. In the history
department, Andrew Amstutz, Rishad Choudhury, Osama Siddiqui,
Kelsey Utne, and Rukmini Chakraborty have broadened my thinking
about the nature of what South Asian history should be. Graduate stu-
dents I have worked with in other fields have pushed me to be interdisci-
plinary: much gratitude to Krupa Shandilya, Saiba Varma, Thea Sircar,
Mukti Langharam, Mario Roman, Kelly Basner, Carter Higgins, Hayden
Kantor, Brinda Kumar, Natalia diPietrantonio, Anaar Desai-Stephens,
Kasia Paprocki, Shoshana Goldstein, Vince Burgess, Shivrang Setlur, Ai
Baba, Shiau-Yun Chen, Christina Casey, and Trais Pearson.
Friends near and far kept me human. Kimberly Martin, my oldest
friend, remains an anchor in my life. Loretta Chen, Anne Keary, Elaine
Meckenstock, Wendy Turchin, and Andrea Zemgulys have, in their own
ways, reminded me of the ways that life is more important than work.
I depended on Rachel Sturman to read the final versions of this manu-
script as it went to press, as I depend on her for her kindness and
generosity. Kate Bevington and David Estes, Wendy Wilcox and Mark
Lewis, Jason Freitag and Karla Hanson remind me that being a grown-up
is fun.
A large extended family across India has inspired this project: a cousin,
Shakuntala Ray and her husband, Debashish, offered us their home for
many months; between the Ghoshes of Rishra and the Tarafdars of Ruby
Park, I have had no shortage of strong opinions of what else I should write.
As ever, my parents, Arun and Banasree, and my sister, Varsha, have been
there from the start.
My children, Ravi and Lila, have lived through the making of this book in
many ways. As they have grown from fussy fetuses to very opinionated
teenagers, I am so grateful and proud to be their mother. They have never
asked why we spent nine months in Kolkata, a few random months in
a Church of England school in Cambridge, UK, and summers in a
London day camp learning how to play cricket. They are the sweetest and
most adventurous about-to-be adults I could have imagined. My husband,
Robert, has been both a partner in life and intellectual companion. Without
his daily care, love, and support, none of this would be possible.
 Introduction

The title of this book, “Gentlemanly Terrorism,” is a translation of two

Bengali words – bhadralok and dacoity – that do not ordinarily go
together. “Bhadralok” was used to identify upper-caste, typically
Hindu, landholding elites who were educated, often in English, and
were trained for “respectable,” or white-collar, jobs in the colonial
administration.1 “Dacoity” was drawn from nineteenth-century usage
in British India to describe armed assault and robbery that was com-
mitted by “thagis,” (or thuggees), the nomadic criminal caste and tribal
groups who roamed the Indian countryside and were associated with
armed raids.2 “Bhadralok dacoity” was, thus, a colonial oxymoron that
attempted to explain the emergence of a radical and militant movement
in which armed and educated men (and later women) committed violent
attacks against the colonial state as a way of terrorizing the British
government to leave India.
“Bhadralok” or “gentlemanly” indicated that the participants were
drawn from a population of elite colonial subjects who had been incul-
cated in what were believed to be civilized or bourgeois behaviors.
As Thomas Macaulay imagined in 1835, his wish for the future of educa-
tion in Bengal was to produce a social group of Indian elites: “We must at
present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us
and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and

1
On definitions of the term, J. H. Broomfield, Elite Conflict in Plural Society: Twentieth century
Bengal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing
Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), ch. 8; Partha Chatterjee, The Present
History of West Bengal: Essays in Political Criticism (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1997), ch. 5.
2
The “thuggee archive,” as Parama Roy has termed it, includes many European accounts
of being assaulted by what were called “criminal caste” groups. Parama Roy, Indian
Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998); Martine von Woerkens, The Strangled Traveler: Colonial
Imaginings and the Thugs of India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002);
Kim Wagner, Thuggee (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

1
2 Introduction

colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”3

British officials rendered “dacoity,” (which meant armed robbery) into
“terrorism” to denote the wide-ranging acts of political violence that were
directed at the government and its officials. Among Bengali participants
and supporters of the movement, the term biplabi, which could be trans-
lated as revolutionary, was used to mark the ways in which these men and
women departed from mainstream political groups, such as the Indian
National Congress, who advocated for nonviolent means of protest,
particularly after 1920. The gentlemanly terrorists posed a challenge on
two fronts. To the British officials and inhabitants, they were terrorists
who were attempting to drive the British out of India immediately.
To Indian nationalists, they pressed a more radical approach on politi-
cally moderate figures. Following the preferences of several scholars,
I have used the term revolutionary terrorist as a way to recognize both
British and Indian perspectives.4
Although the use of the term “terrorism” to describe this group has been
recently contested, I have chosen to retain the term because it reflects the
historical usage of the 1920s and 1930s, when the word was in circulation
across India to describe members of underground political groups who
espoused a form of militant anti-colonialism.5 The revolutionary terrorist
movement targeted the British government by attacking colonial officials,
institutions, and buildings with armed robberies, bombs, and assassinations.
Alternately called “anarchists,” “revolutionaries,” and “terrorists” by the
British, these terms marked a radically violent turn among anticolonial

3
Minute by T. B. Macaulay, dated February 2, 1835, www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritch
ett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt minute education 1835.html [accessed June 26, 2016]
paragraph 34.
4
A case for the use of “revolutionary terrorists” appears in Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal:
The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993),
p. xi; see also Purnima Bose, Organizing Empire: Individualism, Collective Agency, and India
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 128 35; Shukla Sanyal, Revolutionary
Pamphlets, Propaganda, and Political Culture in Bengal (Delhi: Cambridge University Press,
2014), p. 19. For other alternatives, see Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal,
1903 1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973), p. 76; Sabyasachi Bhattacharya,
The Defining Moments in Bengal, 1920 1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014),
p. 179. See also “Bhagat Singh as Revolutionary Terrorist: Romila Thapar on Why
Context Is Key to Studying History,” May 5, 2015, www.scroll.in/article/807630/bhagat
singh as revolutionary terrorist romila thapar on why context is key to studying history
[accessed May 5, 2016].
5
“SP MP Seeks Action against Authors Referring to Bhagat Singh as Terrorist,” Indian
Express, May 5, 2016, www.indianexpress.com/article/india/india news india/action must
be taken against writers who termed bhagat singh terrorist says rajya sabha mp/
[accessed May 20, 2016]; “School Textbooks in Bengal Describes Revolutionaries as
Terrorists,” Times of India, August 11, 2014, www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Sch
ool textbook in Bengal describes revolutionaries as terrorists/articleshow/40065478.cms
[accessed September 9, 2014].
 Introduction 3

insurgents against the colonial state. Until the 1940s, the terms “revolu-
tionary” and “terrorist” were used interchangeably by both Bengalis and
Britons, although in recent years, “militant” and “freedom fighter” has been
preferred.
This pithy term, “gentlemanly terrorism” encapsulates several inter-
linked concerns of this book. First, it analyzes some of the paradoxes
inherent to the structures of colonial governance by examining how the
application of the rule of law, seen as a hallmark of British colonial rule in
India, was abrogated, reshaped, and transformed as the British faced
challenges posed by violent campaigns waged against the colonial state.
Between the end of the First World War in 1919 to 1947, when the British
finally left India, the British government of India introduced a series of
constitutional reforms that were accompanied by a series of repressive
and emergency legislation. While these reforms might seem at odds with
one another, the book shows that the link between emergency legislation
and the process of constitutional reform became stronger as the colonial
government planned to delegate political authority, but not complete
political sovereignty, to Indians. The colonial government rationalized
the enactment of repressive legislation as a protection to the process of
constitutional reform, which was intended to recruit Indians, but only
those with moderate politics, into supporting the British government of
India. As new and more detailed repressive laws were adopted to deal with
the problem of gentlemanly terrorism, the relationship between the colo-
nial state and militant anticolonial activists intensified. Revolutionary
terrorists became subjects of a consolidated and empowered colonial
state, even as they rejected the continuation of colonial occupation.
The shifts toward enhanced repressive legislation were fiercely debated
between British colonial officials, moderate Indian nationalist politicians,
and those who were detained for long periods of time, with moderate
Indians supporting some of the claims of more radical and militant
political activists. Through these episodic engagements in the 1920s,
’30s, and ’40s, characterized by a cycle of political violence that was
met with repressive legal actions, the government expanded an infrastruc-
ture of emergency and security laws, as well as detention sites to house
suspected political dissidents.
These confrontations between government officials and revolutionary
terrorists are informed by a voluminous archive on terrorism and
a security threat perceived by the colonial state. Using the colonial gov-
ernment’s archives on terrorism and vernacular archives generated by
revolutionaries and their followers, I argue that these different archives
were central to managing the pace of political change in late colonial
India. Accounts written by colonial officials connected disparate and
4 Introduction

isolated events together across several decades and different parts of India
in order to merge incidents of terrorist attacks into a history of revolu-
tionary terrorism that looked much like a conspiracy against the
government.6
Accounts were written by participants of the movement, who wanted
the British to depart quickly and completely from India, and drew from
a similar kind of lineage that drew terrorist incidents into a longer history
of revolution. In contrast to many Indian nationalists, revolutionary
terrorists demanded complete independence rather than dominion sta-
tus. Although the movement was secret and underground, narratives
about revolutionary terrorists explained how the activities of various
individuals became a movement with a particular history of insurgency.
These historical representations of the movement explicated how,
inspired by reading about the American and French revolutions, the
unification of Italy under Garibaldi and Mazzini, the Irish struggle against
the British by figures such as Dan Breen, who wrote My Fight for Irish
Freedom, and Bengali novels such as Saratchandra’s Pather Dabi, edu-
cated and elite Indians embraced political violence. These texts fueled the
idea that revolutionary violence would bring about a new kind of political
formation. Memoirs of heroic revolutionaries who had been exiled or
jailed, biographies of those who had risked their lives for the nation, and
images of “martyrs,” (those who had been executed by the government
for terrorist crimes) circulated widely as a way to promote political vio-
lence as an alternative to the nonviolent campaigns advocated by
Mohandas K. Gandhi and other leaders of the Indian National Congress.
Through these historical narratives of the movement, the book draws
attention to the changing definitions of the “gentlemanly terrorist” as he
(and later she) became a particular type of political and legal subject of the
colonial state. Over the course of the interwar decades, the terrorist
became a political prisoner, “detenu,” state prisoner, security prisoner,
and subsequently, a political sufferer and a freedom fighter. Although
many of these terms were widely used to describe a range of anticolonial
activists across India, the figure of the gentlemanly terrorist was quite
specific to Bengal, which was, until 1911, the site of Calcutta, the capital
of British India. During the swadeshi period of 1905–1907, the activities
of revolutionary terrorists, often organized in collaboration with landed
elites, alarmed British officials who had chosen these elites to support the

6
Partha Chatterjee, “Terrorism: State Sovereignty and Militant Politics in India,” in
Carol Gluck and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, eds., Words in Motion: Toward a Global
Lexicon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), pp. 241 62; James Hevia, Imperial
Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire building in Asia (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), ch. 5.
 Introduction 5

British administration of India. By following the changing relationship

between the gentlemanly terrorist and the colonial government, I show
how this relatively small, elite, and educated group of Bengali, and pre-
dominantly Hindu, men and women became central to defining how
political dissidents were treated by the law under the colonial and (after
1947) by the postcolonial regimes. By placing political violence at the
center of what are known as India’s campaigns to win independence from
the British, this book examines how terrorism, which is often seen as
irrational and as an uncivil form of seditious or treasonous behavior,
shaped the modern nation-state in India.
By 1900, in India, as in other parts of the world, radicals and revolution-
aries across the globe began to imagine new forms of political organization
that would overthrow monarchical, elite, bourgeois, and colonial govern-
ments; these political activists included anarchists, terrorists, communists,
socialists, Marxists, and increasingly, anticolonial activists who saw them-
selves as architects of social movements that would bring about political
and economic change.7 Inspired by transnational and internationalist
movements in France, Russia, Ireland, Italy, and the United States,
young educated women and men in colleges and universities across India
began to challenge British rule in India. They mobilized a discourse of
modern and universal ideas, such as individual liberties and freedom, state
sovereignty, the rule of law, and expanded political representation.
In Bengal, the eastern part of India where the capital of British India
was located, the swadeshi campaigns provided an important catalyst for
the rise of revolutionary terrorism. The movement challenged the British
government’s 1905 partition of the province of Bengal, which divided
Bengal into a Hindu-majority western province and Muslim-majority
eastern Bengal. Elite landholding groups from eastern Bengal – the pri-
mary recruiting grounds for secret societies of revolutionary terrorists –
felt they were being disenfranchised. Although the swadeshi campaigns
called for a nonviolent boycott of foreign-made goods, groups such as the
Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar promoted a more radical response and
advocated for the destruction of colonial commodities and property.8
As revolutionary terrorists organized violent attacks to draw attention to
the swadeshi campaigns, the “cult of the bomb” threatened to overtake

7
Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti colonial Imagination
(London: Verso, 2005); Craig Calhoun, The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public
Sphere, and Early Nineteenth century Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2012); Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global
Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2011).
8
Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement; Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal.
6 Introduction

the nonviolent project of boycotting foreign goods. Rabindranath

Tagore’s 1916 novel, Ghare Baire, which narrated the story of two men,
the self-proclaimed revolutionary, Sandip, and his host, Nikhil,
a zamindar who identified as a progressive and western-educated social
reformer, staged some of the tensions between the revolutionary terrorists
and the social groups from which they were drawn. While Sandip’s fiery
and passionate speeches inspired his followers to break into houses and
shops to set fire to foreign-made goods, Nikhil expressed alarm that
innocent civilians were being harmed. As readers of the novel know,
Nikhil’s inability to restrain his more passionate friend through reason
and debate resulted in a domestic tragedy. His wife, Bimala, whose
education Nikhil had supported in an effort to free her from traditional
norms of Bengali womanhood, had fallen in love with Sandip, dramatiz-
ing how ideas of radical liberation could be seductive. In Tagore’s fic-
tional rendering, radicalism had tragic political and social consequences.9
Tagore’s novel was not alone in the literary fictions of the 1910s, as late
Victorian and Edwardian authors writing in English repeatedly returned
to the effects of revolutionary ideologies and practice.10
At the start of the twentieth century, British colonial officials began to list
“bhadralok dacoity” in their annual index of “seditious activities” in the
territories of British India. As officials began to track activities such as
armed assault and robbery, they saw a pattern of crimes undertaken by
members of what they considered the “respectable classes” in British India.
In government documents, these crimes stood out because they relied on
modern technologies – guns and bombs – and the robbers were unusually
well dressed – often in jackets, ties, and hats – for criminal activity.
Recruited from schools and universities, the movement trained young
men by teaching them martial arts, lathi (stick) play, rituals of asceticism
and celibacy, and about the histories of revolutions, from the French and
the American revolutions, to the histories of national unification, such as in
Italy, and violent anticolonial resistance (such as in Ireland).11 In the first
decade of the twentieth century, bhadralok dacoits raided the homes of
9
Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World (London, New York: Penguin, 2005); for
a recent retelling of Tagore’s novel from the perspective of Bimala’s English governess,
Miss Gilbey, see Neel Mukherjee, A Life Apart (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016).
10
Stephen Morton, “Terrorism, Literature, and Sedition in Colonial India,” in
Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, eds., Terror and the Postcolonial (Oxford: Wiley
Blackwell, 2010), pp. 202 25; Alex Tickell, Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian English
Literature, 1830 1947 (New York: Routledge, 2012).
11
John Rosselli, “The Self image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in
Nineteenth century Bengal,” Past and Present 86 (February 1980): 121 48;
Michael Silvestri, “The Bomb, Bhadralok, Bhagavad Gita and Dan Breen: Terrorism
in Bengal and Its Relation to the European Experience,” Terrorism and Political Violence
21 (2009): 1 27.
 Introduction 7

wealthy families, railway ticket offices, post offices, and banks to fund their
campaigns to terrorize the British into leaving India. Participants were
drawn from predominantly high-caste groups in Bengal, Brahmins and
Kayasths, who were educated in English, attended colleges and universi-
ties, and felt that it was time for India to become independent of British
rule.12 Some were employed by the colonial administration, but all were
growing increasingly disenchanted with the ways in which their social,
economic, and political progress was limited by the colonial government.
Based on nineteenth-century anthropological research on India’s caste
groups and, in particular, “criminal castes,” British officials were con-
founded why Bengali bhadralok, who had long been categorized as
“effeminate” and “unwarlike,” were taking up arms.13 Even though
colonial officials implicitly believed that all Indians were organized into
“menacing secret organisations . . . [that created] potentially sinister and
conspiratorial bonds of allegiance,” the bhadralok dacoits were not initially
seen as a security risk.14
Colonial law enforcement officials used “terrorist” to distinguish
seditious crimes from what they called “ordinary crime” that was com-
mitted by “habitual” or “common” criminals. In the process of differ-
entiating between kinds of bhadralok dacoits and ordinary crime and
criminals, colonial officials made clear that Bengali bhadralok were not
ordinary criminals. Moreover, they had not shown signs of being of
members of the “martial races,” nor of criminal tribes, two categories
of Indians that the colonial state had defined as more masculine than the
“effeminate Bengali.”15 Officials initially inquired whether the Criminal
Tribes Act of 1911 might be applied to bhadralok dacoits, since that act
applied to tribes and castes that were seen to be engaging in criminal

12
See Alexander Lee, “Who Becomes a Terrorist?: Poverty, Education, and the Origins of
Political Violence,” World Politics 63.2 (2011): 203 45, which argues that terrorists
(particularly those in Bengal) were recruited from those who were relatively wealthy
and educated.
13
Rowlatt Committee Report, p. 12; Discourses about the Bengali “babu” are best
explained in Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly” Englishman and the
“Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1995); Indira Chowdhury Sengupta, The Frail Hero and Virile History
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).
14
Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern
Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 116 17; Nicholas Dirks, Castes
of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2001).
15
National Archives of India, Home Political, File no. 379 I of 1924, “Note on the Activity
of Released Political Prisoners and Detenus,” cited in Maya Gupta, “Non Cooperation
Movement and Militants of Bengal,” Quarterly Review of Historical Studies, XVII, no. 3
(1978 1979): 150. Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race, and Masculinity in
British Imperial Culture, 1857 1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
8 Introduction

activity.16 While the advocate-general felt the Criminal Tribes Act was
“technically applicable,” the Governor of Bengal noted:
Before any persons can be registered as belonging to a criminal tribe, it is
necessary to define them. You must have some definitions which will apply to
every person whom you propose to class as a member of that criminal tribe.17
As officials explicitly stated, classifying bhadralok who were engaging in
political activity as criminals was not what the Criminal Tribes Act had
intended; several officials referred to the loyalty that had historically been
shown to the imperial government by Bengali elites. Revolutionary ter-
rorism was attributed, thus, as the product of a small number of unruly
Bengali youth who had been made disloyal by the emergence of secret
societies; they were not deemed to possess violent traits that could be
ascribed to particular tribe or social groups.18 Yet, in the early years of the
movement, the Secretary of the Home Department of the Government of
India noted with some concern that bhadralok dacoity might spread to
other parts of India and treated it as a contagion:
There is a serious risk, unless the movement in Bengal is checked, that political
dacoits and professional dacoits in other provinces may join hands and that the
bad example set by these men in an unwarlike province like Bengal may, if it
continues, lead to imitation in provinces inhabited by fighting races where the
results would be even more disastrous.19

In the process of finding how to deal with the criminal behavior of a group
that was not known for its criminal activities, officials proliferated terms to
describe bhadralok dacoits, among them political prisoners, state prison-
ers, and “detenus.” These terms became crucial ways to mark the dis-
tinctions between the different levels of threat they posed to the state and
the range of legal instruments that could be used to imprison them.
By making these kinds of bureaucratic differentiations and merging
them with caste and regional distinctions, officials at various levels of
the colonial government seemed to recognize that the phenomenon of

16
APAC, L/P&J/6/1246, “Letter no. 111 of 1913, Government of India, Home Political.”
17
APAC, L/P&J/6/1246, “Letter no. 111 of 1913, Government of India, Home Political,”
paragraph 15.
18
In this colonial conception of India’s populations, Bengal differed from Punjab and the
Northwest Frontier Provinces where the idea of the “fanatic” animated an infrastructure
of laws such as the Murderous Outrages Act from the late nineteenth century.
Elizabeth Kolsky, “The Colonial Rule of Law and the Legal Regime of Exception:
Frontier ‘Fanaticism’ and State Violence in British India,” American Historical Review
120.4 (2015): 1218 1246.
19
APAC, L/P&J/6/1246, file 2198, “Political Situation in Bengal,” J&P 2198/1913 Letter
no. 208, dated Simla May 27, 1913 from Secretary, Govt. of India, Home Dept. to Chief
Secretary, Govt. of Bengal.
 Introduction 9

elite and educated men taking up arms did not fit into what they under-
stood of Bengal and the particular brand of liberalism that the British felt
they had introduced there. The government’s treatment of political pris-
oners remained embedded in caste-based thinking, making distinctions
between “martial races,” “criminal castes,” and other groups whose
ethnic and communal attachments were seen to mark them with particu-
lar characteristics. So even though most bhadralok were not militants, the
idea that most revolutionary terrorists came from the gentlemanly and
landed classes of Bengal structured officials’ treatment of this particular
group of political prisoners.
During the 1910s, the British government prosecuted a number of
conspiracy cases against groups of terrorists who had amassed large
amounts of guns, ammunition, and bomb-making supplies. In Bengal,
the Alipore Conspiracy Case, Midnapore Conspiracy Case, the Howrah
Gang Case, and other conspiracy trials enabled the government to detain
those involved with secret and underground political groups. Relying on
a century-old piece of security legislation that included the Regulation III
of 1818, the government also passed the Indian Criminal Law
Amendment Act of 1908 and the Defence of India Act in 1915 to bring
political violence against the state under control.
This first phase of the revolutionary terrorist movement, from the
attacks on Lieutenant-Governor Andrew Fraser in Midnapore in 1907,
to the end of the First World War, has been well studied as a vibrant
example of militant nationalism in India.20 The swadeshi campaigns
ended in 1911 and Bengal was reunited into a single province, which
appeared as a victory by those who had been involved in these campaigns.
By the start of the First World War, the British capital had moved to New
Delhi, away from the tumult of Bengal. The Indian National Congress
and the British colonial government entered into conversations about
how to progress toward a government in which Indians would have
political representation, either as a dominion or under some conception
of home rule.

20
Among the fullest and most critical accounts are: Hiren Chakravarti, Political Protest in
Bengal: Boycott and Terrorism, 1905 18 (Calcutta: Firma, 1992); Leonard Gordon,
Bengal: The Nationalist Movement, 1876 1940 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1974), esp. ch. 5; Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal; Dalia Ray, The Bengal Revolutionaries and
the Freedom Movement, 1902 1919 (New Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1990); Rajat
K. Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal, 1875 1927 (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1984), 174 85; Shukla Sanyal, Revolutionary Pamphlets and
“Legitimizing Violence: Seditious Propaganda and Revolutionary Pamphlets in Bengal,
1908 1918,” Journal of Asian Studies 67.3 (August 2008): 759 87. For a good overview
about terrorist movements in India, see Amitabha Mukherjee, ed., Militant Nationalism in
India, 1876 1947 (Calcutta, 1995).
10 Introduction

This book takes 1919 as its departure point, and focuses on the revolu-
tionary terrorist movement in Bengal through the interwar years to circa
1950. Even though the revolutionary terrorist movement had been assumed
moribund by 1919, superseded by nonviolent mass politics and the involve-
ment of peasants, workers, Muslims, dalits, and other groups, I draw atten-
tion to the movement as a way of examining how anticolonial insurgent
movements that were categorized as “terrorist,” “revolutionary,” or “mili-
tant” reshaped the politics and laws of late anticolonial nationalism in India.
By examining this period closely, this book interrogates how the colonial
state’s treatment of revolutionary terrorists – those who were deemed a threat
to the progression of the liberal reforms of the interwar period – relied on
security measures such as preventive detention to protect putatively norma-
tive democratic behaviors in India. The relationship between security and
democracy is not a new concern, but reconstructing how this relationship
grew stronger through negotiations that occurred at particular moments in
the history of late colonial India is one of the book’s primary interventions.21
By revising the conventional narrative that the nonviolent movement
led by Gandhi laid the civic foundations of Indian civil society through
which the world’s largest democracy emerged, I join a number of other
scholars who are reconsidering the place of radical and militant politics in
the making of modern India, as well as the relationship between violence
and nonviolence.22 For nearly a generation, scholars have suggested that
the revolutionary terrorist movement remained marginal to the larger
arena of organized civil disobedience because the revolutionary move-
ment was secret, underground, and its elite membership never managed
to build a mass following.23 Instead, I argue that the revolutionary

21
The relationship between security and democracy is drawn from Michel Foucault,
Security, Territory, Population (New York: Picador, 2007) and “Society Must Be
Defended,” (New York: Picador, 2003). On governmentality, see Michel Foucault,
“Governmentality,” in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954 1984: Power (New York:
The New Press, 1994) and David Scott’s call to historicize the concept, “Colonial
Governmentality,” Social Text 43 (Autumn 1995): 191 220, esp. pp. 193, 197 98;
Chatterjee, “Terrorism” analyzes this link through India’s twentieth century history;
on the elaboration of extraordinary laws in postcolonial India, see Ujjwal Kumar Singh,
The State, Democracy, and Anti terror Laws in India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2007);
Jinee Lokaneeta, Transnational Torture: Law, Violence, and State Power in the United
States and India (New York: New York University Press, 2011), ch. 5.
22
Kama Maclean and J. Daniel Eelam, editors, Revolutionary Lives in South Asia: Acts and
Afterlives of Anticolonial Political Action (London: Routledge, 2015); Kama Maclean,
A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (London:
Hurst & Co, 2015); Taylor Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (London:
Routledge, 2010). For an earlier period, see Shruti Kapila, “A History of Violence,”
Modern Intellectual History 7.2 (2010): 437 57.
23
Synthetic accounts of India’s modern history give the movement relatively little attention:
see, for instance, Judith Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (New
 Introduction 11

terrorist movement in Bengal was constitutive of the Indian nationalist

movement more broadly – not part of a radical fringe – but central to the
formation of militant strategies of protest within the Indian nationalist
movement. Revolutionary terrorist groups in Bengal were continually in
contact with Gandhi and other members of the Indian National Congress
from the 1920s onward, often using the cover of campaigns such as the
Non-Cooperation Movement in the 1920s and the Civil Disobedience
movement in the 1930s to recruit new members and agitate for actions
that targeted British officials and the colonial state directly. Although the
Congress formally disavowed bomb-throwing, assassinations, and armed
robberies, the Congress used the continued detention of revolutionary
terrorists and the figures of revolutionary martyrs to mobilize popular
resistance against the British, not just in Bengal, but in north India more
broadly. As Kama Maclean has demonstrated in an important study of
north India, “The politics of the period were more porous than
partisan.”24
The second wave of anti-colonial violence in Bengal, which began in
the 1920s and 1930s, is often seen to be the period in which Bengal’s
politicians started marching left toward communism and became increas-
ingly alienated from the larger nationalist movement, particularly from
Gandhi and the leadership of the Congress Party.25 Although historians
of Bengal generally argue that the revolutionary terrorist movement was
much less central to nationalist politics in this period, largely because it
remained an elite (rather than mass) movement, a careful reading of
colonial documents and intelligence records from the interwar years
shows that the movement was perceived as an active threat by the colonial
government. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Indian politicians across
the political spectrum, from those who identified as politically moderate
to those who considered themselves more radical, strategically used the
threat of revolutionary terrorism as a way to challenge the British govern-
ment. Elected and appointed representatives to the central Legislative
Assembly in Delhi repeatedly challenged the government’s efforts to

Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985) and Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885 1947
(Delhi: Macmillan, 1983).
24
Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India, p. 105; Rama Hari Shankar, Gandhi’s
Encounters with the Revolutionaries (New Delhi: Siddarth Publications, 1996).
25
Bhattacharya, Defining Moments; Partha Chatterjee, Bengal, 1920 1947 (Calcutta: K.P.
Bagchi, 1984); Srilata Chatterjee, Congress Politics in Bengal, 1919 1939 (London:
Anthem Books, 2002); David Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left,
(Calcutta, 1978); Tanika Sarkar, Bengal, 1928 1934, The Politics of Protest (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1987); see also Rajat Ray, “Masses in Politics: The Non
Cooperation Movement in Bengal, 1920 22,” Indian Economic and Social History
Review 11 (1974): 343 410 and John Gallagher, “Congress in Decline: Bengal, 1930
to 1939,” Modern Asian Studies 7.3 (1973): 589 645.
12 Introduction

enact legislation that would detain (but not charge) suspected revolu-
tionary terrorists. A resurgence of violence in the 1930s demonstrated to
British officials that the revolutionary terrorist movement in Bengal could
dramatically destabilize British authority in India and derail constitu-
tional reforms that were underway.
In the interwar period, the British government in India began to
devolve political responsibilities to its colonies; in India, the constitu-
tional reforms, introduced as the Government of India Act of 1919 and
also known as the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms, began the process of
granting Indians “responsible government” by allowing them to have
control over matters of provincial governance, such as public works,
sanitation, and education.26 The 1919 reforms were followed, beginning
a decade later, with a review of these reforms and a further Government of
India Act in 1935 to expand the franchise and allow a federation of
provinces and princely states which would have more autonomy to govern
themselves.
The process of progressive constitutional reform was disrupted by waves
of political violence, which included the assassinations and attempted
assassinations of government officials, and robberies of post offices,
banks, railway ticket offices, and other colonial buildings. Rather than
admit that the plan to devolve power was under threat, British officials in
Bengal created a sophisticated infrastructure of emergency legislation,
starting with the ill-fated Rowlatt Act in 1919 and the many versions and
supplements of the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Acts that were
passed between 1925 and 1932. These ordinances and bills authorized
the arrest and detention of those suspected of revolutionary and radical
politics, and officials rationalized what were considered extraordinary legal
measures as protections to the process of constitutional reforms. While
many in Britain believed that political change would evolve slowly with the
cooperation of appointed and elected Indian elites, the periodic resurgence
of the revolutionary terrorist movement seemed to demonstrate that British
rule was confronted by a security risk that required extraordinary police
and legal intervention. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the colonial
government continued its surveillance of suspicious groups and indivi-
duals, detained several thousand young men and women without trying
them in open court, and created a network of jails and detention camps to
contain the threat that was posed by revolutionary terrorists, all while
proceeding with the process of devolving political power to Indian elites
who were considered worthy of governing the colony.

26
This trajectory is nicely summarized by Partha Chatterjee, “The Curious Career of
Liberalism in India,” Modern Intellectual History 8.3 (2011): 687 96.
 Introduction 13

If the educated native came to symbolize the promise of representative

government in India in the nineteenth century, the gentlemanly terrorist
marked the limits of such an imaginary in the early twentieth century.
Bhadralok, who were initially imagined as the ideal Macaulayan subjects
in nineteenth-century British India, were well-versed in the language of
rule of law. Yet, by the start of the twentieth century, their education in an
emergent global discourse about freedom, national unification, and
sovereignty radicalized them as the slow pace of constitutional progress
toward Indian independence frustrated those with revolutionary goals.
From the moment revolutionary terrorists joined secret societies in the
1900s and 1910s, they were on a campaign to drive the British out of India
permanently, without any concessions to the idea of self-government or
dominion status promoted by British liberals. Throughout the 1920s,
’30s, and ’40s, they worked in tandem with other anticolonial groups to
strategize about how Indian independence could be brought about more
quickly.
From the perspective of British officials, both in India and in Britain,
the escalation of revolutionary terrorism in India was a sign that Indians
were unprepared for constitutional reforms toward liberal government.
The use of repressive legislation, which had been central to the concep-
tion of liberal reform since the inception of modern political theory, was
rationalized by officials in the twentieth century as a feature of dealing
with the Indian public. H. A. Stuart, an official in the government of
India, cited the words of John Stuart Mill in Representative Government to
justify the use of security legislation against revolutionary terrorists: “a
people who are revolted by an execution, but not shocked at an assassina-
tion require that the public authorities should be armed with much
sterner powers of repression than elsewhere . . .”27
Many of the men who participated in the revolutionary terrorist move-
ment were members of landed families in eastern Bengal, whose ancestors
had been beneficiaries of the 1793 Permanent Settlement. When the
movement came to the notice of British in the early 1900s, one official
drew from a sense of historical betrayal by noting, “To anyone unfamiliar
with Indian problems to say that the permanent settlement in Bengal is
responsible for the difficulty of administering the Presidency would seem
ridiculous – yet it is probably true.”28 Beginning with Macaulay’s 1835

27
Ujjwal Singh, Political Prisoners in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 28,
citing Mill in NAI, Home Judicial, File no. 27, July 1909, pp. 2 3.
28
APAC, L/P&J/6/1246, file 2198, “Political Situation in Bengal,” J&P 1658/1913:
Government of India, Home Political, Letter no. 111 of 1913, from W Marris,
Secretary to the Government of India to Sir T. W. Holderness, HM’s undersecretary of
state for India, Simla, 16 April 1913.
14 Introduction

imaginary of a group of “interpreters between us and the millions whom

we govern” to the publication of James Fitzjames Stephen’s and Henry
Maine’s work on the codification of law and custom in the 1890s, British
officials in India believed they could move India and Indians onto
a universal timeline of progress toward social, political, and economic
development. Such a transformation would enable India to become mod-
ern and liberal, attaining a form of governance that was distinct from the
despotism that had marked its history.29 By the turn of the twentieth
century, however, a number of British observers expressed doubt that
Indians could ever adapt to liberal government.30 Henry Maine came to
believe that colonialism had derailed India from progressing, and that
perhaps India would not modernize in the way that Europe had. He
argued that Britain had wrongly attempted to accelerate historical change
in India by attempting to codify the law and that British officials would do
better to adhere to cultural norms that were already existent in India.
The temporality of liberalism became a normative standard for measuring
whether Indians, and indeed, all those who were colonized, were “ready”
for the kind of independence that British officials imagined for them.
As Karuna Mantena suggests, indirect rule – allowing each society’s
“natural leaders” to lead according to local norms – enabled the British
to develop an “alibi” for empire-building, empowering Britain to expand
and solidify its empire while it simultaneously proclaimed its liberal
credentials through the language of cultural protection.31
Yet, as Thomas R. Metcalf has long argued, the British approach was
contradictory, marked by an “enduring tension between two ideals, one of
similarity and the other of difference.”32 Bengal’s bhadralok were, in this
sense, caught in the crosshairs of these contradictions: consummate insi-
ders because many had a British education, particularly in history and the
law, their status as gentlemen gained them some recognition from British
officials in India and in Britain. As the discussion on whether bhadralok
should be considered a “criminal tribe” showed, officials repeatedly argued
bhadralok were to be treated as subjects of a privileged group amid a larger
population of uneducable masses. Yet, a raft of laws targeting the bhadra-
lok’s liberty to freely assemble, publish, or read were enacted.

29
Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth century British Liberal
Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Karuna Mantena, Alibis of
Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2010).
30
Valentine Chirol, Indian Unrest (London: Macmillan, 1910).
31
Mantena, Alibis of Empire, epilogue.
32
Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), p. x.
 Introduction 15

Within a foundational assumption that liberalism was a universal ideol-

ogy that could improve government, civil society, and individual rights
across the globe, the kind of liberal governance that structured the British
regime in India was authorized by the multiple goals of rationalizing the
rule of law, protecting property rights, introducing representative govern-
ment, and inculcating modern forms of civil society.33 By making India
into a laboratory of political and cultural improvement, however, officials
were rarely clear on whether India could be improved to the level of
putatively modern European norms.
From the 1909 Morley–Minto reforms onward, the colonial govern-
ment promulgated a series of constitutional reforms that were intended to
help Indians move toward greater self-government, although the promise
of full independence was always deferred by British officials. A series of
legislative reforms in 1919 and 1935 expanded the franchise and allowed
more Indian officials to participate in legislative decisions, apportioned
representation to minority groups, addressed how the government of
India might protect the rights of different categories of Indian subjects,
and transferred power to provinces, localities, and princely states.
Throughout these putatively progressive changes, however, the viceroy
appointed by Parliament retained the executive power to authorize any
order that was necessary to defend the security of the state, a feature that
further secured the sovereignty of India to the British crown and cabinet
through this period.
From the perspective of radical and militant anticolonial groups, these
incremental measures to devolve political authority to Indian elites appeared
insufficiently progressive because the continued British occupation of India
was seen to be a violation of the principle of state sovereignty. In order to
respond to the threat of radical politics, the British government enacted
a succession of emergency, or “extraordinary,” legislative acts to suppress
the challenge posed by revolutionary terrorism, which relegated the move-
ment to a space outside common or ordinary law. As Ujjwal Singh has
noted, “The contest over the definition of ‘political’ remains central. From
the 1920s to the 1940s, the colonial government excluded the revolutionary
terrorists and the communists from this ‘hallowed’ category of political
dissenter by branding their activities as ‘conspiratorial’ and ‘dangerous.’”34

33
Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996); Ranajit Guha, The Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay
on the Permanent Settlement (Paris: Mouton, 1963); Thomas R. Metcalf, The Aftermath of
Revolt: India, 1857 1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964); Andrew Sartori,
“The British Empire and Its Liberal Mission,” Journal of Modern History 78.3 (2006):
623 42.
34
Ujjwal Singh, Political Prisoners, p. 17.
16 Introduction

Government officials argued that detaining those who threatened the pro-
cess of constitutional reform, even if detention was illegal, would enable
a liberal political formation to develop.
Each measure of constitutional reform to expand Indian representation
in 1919 and 1935 was accompanied by emergency legislation to suppress
political activism by those identified as terrorists and considered a threat
to the security of the state. The controversies over the Rowlatt Act in 1919
are well known, but the passage of legislation such as the Bengal Criminal
Law Amendment Act in 1925 and 1930 or the Bengal Suppression of
Terrorist Outrages Act in 1932 has received much less attention. In these
provincial legislative acts and ordinances, many provisions of the Rowlatt
Act were enacted in Bengal. As I show in chapters 3, 4, and 5, Indian
politicians decried the passage of what they considered objectionable
legislation. In their positions as members of the Legislative Assembly,
they argued vociferously against repressive legislation, claiming that these
laws showed that the British were not fully committed to offering India
self-governance. Their sustained opposition was ultimately unsuccessful:
there were further elaborations of security legislation.
As critics of liberal governmentality have long shown, states of excep-
tion are a central condition of the modern state. That the colonial govern-
ment refused to recognize “the terrorist” as having a political subjectivity
is not surprising; nor is it unusual that this logic authorized state violence
against those marked as terrorists. What makes this conjunction of histor-
ical developments unusual is that repression occurred in the same dec-
ades that the colonial state proposed to devolve political authority to
Indians. Part of the operating fiction that was foundational to colonialism
was that once Indians joined a modern historical timeline, the colonial
state would be disbanded. Yet, even at the moment of political devolu-
tion, radical and militant Indians were put in specially constructed deten-
tion camps intended for gentlemanly terrorists; detention camps and
prisons became an important way to bypass the writ of habeas corpus,
which had been central to the use of British common law since the
seventeenth century.35 Twentieth-century constitutional reforms were
intrinsically linked with repressive legislation in India’s late colonial his-
tory, with political reforms always constituted by emergency legislation.
In India, as in other modern nations, ideas about liberal government
were shot through with various compromises and conditions that enabled
the coexistence of constitutional reforms alongside emergency legislation
that contained the rights of Indians. The moment of emergency or

35
Paul Halliday, Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2010), pp. 248 49.
 Introduction 17

exception provides, as modern political theorists agree, the state or the

sovereign the right to temporarily suspend rule of law.36 In India, in
moments defined by the colonial state as crises or emergencies, through-
out the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, various rights ordinarily claimed by rule of
law were suspended. These rights included habeas corpus, the right to
assemble, speak, and publish freely, and the right to protest the govern-
ment’s policies. Marked as “extra-legal” or “extraordinary” measures by
colonial officials, all of the legislation was limited to a certain period of
time – six months, three years, or five years – and subject to renewal if
conditions did not improve. The temporary nature of the legislation
implied some recognition that these laws did not completely adhere to
the idea of rule of law, yet nearly all of the legislation was renewed, often
prepared in advance of its expiration on the tautological reasoning that
the legislation had worked, but that abandoning emergency legislation
would give rise to further emergencies. As Mary Dudziak has shown for
emergency laws in post–1945 US, which have been repeatedly authorized
in the name of wartime emergency, there has been no moment in
recent US history when the country has not been at war. Even in the
dramatic responses to the attack on Pearl Harbor, which enabled the
president to avail himself of the Wartime Powers Act and unlawfully
detain Japanese–Americans, the legislation had been prepared well in
advance of the attack.37 As I note throughout the book, emergency
legislation in India was always drafted before a political emergency
occurred; officials repeatedly explained this sequence as a preventive
mechanism rather than one that was responding to a sudden event.
By retracing the evolution of repressive laws in India, I challenge the
conception that emergencies were moments of exception. Instead, follow-
ing the work of recent political theorists, I argue that the idea of emergency
became quite “banal” and even “prosaic” in late colonial India, and
achieved permanence in the legal code.38 The emergency of the First

36
See Peter Caldwell, “Controversies over Carl Schmitt: A Review of Recent Literature,”
Journal of Modern History 77.2 (2005): 357 87; see Schmitt, Political Theology, pp. 6 7.
37
Mary Dudziak, Wartime: An Idea, Its History, and Its Consequences (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012), ch. 2.
38
Leonard Feldman, “The Banality of Emergency: On the Time and Space of ‘Political
Necessity,’” Sovereignty, Emergency, Legality, edited by Austin Sarat (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 136 64; A. G. Noorani, “The Banality of
Repression,” Frontline, September 23, 1994, p. 12; see also Horst Bredekamp, translated
by Melissa Thorson Hause and Jackson Bond, “From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt via
Thomas Hobbes,” Critical Inquiry 25.2 (1999): 247 66; John Pincince, “De centering Carl
Schmitt: The Colonial State of Exception and the Criminalization of the Political in British
India, 1905 1920,” Política Común 5 (June 2014) [DOI: www.dx.doi.org/10.3998/p
c.12322227.0005.006]; Ujjwal Kumar Singh, The State, Democracy, and Anti terror Laws
in India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2007), ch. 1.
18 Introduction

World War gave rise to laws such as the Defence of the Realm in Britain
and Ireland, and the Defence of India Act to contain the threat posed by
resident aliens whose loyalties were seen with suspicion. From that
moment, the emergency seemed to never end: the end of the First World
War precipitated a chain of conversations, discussions, and debates on how
a colonial government might put legal principles, such as the rules of trial
and evidence, into abeyance in the service of expanded constitutional
reform.39 Repressive laws became commonplace in late colonial India,
and perhaps more importantly, expanded and became more detailed.
As laws, terminologies, and disciplinary practices to regulate the detention
of persons became a part of a new elaborated set of legal norms in the
interwar period, the state entered into a condition of “hyperlegality,” which
made for more laws rather than simply the abrogation or suspension of
existing laws.40 Drawing from the work of the late Nasser Hussain, I show
the government responded to protest by Indian politicians by producing
detailed legislation about how to detain those suspected, but not convicted,
on charges of terrorism and conspiracy. Between the public furor over the
Rowlatt Act in 1919 and the passage of a raft of emergency legislation in the
1930s, the rules for detaining those suspected to revolution, radicalism, or
political violence became comprehensive, covering all possible exigencies,
as each statute attempted to contain the threat that was posed by revolu-
tionary terrorism. Although Indian politicians regularly decried these laws
as the “opposite of law,” or lawless, the ever-expanding body of emergency
law was represented by the government’s officials as lawful, intended to
cover any situation in which a revolutionary terrorist might actively parti-
cipate in seditious activities. As I argue in chapters 4 and 5, the proliferation
of repressive laws created the context for different categories of political
prisoners, as well as detention camps for those who had not been convicted
of any crimes. Moments of emergency led to a “deepening of governmen-
tality in India,” generating subjects who accommodated themselves to
a new state form.41
Because a British liberal imaginary in interwar India held that colonial
sovereignty was a temporary condition, one that had to be maintained until
the right sort of Indian politicians emerged to take the reins of authority, the
colonial government sustained their vigilance over the political process,
particularly when political reforms were introduced in 1919 and 1935.

39
Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).
40
Nasser Hussain, “Beyond Norm and Exception: Guantanamo,” Critical Inquiry 33
(2007): 734 53, p. 736; see also Lokaneeta, Transnational Torture, pp. 69 71.
41
Partha Chatterjee, Lineages of Political Society (New York: Columbia University Press,
2011), p. 70.
 Introduction 19

By turning to the ongoing exception that undergirded colonial law (and was
therefore not an “exception”) and linking the different stages of political
reform with the repression of political dissidence, I argue that British
officials embedded repressive laws in the common law, proliferating laws,
codes, and revisions that rationalized its prolonged detention of suspected
terrorists. Through this series of legal maneuvers, the government pro-
duced a range of categories for its subjects – the political prisoner, the
detainee (or detenu, in Anglo–Indian parlance), and the state or security
prisoner – terms that produced these men and women as particular types of
subjects as they spent months and years in British jails, prisons, and
detention camps.42 Following David Scott’s analysis of colonial govern-
mentality, “The crucial point here is not whether natives were included or
excluded so much as the introduction of a new game of politics that the
colonized would (eventually) be obliged to play if they were to be counted
as political [emphasis added].”43 An analysis of an ever-growing infrastruc-
ture of laws and categories and classification to define law-breakers, this
book argues that repressive legislation to contain political opposition was
increasingly seen as a necessary condition to the process of legitimating
colonial attempts to promote civic society and liberal governance in India.
Colonial officials proposed to create a democracy by detaining radicals and
militants, thereby giving rise to Indian subjects who could be made into
appropriate heirs to a liberal government. In the conclusion, I turn to the
ways in which emergency legislation in India has proved resilient in the
postcolonial period, as the Indian postcolonial nation-state has adopted
security legislation to protect the world’s largest democracy.
The infrastructure of laws passed to contain the threat of seditious
activity has been well documented by the reams of documents in what
are called the “official archives” of the government of India in the twen-
tieth century. Terrorism, because it was seen to be a mortal threat to the
state, generated a dense archive that documented suspicious individuals,
their networks, and their activities. The colonial state became dependent
on what Bhavani Raman has called a “papereality” that attested to the
rationality and bureaucratic purpose of colonial governance; on paper,
accounts of conspiracies, the surveillance of suspected insurgents, and
reports of inter-provincial and international networks generated what
appeared as a very real threat to the state.44 Documents such as long

42
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, translated by Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005); Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
(New York: Verso, 2004), ch. 3. I am grateful to Joya Chatterji for pressing me on this point.
43
Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” p. 208.
44
Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2012).
20 Introduction

history sheets of the careers of suspected revolutionary terrorists enabled

the state to detain, but not charge or convict, those with a long history of
suspicious behavior. Official reports, memos, and files on conspiracies
show that the state maintained an active surveillance regime over those it
had tagged as bhadralok dacoits. The surveillance of the Intelligence
Branch, documented by “a regime of paper documents” substantiated
the state’s claim that revolutionary violence was a risk, but not one that
the state could prove in a court of law.45
The archives that the British government of India generated to keep an
account of its attempts to suppress revolutionary terrorism include
Legislative Assembly debates in which Indian representatives challenged
security legislation, commissions that were repeatedly assigned to exam-
ine the problem of political prisoners, petitions made by political prison-
ers who agitated for better treatment while in detention, surveillance
reports, and a long series of reports produced by civil servants in the
intelligence bureau as they tracked the phenomenon that they had
named euphemistically “political trouble,” and more specifically, “terror-
ism in Bengal.” The colonial archive, as Ann Stoler has argued, “serve less
as stories for a colonial history than as active, generative substances with
histories, as documents with itineraries of their own.”46 Some of these
documents appeared to produce transparency and public accountability,
while others represented the wide-scale anxieties that officials felt as they
considered their safety in India. Histories written by colonial officials
rationalized why the government had taken unusually repressive mea-
sures to keep public order and security. The production of such
a historical narrative by colonial officials, those in the Intelligence
Branch or Special Branch of Police in Bengal, authorized many of the
policy decisions that were subsequently taken by officials in the Home
Department of the provincial government of Bengal or the central gov-
ernment of India.47 In time, as these memos and reports accumulated,
they contributed to creating a logic among colonial officials that revolu-
tionary terrorism was not remediable, but a permanent condition of
politics in Bengal.
The colonial government’s ability to write histories of India had
long rationalized the role of Britain in that history and provided the

45
Matthew Hull, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
46
Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 1.
47
See my “An Archive of ‘Political Trouble in India’: History writing, Anticolonial
Violence, and Colonial Counterinsurgency, 1905 37,” in The Handbook of the History
of Terrorism, edited by Carola Dietze and Claudia Verhoeven, published online, 2014.
 Introduction 21

foundations for Britain’s continued occupation of India.48 History-

writing became a form of expertise that explained why Indians had
failed at building a civil society; at various times, these failures could
be attributed to communal divisions and an inadequate sense of
political solidarity.49 In the colonial government’s account of itself,
often written with the larger goal of explaining why the British
remained in India, the government’s ambitions for representative gov-
ernment and eventual political devolution were interrupted by epi-
sodes of unexpected political violence. The aftermath of the 1857
mutiny in India changed the tenor of Victorian liberalism in the late
nineteenth century as an imperial ideology of improvement was trans-
formed by a new set of practices that were defined by maintaining
racial distance and distinctions.50 The project of a classic liberalism
was derailed by the unrestrained rapacious behavior of Indian soldiers,
who had previously been – it was widely believed in literature pro-
duced by Britons – loyal subjects of the empire.51 These violent
challenges to British rule, rather than the existence of British rule
itself, were explained as disruptions that threatened the progress of
liberal constitutional reforms and British withdrawal.
For colonial officials, the evidence of a past history of political violence
became a way to authorize repressive legislation that would prevent future
attacks. For revolutionary terrorists, their history showed the way toward
a radical and militant trajectory that would propel them to pushing the
British out of India; history became a means to explain the way in which
actions such as bombings, assassinations, and attacks on British buildings
and institutions would give rise to a new political formation, a future that
was built on a history of radical anticolonial protest.

48
Partha Chatterjee and Anjan Ghosh, eds., History of the Present (Ranikhet: Permanent
Black, 2007); Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1996); Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity
in Western India, 1700 1960, (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007), ch. 1; Javed Majeed,
Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992); Rama Mantena, The Origins of Modern Historiography in India,
1780 1880 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), chs. 1 2. On governmentality and
expert knowledge, see Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose, eds., Foucault
and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo liberalism, and Rationalities of Government (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996), especially introduction and essays by Graham
Burchell and Nikolas Rose.
49
Gyan Pandey, “The Construction of Communalism,” Subaltern Studies.
50
Metcalf, Aftermath of Revolt.
51
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830 1914
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), ch. 7; Nancy Paxton, Writing under the Raj:
Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830 1947 (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1999); Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman
in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993), ch. 4.
22 Introduction

In the histories put forward by revolutionaries, terrorists, and their

followers, political actions taken by revolutionary terrorists would accel-
erate historical change in India and succeed in overthrowing an oppres-
sive government.52 While the British wanted to leave when the time was
right, revolutionary terrorists wanted the British to leave immediately.
Kama Maclean has called revolutionary politics “a politics of impa-
tience,” which created friction with a liberal timeline.53 This temporal
disjuncture animated some of the political tensions between revolution-
ary terrorists and British officials. As officials counseled patience, the
revolutionary terrorists demanded action that was sudden, drawing atten-
tion to the revolutionary possibilities that were produced by colonialism’s
own violence. Anticipating Fanon by several decades, Bengal’s revolu-
tionary terrorists turned violence against their colonial oppressors and
made it a central component of their political strategy for a radical deco-
lonization of India.54
Knowing that their future was a dramatic departure from the past,
Bengal’s revolutionary terrorists rearranged a conventional timeline for
political change and advocated for radical transformation.55 From the
first decades of the revolutionary terrorist movement, participants had
used visual, aural, and print media, relying on newspapers, pamphlets,
posters, poems, and songs to communicate a political strategy that legit-
imized violence. Revolutionary terrorists raised consciousness by drawing
on a language of sacrifice for the motherland, pressing for a campaign of
terror against the British to allow India to be free.56 These missives
created a timeline and narrative from events that might have otherwise
seemed like isolated political attacks. By the interwar period, histories of
the revolutionary terrorist movement documented the movement,
explaining who the key leading figures were, what kinds of social and
political formations they imagined, and how a new society would emerge

52
Datta, Bhupendra Nath, Bharatiyer Dwitiya Svadhinatar Sangram [India’s Other
Independence Campaign] (Calcutta, Barman Publishing, 1949). A recent anthology of
revolutionary literature suggests how writing the story of revolution was a widespread
strategy for creating revolutionary movement in South Asia; Nivedita Majumdar, ed.,
The Other Side of Terror: An Anthology of Writings on Terrorism in South Asia (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2009).
53
Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India, pp. 5 7.
54
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963).
55
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translated by
Keith Tribe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 39 54; The Practice of Conceptual
History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, translated by Todd Samuel Presner
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); see also David Scott, Refashioning Futures:
Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
56
Sanyal, Revolutionary Pamphlets; Christopher Pinnney, ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed
Page and Political Struggle in India (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), pp. 117 19.
 Introduction 23

once Bengal was liberated from British control. In writing accounts of

themselves and of their movement, Bengali revolutionary terrorists made
themselves into historical subjects whose importance was consolidated by
the act of history-writing.
In these accounts, revolutionary terrorists jettisoned a sequence of
events in which political change occurred only when the conditions
were right; rather, historical conditions would be dramatically reset for
a new kind of timeline and a new kind of future. For revolutionaries, as
Claudia Verhoeven shows, time accelerates suddenly, leap-frogs, and
evades the ordered of sequence of history.57 Even among revolutionaries,
the “critique of terrorism, which is not a critique of violence as such, but
rather of violence that is premature, badly timed, or spontaneous . . .
terrorists are those who recklessly break the historical speed limit, then
crash, and with their wreckage cause congestion (police intervention,
political reaction, revolutionary delay) en route to the foreseeable
future.”58 The history of terrorism in Bengal is often described as incom-
plete, or inadequate to the ambitions of the present or future. In accounts
of the movement written by its supporters, many of the revolutionary aims
of the movement were stymied by figures or violent actions that occurred
at the wrong time or in the wrong way. For instance, when writing about
the Chittagong Armoury Raid in April 1930, participants reported they
had intended that all of Bengal would rise up against the British. Because
of poor planning and poor timing, the mass uprising never occurred and
the British remained in India for nearly another two decades.
Histories on revolutionary terrorism in Bengal appeared at two crucial
moments, often after a long period of incarceration and detention, in
which detainees and political prisoners had time to reflect on their poli-
tics. The first round of memoirs and histories appeared in the 1920s.
A generation of revolutionary terrorists were released or amnestied and
they wrote about a half-dozen accounts of their lives and time in British
jails. Didactic in nature, these histories circulated widely as serialized
newspaper articles. At the heart of these narratives was the exemplary
revolutionary terrorist, for whom “human will could consciously shape
the future and thereby accelerate the effects of time.”59 By focusing on
individual figures, particularly a figure such as Khudiram Bose, whose
57
Claudia Verhoeven, “Time of Terror, Terror of Time: On the Impatience of Russian
Revolutionary Terrorism.” Special Issue of Jahrbücher für die Geschichte Osteuropas:
“Terrorism in Imperial Russia: New Perspectives,” eds. Anke Hillbrenner and
Benjamin Schenk, vol. 58, No. 2 (2010): 254 73.
58
Verhoeven, “Time of Terror,” p. 255.
59
Lynn Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest: Central European University,
2008), p. 65; see also Sanja Perovic, “The French Republican Calendar: Time, History,
and the Revolutionary Event,” Eighteenth century Studies 35.1 (2012): 1 16.
24 Introduction

1908 execution was illustrated into calendar art in the 1940s, as is shown
on the cover, personal sacrifices and suffering could serve as object
lessons for the nation. By drawing revolutionary terrorists as gentlemanly,
they embodied a kind of caste patriotism that reminded readers of their
status as bhadralok, who had departed from social and cultural expecta-
tions to become militants. In these accounts, Bengal’s distinctive past
gave way to a historical trajectory that had generated the revolutionary
terrorist movement, not only in Bengal, but in north India more generally.
These authors hoped to reinvigorate a radical anti-colonial movement
that was widely perceived to have been successfully repressed by the
colonial government in the 1910s. In a moment in which Gandhi’s
influence in turning Indian politics toward nonviolence was on the rise,
the emergence of texts about particular figures served as a way to offer role
models, appealing to young men and women members to join revolu-
tionary secret societies that had proliferated in schools and universities.
Written accounts of the first decades of revolutionary terrorism used
biography and a chronological timeline to debate the strategies of
Indian nationalism, pitting the value of revolutionary violence against
a policy of nonviolence and civil disobedience. Through these histories,
revolutionary terrorism acquired a storied past, while nonviolence was
represented as an untested political strategy.
The second round of histories of revolutionary terrorism appeared
shortly after 1947, when the British left India and India was finally
declared politically independent. As I show in Chapter 6, the release
of the revolutionary terrorist movement’s participants from jails or
detention camps provided the impetus to publicizing the history of
a movement that had long been secretive because its members had
been underground or had spent long years incarcerated. Participants
of the movement feared they would be forgotten in the maelstrom of
constitutional, territorial, and national changes that were underway, so
they proclaimed their historical importance, even though it was not clear
that the revolution had materialized. Long identified as militants, radi-
cals, revolutionaries, and terrorists, these men and women began to
assemble a narrative of their new nation; as they did so, they situated
themselves alongside a larger nationalist narrative and became freedom
fighters, patriots who had actively struggled and suffered on behalf of the
nation. As revolutionary terrorists generated their own accounts, many
expressed the view that the history of militant nationalism and the
radical politics it had espoused had been sidelined. These post-1947
accounts framed subsequent engagements between the history of the
revolutionary terrorist movement and its relationship to the larger
movement for Indian independence.
Introduction 25

Figure I.1. The hanging of the young Khudiram Bose (1889 1908) for
an attempted bomb assassination, anonymous, 1940s, image courtesy of
Kroch Library, Division of Asia Collections, Cornell University Library
26 Introduction

Given the wealth of materials on the history of revolutionary terrorism

in Bengal, this book offers a partial and selective account. I have chosen to
examine processes rather than individual acts of political violence, and
moments of engagement between the government’s officials and the
revolutionary terrorists who opposed their views. By choosing to focus
on the different political imaginaries that informed politics in British India
in the interwar period, I have paid more attention to the construction and
passage of particular laws in order to explain how emergency laws gained
importance from the interwar period and have now become a cornerstone
of the postcolonial state. I have not provided much detail about well-
known left-leaning figures of Bengal’s politics; there are many other books
published in English, Bengali, and Hindi that cover that ground. I have,
however, directed attention to the ways that terrorist actions, repressive
laws, and conflicts over the status of political prisoners structured the
political debates of this period and drew in political actors from across
a diverse political spectrum.
By its own accounts, the revolutionary terrorist movement failed as
a project of revolutionary transformation. Yet, the prolonged engagement
between the colonial state and those it considered terrorists was an
important constitutive feature of the colonial and postcolonial history of
modern India.
1 The Reforms of 1919: Montagu–Chelmsford,
the Rowlatt Act, Jails Commission, and the
Royal Amnesty

The year 1919 marked the formal end of the First World War and
provided an opportunity to the British government in India to defuse
radical and militant Indian nationalists who had challenged colonial rule
through acts of political violence. The passage of the Government of India
Act of 1919 intended to privilege Indian elites who were politically
moderate by creating a road map to allow Indians the ability to eventually
govern themselves, but with British supervision. Although colonial
officials preferred the language of “responsible government” over self-
government, the act proposed limited political changes to promote civic
institutions and encourage democratic representation. In addition to the
introduction of the Government of India Act of 1919, this chapter exam-
ines several measures and reforms that the British government in India
instituted after the First World War, particularly the continuation of
repressive legislation through the recommendations of the Rowlatt
Commission, a reform of jails and prisons through the Jails Commission
Report, and a royal amnesty of political prisoners. Focusing on how this
series of reforms was shaped and affected by the revolutionary terrorist
movement in Bengal, this chapter addresses the simultaneous introduc-
tion of constitutional and jail reforms with the restriction of civil liberties.
As Edwin Montagu, secretary of state, noted, “. . . sooner or later there
must be peace restored between the Government of India and these
men . . . Could they not be treated with courtesy and dignity as the
honourable but dangerous enemies of Government?”1
The political reform of British India developed from a liberal and
international vision of territorial sovereignty for all nations. This inter-
nationalist discourse put particular pressure on nations with colonies.
Systems of international laws to enable cooperation between European
nations and the formation of the League of Nations were intended to put a

1
APAC, L/P&J/6/1611, “Treatment of Prisoners Convicted of Political Offences,” J&P
1634/1922, “Telegram from Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State, India Office, London to
Governor General of India in Council, Dated 16 December 1921.”

27
28 The Reforms of 1919

putative end to colonial occupation as it was heralded in President

Wilson’s Fourteen Points.2 Although Britain had long claimed to be at
the forefront of humanitarian internationalism, these claims were chal-
lenged by its imperial activities.3 Thus, the end of the war marked parti-
cular crises for the British empire as nationalists in Ireland, Egypt, India,
and the Khilafat rebelled against British rule. As the British government
faced anticolonial challenges, it paradoxically expanded its influence
under an internationalist regime in various places, perhaps most notably,
the Middle East, where it held the mandate over large parts of the former
Ottoman Empire.4
The most well-known post-war reform in British India was the passage
of the Government of India Act of 1919, or the Montagu–Chelmsford
reforms, after the two men who orchestrated its passage. Named after the
Viceroy of India, Frederic Chelmsford, and the Secretary of State Edwin
Montagu, the act has often been marked as a major turning point in the
history of twentieth-century India. The provisions for representative self-
government were expanded from a previous set of reforms promulgated
in 1909, which had offered minorities, such as Muslims, separate elec-
toral representation.5 The 1919 reforms are considered unique because
they offered Indian nationalists dyarchy, which was a double or split
government in which the central and provincial governments were given
selected powers. The central assembly was governed by officials elected
by Indian elites, and officials appointed by the colonial government; the
provincial councils were comprised of appointed officials, both Indian
and British. A newly constituted all-India Legislative Assembly required
106 members who were elected from an expanded population of those
newly eligible to vote. In addition, 40 members were appointed from
official and non-official groups that represented key constituencies, such
as chambers of commerce, industrial groups, and universities. Bengal’s
Legislative Council was enlarged to 139 members, as many more
property holders, businessmen, lawyers, and professionals were rendered

2
John Gallagher, “Nationalisms and the Crisis of Empire, 1919 22,” Modern Asian Studies
15.3 (1981): 355 68, see especially pp. 350 65; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self
Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007).
3
Michelle Tusan, “‘Crimes against Humanity’: Human Rights, the British Empire and the
Origins of the Response to the Armenian Genocide,” American Historical Review 119.1
(February 2014): 47 77.
4
Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 2012);
Jeanne Morefield, Covenant without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The
League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
5
Shabnum Tejani, Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History, 1890 1950
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), ch. 3.
 The Reforms of 1919 29

eligible to vote.6 Provincial governments were responsible for governing

education, public health, public works, and agriculture (the “nation-
building” activities); the central government kept control over the mili-
tary, revenue, and foreign policy (the “law and order” functions).7 The
Government of India act was considered a step toward offering Indians
the right to govern themselves through elected representatives, an
expanded franchise, and involvement in local governance. In spite of
provincial devolution and the expansion of the franchise, as many critics
noted, the 1919 reforms were limited by the oversight of British admin-
istrators. The Governor-General of each province, who was appointed by
the India Office, had the right to veto or validate any bill against the wishes
of the partially elected council; the viceroy, the presumptive head of state
in the Government of India, could override votes made by the Legislative
Assembly.8
The reforms were meant to be evaluated after a decade and expanded
further if the time seemed right. Some members of the Indian National
Congress and Home Rule Leagues imagined that this might be a step
toward Indian independence, but the majority of members of the Indian
National Congress were unsatisfied with the reforms, arguing that
Indians should have purna swaraj, or complete independence.9 British
officials were divided on the question of complete Indian sovereignty,
although there was some agreement that any constitutional change would
have to come gradually through slow and incremental change rather than
a quick transfer of power.10

6
The Central Legislative Assembly consisted of 140 members, 40 who were appointed by
the government and 100 were elected by Indian electors, separate representation for
Muslims and Sikhs. There was a council of State which had 60 members, 26 appointed
and 34 elected, 20 General, 10 Muslims, 3 Europeans, and 1 Sikh. Provincial councils were
expanded with up to 70 percent of its members to be elected. In the Bengal legislative
council, there were 115 elected members, with no more than 16 being officials of the
government. Divided by district, the constituencies were categorized as non
Muhammadan urban (11), non Muhammadan rural (32), Muhammadan urban (6),
Muhammadan rural (31), Europeans (6), landholders (5), universities (1), commerce
and industry (15), and labour (2). www.archive.org/stream/govtofindiaact19029669mbp#
page/n253/mode/2up [accessed June 26, 2016], pp. 210 213.
7
Dietmar Rothermund, “Constitutional Reforms versus National Agitations in India,
1900 1950,” Journal of Asian Studies 21.4 (1962): 505 22, pp. 508 12; Hugh Tinker,
“India in the First World War and After,” Journal of Contemporary History (1968): 89
107, pp. 90 91.
8
Vincent A. Smith, revised by Percival Spear, Oxford History of India, fourth edition
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 787 89.
9
Judith Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power: Indian Politics, 1915 1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1972).
10
P. G. Robb, The Government of India and Reform: Policies towards Politics and the
Constitution, 1916 1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), chs. 1 4.
30 The Reforms of 1919

The Montagu–Chelmsford reforms, which had been under parliamen-

tary discussion for several years before their enactment, expressed a vision
that India (and other colonies) would one day govern themselves, perhaps
as members of a commonwealth or with dominion status, so that Britain’s
links to India’s economy would not be severed.11 Many in Britain knew by
the end of the First World War that continued colonial occupation
was politically and economically unsustainable, but creating a plan for
how Britain’s colonies would gain some semblance of political indepen-
dence remained fraught. Politicians from successive Liberal, Labour,
Conservative, and coalition governments agreed that India needed self-
government and had the right to self-determination, but it was unclear
when India and Indians would be ready to govern themselves.12 Parties
on the political left, such as Labour, tended to support Indian nationalist
demands, while British observers across the political spectrum wished to
preserve British power and influence in India.13
The language of “responsible government” over “self-government” in
the text of the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms was calculated to leave the
timeline toward self-government and perhaps independence from Britain
vague.14 This ambiguous timeline held Indian ministers accountable, first
to their British superiors and secondly to an Indian electorate. But even
colonial officials knew that the logic of this timeline varied: Lord Irwin,
viceroy from 1926 to 1931, joked that the Earl of Birkenhead, who served
as secretary of state for India in that period, believed that India would be
ready for self-government in 600 years.15 From a certain perspective, the
Montagu–Chelmsford reforms were a key moment in the historical pro-
gress of the colonial government to provide representative institutions for
Indians, Indianizing the British civil service, and pragmatically scaling
back British involvement in India without giving up sovereignty over
Indian territories.16 But as successive governments in Britain grappled
11
Carl Bridge, Holding India to the Empire: The British Conservative Party and the 1935
Constitution (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1986); Andrew Muldoon, Empire, Politics,
and the Creation of the 1935 India Act, (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009).
12
Richard Whiting, “The Empire and British Politics,” in Andrew Thompson, eds.,
Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century, in Oxford History of the British
Empire, companion series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 161 210.
13
S. J. Ball, ed., Conservative Politics in National and Imperial Crisis: Letters from Britain to the
Viceroy of India 1926 31 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), chs. 5 6.
14
For a fuller explanation on how “responsible government,” rather than “self government,”
became a key term in the reforms, see Robb, ch. 3; Richard Danzig, “The Announcement
of August 20, 1917,” Journal of Asian Studies 28 (November 1968): 19 37; Gallagher,
“Nationalisms and the Crisis of Empire,” pp. 359 60.
15
Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox: The Life of Lord Halifax (London, 1991), p. 19 cited in
Whiting, “The Empire and British Politics.”
16
See Robb, Government of India, p. 52: “He [Chelmsford] looked forward to the transfer
of power, not of sovereignty.” D. A. Low, “The Government of India and the First
 The Reforms of 1919 31

with militant anticolonial resistance from Indians, British politicians

revised their views on whether repressive legislation should be a part of
constitutional reforms.
The Montagu–Chelmsford reforms are only one part of the accepted
narrative of 1919. This chapter turns to several other reforms initiated by
the colonial government in India in the interwar period, measures that
occurred immediately after the First World War and had a large impact
on how the revolutionary terrorist movement unfolded after 1920. Two of
these measures, the reform of emergency legislation and the reform of
jails, were authorized by commissions who studied the history of these
problems under colonial rule and diagnosed possible solutions. These
commissions, in the spirit of liberal reforms that animated this period,
offered “high-profile promises of public accountability” that identified a
reform project and articulated a goal that could be authorized by a multi-
plicity of political actors.17 Even though these “forms of inquiry” were
often symptoms of an insecure government, commissions enlisted experts
in making recommendations that would render state actions legitimate.18
As the constitutional reforms of 1919 got underway, the government
attempted to address other reforms that could stand in the way of con-
stitutional change. The provisions of the 1919 reforms were intended to
“rally the moderates,” those among India’s political classes who could
be expected to govern India on Britain’s behalf.19 Yet the government had
an underlying concern that radical and militant anticolonial resistance
would threaten the 1919 reforms and thus, they urged pre-emptive
action.
One proposal to limit the influence of radicals and militants was the
promulgation of the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, better
known as the Rowlatt Act, based on the report produced by the Rowlatt
Commission, which recommended the continuation of repressive mea-
sures such as limiting the right to a jury trial in the case of certain political
offenses and the suspension of habeas corpus through a provision that
suspects might be detained because they were suspected of sedition.
The provisions of the Rowlatt Act developed from measures in the
Defence of India Act of 1915 to detain those who were defined as a threat
to the security of the state while it was involved in fighting a war. The

Non Cooperation Movement, 1920 22,” Journal of Asian Studies 25.2 (1966): 241 59,
especially 242 43; see also Gallagher and Seal, pp. 399 401.
17
Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 28 35, especially p. 31.
18
Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, pp. 141 46, especially p. 141.
19
John Gallagher and Anil Seal, “Britain and India Between the Wars,” Modern Asian
Studies 15.3 (1981): 387 414, see pp. 394, 399, 405.
32 The Reforms of 1919

Defence of India Act was considered a temporary and “emergency” piece

of legislation that was to deal with the extraordinary context of war.
Intended as a “preventive” measure that authorized the internment and
detention of those who were politically subversive, it was used to detain
revolutionaries, terrorists, members of opposition political parties,
Germans, and others of suspicious political affiliation.20
The language of wartime necessity authorized the expansion of execu-
tive powers, even when there was not a war: “wartime works as a short-
hand invoking the traditional notion that the times are both exceptional
and temporary.”21 The act was due to expire six months after the end of
the war, yet even before the end of the hostilities, British officials recom-
mended that the temporary measures in the Defence of India Act be
extended with an eye toward making them permanent. The threat of
political dissidence in the form of revolutionary terrorism had not died
down and the government believed it needed a continuation of extralegal
measures.22 Thus, in December 1917, the colonial government author-
ized the formation of a commission to “investigate and report on the
nature of the criminal conspiracies connected with the revolutionary
movement in India” and to “advise as to the legislations, if any, necessary
to enable Government to deal effectively with them.”23 Headed by Sidney
Rowlatt, the commission issued the report in April 1918; it was printed
before the formal cessation of hostilities in Europe and while the Defence
of India Act was still in place.
This peculiar timing and logic – producing the language and rationale
for a permanent executive order to suspend the rule of law in order to
replace an existing temporary executive order – was fueled by the anxiety
of what might happen to the colonial government if it lost its executive
privileges to detain suspects on suspicion of sedition as it did in a time of
emergency. By sustaining executive power, or what Walter Benjamin
characterized as the “law-preserving” and “law-making” characteristics
of the state, the colonial government was able to forestall the kind of
political violence it feared from revolutionaries, terrorists, and other
political insurgents.24 The Rowlatt Act was thus framed as a preventive

20
It is parallel to the measures used in the United Kingdom and Ireland during the war,
which was the Defence of the Realm Act. See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 18 19.
21
Mary Dudziak, Wartime: An Idea, Its History, and Its Consequences (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012), p. 107.
22
WBSA, Memorandum on History of Terrorism from 1905 33.
23
Sedition Committee Report, No. 2884, Resolution, Government of India, Home
Department, Delhi, December 10, 1917, p. i.
24
Walter Benjamin, “Critique on Violence,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical
Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1978).
 The Reforms of 1919 33

measure that would defend the process of constitutional reforms from

those who might threaten it; there was no immediate threat of emergency
except by the circular reasoning that the lack of repressive measures might
potentially cause the government to face a political emergency.25
At the same time as the colonial government considered the provi-
sions of the Rowlatt Act, the Government of India initiated another
commission to study the problem of prison reform. This commission
was assigned to study the problem of jails in India, and in particular, how
to end the practice of transportation as a punishment for those accused
of sedition, conspiracy, or activities intended to overthrow the govern-
ment. The committee focused on the Andaman Islands prison, which
had been reserved for the most violent political offenders, including a
large group of gentlemanly terrorists who had been sent there in the
1910s. Among the questions the committee considered was how to treat
prisoners of different classes and castes, with the goal of reforming those
who might be returned to the larger population. In a moment when
reports, commissions, and reforms proliferated, the colonial govern-
ment in India drew from a wealth of knowledge it had generated about
India, depending on a colonial sociology of caste and its relation to
criminality, and what could be expected of Indian behavior.26 The
growth of the prison population in India may have been a budgetary
concern, but it merged with a growing concern about how to compre-
hend the large number of Indians who were not members of the “crim-
inal castes and tribes” but who were considered political prisoners.
Although colonial officials were reluctant to call these men “political
prisoners,” colonial officials were especially concerned with the rehabi-
litation of those who were willing to go to jail as a form of political
protest. For colonial officials, particularly high-ranking liberals such as
Edwin Montagu, managing the imprisonment of those in jail for political
dissidence was an important problem, largely because these were the
groups who were imagined as being central to any future political
reform. In debates between different constituencies within the govern-
ment, the question of how to distinguish between terrorists, militants,
radicals, and eventually, nonviolent activists such as the satyagrahis who
were influenced by Gandhi and Congress officials, meant that officials
were pressed to recognize the difference between crime and insurgency
when considering the population of those in jail and whether these
populations could be reformed.

25
Rowlatt Commission’s Report, ch. XVII; Robb, Government of India, p. 153.
26
Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001), ch. 3.
34 The Reforms of 1919

The Jails Commission report of 1919 has often been seen as a tangent
to the other reforms under discussion here, but I argue that it was linked
to the constitutional reforms of that year with the Rowlatt Act, particu-
larly from the perspective of Bengal’s revolutionary terrorists. As the
British government attempted to create a framework for “responsible”
government in India, it became invested in the idea of the “responsible”
Indian, a person who could represent Indian interests through a constitu-
tional framework. Those considered “political prisoners,” many of them
radicals, militants, and terrorists before 1919, represented the class of
Indians who could be enlisted in the project of constitutional reform.
Because they were politically active, middle-class, educated men and
women who had participated in civil (and sometime not-so-civil) protest,
some colonial officials believed they could be turned away from radical
politics and reformed. The problem of political prisoners intensified for
the government after 1919: as Indian nationalists went to jail willingly in
the 1920s and onward, the colonial government was pushed to defend its
harsh treatment of those who were considered putative subjects of the
crown.
The reforms I discuss below speak to the constitutive nature of how a
self-consciously liberal and colonial state reformed its governance of a
foreign territory so it could present itself as a constitutionally organized
state with representative institutions. Thus, a plan of introducing self-
government to educated elites in India and improving jail conditions was
paralleled by a series of repressive legislation that attempted to discipline
the revolutionary and radical activities of those very same educated elites;
these measures exemplify a certain measure of the colonial state’s sover-
eignty over its colonized subjects and its ability to discipline and educate
these men and women in the service of the state’s goals. But, perhaps just
as crucially, these legislative events remind us how a modern state appa-
ratus was able to reconcile principles of liberal government with repres-
sive colonial tactics.

The Rowlatt Commission’s Report as a History

of Terrorism
The promulgation of the Rowlatt bills in March 1919, as every Indian
school child knows, provoked a nationwide hartal (work stoppage) orga-
nized by Mohandas Gandhi, on April 6, 1919.27 As its many critics noted
at the time, the Rowlatt Act suspended basic principles of rule of law by
allowing closed court proceedings against suspected political dissidents.

27
J. Brown, Gandhi’s Rise, ch. 5.
 The Rowlatt Commission’s Report 35

To Indian nationalists and politicians, these measures seemed antithetical

to the liberal spirit of the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms, and the mea-
sures were quickly labeled the “Black Acts.” The government repeatedly
claimed that the act would affect few Indians. But anticolonial activists,
most notably Gandhi, used the occasion as a symbolically important
moment because it allowed him to highlight the inconsistencies of
British rule, particularly in the government’s application of the rule of
law.28 Indian officials on the Imperial Legislative Council voted unan-
imously against the measure, but it passed anyway, showing how execu-
tive power could be mobilized by the colonial government in a moment of
political reform in which democratic institutions were expanding.29
Gandhi noted with alarm that the act was an “affront to the nation.”30
The first nationwide mass action on April 6, 1919, was followed by an
army assault on an unarmed crowd in Jallianwala Bagh in the Punjab on
April 13, killing several hundred Indians and injuring over a thousand.
Subsequently, martial law was imposed in the Punjab because of the
“Punjab disturbances” and there was widespread state terrorism against
Indians.31 The Rowlatt bills were never implemented on a national level
because of Indian agitation in 1919; many of those detained under martial
law in Punjab were released by a royal amnesty later in the year. After the
Rowlatt sataygraha brought Gandhi to national and international promi-
nence, he began planning his well-known Non-Cooperation Campaign,
in which he urged all Indians to withdraw their labor from British indus-
tries, government, and educational institutions.
In this section, I analyze the text and the provisions of the Rowlatt report
closely in order to argue that the Rowlatt report mobilized the history
of terrorism in Bengal as a way to advocate for the extension of security
laws across India. Using historical data and evidence collected from the
Intelligence Branch, government reports, and testimony of colonial offi-
cials engaged in combatting counterinsurgency in India, the Rowlatt
Commission wrote a history of terrorism, one in which the government’s
past experience with Indian counterinsurgency provided the grounds to

28
CWMG, “Letter to the Press on Satyagraha Pledge,” dated February 26, 1919, vol.
XVII, p. 318.
29
J. Brown, Gandhi’s Rise, pp. 162 63.
30
J. Brown, Gandhi’s Rise, p. 164; letters that Gandhi wrote to his associates from February
1919, culminating in a telegram that he sent to the Viceroy on February 24, 1919.
31
Purnima Bose, Organizing Empire: Individualism, Collective Agency, and India (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2003), ch. 2; Vinay Lal, “The Incident of the ‘Crawling Lane,’
Women in the Punjab Disturbances of 1919,” Genders 16 (1993): 35 60; Derek Sayer,
“British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre, 1919 1920,” Past and Present 131 (1991):
130 64; Taylor Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (London: Routledge,
2010), ch. 2.
36 The Reforms of 1919

argue for permanent legislation that could be invoked in times of emer-

gency to limit the legal rights of Indians. The section on Bengal comprised
roughly two-thirds of the report, although the recommendations for emer-
gency legislation would apply to all of India. The bulk of historical evidence
was drawn from the government’s archives in Bengal, by various members
of the Intelligence Branch who had thoroughly documented aspects of the
movement throughout the 1910s when the movement was seen to be the
most active. The repetitive nature of reports on the terrorist movement
converted several episodes of the movement into a documented genealogy
of causal events, making it appear as if a conspiracy against the British was
well organized.32
Although the Rowlatt Commission was produced in December 1918, it
was a virtual copy of a previous report produced by the Government of
Bengal the year before.33 The first printed report was published in 1917
by J. C. Ker, the Director of the Intelligence Branch, and it was titled
Political Trouble in India, 1907–1917, marking the decade from the emer-
gence of the revolutionary terrorist movement in 1907 to its putative
conclusion in 1917. The report declared that a decade of fighting terror-
ism had been won by police and intelligence officers through careful
surveillance, multi-sited investigation, and the use of extra-legal powers
to detain those suspected of sedition. This first report was followed by a
half-dozen others, including the publication of the Rowlatt Committee
Report, weekly and annual reports from 1920 through the 1930s, and
finally, a second version of Political Trouble in India, in 1937.
By the later reports, there was an established sequence of acts that was
attributed to the development of the revolutionary terrorist movements of
the early twentieth century: the 1872 assassination of Lord Mayo at the
Andaman Islands by a political prisoner; the 1897 assassination of
Lieutenant Rand, the plague commissioner in Pune by the Chapekar
brothers, who had been inspired by Tilak, a visible and voluble Indian
nationalist. The 1905 victory of the Japanese over the Russians was often
noted as an inspiration to the revolutionaries who applauded the success of
an Asian power over a European one. Although the histories were careful to
distinguish the differences between different regions of India – Madras
seemed to be calm, while Bengal, Maharashtra, and Punjab were always in
turmoil – the collection of information into these historical compendium
made the crisis of counterinsurgency appear as a violent and coordinated

32
On repetition as a way of producing or disrupting historical “facts,” see Edward Said, The
World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), pp. 111 25; Stoler,
Along the Archival Grain, p. 20 and p. 142.
33
J. C. Ker, Political Trouble in India, 1907 1917 (original published by the Government of
India, 1917; Delhi: Oriental Publishers, 1973, reprint), foreword.
 The Rowlatt Commission’s Report 37

conspiracy across the different regions and provinces against British

rule, one that would have to be pacified before the British could hand
over the reins of power to moderate political forces and leave India.
Although the repetition of these reports bordered on plagiarism, the
invocation of the same sequence of historical events made the causes
and effects of revolutionary terrorism clear from a colonial perspective –
when the government removed repressive tactics, revolutionary terror-
ism thrived.
Ker’s Political Trouble in India, 1907–1917 laid the groundwork for the
ways in which officials would use the history of terrorism to make argu-
ments about how it could be contained. Ker began his career in the capital
of British India in Bengal as the personal assistant to the director of the
Criminal Intelligence Department in 1907 and rose to becoming one of
the first experts on terrorism in Bengal. A member of the Indian Civil
Service, Ker had been trained a mathematician and was a fellow of
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge; he left this position at the age
of 23 to go to India.34 Ker went on to become Director of Criminal
Intelligence, generating weekly reports for officials in India and Britain,
by drawing from surveillance and history sheets of those who were under
suspicion and the reports of the provincial officials who monitored local
revolutionary and politically suspicious activities. In his first few pages, he
made his historical method clear: he called his book a “connected
account” that synthesized the many records that had been kept by his
office in the first decade of its existence. He specified that his account
could not be comprehensive – “It would be impossible to follow the
ramifications of every conspiracy in detail” – but he tried to explain the
reasons they had been included in his report.35
Political Trouble spanned over 500 pages, beginning with an account of
India in 1907 and ending with chapters such as a “Who’s Who,” of
important “political agitators,” a chronology that listed all of the key
events and crimes that might be categorized as terrorism, and an appendix
that listed the compilations of “history sheets” of important suspects that
had been kept by the Criminal Intelligence Division. In the appendix,
important historical events in the history of Indian terrorism range from a
Coronation tree being sawed in half in the Central Provinces to the
murder of Colonel William Curzon Wyllie, a high-ranking official, in
London in 1909. Each event was classified, either as “political dacoity”
or bomb-related action, and the passage of important legislative

34
Richard Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of
the Indian Empire (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1995), p. 68.
35
Ker, Political Trouble, pp. 1 2.
38 The Reforms of 1919

information was listed in order that readers might link the legislation with
certain outcomes. Ker’s account drew from earlier reports produced by
those who worked in the intelligence branch of the government, F. C.
Daly, R. H. Sneyd-Hutchinson, H. L. Salkeld, among others.36
In spite of the volume of materials produced about the history of revolu-
tionary terrorism in Bengal in the 1910s, many in the intelligence services
in India concluded, “By 1918, neither the terrorists of Bengal, nor the
Indian revolutionaries abroad appeared a threat to the Raj.”37 The pub-
lication of Ker’s volume marked 1917 as an end date for the movement,
declaring that Bengal’s terrorism was over because of the effectiveness of
detaining suspected terrorists under the terms of the Defence of India Act.
The Defence of India Act had not been initially intended to target
revolutionary terrorists. Analogous to the Defence of the Realm Act
which was used in the United Kingdom and Ireland during the war,
these were temporary pieces of emergency legislation to deal with the
extraordinary context of war and intended as a “preventive” measure that
authorized the internment and detention of those who were opposed to
Britain, particularly Germans.38 But the Defence of India Act had an
additional purpose in the Indian dominions of the British empire; it was
used to detain revolutionaries, terrorists, members of opposition political
parties, and others of suspicious political affiliation. By and large, it was
seen to be successful in suppressing revolutionary activity in Bengal and
yet, police and intelligence forces still felt weakened and pressed for legal
measures to continue surveillance and arrest of those who were involved
in revolutionary violence. With the end of the war and the end of this
legislation looming, many officials feared that there might be a resurgence
of radical political activity.
To confront what was perceived by British officials as an ongoing
problem, a commission headed by S. A. T. Rowlatt, was convened. The
members of the commission worked in the British Government in India;
they included three judges (including Rowlatt), and three members of the
Indian Civil Service.39 Because Bengal had been one of the central
36
These reports have been made publicly available and reprinted by the West Bengal State
Archives, Terrorism in Bengal, vols. I and II. F. C. Daly, “Notes on the Growth of the
Revolutionary Movement in Bengal, (1905 1911),” in vol. 1, pp. 1 216; dated August 7,
1911. H. R. Salkeld produced a four volume study of one revolutionary association, the
Dacca based Anushilan Samiti, which appears in Terrorism in Bengal, vol. II; R. H.
Sneyd Hutchinson, “Note on the Growth of the Revolutionary Movement in Bengal,
Eastern Bengal and Assam, and United Bengal,” Terrorism in Bengal, vol. III. pp. 219
349; dated May 1, 1914, it covers from 1900 to April 1, 1912.
37
Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, p. 300.
38
Agamben, State of Exception, pp. 18 19.
39
S. A. T. Rowlatt was a judge in Britain; Sir Basil Scott, the chief justice of Bombay; C. V.
Kumaraswami Sastri, a High Court Judge in Madras. The others included Verney
 The Rowlatt Commission’s Report 39

sites “seditious and anarchical crimes,” the province had assigned two
full-time civil servants from the Special Branch to gather information for
the commission’s research, which was conducted in Calcutta.40 In addi-
tion, the commission was advised by J. C. Ker, J. C. Nixon, C. Tindall,
and J. D. V. Hodge, all of the Indian Civil Service.
Much like J. C. Ker’s report, the Rowlatt report began with revolu-
tionary conspiracies in late nineteenth-century western India. Part I,
which was titled “Historical,” comprises the bulk of the text, or about
180 pages; Part II is titled “Difficulties and Suggestions,” and runs about
40 pages with a shorter appendix of judicial summaries of conspiracies
that had been prosecuted (unsuccessfully, to the mind of the Rowlatt
Committee, because so many had been overturned on appeal or resulted
in acquittals). The first 15 pages of the report constructed a lineage that
repeated what had appeared in Political Trouble. The murders of Curzon
Wyllie in London in 1909, followed by the murder of district magistrate in
Nasik in western India later that year, were seen to be part of a longer
historical progression even though the events took place oceans apart, one
in Britain and another in Maharashtra. Coincidentally, Rowlatt had been
involved in the prosecution of Curzon Wyllie’s assassin, an Indian engi-
neering student named Madanlal Dhingra.41
According to the Rowlatt Committee, the link between these different
activities in western India and in Britain was that “All the conspiracies
were Brahmin and mostly Chitpavan.”42 The chapters that followed
established the sequence of these particular events as somehow founda-
tional to the emergence of terrorism in Bengal in eastern India (which was
across the subcontinent). This series of events then became the animating
reason for the founding of the Criminal Intelligence bureaus in the early
1900s and the subsequent recommendations of the Rowlatt committee in
the 1920s. The report provided this candid assessment: “It may be true to
say that there was not one conspiracy in the sense that the individual of
one group or party could not be held legally responsible for the acts of
another group . . . But that there was one movement, promoting one
general policy of outrage and intimidation and working very largely in

Lovett, who was a member of the Board of Revenue in the United Provinces, and Provash
Chandra Mitter, a vakil (a pleader) in the High Court in Calcutta. The secretary was J. D.
V. Hodge, a member of the Indian Civil Service, stationed in Bengal.
40
Two agents from the Special Branch had been assigned to support the Rowlatt commis
sion in gathering information. P. B. Sinha, “A New Source for the History of the
Revolutionary Movement in India, 1907 1917,” Journal of Asian Studies 31.3 (1971):
151 56.
41
“Madar [sic] Lal Dhingra, Murder 19 July 1909,” Old Bailey Online, www.oldbaileyon
line.org, version 7.2 [accessed June 6, 2016].
42
Rowlatt, p. 13.
40 The Reforms of 1919

concert is, we think, perfectly clear.”43 The Rowlatt report’s history made
the argument that what might have previously been thought of as isolated
terrorist attacks should be seen as part of a larger movement.
The bulk of the Rowlatt report – over a hundred pages of the total two
hundred – were devoted to the problems faced by the British in Bengal,
the region in which the British had centralized their commercial opera-
tions in the eighteenth century and their political administration in the
nineteenth.44 As the committee noted, “The bhadralok of Bengal have
been for centuries peaceful and unwarlike, but, through the influence of
the great central city of Calcutta, were early in appreciating the advan-
tages of Western learning.”45 Drawing from the language of the “unwar-
like” Bengali elite, as a colonial official had done in 1913, the Rowlatt
report reiterated a popular stereotype to explain how unusual it was for
bhadralok to embrace violence. The report put forward a historical argu-
ment based on the progress that British colonial activity had provided,
dating to Macaulay’s wish to see Indians educated in English: increased
access to western education gave upper-caste Bengali elites an enhanced
sense of political possibility. But, as Bengali elites began to imagine social
and economic mobility, they found themselves limited by job opportu-
nities. In a narrative that would later resonate for Marxist historians of
Bengal in the postcolonial period, the report noted, “Thus as bhadralok
learned in English have become more and more numerous, a growing
number have become less and less inclined to accept the conditions of life
in which they found themselves on reaching manhood.”46 The Rowlatt
report argued that many of these educated elites were landholders who
found their lands sold off, thus, their annual income based on the rents
paid by peasant cultivators was shrinking; amid this economic squeeze
that limited social mobility – the lack of job and a decline in the worth of
their land – they turned to political radicalism.
The Rowlatt report then followed a year-by-year account of political
crimes committed in Bengal, from 1906 until 1917, which were accom-
panied by a foldout map that identified the major centers of sedition and
revolution. Following the narrative of Ker’s account from the year before,
the movement was reported to be inspired by late nineteenth-century
religious ascetics such as Rama Krishna, Swami Vivekanand, and

43
Rowlatt, p. 102. 44 Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead.
45
The language of these men as “unwarlike,” had been articulated in a previous series of
reports, APAC, L/P&J/6/1246, J & P 2198/1913, letter no. 208, dated Simla May 27,
1913, from Government of India, Home Department to Chief Secretary, Government of
Bengal.
46
Rowlatt, p. 16; Rajat Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal, 1875 1927 (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1984).
 The Rowlatt Commission’s Report 41

eventually Sri Aurobindo and propelled forward by the ill-judged decision

of the viceroy, Lord Curzon, to partition Bengal into two halves in 1905.
Although the report did not identify this fact, the brothers of Swami
Vivekanand and Sri Aurobindo, Bhupendranath Dutta and Barindra
Kumar Ghosh respectively, had been jailed for radical activities and
continued to be active in revolutionary circles well into the 1930s.47
The first partition of Bengal in 1905 provoked the swadeshi movement.
Largely nonviolent, the campaign to boycott foreign goods was supported
by groups drawn from volunteer societies, secret societies that trained in
the martial arts, and college and university groups.48 The swadeshi call to
boycott goods such as machine-made textiles, tobacco, and alcohol
became a template for Gandhi’s later movements in the 1920s and 1930s.
In words used by James Ker in Political Trouble and echoed in the
Rowlatt report, sometime around 1907, the nonviolent swadeshi turned
to “rowdyism” and gangs of elite men organized robberies to fund their
acts of political violence against high-ranking officials. The targeted offi-
cials were chosen because of their involvement in suppressing political
violence. On December 6, 1907, the Lieutenant-Governor’s train was
derailed by a bomb outside Midnapore, a district that would later become
synonymous with political violence. Perhaps most famously, in April
1908, there was an attempt on the life of Douglas Kingsford, the district
magistrate of Muzzafarpur, in which two women were mistakenly killed.
The Muzzafarpur attack became the seed for prosecuting the Alipore
Conspiracy Case, when a home in Calcutta was discovered with the
ingredients for the bombs that had killed the two women in
Muzzafarpur. The Alipore Conspiracy resulted in the conviction of 15
men, but the killing of an approver by two of the accused showed the
lengths to which revolutionary terrorists were willing to go to enforce
loyalty within the movement; a public prosecutor and a deputy super-
intendent involved in prosecuting the case were also killed by the mem-
bers of the movement.
The repeated attacks against police officials and witnesses who had
agreed to testify for the state appeared in the Rowlatt report as explana-
tions for the proposed promulgation of enhanced extra-legal procedures.
Rowlatt noted that there was a legal precedent: in December 1908, in the

47
Shukla Sanyal, Revolutionary Pamphlets, Propaganda, and Political Culture in Bengal (Delhi:
Cambridge University Press, 2014), chs. 1 2; for the influence of Swami Vivekanand and
Aurobindo, see Rajat Ray, “Moderates, Extremists, and Revolutionaries: Bengal, 1900
1908,” in Richard Sisson and Stanley Wolpert, eds., Congress and Indian Nationalism: The
Pre Independence Phase. Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press, 1988, pp. 62 89.
48
Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903 1908 (New Delhi: People’s
Publishing House, 1973).
42 The Reforms of 1919

year after the Alipore Conspiracy, the government passed the Indian
Criminal Law Amendment Act, which authorized trials without juries
but by a tribunal of three judges. The act had also allowed the banning of
certain revolutionary groups. In 1910, the government passed a censor-
ship act and a prohibition limiting the ability of “seditious” groups to
meet, both of which were targeted toward the revolutionaries and terror-
ists of Bengal. The Indian Criminal Law Amendment Act (1908) was
used with limited success in prosecuting a number of cases in Bengal, the
Dacca Conspiracy Case and the Barisal Conspiracy Case, as well as
elsewhere in India, Lahore, Benaras, and Delhi.
By 1913, there were so many attacks on police officials, government
buildings such as railway ticket and post offices, and witnesses that “It is
unnecessary to describe all the dacoities of the year in detail, since in all
respects they conformed to what had by this time become a recognized
type of crime.”49 By abandoning what was seen as needless repetition, the
logic of the Rowlatt report was that history showed a pattern of political
violence that was well established.
The shortest part of the Rowlatt report was perhaps the most conse-
quential: it ended with a recommendation that the government enact the
Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, or what became known as the
Rowlatt Act. The provisions of the Rowlatt Act were a continuation of
many provisions of the Defence of India Act of 1915, although the war
was coming to an end. In Part II, which the committee labeled “difficul-
ties and suggestions,” they recommended the extension of what they
called “extraordinary powers” in order to successfully jail those accused
of trying to bring down the British government. The report acknowledged
that measures such as Regulation III of 1818 and the Defence of India Act
in 1915 had succeeded because they resorted to measures that were not in
line with the ordinary practice of criminal law, which the revolutionary
terrorists seemed to flout more easily.50
In the process of explaining why extra-judicial measures should con-
tinue, the Rowlatt committee noted that few of these conspiracies had
been prosecuted under the ordinary criminal law, which called for certain
rules of evidence, jury trials, and the guarantee of the right of defendants
to hear charges and be present for their trials. Instead, the committee
noted that “The main reason why it has not been possible by the ordinary
machinery of the criminal law to convict and imprison on a larger scale
those guilty of outrages and so put down crime is simply want of sufficient
evidence.”51 Police in local areas were hindered by the lack of enough
investigators; the roads were often impassable in the monsoon season and

49 50 51
Rowlatt, p. 59. Rowlatt, p. 181. Rowlatt, p. 182.
 The Rowlatt Commission’s Report 43

made collecting evidence difficult; and confessions made to the police

were often disallowed as evidence. Added to these problems, witnesses
were often unreliable or reluctant to come forward for fear of recrimina-
tions. Because the trials often took years, and were well publicized, the
trials served to recruit more followers, especially if they did not result in
convictions. The report noted a grim cause-and-effect: “If they are not
convicted, the movement is not checked.”52
The final twenty pages of the report offered suggestions to the govern-
ment “to deal effectively with the difficulties that have arisen in dealing
with conspiracies,” by which they meant the inability of the government
to successfully prosecute those who had wanted to overthrow the British
government.53 Although the committee was not charged with drafting
legislation, they recommended that any changes to the law should be
enacted before the movement revived. Anticipating the need for emer-
gency regulations before there was an emergency, the Rowlatt report
noted, “The powers which we shall suggest for dealing with future emer-
gencies must be ready for use at short notice. They must therefore be on
the statute book in advance . . . To postpone legislation till the danger is
instant, is, in our view, to risk a recurrence of the history of the years
1906–1917.”54 They did not recommend a permanent extension of
emergency powers, but rather that the laws should be available in case
of emergency: “The powers involved are therefore to be dormant till the
event occurs.”55 These caveats were intended to ensure that these mea-
sures would be used for a defined period of time and could be invoked at
the discretion of the Governor-General of each province when necessary.
Among other recommendations, the Rowlatt commission argued that
seditious crimes be tried by three judges, rather than a jury. This measure
had been previously authorized by the Indian Criminal Law Amendment
Act of 1908. They also recommended that suspects should be required to
report their movements to the police, that they could be banned from
attending meetings of proscribed political groups, write for a journal, or to
be complicit in disseminating seditious materials. Among the more
extreme measures proposed by the committee was that the executive
arm of the government could arrest, search, and confine in “non-penal
custody,” anyone they suspected of seditious activity against the govern-
ment. The principles behind the Rowlatt report allowed the executive
branch of government to detain suspected revolutionaries and terrorists
without charging them through the ordinary criminal code – the Indian
Penal Code – but rather through the extra-judicial provisions that were
inspired by the Defence of India Act of 1915.

52 53 54 55
Rowlatt, p. 192. Rowlatt, p. 195. Rowlatt, p. 200. Rowlatt, p. 209.
44 The Reforms of 1919

Anticipating dissent, the Rowlatt Commission defended the detention

of suspected revolutionary terrorists. The report referred to a special
report that was issued by Justices Beachcroft and Chandavarkar titled
“The situation of the Bengal Detenus under the Defence of India Act and
Regulation III of 1818.” Commissioned by the Government of Bengal in
the summer of 1918 to answer its critics who were opposed to the large-
scale detention of political activists during the war, the two judges inves-
tigated the detention of over 800 men in Bengal whose political activism
was seen to be subversive and necessitated detention. Of the 806, 702
were detained under the Defence of India, 100 under Regulation III of
1818, and 4 under the restrictions to limit the movement of subversives
under the Ingress into India Act. The judges asked for written representa-
tions from each person and only 167 detainees responded. Nonetheless,
based on written evidence that had been collected by the Bengal police,
Beachcroft and Chandavarkar determined that all but 6 of the detainees
who remained in detention in August 1918 remained a threat to public
safety.56 These findings were hailed by Bengal’s many lawyers as proof
that the detentions remained unlawful; colonial officials in government,
including those writing the Rowlatt report, used this report to demon-
strate that rule of law had been upheld, even if the detainees had never
been charged of any crimes or tried in court.
In March 1919, the legislation that emerged from suggestions in the
Rowlatt report was promulgated by the Government of India. The report
was quickly equated with the exercise of arbitrary martial law by Indian
nationalists, particularly Gandhi, who led a day-long hartal, or work
stoppage, to show that he could mobilize a national protest. Ironically,
although the legislation targeted those who identified with political vio-
lence, the idea that the colonial government could suspend habeas corpus
galvanized the nonviolent movement. A week later, a group of armed
military led by General Reginald Dyer fired on and killed several hundred
unarmed civilians when they congregated at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar.
Martial law was declared in the Punjab, but under provincial legislation,
and not under the central legislation proposed by Rowlatt.
Ultimately, the legislation recommended by the Rowlatt report was
never enforced on a national level and the legislation was repealed quietly
in September 1921. By then, emergency legislation such as the Defence
of India Act had expired and other repressive measures – the Indian
Press Act of 1910, and the Seditious Meetings Acts of 1908 – were not
being enforced. At the end of 1919, those detained under various

56
APAC, L/P&J/6/1675, Bengal Detenus Committee Report on Detenus and Internees in
Bengal, file 3021.
 Indian Jails Committee 45

emergency powers were released under the terms of a royal amnesty.

By 1920, what the British called the “terrorist threat,” seemed to have
subsided, especially because revolutionary groups were believed to have
joined Gandhi’s Congress party and appeared to be following the cam-
paign of nonviolence.
Although the recommendations of the Rowlatt Commission were not
adopted and the protests that it generated were seen as a failure for the
colonial government, the historical arguments mobilized in the 200-page
report documented a pattern that colonial officials would draw from to
argue throughout the 1920s and 1930s about the necessity of repressive
legislation to combat terrorism.

Indian Jails Committee: Reforms for Political Prisoners

Simultaneous with the Rowlatt commission’s recommendations were the
recommendations of another committee that was enjoined by the govern-
ment to reform the status of prisoners, and in particular, those who had
been identified as threats to the security of the state. When the Report of
the Indian Jails Committee was presented to Parliament in 1921, it
comprised 24 chapters that began with a historical survey about prisons,
jails, and reform across the British empire – Hong Kong, Burma,
Malaya – and other parts of the world – Japan, the Philippines, England,
France, and Germany. Based on both world historical and ethnographic
research, the report drew from a global language of prison reform and
offered some suggestions with the goal that rehabilitation was a central
concern. Key among these suggestions was that a better system of classifi-
cation was needed so that prisoners who were likely to be reformed could
be targeted early, treated according to their status, and ultimately released
into the general population.
The report noted that there were two main groups: “habitual convict
and non-habitual convict,” and that the two groups ought to be incarcer-
ated separately. Habitual or “ordinary criminals” were seen to be those
whose livelihoods depended on crime, members of the criminal castes
and tribes, and those who would be harder to reform. Among the
“non-habitual convicts,” were the “well-to-do criminals,” many of
whom comprised “persons of good social status.”57 These distinctions
mapped onto the prisons’ regime, and those who were more respectable
were seen to be deserving of special dispensations on the question of
clothing, diet, and the kind of labor they could be expected to perform.58

57
APAC, L/PARL/2/407, Report of the Indian Jails Committee, 1919 1920, p. 90.
58
These provisions were spelled out in the Prisons Act (1894), section 60.
46 The Reforms of 1919

Informants who were interviewed for the report claimed another

category – the “political prisoners” – whose crimes were not motivated
by criminal ends, but by patriotism. The members of the Indian Jails
Committee objected to the idea of the designation of the political
prisoner, noting that it would be difficult to decide whether a criminal
act – such as murder, attempted murder, or armed assault – that was
motivated by politics was distinct from criminal acts that lacked an
explicit political demand. Yet, that the term appeared in the report
suggests that it was a salient category for those in the jails and those
hoping to reform the jails system.59 Supporters of this designation noted
that the political prisoner was not a habitual convict and should be treated
with respect because of their status and patriotism; repeatedly, through-
out the period of the committee’s inquiry and afterward, Indian politi-
cians would argue that crimes committed by political prisoners would
cease if the cause of their political opposition – the continued British
occupation of India – ended.
As the population of those who might be considered political prisoners
expanded through the 1920s and 1930s, which were the most active
phases of the Indian nationalist movement, the colonial state was repeat-
edly confronted with the question of designating the political prisoner as a
distinct type of incarcerated person. In the case of revolutionary terrorists,
among the key concerns was whether the government’s recognition of
political prisoners would be seen as legitimizing violence against the state.
For this reason, the government was reluctant to use the term “political
prisoner” although it agreed to make special provisions for those who
were understood to be “non-habitual” criminals. Many of the so-called
non-habitual criminals had not been convicted of crimes, but were being
held on suspicion of sedition, rendering their status legally anomalous.
Officials also hoped that special treatment (although not a designation)
would produce reformed prisoners who could one day become model
citizens. Thus, the government made provisions that included special
diets, the right to wear one’s own clothing, the right to read, to correspond
with relatives, and, eventually, the guarantee of a bar of Lifebuoy soap to
be supplied monthly for bathing.60
Shortly after the 1921 Jails Report was published, the Government of
India began a series of correspondence with local and provincial govern-
ments to determine how each province dealt with prisoners who were in

59
Ujjwal Singh, Political Prisoners in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 9 22;
Indian Jails Committee, p. 91.
60
NAI, Home Political File 43/18/40, “Treatment of Detenues and Court Martial
Prisoners in the Cellular Jail, Port Blair,” dated 1940.
 Indian Jails Committee 47

jail because of their political activities and to attempt to homogenize the

rules across the different British dominions. There were vociferous
debates within the Legislative Assembly, between Indian representatives
and colonial officials. Eventually the colonial government convened a
conference of relevant officials in Simla in July 1922 to determine a
response to the question that was framed as the “Treatment of Political
Prisoners.” The presumption behind all of these discussions was that
those who were in jail for political reasons were middle-class and well-
educated, rather than uneducated or members of lower castes and classes.
In what represented a peculiar irony, the colonial government was keen to
treat political prisoners in a way that was commensurate with their social
status, which indirectly provided legal recognition that they were being
jailed for political protest rather than what would be considered “ordin-
ary” criminal acts that could be prosecuted by ordinary laws.61
Almost all of the colonial officials polled were “opposed to any prefer-
ential treatment being accorded to political prisoners, though they recog-
nized that some intermediate form of punishment between ‘simple’ and
‘rigorous’ was desirable.”62 Although there would be no recognition of
the political prisoner, perhaps these prisoners could have the requirement
to perform labor that was not “arduous.”63 Among the suggested forms of
labor for gentlemanly terrorists were gardening or envelope making, but
that “Strict instructions have been issued that political or special class
prisoners of any kind are under no circumstances to be employed on any
form of office or clerical labour” lest they use these supplies to produce
seditious material.64
In the correspondence between officials at the provincial level and
those at the central level, liberal officials who hoped to devolve political
authority to Indians placed some hope in the possible reform of those in
jail for protesting the government. Montagu, the secretary of state, argued
with officials both at the level of the central government and at the
provinces that political prisoners should be recognized as distinctive:
“there are cases in which men who suffer ‘for conscience sake’ should

61
APAC, L/P&J/6/1611, “Treatment of Prisoners Convicted of Political Offences,” J&P
4976/22, “Letter from Secretary of Government of India to All Local Governments,
Dated Simla, 23 August, 1922.” See also Ujjwal Singh, Political Prisoners, pp. 94 106;
Sherman, State Violence, pp. 47 49.
62
NAI, Home Political File 201/I/1921, serial no. 1.
63
NAI, Home Political File 201/I/1921, serial no. 2, “Letter from C.W. Gwynne,
Government of India, Home Department to Governments of Bombay, Bengal, United
Provinces, and Punjab, 22 August 1921.”
64
NAI, Home Political File 201/I/1921, serial no. 6, “Letter from W.S. Hopkyns, Secretary
to the Government of Bengal to Secretary of Government of India, Home Department,
Dated 6 October 1921.”
48 The Reforms of 1919

not be treated as ordinary criminals.”65 Montagu debated Chelmsford,

the Viceroy, over this issue:
. . . what I am very much concerned with is the fact that the world should think that
we allow political leaders to undergo rigorous imprisonment . . . I would repeat
that sooner or later there must be peace restored between the Government of
India and these men . . . Could they not be treated with courtesy and dignity as the
honourable but dangerous enemies of Government? Should we not gain more
than we lose by letting it be known that we treat these political prisoners with
courtesy and recognition of the sincerity of their mistaken and dangerous motives
rather than as jail birds.66

The tension between the “honourable but dangerous enemies of

Government,” encapsulated the tensions between Indian politicians,
colonial officials at the provincial level, and central government officials.
Secretary of State Montagu, who represented the British government’s
position to the colonial government, recognized that incarcerating Indian
political activists and leaders seemed antithetical to the liberal goals of the
colonial government; officials in India, such as the Viceroy, were not
completely persuaded. As the violence escalated, officials felt more keenly
that law and order within India was at risk.
Indian politicians felt that distinctions between the political prisoners
and others should be maintained. Provincial assemblies, newly infused
with more Indian representatives by the terms of the Government of India
Act of 1919, were among the most vocal advocates of making distinctions
between those who were in jail for political reasons and those who were in
jail for common crimes. Mian Beli Ram, spoke forcefully in the Punjab
Legislative Council, “. . . prisoners should not be mixed up with ordinary
culprits because in their case the motives are very different from those of
ordinary prisoners. They are not low class people actuated with the love of
crime . . . They generally belong to that class which is known as the
patriots . . ..”67 Pandit Nilakantha Das of Bengal demanded that political
prisoners “be classed distinctly and separately from other prisoners and

65
NAI, Home Political File 201/VI/1922, serial nos. 1 54, “Letter from Wm. Hailey,
Government of Bengal to S.P. Donnell, Secretary of Government of India, Home
Department, Dated 30 December 1921,” pp. 9 10. See also APAC, L/P&J/6/1611,
“Treatment of Prisoners Convicted of Political Offences,” J&P 4799/19, “Letter from
Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State, India Office, London to Governor General of India
in Council, Dated 11 September 1919.”
66
APAC, L/P&J/6/1611, “Treatment of Prisoners Convicted of Political Offences,” J&P
1634/1922, “Telegram from Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State, India Office, London
to Governor General of India in Council, Dated 16 December 1921.”
67
APAC, L/P&J/6/1611, “Treatment of Prisoners Convicted of Political Offences,” J&P
2122/23, “Punjab Legislative Council Debates, Dated 27 February 1923.”
 Indian Jails Committee 49

should receive treatment in keeping with their honour and respectability,”

thus allowed to read books and newspapers.68
In a report that responded to the Jails Committee’s recommendations,
those considered politically moderate in the Indian National Congress,
B. N. Sharma, M. Shafi, and Tej Bahadur Sapru noted that they would
“refrain from going into the larger issue relating to the classification of
prisoners . . .” but that they hoped that the government would consider
using the “Irish rules,” and regard political crime as a misdemeanor rather
than a capital crime.69 Sharma, Shafi, and Sapru noted that anyone
convicted of murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, wrongful assault,
robbery, extortion, rioting, or possession of arms or ammunition would
be considered a felon, regardless of their social status. But they hoped that
the government understood that it would “stand to gain much and not to
lose anything if, when these prisoners come out, they feel that they were
not unnecessarily humiliated or put to avoidable discomfort.”70
Colonial officials from the provinces that had large numbers of political
prisoners – Bengal, United Provinces, Punjab, and Central Provinces –
refused to label the political prisoner as distinct from other prisoners, but
made provisions commensurate to these prisoners’ social status. Most
local officials ensured that these prisoners were allowed their own clothes,
food, and books; if they could afford it, these prisoners could hire convicts
to serve as personal servants to perform menial chores such as laundry.
Throughout the process of working out how to treat this new group of
prisoners, some officials in the administration such as William Vincent of
the Home Department resisted these accommodations and noted that
“In Bengal, they live in absolute comfort, and are subject to no discipline,
playing games, acting plays, reading books all day and having their food
whenever they like.”71
When the “Rules for the treatment of special class prisoners,” was
published in pamphlet form in 1923, “special-class prisoner” denoted
the political prisoner and the rules spelled out the modifications of the
Indian Prisons Act of 1894 which had detailed how prisoners should be
treated. Among the many provisions that were agreed to – in consultation

68
NAI, Home Political File 238/1925, “Resolution on 16 January 1925 by Pandit
Nilakantha Das.”
69
NAI, Home Political File 201/VI/1922, serial nos. 1 54, pp. 16 19, “Report Prepared by
B.N. Sharma, M. Shafi, and T.B. Sapru on the Order of the Executive Council to
Formulate Recommendations, Undated.”
70
NAI, Home Political File 201/VI/1922, serial nos. 1 54, pp. 23 24, “Letter T.B. Sapru,
Dated 13 March 1922.”
71
NAI, Home Political File 201/VI/1922, serial nos. 1 54, “Telegram to Secretary of State,
from Wm. Vincent, Secretary of Government of India, Home Department, Dated 21
February 1922.”
50 The Reforms of 1919

with British officials at all levels of the colonial government, Indian

politicians, and others who sent petitions and letters – were that prisoners
of “special class” could import their own food to supplement the prison
diet, they could wear their own clothing as long as it did not represent a
political symbol (the Gandhi cap was a particular concern), they would be
kept separate from the other prisoners, they would have the right to
separate latrines, they would be allowed one monthly visit from a family
member, and the right to write and receive a letter a month.72 In recogni-
tion of their special status, these prisoners would be expected to stand, but
not salute (“raise the hands so as to display the palms”), in the presence of
jail authorities such as the Superintendent, Deputy or Assistant Jailer, or
medical officers and visitors. Additionally, these prisoners “should not be
called on to perform menial duties if he is willing to pay for the services of
one other prisoner to serve him.”73 In spite of its reluctance to label
political prisoners as such, the colonial government, prodded by protests
made by some Indian politicians and the encouragement of high-ranking
liberal officials such as Edwin Montagu, made a series of distinctions
about the conditions of incarceration.
The question of how to categorize “political prisoners” would become a
much larger issue in the years after these guidelines were issued. Largely
because of the growth of the Gandhian Non-Cooperation Movement in the
1920s, which produced a larger number of Indian politicians who were
willing to go to jail, the treatment of “non-habitual prisoners” became a
central concern for colonial authorities in Bengal and across India.74
Echoing Montagu’s concern that “sooner or later there must be peace
restored between the Government of India and these men,” the govern-
ment went to significant lengths to make special provisions for the jailing
and detaining of those they considered political opponents, particularly
once new legislation was introduced that permitted the government to
detain suspected terrorists and keep them under detention without char-
ging them of particular crimes. I return to this problem in Chapter 3.

The Royal Amnesty

In the final section of this chapter, I want to examine a lesser-known
political event of 1919, which was the royal amnesty of political

72
APAC, L/P&J/6/1611, “Treatment of Prisoners Convicted of Political Offences,” J&P
504/1923, “Rules of the Treatment of Special Class Prisoners.”
73
APAC, L/P&J/6/1611, “Treatment of Prisoners Convicted of Political Offences,” J&P
4976/1922, “Letter from Secretary of Government of India to All Local Governments,
Dated Simla 17 June 1922.”
74
Ujjwal Singh, Political Prisoners, ch. 3.
 The Royal Amnesty 51

prisoners and revolutionary terrorists that accompanied the release of

the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms in December. This reform offered –
at least on the surface – a kind of solution to how the colonial state
attempted to treat those who had been imprisoned for political offenses
but might be persuaded to support the liberal reforms promoted by the
Montagu–Chelmsford reforms.75 While it might seem ironic to have a
British monarch involved in a process of constitutional reform in India,
the proclamation re-established the presumed connection between the
King (a sovereign) and his subjects in India, particularly those who had
been agitating for the right to represent themselves. Stemming from a
precedent set from the Queen’s proclamation in 1858, a seemingly archaic
connection between a monarch and his putative subjects endured in spite
of the reforms to expand the role of the constitution in a parliamentary
government.
In December 1919, shortly after the colonial government abandoned
the Rowlatt Act and decided to close the jail at the Andaman Islands, the
King issued a proclamation that had been written with the support of the
secretary of state for India, Edwin Montagu. The proclamation granted a
royal amnesty to those who had been jailed or detained for political crimes
and commuted the sentences of those who had less than a year to serve.
Although many of these political prisoners had been jailed for plotting the
violent overthrow of the colonial government, the government argued
that this group of men might be drawn into a new political formation, one
whose foundations included the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms. The
royal amnesty, issued by King George V, called for the immediate release
of political prisoners who had been detained or convicted and remained in
British jails under the Seditious Meetings Act, the Indian Press Act, the
Defence of India Act, Regulation III of 1818, and those convicted of
sections 121A, 124A, and 153A of the Indian Penal Code, and “other
similar enactments or ordinances.”76 In spite of the findings of the
Beachcroft–Chandavarkar report which had shown that these men had
been rightly detained, the amnesty authorized the release of all prisoners
who had been detained during 1919 under the nationalist agitations
against the government that year and remitted the sentences of those in
jails for political crimes committed before and during the war.

75
Sherman, State Violence, pp. 21 22.
76
L/PO/6/5, “Government of India Act 1919 and Amnesty,” Telegram from Secretary of
State to Viceroy, November 25, 1919, p. 112. The phrase was written by Montagu. See
also, WBSA, Home Political File 409/19 (1 24), Grant of Clemency to Political
Prisoners on the Occasion of Passing of Government of India Bill, Serial no. 1,
Telegram from Home Department to Bengal Home Political File December 4, 1919.
52 The Reforms of 1919

The language of the proclamation was remarkable in its scope: it

provided a historical narrative of the progress of liberal and representative
institutions in the governance of British India and offered a vision of a
political amnesty that promised to render the most militant opponents of
the colonial government into participants of the broader constitutional
reforms that the colonial government had introduced that year. It also
promised the king’s loyalty to the Chamber of Princes, who represented
the 500 areas that were not under direct British rule, thus recognizing and
guaranteeing the sovereign power of the royal states within India, who
were not included in the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms. The King’s
proclamation began with a brief history of legislative acts promulgated
in the British Parliament that directly dealt with Indian affairs: acts
promulgated in 1773, 1784, 1833, 1858, 1861, and 1909 provided a
series of legislation that were “for the better government of India and
the greater happiness of its people.” The particular legislation from 1861
and 1909 were noted because they “sowed the seed for representative
institutions,” something that the 1919 act would bring to fruition. Based
on India and Britain’s longstanding relationship of “affection and devo-
tion,” the King noted that “the Parliament and the people of this realm
and My officers in India have been equally zealous for the moral and
material advancement of India.” With this grand and ambitious begin-
ning, the King noted his approval of Indians’ growing demands for
representative institutions, and agreed that the “progress of a country
cannot be consummated – the right of its people to direct its affairs and
safeguards its interests.” He briefly acknowledged that Indians had long
been clamoring for political reforms, applauding those who had pursued
these reforms through “constitutional channels,” rather than through
“acts of violence committed under the guise of patriotism.” In spite of
Indians’ demands for a change in the style of governance, the King’s
proclamation noted the British origins of good government, “In truth
the desire after political responsibility has its source at the very root of the
British connection with India.”
The king’s brief history lesson sketched a British history of India that
was filled with liberal progress toward democratic institutions. The king
warned that in the future, “the path will not be easy,” and offered advice
to those who were elected to “face responsibility,” and “sacrifice much for
the common interest of the State,” in order to “maintain the standards of
a just and generous government.” After a brief instructional passage to
Indians about how self-representative institutions relied on “honest
work,” “mutual respect,” and “perseverance and forbearance,” para-
graph 6 explained why it was important for the crown to offer an amnesty
to those who had been convicted of political crimes. It is worth quoting
 The Royal Amnesty 53

this passage at length to animate the liberal aspirations that guided this
proclamation:
It is my earnest desire at this time that, so far as possible, all traces of bitterness
between My people and those who have been responsible for My government
should be obliterated. Let those who, in their eagerness for political progress, have
broken the law in the past respect it in the future. Let it become possible for those
who are charged with the maintenance of peaceful and orderly government to
forget the extravagances which they have had to curb. A new era is opening. Let it
begin with a common determination among My people and My officers to work
together for a common purpose. I therefore direct my Viceroy to exercise, in My
name and on My behalf, My Royal clemency in the case of political offenders, save
those who have directly taken part in the murder of Our subjects, to the widest
extent which in his judgment is compatible with the public safety, and to extend it
to persons suffering restraint or held to security for offences against the state
under any special or emergent measures for the maintenance of order, or under
any exceptional powers employed for that purpose by the executive government. I
trust that this leniency will be justified by the future conduct of those whom it
benefits, and that their conduct will render it unnecessary to enforce the law
against them hereafter.77
The amnesty was issued over the objections of the Viceroy of India,
Lord Chelmsford, who was repeatedly advised by local authorities from
Punjab to Madras that the release of those convicted under various
political crimes would pose a serious threat to the security of the state
and would create more unrest rather than defuse it.78 As the viceroy
measured the various positions, he noted, “The risk of release on the
one hand is the danger . . . [of] the gradual reformation for revolutionary
organization. The risk on the other hand of continued detention is . . . the
creation of bitterness and wide-spread agitation, which might be fatal to
authority of Government.”79 Officials in Punjab, in particular, made clear
that the inquiry into the April 1919 disturbances and the Jallianwala Bagh
massacre should be concluded before any political prisoners were
released.80
Montagu, the secretary of state, was not to be dissuaded and issued a
strongly worded rebuke that was directed at local authorities who were
attempting to dilute the general amnesty with “exceptions”: “I feel very
strongly that this amnesty is only worth granting if we give it in a spirit of

77
APAC, L/PO/6/5, “Government of India Act 1919 and Amnesty,” pp. 1 30.
78
APAC, L/PO/6/5, “Government of India Act 1919 and Amnesty,” Telegram from
Viceroy to Secretary of State, December 14, 1919, pp. 101 2.
79
APAC, L/P&J/6/1643, J&P 560/20, Memo from Viceroy to the India Office, dated
January 25, 1920.
80
The Hunter Commission report to investigate the actions of Reginald Dyer at Jallianwala
Bagh were released in March, 1920; see Sayer, pp. 147 49; Sherman, pp. 20 22.
54 The Reforms of 1919

most liberal confidence. And I feel that we ought to give it in that spirit
and make a supreme effort to convince India by our sincere desire to bury
the past.”81 As he reiterated the liberal aspirations of the amnesty,
Montagu made the case that a general amnesty would promote the
success of the Government of India’s reforms.82 It would fulfill the con-
ditions of bringing Indians into government, something that British
government had committed itself to in constructing the reforms; indeed,
political prisoners such as Annie Besant had been released from intern-
ment under the Defence of India Act as early as 1917 in order to show the
good faith of the government in negotiating with dissidents.83 His state-
ments, both in public and in private, illuminated his belief in a liberal
approach that would remake “gentlemanly terrorists” into gentleman
who might take part in a new structure of governance for India; he argued
that the “King’s policy of a clean slate,” would enable such a political
reformation.84 In any case, the terms of the amnesty gave local authorities
sufficient grounds for restraining the small number of figures they felt
were a serious threat.
Against their considered judgment, officials from the province of
Bengal released nearly 60 men who had been members of revolutionary
terrorist groups in 1920 and 1921; all were high-caste, educated, and had
been either convicted or detained for their involvement in secret, under-
ground networks, but most had not themselves pulled any triggers, set off
any bombs, or assassinated any officials.85 Bengal’s officials argued they
were upholding the spirit of the general amnesty, as Montagu had direc-
ted, but they registered their “gravest misgivings,” and “want to have it
placed on record that they have done so [released these detainees] under

81
APAC, L/PO/6/5, “Government of India Act 1919 and Amnesty,” Telegram from
Secretary of State to Viceroy, December 15, 1919, p. 98.
82
WBSA, Home Political File 409/19 (1 24), Grant of Clemency to Political Prisoners on
the Occasion of Passing of Government of India Bill, Serial no. 1, Telegram from Home
Department to Bengal Home Political File December 4, 1919.
83
NAI, Home Political File 1917 Sept. 14 Part A; Announcement by Secretary of State
for India Re: An Amnesty to Certain Political Offenders, Appendix A, Gazette of India,
August 10, 1917.
84
APAC, L/PO/6/5, “Government of India Act 1919 and Amnesty,” Telegram from
Secretary of State to Viceroy, December 26, 1919, p. 78; see also Sherman, p. 21, citing
APAC, Mss Eur D/523/9, letter from Chelmsford to Montagu, July 25, 1919.
85
APAC, L/P&J/6/1743, Release of Bengal Prisoners under the Amnesty of 1919, J&P 98/
20; for a detailed analysis of each prisoner, their alleged crime, and the statutes under
which they were detained, see NAI, Home Political File Poll May 416 470, Part A,
“Release under the Amnesty Announced in the Royal Proclamation under Bengal
Regulation III of 1818; The Ingress into India Ordinance of 1915; And the Defence of
India Act 1915; Also, Those Convicted of Offences under Section 121 A and Cognate
Offences of the Indian Penal Code.”
 The Royal Amnesty 55

force.”86 Montagu continued to insist that these were exactly the men
whose trust could be earned by an amnesty and brushed off these
anxieties.87
Even if the numbers of crimes, casualties, and detainees in Bengal were
roughly equivalent with those from other regions, particularly Punjab,
which had been the site of protests in the aftermath of the Jallianwala
Bagh massacre, Bengal’s officials felt they faced a particularly acute crisis
from the amnesty: if they kept some political dissidents in jail, it might
unleash protests and “wide-spread agitation,” but releasing them was
sure to result in a renewed campaign of terrorism.88 As one of Bengal’s
top officials predicted, “. . . the result will be a revival of agitations against
the policy of extra-judicial restraint and a widespread and virulent attack
upon Government, who will be represented as whittling down the Royal
boon.”89
In spite of their grave misgivings about the royal amnesty and releasing
those who had a record of violent insurgence against the government,
between 1920 and 1921, the Bengal government under the governor, the
Earl of Ronaldshay, released nearly all prisoners and detainees who had
been in British jails and prisons for political crimes under various statutes.
Called alternately “state prisoners,” if they were detained under Regulation
III of 1818, or “detenus,” if they were held under the Defence of India Act,
the amnesty marked the end of their detention. The amnesty reduced the
sentences of political convicts whose sentences were near completion,
which meant that those who had been convicted of political crimes against
the state, such as publishing or distributing seditious texts, involved in
conspiracies against the government or its officials, or organizing meetings
for anti-government activities were released as well.
In anticipation of a new chapter in politics in India, in 1921, the
Government of India also decided to close the Cellular Jail at the
Andaman Islands, which had been built and used to incarcerate India’s
worst political offenders. Among the prisoners who had been jailed there
included those convicted of some of the most widespread criminal con-
spiracies of the 1900s and 1910s.

86
APAC, L/PO/6/5, “Government of India Act 1919 and Amnesty,” Telegram from
Viceroy to Home Department, Delhi, January 4, 1920, pp. 74 75.
87
APAC, L/PO/6/5, “Government of India Act 1919 and Amnesty,” Telegram from
Secretary of State to Viceroy, January 6, 1920, pp. 69 71.
88
APAC, L/P&J/6/1743, Release of Bengal Prisoners under the Amnesty of 1919, J&P 560/
20 from Viceroy, Home Department, to India Office, London, Dated January 25, 1920.
89
WBSA, Home Political File 409/19 (1 24), Grant of Clemency to Political Prisoners on
the Occasion of Passing of Government of India Bill, Serial 6, Letter no. 14779P,
Calcutta, December 20, 1919, from H. L. Stephenson, Chief Secretary to
Government of Bengal, to Secretary of Government of India, Home Department.
56 The Reforms of 1919

Conclusion
These small and large historical events that occurred in the immediate
aftermath of the First World War – the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms,
the Rowlatt Act, the Jails Commission’s reforms, and the royal amnesty –
are constitutive of one another, intricately linked by the exigencies of
political reform that was carefully managed by colonial officials and
focused on those who had undertaken acts of political violence. The
revolutionary terrorist movement put a great deal of pressure on the
colonial state as it attempted to reform the structure of governing India.
In the process of introducing constitutional reforms, the colonial govern-
ment was compelled to defuse radical and militant activity that had been
thriving for over a decade, particularly among a group who had been
identified as gentlemanly terrorists, or in Montagu’s words, “honourable
but dangerous enemies of the Government.” The tensions between the
goals of British officials in London, such as Montagu, Chelmsford in
Delhi, and provincial officers in Bengal animated a bureaucratic, admin-
istrative, and legal set of problems that was central to governing a colonial
territory that was putatively governed by rule of law and simultaneously
confronted by the threat of campaigns of political violence. In the discus-
sions that spanned the years of 1919 to 1921, where this chapter ends,
liberal ideals of rule of law and prisoner reform laid the foundations of
Britain and India’s interwar relationship. The realities faced by local
officials, who were often resistant to adopting legislation or policies that
would embolden revolutionary terrorists, were repeatedly challenged by
reform-minded officials at higher levels who felt Indian radicals, mili-
tants, and revolutionaries could eventually be persuaded to convert to the
goals of civic and liberal government.
Disagreements between colonial officials at different levels show how
conflicts about how to suppress violent acts of political dissidence were
debated on the grounds of laws and legislation that were ratified by
emergent representative institutions. Embedded within this moment –
maintaining repressive laws that had the logic of rule law behind them
while promoting political reforms – was a crisis of sovereignty and poli-
tical legitimacy in the aftermath of the war. Throughout the conversations
and discussions behind the plight of the detainees, the government stood
behind the legality of the Rowlatt Act and the wisdom of granting amnesty
to political prisoners (allowing for the possibility that they might be
detained again). Throughout, Indian nationalists voiced in their objections
to the Rowlatt bills and provincial colonial officials stated strong opposition
to the royal amnesty. By framing the Rowlatt Act as they did, the colonial
government voiced a clear commitment to making the detention of
 Conclusion 57

suspected revolutionaries and terrorists appear legal because it was pro-

duced through constitutional channels and in consultation with officials
and legislators. The appearance of bureaucratic transparency – sustained
by the convening of commissions, investigations, and reports – enabled the
colonial government to explain how it was promoting constitutional reform
all while enacting emergency legislation.
Reports such as those by the Rowlatt commission, the Beachcroft–
Chandavarkar inquiry, the Hunter commission on the Punjab distur-
bances, and the Indian Jails Commission repeatedly investigated the
enforcement of laws having to do with Indian affairs and showed how
committed the government was to thorough inquiry with legality in mind.
As Montagu noted in a debate in the House of Commons, the Rowlatt
Act and other similar legislation had passed through many channels of
discussion, even though the government could have issued an executive
ordinance in its place.90 Indeed, in response to opposition by elected
Indians, the Government abandoned the idea of making the Rowlatt
legislation permanent; instead, it was adopted for a three-year period
and only in districts where there was a defined threat of revolutionary
activity. In the end, because of mass protests, the Rowlatt Act was never
enforced.
Yet, Montagu defended the legislation: although a suspect could be
detained indefinitely, the government had to convene a three-member
committee to ensure that there was a just cause for detention. This
committee could be understood in a benign and liberal spirit: “It is
more like a body of schoolmasters investigating trouble in a school, a
committee of a club using its friendly services for the purposes of inquiry;
some body to explore all matters, some body to see that injustice is not
done, some body to be sure that all the facts are investigated.”91 The
detention of suspects was authorized through legal measures that sub-
jected political dissidents to more state intervention, subverting the accu-
sation that these measures were arbitrary or authoritarian. To their critics,
Montagu and other British officials noted that the government already
had the mechanism to detain those suspected of sedition – Regulation III
of 1818 – but that the Rowlatt provisions gave more legal rights to the
detainee by creating oversight for the government’s actions.

90
Statement of Montagu, Secretary of State for India, Hansard, House of Commons Deb 22
May 1919 vol 116 cc621 713. While acknowledging the unrest and opposition to the
Rowlatt Act, Montagu defended the work of the Rowlatt Committee, noting that it was a
commission of legal thinkers, p. 629: “Our anxiety was to try to rely entirely upon legal
processes rather than upon executive action.”
91
Statement of Montagu, Secretary of State for India, Hansard, House of Commons Deb 22
May 1919 vol 116 cc621 713.
58 The Reforms of 1919

In order for India to develop as a nation, which was a stated goal behind
the constitutional reforms, the government needed to protect the political
arena from those who might disrupt the progress of the Montagu–
Chelmsford plan. As Montagu wrote, “We intend to maintain order in
India, and we intend to safeguard it because we believe that that is the
only atmosphere in which nationality can grow uninterruptedly, surely,
and swiftly.”92
The aspirations toward “safeguarding” order so that nationalism
could thrive would prove not to be well founded. Within a year of
Montagu’s statement, Gandhi, who had been elected the President of
the Indian National Congress, abandoned any optimism about the
possibilities of the royal amnesty and turned against the constitutional
reforms of 1919.93 He called for purna swaraj, or complete indepen-
dence from the British within the year, and announced plans for a non-
cooperation campaign that called on all Indians to withdraw their
labor from work, school, and administration – anything that sustained
the British government and economy in India. By July 1920, he
expressed his dismay about the events of 1919, gesturing in particular
to the bad faith that was represented by the Rowlatt Act and the
Jallianwala Bagh massacre. For Gandhi, who had trained as a barrister
and passed the bar at the Inner Temple in London, violence by the
military backed by a new round of repressive laws showed that the
British were not fully committed to the project of Indian governance in
India. He wrote that he had “honestly believed that a new era was
about to begin, and that the old spirit of fear, distrust, and consequent
terrorism was about to give place to the new spirit of respect, trust, and
goodwill . . . But to my amazement and dismay, I have discovered that
the present representatives of the Empire have become dishonest and
unscrupulous.”94
Under Gandhi’s leadership, the Indian National Congress was reorga-
nized, adopting a creed of nonviolence. Many former revolutionary terror-
ists – including those who had been amnestied in 1919 – joined Gandhi’s
movement in Bengal, even though they had been active as revolutionary
terrorists before the war. The next chapter begins with those released from
Cellular Jail on Andaman Island, those who had been considered the
most dangerous threat to political order, which included Barindra Kumar

92
Statement of Montagu, Secretary of State for India, Hansard, House of Commons Deb 22
May 1919 vol 116 cc621 713.
93
Rajat Ray, “Masses in Politics: The Non cooperation Movement in Bengal, 1920 22,”
Indian Economic and Social History Review 11 (1974): 344 45.
94
CWMG, vol. 21, p. 90.
 Conclusion 59

Ghosh, Upendra Nath Banerji, and Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty.95 While

the revolutionary terrorist movement appeared to be moribund, largely
because many of its participants in the 1910s appeared to join Gandhi’s
nonviolent movement, these political prisoners generated a history of the
terrorist movement in Bengal from the perspective of its participants. From
the early 1920s onward, they produced memoirs that included an account
of their early lives, how they embraced revolutionary nationalism, and how
a revolutionary future might emerge if Indians came together to challenge
the British.
The autobiographies, memoirs, and histories written by those who
participated in the revolutionary terrorist movement articulated a differ-
ent kind of historical progression than the one offered by the British that
was animated by a history of India’s past as a nation that had resisted
many kinds of tyranny. Among those released from jails in Bengal,
Bhupendra Kumar Dutta published a series of historical vignettes,
explaining Bengal’s turn toward radicalism as part of a revolutionary
process that would undermine the kind of incremental change that the
British imagined. As a burst of autobiographies, memoirs, and historical
accounts of the experiences of revolutionary terrorists were published and
distributed widely in the early 1920s, former revolutionary terrorists
returned to clandestine activity, causing a “recrudescence of terrorism,”
as British officials called it.
After Gandhi’s protests, the Rowlatt legislation was not enforced at a
national level, but many of the extra-legal measures were later enacted
and enforced on a provincial level, particularly in Bengal where the
revolutionary movement continued to be characterized as a live threat
by the government. Enabled by the provisions of a diarchic government,
the Government of Bengal enacted nearly all of the provisions that the
Rowlatt Act had proposed. In subsequent chapters, I turn to “temporary”
legislation that followed the events of this chapter and I examine the logic
of a series of provincial acts that began with the Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Acts and Ordinances in the 1920s, and became more or less
permanent provisions enabling the government to detain without charge
until the next Government of India Act, which was passed in 1935.

95
WBSA, Home Political File 309/20 (1 4), “Proposed transfer of political convicts from
Andamans, which authorized these transfers,” NAI, Home Political File 1919 January
272 273 Part B, “Release of Barendra Kumar Ghosh, Hem Chandra Das, and Upendra
Nath Banerji under the Terms of the Amnesty.”
2 The History of Revolutionary Terrorism
through Autobiography

Shortly after the amnesty and release of political prisoners in late 1919
and 1920, officials from the Intelligence Branch reported to the govern-
ment that there was a proliferation of texts, memoirs, biographies, and
accounts about the lives of revolutionary terrorists circulating around
Bengal. Histories of revolutionary terrorism were being disseminated
through print and visual media, such as pamphlets and flyers, and
serialized in magazines and journals. In the wave of revolutionary his-
tories of the movement written by its participants, authors hoped to
reinvigorate a radical anti-colonial movement that was widely seen as
moribund by 1919 by the colonial government. Moreover, in a moment
in which Gandhi’s influence was on the rise, the emergence of texts
about revolutionary terrorism characterized some of the ongoing
debates within Indian nationalism. As Gandhi and some Congress
leaders pressed for nonviolence and civil disobedience as a strategy,
others, particularly those in Bengal, pressed for a more militant
approach and argued that violence against the state, its institutions,
and its agents would bring about complete independence for the nation.
In the early 1920s, memoirs and autobiographies of Bengal’s revolu-
tionaries supplemented the newspapers and pamphlets that had been
doing this ideological work and conveyed to a reading public that the
goals of revolutionary terrorism were to quickly oust the British.
By the late 1920s, these ideas were consolidated into socialist and
communist ideologies that animated revolutionary terrorists across
northern India.1
Bhupendra Kumar Dutta, a revolutionary terrorist who had been
imprisoned for his part in the Alipore Conspiracy in the 1910s and
released at the end of the winter of 1920–1921 by royal amnesty, was
among the most direct when he proclaimed why writing a history of

1
Bipan Chandra, “The Ideological Development of the Revolutionary Terrorists of
Northern India in the 1920s,” Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India (Hyderabad:
Orient Longman, 1979), pp. 223 51.

60
 Revolutionary Terrorism through Autobiography 61

the revolutionary terrorist movement was needed at precisely this

moment.2
I have said that it is highly necessary to write a contemporary history, as its absence
will render difficult the preparation of history in the future. From practical
political experience I know that whatever gains currency among the people or is
printed in books, does not constitute history. Actual facts remain for the most part
unknown to the people, and historians fail frequently to discover the truth about
them . . . The revolutionary movement is extinct to day in India and the people
have accepted non violence as their creed; and it is time, therefore, to examine the
records of our own activities . . .3

When Bhupen declared the necessity for a history of a movement that

had been named as a “terrorist conspiracy” by the colonial state, he hoped
to revive the movement by giving it a historical lineage and trajectory that
endowed it with an ideological purpose. These histories challenged
a colonial assumption that Bengalis were “unwarlike” and that revolu-
tionary terrorist activity was borne of irrational and overemotional beha-
vior, as intelligence officials frequently claimed in the accounts they had
produced in the 1910s. For revolutionaries, writing their own narrative of
the movement allowed the possibility that the movement was ongoing,
regrouping for a revolutionary future that had yet to materialize. Indeed,
Bhupen argued that the “revolutionary movement” of India needed
a written history that would allow the “preparation of history in the
future,” one in which a successful revolution would oust the British and
pave the foundations for a new form of governance in India. In this,
Bhupen echoed Reinhart Koselleck on modern history-writing, “revolu-
tionary legitimacy became a coefficient of movement, mobilizing history
in terms of the prevailing prospect of the future.”4
Published in a Bengali periodical as a series of articles shortly after the
end of Gandhi’s nationwide Non-Cooperation Movement in 1922,
Bhupen announced that his effort to write such a history – one that was
“for the most part unknown to the people” – would bring about the kind
of radical political change that Bengal, and India more broadly, needed in
order to rid the subcontinent of British rule. Although there was disagree-
ment about the strategy of how to challenge British rule among Indian

2
APAC, L/P&J/6/1643, “Release of Bengal Prisoners under Amnesty of 1919,” J&P 1502/
21, Letter to Sir William Duke, H.M.’s Under Secretary of State for India From
Government of India, Home Political, dated Delhi 15 February, 1921.
3
WBSA, IB File 108/25, Bhupendra Kumar Dutta, Bangabani, Aghrayan 1331 BS,
“Printing Articles Relating to Reminiscences of Revolutionaries Which Have Appeared
in the Press.”
4
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translated by
Keith Tribe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), p. 52.
62 Revolutionary Terrorism through Autobiography

nationalist groups, Bhupen Dutta and other authors of the movement in

Bengal argued that the first step should be that India be liberated from
colonial rule in order to chart its own course.5 This argument drew from
earlier themes in revolutionary literature, making the case to a vernacular-
reading populace that violence had an important place in modern
politics.6 These accounts argued for the foundations of revolution,
which represented, in some shape and form, a complete rejection of
British norms of governance.
By writing their own histories, Bhupen and his revolutionary terrorist
colleagues took control of their history and the pace of historical change,
thus wrestling it away from the British, who had been writing the history
of India for over a hundred years. As scholars of colonial India have
shown, British civil servants wrote numerous histories of India in order
to rationalize the British occupation of India. The perception that Indians
lacked a modern historical sensibility that demonstrated a commitment to
facticity or chronology was often used to explain why Indians could not be
considered modern.7 By the middle of the nineteenth century, the idea of
creating a historical chronology for British India that marked the progress
of a liberal colonial state to improve its colonized subjects became an
important feature of colonial rule, legitimating colonial intervention in
the name of inserting India into a timeline of progressive development.8
In its self-produced historical narrative, the colonial government ima-
gined it was in the process of introducing liberal reforms such as rule of
law, representative government, and various individual freedoms to India
and Indians; thus, crime and violence were never cast as political protest
or radical dissension, but represented a failure on the part of Indians to
achieve the consciousness of appropriately constituted subjects of civil

5
WBSA, IB File 108/25, Bhupendra Kumar Dutta, Bangabani, Aghrayan 1331 BS, in
“Printing Articles Relating to Reminiscences of Revolutionaries Which Have Appeared in
the Press.” See also Sachindranath Sanyal, “Prison Life,” published in Falgun 1329 B.S.
and Kartic 1331 B.S.
6
Sanyal, Revolutionary Pamphlets, ch. 3.
7
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its
Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Ranajit Guha, Dominance with
out Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1997); Vinay Lal, The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2003).
8
Partha Chatterjee and Anjan Ghosh, eds., History of the Present (Ranikhet: Permanent
Black, 2007); Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996); Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts Historical Memory
and Identity in Western India, 1700 1960 (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007), ch. 1;
Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and
Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Rama Mantena, The Origins of Modern
Historiography in India, 1780 1880 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), chs. 1 2.
 Revolutionary Terrorism through Autobiography 63

society.9 In colonial accounts, radical and subaltern protest by peasants,

non-Brahmins, or workers was categorized as irrationality, communal-
ism, or an insufficient awareness of civic norms.10 To challenge colonial
claims that Indians lacked a modern sensibility about politics and histor-
ical change, from the early modern period onward, history-writers in
South Asia produced history in various forms, drawing attention to com-
munity norms and practices, creating political genealogies, and writing
object lessons for how those inhabiting the Indian subcontinent devel-
oped a sense of time and historical change.11 For Indians, writing their
own history has become widely understood as a form of political practice;
for the revolutionary terrorists, it was a part of their political insurrection.
As several scholars have shown, “amateur” and popular history-writing,
particularly in the vernacular, became a form of anti-colonial resistance,
countering a colonial hegemony over knowledge that presumed that India
had no history, and by extension, little sense of political change.12
By writing their own history, Indians took control of the narrative and
took control of time. From the late nineteenth century onward, it became
a crucial way in which Indians began to imagine their past and map it into
the future. In contrast to the histories of the terrorist movement written by
British officials, who claimed that the revolutionary terrorist movement
demonstrated the sentimentality and irrationality among Bengali bhadra-
lok youth, the texts produced by members involved in this movement
showed the movement was ideologically driven – a list of inspirational
texts were often central to the narrative – as well as explicitly plotting
India on a timeline toward a radical and dynamic future. By placing
Bengal’s history of militant nationalism at the heart of a national narrative
for Indian independence, Bhupen Dutta’s vision of a “true” history
enabled him to imagine a nation that was yet to be, but could claim
a revolutionary spirit and genealogy that focused on the distinctiveness
of Bengal’s history. By conflating Bengal with India, these texts created
a lineage of revolution that drew from Bengal’s past and linked local
events to national and international concerns; they also drew from global
revolutionary events such as the French and American revolutions,

9
Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1983) perhaps most clearly articulates the fine line between crime and insurgency.
10
David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras, 1859 1947 (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1986); Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of
Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990).
11
V. N. Rao, David Schulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing
History in South India, 1600 1800 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001).
12
Prachi Deshpande, Creative Histories (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2007);
History of the Vernacular, edited by Partha Chatterjee (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2008).
64 Revolutionary Terrorism through Autobiography

Garibaldi and Italian unification, and the Bolshevik revolution.

By embracing republican ideas as well as communism, which were emer-
gent in these decades, revolutionaries made it clear that they rejected
British political norms and favored other political ideas that paved the
road to self and territorial sovereignty. In framing their revolutionary
credentials, those who wrote memoirs actively challenged the liberal
and evolutionary pace of political change offered to them by constitu-
tional changes such as the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms, and also by
what was perceived as a slow pace of change offered by Gandhian pro-
tests. By situating themselves as radicals and revolutionaries, revolution-
ary terrorists could argue that a campaign of violent political actions – and
not constitutional reform – would accelerate the British departure from
India.
By analyzing “contemporary histories” (in Bhupen’s words) from the
1920s onward, this chapter draws from the writings of revolutionary
terrorists in Bengal, many of whom used the exemplary nature of their
own lives to explain how the history of their movement had animated and
should continue to influence Indian nationalist politics. The wave of
revolutionary memoirs in the 1920s became a means of staging debates
between different political constituencies and formations among Indians,
often consolidating regional and caste identification in the process and
animating some of the disputes that existed within the movement.
Although they were putatively revolutionary figures who advocated
upending the social order, the highly individualized nature of biographi-
cal and autobiographical narratives undermined a sense of collective
purpose, particularly in forming solidarities with others. Most of these
men were considered of the respectable castes – identified in colonial
records as Brahmin, Kayasth or Baidya, all had gone to university, and
were raised in prominent families.13 They were fluent in English and
Bengali, writing in both languages and making reference to various cano-
nical texts in these literatures to affirm their fluency. Accounts by the
detainees discussed in some detail their loss of caste and social status
while in detention or in prison as a sign of the sacrifices they were willing
to make for their nation. Framed as a series of sacrifices for their nation,
these accounts were filled with stories of having to cook, do laundry, and
perform the kinds of rigorous manual labor to which they were unaccus-
tomed. Forced into making rope from the fibers of coconut shells, and
pressing oil from mustard seed using a hand crank, all of the men who
wrote memoirs addressed how their bodies were riddled with blisters,
sunburned, and emaciated from the poor diet. These harrowing

13
Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement, p. 76.
 Revolutionary Terrorism through Autobiography 65

descriptions of having to perform tasks that were alien to them because of

their social status – a status they shared with their presumed readers –
were juxtaposed against jokes about the menial labor they did. For some
revolutionaries, becoming “common” was a source of pride and signaled
the ways their incarceration broke down social barriers. The idea of
making sacrifices easily meshed with suffering, an idea that created the
foundation of the idea of the “political sufferer,” someone who had made
sacrifices for the national cause and should be compensated by an allow-
ance or a stipend by the state or the Congress.
Nearly half a dozen volumes of memoirs and autobiographies appeared
between 1921 and 1924, soon after the release of the political prisoners of
the previous decade from the Andaman Islands.14 These well-known
accounts of the revolutionary terrorist movement of the 1920s were pro-
duced in an autobiographical or biographical mode, profiling the lives of
great figures, recounting first-person experiences, and offering a kind of
didactic example to others. Beyond giving the movement a history with an
ideological foundation, there was a practical goal behind this particular
moment of historical construction: members of revolutionary parties such
as Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar in Bengal, the Hindustan Socialist
Republican Army in northern India, and others were attempting to attract
new recruits, claiming that violent modes of political protest would be the
key to bringing about Indian independence. As an account of native news-
papers noted in 1923, “The distrust of the people must be removed.
To give them such training, the life stories or self-sacrificing heroic patriots
must be recited to them.”15 By situating the exemplary individual at the
heart of a revolutionary struggle, these accounts privileged the ideal of the
male revolutionary, someone who had made great sacrifices for the nation.
In using sacrifice and suffering as an important feature of the memoirs,
revolutionary terrorist autobiographies were able to create a bond with
their readers. As Shukla Sanyal has noted for an earlier period, “to repre-
sent the act of violence as an act of self-sacrifice [meant that] the targets of
violence were no longer its victims.” Rather, by framing acts of violence as
a sacrifice, the British became the perpetrators. By ennobling a narrative of
sacrifice, community bonds could be re-established, even when some
Indians objected to revolutionary terrorist acts.16
14
These accounts have been assembled in chronological order in, R. C. Majumdar, Penal
Settlements in Andamans (New Delhi: Government of India Ministry of Education and
Social Welfare, 1975). For how to use them as historical sources, see Sarkar, Swadeshi
Movement, pp. 465 68.
15
APAC, L/P&J/12/397, “Terrorism in India,” P&J (S) 1000/33, pp. 102 44, see especially
p. 113: the pamphlet, “Memorandum on the History of Terrorism in Bengal, 1905 33,”
can also be found in WBSA Home Political File/1905.
16
Sanyal, Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 109.
66 Revolutionary Terrorism through Autobiography

Because their activities had been largely secret and underground, his-
tory in the form of autobiography enabled exceptional figures in the
movement to publicize the characteristics and training that could make
a revolutionary without revealing exactly what they had done to be
accused of being a terrorist or militant. By writing histories of how and
when they became aware of the movement, and what kinds of education
and training was required, revolutionary terrorists were able to write
a history of a movement, while simultaneously making themselves into
historical subjects whose life stories would be catalysts to the history of
free India. When the revolution came – as they were confident it would –
revolutionaries could be counted as historically central to the formation of
the Indian nation. By writing these autobiographies, they anticipated that
their status as great men would be well established.
The genre of “life histories” is well known in Indian nationalist bio-
graphies and autobiographies, with Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal
Nehru serving as highly visible examples of political figures who relied on
autobiography and history to articulate their respective political visions.
Incarceration for political crimes became a badge of honor, almost de
rigueur, for Indian nationalists from the 1920s onward.17 Many well-
known figures, such as Nehru, Gandhi, Vinayak Savarkar, and Subhas
Chandra Bose were jailed under the extraordinary legislation that was
passed.18 The newly released political prisoner became an important role
model, one whose life was intended to provide inspiration to Bengal’s
youth and recruit new followers into a movement; incarceration for
political reasons became a cause célèbre to protest unjust rules of deten-
tion and arrest.
As Javed Majeed has argued, for nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Indians, autobiography became a genre that produced individual subjec-
tivity and consciousness, a sign of one’s claim to being modern, which was
something that Europeans believed Indians lacked. The construction of
a nationalist self was one that could produce an argument for a viable
collective polity. Paradoxically, because the first histories of this move-
ment were told through the genre of the “life story,” they better explained
what was exceptional or unique about each writer, focusing on the ways in

17
Majeed, pp. 36 37, 104 07; David Arnold, “The Self and the Cell: Indian Prison
Narratives as Life Histories,” in Arnold and Stuart Blackburn, eds., Telling Lives in
India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2004), pp. 29 53; Alex Wolfers, “Born Like Krishna in the Prison: Narrating
Resistance through the Revolutionary Autobiography,” unpublished ms. For Vietnam,
see Peter Zinoman, “Reading Revolutionary Prison Memoirs,” in Hue Tam Ho Tai, ed.,
The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2001).
18
Nehru’s Discovery of India was written while in prison, as were many of Gandhi’s writings.
 Revolutionary Terrorism through Autobiography 67

which they cultivated themselves into revolutionary figures. As they

articulated individual fears, thoughts, plans, desires, and most impor-
tantly, new futures, they were able to explain and rationalize how they had
joined a movement that promoted violence against the British
government.19
Even though writing history made revolutionary terrorists into modern
individuated subjects, one of the recurring gaps of their accounts is how
little they spoke of the moment in which they committed their violent acts.
For revolutionary terrorists, acts of political violence – murder, assault,
robbery – were the grounds on which many revolutionaries were accused
by the British of being uncivil and unprepared for the discipline of respon-
sible government. Tellingly, Hem Chandra Kanungo, a revolutionary who
had been sentenced to imprisonment on the Andaman Islands, switched to
the third person form when he described his efforts to blow up the train of
the Lieutenant Governor with a bomb.20 His account was among the most
critical of the failures of the movement, as he confronted the times that
revolutionary terrorists missed their targets. Yet, few revolutionaries or
their biographers ever wrote about these moments. Instead, much of
their focus was on their claim to be pioneers who suffered the first round
of political convictions for their crimes. As Ullaskar Dutta noted in a critical
spirit, “jail-going for the vindication of the rights of man was a thing almost
unknown in our national history.”21 They focused on the experience of
detention and how poorly they were treated in British jails, prisons, and
detention camps, which was unusual in the first decades of the twentieth
century. In their writing, revolutionary terrorists focused on their training,
what they read, and their suffering. This focus allowed them to draw their
readers’ attention to the costs they had incurred in the service of the nation
while eliding some of the crimes they planned or committed. Downplaying
his skills with bomb-making, Barin Ghosh noted with some pithiness,
“No doubt, we played at throwing bombs, but was that any reason we
should be given over to Death itself?”22
The first rounds of first-person accounts were written in Bengali and in
English, predominantly by former detainees and revolutionaries from
colonial jails who had been recently released because of the amnesty.23

19
Javed Majeed, Autobiography, Travel, and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru, and Iqbal
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), ch. 1.
20
Hem Chandra Kanungo, Amiya Samanta, ed., Account of the Revolutionary Movement in
Bengal (Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2015), pp. 165 72.
21
Ullaskar Dutta, Twelve Years of Prison Life (Calcutta: Braja Behari Burman, 1924), p. 11.
22
Barin Ghosh, Tale of My Exile (Pondicherry: Arya Office, 1922), p. 71.
23
Jadu Gopal Mukopadhyay, Biplaber Jibaner Smriti (The story of the life of a rebel)
(Calcutta, 1363 BS); Bhupendra Nath Datta, Bharater Dwitiya Swadhinater Sangram
(India’s other independence struggle) (Calcutta, 1949, 1983).
68 Revolutionary Terrorism through Autobiography

Published from 1921 onward, these prison autobiographies quickly came

to the attention of colonial officials who feared that the revolutionary
terrorist movement was reviving. Once political prisoners were released
from jails and detention centers, many rejoined revolutionary political
parties and worked to create new networks. During Gandhi’s Non-
Cooperation Movement, these revolutionary groups agreed to suspend
planning any violent actions, but many of the men joined district-level
committees of the Bengal Congress and were active in recruiting new
followers.24 To coincide with this recruitment drive, many men published
accounts of their involvement in the first stage of Bengali revolutionary
terrorism, situating themselves as patriots in a larger struggle.
As they constructed their own subjectivities, one that was framed by the
demands of a larger movement, they made distinctions between them-
selves and others, between their own sacrifices and those made by their
compatriots, and they implicitly set themselves apart from those they
imagined were not up to the task of becoming revolutionaries. As Upen
Banerji, the author of a memoir, noted, “Common Revolutionaries never
fail to overestimate their individual capacities. They have always a larger
dose of vanity and self-assertion than average people.”25 One of Upen’s
colleagues, Ullaskar Dutta noted that he knew that readers would be
aware of many of the events of his life from the accounts written by
Barin Ghosh and Upen Banerji, but “there is a good deal of difference
in respect to the particular, especially my own individual experiences.”26
Several of these biographies are so well known and widely reprinted
that they can be found in many research libraries: Upendra Nath Banerji,
Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Barindra Ghosh, The Tale of My Exile, and
Ullaskar Dutta, Twelve Years of Prison Life. All were published by Indian
presses soon after the three men were released from the Andaman Islands
for their participation in the Alipore and Manicktolla conspiracies, which
were linked to the assassinations committed by Khudiram Bose and
Prafulla Chaki.27 Barin Ghosh, Upen Banerji, and Ullaskar Dutta had
been among those who had been most active in the publication of the
Jugantar magazine of the first decade of the twentieth century, and had
long been voicing their violent opposition to the government during the
swadeshi years.28 Barin and Ullas, as they referred to one another, were
24
WBSA, Home Political File 26/32, “Brief Note on the Alliance of Congress with
Terrorism in Bengal”; also in Terrorism in Bengal, vol. III.
25
Banerji, Memoirs, pp. 124 25. 26 Dutta, Twelve Years, p. 14.
27
Taylor Sherman, The Politics of Punishment and State Violence in India, 1919 1956, PhD
2006, University of Cambridge, p. 93. See also Satadru Sen, Disciplining Punishment:
Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2000), Afterword.
28
Sanyal, Revolutionary Pamphlets, pp. 30 33.
 The Making of a Revolutionary Terrorist 69

initially sentenced to death, but this was reduced under appeal to trans-
portation for life. Their compatriot, Upen, was sentenced to transporta-
tion for life. Members of the first group of political convicts who were sent
to the Andaman Islands jails in 1909, upon release, turned to another
method of raising awareness of the movement by writing memoirs.
Although these texts appeared during a period of relative quiet in the
revolutionary terrorist movement, they had an inspirational effect on
a movement that British officials had assumed was successfully repressed.

The Making of a Revolutionary Terrorist

Upendra Nath Banerji’s account, Memoirs of the Revolutionary, was the first
to be made available to the reading public and was quickly intercepted by the
Intelligence Branch. Upen had been planning to write such an account from
as early as 1910, when he began his jail sentence in the Andamans; prison
officials had found a handwritten statement in his jail cell that was a kind of
outline of the book.29 Memoirs of a Revolutionary was published as Nirbasiter
atmakatha, in 1921, and appeared as a serial in the Bengali journal, Narayan,
which was edited by C. R. Das, who had been Upen’s lawyer, and edited by
Barin Ghosh, one of Upendra Nath’s co-conspirators.30 It was later pub-
lished in English in 1924. It was a combination of a history and a memoir,
beginning with agitations of 1906, when Bengal was first partitioned and the
revolutionary terrorist movement emerged out of a physical culture move-
ment that trained young men in martial arts. It characterized the early years
of the century as a moment of great possibility: “I became mighty curious
about those precious souls who were to bring about a Revolution in India
and who were, so to speak, to be the living images of the future Freedom of
India.”31 Upen joined the staff of the journal, Jugantar, which later inspired
the political group by the same name; there, Upen met Bhupendranath
Dutta, who was also a member of the editorial staff, as well as Barin
Ghosh, the leader of the group, and Ullaskar Dutta. The Jugantar magazine
had the reputation of being a “den of revolutionaries.” Inspired by the idea of
revolution, and “heroes from Robespierre down to the latest firebrand,”
Upen joined the group in the hopes that India’s freedom was imminent.32
When he met Barin, “a rich man’s son,” Barin persuaded Upen that “the
freedom of India was inevitable.”

29
NAI, Home Political File Aug. 9, 1910 deposit, “Statement Made by Upendra Nath
Banerji Regarding the Revolutionary Conspiracy in Bengal, Marked MOST
CONFIDENTIAL.”
30
WBSA, IB File 110/1921, series no. 364/21, “Articles by Upendranath Banerji on His
Exile.”
31
Banerji, Memoirs, p. 3. 32 Banerji, Memoirs, p. 3.
70 Revolutionary Terrorism through Autobiography

Upen’s account narrated the first decade of the century and the move-
ment with an air of excitement – “It was surely a new age for Bengal,”
Upen wrote, “. . . a new faith and a new optimism were brimming over in
all hearts . . . we could blow this mighty house of cards with a single whiff
of our breath!” Marking the newness of the moment, gesturing to a sense
of the uniqueness of this time that Koselleck describes as integral to being
modern, Upen declared, “we are not going to relive the past.” Living in
some small rooms in Manicktolla, a neighborhood of Calcutta, the men
lived an “ashram-like life,” cooking dal every day, washing their own
clothes, and even raising their own chickens so they might have eggs.33
Their self-proclaimed asceticism was a recurring refrain in these
accounts, offering renunciation of worldly comforts as a form of spiritual
development. Portions of his book are remarkably similar to the “history
sheet” that the colonial intelligence bureau produced of his career, show-
ing how his affiliations and connections became on the one hand, impor-
tant bits of judicial evidence to convict him of conspiracy, and on another,
evidence of his abiding political activism.
From this promising moment – dating to 1906 – Upen retold the
history of his involvement in the Alipore and Manicktalla conspiracies,
in which over thirty men were accused of organizing plans to manufacture
homemade bombs to terrorize the British into leaving India. As the
ashram grew to twenty men, and their studies into revolution and history
became more sophisticated, Upen and another colleague traveled
through the Gangetic plain searching for another site for an ashram, but
they returned to Calcutta without doing so.34 Upon his return, likely
sometime in early 1908, Upen met Ullaskar Dutta, who he claimed had
been a star student at Presidency College in Calcutta, and had been
expelled for throwing a shoe at a professor.
Revolutionary memoirs told their versions of well-known events that
had been exhaustively detailed in colonial reports. As Upen explained,
when the police and intelligence bureau became aware of this group,
Upen and Ullas went on a pilgrimage to Nepal with a group of ascetics.
In Nepal, Upen discovered that Nepal was more than a spiritually rele-
vant place – it was also a place that was politically free of the British.
“We had always feared to find Nepal as a centre of rough barbarism; but
we found out our error. The idea that we trod on the soil of a free Indian
State put our minds in a gay flutter of excitement.”35 While they were
away, Upen recounted, the magistrate of Dacca was assassinated and

33
WBSA, IB serial no. 54/1920, file no. 85/20, “Memoirs of a Revolutionary” by Upendra
Banerji, pp. 17 18.
34
Banerji, Memoirs, pp. 19 27. 35 Banerji, Memoirs, pp. 35 36.
 The Making of a Revolutionary Terrorist 71

then a member of the Manicktolla ashram was killed while making

a bomb. A month later, in April 1908, Khudiram Bose and his accomplice
Prafulla Chaki attempted to kill Douglas Kingsford, formerly the chief
district magistrate in Calcutta, who had been putting seditious journalists
into the Alipore jail, and ordering that the men be whipped as if they were
“ordinary criminals.” Because of the revolutionary plots to harm
Kingsford, he had been transferred by his superiors to a town several
hours north in Muzzafarpur. Instead of killing Kingsford, the two assas-
sins, Prafulla Chaki and Khudiram Bose, accidentally killed two
Englishwomen, a mother and daughter, who were leaving Kingsford’s
home in a carriage. Prafulla shot himself in the head when he was cor-
nered by police; Khudiram was executed in August 1908 by hanging after
a quick trial and a confession. The Manicktalla group decided to attempt
to assassinate the Lieutenant Governor, Andrew Fraser, by placing explo-
sives near the train tracks where his train would pass; there were two
attempts and both failed.36
The attempted assassination of Kingsford on April 30, 1908, galva-
nized the police, and the next day, the house at Manicktolla was raided by
the police. Upen’s account revealed that he had managed to hide in the
house for over twelve hours, but was eventually discovered by the police.
The young men living there were taken to different jails across the city,
and charged of conspiracy. Within two months, the Alipore jail was
flooded with various men who were suspected of having been involved
in bringing down the British government by planning acts of political
violence, including men who would later become well-known leaders of
the movement: Sachindranath Sen, Pandit Hrishikesa, Nalini Kanta
Gupta, Hemchandra Das, and others. Initially isolated from one another,
they were eventually allowed to live together when the jail became over-
crowded. Upen describes this moment as “the joy of happy accommoda-
tion,” in which the men were able to engage in studying both religious and
revolutionary texts, debating when their prison sentence would be inter-
rupted by India’s independence from the British.37
This brief period of jail conviviality was interrupted when the prisoners
discovered that one of their own, Naren Goswami, had become an
informer who was going to provide state’s evidence. In the first week
of September, 1908, Satyen Bose, who had contracted pthisis (a common
respiratory ailment among prisoners), went to the hospital ward, from
where he summoned Goswami on the pretense that he wanted advice
about how to become an informer as well. Goswami went to visit him, and
was first shot by Bose, then by Kanai Lal Datta who had also gone to the

36 37
Banerji, Memoirs, pp. 28 29. Banerji, Memoirs, p. 69.
72 Revolutionary Terrorism through Autobiography

hospital and smuggled in a gun. A hospital warder and a European

prisoner were killed in the tumult. The events occasioned a massive
reshuffling in the jail, and all of the Indian jailors were replaced by British
wardens.38 Kanai Lal was quickly sentenced to die; Upen writes that he
saw him briefly the day before the execution and recalls that “I do not
remember seeing a face looking so godly serene as Kanai’s before Fate
gathered him to the House of the Dead . . . [he] had the look of a real
saint . . .”39 On November 8, 1908, Kanai Lal was hung at the Alipore jail;
his body was handed over to his relatives for cremation and a large
procession followed it to the burning ghat.40
Khudiram became the revolutionary movement’s first martyr; Kanai
Lal became the movement’s second hero, executed for killing an informer
who had turned against the movement. These two men would become
important icons for the movement, as accounts of their sacrifices became
canonic in encouraging others to follow suit. Eulogies, published
deathbed images, and witness accounts of the final moments before
martyrdom would become recurring features for revolutionary texts, as
the life narrative became a vehicle to tell the history and ideology of
a movement.41
Upen’s memoirs are unique because they comprise the history of a few
eventful years at the start of the twentieth century, in which he details
some of the foundational moments of the revolutionary terrorist move-
ment as young educated men gained a consciousness about how to propel
the British to leave India. When the conspirators were finally sentenced
after a year-long trial, Sri Aurobindo (Barin’s brother), who had been the
spiritual and intellectual inspiration for the movement, was acquitted.42
He retired to a life of seclusion and scholarship in Pondicherry, but the
others were sentenced to life in prison and transported to the Andaman
Islands.
In Upen’s account, as in those that followed, the first period of the
Bengal revolutionary terrorist movement provided the pantheon of heroic
figures that became important to creating a history for the movement,

38
Banerji, Memoirs, p. 84. For details of Goswami’s death, APAC, L/P&J/6/980, Alipore
Bomb Conspiracy (and supplementary) case; see also L/P&J/6/891 and L/P&J/6/893,
“Murder of Narendra Goswami, Informer.”
39
Banerji, Memoirs, p. 86. 40 APAC, L/P&J/6/903, “Death of Kanai Lal Dutta.”
41
Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Page and Political Struggle in India
(London: Reaktion Books, 2004), pp. 117 19.
42
On Aurobindo’s importance as a spiritual and intellectual guide to the movement, see
Wolfers (2015); Sugata Bose, “The Spirit and Form of an Ethical Polity: A Meditation on
Aurobindo’s Thought,” Modern Intellectual History 4 (2007): 129 44; Andrew Sartori,
“The Transfiguration of Duty in Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita,” Modern Intellectual
History 7 (2010): 319 44.
 The Land of “Topsy turvydom” 73

consolidating a sequence of critical events that made it clear that this was
a movement, rather than an isolated series of events. It plotted causes –
Kingsford had ordered that revolutionaries be whipped – and conse-
quences – Kingsford became a target of assassination. From the point of
view of the revolutionary terrorists and later Indian nationalist historians,
the conspiracy cases of the 1900s and 1910s were often cast as “success-
ful” because they created instability within the structures of the British
government in India, reversed the first partition of Bengal, and pushed
through the introduction of constitutional reforms when the First World
War ended in 1919.
The latter half of Upen’s memoir, along with other memoirs written by
those who accompanied him to the Andamans, comprise the dozen or so
years they were imprisoned there. In addition to focusing on the history of
the movement, Upen’s account, which was followed by Barin Ghosh and
Ullaskar Dutta, emphasized the debilitating and dire conditions in which
imprisonment occurred, particularly because it was before the jail reforms
of 1919. These men suffered through high heat and humidity, bouts of
malaria, scorching sun, and drenching rains. Over half of Upen’s memoir
is devoted to his time in the jails and the poor living conditions under
which he was jailed. Barin’s memoir, on the other hand, The Tale of
My Exile, focuses almost entirely on the period in which he was incarcer-
ated in the Andamans.

The Land of “Topsy-turvydom”

Of all the memoirs I examine here, Barin Ghosh’s Tale of My Exile was the
most widely distributed to libraries across the world. It is a largely auto-
biographical account that is influenced by other genres of writing, sug-
gesting both that he was well read and aspired to reach an audience who
might recognize a range of literary forms. The first few chapters, titled
respectively, “A Voyage into the Unknown,” “A Survey of the
Unknown,” and a “A Survey of the Settlement,” might have been the
opening chapters of a book of travel writing. Sections of it might be
described as “colonial,” focusing on the different forms of nature, of
people, and emphasizing Barin’s own level of sophistication by position-
ing himself as a traveler to a different place. Barin described the voyage to
the Andamans, native foliage, animals, and the original inhabitants of the
islands as, “The natives of these islands are a wild and aboriginal
people.”43 Drawing liberally from references to Shelley’s poetry as well
as Indian epics, Barin’s writing showed his wide-ranging erudition.44

43 44
Ghosh, Tale of My Exile, p. 27. Ghosh, Tale of My Exile, pp. 39, 50.
74 Revolutionary Terrorism through Autobiography

In a flowery style filled with clever asides, Barin’s book apologized for
any lapses in memory, noting that “one must not expect from me any
ordered narration of facts in their logical relation of time and place.”45
Upendra Nath Banerji had authored chapters six and seven. Along with
Upendra Nath and Barin, six other prisoners who had been convicted in
the conspiracy, Ullaskar Dutta, Hem Chandra Kanungo, Hrishikesh
Kanjilal, Indu Bhusan Roy, Bibhuti Bhusan Sarkar, and Abinash
Chandra Bhattacharya accompanied them to the Andamans.46 They
were followed by other Bengalis such as Nanigopal Mukerjee, Pulin
Bihari Das, Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty, and eventually, Vinayak
Savarkar, who published a memoir of his time in the Andamans as well.
Pulin Das and Hem Chandra also published accounts of their views of the
revolutionary terrorist movement, and according to some scholars, their
accounts corrected Barin, Ullas, and Upen’s self-serving accounts.47
If the reader imagined that this account was authoritative, Barin noted
that his Andamans account was part of an already well-known history (as
it likely was): “Their fame, is already, of course, world-wide . . ..”48
Branded a seditionist, a conspirator, and a terrorist by the British
colonial government, Barin noted that the conditions under which they
were transported from Alipore jail in Calcutta to the Andaman Islands in
the Indian Ocean was akin to being incarcerated in the government’s
harem. Barin described the vehicle that would take them to the ship that
would sail for the Andaman Islands, like a “Girls’ school omnibus,”
shaded on all sides so that no sunlight would get in. In an image that he
would invoke repeatedly, he wrote, “We were then the Government’s
zenana . . ..”49 After the long journey cramped together on a boat, the
prisoners disembarked at the jetty, marching up to the outer gates of the
jail. As they went inside, Barin observes, “finally we entered into this
strange harem . . . we were banished, even as Sri Ram Chandra, and this
advantage on our side that we had no faithful Sita Devi to cook our
food.”50 Mixing different cultural references, from the Hindu epic the
Ramayana to the Arabian Nights harem, he drew from a range to meta-
phors and allusions in order to express that men were emasculated in
colonial jails.
By analogizing his own exile to Ram’s in the Ramayana, the widely read
Indian epic in which Ram was exiled to the forest for twelve years (also the
term that Barin served), Barin reminded his readers that there were no

45
Ghosh, Tale of My Exile, p. 1. 46 Dutta, Twelve Years, pp. 25 26.
47
Hem Chandra Kanungo, Amiya Samanta, ed., Account of the Revolutionary Movement in
Bengal (Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2015), pp. 64 69.
48
Ghosh, Tale of My Exile, p. 11; see also Dutta, Twelve Years, publisher’s note and p. 62.
49
Ghosh, Tale of My Exile, p. 9. 50 Ghosh, Tale of My Exile, p. 50.
 The Land of “Topsy turvydom” 75

women to accompany them, evoking the test that Ram and Sita went
through in their epic separation. In a later passage, he drew from another
Indian epic, the Mahabharata, and describes their immodest and public
bathing conditions: “we were in as helpless a condition as Draupadi in the
assembly of the Kauravas.” The scene when Draupadi was disrobed (but
never completely) represented a challenge to her modesty and chastity.
In most tellings of the story, she survives by divine intervention; in the
prison, there is no intervention and Barin’s paraphrasing of this scene
suggests that the chastity of the men was violated. In jail, Barin concludes,
“there was no such thing as gentlemen.”51
Amid the flowery prose, the gendered metaphors, and the literary
allusions, Barin’s detailed exposition of how the Andamans jails were
organized have a bureaucratic tone that documents what the experience
of jail-going entailed (there is even a chart): seven blocks which comprised
three stories in each one. With between 20 and 50 cells on each corridor,
there were nearly 700 convicts in Cellular Jail.52 Political prisoners and
“anarchists” were treated the most harshly, forced to wear “tickets”
around their necks that were circular, rectangular, or triangular.
The tickets detailed the crime and the punishment, thus making each
prisoner legible to the jailors. A black mark on a prisoner’s ticket, made in
charcoal by the warders, would result in punishment. Murderers were
considered the most dangerous, but “anarchists” such as Barin, who had
been convicted in a bomb conspiracy, were equally feared by the prison
authorities.53 The Bengal conspirators were segregated from one another,
disallowed from conversing with one another. As Barin noted dryly about
the sophistication of colonial bureaucracy, “Our benign government can
never be accused of any defect in method and procedure.”54
Upendra Nath Banerji confirmed Barin’s sense that Bengal’s revolution-
aries were being singled out at the Andamans. “On our arrival, those of us
who had been Brahmins had to give up their sacred threads [although] . . .
clearly it was an interference with our religion.” Observing that Sikhs were
allowed to keep their long hair, and Muslims their beards, Upen concluded
because Bengalis had been weak – a common explanation for why Bengal
had been first conquered by the British – they had been made to suffer even
more.55 Several of the chapters from Upen’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary are
reprinted in Barin’s Tale of My Exile, chapters in which Upen describes the
backbreaking work that led the convicts to go on hunger strike.

51 52
Ghosh, Tale of My Exile, p. 53. Ghosh, Tale of My Exile, p. 55.
53 54
Ghosh, Tale of My Exile, p. 57. Ghosh, Tale of My Exile, p. 121.
55
Banerji, Memoirs, p. 112.
76 Revolutionary Terrorism through Autobiography

Details about incarceration in the Andaman jails are abundant in both

accounts, as the writers explained prison experiences that they assumed
would be foreign to the reader. For instance, Barin described in full detail
how to grind oil out of mustard seed and how to make rope by pounding
coir into shape, because he assumes his reader has not had this particular
experience. Ullaskar likened the work of pressing oil from coconuts as one
that would better suit bullocks, but was assigned to the “politicals,” who
were required to produce more than double the amount required of an
animal.56 Barin noted, that “They [the jail authorities] seemed to appear
unmoved by our troubles and would show us no consideration as literate
people, unused from childhood to any kind of hard manual labour.”57
One day, sitting alongside the other Bengali prisoners, Barin had made
the longest rope, which he showed off to his fellow prisoners. To which,
Barin Ghosh describes, “[Upen Banerji] said, ‘You must have worked
then secretly at home,’ as if I, a scion of the House of Ghoshs was no
better than a dom (rope-maker, sweeper, etc. by caste). The insinuation
set fire to all the blood in my veins! But we were in the Blessed Land of
Prison and I could only gnash my teeth and pocket the insult.”58 Barin’s
uncontained rage at being presumed to be proficient at manual labor was
something he returned to several times: in another memorable passage, he
described grass cutting as a desirable job: “My Babu readers might
shudder at the idea of a gentleman cutting grass; but as a matter of fact
the work of a gardener, a sweeper of even a scavenger was considered as
a high privilege in this kingdom of topsy-turvydom. We have seen many
kayasthas, chhatris, and even Brahmins petitioning for the work of
a scavenger, out of the dread of oil-grinding. The people who were
given those works could, at least, move about freely.”59 As many prison-
ers did, Barin worked out a way to lessen the punishing effects of being at
the Andamans. By his own account, Barin Ghosh was treated relatively
well because he shared his allowance of milk with the guards and spoke
English with the jail superintendent, who came to seem Barin “as an
equal.”60 But he noted that “common convicts” did not have such mild
treatment and they suffered even more than the political convicts.
Barin Ghosh’s occasional sympathy with the “common criminal” did
little to undermine the tone of wonderment and rage that was the founda-
tion of Tale of My Exile. Indeed, his first piece of writing (unlike his later
works) lacked a sense of the larger political movement of which he was

56
Dutta, Twelve Years, pp. 27 29. 57 Dutta, Twelve Years, p. 30, see also pp. 54, 60, 87.
58
Ghosh, Tale of My Exile, p. 62. 59 Ghosh, Tale of My Exile, pp. 76 77.
60
Ghosh, Tale of My Exile, pp. 73 74. Ullaskar Dutta reported that he drank all his milk,
and so was transferred out of the unit in which he received a supplement, Twelve
Years, p. 48.
 Ullaskar and his Madness 77

a part, perhaps because in 1922, it was unclear what the future of the
movement was. Nonetheless, Tale of My Exile affirmed his place as
a person of political and historical importance. He had been among the
first group of political convicts and the wide circulation of this book
became a way of radicalizing new recruits to the movement.
Both Barin’s and Upen’s account ended with their release and return to
Bengal. Upen drew from material that he had contributed to Tale of
My Exile and supplemented it with some additional details. Reiterating
the sacrifices he had suffered over a dozen long years, Upen boarded
a ship in Port Blair with Hem Chandra Das and Barin Ghosh. The ship
docked at Kidderpore docks near Calcutta. They were brought to
Alipore, where their incarceration and trial had occurred, then all three
men were released into the streets of Calcutta. They called at the home of
Chittaranjan Das, their lawyer, who had become a political leader, and
then went to another friend’s home. Unable to find either, the three
friends split up and Upen Banerji decided to go to his father-in-law’s
home. But, after a dozen years, “Calcutta was a new city to me,” and he
got lost, a process that he describes with great joy and elation, freed from
surveillance and incarceration.61 As he walked through the Calcutta
night, he was confronted by a suspicious policeman who mistook him
for an Oriya, or a man from Orissa, a neighboring province. Upen,
restraining himself “from laughing out loud,” responded that he was
a Brahmin.62 When he finally arrived home, Upen was reunited with his
son, who was only 18 months old when his father was sentenced. They
were both unable to recognize one another.

Ullaskar and His Madness

Barin Ghosh’s Tale of My Exile and Upendra Nath Banerji’s Memoirs of
Prison Life appeared soon after they were released. Shortly thereafter,
Ullaskar Dutta, another one of the prisoners who had been convicted in
the Alipore Conspiracy, wrote his Andamans account, which was mark-
edly different from the others. The publisher proclaimed Ullaskar’s
fame in his foreword, “The name of Babu Ullaskar Dutta is
familiar to every educated household in India” and promised that his
account of the “extraordinary spiritual experiences . . . will not fail to
interest a large number of readers.”63 As in the others, there were many
repetitive aspects to this account – Ullas recalled the swadeshi movement
in Bengal as a key moment, recalling that he had heard speeches by Bipin
Chandra Pal and Rabindranath Tagore, and had been introduced to

61 62 63
Banerji, Memoirs, p. 171. Banerji, Memoirs, p. 171. Dutta, Twelve Years, p. i.
78 Revolutionary Terrorism through Autobiography

Bhupendranath Dutta, the publisher of the Yugantar magazine. He had

read Bankim’s novels, history books about Mazzini and the Young Italy
movement, and Robespierre. Like Barin, who had described the trip on
the boat to the Andamans as “merry,” with everyone “singing and chat-
ting and playing and joking,”64 Ullas characterized the trip to the
Andamans as “jolly,” recalling the cosmopolitan credentials of his co-
conspirators:
We made quite a jolly lot of exiles adrift and enjoyed full well the sea trip that
happened to have been the first of its kind of most, excepting Hemda, who had
been to foreign countries before, and also Barinda in a way, who was born at sea
while his parents were on their way to England . . .65
Ullas differentiated his account from the others by saying that he had
experienced a number of “supernatural” visions, “It is for this reason only
that I intend to place before my readers facts from my own personal
experience, sifted and arranged, with a view to arrive at a reasonable
explanation as to their nature and cause.”66 Although the first 30 or so
pages of his account replayed details that were well known, at some point,
he recalled that he had a vision that was emotionally overpowering,
leaving him unable to decide what was real and what was imagined.
Through the nearly 300-page text, he had several long philosophical
passages that were interspersed with accounts of having had visions of
seeing old friends and family members. In one daunting sequence of
events, he imagined that the royal family, including King George V,
visited him in jail during the First World War. These “supernatural” or
“celestial” visions appeared as hallucinations, often at moments when he
was tired, stretched beyond his laboring capacities. In one instance, after
he was sent on his own to Viper Island, which was at some distance from
the main jail in the Andamans, he believed he was being escorted by
a Muslim guard who spoke the Bengali dialect of his region from home.
Shortly after, he heard the voice of a young woman with whom he was
infatuated and he saw an image of her. In another instance, he had a vision
that an official came to visit him to tell him his nieces had died; he recalled
this vision when he received a telegram a week later informing him that his
nieces had, indeed, died.67 He concluded, “I came to believe in the
existence of a mysterious world.”68
These visions were largely uncorroborated in the other accounts,
although we have a hint of what was happening to Ullaskar, when we read
in the section of Barin’s book that Ullaskar had protested making bricks and
64
Ghosh, Tale of My Exile, pp. 12 13. 65 Dutta, Twelve Years, p. 26.
66
Dutta, Twelve Years, p. 18. 67 Dutta, Twelve Years, pp. 39 41.
68
Dutta, Twelve Years, p. 43.
 Ullaskar and his Madness 79

had then been transferred back to the Cellular Jail. There, Ullaskar was
tortured, left hanging in a prison cell for a whole day while handcuffed to the
wall.69 Ullaskar fell ill, coming down with a fever, and was sent to the
hospital. These events occurred a few days after the suicide of Indu
Bhusan Roy, which Ullas does not mention, but had become a flashpoint
in the discussions about jail reform.70 Ullas’ stay in the medical unit was
then punctuated by what sounded like electric shock treatment,
“The effects of the battery charge seemed to have been, to turn me ‘inside
out,’ so to say, and thereby render me subject, more or less, to influences,
that I had never been subject to.”71 Ullas attempted to commit suicide by
trying to hang himself, but he was prevented by a guard. Eventually, he was
given permission to finish his sentence in a “lunatic asylum” in Madras, and
the latter two-thirds of his text focus on his time there.
Once in Madras, Ullas described a range of people who were unlike
those he had met in Bengal. One was English, but many were Tamil or
Muslim. Distinguishing between what he saw as the “Aryan” and
“Dravidian,” he decided that he had learned quite a bit about India
through the process of incarceration.72 He learned how to use
a handloom to weave, and then transferred this skill to making mats for
sleeping. But yet, here too, he had visions that his parents and brother had
come to visit him and that his old beloved was now an old woman who was
awaiting his return. In the most interesting passage of a hallucination
coinciding with history, he had a visit from the royal family and concluded
that they were in India because they had to leave England because of the
First World War. The King decreed that Ullas was “free,” but then Ullas
found himself in his old cell.73
Eventually, Ullas heard that he was to be released, “on account of the
peace celebrations.”74 He learned that his co-conspirators from the
Andamans had been amnestied and he was informed that he would
leave the Madras asylum and return to Calcutta. Before he left Madras,
he asked for a tour of the city in which he spent seven years and he was
taken to the museum, where he saw some paintings by Ravi Varma, an
important modern Indian painter; he then embarked on a three-day train
from Madras to Calcutta accompanied by a European warden and two
Indian policeman.

69
Ghosh, Tale of My Exile, pp. 98 99.
70
APAC, L/P&J/6/980, “Alipore Bomb Case,” P&J File 3171/12, “Suicide in Jail at Port
Blair by Indu Bhusan Roy”; see also Majumdar, Penal Settlement, pp. 177 84.
71
Dutta, Twelve Years, p. 71; see also, R. V. R. Murthy, Andaman and Nicobar Islands:
A Saga of Freedom Struggle (Delhi: Kalpaz Publications, 2011), p. 109.
72
Dutta, Twelve Years, pp. 137 48. 73 Dutta, Twelve Years, pp. 249 79.
74
Dutta, Twelve Years, p. 281.
80 Revolutionary Terrorism through Autobiography

Ullas’ account ended with his return to Calcutta; there was no one to
meet him at the train station, so he guided his chaperones – who had never
been to Calcutta – across the Howrah bridge, where they took a tram to go
to the Alipore jail, where he was supposed to report so that his family
could pick him up. They arrived at the jail to discover that it had been
renamed the Presidency Jail and been completely transformed. After he
was given a “first-class repast” of toast, nuts, and fruit, he writes, “It really
made me laugh, considering the very radical change that the attitude of
the Government had undergone towards us politicals, within the last
twelve years.”75 His father, much older than the visions he had had of
him, came to collect him later that afternoon. Similar to the family
reunion that greeted Upen, Ullas concluded, “It is not necessary for me
to describe in detail the joyous scenes that followed, father holding son in
warm embrace, the very scapegrace child of his that had given him no end
of trouble ever since arrest and trial.”76
Ullaskar Dutta’s “madness” was widely seen as a turning point in the
incarceration of political prisoners, particularly because it followed the
suicide of Indu Bhusan Roy, one of the other convicts jailed in the bomb
conspiracy. These two events, which occurred in 1912, were widely
reported in the Indian press and put significant pressure on the govern-
ment to consider jail reforms, which they eventually did in 1919. When
Ullas returned to Calcutta, he returned to a reformed jail, and was
eventually reunited with his colleagues from the Andamans.

The Memoir as Retrospective: Men of the “People”

These three accounts by Upen Banerji, Barin Ghosh, and Ullaskar Dutta
were written at a time soon after the prisoners were released. As such, they
read quite differently from accounts that appeared much later and took
a longer retrospective view. I end this chapter with a reading of the
autobiography written by Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty, who had been at
the Andamans with the others in the 1910s, but did not publish his
memoir until 1946, when a second wave of histories of the revolutionary
terrorist movement were published. By 1946, it was clear that the British
were going to leave India, and Trailokya’s account had a more reflective
tone, assessing the success of the revolutionary terrorist movement as
India’s independence loomed. I analyze this moment more fully in the
final chapter, but here, I focus on some of the ways that Trailokya’s
account compared with those written much earlier.

75 76
Dutta, Twelve Years, p. 289. Dutta, Twelve Years, p. 291.
 The Memoir as Retrospective 81

The imagined readership of revolutionary terrorist memoirs changed

over the two and half decades in which these accounts appeared. Barin
Ghosh’s memoir, published in 1922, and Ullaskar Dutta’s account,
published in 1924, imagined a reading audience of people like them:
educated, elite, and unused to manual labor. Trailokya Nath’s memoir,
written in Bengali in 1946, supplemented and translated into English in
1963, and revised in 1968, had a different sense of readership. Because his
book was published when it seemed the British were already planning to
leave India, Trailokya had the benefit of hindsight to situate himself
within a much larger movement. Trailokya’s text was not intended to
recruit followers to the movement, but intended to inspire patriotism
around the history of an underground movement that had already existed
for several decades.
Trailokya’s memoir narrated a political career in which he describes
who he met, whose influence he came under, when he was introduced to
teachings of Marx and the Gita, and how he survived underground,
evading police detection. In comparison to the memoirs by Barin,
Upen, and Ullas, Trailokya Nath’s memoir marked out what sorts of
subversive strategies revolutionary terrorists used to battle colonial sur-
veillance, enhancing existing information and correcting it when he felt
necessary. Trailokya Nath repeatedly noted that he wrote only reluc-
tantly, feeling the need to explain the misunderstood history of the
revolutionary struggle. Echoing Bhupen Dutta’s claim that Indians
needed to have a “true history,” Trailokya attempted to give a sense of
why a correct understanding of history would explain the present.
Trailokya Nath’s account of his career of many peregrinations allowed
him to sketch his life story as one that was connected to the larger Indian
nationalist movement starting from his conviction in the Barisal
Conspiracy Case in 1908, and into the 1930s and 1940s. He described
meeting J. M. Sengupta and Gandhi while in jail, and discussing Marx
with Subhas Chandra Bose. He even described those he never met, such
as the women revolutionary terrorists Bina Das, Pritilata Waddedar,
and Kalpana Dutta. His history was also the history of his group,
Anushilan Samiti, and he linked the various activities of Anushilan
members with his own life. Like the other prisoners at the Andamans,
Trailokya Nath described a life of great sacrifice: living on very little
money and washing his own clothes, eating dal (cooked lentils) and
muri (puffed rice) when he could find it. This part of his narrative suggests
that his autobiography was a form of critique, not just about the British,
but also about the other possible directions of the nationalist movement.
He revised earlier Andamans accounts, recounting that some of the
detainees were respected, because they actively resisted the jailors.
82 Revolutionary Terrorism through Autobiography

Other detainees, such as Barin Ghosh and the Savarkar brothers, nego-
tiated with prison officials, flattering them in English, and securing early
release.
While at the Andamans, Trailokya Nath organized a jail protest with
several other prisoners: they resisted repeated beatings and several of
them were given solitary confinement and received a liquid diet of rice
extract twice a day for several months. Although Barin, Upen, and the
Savarkar brothers described these work and hunger strikes in their writ-
ings, none of them participated, according to Trailokya, a betrayal that
had been highlighted in Hem Chandra Kanungo’s account from 1928.77
Trailokya Nath’s barely disguised resentment of Barin Ghosh and the
Savarkar brothers positioned his own place in the independence move-
ment as a committed patriot in a larger battle, fully committed to the long
process of revolution, and enduring all the sacrifices that were required of
him. Like Hem Chandra Kanungo, whose memoir had explained that
Barin, Ullaskar, and Upen had confessed their crimes to the British and
then attempted to curry favor with officials to avoid punishment,
Trailokya distinguished his own sacrifices from those made by other
revolutionary terrorists.
Throughout his life story, Trailokya Nath represented himself as a man
of the people, wandering through villages and living off the generosity of
the local population: Muslims, as well as Hindus, and untouchables, as
well as Brahmin priests. He befriended boatmen and coolies, who lent
him clothing to disguise himself from the police, although this tactic
almost failed when a police officer corralled him to row him across the
river and Trailokya did not know how to row. As a high-caste Brahmin,
these claims speak to his cosmopolitan charisma as a seemingly caste-less
and secular subject whose friendships transcended social divisions.
Because he spent much of the 1920s and 1930s attempting to evade
police surveillance, he did not advertise his identity or attain any positions
of leadership until his release in 1946, when he expressed surprise at how
famous he had become during his time in detention.78
Given Trailokya Nath’s populist leanings, one might imagine that any
mention of caste or social status would be absent from Trailokya Nath’s
narrative. Yet, he describes how upon his arrival on the Andamans, his
sacred thread was removed, as he had heard Upen Banerji’s was as well.79
While living underground, he noted that revolutionaries infrequently ate
fish, had to wash their own clothes, and even had to forgo trips to the

77
T. Chakrabarty, Thirty Years, pp. 142 43. 78 T. Chakrabarty, Thirty Years, p. 186.
79
T. Chakrabarty, Thirty Years, p. 122; Upen Banerji describes this in Tale of My Exile,
p. 78, a passage that was reproduced in Memoirs, p. 112.
 The Memoir as Retrospective 83

Calcutta theater. These glimpses of how the expected course of Trailokya

Nath’s life changed focus surprisingly on the privileges of the life he
should have had as the first-born son in a well-to-do Brahmin family,
had he not become a revolutionary terrorist. These were, no doubt,
devastating humiliations for men who might have expected to live in
more comfort; however, one hears relatively little in many of these
accounts about the lives of convicts or “common criminals” who served
these men, including Trailokya, in prison and detention camps every day
and lived alongside them.
These accounts are perhaps not so surprising: it is undeniable that
detention was difficult and that it produced self-interested demands for
better treatment from political prisoners who were from the educated
middle-classes. Having said that, it is interesting that unlike colonial
Vietnam or colonial Indonesia, the detention of political prisoners in
India in the late 1910s did not produce solidarity among the prisoners
across class, caste, or regional boundaries.80 Although prison officials were
always concerned that free association would allow terrorist planning to
thrive among detainees from different regions, it does not seem that was the
case in Bengal during the early years of the movement. If anything, caste
hierarchies and relationships from outside became more entrenched.
As Upen Banerji noted at the end of his memoir, “In the Andamans jail,
there was no end of petty squabbles about the comparative achievements of
different political groups or of different leaders. Everybody stood up for his
own particular party and abused the others, and all this narrowness of mind
was always mixed up with gross provincial jealousy.” Tensions between
prisoners from Punjab, Bengal, and Maharashtra, the three hubs of revolu-
tionary terrorist activity, were particularly vicious and regional stereotypes
proliferated.81 Similarly, when Barin Ghosh self-published A Wounded
Humanity in the mid-1930s, he noted that “It is on the face of it a Babus’
movement . . . having no link or touch with the masses who are the real
sufferers from both foreign and indigenous exploitation.”82 This echoed
the views of other revolutionary terrorists who turned to writing; Bhupen
Dutta, Trailokya Nath, and others would echo much the same sentiment in
their writings, lamenting that the movement never seemed to move beyond
“Brahamanism,” or a caste-bound concern with improving one’s one place
in the nation.83

80
Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862 1940
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
81
WBSA, IB serial no. 54/1920, file no. 85/20, “Memoirs of a Revolutionary,” Upendra
Banerji, p. 125.
82
WBSA, Home Political File 769/35, “A Wounded Humanity,” p. 51.
83
WBSA, IB File 108/25, installment from Jaistha, 1330 B.S.
84 Revolutionary Terrorism through Autobiography

The Eulogy as History and Biography

The model of the disciplined, modern, revolutionary subject as a young man
who was willing to sacrifice his life for his nation proliferated in the 1920s
and 1930s. These accounts countered the image of the nonviolent satyagrahi
and reminded both Indians and British officials alike that Bengal had a long
tradition of militant activity that had laid the foundations for revolutionary
transformation.84 Aside from Bhupen Datta’s account, a lineage of revolu-
tionary terrorists were frequently listed in prefaces of books, booklets, and
pamphlets produced in the 1920s. If Chaitanya, (the sixteenth-century
mystic saint), and Rammohun had been the revolutionary forefathers in
Bhupen Datta’s accounts, figures such as Khudiram Bose, Prafulla Chaki,
and Kanai Lal Dutta, who had either died or been executed in the 1910s,
became the figures most frequently mentioned in other accounts a decade
later. “Eulogy literature” written by revolutionaries were important venues
for impressing upon readers what the range of political possibilities were for
anticolonial resistance and how the figure of the revolutionary should be
mobilized in the militant anticolonial struggle.85
For example, a memorial booklet honored the death of Kanai Lal
Datta, who was executed for his involvement in killing Narendra
Goswami, the state’s witness in the Alipore Conspiracy. Although it was
titled simply, “Kanai Lal,” the booklet reprinted a series of articles about
the history of the movement and its key figures, such as Barindra Kumar
Ghosh, Khudiram Bose, and Prafulla Chaki. The articles had appeared in
the Bengali magazine, Pravartak, with several black and white photo-
graphs of the main protagonists, but the journal had been banned by
the British under the Indian Press Act. The 50-page pamphlet was
printed in Bengali out of Chandernagore, a French territory outside
Calcutta, and showed up in the files of the Intelligence Branch. It was
banned that year under the Sea Customs Act of 1878, which was used to
prevent “objectionable material” from being transported into British
territories; it remained proscribed until 1947.86

84
NAI, Home Political File 249/1925, “Revolutionary Press Propaganda in Bengal,” see
especially Appendix I.
85
Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text
(London: Hurst & Co, 2015), p. 39; Sanyal, Revolutionary Pamphlets, pp. 164 73;
WBSA, IB serial no. 164/1925, File no. 495/25, “Revolutionaries of Bengal,” by
Hemanta Kumar Sarkar; WBSA, IB serial no. 182/1929, File no. 212/29, “The Rebel
Hero,” by C. B. Dutta, ex detenu of Chittagong; NAI, Home Political File 379/3 of
1924, “Bengal Revolutionary Leaflets and History Sheets, Including SC Bose, and Other
Papers Relating to Persons Connected with the Revolutionary Movement.”; WBSA,
Home Political File 612/26, “Revolutionary Press Propaganda in Bengal”; APAC,
L/P&J/12/220, “Distribution of Leaflets in India, August 1924 February 1929.”
86
WBSA, IB serial no. 113/23, File no. 310/23, Proscription of a book entitled “Kanai Lal.”
 The Eulogy as History and Biography 85

Written by Moti Lal Ray, one of the men who had accompanied Kanai
Lal’s body to the cremation ground, with an afterword by Upendra Nath
Banerji, who had seen Kanai Lal the day before his death, the pamphlet
ended with a history and a eulogy of Kanai Lal. Moti Lal explained that he
had written the pamphlet “as a mark of our friendship” and that he had
attempted to provide as “true and undistorted” an account as possible.
The pamphlet explained that Kanai Lal had been passionate about the
study of history, having learned the history of India, Ireland, and Russia,
which represented “the achievement of independence by different nations
of the world.”87
Even though Kanai Lal had died nearly 15 years before, Moti Lal
recalled the sight of Kanai Lal’s dead body on the funeral pyre, which
was illustrated by a photograph in the pamphlet: “As soon as the blanket
was carefully removed, what did we see – language is wanting to describe
the lovely beauty of the ascetic Kanai – his long hair fell in a mass on his
broad forehead, the half-closed eyes were still drowsy as though from
a taste of nectar, the living lines of resolution were manifest in the firmly
closed lips, the hands reaching to the knees were closed in fists. It was
wonderful! Nowhere on Kanai’s limbs did we find any ugly wrinkle
showing the pain of death . . .”88 Invoking the peaceful way in which
Kanai Lal had embraced his death, Upen Banerji, who had been at school
with Kanai Lal’s older brother, used the eulogy to direct a criticism
toward the nonviolent movement: “When I hear to-day all around me
that non-violence is the supreme virtue . . . I remember the picture of the
profoundly tranquil face of Kanailal.”89 Even if Kanai Lal had died before
he could write his own account, witnesses to his virtue were abundant,
including the police officer who was moved by Kanai Lal’s bravery.
Other texts, such as the simply titled, “Revolutionaries of Bengal,”
written by Hemanta Kumar Sarkar, sold out upon publication in 1923.
The short book describes the author as a “humble admirer,” who had
followed the careers of Barindra Ghosh, Upendra Nath Banerji, Ullaskar
Dutta, as well as several figures involved in the Indo–German conspiracy.
Described as a series of “life sketches,” the book was not in the file kept by
the Intelligence Branch, but was said to be a summary of the books that
had been banned by the British, presumably those written by Barin
Ghosh, Upendra Nath, and others.90

87
WBSA, IB serial no. 113/23, File no. 310/23, Proscription of a book entitled “Kanai Lal.”
88
WBSA, IB serial no. 113/23, File no. 310/23, Proscription of a book entitled “Kanai Lal.”
89
WBSA, IB serial no. 113/23, File no. 310/23, Proscription of a book entitled “Kanai Lal.”
90
WBSA, IB serial no. 164/1925, File no. 495/25, “Revolutionaries of Bengal,” by Hemanta
Kumar Sarkar.
86 Revolutionary Terrorism through Autobiography

As the 1920s went on, pamphlets about the recently deceased or

detained became a staple of revolutionary literature. The admiring bio-
graphy of Pramode Ranjan Chaudhuri, who had been involved in the
Dakhineswar Bomb Case and executed in 1926, as well as a fictional
account of Abani Mukerjee, were widely circulated. Pramode Ranjan’s
biography, “The Rebel Hero,” was written by a friend and ex-detainee
from Chittagong, Charu Bikash Dutta. Published in Calcutta in 1929,
700 copies were printed and circulated, although the police could not find
a single copy.91 The focus was on Pramode Ranjan, and secondarily with
his accomplice, Ananta Hari Mitra, but it retraced the history of the
terrorist movement dating from 1905 and the founding of the
Anushilan Samiti. It recited the names and situations of the revolution’s
early “martyrs,” Khudiram and Kanai Lal, and drew attention to a more
recent figure, Gopinath Saha, who had been executed in 1924 for mur-
dering a European. The translator’s summary noted that the life story of
this particular figure was being used to promote revolutionary ideals and
martyrdom. This formula became more popular as a strategy in the later
1920s and 1930s as a new pantheon of figures emerged and formed in the
revolutionary terrorist movement.92

A History of Revolutionary Terrorism

Several years later after the appearance of Barin Ghosh’s and Upendra
Nath’s accounts, in 1925, Bhupendra Kumar Dutta, wrote a history that
reached back as far as the founding of Brahmo Samaj and the reformist
ideas of Rammohan Roy in early nineteenth-century Bengal. Published in
the Bengali periodical, Bangabani, his series of articles were both critical
and sympathetic, situating the revolutionary terrorist movement amid
a larger tradition of political and social reform in Bengal. He cited
a long list of literary figures – among them Bankim Chandra Chatterjee,
Bhudev, and Hem Chandra, as well as figures such as Keshub Chandra
Sen, Swami Vivekanand, and Sri Aurobindo – who had influenced the
revolutionary terrorist movement, but he noted that “there are hundreds
of such self-sacrificing boys and young men in Bengal.”93 Bhupen Dutta

91
WBSA, IB serial no. 182/1929, File no. 212/29, “The Rebel Hero, by C. B. Dutta,
Ex detenu of Chittagong.
92
See, for instance, WBSA, IB serial no. 19/1930, File no. 11/30, Proscription of book
titled, “Biplabi Abani Mukherji.” Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar
India, ch. 5.
93
WBSA, IB File 108/25, Sravan 1330. Swami Vivekanand and Sri Aurobindo were
spiritual leaders who inspired Bengal’s middle classes; Vivekanand was Bhupen Dutta’s
brother; Aurobindo was Barin Ghosh’s brother.
 A History of Revolutionary Terrorism 87

argued that for Bengal, after Chaitanya, this was a second moment of
upheaval.94
He had many criticisms of the movement – it had moved away from
recruiting Muslims and had become almost entirely Brahmin and
Kayasth. By these exclusions, it allowed orthodox Hinduism to revive,
and it had not sufficiently reached out to the masses, as Gandhi’s move-
ment had. In one installment, he wrote, “The cult of revolution in Bengal,
as has already been stated before, was always, and still is, confined to the
bourgeoisie class only; and this class, the world over, though it tries its
best to wrest away as many rights and privileges from the aristocracy as it
possibly can, will never share and enjoy them along with the lower
classes.”95 Bhupen’s message was tinged with a call for collective action,
a sense that the revolutionaries had lost an opportunity to reach out to
“the masses.” As Bhupen noted, “The masses had not been won over by
the revolutionaries, nor did we or our successors know how to draw them
into our folds.”96 This lament was echoed by Hem Chandra Kanungo,
who had been jailed in the Andamans for his part in the Manicktalla
Bomb Conspiracy. Published in the journal Forward, and then in
Basumati, Kanungo’s account drew from contemporary communist
texts, noting that many of the key figures were not motivated by social
revolution. As Kanungo wrote Banglay Biplab Kahini, which was trans-
lated as the “The Story of a Revolutionary Movement in Bengal,” the
movement had strayed from its initial ambitions and should direct itself
toward mass politics and move beyond the limited ambitions of a few
figures.97 The translator, an Indian working for the Intelligence Branch,
observed, “The causes of failure as narrated by the author seem to be
narrow conservatism, an overdose of spiritualism, vain demagogy, blind
hero-worship, brazen foolhardiness, and shameless treason to the
party.”98
In spite of its failures to become a viable broad-based social movement,
Bhupen argued that revolutionary terrorism had awakened a dormant
spirit of nationalism in Bengal, one that had been beaten down through
generations of subservience to British rulers. The idea of Bengal being
“awakened” was an important historical trope, replicating the sense of

94
WBSA, IB File 108/25, Bangabani, Bhadra 1331.
95
WBSA, IB File 108/25, Bangabani, Jaistha 1331.
96
WBSA, IB File 108/25, “Printed articles relating to reminiscences of revolutionaries
which have appeared in the press.” In Bangabani, Bhadra 1330 BS.
97
WBSA, Home Political File 612/26, “Revolutionary Press Propaganda in Bengal.” This
account has recently been edited and published: Hem Chandra Kanungo,
Amiya Samanta, ed., Account of the Revolutionary Movement in Bengal (Kolkata: Setu
Prakashani, 2015).
98
WBSA, IB File 250A/37, “Publications (Terrorist) Brought to the Notice of the IB.”
88 Revolutionary Terrorism through Autobiography

“enlightenment” that replaced the so-called medieval “dark ages.”

The trope was reproduced in leaflets, flyers, and posters that circulated
in the 1930s when the colonial government was faced with yet another
tide of terrorist unrest.
Bhupen Datta’s 1925 history was of a different ilk than the personal
accounts and eulogies I have cited so far: indeed, the most remarkable
feature of his history was that he did not mention his own life story, but
focused on the lineage of the movement of which he felt himself a part.
By 1925, he and others had a clear sense that their movement should be
recorded for the sake of history before it was forgotten by the tide of
nationalism that had gripped the nation under Gandhi. Bhupen Datta’s
account situated revolutionary terrorism within a longer narrative of
momentous and radical shifts in Bengal, dating back much beyond the
usual starting point of the Chapekar brothers in Maharashtra in the late
nineteenth century to the sixteenth century. For him, as for many others, the
history of Bengal was an intellectual project of social reform that linked
Chaitanya, a spiritual figure, and Rammohun Roy, a liberal reformer, with
a territorial project that united those who had been of Bengal’s soil. Bhupen’s
account drew from a “spatio-temporal” imaginary that was particular to
Indian intellectuals as they articulated a model of nationalism that attempted
to define itself in opposition and aside from colonial occupation.99
By situating the movement in such a way, Bhupen Datta’s conception
of the history of the movement allowed the revolutionary terrorists to
inherit a well-established past and project and imagine a future that was
distinct, in particular, distancing the history of Bengal’s political and
social radicalism from the imaginary of nonviolent protest being projected
by Gandhi across India. Moreover, Bhupen argued that the revolutionary
terrorist movement drew a clear connection between militancy and mas-
culinity: “We then clearly saw that the mendicant policy – the policy of
prayer and petition – followed by Congress was gradually emasculating
the nation and we were, therefore, determined to rejuvenate the nation by
examples of courage and self-sacrifice.”100
In May 1925, Lawrence Birley, the Chief Secretary of the Government
of Bengal, wrote to Arthur Hirtzel, the Secretary of the Government of
India, that the repeal of the Indian Press Act of 1910 meant that revolu-
tionaries were actively publishing accounts of the movement to “recruit
the youth of Bengal to hate the British and as a result of that hatred to
commit violent crime.”101 He categorized the articles into the following

99
Manu Goswami, Producing India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
100
WBSA, IB File 108/25.
101
NAI, Home Political File 249/1925, “Revolutionary Press Propaganda in Bengal.”
 Conclusion 89

four classifications, which he claimed to have “an extraordinary influence

over the unbalanced minds of students of Bengal.”
a) “The familiar kind of article which denounces the economic oppres-
sion of the British in India and very often adds something about
defending the chastity of mothers and sisters . . . Articles of this class
are very common . . .”
b) “Appeals, which are frequently poems in mystic language, which extol
freedom and self-sacrifice. These are intended to excite religious
emotion . . .”
c) “Articles which profess to give an historical account of the doings of
old revolutionaries . . .”
d) “Articles which profess to deal in a detached and scientific manner
with various methods of the use of force . . .”102
By breaking revolutionary literature into these formulaic categories,
Birley’s categories defined much of the anticolonial rhetoric circulating
in Bengal in the 1920s, particularly the criticism leveled at the economy.
Yet, in spite of colonial surveillance, these life stories in pamphlets, small
books, and serial publications continued to appear in the vernacular press
as a way to advocate for political violence against the state as a way of
protesting British rule. The Intelligence Branch kept an annual file titled
“Publications (terrorist) brought to the notice of IB,” while the
Fortnightly Reports and Reports of Native Newspapers kept track of
meetings, assemblies, and the movements of suspected terrorists.103
The government eventually banned the practice of publishing biogra-
phies, eulogies, or photographs of terrorists, including it as a measure in
the Bengal Suppression of Terrorist Outrages Act in 1932.

Conclusion
There are many more autobiographies, memoirs, and histories in the
form of life stories that emerged from the revolutionary terrorist move-
ment other than those analyzed here. It would be too easy to dismiss the
genres of biography, memoir, or eulogy as literary genres that did not
conform to conventional forms of history-writing.104 Autobiographies
and life histories of revolutionaries became a crucial way of writing the
history of this movement from an Indian perspective. These narratives

102
NAI, Home Political File 249/1925, “Revolutionary Press Propaganda in Bengal.”
103
WBSA, IB File 250A was an annual compilation of leaflets, posters, and texts that drew
attention to the movement.
104
“Historians and Biography: A Roundtable,” American Historical Review 114 (June
2009): 573 661.
90 Revolutionary Terrorism through Autobiography

documented a lived history and saw the history of revolutionary terrorism

in Bengal as integral to the history-in-the-making of a postcolonial India.
By inserting themselves into an evolving nationalist narrative about
anticolonial resistance, revolutionaries’ narratives described the emer-
gence of militant and radical forms of political and historical subjectivity,
thus challenging a slowly developing historical narrative that privileged
nonviolence as the dominant political paradigm or the process of liberal
constitutional reform as the appropriate pace for political change in
India. For those who saw their part in history as active members of
a revolutionary terrorist struggle, they were able to press their claims
about particular ideological, political, and social affiliations as possible
revolutionary futures for the nation. In this sense, revolutionary history-
writing was very much a modern project, one that anticipated the future
as well as recorded the past, not always as it was, but the way it should
have been.
Thus, while Barin Ghosh’s, Upen Banerji’s and Ullaskar Dutta’s books
seem parochially focused on themselves and the prison conditions they
suffered, the other texts I have discussed, Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty’s
memoirs and Bhupen Dutta’s first historical tracts, gesture toward
a larger political world and a longer history that was engaged with
explaining a radical anticolonial movement that was going to bring
about political change. The nature of that political change was not so
readily apparent in the 1920s, when Gandhian civil disobedience was an
important form of protest, nor was it much clearer in the 1940s, when it
looked as if the province of Bengal was likely to be partitioned into two
parts, yet those who wrote histories in the form of autobiography and
memoir believed that their accounts would narrate a way that India could
be independent.
By using the form of the life story, these texts melded the politics of the
personal with the politics of the nation, repeatedly holding up the named
hero or heroine as exemplary, virtuous, and moreover, willing to sacrifice
for the nation. The idea of sacrifice, perhaps always central to imagining
nationalist forms, was a persistent trope in these accounts, and celebrat-
ing martyrdom was a way of marking the ultimate sacrifice one could
make for the nation. For those who survived incarceration, loss of caste
status and respectability, physical suffering, and the social sacrifices they
made became ways that they narrated their contributions and recuperated
their losses. As I have argued, the repetitive accounting of the loss of the
sacred thread upon entry into prison, and having to cook and do laundry
highlighted what revolutionary terrorists suffered. They also highlighted
the great distance with which their violent crimes should be judged
differently from the crimes committed by their fellow prisoners. Missing
 Conclusion 91

in these accounts is any hint of the violent crimes of which they were
accused: Barin Ghosh and Ullaskar Dutta were accomplished bomb-
makers; Trailokya Nath was convicted of holding up a bank with
a revolver; Upen Banerji learned physics so he could collect and assemble
explosives. Ironically, although violence was central to their political
project, when they wrote a history that imagined a post-colonial future,
the movement had to be cleansed of the violence these men committed,
thus allowing for the possibility of a subject who could reinvent himself
anew after independence.
The sense that the prison was a “kingdom of topsy-turvydom,” as Barin
Ghosh put it, was one that might have produced revolutionary change,
but it did not, as those who wrote about the movement observed from the
1920s onward. Even in these early histories of the movement told by its
participants, one can see the limitations of secret societies organized
around caste lines: among the hallmarks of this movement was that it
comprised bhadralok, young men and some women of Kayasth and
Brahmin families in Bengal, to the exclusion of Muslims and others out-
side what would be considered the “respectable” classes.105 Most were
educated at least until college, and many had never expected to spend
time in a colonial prison or detention camp. The affirmations of caste
status and gender hierarchy from within the movement – and there are
many such moments – make it hard to imagine how a revolutionary
terrorist movement imagined it could become socially radical when so
many of its members treated their participation in the revolutionary
terrorist movement as something that was antithetical or exceptional to
their social status.

105
Rajat Ray, “Revolutionaries, Pan Islamists, and Bolsheviks: Maulana Abul Kalam Azad
and the Political Underworld in Calcutta, 1905 1925,” in Mushirul Hasan, ed.,
Communal and Pan Islamic Trends in Colonial India (Delhi: Manohar, 1981), pp.
85 108.
3 After Chauri Chaura: The Revival and
Repression of Revolutionary Terrorism

In February 1922, in what is one of the most well-known events in the

history of the Indian independence movement, Gandhi called off the
Non-Cooperation Movement after a group of villagers attacked and killed
police officers at a local police station in Chauri Chaura in Gorakhpur
District in the United Provinces.1 The campaign was Gandhi’s first
extended nationwide campaign of mass nonviolent resistance, organized
to protest the passage of the Rowlatt Act which had authorized the
suspension of habeas corpus in cases of sedition. It dramatically expanded
the scope of the Indian nationalist movement by bringing in participation
from men and women in all walks of life, including revolutionary terror-
ists who agreed to suspend any violent action during the campaigns.
The movement started in September 1920, when Gandhi promised
Indians that the nation would achieve independence, or purna swaraj,
within the year. Gandhi felt strongly that a campaign of mass nonviolent
protest that called on all citizens to withdraw their participation from
British institutions – such as legislative assemblies and councils created
under the 1919 reforms – would compel the British to leave India.
Gandhi’s campaigns called for other forms of political protest, from
workers’ strikes to peasant movements that resisted paying taxes and
rent, thus expanding the definition of non-cooperation to include acts
of civil disobedience that broke unjust laws and enabled Gandhi’s sup-
porters to court arrest. By February 1922, when the events at Chauri
Chaura unfolded, a range of political groups were reluctant to adhere with
Gandhi’s all-India strategy of nonviolent protest and wanted to try other
methods for applying political pressure to the British. Later that year,
there was a split within the Indian National Congress between those who
considered themselves the “pro-changers” versus those who were called
the “no-changers,” between those who felt that they should join the

1
Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922 1992 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1995), see especially pp. 9 18, which narrate the event of the riot and
its fraught place in the history of India’s independence movement.

92
 After Chauri Chaura 93

government and change it from within and those who wanted to adhere to
the boycott of legislative councils. Gandhi and his followers occupied the
no-changers position, advocating that Congress should withdraw any
cooperation with the government; others, such as members of the newly
formed wing of the Congress, the Swarajya Party, decided to stand in
elections. At that moment, it looked as if Gandhi’s ability to manage the
different regional and political constituencies of India was fragmenting
and his hold on the political strategies of politicians across India was
limited.2
In Bengal’s historiography, the 1920s is often understood as the
moment in which Bengal’s politicians turned politically away from some
of the positions of the Indian National Congress, leaning toward social-
ism, communism, and more militant forms of anticolonial resistance.3
Figures such as Chittaranjan Das, Bipin Chandra Pal, Subhas Chandra
Bose, M. N. Roy, and J. M. Sengupta became leading critics of
Congress’s methods and offered a range of political alternatives to
Gandhi’s strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience. Unsure about whether
Gandhi’s and the Congress’s all-India strategies would succeed in bring-
ing about Indian independence, these younger political figures offered
cautious support to the revolutionary terrorists, although they did not
express public approval of violent methods. They did, however, cham-
pion the legal rights of detainees, with C. R. Das and J. M. Sengupta
becoming among the more famous defense attorneys of this period.
This chapter turns to the 1920s, when former revolutionaries who had
been released in 1919 joined the Bengal Congress and agreed to suspend
any revolutionary actions while the Non-Cooperation Movement was
underway. The Indian National Congress convened a special session in
Calcutta in early September 1920 to discuss the non-cooperation
program, and a number of ex-revolutionaries attended and agreed to
suspend planning any terrorist actions for a year.4 By the end of the
Non-Cooperation Movement in February 1922, it appeared that many
revolutionary terrorists had returned to secret societies to organize acts of
political violence to protest colonial rule and there was a rash of terrorist
acts between 1923 and 1925. Evidence collected by the Intelligence
Branch showed that the two main revolutionary groups in Bengal,
2
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, The Defining Moments in Bengal, 1920 1947 (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2014), ch. 5; Rajat Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in
Bengal, 1875 1927 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 311 16.
3
Srilata Chatterjee, Congress Politics in Bengal, 1919 1939, (London: Anthem Books,
2002), pp. 36 43; Leonard Gordon, Bengal: The Nationalist Movement, 1876 1940
(New York: Columbia University, 1974); Ray, Social Conflict, ch. 4.
4
Bhattacharya, Defining Moments, pp. 165 66, 169 70; Rama Hari Shankar, Gandhi’s
Encounters with the Revolutionaries (New Delhi: Siddarth Publications, 1996), Chapter 3.
94 After Chauri Chaura

Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar, had generated several more revolutionary

groups, such as Sree Sangha, the New Violence Party, and the Bengal
Volunteers.5
By the middle of the 1920s, events in Bengal dramatized the crisis
facing the British government across India. Although I focus predomi-
nantly on acts of political violence and the government’s responses in
Bengal in this chapter, throughout the early 1920s, the government of
India prosecuted a number of inter-provincial conspiracy cases against
a range of insurgent groups who used political violence; many of these
cases involved revolutionary terrorists from Bengal, who had made links
with their counterparts in other provinces. Bengali revolutionaries such as
Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee, Sachindranath Sanyal, Jatin Das, and mem-
bers of Anushilan Samiti were affiliated with the Hindustan Socialist
Republican Army.6 Organization between underground groups in the
United Provinces, Punjab, and Bengal to coordinate robberies, bomb-
ings, and assassinations alarmed government officials. Among other
cases, the government prosecuted the Kakori Train Dacoity case, the
Deoghar Conspiracy Case, Cawnpore Conspiracy Case, Meerut
Conspiracy Trials, and the Lahore Conspiracy Case.7
Of these, the Lahore Conspiracy Case, which occurred between 1928
and 1929, drew the attention of officials in Bengal; a number of Bengalis
had been involved in Lahore and the group known as the Hindustan
Socialist Republican Army had been actively recruiting followers of
Anushilan Samiti.8 In April 1929, Bhagat Singh and his comrade,
Batukeshwar Dutta (a Bengali), threw a bomb into the Legislative
Assembly in Delhi to state their opposition to the continued British occu-
pation of India. Police investigations showed that members of Hindustan
Socialist Republican Army had been behind the December 1928 assassina-
tion of a British official, J. P. Saunders, who had been mistaken for his boss,
J. A. Scott, the superintendent of police. Scott had been in charge when the
nationalist figure, Lala Lajpat Rai, was assaulted by police batons
while marching against the Simon Commission in October 1928. When

5
Asok Kumar Ray, Revolutionary Parties of Bengal: Dacca Anushilan, New Violence, and
Jugantar, 1919 1930 (Kolkata: Papyrus Books, 2013).
6
Ray, Revolutionary Parties, pp. 21 24.
7
APAC, L/P&J/6/1910, “Kakori Train Dacoity and Conspiracy Case”; L/P&J/6/1962,
“Deoghar Conspiracy Case”; APAC L/P&J/12/327, “Meerut Conspiracy Case”; see
also the special issue edited by Michele Louro and Carolien Stolte, “The Meerut
Conspiracy Case in Comparative and International Perspective,” Comparative Studies of
South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33.3 (2013): 310 15; Noorani, Indian Political
Trials, ch. 10.
8
Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India, p. 35.
 After Chauri Chaura 95

Lajpat Rai died in the hospital, his death at the hands of the Punjab police
gave rise to a new round of political violence.
Conspiracy trials were prosecuted with uneven success by the colonial
government which occasioned a proliferation of repressive laws across
India. Alongside the nationwide Non-Cooperation Movement and
Khilafat movements between 1920 and 1922, the continued existence
of the revolutionary terrorist movement, from the middle of the 1920s
and onward, showed that anticolonial sentiment was widespread in India.
Moreover, perhaps more alarmingly for British officials, revolutionary
terrorists were drawing on global trends and connected to international
radical movements.9
By 1925, just five years after the anti-Rowlatt protests, the colonial
government enacted a series of emergency ordinances and legislative acts
that authorized police and intelligence officials in India to arrest and
detain suspected terrorists, revolutionaries, and violent political dissi-
dents and try them in special courts. In spite of the anti-Rowlatt protests
and a strong recommendation to repeal all regulations authorizing deten-
tion by the 1921 Repressive Laws Committee, which was headed by the
political moderate, Tej Bahadur Sapru, the language and logic of this new
legislation drew substantially from the terms of the Defence of India Act
of 1915 and Rowlatt Act.
This chapter follows the re-emergence of revolutionary terrorism in the
early 1920s from the enactment of the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment
Act in April 1925 to when it lapsed five years later in April 1930. While the
Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act and its supplements were in force,
politicians in Britain and in India were repeatedly drawn into debates
about detaining political dissidents without formally charging or convict-
ing them. While officials in the government argued they were protecting
the process of political devolution to Indians from radical and militant
elements, members of the Indian Legislative Assembly passed resolutions

9
In 1922, the Interdepartmental Committee on Eastern Unrest was convened in London to
survey the threats the British empire faced from Indian, Turkish, and Egyptian national
ists, the pan Islamic movement, Bolshevik activities, and Indian revolutionaries in
Europe, America, and Asia. The committee brought together the Foreign Office, the
War Office, the Colonial Office, and the India Office to coordinate a response to transna
tional anti colonial movements that connected different regions, such as the Indian
revolutionary terrorist movement, which had a following in Bengal, the Punjab, United
Provinces, Central Provinces, and further afield in London, Berlin, Paris, and Moscow.
Public Records Office, Kew, Great Britain, (PRO) CO 537/935, “Report of the Inter
departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest.” Copies of the report can also be found at
APAC, L/P&J/12/120. For evidence of these international connections, see
Kris Manjapra, “Communist Internationalism and Transcolonial Recognition,” in
Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, eds., Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the
Global Circulation of Ideas (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 159 77.
96 After Chauri Chaura

urging the repeal of repressive laws and demanded the release of those
who had been detained and not charged.
In legal engagements with issues surrounding the revolutionary terror-
ist movement, Indian legislators, many of whom had trained in England,
actively challenged repressive legislation in the 1920s and 1930s,
although they did not approve of violent methods. Partha Chatterjee
has called the involvement of Indian lawyers, ordinarily considered the
most politically moderate group among nationalists, the “secret history of
Indian nationalism.”10 The resistance to repressive laws ultimately
proved ineffective, which is perhaps a reason that the legal history of
this moment has not been prominent in many historical accounts.
In response to the resistance it faced from Indian legislators, the govern-
ment expanded repressive laws and the laws became ever more detailed in
the 1920s and 1930s. By design or not, these protracted debates pushed
the colonial state to create more laws and ordinances and led to the
prolonged incarceration of political prisoners, which became a site for
political protest.
The involvement of Indian legislators was a new feature of governing
India after 1919. Unlike the passage of the Defence of India Regulations
in 1915 and the Rowlatt legislation, the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms
of 1919 required that such legislation was to be presented and debated in
the (provincial) Bengal Legislative Council and the (central) Legislative
Assembly. However, an executive provision of the act allowed the govern-
ment to “certify” any important legislation over the objections of the
provincial councils or central assembly. British politicians believed that
enlisting Indian moderates into government would provide the grounds
for responsible government. This logic relied on a “simplistic” idea of
Indian politics, believing that it was divided between Indian moderates
who wanted to preserve their status and “‘extremists’ and ‘terrorists’ on
the Bengali model” who advocated for dramatic political change.11 But
the government’s impression of Indian politics was frequently disrupted
as Sapru, and other political moderates, repeatedly defended the legal
rights of political prisoners, who represented the more radical and mili-
tant edge of nationalist politics.
In the debates surrounding emergency legislation throughout the
1920s and 1930s, the colonial government repeatedly found itself over-
riding the views of Indian politicians, particularly those who were con-
sidered “moderate,” or at least moderate in contrast to Gandhi and his
10
Partha Chatterjee, The Princely Impostor: The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of
Bhawal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 375 79.
11
Andrew Muldoon, Empire, Politics, and the Creation of the 1935 India Act (Burlington, VT:
Ashgate Publishing, 2009), p. 61.
 After Chauri Chaura 97

followers who had refused to stand for elections to the Assemblies or

Councils. Indian moderates were seen to be practically conservative in
comparison to radicals and militants. Yet, while revolutionary terrorists
kept up their attacks against British officials and institutions, the colonial
government faced about a dozen resolutions passed by the Indian repre-
sentatives of the Legislative Assembly recommending that the govern-
ment repeal all repressive laws. British officials, such as the viceroy in New
Delhi, ministers in various departments, and the governor of Bengal in
Calcutta, worried that Indian politicians were colluding with terrorists.
But Indians across the political spectrum noted that there was something
lawless about allowing the government to detain, without charge or con-
viction, hundreds and sometimes thousands of men and women alleged
to have participated in seditious activity.
This political standoff between colonial officials in India and Indian
politicians coincided with the tenor of political developments in London.
Between 1922 and 1931, the British Parliament was governed by either
two short-lived coalitions between Labour and Liberal parties (in 1924
and 1929–1931) or by a larger majority of the Conservative Party
(1922–1929). The split and decline of the Liberal Party gave way to the
rise of Labour, as both parties attempted to challenge the Conservative
party’s dominance in these years. Between 1931 and 1940, a coalition of
all three parties constituted the national government under the leadership
of Ramsay Macdonald (of Labour), Stanley Baldwin, and Neville
Chamberlain (both Conservatives). Regardless of party affiliation, how-
ever, British officials in London, from members of parliament to the
secretary of state for India in London, repeatedly had to answer questions
about why the colonial state was keeping several thousand men and
women in detention. While those on the left objected to detention on
grounds of humanitarianism, those on the political right – mainly those of
the Conservative Party – objected to detention because it cost the govern-
ment to imprison “gentlemanly terrorists” who had to be treated well
because of their social status. In spite of their political differences, Labour
and Conservative politicians resisted expanding repressive laws, recogniz-
ing that these laws undermined the appearance of a government that
adhered to the rule of law. They feared the kind of mass protests that
the Rowlatt Act had attracted in 1919. On these grounds, politicians in
Britain often battled local colonial officials as they argued whether the
lapse of repressive legislation would result in more terrorist violence.
Through these discussions, there was much ink spilled over the ques-
tion of what to call political prisoners and how they should be designated
as distinct from other prisoners. By the late 1920s, when many detainees
and state prisoners had been in jail for several years, the government was
98 After Chauri Chaura

pushed to recognize that political prisoners were distinct from those who
had been convicted through the ordinary law. Detention was rendered
legal by an infrastructure of emergency laws, yet detainees were seen to
have certain rights that made them distinct from those who had been
convicted of crimes. This distinction, as well as the gentlemanly status of
the detainees, was acknowledged by the government, by Indian politi-
cians, and by the detainees themselves. This acknowledgment pervaded
the treatment of those suspected of revolutionary terrorism well into the
1930s and 1940s, a trajectory I follow here and in the next chapter.

Non-Cooperation and Revolutionary Terrorism

During the period of the Non-Cooperation Movement and Khilafat,
from August 1920 through February 1922, former revolutionaries and
political prisoners who had been released joined the Bengal Provincial
Congress Committee (BPCC), which was the provincial unit of the larger
Indian National Congress.12 The relative quiet in revolutionary terrorist
actions in Bengal while the Non-Cooperation Movement was ongoing
suggested that the tacit agreement between the public political parties,
such as Congress and the Swarajya Party, and underground revolutionary
groups, such as Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar, was working. This under-
standing between political leaders and those who belonged to revolution-
ary terrorist groups kept acts of political violence from occurring, at least
for a time.
Some government officials believed that those amnestied could be
reformed, so those who had been detained by the Defence of India or
Regulation III were offered some financial support from the government
to help them after their release. A letter from J. W. Nelson in the Bengal
secretariat to all of Bengal’s district magistrates announced on February
5, 1920, that “It has always been the policy of Government to assist
released detenus to obtain work in the hope that they will settle down as
peaceful citizens.” Acknowledging that a large number of former revolu-
tionaries released into the general population might pose a security risk,
Nelson noted, “[it] makes a special effort in this direction necessary,” and
encouraged district officials to make recommendations to future employ-
ers, to make small government grants for welfare, and larger grants in case
a former revolutionary wanted to set up a business.13

12
Maya Gupta, “Non Cooperation Movement and Militants of Bengal,” Quarterly Review
of Historical Studies, XVII, no. 3 (1978 1979): 160 65; see also S. Chatterjee, Congress
Politics in Bengal, ch. 2; Shankar, Gandhi and the Revolutionaries, ch. 3.
13
WBSA, IB File 66/20, “Monetary Aid to Ex detenus and State Prisoners.” Letter
dated February 5, 1920.
 Non Cooperation and Revolutionary Terrorism 99

Alongside the government’s plans to reform revolutionary terrorists,

intelligence officials kept up their surveillance of those who had been
convicted or detained on charges of sedition. By the end of 1922,
police and intelligence officials saw signs that the revolutionary terror-
ist groups had reconstituted themselves under the cover of the Non-
Cooperation Movement and had shifted the direction of provincial and
local politics. Because they maintained surveillance on leaders in the
Bengal Congress as well, the Bengal government was able to document
that revolutionary groups had close ties to the Congress leadership,
particularly through the Calcutta Corporation, which was a municipal
body for the city.14
The relationship between political leaders in Bengal and former revo-
lutionary terrorists was widely acknowledged by Bengalis. Subhas
Chandra Bose, then a young political activist, admitted that he was
present at meetings between Das, Gandhi, and the revolutionaries. He
acknowledged that the political leaders of Bengal recognized they had to
find a way to integrate those who had been active in the pre-war cam-
paigns of political violence.15 Bhupendra Kumar Dutta, the ex-state
prisoner who had been arguing that writing the history of the movement
would pave the way for a new kind of radical politics in Bengal, noted that
the two revolutionary terrorist organizations had agreed to suspend any
actions while Gandhi’s campaigns were underway.16 One historian has
tabulated the presence of revolutionaries at Congress meetings in
Calcutta and argued that their participation pressed the Indian National
Congress’ to a position that demanded independence, even as the
Congress adhered to a creed of nonviolent protest.17
The formation of the Swarajya Party, under the leadership of
Chittaranjan Das and Motilal Nehru in December 1922, allowed
Congress members who did not agree with Gandhi’s mode of disobedience
to join this new political party. The swarajists protested the colonial
government by joining legislative councils in order to subvert them,

14
APAC, L/P&J/12/391, “Revolutionary Activities in India Dated 1932,” P&J (S) 938/
1929, titled “Brief Notes on the Alliance of Congress with Terrorism in Bengal,” which
had been drafted by R. E. A. Ray, Special Superintendent of Police, Intelligence Branch,
Criminal Investigation Department, Bengal, pp. 88 104, which is also available in
Terrorism in Bengal, vol. III. pp. 931 57.
15
Subhas Chandra Bose, The Indian Struggle, 1920 1942, edited by Sisir K. Bose and
Sugata Bose (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 65 66; see also
Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against
Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 56 57.
16
Bhupendra Kumar Dutta, Biplabēra Padacinha, cited in S. Chatterjee, Congress Politics in
Bengal, p. 40 and Bhattacharya, Defining Moments, p. 189.
17
Shankar, Gandhi’s Encounter with the Indian Revolutionaries, tables on p. 71, pp. 84 86,
and p. 105.
100 After Chauri Chaura

something Gandhi had argued was antithetical to total non-cooperation.18

Das, a barrister who had represented those accused in the Alipore and
Dacca Conspiracy trials of the 1910s, worked with revolutionary terrorists
in several capacities. As the chief executive of the Calcutta Corporation,
Das, and later, Subhas Chandra Bose, the mayor of Calcutta, provided ex-
detainees with jobs. Ex-detainees became involved in expanding programs
of social welfare, established ashrams and centers from which to dispense
grains in times of famine, provided medical relief, and promoted the use of
homemade, or swadeshi, goods.19 Upendra Banerji, who had written
a memoir of his time as a convict in the Andamans, joined the publicity
group of the nonviolent Swarajya Party and was responsible for producing
printed materials to distribute and circulate in order to raise the political
awareness of the masses. Others became members of Bengal Provincial
Congress committees at the district level, enabling them to travel freely
under the rubric of participating in civil political activism.20 These devel-
opments enabled the revolutionary terrorist movement to regroup even
while under police surveillance. By the end of the Non-Cooperation
Movement in February 1922, police and intelligence officials reported
that the revolutionary terrorist movement had revived and had gained
additional recruits through their contacts in local communities.21
According to officials in the Intelligence Branch, the Non-Cooperation
Movement provided a unique opportunity for revolutionary terrorists;
because so many were involved in working at the district level, raising
awareness and membership dues from local populations, they could hide
behind nonviolent political activity.22 H. H. Hansen, Additional Deputy
Superintendent in Dacca, noted in his report on revolutionary terrorists
in eastern Bengal, “Work by members in the committees also serves the
very useful purpose of throwing dust in the eyes of the public, and leaving
a general impression they are nonviolent non-cooperating Congress
18
Partha Chatterjee, Bengal, 1920 47 (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1984), pp. 63 64, 94 95,
177 79: The broad based coalition, which included peasants, workers, and Muslim
groups, collapsed with the death of Das in 1925. See Ray, Social Conflict, ch. 5, esp.
pp. 324 25; Gordon, Bengal Nationalist Movement, pp. 193 94.
19
NAI, Home Political Conf. File 469/25 (1), “Instructions to the District Magistrates
about Village Reorganization Scheme of Swaraj Party,” cited in S. Chatterjee, Congress
Politics in Bengal, p. 232, footnote 46. Out of 25 district leaders, 14 identified as
“revolutionaries.”
20
S. Chatterjee, Congress Politics in Bengal, pp. 110 11 and “Brief Notes on the Alliance of
Congress with Terrorism in Bengal.”
21
NAI, Home Political File 6, “Note of the Connection between Revolutionaries and the
Swarajya Party in Bengal,” cited in Gordon, Bengal Nationalist Movement, p. 176; see also
APAC, L/P&J/6/1878, J&P 2022/24 and 2200/24; APAC, L/P&J/6/1886, J&P 3237/24,
pp. 76 81; and S. Chatterjee, Congress Politics in Bengal, pp. 110 11, 120 21, 127 28.
22
“Brief Notes on the Alliance of Congress with Terrorism in Bengal,” Terrorism in Bengal,
vol. III.
 Non Cooperation and Revolutionary Terrorism 101

men.”23 Throughout the campaign, the director of the Intelligence Branch

in Calcutta asked district officials for a count of how many “ex-political
prisoners” were participating in the Non-Cooperation Movement, thus
maintaining the state’s surveillance of potentially subversive figures.24
Intelligence officials across India noticed that there was a growing
amount of press, leaflets, pamphlets, and flyers circulating about revolu-
tionaries, about martyrdom, and more specifically about the possibility of
overthrowing the British through terrorism. The publication of former
revolutionaries’ memoirs and autobiographies had already been banned,
and officials began to include translations of these texts in their reports so
that their superiors in the colonial administration could see the kinds of
dramatic rhetoric that was being mobilized against the colonial govern-
ment. As the Intelligence Branch and police showed in their fortnightly
reports throughout 1923 and 1924, leaflets that celebrated the martyr-
dom of past revolutionaries seemed to be everywhere in Bengal.25
A leaflet that headlined with “Bande Mataram,” the battle cry for leaders
of the swadeshi campaigns of the first decade of the twentieth century, and
a resolution to assassinate anyone involved in prosecuting repressive
measures was sent to a number of government officials who had been
involved in suppressing the movement.26 A “Red Bengal” leaflet was
distributed around Dacca and Calcutta, encouraging a campaign of
political violence against the “alien tyrant.” The “red” here stood for
the blood that should be sacrificed, although it fueled some of the anti-
communist fears of local officials.27 Another flyer, which was distributed
and posted in schools and universities across Bengal, encouraged young
people to model themselves after those who had died for the nation.
Headlined with “Utho, Jago,” or “Arise! Awake!,” the flyer reminded
students about two brief snippets of the history of revolutionary terrorists
in Bengal and linked them to well-known historical revolutionary figures
from the 1910s:

23
WBSA, IB File 36/1923, series 360/1923, “Dacca Jugantar Organization,” report
dated October 16, 1923.
24
WBSA, IB File 162/1920, series 2677/20, “List of Revolutionary Names Involved in
Noncooperation”; WBSA, IB File 107/22, series 99/22, “List of Ex political Prisoners in
NCO.” The figures ranged from 49 in Rangpur, which was a district in eastern Bengal, to
none in Jalpaiguri, which was in the north near Darjeeling.
25
NAI, Home Political File 249/1925, “Revolutionary Press Propaganda in Bengal,”
Appendix V.
26
APAC, L/P&J/12/220, “Distribution of Leaflets in India, Aug 1924 Feb 1929,” pp. 1 4,
from “Extracts from Weekly Report of the Director, IB, Home Dept, Government of
India, dated Simla, 6 and 13 August 1924.”
27
APAC, L/P&J/12/220, “Distribution of Leaflets in India, Aug 1924 Feb 1929,” p. 5,
titled “Extract from Weekly Report of the Director, IB, Home Dept, Government of
India, dated Simla, 27 August 1924.”
102 After Chauri Chaura

Kanai Lal is gone, Khudiram is gone, Prafulla is gone, Jatin is gone and hundreds
of youths have spilt their heart’s blood and thereby sacrificed themselves in the
service of the Mother. What more time are you to waste in slumber? . . . Are you
not expected to bring about the emancipation of India? Are you not to free India
from her fetters? Why then do you remain inert though awake? Remember de
Valera of Ireland, Lenin of Russia, Mazzini and Garibaldi the past glories of
Italy, the Rajput heroes of the world.28
Alongside these leaflets and flyers, the Bengali journal Bangabani pub-
lished Saratchandra Chatterjee’s novel, Pather Dabi, in weekly install-
ments from 1922 through 1926.29 The protagonist was a charismatic
revolutionary, Sabyaschi, also called Doctor, who was the leader of
a secret society that was committed to bringing about revolution through
acts of violence. Sabyaschi’s attempts to persuade the young people of the
novel to follow him form the narrative arc of the novel, as he engaged in
intense political discussions about the value of violence over nonviolence,
the many ills of British occupation, and of the importance of learning how
to sacrifice. The two women at the heart of the novel, Bharati, a well-
meaning Christian convert who struggles to believe that the British are
evil, and Sumitra, Sabyaschi’s protege, focused attention on the growing
political awareness of middle-class women. As Tanika Sarkar notes, the
novel showed that the root of India’s problems could never be alleviated
until the British were forcibly made to leave India.30 Five thousand copies
of the novel sold out when it was published in August 1926, and it was
subsequently banned in November 1926.31 Kamala Dasgupta and Bina
Das, revolutionary terrorists who became quite active as members of the
women’s groups at Bethune College, later credited the novel with raising
their awareness.32
Soon after these leaflets, flyers, and short stories appeared around
Bengal, there was a resurgence of terrorist acts. In Bengal, through
1923 and the first half of 1924, there was a cluster of violent actions
around Calcutta – a robbery and double murder at Kona, near the
Howrah railway station; in May, there was a post office robbery across

28
APAC, L/P&J/12/220, “Distribution of Leaflets in India, Aug 1924 Feb 1929,”
pp. 8 11, from “Extracts from Weekly Report of the Director, IB, Home Dept,
Government of India, dated Simla, 26 November to 3 December 1924.”
29
Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, The Right of Way (Pather Dabi), translated by
Prasenjit Mukherjee (New Delhi: Rupa Publishers, 1993, 2001).
30
Tanika Sarkar, “Bengali Middle class Nationalism and Literature: A Study of Sarat
Chandra’s ‘Pather Dabi’ and Rabindranath’s ‘Char Adhyay’,” in Economy, Society &
Politics in Modern India, edited by D. N. Panigrahi (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House,
1985), pp. 449 62.
31
WBSA, Home Political File 605/26, “Proscription of Pather Dabi.”
32
NMML, Oral History Transcripts, acc. no. 95: Kamala Das Gupta; Bina Das, Bina Das:
A Memoir, translated by Dhira Dhar (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2010), pp. 9 10.
 Non Cooperation and Revolutionary Terrorism 103

the Hooghly river; two robberies with firearms in July; and in August,
another post office robbery in which the postmaster was killed. These
armed robberies suggested that revolutionary terrorist groups needed
funding to carry out future attacks. Soon thereafter, a bomb factory was
discovered, and a bombing in a shop at 25 Mirzapore Street targeted
a police inspector. Beyond the city of Calcutta, there had been a robbery
in Chittagong on the Assam–Bengal railway, and in Faridpur district,
a young man had been injured while trying to build a bomb.33 In addition
to robbing government buildings that were likely to have money stored in
them, many Bengalis who were seen to be loyal to the government had
been targeted for being witnesses, police informers, or opposed in one
way or another to the aims of the revolutionaries. This series of attacks
occasioned a return to debates about the value and use of repressive
legislation. British officials in India and Indian politicians debated
whether suspending the rule of law, and in particular, suspending habeas
corpus, and allowing closed trials with just three judges made sense in
a moment of constitutional reform and the expansion of Indian represen-
tation. High-ranking officials, such as successive secretaries of state for
India, continued to agree with Montagu that the government needed to
find a way come to an agreement with the gentlemanly terrorists. As the
debates from the first Legislative Assembly in September 1921 show, the
viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, took seriously the recommendations of the
Repressive Laws Committee, chaired by Tej Badahur Sapru. Sapru,
a moderate Indian politician who had not supported Gandhi’s Non-
Cooperation Movement, argued that the government should continue
to abide by ordinary law rather than enact repressive laws to put down
political dissent.34 When Chelmsford opened the session of the
Legislative Assembly that fall, he announced “that a number of laws,
popularly regarded as infringements of the liberty of the subject, will, in
all probability, be repealed.”35 He noted that the Sapru Committee had,
conducted “a careful examination of certain laws and regulations which
confer extraordinary powers on the Executive Government . . . [I cannot
promise what the government will do] But I think I may safely say that

33
APAC, L/P&J/12/397, “Terrorism in India,” P&J (S) 1000/33, pp. 102 44, see especially
pp. 112 13 in the pamphlet, “Memorandum on the History of Terrorism in Bengal,
1905 33.”
34
Indian Legislative Assembly Debates, 10 January 28 February 1922, Second Session,
First Legislative Assembly 1921 23; volume II, part 2, p. 1720; WBSA Home Political
File 139/21, series 7 8 “Report to the Government of India of Committee to Examine
Repressive Laws Submitted 9 September 1921.”
35
Indian Legislative Assembly Debates, 1 September 1921 30 September 1921, Second
Session, First Legislative Assembly 1921 23; volume II, part 1, p. 13.
104 After Chauri Chaura

a number of laws, popularly regarded as infringements of the liberty of the

subject, will, in all probability, be repealed.”36
Although the unpopular Rowlatt Act had lapsed in 1921, and high-
ranking figures such as the viceroy expressed his view to the legislative
assembly that all security measures would be repealed, by the end of 1924,
colonial officials in Bengal were agitating for some kind of extra-judicial
measure to enable the government to suppress the resurgence of campaigns
of political violence. Moderate Indian politicians noticed the resonance
between the Rowlatt Act and new repressive laws, warning that enacting
repressive laws might be unwise given the possibility of further political
protest. As Syed Majid Baksh, a member of the Legislative Assembly who
represented the rural Muslim constituency in the Burdwan and Presidency
divisions in Bengal, said in a speech, “Sir, I really do not see why after we
repealed the infamous Rowlatt Act, the very same provisions were promul-
gated under the Bengal Ordinance and enacted of course by the process of
certification in Bengal again.”37 Other politicians from Bengal agreed,
defending the legal principle of habeas corpus. Leaders such as C. R. Das,
J. M. Sengupta, and others who had trained as barristers, invoked the rule
of law, repeatedly reminding British officials that enacting a law that
suspended basic legal principles would violate the spirit of extending con-
stitutional reforms toward representative democracy.
The Bengal Criminal Law Ordinance and the Amendment Act that
followed was put in force in 1925 over the objections of Indian politicians
who had been elected to these representative bodies in 1921. Indian
politicians noted the irony of having an elected assembly in a reformist
moment enact emergency legislation for the executive: M. K. Acharya (of
South Arcot cum Chingleput, non-Muhammadan, rural) said in an
assembly speech, “It is unfortunate that during the time of a Liberal
Governor of Bengal and a Liberal Governor-General of India, this black-
est of black Acts of Bengal, the Criminal Law Amendment Act, has been
brought into existence.”38 As a concession to the political opposition, the
act that was passed by executive authority limited the legislation to five
years and was due to expire in April 1930.
From the perspective of some British officials, the special and extra-
ordinary repressive legislation was warranted by attacks on colonial

36
Indian Legislative Assembly Debates, 1 September 1921 30 September 1921, Second
Session, First Legislative Assembly 1921 23; volume II, part 1, p. 13.
37
Indian Legislative Assembly Debates, 20 January 1926 9 February 1926, Fourth
Session, Second Legislative Assembly; volume VII, part 1, p. 271, January 26, 1926.
38
Indian Legislative Assembly Debates, 20 January 1926 9 February 1926, Fourth
Session, Second Legislative Assembly; volume VII, part 1, p. 274, January 26, 1926,
“Resolution to Put Any Detenus under Trial and Bring Them to Court.”
 Non Cooperation and Revolutionary Terrorism 105

officials. Among the most ominous of these events were the two assassi-
nation attempts on the life of Charles Tegart, the Commissioner of
Police, who had started his career in Bengal in 1906 and then developed
particular expertise suppressing Sinn Fein in Ireland in the 1910s.39
Tegart survived these attempts, although a failed attempt on Tegart killed
Ernest Day, a bystander, on a street in central Calcutta in January 1924.
Ernest Day’s assassin, Gopinath Saha, was charged and sentenced to
death. Day’s death and Saha’s execution galvanized Indian political
activists and leaders, but at cross-purposes.
Soon after his execution, Gopinath Saha was publicly extolled as a hero
by leaders of the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee, which was the
group that comprised representatives from each of the district-level com-
mittees in the province. In June 1924, at the meetings of the Bengal
Provincial Congress Committee, revolutionary terrorist members of the
committee proposed the following resolution: “While adhering to the
policy of non-violence this Conference pays its respectful homage to
the patriotism of Gopinath Saha who suffered capital punishment in
connection with Mr. Day’s murder.”40 Colonial officials expressed
alarm that an assassin was taken to be a hero; some viewed the direction
that nationalist politics had taken in Bengal as an ominous sign of what
might happen in other parts of India. Members of the All-India Congress
Committee, a governing committee that oversaw the Indian National
Congress, met several weeks later in June in Ahmedabad and expressed
some concern as well. Pressed to explain what was going on in Bengal,
C. R. Das released a statement explaining that the Bengal group did not
promote political murder, but wanted to recognize Saha’s sacrifice.41
At the Ahmedabad meetings, Gandhi rejected the resolution because of
its use of the word “patriotism” to describe Gopinath Saha’s act, arguing
that such violence was antithetical to the kind of patriotism that the
Congress had voted to adopt in 1920 when they had voted to begin non-
cooperation. Gandhi offered a revision to the resolution to honor
Gopinath Saha and it was rephrased to read: “Although eschewing all
kinds of violence and accepting the true character of the basic principle of
non-violence, this Conference realises the high and noble ideal of Gopi

39
Michael Silvestri, “An Irishman Is Specially Suited to Be a Policeman’: Sir Charles
Tegart & Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal,” History Ireland 8.4 (2000): 40 44;
Michael Silvestri, “The Thrill of ‘Simply Dressing Up’: The Indian Police, Disguise,
and Intelligence Work in Colonial India,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 2.2
(2001): paragraphs 24 25.
40
APAC, L/P&J/6/1870, J&P no. 3052, Copy of letter no. 6624 P dated Calcutta,
8 July 1924, from the Chief Secretary of Government of Bengal, Political Department,
to the Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, Political.
41
Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent, p. 56.
106 After Chauri Chaura

Mohan Saha and makes known its respect for him for the noble self-
sacrifice he, misguided though he was, has made in the matter of the
preservation of the interests of the Motherland.”42 Gandhi continued to
feel that any resolution for Gopinath Saha was “unfortunate,” and in an
interview with the Times of India, he called Bengal’s revolutionaries and
anarchists “his misguided friends”: “I yield to no one in my admiration for
the spirit of self-sacrifice that actuates them, but I know that their activity
does immense harm to the country.”43 In addition to modifying the resolu-
tion about Gopinath Saha, Gandhi put forth a series of resolutions for the
Congress to adopt, which included a resolution offering condolences to
Mr. Day’s family and that political murders should be condemned by the
Congress.44 These measures were resisted by those present, and in a later
memo, Gandhi noted with some dismay, “We agreed to employ only non-
violent noncooperation; and yet we spoke exclusively about violence.”45
He was greatly distressed that his resolution to modify support for
Gopinath Saha had passed by only 8 votes, which was a bare majority of
those present. Of 148 votes cast, 70 had voted against Gandhi’s resolution
to condemn the actions of Gopinath Saha, suggesting that there was a great
deal of support for political assassination as a strategy.46
The Gopinath Saha resolution dramatized some of the political disagree-
ments between the leadership of the Indian National Congress, the key
figures of the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee, and the Swarajya
Party over the place of political violence in the nationalist struggle through-
out the latter part of 1924 and into 1925. At the Congress meetings in
Cawnpore in December 1925, the Indian National Congress decided to
establish a “political sufferers’” fund that was intended to provide financial
relief to those detained or jailed by the government for political crimes.
Promoted by members in United Provinces, Punjab, and Bengal, “the
greatest sufferers in political matters.” The fund was quite modest, collect-
ing about Rs. 10,000 from a handful of individuals; as a result, it disbursed
small amounts (from Rs. 5 to Rs. 100) infrequently throughout the 1920s
to those who made requests for support.47
Even though Congress politicians agreed to nonviolence as a principled
form of protest, Bengal’s politicians remained committed to advocating
for the legal rights of young men who had become involved in secret
42
APAC, L/P&J/6/1870, J&P no. 3052, Copy of letter no. 6624 P dated Calcutta, 8 July
1924, from the Chief Secretary of Government of Bengal, Political Department, to the
Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, Political. The government’s
documents list him as “Gopinath,” although Indian accounts understood him to be
Gopimohan.
43
CWMG, vol. 28, p. 111. 44 CWMG, vol. 28, pp. 179 82.
45
CWMG, vol. 28, pp. 244 45. 46 CWMG, vol. 28, pp. 248.
47
NMML, All India Congress Papers, File G 38, 186 V (1926).
 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance 107

revolutionary societies. Chittaranjan Das, who served as an attorney for

the defense of Barin Ghosh, Ullaskar Dutta, and Upendra Banerji in the
Alipore Conspiracy Case, was at the center of these discussions, as was
Subhas Chandra Bose, who was the vice president of the Swarajya Party
as well as the chief executive officer of the Calcutta Corporation.48
Bose was soon brought under suspicion for his political activism, as well
as his alleged involvement with revolutionary groups. He was first
detained under Regulation III of 1818 in October 1924 and exiled to
a jail in Burma. When the BCLA was passed, he was detained under that
legislation in October 1925.49 As vigorous debate in the Indian
Legislative Assembly showed in 1927, many Indian politicians argued
with government officials about whether Bose and others should be kept
under detention for over three years. If they were guilty of any crime, they
should be tried and convicted; otherwise, the government had shared
little proof of any crime. With a majority, they passed the following
resolution: “This Assembly recommends to the Governor General in
Council that he be pleased to immediately release or bring to trial all
detenus under old Regulations and the Bengal Criminal Law
(Amendment) Act of 1925.”50 These efforts to protest repressive laws,
as we will see, were largely unsuccessful.

The Passage of the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment

Ordinance, 1924
By the beginning of July 1924, in the immediate aftermath of the
Congress debate on what kind of resolution to pass about Gopinath
Saha, officials in the Government of Bengal argued that they were strug-
gling to contain a violent insurgency that had emerged in Bengal. In what
they described as “a recrudescence of terrorism,” they admitted that
although they had claimed that the movements had been successfully
repressed in 1919, they found themselves confronting a new round of
political violence.51 In a letter to the Government of India in Delhi,

48
S. Chatterjee, Congress Politics in Bengal, p. 37; for the details of Das’s defense in the
Alipore conspiracy case, see A. G. Noorani, Indian Political Trials, 1775 1947 (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press), pp. 146 50.
49
Indian Legislative Assembly Debates, 19 January 1927 21 February 1927, First Session,
Third Legislative Assembly; volume I, p. 1052, “Statement of Detenus in Jail under the
Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1925 on 4 February 1927.”
50
Indian Legislative Assembly Debates, 19 January 1927 21 February 1927, First Session,
Third Legislative Assembly; volume I, pp. 442 507, “Resolution Regarding the Release
of Bengal Detenus.”
51
Indian Legislative Assembly Debates, 13 March 1924 25, March 1924, First
Session, Second Legislative Assembly 1924; volume IV, part 3, pp. 2058 61.
108 After Chauri Chaura

Bengal officials noted that they had asked for “extraordinary powers”
a year earlier, but that they had been discouraged from proceeding by
central government. At the time, the use of Regulation III of 1818 was
authorized and 19 people were detained. In the year between August
1923 and July 1924, however, Bengal officials noted that aside from the
spate of terrorist crimes in Calcutta, crime in eastern Bengal was rising.
There had been a robbery of the Assam–Bengal Railway at the Chittagong
station; a shootout in an abandoned house in Chittagong where several
suspected revolutionaries were residing; and the assassination of a Bengali
sub-inspector who had been charged with monitoring revolutionary
terrorists.52 Officials in Bengal were clearly alarmed that even after the
arrest and trial of these suspected terrorists, many cases were being
acquitted by sympathetic juries.53 In the series of crimes around
Calcutta from May to August 1923 that became the second Alipore
Conspiracy Case, the government charged five suspects. It took just
thirteen weeks to acquit them all.54 Although police officials identified
some of the protagonists who were most active in the underground move-
ment, they had insufficient evidence to convict them. Several of these
men – Ananta Lal Singh, Surja Sen, and Ambica Charan Chakravarti –
would go on to plan more dramatic actions against the government.55
In exchanges between the earl of Lytton, who served as governor in
Calcutta, earl of Reading, the viceroy in Delhi, and Sydney Olivier, the
secretary of state for India in London, colonial officials worried that the
adoption of repressive laws would prove to be politically controversial.
Officials in Delhi wrote to officials in Bengal by “admitting that the
situation has deteriorated rather quickly,” but that they were wary of
inflaming the Indian National Congress and provoking another nation-
wide campaign against the government.56 In August 1924, after several
rounds of discussion with the secretary of state, the Earl of Reading wrote
to the government in Bengal that

52
NAI, Home Political File 379/2 of 1924, “Revolutionary Movement in Bengal. Question
of Framing an Ordinance and of a Bill to Meet the Situation,” serial 1, “Letter from the
Government of Bengal, no. 6721 P, dated July 10, 1924.”
53
NAI, Home Political File 379/I of 1924, “Measures for Coping with the Revolutionary
Movement Outbreak in Bengal,” serial 18, “Demi official Letter no. 830 P, Dated
5 June 1924, from A.N. Moberley, Chief Secretary, Home Department, to
Government of Bengal.”
54
APAC, L/P&J/6/1878, “Alipore Conspiracy Case.”
55
Terrorism in Bengal, vol. I, “Activities of Revolutionaries in Bengal from the
1st September 1924 to 31st March 1925,” Appendix V, pp. 407 09.
56
NAI, Home Political File 379/2 of 1924, “Revolutionary Movement in Bengal. Question
of Framing an Ordinance and of a Bill to Meet the Situation,” serial 2, “Letter from the
Government of India, Home Department, Political to Chief Secretary, Government of
Bengal, no. 2359, Dated 15 August, 1924.”
 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance 109

The policy which commends itself to His Majesty’s Government is that you should
as fully as possible make use of all powers under Regulation III or any other powers
already existing which might enable you to cope with dangers of situation, rather
than to make any premature demonstration of an intention on the part of the
Government to invest itself with new exceptional powers. Either course may equally
be denounced as arbitrary, but the latter seems to likely provoke the more outcry.57
Of particular concern to central government officials in London and
Delhi was that the measures under consideration “avoid the close resem-
blance it now has in structure and terms to the portions of the Rowlatt
Act,” which had occasioned Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement
against the British government in the first place.58
Before the central government of India agreed to accept a new ordi-
nance, the provincial government of Bengal had already begun to frame
the rationale and language of an ordinance, one that created a justification
for legislation to deal with the particular emergency of the resurgence of
terrorism. In reports produced by the Intelligence Branch in Bengal, titled
“Activities of Revolutionaries Subsequent to the 31 August 1924,” and
“Note on the Connection between Revolutionists and the Swarajya Party
in Bengal,” officials noted that during the early months of 1924,
Chittaranjan Das had been trying to persuade revolutionary parties to
suspend their plans, and that there was some disagreement between the
different revolutionary groups, Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar, whether
the moment was right for revolutionary action.59 Yet, officials reported,
on the basis of information provided by confidential informants, violent
plots were being planned against the government.60 By August, it was
clear that the agreement between leading Indian politicians and under-
ground revolutionary groups was fraying and intelligence officials in
Bengal discovered that the Jugantar party was planning to assassinate
the Governor of Bengal, the earl of Lytton.61
Given this evidence, on September 1, the central government finally
conceded and gave permission to allow the adoption of Ordinance I in

57
APAC, L/P&J/6/1886, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act,” Telegram from Viceroy
to Secretary of State, dated August 3, 1924.
58
APAC, L/P&J/6/1886, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act,” Telegram to Viceroy,
dated 8th August, 1924 and P&J 3118/24 and P&J 3237/24.
59
NAI, Home Political File 379/2 of 1924, “Revolutionary Movement in Bengal,”
pp. 19 27, pp. 33 38.
60
APAC, L/P&J/6/1886, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act,” Telegram from Viceroy
to Secretary of State, dated August 3, 1924; APAC, L/P&J/12/253, “Report on Activities
of Revolutionaries in Bengal, 1924 1925,” pp. 16 45; NAI, Home Political File 379/2 of
1924, “Revolutionary Movement in Bengal,” see pp. 94 ff.
61
APAC, L/P&J/12/253, “Report on Activities of Revolutionaries in Bengal, 1924 1925,”
J&P (Secret) no. 934/25, Typewritten file titled “Activities of Revolutionaries in Bengal
Subsequent to the 31st August 1924.”
110 After Chauri Chaura

Bengal, which “follows the lines of the Defence of India Act Rules in the
extraordinary powers it gives for arrest and detention without recourse to
the ordinary criminal courts.”62 As discussions about whether a new
ordinance was warranted took place in September, Das again reminded
the leaders of the major revolutionary groups that “the safety of the
Congress organization would be seriously endangered unless overt acts
were suspended for a while.”63 Both central and provincial government
officials attempted to reassure Indian politicians that legitimate political
opposition was not a target of the ordinance; instead, the government
communicated that it hoped to prevent “movements the object of which
is to subvert the Government established by law in British India of any
thereof to disturb by violence the public safety or tranquility.”64 When
Gandhi was asked about the ordinance, he noted that since it was not
sanctioned by “duly elected representatives,” it should not be enacted.
He reminded his readers that Punjab had been put under martial law in
1919 under such a rationale, and contrary to the government’s fears of
what would happen without martial law, there had been no rebellion
when martial law was lifted.65
Ordinance I of 1924 deliberately adopted the language of the
Defence of India Act, which had been in use from 1915 through the
end of the First World War in 1919. Rather than use the term “anar-
chical and revolutionary movements” that was used in the unpopular
Rowlatt Act, the ordinance stated that it was designed to “preserve
public security on which political advance and all the functions of
a civilized social organism depend.”66 The logic of the act was that it
would defend liberal constitutional norms from the challenges posed
by “violent criminal methods.” Within the printed ordinance, the vice-
roy gestured to the Indian political leadership in Bengal and hoped
that “Acting with these objects and intentions, I believe myself and my
Government to be entitled to the support and cooperation of all those
who have truly at heart the peace, prosperity and the political future of
India.”67

62
APAC, L/P&J/12/253, “Report on Activities of Revolutionaries in Bengal, 1924 1925,”
pp. 2 3.
63
APAC, L/P&J/12/253, “Report on Activities of Revolutionaries in Bengal, 1924 1925,”
p. 2.
64
NAI, Home Political File 305/1924, “Promulgation of an Ordinance to Deal with the
Political Situation in Bengal.”
65
CWMG, vol. 30, pp. 154 55.
66
NAI, Home Political File 305/1924, “Promulgation of an Ordinance to Deal with the
Political Situation in Bengal.”
67
NAI, Home Political File 305/1924, “Promulgation of an Ordinance to Deal with the
Political Situation in Bengal.”
 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance 111

On October 25, 1924, the ordinance was passed. It allowed the govern-
ment to detain political dissidents without charging them, to try them in
front of three-person tribunal, and to refuse the right of appeal to any
judicial body except the High Court. Because it was an ordinance, it did
not go through the Legislative Assembly or any elective body of Indian
representatives; instead, it was issued as an executive order that expired in
six months, presumably when the threat of terrorist activities had been
controlled. Nearly all of the figures who had been acquitted in trials under
suspicion of sedition and conspiracy that year were detained under this
ordinance.
At dawn the next day, the Bengal government initiated raids on the
homes and offices of “prominent revolutionaries,” and arrested 81 under
the emergency ordinance. One person was prosecuted for sedition, and 7
others could not be found. The report that described these events noted
that “Although the raid yielded nothing in the way of arms, ammunition
and explosives, yet a scrutiny of the results reveals the fact that out of
a total of 104 houses, revolutionary literature of different kinds was found
in 33.”68
The fact that few arms were found – and that the only evidence of
a violent conspiracy was the existence of “revolutionary literature” –
provoked vociferous opposition from organized political parties in
Bengal, included the Swarajya Party and the Bengal Congress. One
Legislative Assembly member, Syed Majid Baksh (Burdwan and
Presidency divisions, Muhammadan, rural), who had been in Calcutta
staying at the home of someone who had an office of the Swarajya Party,
made a speech about the how the secrecy of the ordinance had given
a great deal of courage to the police. He was startled on the night
of October 26, 1924, when the BCLA ordinance was passed and the
house was raided “. . . we were awakened by a thumping sound on the
stairs and found that we were faced by a white person, revolver in hand
like, if I may use the expression, a gaping monster ready to suck our
blood.” In the end, he noted with a rhetorical flourish, “Not a single
cartridge, not even a speck of gunpowder was found.”69
In spite of the government’s repeated claims to the contrary, Swarajya
party officials claimed that the ordinance was intended to suppress legit-
imate political opposition to the colonial government and they began
a campaign that suggested that the Swarajya Party, and not the revolu-
tionaries, were the target of these ordinances. Public meetings were held
68
APAC, L/P&J/12/253, “Report on Activities of Revolutionaries in Bengal, 1924 1925,”
p. 4.
69
Indian Legislative Assembly Debates, 20 January 1926 9 February 1926, Fourth
Session, Second Legislative Assembly; volume VII, part 1, p. 270, January 26, 1926.
112 After Chauri Chaura

around Calcutta to protest the ordinance and the arrests, and nearly
a hundred meetings were held in the province to galvanize Indians against
the government’s repressive measures. In speeches, public rallies,
marches, and processions across Bengal through the winter of 1924 and
1925, Indian politicians called for the abolition of the ordinance.
Much to the consternation of the colonial government, in public rallies,
Bengal’s politicians invoked the history of revolutionary terrorists drawn
from the historical accounts written by revolutionary terrorists in Bengal.
In a genealogy that was built around martyred Bengalis, politicians
reminded their audiences how many revolutionaries had died in the cause
of the struggle to overthrow the British – they named Khudiram, who had
been executed for the assassination of two European women in
Muzzafarpur; Prafulla Chaki, who was Khudiram’s accomplice and had
committed suicide at the scene; the hangings of Kanai Lal Dutta and
Satyendra Basu, who had assassinated someone who had turned state’s
evidence in to the Alipore Conspiracy Case; Tarini Mazumdar and
Jyotindra Nath Mukarji, who had both been killed in police encounters in
the 1910s; and most recently, Gopinath Saha, who had killed Ernest Day in
central Calcutta. The Bengal government report noted, “A most perni-
cious and widespread feature in the Swarajist campaign was the persistent
eulogy by prominent speakers of . . . murders and assassins.”70
Indian politicians, many in elected or appointed positions in the
Legislative Assembly, protested the detention of those who were alleged
to be active revolutionaries or terrorists. They argued repeatedly that the
ordinary law should be sufficient to deal with the crimes that were allegedly
committed by those who were under suspicion for trying to overthrow the
government. In December 1924, Kumar Shankar Ray proposed
a resolution to withdraw the ordinance and also demanded the release of
those who were being detained under Regulation III of 1818. He drew
particular attention to the detention of Subhas Chandra Bose, the charis-
matic politician who was active in the Bengal Congress.71 The following
month, Pandit Nilakantha Das noted that there was a “strong feeling of
resentment” by house members because of the ordinance.”72 Satyen

70
APAC, L/P&J/12/253, “Report on Activities of Revolutionaries in Bengal, 1924 1925,”
p. 6.
71
NAI, Home Political File 235/2 of 1925 and KW, “Proposed Resolutions in the Legislative
Assembly Recommending the Suspension of Withdrawal of the Bengal Ordinance.” See
Indian Legislative Assembly Debates, 13 March 1924 25 March 1924, First
Session, Second Legislative Assembly 1924; volume IV, part 3, pp. 2043 80; Indian
Legislative Assembly Debates, 20 January 1925 24 February 1925, Second
Session, Second Legislative Assembly; volume V, part 1, pp. 395 440.
72
NAI, Home Political File 237/1925, “Proposed Resolution in the Legislative Assembly
Regarding the Bengal Ordinance and Arrests under Regulation III of 1818.”
 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance 113

Chandra Mitra, who had been active in creating the political sufferers’ fund
and had been elected to the Indian Legislative Assembly as a member of
Congress, was detained under Regulation III of 1818 and BCLA from
1924 to 1928; as the representative of both the Chittagong and Rajshahi
Divisions, he was elected to represent the non-Muhammadan rural con-
stituency, but he was unable to occupy his position in the assembly until his
Indian colleagues intervened and passed a resolution urging his release.73
The British government in India proposed several times to make the
ordinance into a legislative act, which meant that it had to be debated in the
Bengal Legislative Council and the Indian Legislative Assembly by British
officials and Indian politicians who had either been elected or appointed
after the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms. Presented first in the Bengal
Legislative Council on January 7, 1925, the Governor of Bengal, the earl
of Lytton, argued that “the welfare of the state as a whole is in danger.”74
In response, Provash C. Mitter, one of the Indian barristers who had been
on the Rowlatt commission, opposed the measure, noting that while he
agreed that “this revolutionary movement must be checked,” he felt
strongly that “the Bill proposes not a physician’s treatment of the malady
but a quack’s remedy.”75 In spite of Mitter’s opposition, the executive
provision in the Government of India Act of 1919 allowed the government
to “certify” any important legislation over the objections of the assembly
was mobilized. The bill was certified by the governor of Bengal, the earl of
Lytton, over the objections of the Bengal Legislative Council and then
forwarded to Delhi.
When the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act came up in the Indian
Legislative Assembly on March 23, 1925, Sir Alexander Muddiman, the
Home Member, argued that the Government of India should pass the act
in order to support the Bengal government’s aims in containing terrorism.
The act would allow the suspension of habeas corpus, the establishment of
detention centers, trials by three-member tribunals, and appeals to the
High Court. The government’s ability to suspend habeas corpus was
already part of the ordinance, but the remaining provisions created
a system of trial that could bypass the procedures of criminal prosecution
required by the Indian Penal Code. This expansion required the assent of

73
Indian Legislative Assembly Debates, 19 January 1927 21 February 1927, First Session,
Third Legislative Assembly; volume I, pp. 18 40, “Resolution Introduced by Motilal
Nehru to Allow S. C. Mitra to Occupy his Seat in the Indian Legislative Assembly, which
He Is Prevented from Doing because He Is under Detention by BCLA.”
74
PRO, CAB/24/210, “The Question of the Renewal of the Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Act, 1925,” p. 399.
75
PRO, CAB/24/210, “The Question of the Renewal of the Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Act, 1925,” p. 405.
114 After Chauri Chaura

the Indian Legislative Assembly to be made into laws that would apply to
the jurisdictions of Bengal province.
When the bill came to the Legislative Assembly, Indian politicians,
representing different constituencies across India, protested loudly against
the bill. They grounded their protest in the rule of law, arguing that the
legislation violated important legal principles about due process. Motilal
Nehru, the non-Muslim representative from United Provinces, and an
important Congress leader began: “We look upon it as a vicious
measure . . . it is a sordid attempt to achieve justice.”76 He noted that the
right to appeal made the legislation appear fair, but that the first trial would
be conducted by commissioners and not a jury, that suspects would be
denied due process in terms of evidence and legal representation, and that
the government could arrest and detain suspects without charging them.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who was the Muslim representative from Bombay,
thundered even more vociferously, arguing that the law was illegal, violat-
ing section 491 of India’s Criminal Procedure Code, and depriving those
arrested of a right to habeas corpus.77 Even G. A. Natesan, a non-official
member from Madras, who had been appointed by the government, noted
that the act denied suspects the “ancient privilege of habeas corpus.” He
admitted that he was an admirer of the British justice system, and yet, “I do
not think this is a procedure in which one can expect this House and men
like me who have been brought up in the best traditions of British rule,
cherished, nurtured, and fostered in the higher and nobler traditions which
every Englishman prizes to give support to this measure.”78
In addition to the objections to suspending habeas corpus, Indian poli-
ticians noted that extraordinary laws had been used in times of war, but
that there was no war in India and thus, the ordinary law should be used to
prosecute criminal conspiracies against the state. C. Duraiswami
Aiyangar (non-Muhammadan of Madras’s ceded districts), asked,
“Is Bengal in a state of civil war or a sweeping rebellion? Are not the
ordinary courts functioning without interruption?”79 Similarly, Diwan
Badahur Rangachariar (Bombay, non-Muhammadan) wondered why it
76
APAC, L/P&J/6/1886, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, 1924, and Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act,” Extract from the proceedings of the Legislative
Assembly, dated March 23, 1925, pp. 2 4.
77
APAC, L/P&J/6/1886, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, 1924, and Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act,” Extract from the proceedings of the Legislative
Assembly, dated March 24, 1925, p. 3.
78
APAC, L/P&J/6/1886, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, 1924, and Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act,” Extract from the proceedings of the Legislative
Assembly, dated March 26, 1925, pp. 3 5.
79
APAC, L/P&J/6/1886, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, 1924, and Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act,” Extract from the proceedings of the Legislative
Assembly, dated March 24, 1925, pp. 3 5.
 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance 115

was necessary to suspend habeas corpus if the police were doing their jobs
and could secure convictions through jury trials.80 Natesan noted that the
ordinary law should be preferred whenever possible.81
Jinnah challenged the way in which the law was being passed, over the
objections of the Indian members of the Bengal Legislative Council and the
Indian Legislative Assembly. He prevailed on the honor of British officials
asking them to explain the passage of a law that allowed innocent men to lose
their liberty on unsubstantiated accusations. He turned the tables on British
officials who argued that their lives were endangered by the continued
existence of revolutionaries and terrorists: “If I were an official and if I felt
that my life was in danger and I was going to be shot down, even like a dog,
I should never be a party to a measure which will endanger the life and liberty
of the innocent population as this measure undoubtedly does.”82
As the debate on the issue continued over several days, Indian politi-
cians on the Legislative Assembly reminded their British colleagues of the
lessons of history, particularly lessons that showed that political change
occurred after revolutionary or social upheaval. T. C. Goswami of
Calcutta, reminded the government that ordinances in 1909 and in
1924 had not worked to change the nature of political protest:
“Ordinances may impede constitutional agitation; they cannot stave off
revolt.”83 Bipin Chandra Pal, also of Calcutta, noted that “the story of
political criminalism or revolutionary patriotism is an old story, 20 years
old . . . you had these ordinances, you had these arrests and detention
without proper, legal, judicial trial in 1905, 1906, 1907, etc. to 1911. Did
it frighten Bengal? Bengal was not frightened.”84 Pal, annoyed at the
colonial refrain about the manly Englishman and the effeminate
Bengali, noted that “Bengal has proved that it is not cowardly.”85

80
APAC, L/P&J/6/1886, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, 1924, and Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act,” P&J 605/1925.
81
APAC, L/P&J/6/1886, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, 1924, and Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act,” Extract from the proceedings of the Legislative
Assembly, dated March 26, 1925, pp. 3 5.
82
APAC, L/P&J/6/1886, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, 1924, and Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act,” Extract from the proceedings of the Legislative
Assembly, dated March 23, 1925, pp. 4 6. For Jinnah’s defence of Tilak in a sedition
trial of 1916, see Noorani, Indian Political Trials, pp. 163 84.
83
APAC, L/P&J/6/1886, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, 1924, and Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act,” Extract from the proceedings of the Legislative
Assembly, dated March 23, 1925, p. 13.
84
APAC, L/P&J/6/1886, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, 1924, and Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act,” Extract from the proceedings of the Legislative
Assembly, dated March 26, 1925, pp. 9 10.
85
Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly” Englishman and the “Effeminate
Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1995).
116 After Chauri Chaura

Others drew comparisons from American history: C. Duraiswami

Aiyangar, recalled that the only time habeas corpus had been suspended in
the United States was during the civil war in 1863. Bipin Chandra Pal
reminded the assembled group that “it is the universal verdict of history
that wherever Governments have tried to put down legitimate movements of
freedom by the people by brute force, the rest has been that force met force.”
Although he did not approve of violent revolution, he noted that “this
handful of young Bengalis, who are charged with using bombs and revolvers,
are not the disease themselves, they are the symptoms of a deeper and wider
disease.” If the parable about the value of anticolonial nationalism was lost
on those listening, Pal concluded, “That is the history of the Puritan move-
ment. That is the history of the freedom movement in America.”86
British officials, such as Muddiman, the government’s architect of the
measure, drew attention to the recent success of repressive methods
during the recent rebellion against British rule in Ireland. Natesan, the
appointed official from Madras, recognized that the example of Ireland
was intended to be “conciliatory,” but he pleaded, “Please do not convert
India into an Ireland. Ireland has had to attain her liberty, her self-
government by terror, by taking the blood of many people.”87
Finally, Britain’s longstanding claim to being a liberal government was
exposed as a convenient fiction that enabled the expansion of exceptional
legislation. Motilal Nehru contested the government’s narrative of a recent
conspiracy and noted that the reasons were drawn from a decade before
and suggested the plan for liberalizing India had always included repressive
legislation: “The real fact . . . is that all these phrases, murders of approvers,
murders of witnesses, intimidation of jurors, have been borrowed from the
Rowlatt report.”88 C. Duraiswami Aiyangar was even more direct about
what he viewed as the government’s hypocrisy in claiming that it had
reluctantly approved repressive laws, “It is no use to for us to be told that
this Ordinance was promulgated by a liberal politician . . . If you are going
to give us that personal freedom which is considered a sacred birthright in
England, you ought to assure us and guarantee us that freedom, and if you
do that, that is proof of liberalism.”89 Amar Nath Dutta (Burdwan division,

86
APAC, L/P&J/6/1886, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, 1924, and Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act,” Extract from the proceedings of the Legislative
Assembly, dated March 24, 1925, pp. 9 10.
87
APAC, L/P&J/6/1886, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, 1924, and Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act,” Extract from the proceedings of the Legislative
Assembly, dated March 26, 1925, pp. 5 6.
88
Indian Legislative Assembly Debates, 20 January 1925 24 February 1925, Second
Session, Second Legislative Assembly; volume V, part 1, 5 February 1925, p. 825.
89
Indian Legislative Assembly Debates, 20 January 1925 24 February 1925, Second
Session, Second Legislative Assembly; volume V, part 1, 5 February 1925, p. 848.
 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance 117

non-Muhamman rural), representing the populations who had largely

been subjected to the ordinance, followed these rebukes with “I want to
give an opportunity to the Government to prove by introducing a Bill of this
nature that they have kept pace with ideas of freedom and liberty consistent
with civilized concerns of jurisprudence,” but he expressed disappointment
that even Alexander Muddiman, the representative of the Home
Department in the Legislative Assembly, who had repeatedly voiced his
distaste with these measures in the past, had continued to support them
nonetheless.90
In spite of the strong protests made by Indian politicians in the
Legislative Assembly, which were accompanied by protests orchestrated
by the Swarajya Party in Bengal, the Government of India authorized that
the bill be certified over these objections. The Earl of Birkenhead, the
secretary of state for India, sent a memo to Lord Reading, the viceroy,
noting that since it appeared the crisis of terrorism had not abated, that
the Government should plan to put the legislative act into place
on April 25, 1925, when the six-month ordinance expired.91
By promulgating a law to replace the ordinance, the government ensured
that no additional legal action would be necessary to keep those who were
already under detention in government custody. Several suspects who
had been detained under the ordinance of Regulation III were easily
transferred to state custody under the new provisions.92
Several months after the passage of the Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Act of 1925 in April, Chittaranjan Das died. On the occa-
sion of his death, the Bengali members of the Legislative Assembly called
for the release of all those detained under emergency laws in order to
honour Das’s death; even Gandhi chimed in his support, writing, “Will
the government in honour of Chittaranjan Das, who is no longer with us
to plead the cause, release the political prisoners who he protested were
innocent?” The motion was considered “impracticable,” and within the
month, Birkenhead replied that those who were under detention would
remain where they were.93
The law titled the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1925 was
set to expire in five years on April 24, 1930. Colonial officials confidently

90
Indian Legislative Assembly Debates, 23 February 1925 24 March 1925, Second
Session, Second Legislative Assembly; volume V, part 2, 19 March 1925, p. 2649.
91
APAC, L/P&J/6/1886, P&J 1107/25.
92
Terrorism in Bengal, vol. I, “Terrorist Conspiracy in Bengal, from 1 April to
31 December 1925,” pp. 469 70; “Terrorist Conspiracy in Bengal, from 1 April to
31 December 1925,” pp. 498 500.
93
NAI, Home Political File 12/XXI/1925, “Question in the Legislative Assembly whether
to Honor C. R. Das, All Political Prisoners Should Be Released.”
118 After Chauri Chaura

predicted that this would be the end of acts of political violence, the act
would be allowed to lapse, and there would be a return to “ordinary” law.

“Political Prisoners” and “Detenus”

In the decade that followed the promulgation of the BCLA of 1925, the
apparatus of special and emergency legislation grew and the number and
classifications of those considered “political prisoners” expanded. By the
terms of this legislation, if someone was detained without charge, they
had to be detained in conditions that replicated conditions in their home
province; they were eligible for a diet and personal allowance, and in some
select cases, were due to ask for compensation for their families if they
were the primary wage earners.94 By creating the category of the “detenu”
from the French to mark those who were detained, the colonial govern-
ment acknowledged that the detenu was distinct from a convict or some-
one awaiting trial even as it repeatedly rejected this category as one that
required special treatment, much as they had decided in July 1922 at the
conference on the subject in Simla. The government’s continued objec-
tions to the term “political prisoners” took shape in three ways. First,
officials were concerned that labeling some as “political prisoners” con-
fused the distinctions between the Gandhian nonviolent protesters, the
satyagrahis who were jailed in large numbers, and the revolutionary
terrorists, who were detained on suspicion of conspiracy or who had
committed crimes in which guilt could not be proven. A second objection
stemmed from the observation that since many of the crimes involved
robbery, armed assault, or murder, it would be hard to classify one
prisoner as less criminal or more “political” than another. Finally,
a third objection was that even if political prisoners were recognized,
they should not be provided, as one official called it, “privileged treat-
ment” while jailed.95 Ironically, in spite of this resistance, as an extensive
group of emergency legislative acts developed, the government developed
a labyrinthine set of administrative regulations for the treatment of those
who were considered, but not directly called, “political prisoners.”

94
NAI, Home Political File 169/II/1925, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance of
1924,” Section 21 of the BCLA Act and Ordinance read as follows: “The Local
Government shall make to every person who is placed under restraint by reason of an
order made under sub section (1) of section 12 a monthly allowance for his support of
such amount as is, in the opinion of the Local Government, adequate for the supply of his
wants, and shall also make to his family, if any, and to such of his near relatives, if any, as
are in the opinion of the Local Government dependent on him for support, an allowance
for the supply of their wants according to their rank in life.”
95
NAI, Home Political File 242/29, “Treatment of Political and Other Undertrial
Prisoners” p. 14.
 “Political Prisoners” and “Detenus” 119

The different levels of treatment had to accommodate the different forms

of status accorded to them in prisons and jails, and eventually provided
the groundwork for making political prisoners into a matter of national
and international concern. Eventually, as I show in Chapter 5, a growing
number of detention camps emerged to incarcerate this new population
of those who were imprisoned in British jails, but were not considered
“common” convicts.
As the legal statutes for political prisoners multiplied, figures who
ordinarily disagreed over political strategies came together over the plight
of political prisoners. Even though Gandhi opposed political violence, he
became a staunch defender of the rights of all political prisoners, even
though he did not subscribe to the methods of those suspected of terror-
ism. He continued to remind his readers and followers of the illegality of
detaining political prisoners without charging them through the ordinary
courts of law. Given how central law-breaking was to civil disobedience,
Gandhi stood behind legal principles. When the earl of Lytton, the
governor of Bengal, called for jails to provide reform and rehabilitation
in addition to punishment, Gandhi responded that “According to Lord
Lytton’s own standard, the detention of political prisoners without trial
and their reported ill-treatment is wholly wrong.”96 In the late 1920s,
when the cause of political prisoners became a cause célèbre – many had
been detained for several years without being charged – Gandhi noted,
“I regard the indefinite detention of the Bengal patriots without any trial
of any sort as a grave injustice.”97
The lack of recognition for those considered political prisoners sat
uneasily with another legal problem produced by the conditions of anti-
colonial protest: until the early 1920s, most protesters were jailed either
under charges in the Indian Penal Code or under Regulation III of 1818,
but by the middle of the 1920s and onward, protesters might be detained
under a range of special legislation such as the Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Acts. Under the terms of this legislation, those suspected
of sedition, terrorism, and fomenting revolution could be held or detained
for long years without the prospect of a jury trial or judicial appeal.
Because the second part of this legislation was seen to be a preventive
measure intended to stop terrorist crime before it occurred, technically,
none of the prisoners were considered convicts although they were
housed in jails with those who had been convicted of violent crimes.
Labels such as “state prisoner” had long been used for those detained
under Regulation III of 1818; added to this was “detenu,” for those
detained under the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act, to which

96 97
CWMG, vol. 34, p. 305. CWMG, vol. 38, p. 403.
120 After Chauri Chaura

was added “security prisoner.”98 The term “political prisoners” or “poli-

ticals” became an accepted term used by a range of nationalist and
colonial figures and provided the grounds for political mobilization
against the colonial state’s infrastructure of emergency laws. Ironically,
political prisoners who had been detained because they were suspected of
disrupting the process of constitutional reform were able to create dis-
ruption from within jails, prisons, and detention camps.
By the early 1920s, as Ujjwal Singh and Taylor Sherman have shown,
prisons and jails that housed political prisoners – both violent and non-
violent – became important spaces of protest to Indian nationalists and
anticolonial activists.99 As those suspected of sedition, terrorism, anar-
chism, and other political crimes were put into jail or detention, they
began to agitate for better prison conditions. By doing so, they invoked
their peculiar legal status as having become subjects of emergency law
rather than the ordinary rule of law. In 1923, supported by prominent
nationalist figures such as J. M. Sengupta, C. R. Das, and Sarat Bose,
those detained under Regulation III of 1818 began to petition for better
conditions, largely using the logic of their special social status as educated
and elite men who were being kept from the life they had outside the jail.
Those jailed in the Midnapore Jail refused to submit to being finger-
printed and photographed, arguing that these forms of state intervention
were the mark of how common criminals were treated. The first round of
written petitions from the “state prisoners” reached jail authorities
in January 1924 when the detainees demanded facilities to play tennis
and have the right to exchange two letters a week. In March 1924, they
demanded art supplies, more books, and bed stands on which to put
books and art supplies. A year later, in February 1925, they demanded
the right to have a two-hour interview with family members who had
traveled a long distance to see them.100
Colonial officials expressed frustration at the lack of a consistent policy
toward these prisoners – and in particular, on the question of who should
pay to house and feed the detenus. Since detenus and state prisoners had
not been formally charged or convicted, under British legal norms, they
could not be treated as ordinary convicts were. By the terms of the Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1925, the provincial government in
Bengal was “legally bound,” as one official noted, to provide a living
allowance to the families of those men who were detained. Yet, those
who were considered dangerous to the nation were detained under
98
Singh, Political Prisoners, p. 21, footnote 41.
99
Singh, Political Prisoners, and Sherman, State Violence.
100
WBSA, IB File 71/1923, accession no. 319/23, “State Prisoners: Transfer,
Classification, Photography and Fingerprinting, Rules for Government Treatment Of.”
 “Political Prisoners” and “Detenus” 121

Regulation III of 1818, which was considered under the jurisdiction of the
central government, the Government of India.101 Among those who were
kept in Bengal jails under Regulation III were Upendra Nath Banerji,
Santosh Kumar Mitra, Arun Chandra Guha, Pratul Chandra Ganguli,
Bhupati Majumdar, Bhupendra Kumar Dutta, and Ganesh Ghosh.
In due course, the government of Bengal asked for reimbursement from
the central government for housing them in Bengal’s jails.102
Officials agreed that the allowance should be standardized across cate-
gories and across the province so that there was little cause for unrest.
A Calcutta-based official reported that “provisions like diet, clothing,
books and reading material are standardized but allowed family allowan-
ces to fluctuate.” This was “a policy made practicable by the fact that all
are of the middle bhadralok class, and one that avoids the more difficult
questionings, and the trouble in jails, that would follow inevitably from
any attempt to assess each case separately.”103
Thus, an allowance was granted to the family of each detainee depen-
dent on their earning capacity, and an additional stipend permitted so
that detainees could have the supplies they needed.104 Moreover, the
government acknowledged their social status as “gentlemen,” and that
this status had to be maintained while in jail. Even so, some officials noted
wryly that the prisoners were demanding privileges that they might not
have had when they were not in jail, perhaps as a sign of civil disobe-
dience. Hugh Stephenson, of the Intelligence Branch, wrote with some
exasperation to the Home Department, “I think it is absolutely certain
that none of these people ever had electric fans in their own homes.”105
As the 1920s went on, these ad hoc policies on the treatment of political
prisoners became more elaborate and permanent. One of the amendments
of the BCLA allowed the Government of Bengal to send its most dangerous
political prisoners to other provinces. As some were transported outside of

101
NAI, Home Political File 159/1925, “Expense of Allowances to Detenus Must Be Met
from Provincial and Not Central Revenues.”
102
NAI, Home Political File 159/1925, “Expense of Allowances to Detenus Must Be Met
from Provincial and Not Central Revenues,” pp. 40 47: a series of letters from L. Birley
to the Govt of India, dated June 22, 1925, listed all of the state prisoners who were
confined in Bengal or Burma jails for whom Bengal was seeking reimbursement from the
central government.
103
NAI, Home Political File 159/1925, “Expense of Allowances to Detenus Must Be Met
from Provincial and Not Central Revenues,” pp. 30 31: letter from L. Birley, Secretary
to the Government of Bengal to H. Tonkinson, Secretary, Home Dept, Govt of India,
Simla, dated April 15, 1925.
104
APAC, L/P&J/7/335, “Allowances to Political Detenus and Their Dependents,” P&J 891/
1933, House of Commons question to Secretary of State for India, dated March 20, 1933.
105
WBSA, IB File 130/1925, “Questions Relating to the Treatment of Prisoners Interned
in Village Domiciles.”
122 After Chauri Chaura

Bengal, the question of who should pay for which prisoners was reiterated.
In March 1926, officials in Burma wrote to the Government of India asking
whether they could be compensated for the costs of confining Bengal’s
“state prisoners” in Mandalay and Insein. Those incarcerated there
included very high-profile figures such as Bhupen Kumar Dutta and
Subhas Chandra Bose, as well as a number of figures described in the
records as “Bengali gentlemen.” The men were granted 8 dhotis apiece,
12 handkerchiefs, a warm overcoat, and flannel and regular shirts, as well as
a suit.106 A later report noted that in Burma, following the “liberal” (which
we might understand as meaning generous) precedent set by Bengal, detai-
nees were allowed to wear clothes that were “in accordance with the ordinary
civilian apparel of the social class to which the prisoner belongs.”107
In spite of what the government felt were generous provisions made for
political prisoners, a number of political prisoners staged a hunger strike,
intended to draw attention to their living conditions. Incarcerated in jails
that were designed for the ordinary prison population, revolutionary
terrorists contended that their allowances were “insufficient.” They
asked for provisions to celebrate Durga Puja, a major annual religious
holiday, and clothes appropriate to their status.108
Then, a suicide in Alipore jail in Calcutta on April 3, 1926, brought the
issue of prisoners’ treatment to the press in a spectacular way: Ambica
Charan Khan, a young detainee who was suspected for his involvement in
the Mirzapur Bomb Case, poured kerosene over himself in the jail and died
of burns. He had been detained under the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment
Act of 1925 for his alleged membership in the Pabna branch of the Jugantar
group. After Ambica Charan’s suicide, the government investigated the
circumstances and concluded that he had felt guilty for causing the death
of one of his associates and the blinding of another. The government
reported that he had met with the head of the Intelligence Branch, Hugh
Stephenson, a week before and had been granted permission to see his
brother in the hospital, just a few days before the suicide.109 The Bengali
press published his suicide note several months later, and its text suggested
the depth of his alienation while under incarceration.110

106
NAI, Home Political File 80/IV/1926, “Increase Personal Allowance for Bengal State
Prisoners in Burma Jails,” pp. 8 10.
107
NAI, Home Political File 242/29, “Treatment of Political and Other Undertrial
Prisoners,” pp. 8 10.
108
NAI, Home Political File 57/XXV/1926, “Question in the Legislative Assembly
Relating to the Hunger Strike at Mandalay Jail; The Health of Subhas Chandra Bose;
The Grant of Allowances for Religious Ceremonies, Clothing, Newspapers, Etc.”
109
NAI, Home Political File 126/26, “File on the Suicide of Ambica Charan Khan.”
110
WBSA, IB File no. 363C/27, accession no. 102/27, “Article about Ambica Charan
Khan.”
 “Political Prisoners” and “Detenus” 123

Ambica Charan’s suicide coincided with a series of reports about the

treatment of political prisoners. The health of political prisoners was
suffering and there were suggestions that the government should be
more actively providing medical support. In 1927, district officers in
Bengal, who had been charged with overseeing detainees who had been
sentenced to home or village domicile, reported that the health of detai-
nees was declining. Several inquired about which governmental body
should supervise and (more importantly) pay for health visits, and the
Government of Bengal responded that “Although the health of detenus in
home domicile should primarily be the concern of their relations,
Government are ultimately responsible for their health, seeing they are
technically under restraint.”111 The government then ordered that health
reports be filed twice a year by district magistrates for all those detainees
who lived in home and village domicile.
Because the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act was seen to be
a temporary measure, most political prisoners continued to be housed
either in local jails and prisons, or what was called home or village
domicile. In order to improve jail conditions, officials in London and in
Delhi suggested that special detention centers be established far from
urban centers so that political prisoners should be isolated from the
general prison population. This resulted in a strong refusal from the
government in Bengal, who wrote: “The government of Bengal have no
intention of establishing detention camps for groups of detenus in remote
places. No such camps exist.”112
As news of suicides, ill health, and the denial of basic necessities
flooded the Indian press, keeping detainees alive and physically and
mentally healthy became a pressing concern for the colonial government.
Among the most dramatic and well-publicized events of 1929 was a 63-
day hunger strike undertaken by revolutionary terrorists as they awaited
trial for their part in the Lahore Conspiracy Case.113 Jatin Das, a Bengali
who had been imprisoned in Lahore, had begun his career as a member of
the Anushilan Samiti. He had been in and out of jails and internment
throughout the 1920s. When he and the other undertrial prisoners began

111
WBSA, IB File 176/27, accession no. 492/27, “Health Reports of Detenus in Village
Domicile,” Letter no. 4576 4598X, dated June 30, 1927, Government of Bengal,
Political Department, Special Branch, D.M. Martin, Deputy Secretary to District
Officers.
112
NAI, Home Political File 40/27, “Explanation of the Term ‘Village Domicile’ in
Connection with Detention of State Prisoners and Detenus.”
113
Kevin Grant, “The Transcolonial World of Hunger Strikes and Political Fasts,
c. 1909 1935,” in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, eds., Decentring Empire: India
and the Transcolonial World (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2006); Maclean,
A Revolutionary History of Interwar India, ch. 6; Sherman, State Violence, ch. 6.
124 After Chauri Chaura

their hunger strike in mid-June, government officials at all levels were

thrown into a tailspin, particularly because Jatin Das seemed to form
evidence of a link between the revolutionary terrorist groups in Punjab
and in Bengal. Punjabi supporters of the hunger strikers marched in
a parade for political sufferers in Calcutta in August that year, as the
strikes were ongoing.114 In conversations with the Government of India
Home Department, officials from the Government of Punjab asked that
some action be taken by the government before anyone died. There was
agreement that some “bridge” out of the situation be found so that neither
side – the government or the hunger strikers – could claim victory and
neither side would be forced to resort to more desperate measures.115
The drama of this mass hunger strike unfolded through the course of
the monsoon season, when most colonial officials had decamped to hill
stations in Simla, Darjeeling, and Mussoorie, to escape the heat and
humidity of the plains. Prominent Indian politicians, local colonial offi-
cials, and the hunger strikers themselves reminded the government that
recognition of the special status of the political prisoner had long been
a demand of political activists, even citing the 1922 conference in Simla
when the issue had first surfaced.116 The colonial government remained
resolutely committed to their longstanding position – that they would not
recognize the political prisoners as such, but they were willing to make
special accommodations in terms of labor, diet, reading material, and
other privileges denied to convicts. Officials overseeing the hunger stri-
kers in Lahore Jail noted that the prisoners had been allowed to use their
own utensils, bedding, and clothing, they were allowed to write and
receive letters and have visits, and were not required to do labor that
was unusually rigorous. On the subject of diet, prison officials noted that
because Jatin Das was a Bengali, fish, which was ordinarily not part of
a Punjabi diet, had been especially ordered.117
As publicity for the hunger strike grew, H. W. Emerson, the secretary of
the Government of India’s Home Department, drafted a memo to the
viceroy, Lord Irwin, to prepare the viceroy for the next Legislative
Assembly debate. He reiterated that “So far as Government are [sic]
aware, no civilized country recognizes political motive as a ground for
privileged treatment.” Drawing from the 1919 Jails Committee report,

114
Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India, pp. 159 60.
115
NAI, Home Political File 242/29, “Treatment of Political and Undertrial Prisoners.”
116
NAI, Home Political File 242/29, “Treatment of Political and Undertrial Prisoners,”
telegram to Hailey from H. W. Emerson, Secretary to Government of India, Home
Dept, August 8, 1929.
117
NAI, Home Political File 242/29, “Treatment of Political and Undertrial Prisoners,”
Appendix, August 5, 1929, pp. 20 23.
 “Political Prisoners” and “Detenus” 125

Emerson argued that there was no evidence – as the prisoners claimed –

that they should benefit from a special designation. Emerson dug his heels
in further and noted that the prisoners’ demands “are based on the view
that offences against the State amounting to even armed rebellion are
minor offences.”118
In spite of the volume of correspondence, debate, and press publicity
on the demands made by the hunger strikers in Lahore, Jatin Das died
on September 13, 1929. His long hunger strike and his death seemed to
cause as much alarm to the government as it did to Indians who followed
the story in newspapers. Nearly ten days before Das died, officials from
the Government of Bengal wrote to Emerson saying that they did not
want to “arouse intense excitement” among the population and hoped
that Jatin Das’s cremation would occur outside Bengal and that his ashes
would be scattered elsewhere. In response, the Government of Punjab
noted that they would prefer to hand the body over to his family, but
wished that the cremation occurred elsewhere too.119 After lengthy delib-
erations about how Jatin Das would be cremated and his ashes disposed,
his body was carried to the train station in Lahore so that he could return
to Howrah, the main train station in Calcutta, which was over 1000 miles
away. His funeral procession drew hundreds of followers and his death
was widely reported as an example of the government’s callousness to
political prisoners.120 The cost of transporting the body of Jatin Das was
paid for in part by a contribution by Subhas Chandra Bose, himself
recently released from detention.
In the Legislative Assembly debate that followed, Motilal Nehru chas-
tised the government for standing by as Das died. The case of Ireland was
invoked again, this time to draw attention to Michael Collins’ hunger
strike, in which the government had used a “cat-and-mouse” strategy:
hunger strikers were released into the custody of their family when they
became dangerously ill. Nehru said that in Ireland, “The English
Government . . . was prepared to save life at any expense, even at the
cost of letting convicts go without serving their sentences.” Pandit Madan
Mohan Malaviya had even stronger words and noted that the hunger
strikers were men “who are inspired by a high sense of patriotism and

118
NAI, Home Political File 242/29, “Treatment of Political and Undertrial Prisoners,”
Memorandum from H. W. Emerson to Viceroy for Legislative Assembly session,
August 26, 1929, pp. 12 15.
119
NAI, Home Political File 21/63/29, “Hunger Strike and the Death of Jatin Das,” From
H. W. Emerson, Home Department Government of India to J. G. Beazley, Secretary to
Government of Bengal.
120
APAC, L/P&J/12/686, Bengal Fortnightly Reports, “Report on the Political Situation
for the First Half of September 1929,” pp. 10 11.
126 After Chauri Chaura

a burning desire for the freedom of their country.”121 As they had before,
politically moderate Indians in the Legislative Assembly reminded the
government that political prisoners should be treated as distinct from
other convicts and criminals.
As scholars have shown, the Lahore Conspiracy Case of 1929–1930
and the hunger strikes and executions it produced generated an enormous
amount of popular sympathy for political prisoners, even though many
had been accused or suspected of dramatic acts of political violence.122
Put in the larger context of emergency laws that created a population of
political prisoners, moderate Indian politicians were able to argue that the
British government could not continue to suspend the law in order to
contain political dissidence.
Eventually, the Intelligence Branch published a slim booklet titled
“Instructions for the Treatment of Those Confined in Jails in Bengal
under the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1930, and Regulation
III of 1818” to ensure that the treatment of “state prisoners” was ratio-
nalized across the jails and that all had the same privileges. Thus, dietary
provisions, reading materials, exercise, “loose paper for letters,” and
“exercise books with pages numbered” for notes were offered to those
who had not been charged in revolutionary crimes, but were detained on
suspicion of being involved in a conspiracy to bring down the govern-
ment. Newspapers would be supplied, but without the advertisements,
and each prisoner could have 1.5 hours of exercise outside twice a day.123
Even though the government continued to argue that they were not
designating political prisoners as a special category, the rules guiding
the treatment of those who were classified as “state prisoners” prolifer-
ated and officials argued that emergency legislation should be continued
so that terrorist threats against the state could be contained.

121
NAI, Home Political File 21/63/29, “Hunger Strike and the Death of Jatin Das,”
Legislative Assembly Debates, vol. IV, no. 9, September 14, 1929, pp. 18 19. See
also Indian Legislative Assembly Debates 2 September 1929 to 17 September 1929,
Fifth Session, Third Legislative Assembly; volume IV, pp. 757 821, “Motion for
Adjournment on Action and Policy Re: The Accused under Trial in the Lahore
Conspiracy Case,” quote from Nehru is on p. 803, from Malaivya on p. 805.
122
Kama Maclean, “The Portrait’s Journey: The Image, Social Communication and Martyr
making in Colonial India,” Journal of Asian Studies 70 (2011): 1051 82; Neeti Nair,
“Bhagat Singh as Satyagrahi: The Limits to Non violence in Late Colonial India,”
Modern Asian Studies 43.3 (2009): 649 81; Simona Sawhney, “Bhagat Singh: A Politics
of Death and Hope,” in Anshu Malhotra and Farina Mir (eds), Punjab Reconsidered: History,
Culture, and Practice (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 377 408.
123
WBSA, IB File no. 145/26, “Revisions of Rules for the Treatment of Detenues”; NAI,
Home Political File 43/XVII of 1934, “Bengal Government’s Instructions for the
Treatment of Detenus under the BCLA in the Berhampur, Buxa and Hijli Camp
Jails”; NAI, Home Political File 43/1/40 & KW, “Settlement of Conditions for
Detention of Persons Who Are Detained.”
 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act 127

From the 1920s onward, due in no small part to arrests made in

the Non-Cooperation Movement, the debate over prisoners and
detainees had been about the distinctions in their status as political
inmates versus the status of convicts. Discussions between the differ-
ent layers of the colonial government focused on whether and how
political prisoners could be spared from the rigors of prison life,
particularly what kinds of labor they might be expected to perform.
By the 1930s, this discourse had shifted, particularly when it came to
Bengali bhadralok who were suspected of terrorist activity. This new
set of concerns had to do with men who were considered potentially
violent, although they had not been convicted of any crimes. Unlike
other allegedly violent prisoners, they were educated, elite, and
upper-caste. Thus, they needed a form of detention that was tailored
to their peculiar status as men who were identified as dangerous by
the intelligence bureau and police officials, but not convicted of any
crimes. In the 1930s, regulations about how to treat political prison-
ers proliferated into more detailed provisions, which I return to in
Chapter 5.

The Expiration of the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment

Act, 1925
Within several years of the promulgation of the Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Act in 1925, there was little evidence that terrorism
remained an active threat in Bengal, and even Charles Tegart, the com-
missioner of police in Calcutta, felt that the law was “working” to sup-
press terrorism. Any plans to overthrow the British government through
militant or revolutionary acts had stalled, if only because most who were
suspected of participating in conspiracies to overthrow the government
had been put in some kind of detention between 1924 and 1927. Because
the number of terrorist actions declined, when the new Governor of
Bengal, Stanley Jackson, was brought to India in late 1927, he was
charged with releasing detainees.
The fact that the law suspended basic civil liberties, combined with a lack
of violent activity, propelled opponents of the law to agitate for its repeal,
noting that the continued detention of suspected revolutionaries made little
sense in a moment when the governance of India was due to go through
another period of evaluation and reform. The Montagu–Chelmsford
reforms were up for reevaluation after a decade and a commission, headed
by John Simon, was chosen from members of the British Parliament and
sent to India to evaluate further reforms. The Simon Commission pro-
voked significant protests in 1928 and 1929 because it did not include any
128 After Chauri Chaura

Indian representatives.124 The exclusion of Indians occasioned the start of

another wave of nationwide protests. Orchestrated by Gandhi and the
Indian National Congress, these protests brought political activists of
different stripes together: staunch moderates such as Tej Sapru came
together with Motilal Nehru, by then considered more radical, to put
together an alternative proposal for governance that would grant India
dominion status, making it like Canada.125 Many of the revolutionaries
who became active in the 1930s were motivated by the anti-Simon
Commission marches they attended in 1928; this was especially true for
women revolutionary terrorists, who were drawn to marching in peaceful
protests and rallies that challenged the rhetoric of democratic reform
offered by the colonial government.126
As members of the Congress protested the commission, Wedgewood
Benn, as secretary of state for India, and Irwin, the viceroy, convened an
alternative series of meetings with a range of Indian politicians and British
officials to discuss further constitutional reform. In the months leading up
to the Roundtable Conferences, the problem of political prisoners
remained a key sticking point. Benn noted that he wanted to see self-
government for Indians; Irwin communicated this sentiment to those
involved in the conferences, and implied he did “not desire to continue
ordinances . . . necessitated by a situation which ex hypothesi would no
longer exist,” if self-government were granted.127 Drawing from press
reports of hunger strikers, suicides, and ill health, members of the Indian
National Congress argued that those in jail for political reasons be amnes-
tied, as they had been a decade before.
In addition to the political pressure put to the colonial government to
abandon emergency ordinances, the practice of detaining political prison-
ers drew the attention of those on the left in Britain. As early
as March 1926, parliamentary members of the British Labour Party
visited the India Office in London, protesting that over 150 prisoners
had been detained for over a year under the Bengal law on suspicion of
terrorist and revolutionary activity; several argued that the detainees

124
C. F. Andrews, India and the Simon Report (London: Macmillan, 1930); Report on the
Indian Statutory Commission (London: H. M.’s Stationery Office, 1930).
125
Known as the Nehru Report, the recommendation was not taken by the British: see
Judith Brown, Gandhi, pp. 217 24; Muldoon, Empire, Politics, and the 1935 India Act,
pp. 50 51.
126
Bina Das, Bina Das: A Memoir, translated by Dhira Dhar (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2010),
p. 9; Shanti Das, NMML, Oral History Transcripts, acc. 648; David Laushey, Bengal
Terrorism and the Marxist Left (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1978), pp.
52 55; Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India, p. 31.
127
APAC, L/PO/6/49 (i), Letter from Irwin to Sapru and Jayakar, dated August 28, 1930,
pp. 131 34.
 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act 129

should either be released or tried in a criminal court. The secretary of state

for India, Earl of Birkenhead, who had been appointed by the governing
Conservative Party, agreed and showed his support of liberal principles
that undergirded the language of individual rights. He reaffirmed his
support for the principle of habeas corpus and noted that using executive
powers to suspend the rule of law unnecessarily was repugnant to legal
norms: “I greatly dislike, and I am satisfied that the Government of India
dislikes, the necessity of using special legislation. It offends all my
instincts as a lawyer and as a judge, and I dislike it as much as any member
of this deputation dislikes it.”128
Yet, the next day, Birkenhead took aside some of the Labour members
of Parliament and showed them highly classified evidence collected by the
Intelligence Branch against the most prominent detainees – Subhas
Chandra Bose among them – and persuaded them that it was yet too
early to abandon special legislation.129 Because of threats made against
informers and witnesses and because prominent officials were still being
targeted for assassination, the government could not risk a public trial in
which witnesses recanted (or were killed) and the government failed to
secure a conviction. The challenge from the Labour opposition subsided
for the moment and the issue of repealing the legislation before its
expiration was sidelined.
To their Labour opposition, Birkenhead and Irwin continued to argue
that the Bengal ordinance, as it was initially known, was problematic, but
that it applied to relatively few people, and only those who were consid-
ered a serious threat to public safety. Among themselves, within the
Conservative Party, however, they acknowledged that detention laws
were politically problematic because they stirred up political opposition.
In a confidential minute written by Stanley Jackson, shortly after he had
been appointed Governor of Bengal by Birkenhead, Jackson reminded
the secretary of state that he had been told by his superiors that the
“question of the Detenus” was “one of the most serious and embarrassing
that the Government of India had to cope with.”130 Jackson was author-
ized to allow the release of these detainees because the continued deten-
tion of political dissidents “is a matter of intense public interest in
India . . . and was viewed with great misgiving by all Parties in the

128
APAC, L/PO/6/18, “Re enactment of Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act (1930),”
p. 215.
129
APAC, L/PO/6/18, “Re enactment of Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act (1930),”
pp. 186 87.
130
APAC, L/PO/6/18, “Re enactment of Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act (1930),”
pp. 177 85, “Minute by Governor Stanley Jackson, Dated January 12, 1928, Labeled
SECRET.”
130 After Chauri Chaura

House of Commons.”131 Even so, the governor of Bengal, Jackson,

continued to warn his superiors – the viceroy Lord Irwin, and
Wedgewood Benn, the secretary of state for India – that the legislation
acted as a “deterrent,” and that without it, there might be another flaring
of terrorist conspiracies.132 When he arrived in Bengal, Jackson discov-
ered that the gradual release of detainees had occurred in regular intervals
during 1927, but had halted in the final months of the year because three
local officials, Calcutta Commissioner of Police Charles Tegart,
Inspector-General of Prisons F. J. Lowman, and A. N. Moberly, the
Secretary of the Home Department in Bengal, felt that the most poten-
tially dangerous criminals should remain in detention. Tegart had evi-
dence that the revolutionary groups were reorganizing while in
detention.133 He had already been a target of the terrorists several
times. Moberly, like Lowman, was a lifetime civil servant in Bengal who
had witnessed the first terrorist campaigns as a young man. As Jackson
struggled against those who were under his command in Calcutta, he
argued to his superiors, the viceroy and secretary of state, that the political
opposition to detaining large numbers of revolutionary terrorists wea-
kened British authority.
By the middle of 1928 – just two years later – the Labour MPs asked
again to meet with Secretary of State Birkenhead, noting that two years
had elapsed with little progress on the matter of political prisoners.
The viceroy, Lord Irwin, reported that less than 30 men remained
“under restraint” in May 1928, significantly fewer than the 150 or so
who had been in jail in the middle of 1926. Nearly twenty of these thirty
men were not in jail, but rather in home or village detention, which meant
that they were free to go where they pleased between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m.,
but had to report regularly to local police stations.134 All of these men
were known by police and intelligence officials to have participated in
planning conspiracies against the government, although there were few
witnesses to confirm this in court. Stanley Jackson was eventually credited
with releasing the majority of detainees by the end of 1928, so that the
repressive laws remained on the books, but were not being actively used.
As legislators, civil servants, and nationalist politicians debated the
merits of repressive legislation, in mid-June 1929, the British
131
APAC, L/PO/6/18, “Re enactment of Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act (1930),”
pp. 177 85.
132
APAC, L/PO/6/18, “Re enactment of Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act (1930),”
pp. 95 98, “Extract from Private Letter from Lord Irwin to Wedgewood Benn, Dated
9 November 1929.”
133
Laushey, Bengal Terrorism, pp. 49 52, 65 68.
134
APAC, L/PO/6/18, “Re enactment of Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act (1930),”
pp. 119, 120 22, 130 37, 147 51.
 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act 131

Parliament experienced a change of leadership: the Labour Party formed

a minority government with the assistance of the Liberal Party, pledging
a shift toward further reforms in the relationship between India and
Britain. For figures such as Fenner Brockway, who had been
a conscientious objector and was a Labour MP between 1929 and
1931, the continued detention of political prisoners in India was unac-
ceptable on legal grounds. He had recently spent a significant amount of
time in India, primarily to attend the Indian National Congress in Madras
in December 1927, where he ended up staying for several months in
a hospital because of a car accident.135 Friendly with both Gandhi and
Jawaharlal Nehru, Brockway made sure to bring his campaign to liberate
the political prisoners to Wedgewood Benn, secretary of state for India,
who had voiced his opposition to the emergency ordinances in the past.136
Much of the concern in left and liberal circles about political prisoners
India focused on those arrested in the Meerut Conspiracy Case – who had
been under detention without charge for a number of years because of
their suspected attachments to communism. The idea that political dis-
sidents were being incarcerated because of their ideological views was
worrying, particularly to politicians on the left. Yet, when Benn and
Brockway met to discuss the issue, Benn, a liberal, managed to persuade
his colleague that the issue was more complicated than had been reported
in the press and shared confidential information that the threat of violence
was widespread and not limited to a few stray communists. Benn
reminded Brockway about the events in the Punjab that had occurred in
the preceding months, the death of Lajpat Rai at the hands of a police
charge at a rally, and the subsequent assassination of J. P. Saunders,
a police official, at the hands of the Hindustan Socialist Republican
Army. From the government’s perspective, the possibility of more vio-
lence should keep government vigilant.137
In November 1929, shortly after Jatin Das’s death, and as the proceed-
ings for the Lahore Conspiracy trials began, the highest officials in the
colonial government began to consider how to deal with the problem of
political prisoners as they tried to construct a way to evaluate the success
of the constitutional reforms of 1919 under Montagu and Chelmsford.
In a private letter in November 21, 1929, from Lord Irwin, the viceroy, to
135
NMML, Oral History Transcripts, Fenner Brockway, accession no. 18, pp. 1 2.
136
NAI, Home Political File 11/19/30, “Private and Personal Correspondence between
Secretary of State and Viceroy Regarding Political Prisoners, Meerut Case, and
Repressive Laws.” Brockway recalled this moment when he was interviewed in 1967:
NMML, Oral History Transcripts, accession no. 18, p. 5.
137
NAI, Home Political File 11/19/30, “Private and Personal Correspondence between
Secretary of State and Viceroy Regarding Political Prisoners, Meerut Case, and
Repressive Laws.”
132 After Chauri Chaura

Wedgewood Benn, secretary of state for India and Liberal MP, Irwin
identified two important issues in terms of dealing with political prisoners
and the activities of the revolutionary terrorist movement. One issue was
amnesty for political prisoners, as had been offered in 1919, and
the second was whether to fully prosecute each crime using the mechan-
isms available through the Indian Penal Code. Irwin noted that severe
punishments had been unsuccessful in upholding the laws against sedi-
tion, since the radical materials continued to circulate; he also noted that
if the government wanted to continue to enlist what he called “respon-
sible” Indians, it should use a gentler approach in enforcing laws. Lord
Irwin noted with approval, “I recall the case of Gandhi a few months ago
who was fined a rupee, which vindicated the law, which had only been
technically infringed and left no bitterness.”138
Irwin had consulted John Anderson and Charles Tegart, officials who
were stationed in Bengal and had served in Ireland. Both Anderson and
Tegart reported that it was better to focus not on prosecution, but on
preventing violent acts from being planned. Calling this an “efficient
despotism,” Irwin encouraged the adoption of a policy that would deprive
Indian nationalists and the press from mobilizing around spectacular
prosecutions, gesturing to the press generated by the Lahore conspiracy
trials. In December 1929, militants attempted to bomb Irwin’s train,
which Irwin brushed off. Irwin wrote to the secretary of State, “I think
we were really very lucky not to have an accident . . . and we must again
gratefully recognize that the Indian ability to execute sinister projects
efficiently is less than their ability to design them.”139
Several weeks later, Irwin reported that figures such as Malaviya,
Nehru, and Gandhi had not made demands on behalf of political prison-
ers, as the viceroy had been expecting.140 Within a month, in early 1930,
Lord Irwin, the viceroy, wrote to Wedgewood Benn, secretary of state for
India, arguing that “getting the cooperation of responsible Indians”
would be critical to the success of constitutional reforms, but that “we
must avoid doing anything that can reasonably be regarded as
excessive.”141
Amid the confusion of how to comprehend the status of political
prisoners (without calling them that), Irwin distinguished between the

138
APAC, L/PO/6/51 (iii), p. 154.
139
APAC, Mss Eur C 152/5, Halifax Collection, pp. 185 88: dated December 26, 1929,
from Viceroy to Secretary of State.
140
APAC, L/PO/6/51 (iii), “Extract from Private Letter from Lord Irwin to
Mr. Wedgewood Benn, January 23, 1930,” p. 130.
141
APAC, L/PO/6/51 (iii), “Extract from Private Letter from Lord Irwin to
Mr. Wedgewood Benn, February 6, 1930,” p.129.
 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act 133

two kinds of political prisoners – violent and nonviolent – noting that the
prisoners in jail under the Bengal ordinance were distinct from those who
were in jail for participating in Gandhian protests and it was important
that government “show mercy” toward the nonviolent protesters.142
Benn responded with some sympathy, again restating the logic of protec-
tion that liberal colonial officials who hoped to encourage Indian self-
government relied on: “. . . we have to consider the numbers of prisoners,
the severity of their sentences and their treatment in jail. We have also,
I think, constantly to emphasise the fact that we are doing no more than
preserving, for a self-governing India, a legacy of public order.”143
As the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act neared its expiration date
on April 24, 1930, some British officials in India called for it to be made
permanent on the grounds that the terrorist threat had not fully subsided.
Debate around this question raged in the Legislative Assembly and
representatives of the various Indian constituencies chimed in against
that act’s illegality. There was some sympathy for this position among
British officials. The viceroy reported back to the secretary of state that
some members of the Bengal government felt that the act should be
renewed, although they did not want to create more unrest: “Bengal
Government replied suggesting that they would prefer to continue the
Act on a permanent basis, but that in deference to political considerations
they had not proposed this.”144 The proposal to renew the Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1925 was brought to the attention of
the British cabinet, with Bengal officials noting that the “incarceration
without trial of a considerable number of persons would be the greatest
possible obstacle to the creation and maintenance of an atmosphere
favourable to the success of the Round-table Conference which is to be
convened in England to solve the problem of India’s future.”145
Opponents of the act argued that few potential radicals and revolution-
aries remained in jail, and there had been no terrorist actions in Bengal
proper since 1924, when Ernest Day was mistaken for Charles Tegart and
killed. The viceroy noted that the Government of India was inclined to let
the act expire, particularly since discussions for further constitutional
reforms were forthcoming. The Governor of Bengal, Stanley Jackson,

142
APAC, L/PO/6/49 (i), “Extract from Private Letter from Lord Irwin to Mr. Wedgewood
Benn, 10 July 1930,” pp. 76 77.
143
APAC, L/PO/6/49 (i), “Extract from Private Letter from Wedgewood Benn to Lord
Irwin, 29 August 1930.”
144
APAC, Mss Eur C 152/11, Halifax Collection, Telegram from Edward Frederick
Lindley Wood, Earl of Halifax, Viceroy of India to Secretary of State, p. 48: telegram
no. 78a, dated March 5, 1930.
145
PRO, CAB/24/210, “The Question of the Renewal of the Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Act, 1925,” p. 391.
134 After Chauri Chaura

felt that reenacting the law might stir up political agitation and revive the
terrorist movement. In contrast, Moberly, the Chief Secretary of the
Home Department in Bengal, felt that the legislation should be reenacted
so that the police and civil servants would not become discouraged.146
Jackson’s position won out in Bengal, and the viceroy communicated to
the India Office that the “executive powers of arrest and detention with-
out trial” should be allowed to lapse, until a time when these powers were
required again. The first part of the act retained the authority to arrest
suspected terrorists and revolutionaries and hold special closed trials to
charge them.147 Within the fortnight – on March 20, 1930, Benn wrote to
Lord Irwin, the viceroy, that he was reassured that cooler heads had
prevailed and that the emergency law would not be extended: “I need
not tell you how relieved I felt when I learned that Jackson, with your
approval, was prepared to forgo the parts of the Act securing detention
without trial, which is, of course, however necessary it may have been or
may be in the future, an outrageous invasion of personal liberty.”148
In a Bengal Legislative Council meeting just five days later,
on March 25, Stanley Jackson announced that the Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Act would be allowed to expire on April 24, 1930.149 In the
backdrop of renewed discussions between Indian politicians and British
officials over further constitutional reforms, this seemed an auspicious
way to begin further negotiations for devolving political authority from
the colonial government to Indian political elites.

Conclusion
The emergency legislation passed by the colonial government in 1925
allowed police and intelligence officials in India to arrest and detain
suspected terrorists, revolutionaries, and violent political dissidents and
try them in special courts with district and session judges sitting in three-
person tribunals. The legislation also allowed the government to detain
on suspicion of sedition without necessarily charging or trying political
dissidents. There was much debate among British officials and Indian
politicians about whether suspending the rule of law, and in particular,
suspending habeas corpus, or allowing closed trials made sense in
146
APAC, L/PO/6/18, “Re enactment of Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act (1930),”
pp. 40 45. Telegram from Viceroy to Secretary of State, dated March 5, 1930.
147
APAC, L/PO/6/18, “Re enactment of Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act (1930),”
pp. 55 56. Enclosure March 25, 1930.
148
APAC, L/PO/6/18, “Re enactment of Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act (1930),”
pp. 71 73. Private letter from Secretary of State to Viceroy, dated March 20, 1930.
149
NAI, Home Political File 294/2/30, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act [Printed
with Objects and Reasons] as Introduced in Council on 21 August 1930.”
 Conclusion 135

a moment of constitutional reform. Yet the Bengal Criminal Law

Ordinance and the Amendment Act that followed was put in force in
1925 over the objections of many Indian politicians, particularly those
who had been newly elected to the Legislative Assembly. The language of
this legislation drew substantially from the terms of the Defence of India
Act of 1915, which had been the inspiration for the unpopular Rowlatt
Act after the end of the war. As a concession to the political opposition
that was voiced by Indian politicians and liberal opponents in Britain, the
act limited the legislation to five years and was due to expire in April 1930.
Suspending rule of law for a defined period indicated that rule of law
was still intact, at least in principle. British politicians could argue that
rule of law would be fully restored when the legislation expired and social
and political order was restored. They imagined that the constitutional
reforms brought about in 1919, and any future reforms, would allow
moderate Indian groups to structure political debate and shift protest
away from political violence and militant acts against the government.
As speeches from all sides of the political divide showed, whether they
were conservative or liberal, Indian or British, politicians were wary of
restricting habeas corpus and abrogating the rule of law.
Indian politicians used the special legislation as an example of the
colonial government’s draconian policies, emphasizing that the suspen-
sion of the rule of law betrayed important legal principles such as the right
to an open trial by a jury. They turned to the language of rule of law – long
seen by the empire as a gift that Britain gave to India – to press their claims
about legal rights that were due them as subjects of the empire. In framing
their protests, moderate Indian politicians treated the special legislation
as a betrayal in the liberal compact between the government and English-
educated barristers and lawyers who made up the core of representatives
in the Bengal Legislative Assembly and civil service.
In spite of how little traction Indian politicians gained at resisting the
colonial government’s continued efforts to enact laws that were framed as
suppressing terrorism, these legal disputes over the government’s deten-
tion programs were critical to arguments about when sovereignty over
India’s law and subjects could be devolved to Indian representatives.
By the late 1920s, Indians hoped that India would be granted full inde-
pendence, or purna swaraj, a goal that had been articulated as early as
1920 when Gandhi began his Non-Cooperation Movement. Although
the numbers of those detained under suspicion of terrorism was relatively
small (certainly in comparison to those who were arrested on nonviolent
charges), Indian politicians argued that if the British left India, acts of
terrorism would decline dramatically and the repressive laws would be
unnecessary. Indian politicians began to imagine what the end of British
136 After Chauri Chaura

occupation might look like: as early as 1932, while the Roundtable

Conferences in London were being held, B.C. Chatterjee, a Bengal poli-
tician and an appointed member of the Bengal Legislative Council,
looked forward to the political devolution of sovereignty. He appealed
to British sensibilities about rule of law, while arguing that if “we are going
to have full provincial autonomy within a measurable distance of time . . .
a year or so, if you are going to transfer the portfolio of law and order
under the control of a popular [elected] Minister, why not do it now?”150
Yet, British officials clung to the idea of “responsible government,”
a government that was representative of moderate elites and not radical
militants. This liberal imaginary was dependent on allowing the constitu-
tional reforms to take hold, and an appropriately civil (and civilized) public
to emerge as representatives of a soon-to-be liberated India. The timeline
for independence remained as vague as it had in 1920, and by 1930, amid
the global depression and in the aftermath of agitations against the com-
position of the Simon Commission, colonial officials knew that it would be
hard to sustain the continued colonial occupation of India because of the
cost alone. As the Earl of Lytton, governor of Bengal, said when the Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act was initially passed in 1925, “The only
justification for a Bill of this kind is that the welfare of the State as a whole is
in danger and that the danger cannot be averted by any other means . . .
Government have felt constrained to take this action and to restrain the
liberty of a few men in order that the liberty of many may be secured.”
Lytton reminded those in the Bengal Legislative Council that Bengalis had
a “deep-rooted distrust of Government” that would likely be stanched if
“representative Government” were properly cultivated.151
This chapter examined the arguments of those who called for the
enactment of the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment act, and the chal-
lenges made by Indians. The British decision to allow the emergency
legislation to lapse proved short-lived. In spite of sustained political
opposition from Indian moderates, as I show in the next chapter, the
1925 act was renewed in 1930 and supplemented by other emergency acts
and ordinances. Much like 1919, when the impending constitutional
reforms initiated by Montagu and Chelmsford coincided with the
Rowlatt Act, in 1930, the Roundtable Conferences convened to discuss
future political devolution were simultaneous to the enactment of some of
the most repressive legislation to suspend basic principles for rule of law.

150
APAC, L/P&J/7/395, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1925, an Amendment,”
“Extract of Proceedings of a Meeting of the Bengal Legislative Council, held
1 September 1932,” p. 5.
151
APAC, L/PO/6/18, “Re enactment of Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act (1930),”
pp. 67 68.
 Conclusion 137

Once again, these laws were not antithetical to one another, but rather
complementary to the task of expanding liberal constitutional reforms by
“restraining” those who were seen to be radical and revolutionary and
“preserving” order. If there was a difference in the position of colonial
officials in this decade, by 1930, local officials felt much more deeply
under threat and less confident that the political conversion of militants
into moderates was even possible.
In Bengal, there was strong resistance against repealing the Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act (1925) from British officials who had
been dealing with a generation of revolutionary activity. Drawing from
this long history of “lessons learned,” – something that was repeatedly
documented in various memoranda and “notes on terrorism” – officials
argued that when repressive legislation was withdrawn, terrorist outrages
increased.152 While officials admitted that the legislation “worked” to
suppress terrorism, and that surveillance, intelligence, and the censorship
of the press had been “successful,” they also argued for the laws’ perma-
nent extension. Notably, these discussions began even before there was
evidence of further conspiracies against the government. In the year
before the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act (1925) was due to
expire, local officials in Bengal suggested that revolutionary terrorism
was a permanent condition of unrest in Bengal, rather than a movement
brought about by continued colonial occupation.
In spite of the release of nearly all those who had been detained, many
continued to plan terrorist acts against the British state throughout the
1920s. Although many revolutionary terrorists had been detained and
kept under police surveillance after 1925, several important groups
remained in hiding from British surveillance. The conspiracy cases of
the 1920s, the revival of Gandhi’s campaign to initiate a large-scale
campaign of Civil Disobedience in late 1929 and 1930, and events in
the Punjab in April 1929, enabled many revolutionary cells to regroup
and revive.
By the early months of 1930, events across India, and Bengal, in
particular, dramatically transformed the situation. The Simon
Commission had no Indian representatives as it prepared to publish its
report on future constitutional reforms to devolve political authority to
Indians. On March 12, 1930, in part to protest the commission’s exclu-
sion of Indian members, Gandhi began the Civil Disobedience
Movement with the Salt March, where he walked to the coast in
Gujarat and made salt in violation of the salt tax. Officials were reluctant

152
James Hevia, Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire Building in
Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 172.
138 After Chauri Chaura

to arrest Gandhi or any other high-profile leader because they wanted to

avoid the publicity that would result and reinvigorate the nationalist
movement; they may have hoped that the issue of repressive laws could
fade away from political debate.153
The next month, on April 24, 1930, the Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Act was due to expire. A week before its expiration,
a group of revolutionary terrorists who had been underground came out
of hiding. The four-day siege of the city of Chittagong began on April 16,
terrorizing the city of Chittagong in eastern Bengal. Known as the
Chittagong Armoury Raid, participants hoped to give cause for a mass
uprising across India. There was no sudden mass uprising; instead,
a series of attacks against government officials marked an escalation of
the revolutionary terrorist movement, which forced the hand of the
government to pass further repressive legislation.154
By the early 1930s, it seemed as if all manner of political prisoner – from
Gandhi’s nonviolent activists to revolutionary terrorists – were being
detained by the government. This influx created a crisis of prison over-
population and also a crisis in the laws of colonial governance. In spite of
the government’s claims that emergency laws “worked” to suppress revo-
lutionary terrorism, they appeared to generate more political violence.
Moreover, the British liberal imaginary of gradually developing
a representative set of democratic institutions in India was severely chal-
lenged on many fronts as Indian nationalists began to envisage more
concretely an idea of India that was liberated from British rule.

153
Sherman, State Violence, ch. 4.
154
APAC, L/P&J/7/173, “Victims of Assassinations or Attempted Assassination in India
since 17 Dec. 1928 [to 31 July 1931].”
4 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid:
Revolutionary Terrorism in the 1930s

About a week before the expiration of the Bengal Criminal Law

Amendment Act of 1925, on the evening of Good Friday, April 18,
1930, Surja Sen led nearly 60 revolutionary terrorists to conduct what
quickly became known as the Chittagong Armoury Raid. Called the
Indian Republican Army, the group laid siege to the city of Chittagong
for four days. The raid was an elaborately planned attack in which
revolutionaries managed to occupy major colonial sites, including the
European club, police armoury, and the telephone and telegraph office.
The raiders cut off all communications with officials in other parts of
India, gathered arms, and hoped to terrorize the British while they
enjoyed a Friday evening at their club.1 The raid was a surprise, particu-
larly to officials who had been claiming that the revolutionary terrorist
threat in Bengal had been suppressed. The aftermath was even more
debilitating for the colonial government; for almost three years afterward,
many of the leaders of the raid escaped police detection, which generated
even more repressive emergency legislation.2 Protected by local villagers
in the hills around Chittagong, Surja Sen, the raid’s mastermind, was not
arrested until almost a year after the raid.3
The movement, self-proclaimed as the “Indian Republican Army,”
styled itself as a version of the “Irish Republican Army,” and was inspired
in part by the Irish struggle against the British. Followers read Dan

1
WBSA, IB File no. 176K/1930, “Outbreak by Revolutionaries in Chittagong.” APAC,
Mss Eur D 1194/4b, Grassley Collection, “The Chittagong Raid, Terrorism in Bengal,
1927 37.”
2
APAC, L/P&J/7/242, Memorandum by the Secretary of State for India, 1 2; T. Sarkar,
Bengal, 1928 34, pp. 97 101.
3
Kalpana Joshi, Chittagong Armoury Reminiscences (Calcutta: People’s Publishing House,
1948, 1980); R. C. Majumdar, The Revolutionary Movement in Bengal and the Role of Surja
Sen (Calcutta, 1978); I. Mallikarjuna Sharma, Easter Rebellion in India: The Chittagong
Uprisings (Hyderabad, 1993). From a European perspective, particularly former officials,
the moment looked quite different: Percival Griffiths, To Guard My People: The History of the
Indian Police (London: Benn, 1971), ch. 18; Martin Wynne, ed., On Honourable Terms:
The Memoirs of Some Indian Police Officers, 1915 48 (London: BACSA, 1985), ch. 9;
Robert Reid, Years of Change in Bengal and Assam (London: Benn, 1966), ch. 6.

139
140 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid

Breen’s My Fight for Irish Freedom, relying on his account of the Easter
Rising in 1916 as a model for the Armoury Raid. The raiders hoped that
their siege would unleash a mass uprising across Bengal, if not all of India.
The raid was even timed to begin on Good Friday, which was the
anniversary of the Easter Rising. Otherwise, the day’s symbolism might
have been meaningless in a region where the majority of the population
was Muslim and Hindu; unbeknownst to the raiders at the time, many
Europeans had stayed home that night, which explained why the club
was largely empty.4 Followers of Surja Sen posted flyers titled “Indian
Republican Army” at schools in Rangoon, Barisal, Calcutta, and
Chittagong, urging youths to follow the examples of revolutionaries in
Germany, Russia, and China to protest the practices of an unjust
government.5 Although the siege occurred in a remote part of eastern
Bengal, the British feared that the group had larger connections because it
drew from some of the same language used by Bhagat Singh and the
Hindustan Socialist Republican Army, who had orchestrated attacks the
previous year in the Punjab; the group also had connections with revolu-
tionaries in Burma.6
The day after the raid, the viceroy, Lord Irwin, sent a telegram to
Wedgewood Benn, the Labour secretary of state for India. Irwin, using
his executive authority as viceroy, stated that he was authorizing an
emergency ordinance in Bengal immediately. The siege was ongoing
and it was not clear how the situation would be resolved, but he noted
“If the thing is as it appears part of a wider conspiracy, it might clearly be
a question of utmost urgency.”7 In response, Benn made no mention of
what happened in Chittagong, but wrote, opaquely, “I have never blinked
the fact that order must be maintained, but we have always worked in
order to enlist at any rate the silent support of public opinion on the side of
public security . . . I believe that extraordinary powers and the severity of
punishment only, in the end, accentuates the difficulties [we] are trying to
overcome.”8 Benn was initially resistant to the extension of emergency

4
Silvestri, “The ‘Sinn Fein’ of India’: Irish Nationalism and the Policing of Revolutionary
Terrorism in Bengal, 1905 1939,” Journal of British Studies 39.4 (2000): 470; Kalinikar
Dey, NMML, Oral History Transcripts, accession no. 595; Joshi, Reminiscences; Percival
Griffiths, To Guard My People, pp. 263 65.
5
WBSA, IB File no. 178/30, “Proscription of Leaflet Titled ‘Indian Republican Army.’”
6
Durba Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal: Imperial Strategies of Political Violence and Its
Containment in the Interwar Years,” in Decentring Empire (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan,
2006).
7
APAC, Mss Eur C 152/11, Halifax Collection, p. 89, Telegram from Edward Frederick
Lindley Wood, Earl of Halifax, Viceroy of India to Secretary of State, telegram no. 133,
dated April 19, 1930.
8
APAC, L/PO/6/18, “Re enactment of Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act (1930),”
pp. 38 39, Private Letter from Secretary of State to Viceroy, dated April 22, 1930.
 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid 141

powers, believing (as many liberal politicians had from the 1910s onward)
that revolutionary terrorism could not thrive in British India. His reserva-
tions were quickly overrun by other attacks in Bengal and elsewhere.
As 1930 unfolded, there was political violence on many fronts.
The crisis of terrorism that officials had faced in the early 1920s paled
in comparison to the number of targeted assassinations in the 1930s.
After a five-year period of repressive laws, this escalation suggested that
underground groups had reorganized in the years between 1926 and 1928
in spite of state repression. Colonial officials, from local police inspectors
all the way up to the secretary of state for India, returned to the question of
how to suppress the revival of a movement that had seemed moribund just
a few years earlier. For their part, members of revolutionary terrorist
groups targeted officials in particular districts who had been involved in
suppressing the terrorist movement. The district of Midnapore would
later become known because three successive district magistrates were
assassinated there between 1931 and 1933. Many there traced it to police
brutality against civilian populations in Contai (a village in Midnapore
district) in May 1930.
In the month after the armoury raid, the police in Contai ransacked the
homes of villagers because they suspected them of hiding the armoury
raiders. Schools, which were seen to be the primary recruiting grounds for
revolutionaries and terrorists, were forcibly evacuated by the police. Over
200 people were detained in a jail that was intended to house only forty
prisoners, and others were publicly assaulted. When an independent
committee of eight prominent Bengali leaders came from Calcutta to
investigate, they found that the villagers had only been making salt in
accordance with Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience movement, which had
begun a month earlier.9 The report, which was published in pamphlet
form and illustrated with black-and-white photographs, showed the irre-
trievable damage done to the homes of rural peasants. It was widely
circulated in India and in Britain among those who were opposed to the
colonial government’s growing tendency toward violence against ordin-
ary men and women.
In addition to the Chittagong Armoury Raid in April, later that year
in August 1930, Inspector-General of Police F. J. Lowman was assassi-
nated in Dacca and his colleague Eric Hodson was wounded. While doing
rounds, Benoy Bose, a medical student, learned that the two men would
be at Dacca Hospital visiting an ill friend. Dressed in scrubs, the student

9
NAI, Home Political File 200/5/30, “Report of the Enquiry Committee into the Incident
in Contai, District Midnapore”; Home Political File 5/31, “Book Entitled ‘Law and Order
in Midnapore, 1930,’ as contained in the reports of the nonofficial enquiry committee.”
142 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid

Figure 4.1 Benoy Bose, with permission from Centre of South Asian
Studies archive, Cambridge, Tegart Collection

managed to evade arrest and escaped. Later in August, another assassina-

tion attempt was made on the life of Charles Tegart, Police
Commissioner in Calcutta, in front of some shops in Calcutta’s central
district, Dalhousie Square, and the suspect, Dinesh Majumdar was
arrested but managed to escape from jail.10 In December 1930, Benoy
Bose, Badal, and Dinesh Gupta stormed the Writers’ Building, offices of
the Government of Bengal in central Calcutta, and killed Simpson,

10
NAI, Home Political File 497/30, “Attempt on the Life of Charles Tegart; Murder of
Mr. Lowman, Inspector General, Dacca and Prosecution of Dinesh Majumdar.”
 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid 143

Inspector-General of Prisons, who had also been in favor of preventive

detention. Benoy Bose was acknowledged as the medical student who had
been behind the Lowman assassination. Benoy and Badal committed
suicide at the scene, and Dinesh Gupta, who had been seriously injured,
was executed a year later after a special tribunal convicted him.11
Lowman, Tegart, and Simpson were among those officials who had
been strong advocates for making the repressive legislation permanent,
arguing in favor of the continued detention of suspected revolutionaries
and terrorists. All three men had long been on the frontlines of dealing
with the revolutionary terrorists.
Between 1930 and 1934, revolutionary terrorists assassinated nine
more British officials and attempted to murder numerous Indian-born
government officials and informers.12 The increasing frequency of these
acts across Bengal, bombings and assassination attempts from Calcutta to
Darjeeling, the involvement of young women of university age, and
attacks in conventionally British spaces such as clubs, race courses, and
sporting grounds showed that in spite of extensive repressive legislation,
revolutionary terrorist groups continued to pose a threat to the security of
the British government in India.
Colonial officials in India put even more pressure on politicians in
Britain, demanding that the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act’s
full provisions be reinstated for another five years, perhaps even enacted
permanently.13 To this, Benn, the secretary of state responded tersely,
“The decision in favour of temporary legislation must be regarded as
final.”14 Benn reiterated that a time limit of five years on the legislation
was necessary to avoid the appearance of martial law. He noted it would
be better that the legislation be ratified by the Bengal Legislative Council,
so that a process of legislative debate and approval would enable the
ordinances to gain political legitimacy among Indians, rather than be

11
The bus terminal in Kolkata is B. B. D. Bag, which represents the initials of Benoy, Badal,
Dinesh. This was the name given to Dalhousie Square, which was outside the Writers’
Building in the 1960s.
12
APAC, Mss Eur F 161, Indian Police Collection, S. G. Taylor, “The Terrorist
Movement in Bengal, 1930 34”; APAC, L/P&J/7/173, “Victims of Assassinations or
Attempted Assassination in India since 17 Dec. 1928.”
13
Cabinet Papers (Secret) 273/30, “The Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance:
Question of Continuance, Whether Permanently, or by an Act, for Short Periods”; NAI,
Home Political File 517/30, nos. 1 30, “Question of Undertaking Permanent Legislation
to Replace the BCLA Ordinance 1930, Enactment of the Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Act 1930.”
14
NAI, Home Political File 517/30, nos. 1 30, “Question of Undertaking Permanent
Legislation to Replace the BCLA Ordinance 1930, Enactment of the Bengal Criminal
Law Amendment Act 1930,” serial no. 21, Telegram to Government of Bengal,
no. 2639 S, dated August 8, 1930.
144 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid

perceived as a fiat by executive order as the legislation of the 1920s had

been.15
This chapter examines the expansion of emergency and special legisla-
tion from 1930 to 1935, as political violence against colonial officials
escalated in Bengal and the British government attempted to introduce
another round of constitutional reforms. In spite of the British govern-
ment’s stated reluctance to use special powers or emergency legislation in
India, within just two years after Chittagong, a series of legislation that
modified the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act (1930) was supple-
mented by the Bengal Emergency Powers Ordinances and Acts, the
Bengal Suppression of Terrorist Outrages Act, and the Bengal Public
Security Act. All of it was passed over the opposition of appointed and
elected Indian representatives, and much of it was opposed by liberal and
left-leaning politicians and activists in Britain. In what became known
colloquially as “ordinance raj,” the colonial government passed another
series of executive orders to suppress the revolutionary terrorist move-
ment by circumventing common legal procedures. Indian politicians
feared that some of this legislation was used to arrest those involved in
the Civil Disobedience agitations being organized by Gandhi, but in
Bengal, the focus was largely on revolutionary terrorists.16 In spite of
the initial opposition to emergency legislation, the rules that guided the
temporary suspension of the rules of law became more numerous and
more detailed, endowing emergency laws with a legality that would with-
stand political challenges.
The passage of emergency legislation in a moment of constitutional
reform embroiled the colonial government in a series of debates that
highlighted the problem of political legitimacy for a colonial state as it
made plans to devolve political authority to elite and moderate Indian
politicians. Throughout the 1930s, officials in Bengal province demanded
that the British government make emergency legislation permanent.
The secretary of state for India and the viceroy repeatedly expressed
concerns about the political costs of this legislation on the grounds that
it was unlawful to suspend habeas corpus, a concern that was shared by
Indian politicians. As a compromise, much of this legislation remained

15
NAI, Home Political File 517/30, nos. 1 30, “Question of Undertaking Permanent
Legislation to Replace the BCLA Ordinance 1930, Enactment of the Bengal Criminal
Law Amendment Act 1930,” serial nos. 25 26.
16
APAC, L/P&J/7/410, “Legislation to Replace Special Powers Ordinance, 1932 33.”
Legislation in the file includes “Provincial Criminal Law Supplementary Act, 1933,”
“Bengal Public Security Act, 1932,” “Bombay Special (Emergency Powers) Act, 1932,”
“NWFP Tranquility Act, 1932,” Bihar and Orissa Public Safety Act, 1933,” “Punjab
Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1932,” “United Provinces Special Powers Act, 1932,”
and “Bengal Suppression of Terrorist Outrages Act, 1932.”
 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act 145

temporary, due to expire after a set period of months or years, and

restricted to the districts or areas that were considered the most proble-
matic. Yet colonial officials in Bengal pressed for compromises to get
extensions, amendments, and a substantial cluster of legislation passed
that was considered “repressive” or “special powers” legislation to deal
with the “emergency” produced by terrorism. Officials in the police and
intelligence communities felt strongly that repressive legislation was the
only way to successfully suppress radical movements, and without such
authoritarian measures, Indians could not be trusted with self-
government. Moderate Indian politicians continued to challenge this
logic, arguing that the ability to adhere to the rule of law was the founda-
tion of any legitimate government. Anticipating a continued state of
emergency became a new norm after 1930, ironically, at the moment
when the British Parliament and Government of India began to imagine
a new constitution that would allow India to gain more political autonomy
as a path to self-government.
Gandhi started the Civil Disobedience movement in March 1930, put-
ting pressure on the British Parliament to convene another set of conversa-
tions in which Indians from a range of constituencies were represented.
The three Roundtable Conferences spanned the course of two years,
beginning November 1930 and concluding December 1932. As the pro-
gress of future political reforms was debated in England, one of the impor-
tant issues was over the continued detention of those who participated in
anticolonial protest. When the Government of India Act was finally pro-
mulgated in 1935 with the goal of eventually providing India with self-rule,
there were still thousands in jail for political crimes, many of them detained
under extra-legal measures of the colonial government.
Indian and British politicians debated whether emergency and extra-
legal legislation should be repealed in contrast to those who felt it should
be permanent. At the same time, revolutionary terrorist groups openly
flouted the legislation and showed how limited the state was in its ability
to prosecute political crime. In the process, the laws became more
detailed, rather than less, and the proliferation of emergency laws was
matched by an intensification of revolutionary activity.

The Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1930

On August 21 and 22, 1930, members of the Bengal Legislative Council
met in the hill station in Darjeeling. They believed they were safer there
since Darjeeling was at least an overnight journey by train and away from
cities such as Calcutta and Dacca, which were the places that revolution-
aries and terrorists typically congregated.
146 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid

W. D. R. Prentice, secretary of the Home Department in Bengal, intro-

duced the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1930, which was
intended to supplement substantial portions of BCLA 1925 and replace
the six-month ordinance that was in force to respond to the Chittagong
Armoury Raid. The ordinance, which had been enacted a day after the raid
began, enabled police to detain those on suspicion of conspiracy and try
them under a special tribunal without the usual standards of legal evidence.
Anticipating that the threat of further terrorist acts had not abated, Prentice
and other members of the colonial administration urged the council to vote
in favor of newly revised legislation to replace the ordinance that was due to
expire on October 19. Prentice admitted that the legislation was politically
problematic, noting that “[government] recognize that legislation of this
kind is repugnant to many members of this Council . . .” and promised that
legitimate political opposition would not be suppressed by the legislation.
He acknowledged, however, that the methods had been used before and
been widely hailed as lawful by the Beachcroft–Chandavarkar report,
which had shown that most detentions were ordered by the government
on grounds of reasonable suspicion.17
The Indian appointees to the Bengal Legislative Council challenged
the law on the grounds that it violated British norms of legal jurispru-
dence, rehearsing many of the objections that had been made nearly
a decade earlier by the Repressive Laws Committee and the early sessions
of the Legislative Assembly. Several noted that the law suspended the
basic foundational rights of those who were arrested and charged with
crimes. Jatindra Nath Basu, a prominent Calcutta barrister, noted “[this
measure will] strike at the root of the liberty of the subject and the
elementary principle that accused persons should be afforded reasonable
opportunity for clearing themselves of the accusation against them.”
Naresh Chandra Sen Gupta followed this with the observation “that it
is not a law which we are asked to enact but a measure which is the
negation of law.” Munindra Deb Rai Mahasai reiterated this objection:
“The Bill will mean the negation of the rule of law which is the most
prominent feature of the modern British constitution. Every constitu-
tional principle or rule means the security given to rights of individuals
which they have under the laws of the land.” Sen Gupta noted that in
Britain, habeas corpus could not be suspended for more than a year at
a time, as had been the case in Bengal, which was proving to be unusual in
how it was treated by the British empire. He noted, “Even during the
17
NAI, Home Political File 294/2/30, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act [Printed
with Statement of Objects and Reasons] as Introduced in Council on 21 August 1930,”
extracts from abstracts of the meetings of the Bengal Legislative Council held on
August 21 22, 1930.
 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act 147

darkest days of the Irish disturbances, the Habeas Corpus Act was
suspended year to year.”18
Arguing that extraordinary laws were ineffective at suppressing terror-
ism, Sen Gupta and another council member, Narendra Kumar Basu,
pointedly noted that the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1925
had been in force on April 18 when the Chittagong Armoury Raid began.
If these laws were deemed so successful in tamping down terrorist crimes,
how had they failed so spectacularly in Chittagong?19
Indian appointees to the council attempted to limit the scope of the
legislation. They proposed a series of amendments, demanding that the
act be circulated to the public for comment, asking that the proposal be
limited to six months, or just a year or perhaps two years. A resolution
omitting the clause that linked violations of the Indian Arms Act to
detention was not passed, nor was another resolution that proposed no
one should be arrested for “being controlled” by “revolutionary
thoughts” because these terms were so imprecise.20 In spite of the resis-
tance of Indian representatives, the measure passed and the act was put
into place for five years.
Within a year, by the monsoon season of 1931, officials in Bengal
claimed that the provisions of the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment
Act were not preventing terrorist outrages and that revolutionary and
terrorist groups were targeting officials for assassination. They reintro-
duced an ordinance that had been rejected the year before on the ground
that all Indians had the right to associate with whomever they pleased.
Called the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance (or Ordinance
no. IX of 1931), this ordinance was put into force for a year and would
allow the government to detain “any person [who] is a member or is being
controlled or instigated by a member” of a group that was accused on any
of the scheduled offenses.21 The Government of Bengal argued that it

18
NAI, Home Political File 294/2/30, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act [Printed
with Statement of Objects and Reasons] as Introduced in Council on 21 August 1930,”
extracts from abstracts of the meetings of the Bengal Legislative Council held on
August 21 22, 1930.
19
NAI, Home Political File 294/2/30, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act [Printed
with Statement of Objects and Reasons] as introduced in Council on 21 August 1930,”
extracts from abstracts of the meetings of the Bengal Legislative Council held on
August 21 22, 1930.
20
NAI, Home Political File 294/2/30, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act [Printed
with Statement of Objects and Reasons] as Introduced in Council on 21 August 1930,”
extracts from abstracts of the meetings of the Bengal Legislative Council held on
August 21 22, 1930.
21
NAI, Home Political File 4/47/31, nos. 1 42, no. 2, “Note on the Insufficiency of the
Powers Conferred by the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1930, to Deal with
Terrorism in Bengal.”
148 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid

needed this preventive measure targeting those who were in contact with
known members of terrorist groups, even if they had not participated in
planning or undertaking an act of political violence. As one document
noted, the police were asking what “any person who can be shown to be
a member of a terrorist association before his activities as a member of
such association have been of a definitely criminal character specified in
section 2 (1) (i) (ii) (iii) of the Act.”22
R.E.A. Ray, Special Superintendent of Police, Intelligence Branch,
reported that from the August 1930 attempt on Tegart’s life to the recent
attempt on the life of Mr. Cassells, the Commissioner of Dacca, there had
been five assassinations of officials associated with containing the terrorist
movement. Ray, who had compiled a quick history of the movement from
police records, argued that although colonial officials had always been
targets for the revolutionary terrorists since the early decades of the
movement in the 1910s, in recent years, these attempts had been
more numerous and more successful.23 The deaths of Peddie, district
magistrate of Midnapore in April 1931 (who had been stationed in
Contai monitoring the Civil Disobedience movement) and, in July,
R. R. Garlick, who had served as the head of the tribunal that convicted
and hanged Dinesh Gupta, the man who had shot Simpson in the
Writers’ Building in December, showed that revolutionary terrorist
groups had shifted their focus from colonial buildings and sites to target
particular British officials who had actively upheld repressive laws and
suppressed the revolutionary terrorist movement.24
Although officials from the police and intelligence branches continued
to argue that special powers were needed, they had to grapple with how
unsuccessful the special powers had been, particularly in prosecuting
alleged terrorists. Even though the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment
Act allowed for a special tribunal of three judges – rather than a jury trial –
and for evidence to be presented without the defendant present, securing
convictions continued to be a challenge for the colonial government. For
instance, there had been many witnesses to the attack on James Peddie,
district magistrate of Midnapore, who had died on April 8, 1931, of six
gunshot wounds he had received as he visited a school exhibition

22
NAI, Home Political File 4/47/31, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance
(Ordinance no. IX of 1931),” serial nos. 1 42, serial no. 1, “Secret Letter from the
Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, no. 1051 PSD, 8 September 1931.”
23
WBSA, IB File 218/1930, “Assassination of Lowman,” in which it was reported that the
attack was intended for Hodson, who had authorized the beating of a medical student,
Ajit Banerjee, who died a day later.
24
APAC, L/P&J/7/91, “Assassination of Mr. James Peddie, the Late District Magistrate,
Midnapore”; WBSA, IB File 103/31, 104/31/106/31, 8 parts, “Assassination of
Mr. Peddie, ICS, 7 April 1931.”
 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act 149

surrounded by nearly 25 high school students and teachers. Police and

intelligence officials were sure that Peddie had been targeted; they found
threatening letters and postcards in his files, one that they noted had been
written by “a well-educated person,” suggesting it had been someone
from the bhadralok classes. One long letter made references to the feud-
alism and state violence that had been perpetuated by regimes before the
French, American, and Russian revolutions; it made note of Peddie’s
continued use of police repression and violence and promised that
“By shooting or by stabbing or by poisoning, you will be removed from
the face of the earth.”25
Many young men suspected of being involved in revolutionary terrorist
groups who were questioned in the murder of Peddie – the police file
suggests that nearly twenty suspects were actively investigated – but no
witnesses or informants stepped forward to identify the assailants. Local
officials noticed that there seemed “to be an undercurrent of feeling of
sympathy with the outrage.”26 Witnesses proved to be unreliable and
recanted, few members of the local bar attended Peddie’s funeral for
fear of retribution from underground groups, and the gun that shot
Peddie was never found. There was some evidence that the cell at the
Midnapore school could be tied to the Jugantar group and several men
who had attended the school had gone on to participate in the Chittagong
Armoury Raid. Yet, even with the enhanced powers given to them by the
Bengal Emergency Powers Ordinance, which allowed for more surveil-
lance in the district of Midnapore, Peddie’s killer was not captured right
away.27
Within a few weeks after Peddie’s killing, an anonymous postcard sent
from Rajputana, where the Deoli detention camp was located, promised
that “The matter will go worse, the more the Government carries on its
repressive measures. Besides, we warn the new Magistrate of Midnapore
[sic] . . . that if they go on with oppression, then they will be removed from
this world, i.e., they will have the same fate like Lowman, Simpson,
Peddie, Hodson and Saunders of Lahore.”28 By listing those who had
25
WBSA, IB File 215/31, Part V, “Letter from FW Kidd, Director, Intelligence Branch,
Midnapore, 20 April 1931 to Rai Bahadur, NN Majumdar, Special Superintendent of
Police, Intelligence Branch, Central Intelligence Department, D. O. no. 1519/C.”
26
WBSA, IB File 215/31, Part II, “Letter from FW Kidd, Director, Intelligence Branch,
Midnapore, 20 April 1931 to JC Farmer, Director and Inspector General, Intelligence
Branch, Central Intelligence Department, D. O. no. 1519/C.”
27
APAC, L/P&J/7/91, “Assassination of Mr. Peddie, the late District Magistrate,
Midnapore.” However, a later oral history with Promode Kumar Roy suggested that
Bimal Kumar Dasgupta was jailed at the Andamans in connection with the crime.
NMML, Oral History Transcripts, accession no. 854.
28
WBSA, IB File 215/31, Part III, “English Translation of an Anonymous Postcard Letter in
Bengali, Dated 23 April 1932, from Rajputana to New District Magistrate, Midnapore.”
150 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid

been assassinated across Bengal and the Punjab, this letter created
a genealogy of targeted assassinations for which underground revolution-
ary terrorist groups took credit.
Government officials panicked as acts of political violence multiplied.
State violence against all Indians (and not only those suspected of terror-
ism) went up in the early 1930s, and a large number of men who had been
detained under the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act between 1924
and 1928 were detained again from 1930 to 1938.29
The assassination of Inspector Khan Bahadur Ashanullah, who had
prosecuted the Chittagong Armoury Raiders, in August 1931 was taken
as proof to police and intelligence officials that even Indian officials who
served the government were targets.30 Riots that followed Ashanullah’s
killing were initially classified as “communal riots” by the colonial
government, who described a clash between Hindus sympathetic to the
terrorists and Muslims who took Ashanullah’s death as an assault on their
community. But this account was challenged by another independent
commission convened by a popular assembly at the Town Hall in
Calcutta that was attended by J. M. Sengupta, Nripen Banerji, and
Urmila Devi and Basanta Devi, the sister and the widow, respectively,
of the Swarajist leader, C. R. Das. Their investigation showed that the
police in Chittagong had unleashed a night of terror against Hindus,
attacking homes, stores, printing presses, and schools. Nripen Banerji,
a member of the Bengal Legislative Council, made a pointed reference to
his former students, Ananta Lal Singh and Ganesh Ghosh, who were
under suspicion by the government for their involvement in the
Chittagong Raid and noted that they should be “honoured as heroes.”31
A government investigation into police brutality, which was suppressed
from public release at the time, showed that British police supervisors had
encouraged their underlings to set fires, loot stores and buildings, and

29
From Dictionary of National Biography, edited by S. P. Sen (director, Institute of
Historical Studies in Calcutta, 1972): Ramesh Acharya (1887 1965), Lokenath Bal
(1908 1964), Ambika Chakravarty (1892 1962), Jibanlal Chatterjee (1889 1970),
Rasiklal Das (1889 1967), Purnananda Dasgupta (1900), Bhupendra Kumar Datta
(1894), Bepin Behari Ganguly (1887 1954), Surendra Mohan Ghosh (1893 1976),
Arun Chandra Guha (1892), Manoranjan Gupta (1890), Ashutosh Kali (1891 1965),
Bhupati Majumdar (1890 1973), Jnan Chandra Majumdar (1889 1970), Kiron
Chandra Mukherjee (1883 1954), Rabindra Mohan Sen (1892 1972), Kedareswar
Sen Gupta (1894 1961), and Ananta Lal Sinha (1903 1979).
30
NAI, Home Political File 4/47/31, nos. 1 42, no. 2, “Note on the Insufficiency of the
Powers Conferred by the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1930, to Deal with
Terrorism in Bengal.”
31
NAI, Home Political File 4/48/32, “Situation in Chittagong: Murder of Khan
Ashanullah,” pp. 6 13. Both were later, indeed, found complicit in the Chittagong
Armoury Raid and also honored as heroes, see Chapter 6.
 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act 151

beat youth to punish them in the days after Ashanullah’s death.

Investigators concluded that “abnormal conditions” had prevailed in
Chittagong that day and that all the officials involved had been under
unusual stress because of the threat of terrorism; one British officer had
committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. The government also
acknowledged, “It is recognized that from the point of view both of
discipline and of the political effect these excesses were wrong in them-
selves and prejudicial to Government.”32 Although the government of
Bengal made individual settlements to those who filed complaints, there
was no public acknowledgment of police brutality.
Several weeks after the death of Ashanullah and the riots that followed,
there was more state violence: on September 16, 1931, prison warders fired
indiscriminately at detainees who had been brought to the newly opened
detention camp at Hijli, which was in the district of Midnapore.33 Two
detainees were killed and twenty more were injured with bullet wounds,
burns, and bruises when sentries sounded an alarm that they had been
attacked. In the investigation led by R. Douglas, District Magistrate of
Midnapore, the government reported that detainees had been seen cele-
brating the assassination of Garlick, as well as the death of Ashanullah.
These expressions of support for the acts of terrorists resulted in a fine of
Rs. 5 from their monthly allowance, which caused further discontent.34
Just six months after the riots in the Hijli detention camp, Douglas
became the second district magistrate of Midnapore to be assassinated.
The case that prosecuted his assassin became another flashpoint for the
government. As in the other cases involving assassination, the case was
tried by a special tribunal of three judges against P. K. Bhattacharya, and
there was a unanimous finding of guilt, although one judge felt the death
sentence was not warranted. This judge, Jnanankur De, District and
Sessions Judge of Burdwan District, argued that the sentence of death
was too harsh because the evidence suggested that Bhattacharya had not
fired the fatal shots.35 Douglas had died of seven gunshot wounds, but
Bhattacharya’s gun had gotten stuck and all six bullets remained in the

32
APAC, L/P&J/7/220, “Chittagong: Disturbances Following Murder of Inspector
Ashanulla in August 1931”; see also NAI, Home Political File 4/49 & KW, “Report on
Chittagong Disturbances,” serial 12, “Letter from the Chief Secretary, Home
Department, New Delhi, to the Government of Bengal, no. 938 PS, Dated
23 January 1932.”
33
WBSA, Home Political File 673C/30 (33), “Hijli Camp Establish Staff For.”
34
APAC, L/P&J/7/205, “Shooting at Hijli Detention Camp and Report of Committee of
Enquiry”; WBSA, Home Political File 765/31, “Hijli Camp Report Detailing Events
from September 16, 1931, 9:15 to 9:30 p.m.”
35
APAC, L/P&J/7/362, “Murder of Mr. R. Douglas, ICS, District Magistrate and
Collector of Midnapore,” pp. 68 78, dissent issued by Jnanankur De.
152 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid

revolver. Moreover, Bhattacharya’s revolver’s bullets were .450 bore,

while the bullets that had killed Douglas were .380 bore. It was widely
acknowledged that another man had gotten away and that it was likely
that he was the shooter. Bhattacharya’s defenders noted that he was not
yet 21 and had he been tried in England, he would not have gotten the
death sentence. Bhattacharya’s widowed mother initiated a campaign of
petitions that she sent to various officials from the governor of Bengal to
the secretary of state for India, noting that her son had been a boy scout
and they were both “loyal subjects of the king.”36 In spite of these pro-
tests, Bhattacharya’s guilt was established by evidence of having “revolu-
tionary thoughts”: he reportedly had a piece of paper in his pocket when
he was arrested that was translated from Bengali into English as, “Hijli’s
torture was a travesty; Let these deaths avenge those here; Let India wake
up by our sacrifices; Hail to the motherland.”37
Within the charged context of the Hijli riots, the debate about renewing
and enacting a new ordinance to enhance the existing legislation began a
week later. It was met with some of the same objections that had been
voiced in the past by Indian officials, but it was eventually adopted on
October 29, 1931, to expire six months later, in late April 1932. To face the
recurring objections to the growing body of ordinances, colonial officials
predicted that by the end of 1932, the administration would be able to
“stamp out terrorist crime” and that ordinances would no longer be
necessary.38 However, by mid-February 1932 – shaken by even more
attacks over the mild winter season – colonial officials again returned to
the Bengal Legislative Council to argue that this ordinance was not enough.
On December 14, 1931, two high-school age women, Shanti Ghosh
and Suniti Choudhury, assassinated the district magistrate of Tippera,
C.G.B. Stevens. On the pretense of gaining support for a swimming
competition, the women had asked to see Stevens in his office.
When they got there, they shot at him at point-blank range and he
died shortly after. They were both charged with murder and tried by
a special tribunal convened under the BCLA.39 Then, just six weeks
later, on February 6, 1932, Bina Das, an 18-year-old college student,

36
APAC, L/P&J/7/362, “Murder of Mr. R. Douglas, ICS, District Magistrate and
Collector of Midnapore,” pp. 13 28, P&J 6026/32, Privy Council appeal,
Bhattacharjee versus Emperor, dated January 3, 1933.
37
APAC, L/P&J/7/362, “Murder of Mr. R. Douglas, ICS, District Magistrate and
Collector of Midnapore,” pp. 40 68, Special Tribunal convened under subsections
1 2 of section 4, BCLA.
38
NAI, Home Political File 4/47/31, no. 1, “Secret Letter from the Chief Secretary of
Bengal to the Government of Bengal, no. 1051 PSD,” dated September 8, 1931.
39
WBSA, IB File 850/31, “Assassination of CGB Stevens, ICS, District Magistrate,
Tippera, 14 December 1931.”
 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act 153

Figure 4.2 Convocation Hall where Stanley Jackson was shot, with
permission from Centre of South Asian Studies archive, Cambridge,
Tegart Collection

smuggled a gun into the University of Calcutta convocation and shot at

the Governor of Bengal, Stanley Jackson. The choice of shooting at
Jackson was ironic because he had been so instrumental in releasing
many of the detainees in the late 1920s. He managed to dodge the bullet
by ducking, a skill that was attributed to his university career as a cricket
captain for Cambridge. Jackson was quickly spirited away by the Vice
Chancellor H. S. Suhrawardy, who had come between Jackson and Das.
Das was arrested and charged with attempted murder and quickly tried
under a special tribunal; a search of her college rooms turned up a flyer
of Shanti and Suniti’s photographs that celebrated their assassination of
Stevens just a month before. In addition, she had photographs of Jatin
Das, the deceased hunger striker in the Lahore Conspiracy Case and
Terence Macswiney, the Irish nationalist.40 Her idiosyncratic collection
of photographs suggest how varied were the inspiration for revolutionary
leanings.
40
For an account of Bina Das’ other inspirations and rationale, see Durba Ghosh,
“Revolutionary Women, Nationalist Narratives: How History Makes Women
Well behaved,” Gender and History 25.2 (August 2013): 355 75.
154 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid

Figure 4.3 Shanti and Suniti flyer, with permission from Centre of South
Asian Studies archive, Cambridge, Tegart Collection

There were other attacks that caused serious damage. After an assassi-
nation attempt, L. G. Durno, District Magistrate of Dacca, lost sight in
one eye and a bullet was lodged in this mouth when he was shot sitting in
his car in late October 1931. He survived the attack, but was unable to
work and was sent back to England with a pension. Although 40 members
of the Anushilan Revolted Group and Sree Sangha were arrested, no one
was charged.41 In January 1932, a bomb was thrown into the railway car
of H. Quinton, District Magistrate of Howrah, but it failed to go off.42
In August 1932, C. C. G. Grassby, an additional superintendent of the
Indian Police in Dacca, was shot while in his car and emerged unharmed;
Babu K. Prasad Sen, who worked as a police inspector under Grassby,
was not so fortunate, and was assassinated in a private home in
June 1932.43 The very next month, in September 1932, the European
club at Pahartali was attacked by a group of revolutionary terrorists who
were followers of Surja Sen, the leader of the Chittagong Armoury Raid.
It was a surprise for intelligence officials because the club was not being

41
APAC, L/P&J/7/243, “Attack on Mr. L.G. Durno, ICS, District Magistrate, Dacca.”
42
APAC, L/P&J/7/321, “Attempt on the Life of Mr. H. Quinton, ICS, District Magistrate
of Howrah.”
43
APAC, L/P&J/7/390, “Bengal Terrorism: Attempted Murder of Mr. C. G. Grassby, IPS,
and Murder of Babu K. Prasad Sen.”
 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act 155

monitored by police. One intelligence official noted that “no one thought
that attacks would be made on assemblies of Europeans which were not
likely to contain prominent officials or political leaders.”44 The attack was
led by a woman, Pritilata Waddedar, who had dressed as a man; when she
was shot by police, and it became clear she would die, she swallowed
a cyanide pill and committed suicide. In her shirt pocket when she died
was a leaflet that read, “I earnestly hope that our sisters would no longer
nurse the view that they are weak.”45
Ironically, Priti Waddedar had been interviewed by the police
in June 1932, several months before the Pahartali attack, in connection
with Babu K. Prasad Sen’s death in Dacca. She had identified herself to
the police as the daughter of Babu Jagabandhu Waddadar of Dhalghat,
who worked in the Chittagong town municipality. She had graduated
from Bethune College in Calcutta, and was working as head mistress of
Nandankanan Girls’ School in Chittagong and doing some private tutor-
ing. She admitted to knowing Lila Nag, who was known to police as the
organizer of Dipali Samiti, a girls’ group that trained young women in the
martial arts, but she claimed not to know any women revolutionaries,
including Bina Das, with whom she had attended Bethune College, or
Kalpana Dutta, who had been jailed with her. She did, however, admit to
police that two of her first cousins, Ardhendu and Sukhendu Dastidar,
had been involved in the Chittagong Armoury Raid case and another two
were under detention in British jails.46
The series of targeted attacks sent shock waves through the colonial
administration and there was a growing sense that stronger leadership and
legislation was required. Attacks by armed women, particularly those who
were educated and elite, represented a new shift in the strategy of the
movement. As one official noted, it was difficult to arrest women revolu-
tionary terrorists because their fathers, uncles, and brothers – often
respectable employees of the government – helped them to evade
arrest.47 Ironically, much as the “gentlemanly” nature of the bhadralok
dacoits vexed colonial officials in the 1900s and 1910s, in the 1930s, the
idea of university-educated women joining underground secret societies

44
NAI, Home Political File 4/38/32, “Question whether Sentences of Imprisonment and
Transportation of Life Pass in Case of Territories Comes in Bengal,” pp. 1 6, report
submitted September 28, 1932.
45
Quoted from Chittagong Uprising Golden Jubilee Souvenir (1980 1981), pp. 69 71, in
Sandip Bandyopadhyay, “Women in the Bengal Revolutionary Movement (1902 1935),”
Manushi 65 (July August 1991): 30 35.
46
WBSA, IB File 115/32, “Priti Waddedar.”
47
APAC, L/P&J/7/242, “Terrorism in Bengal, Measures to Suppress,” P&J 754/
1933, Minute paper from R. Peel.
156 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid

puzzled officials who had believed that a university education would lead
women toward liberal politics.48
Soon after the assassination attempt, Stanley Jackson returned to
Britain and was replaced in March 1932 as governor of Bengal by John
Anderson, a British civil servant who had established the British admin-
istration in northern Ireland after Ireland’s partition in 1922. Anderson
was seen by the government to be a figure who would be more forceful
at suppressing terrorism. Ordinance IX was due to expire and
W. D. R. Prentice, Secretary of the Home Department in Bengal, argued
that the government needed “fresh powers.” In his presentation to the
Bengal Legislative Council – the same group of men he had met with
about 18 months earlier in Darjeeling to discuss emergency legislation –
Prentice argued that the ordinance needed to be modified in two ways.
First, local police officers, rather than only those in the Intelligence
Branch, should be authorized to perform searches on suspicion of terror-
ism and second, the government should have the right to modify the
allowances of detainees if they had other sources of income.
Indian appointees to the Bengal council and later, the Legislative
Assembly, again attempted to thwart the passage of the ordinance.
As they had argued before, Narendra Kumar Basu and others noted
that the existence of ordinances seemed to have been ineffective at sup-
pressing terrorism. They called for the bill to be circulated for public
consideration, as they had 18 months before. When this request was
rejected, Munindra Deb Rai Mahasai noted dryly, “These are the ways
of autocrats and not of constitutional governments.” He criticized the
government’s authoritarianism, noting that the public had gotten accus-
tomed to what he called “rule by Ordinances, which are now as plentiful
as blackberries.” He wondered why the government even bothered to ask
elected and appointed Indian officials to cooperate: “why this mock show
of Constitutionalism?”49
Other Indian officials noted that repressive laws were doing the oppo-
site of what was intended; rather than suppressing terrorism, they seemed
to be providing motivation for new recruits, including women. Mahasai
and P. Banerji noted that Bina Das’ confession referred directly to the
ways that ordinances and government repression had inspired her.
Particular note was made in the Legislative Assembly of Bina’s recitation
of recent history:

48
Tirtha Mandal, The Women Revolutionaries of Bengal, 1905 1939 (Calcutta: Minerva,
1991), pp. 27 33.
49
NAI, Home Political File 4/33, “Legislative Department Proceedings Re: BCLA 1932”;
APAC, L/P&J/7/6, “The Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act 1932,” p. 15.
 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act 157

All the ordinances, all measures to put down the noble aspiration for freedom in
my countrymen, came as a challenge to our national manhood and as indignities
hurled at it. This hardened even the tender feminine nature like mine into one of
heroic mould . . . The series of ordinances, savouring of martial law, to my mind,
showed nothing but a spirit of vindictiveness and were only measures to crush
down all aspirations of freedom. The outrages perpetrated in the name of the
Government at Midnapore, Hijli and Chittagong, which is my own district
although I have never seen it, the refusal to publish the official enquiry report
were things I could never drive away from my mind. The outrages on Amba Dassi
of Contai and Niharbala of Chittagong literally upset my whole being.50

The text of Bina Das’ confession had proved to be popular among Indians
because she drew attention to discontent over repressive laws. Restating her
motivation for gaining attention by attempting to kill the governor of Bengal,
Satyen Chandra Mitra noted, “The high ideal of full Dominion Status as the
immediate objective of the Government is a better remedy than all repressive
and inhuman measures.”51 Bina Das’ statement was deemed so dangerous
that it had already been banned from circulation by the government.
W. D. R. Prentice noted sternly that it was illegal to mention the statement
in public debate.52 Nonetheless, Amar Nath Dutta, who represented the
Hindu and rural populations of Burdwan division, put great stock in Bina
Das’ social standing: “This is not the statement of a demagogue, but that of
a girl brought up in the best traditions of a Hindu household, educated in
one of the finest institutions in Calcutta.”53
Satish Chandra Ray Chowdhury reminded the government that when
terrorist crimes had been thwarted or prevented, it was often at the hands
of ordinary citizens who were politically moderate and not “your fat-
salaried police officials or your innumerable constables.” Drawing atten-
tion to the role of Suhrawardy, the vice chancellor who had stepped
between Bina Das and Stanley Jackson to keep Jackson from harm, Ray
Chowdhury reminded the chamber that the enhanced powers of the
police had done little in this situation.54

50
APAC, L/P&J/7/332, “Sir Stanley Jackson, Governor of Bengal: Attempted
Assassination and Conviction of Assailant,” which includes P&J 1462/32, which details
the Special Tribunal’s proceedings.
51
Indian Legislative Assembly Debates March 14, 1932 April 6, 1932, Third Session,
Fourth Legislative Assembly; volume III, March 30, 1932, p. 2691.
52
APAC, L/P&J/7/6, “The Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act 1932,” pp. 12 42;
“Extract from the Abstracts of the Proceedings of the Meetings of the Bengal
Legislative Council, Held on the 23rd and 24th February 1932,” pp. 15 16; see also
NAI, Home Political File 4/33, “Legislative Department Proceedings Re: BCLA 1932.”
53
Indian Legislative Assembly Debates March 14, 1932 April 6, 1932, Third Session,
Fourth Legislative Assembly; volume III, March 30, 1932, pp. 2703 08.
54
APAC, L/P&J/7/6, “Extract from the Abstracts of the Proceedings of the Meetings of the
Bengal Legislative Council, Held on the 23rd and 24th February 1932,” pp. 16 17.
158 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid

Nearly all of the Indian politicians in the Legislative Council stated

unequivocally that they were opposed to terrorism, and that repressive
legislation was not the solution to ending it. Ray Chowdhury drew from
the histories of terrorism elsewhere, noting that in Germany, Russia, and
Ireland, the introduction of democracy had ended decades of political
violence. Maulvi Hassan Ali perhaps said it most succinctly: “Terrorism
is lawless. But special laws and ordinances are also lawless.”55
In spite of the continued opposition by Indian politicians, the Bengal
Criminal Law Ordinance was renewed for another year with the new
provisions, largely with the support of those appointed by the British
civil service. If these discussions in the Bengal Legislative Council and
the Indian Legislative Assembly were intended to show that the objec-
tionable legislation had been subjected to political debate and had elicited
agreement, they failed to convince even those who were watching these
debates from afar in Britain, who remained reluctant to approve of
repressive legislation.
Shortly after this ordinance passed, Carl Heath, of the Society of
Friends, wrote to the prime minister, Ramsay Macdonald of the Labour
Party, that he had noticed that his many moderate Indian friends were
dismayed with the government’s approach toward the detainees and
those convicted of involvement in civil disobedience. “What is troubling
us profoundly is the growing and deep alienation of the moderate men,
which for obvious reasons will not be very openly expressed to govern-
ment officials . . ..”56 In stamping out terrorism, the government seemed
to be driving the politics of Indian nationalism to extremes. Heath, who
had been lobbying to end the passage of ordinances, repeatedly reminded
members of Parliament in Britain that “We recognize that it is the highest
desire of His Majesty’s Government to bring into collaboration with it all
the best and most sober elements in Indian public life, and if the
Ordinance does not have this effect, but, on the contrary, will have the
effect of alienation of Indian public sympathy . . ..”57
Heath echoed the hopes that secretary of state for India, Edwin
Montagu, had expressed in 1920, when he said he believed that Indians
would achieve responsible government and had authorized the amnesty of
revolutionaries and terrorists. Just over a decade later, in August 1931,
55
APAC, L/P&J/7/6, Extract from the Abstracts of the Proceedings of the Meetings of the
Bengal Legislative Council, Held on the 23rd and 24th February 1932,” p. 18.
56
APAC, L/PO/6/65, “Lahore Conspiracy Case; Deoli Detention Center; Notes on
Terrorism,” pp. 228 31, “Letter from Carl Heath, Society of Friends, Euston Road,
London, to Ramsay MacDonald, Dated 8 April 1932.” See also APAC, L/PO/6/75,
“Bengal Ordinances; Terrorism in Bengal.”
57
APAC, L/PO/6/75, “Bengal Ordinances; Terrorism in Bengal,” Letter from Carl Heath,
dated December 22, 1931, pp. 7 12.
 Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act 159

Conservative M.P. Samuel Hoare, who was appointed secretary of state for
India under a coalition government, found himself in a similar predica-
ment. Occupied with evaluating the success of the Montagu–Chelmsford
reforms, he was overseeing the process of developing further constitutional
reforms for India through the Roundtable Conferences, reforms that would
become the basis for the Government of India Act of 1935.58 Nonetheless,
in 1931 and 1932, Hoare reluctantly authorized a series of repressive
legislation; like his predecessors, he insisted that all legislation be put
through a legislative process of debate and agreement. Although the pas-
sage of repressive legislation was framed by the government as restraining
those who were imagined as “bad” political actors because they were
members of anarchist or terrorist groups, British officials in Britain and
Indian liberals argued that the “good” nationalism of moderate and liberal
Indian elites should not be suppressed by the colonial government.
In order to restrain what was seen as a proliferation of ordinances,
Hoare approved Ordinance IX of 1932, but warned that he would
not agree to renew it a third time. Through the viceroy’s office, he
asked that repressive legislation in the form of legislative acts be
passed by the Legislative Assembly, with the full deliberation of Indian
representatives.59 Shortly thereafter, a series of legislative acts was passed
in spite of negative votes from Indian representatives. These acts added
more authority to police and intelligence officials and authorized search
and seizure on a scale that exceeded any previous legislation. Each mea-
sure was seen as a corrective to fix gaps in the previous measures, intended
to supplement laws which were deemed “insufficient” for containing the
threat that terrorism posed. In 1932 alone, the Bengal Legislative Council
passed the Bengal Emergency Powers Ordinance, two amendments to
those ordinances, the Bengal Criminal Law (Arms and Explosives) Act,
the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act (amending the 1930 Act), the
Bengal Criminal Law Amendment (Supplementary) Act, the Bengal
Public Security Act, and the Bengal Suppression of Terrorist Outrages.60
The proliferation of these acts in the 1930s targeted particular kinds of
behavior and particular groups identified as “bhadralok youth,” those

58
J. A. Cross, Sir Samuel Hoare: A Political Biography (London: Jonathan Cape,
1977), ch. 4.
59
NAI, Home Political File 13/27/1932, serial nos. 1 31, no. 1, “Letter from Government
of Bengal, no. 4658 P, Dated 14 July 1932 [in Response to Home Department].”
60
APAC, L/PO/6/75; see also APAC, L/P&J/7/410, “Legislation to Replace Special Powers
ordinance,” which includes the following legislation: Bengal Public Security Act (1932);
Bombay Special (Emergency Powers) Act, 1932; NWFP Tranquility (Additional
Powers) Act, 1932; Bihar and Orissa Public Safety Act, 1933; Punjab Criminal Law
Amendment Act, 1932; United Special Powers Act, 1932; and Bengal Suppression of
Terrorist Outrages Act, 1932.
160 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid

who identified as Hindu, were predominantly Brahmin and Kayasth, and

likely enrolled in institutions of higher learning. The British government
rationalized these measures as a response to the state of emergency their
government faced and argued that containing terrorism would allow
liberal governance to thrive. Yet, as Indian politicians noted, if and
when Indians were to be granted the opportunity to govern themselves,
perhaps terrorism against the state would end. As the second Roundtable
Conference to discuss future constitutional changes was wrapping up in
London, B. C. Chatterjee drew attention to the paradox of enlisting the
cooperation of Indian elites in a council chamber in Calcutta to authorize
the executive’s right to repress at a moment of democratization,
. . . the Government does not realize that since it is going to introduce popular
Government in the country, it should do so at once, instead of merely waiting, and
going on with this painful process of legislation of a kind which is anti British, and
which, I know, in their heart of hearts Mr. Reid and his colleagues cannot possibly
like. I understand we are going to have full provincial autonomy within a measurable
distance of time within a year or so. If that is so if you are going to give us full
provincial autonomy in a year or so, if you are going to transfer the portfolio of law and
order under the control of a popular Minister, why not do it now? . . . Why not first see
whether the introduction of democratic Government in the most vital part of the
sphere of Government, namely, the maintenance of public security, is not going to
bring about a change in the mentality of these young men? If it does, you should go
on with the programme of political advancement. [emphasis added.]61

Chatterjee directed the government to consider whether the costs of

enacting repressive laws were worth damaging the emergence of self-
government on which India’s “political advancement” depended.
The government’s response was to create more detailed provisions in
repressive laws, thus making emergency laws appear legitimate, even as
Indian politicians argued that emergency laws were unlawful.

Suspicious Behavior: Riding Bicycles and Dressing like

a Muslim
The Bengal Suppression of Terrorist Outrages Act replaced or modified
several of the ordinances that had come before, namely the Bengal
Emergency Powers Ordinance and the Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment acts. Two of these measures, the Bengal Suppression of
Terrorist Outrages Act and the Emergency Powers Ordinance, were
designed with districts such as Chittagong and Midnapore in mind.
61
APAC, L/P&J/7/395, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1925, an Amendment,”
“Extract of Proceedings of a Meeting of the Bengal Legislative Council, Held
1 September 1932,” p. 5.
 Suspicious Behavior 161

In Chittagong, many of those involved in the raid had evaded arrest; in

Midnapore, the prison riot in Hijli and the unrest in Contai had resulted in
the assassinations of three district magistrates. The Bengal Suppression of
Terrorism act allowed the police authorities to “detain and question per-
sons behaving suspiciously.” In the service of preventing crimes that had
been identified as seditious or terrorist, the act compelled local populations
to support the police, thus giving the right of police and intelligence officers
to “take possession of immovable property,” regulate traffic and transpor-
tation, commandeer arms and ammunition from local citizens, and require
the assistance of local officials. The Emergency Powers Ordinances author-
ized arrests without warrant and instructed military and police officers
above the rank of sub-inspector to “use any means that may be necessary”
to apprehend absconders and suspected terrorists.62 By expanding who
could enforce the laws put into place against terrorism – police inspectors
and sub-inspectors from a range of districts could be called on to arrest or
detain those outside their own regions – police officers were given addi-
tional jurisdiction beyond their own districts.63
Most of the clauses investing further powers in the government applied
to all of Bengal, but Chittagong and Midnapore were occupied by the
military. The two acts allowed the government to step up its military
presence and enable officers from a range of civil bureaucracies to prior-
itize fighting terrorism over other aspects of civil and social order.
The establishment of “Chitforce” coordinated the responsibilities of the
district magistrate, the local police, and the Intelligence Branch to culti-
vate local informers, study revolutionary literature, and keep information
flowing between the different branches of government. Under the gui-
dance of police commissioners, the Intelligence Branch held a training
session for local police to educate them about how terrorist groups
worked and how to collect information about them.64
Chittagong was subjected to military occupation from November 30,
1931, through 1933, roughly the period during which the Roundtable
Conferences were going on in London. While the military carried out
training exercises, marching through town and parading in public, the

62
APAC, L/P&J/7/242, “Terrorism in Bengal, Measures to Suppress,” P&J 3539/32 and
P&J 3173/32, “Official Publication of the Bengal Emergency Powers Ordinance in the
Calcutta Gazette.”
63
NAI, Home Political File 13/27/1932, serial no. 2, “Letter from Government of Bengal,
no. 4658 P, Dated 14 July 1932 [in Response to Home Department]”; APAC, L/P&J/7/
242, “Terrorism in Bengal, Measures to Suppress, Promulgation of Bengal Emergency
Powers Ordinance, 1931 32,” see especially P&J 494/193; APAC, L/P&J/7/399, “Bengal
Suppression of Terrorist Outrages Act, 1932,” pp. 163 64.
64
WBSA, IB File 1576A/32, “Methods to be Adopted in Combatting the Terrorist
Movement in Bengal.”
162 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid

Figure 4.4 Tombs of Europeans killed at the Chittagong Armoury Raid,

with permission from Centre of South Asian Studies archive,
Cambridge, Tegart Collection

police carried out searches, yielding little information and certainly no

one who had escaped arrest from the armoury raid.65 In October 1932
alone, over a hundred searches were carried out, 88 of them by the
military and 34 by the police with little new information.66 The Bengal
Emergency Powers Ordinances (to which there were two amendments in
1932 alone) allowed the government to use the military to enforce civil
order. In May 1932, the Governor of Bengal asked that the ordinance be
renewed for another year because those who had escaped capture for their
involvement in the Chittagong Armoury Raid had not yet been captured
and brought to trial. The graffiti that read “Long Live Revolution” at
the graves of Europeans who had died in the raid suggested to law
enforcement that the local population was supportive of the revolutionary
terrorist project. The presence of Gurkha forces from Nepal in the area of
Chittagong – quartered near the center of town and parading through
65
NAI, Home Political File 13/32, “Reports on the Operation of the Bengal Emergency
Ordinance in the District of Chittagong.”
66
APAC, L/P&J/7/242, “Terrorism in Bengal, Measures to Suppress,” P&J 5767/32,
“Report on Bengal Emergence Powers Ordinance, October 1932.”
 Suspicious Behavior 163

Figure 4.5 Tombs of Europeans killed at the Chittagong Armoury Raid,

with permission from Centre of South Asian Studies archive,
Cambridge, Tegart Collection

the town’s roads at regular intervals – showed the local population that
the “Government meant business and would not let go until their objec-
tive had been attained.”67 Without ever naming these provisions as
martial law, the Bengal Emergency Powers Ordinance allowed the
British military to be invested with the power to arrest and search without
a warrant.
67
NAI, Home Political File 13/9/I, “Bengal Emergency Powers Ordinances, 1932” [with
amendment ordinances].
164 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid

Rules that were enforced in Midnapore and Chittagong allowed the

respective district magistrates to enforce a curfew of any individuals,
households, or estates that were suspected of involvement in terrorism.
Orders could be issued to restrict traffic in particular areas, so that
“absconders and terrorists” could not travel freely. The measures were
directed toward a particular population: as the district magistrate noted in
a report, “young Hindus, between the ages of 12 and 25 or 30 reading in
government schools and colleges” were put under curfew between sunset
and sunrise, forbidden the use of bicycles, and required to carry identifi-
cation cards.68 These ID cards were to be issued in red, blue, and white,
denoting the level of suspicion that the police had identified each subject
with; over 1000 ID cards were made and distributed through schools,
although police officials acknowledged that students regularly claimed to
have lost their cards when they were stopped by the police.
The legislation singled out techniques used by revolutionary terrorists
to elude arrest: the final clause of the Bengal Suppression of Terrorist
Outrages Act read: “No person shall wear the garb of any community or
sex other than his own, unless he habitually does so in the normal course
of his profession or occupation.”69 If this seemed an intimate prohibition,
the restriction was designed by colonial officials to respond to numerous
arrests or failed arrests where Hindu high-caste men evaded police detec-
tion by dressing as Muslim women, often in full hijab, or the escape of
Hindu high-caste women dressed as men. Nirmal Sen, an “absconder” in
the Chittagong Armoury Raid case, was dressed as a Muslim when he was
killed by police.70 Two college-educated upper-caste women, Kalpana
Dutta and Pritilata Waddedar, were taken into police custody wearing
men’s clothes, occasioning a headline in the Times of India that read
“Arrest of Notorious Woman Who Was Absconding in Male Attire.”71
Members of the police forces expressed the view that these provisions
were relatively uncontroversial, “The order prohibiting the use of bicycles
without a permit . . . has been extended for another two months.”72

68
APAC, L/P&J/7/242, “Terrorism in Bengal, Measures to Suppress,” P&J 1867/1933,
“Report by the District Magistrate of Chittagong on the Operations against Absconders,
9 March 1932 to 31 March 1933,” pp. 15 17.
69
NAI, Home Political File 45/11/33, “Rules Published under the Bengal Suppression of
Terrorist Outrages Act, 1932, for Use in Midnapore District.”
70
APAC, L/P&J/7/242, “Terrorism in Bengal, Measures to Suppress,” P&J 1867/1933,
“Report by the District Magistrate of Chittagong on the Operations against Absconders,
9 March 1932 to 31 March 1933,” p. 18.
71
Times of India, May 20, 1933, p. 13.
72
NAI, Home Political File 13/32, “Reports on the Operation of the Bengal Emergency
Ordinance in the District of Chittagong.”
 Suspicious Behavior 165

Nonetheless, the issue of banning bicycles was raised in Parliament when

a Labour member of the British Parliament asked Samuel Hoare, the
secretary of state for India, “why, in addition to a curfew, the riding of
the ordinary bicycle has been forbidden in Chittagong?” To which the
response was, “Both the curfew order and the order prohibiting the use of
bicycles apply to youths of the Hindu Bhadralok class only” because this
was the “class” from which terrorists were drawn and there was evidence
that bicycles were being used in transporting terrorists.73
The enhanced powers given to the government through this range of
legislation was intended to expand their ability to arrest and detain suspects
by expanding who could do the arresting; yet, the goal of demonstrating
that suspects were involved in a conspiracy that had yet to be carried out
proved difficult. Even under the expanded judicial authority given to the
government, special tribunals were not meting out verdicts or sentences
that were entirely satisfactory to the government.
The Bengal government expressed its collective dismay that after two
years, they had failed to secure death sentences for many of the key leaders
of the Chittagong Armoury Raid. R. Peel, secretary of Bengal’s home
department, wrote to his counterpart in Delhi that the relatively light
sentences given by the three-person tribunals could be “claimed by the
terrorists as a signal victory for terrorism over the legal machinery of the
Crown.”74 As a result, one of the failed requests made by the Government
of Bengal was that the government be allowed to appeal acquittals or
inadequate sentences to a higher court. Bengal officials argued that some
of the special commissioners had not fully understood the threat that the
suspect posed.75 The Government of India noted that there would be too
many objections to giving the government the right to appeal acquittals –
unusual in any system of law – and “that they are not prepared to under-
take the legislation proposed.”76 To drive home its strong legal objection,
the Secretary of the Home Department in Delhi wrote, “the accused has
already been placed at a certain disadvantage by being deprived of
a preliminary enquiry before a Magistrate, and also of the privilege of

73
APAC, L/P&J/7/242, “Terrorism in Bengal, Measures to Suppress,” P&J 5316/32,
dated November 7, 1932, House of Commons question by MP David Grenfell;
Grenfell represented a Labour district in Wales.
74
NAI, Home Political File 7/8/32, “Comments by the Secretary of State Re: Judgment of
Special Tribunal in the Chittagong Armoury Raid.”
75
APAC, L/P&J/7/406, “Proposal to Amend the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment
(Supplementary) Act 1925,” P&J 3797/32, “Proposals of the Government of Bengal
for the Amendment of BCLA (Supplementary) Act.”
76
NAI, Home Political File 4/39, “Proposed Amendment of the Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment (Supplementary) Act, 1925,” “Letter to the Secretary of the Government of
Bengal, Political Department,” no. D 5300/32, dated July 21, 1932.
166 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid

trial by jury, while the Courts of Special Commissioners consist of per-

sons specially selected by the Local Government for each case.”77 Much
to the consternation of officials in Bengal, the Government of India
allowed defendants who had been convicted to appeal if their sentences
were more than 2 years of imprisonment or transportation.78
The back and forth debate continued between officials at the different
levels of the government about other extraordinary measures. In
September 1932, officials in Bengal made another request that a different
supplement to the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act be passed,
again to “remove certain defects in the existing Act.” Even more con-
troversial than asking the government be granted the right to appeal an
acquittal, Bengal officials proposed special tribunals be allowed to pass
a death sentence for attempted murder, if it could be shown that the
attempt was politically motivated. This measure failed to pass.
The measure that did pass was a provision that the government convene
a new tribunal for each defendant and continue to hold in camera proceed-
ings in which the defendant was not required to be present. Several of the
leaders of the Chittagong Armoury Raid were still at large and the govern-
ment’s prosecutions had stalled over the question of whether one could be
tried for conspiracy when other conspirators had not been arrested.
The government argued that convening separate tribunals would be expe-
dient in gaining convictions and sentences. Finally, the act guaranteed
anonymity to the members of the tribunal by making them secret on the
grounds that they could then not be targeted. Robert Reid, the deputy home
secretary of Bengal, used the evidence of colonial “experience” to argue that
these measures were necessary. C.E.S. Fairweather, deputy Inspector-
General of the Intelligence Branch, noted that all tribunals should be held
in camera and that the proceedings of tribunals should not be published. His
rationale was that “Terrorists work in secret. There is every justification
therefore for dealing with them also in secret.”79 Opponents to these
measures noted that by convening different tribunals to try cases in the
same conspiracy, the government gained the chance to refine their legal
strategy as they presented the evidence against a new group of defendants.80

77
APAC, L/P&J/7/406, “Proposal to Amend the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment
(Supplementary) Act 1925,” P&J 3797/32, “Proposals of the Government of Bengal
for the Amendment of BCLA (Supplementary) Act.”
78
APAC, L/P&J/7/428, “Bengal Suppression of Terrorist Outrages (Supplementary Act),
1932.”
79
WBSA, IB File 1231/33, “Views of C. E. S. Fairweather as to the Necessity of a More
Effective Attack against Terrorism.”
80
APAC, L/P&J/7/395, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1925, an Amendment,”
“Extract of Proceedings of a Meeting of the Bengal Legislative Council, Held
1 September 1932,” pp. 7 8.
 Suspicious Behavior 167

Indian politicians on the Legislative Council protested the frequency

with which the government requested more executive authority, particu-
larly by enacting legislation and ordinances to suppress terrorism by
suspending the rules of legal procedure. Narendra Kumar Basu expressed
some exasperation at the government’s request:
This amending Bill is a Bill to amend the Act of 1930 which was in continuation of
an Act of 1925. So for the last seven years we have been giving chances after
chances to the executive to try by their methods to suppress terrorism . . . These
emergency measures, according to the Government of India Act, have operation
for only six months; why? Because it was thought by the framers, i.e., the British
Parliament, that a state of emergency is merely a temporary one.81
In spite of the rise in assassinations against colonial officials, Indian
politicians remained resolute in their opposition to repressive legislation.
Again, they relied on their understanding of rule of law and its centrality to
a liberal government that was committed to democratic citizenship. Shanti
Shekhareswar Ray observed that a death sentence for attempted murder
would render Bengal’s sentences different from those in other provinces.
Naresh Chandra Sen Gupta noted the act would enable the government
“to have a trial without the essentials of a trial. There is no sense in having
the ceremony of a trial, if the trial is not for the purpose of ascertaining the
truth and doing justice to the accused in such a manner that the accused
shall know that justice has been done.”82 Sen Gupta described the current
procedures as “paraphernalia,” noting that for a trial to be an effective
performance of the government’s authority, it had to conform to the rule of
law. In legal terms, to treat “terrorists” as subjects without liberties and
rights before they appeared in court was to make a judgment that had not
been proven in court. As B.C. Chatterjee, another prominent barrister
noted, “You cannot have courts of law administering justice and outlawing
the accused appearing before them at the same time.”
These testy exchanges were topped by Munindra Deb Rai Mahasai, who
seemed be losing patience with British officials who attempted to push
repressive legislation through the Legislative Council. He thundered, “You
are at liberty to govern the country by as many ordinances as you like, but
pray do not make us a party to the perpetuation of blunders which you are
bent on committing.” He reiterated his objections from before – that these
measures were a violation of British law and deprived Indian subjects of the
81
APAC, L/P&J/7/395, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1925, an Amendment,”
“Extract of Proceedings of a Meeting of the Bengal Legislative Council, Held
1 September 1932,” pp. 7 8.
82
APAC, L/P&J/7/395, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1925, an Amendment,”
“Extract of Proceedings of a Meeting of the Bengal Legislative Council, Held
1 September 1932,” p. 29.
168 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid

freedoms they were due – and turned the discussion to the whether the
government’s violence against Indians would be a concern of the law: “May
I ask, Sir, has this principle been followed in the case of the licensed
murderers of Hijli, the licensed hooligans of Chittagong who ruthlessly
plundered and destroyed the hearth and homes of the innocent inhabitants
of that unfortunate locality?”83
Members of the Bengal Legislative Council were considered politically
moderate; because of their own business interests in Bengal, they were
considered a group that was largely cooperative with the provincial gov-
ernment; for this, they were called “flunkeys” by their colleagues in the
more combative Legislative Assembly.84 Unlike large numbers of Indians
who had withdrawn their participation from Indian institutions under the
rubric of Civil Disobedience, these men continued to practice as barris-
ters and to challenge the government from within council chambers in
Calcutta and Darjeeling. In an effort to appease them, the government
put out a pamphlet. Emergency Powers: Their Necessity and Use, produced
by the Bengal Publicity Board, an arm of the Bengal Home Department,
contested the idea that ordinances were intended to “crush the rising
spirit of nationalism in India.” After retracing the history of Britain’s
liberal idealism in India, taking quotations from Thomas Macaulay in
the 1830s, Lords Morley and Minto, who had overseen the constitutional
reforms of 1906, and Lord Montagu, who had constructed the reforms of
1919, the pamphlet concluded that “In the face of these facts, therefore,
one will not be justified in presuming that the British are not in sympathy
with the national aspirations of the people of India and that they desire to
crush them through Ordinances among other methods of ‘repression.’”85
The target of the ordinances was “civil disobedience, communism, and
terrorism,” but not those who were willing to participate in British con-
stitutional structures and reforms.86 Contesting the numerous pamphlets
floating around Bengal about the Irish revolutionary struggle, this gov-
ernment-produced pamphlet took a long historical detour to explain that
repressive legislation in the post-revolutionary Irish Free State was much
more draconian than the laws in Bengal. In Ireland, four men had been
summarily executed simply for having revolvers without a license.
The pamphlet noted, “The measures of the Irish Free State were far
83
APAC, L/P&J/7/395, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1925, an Amendment,”
“Extract of Proceedings of a Meeting of the Bengal Legislative Council, Held
1 September 1932,” pp. 3 4.
84
Indian Legislative Assembly Debates March 14, 1932 April 6, 1932, Third Session,
Fourth Legislative Assembly; volume III, March 30, 1932, p. 2705.
85
Emergency Powers: Their Necessity and Use, Bengal Publicity Board, 1933, pp. 4 7, quote
from p. 7.
86
Emergency Powers: Their Necessity and Use, Bengal Publicity Board, 1933, p. 20.
 Growing Disorder in Bengal and a Charm Offensive 169

more severe and drastic than the measures adopted in Bengal to deal with
terrorism.”87
As the number of emergency ordinances and legislative acts to suppress
terrorism multiplied in the early 1930s, moderate Indian politicians, such
as those who were members of the Bengal Legislative Council or those
who served as district magistrates and judges on tribunals continued to
demand that the rule of law be upheld. By continually challenging the
government on its handling of political violence, Indian moderates
defended the liberalism in which they had been trained by the British
and urged the British not to abandon these values. For their part, British
officials stepped up a campaign of showing that they were trying to
promote positive values under great pressure. In addition to holding up
colonial dealings with Ireland as a success story, British officials encour-
aged measures such as sportsmanship and support for education so that
fewer university students would find their way into terrorist groups and
more could be guided toward productive forms of citizenship.

Growing Disorder in Bengal and a Charm Offensive

By the end of 1932, in spite of the growth of repressive legislation in
Bengal, the number of public servants who had been targeted and killed
were unacceptably high: from 11 in 1930, the number went down to four
in 1931, and then up to six in 1932. Eight non-official Europeans died
in 1932, and the number of wounded meant that 61 Europeans had
been affected by the revolutionary terrorist movement. Assassinations
and attempted assassinations seemed especially rife in the districts of
Midnapore, Dacca, Tippera, Chittagong, and Calcutta, while armed
robberies appeared more of a threat in Hooghly, Mymensingh,
Faridpur, and Bakarganj.88 The geographical spread of political violence
suggested that the movement had a presence across Bengal province.
In spite of the raft of repressive legislation passed by the end of 1932 to
authorize the detention of those who were even thinking of terrorist or
revolutionary activities, an attack on the Hili Railway station in October
1933 suggested that revolutionary groups could still organize an attack.
Two men were killed, four coolies and a railway employee were shot, and
the action that had been organized by the Dinajpur wing of the Anushilan
Samiti robbed the station of Rs. 5000. Two special tribunals were con-
vened to try nearly a dozen suspects. Three men, two of them only aged 17,

87
Emergency Powers: Their Necessity and Use, Bengal Publicity Board, 1933, pp. 11 18.
88
WBSA, IB File 183, no. 935/36 (6), “Statement Showing Number of Public Servants and
Private Persons Killed, Wounded, or Harmed by Terrorists from 1930 to 1935.”
170 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid

pleaded guilty and provided the state with evidence. Sentenced to a

reduced term of five years rigorous imprisonment, the judges hoped that
the young men came to “understand that from the ashes of the fires of
violent political agitation no structure of any value can be erected.”89
Secretary of State for India Samuel Hoare was faced with criticism on
all sides for his handling of a situation that neither protected the legal
rights of alleged terrorists nor could keep the government and its officials
safe from political violence. Those who had family or commercial inter-
ests in India wanted to know why more was not being done to protect
Europeans; they wanted to know why detainees were receiving living
allowances when civil servants’ pay was being cut; they were concerned
at the inability of the government to secure convictions, even against the
most hardened criminals involved in the Chittagong Armoury Raid.
Liberal politicians expressed discomfort at the suspension of legal prin-
ciples and continued to inquire when India would be allowed to govern
itself. In the hopes that British control over India would soon recede,
British officials hoped that the release of political prisoners would come
about under Indian governance and the anticolonial threat of terrorism
would subside. Anderson’s appointment, which had been initiated by
Hoare, was met with significant skepticism among liberal and anti-
imperial politicians: Lionel Curtis wrote to Hoare’s deputy, Findlater
Stewart, that he was concerned that Anderson was not as committed to
political autonomy for Indians as others in the administration were:
“For a man trained from his youth upwards to the high standards of
administration of the Indian Civil Service it is next door to impossible
for him to believe that Indians would ever succeed in governing them-
selves.” Stewart reaffirmed Anderson’s commitment to self-government
for Indians, although he left open the question of whether Bengal would
be ready for it when the time came, “I do honestly believe that the people
of India will eventually be able to govern themselves though I have not the
slightest idea how long it will take . . .”90
Europeans who were stationed in Bengal were alarmed at the govern-
ment’s inability to suppress political violence. Faced with a serious public
relations problem among their own officials at all ranks of the govern-
ment, high-ranking colonial bureaucrats went on a charm offensive and
proposed that the government, with the aid of influential Indian and
British businessmen, should attempt to serve as traveling emissaries to
encourage youth to engage in productive sporting activities, preferably
89
APAC, L/P&J/7/582, “Terrorism in Bengal: Attack on the Hili Railway Station,
October 1933 January 1935,” pp. 247 53.
90
APAC, Mss Eur F 207/5 Anderson Collection, “From Findlater Stewart, Undersecretary
of State for India, Dated March 12, 1932,” pp. 6 7.
 Growing Disorder in Bengal and a Charm Offensive 171

not in secret societies, such as martial arts and wrestling gymnasiums

where terrorism thrived.91 At the annual meeting of the Bengal Civil
Service (Executive) Association, Robert N. Reid, the deputy home secre-
tary of Bengal, addressed an audience that included district officers,
heads of various departments, and others to discuss strategies for combat-
ing political violence and expanded on his views of how to combat
terrorism. The official subject was “What action the members of our
Service can take in their private and semi-official capacities to combat
the terrorist-menace and organize public opinion against terrorism.” Reid
suggested that district magistrates should be encouraged to attend and
serve on school boards in order to ensure that students were not receiving
a seditious education. Officials should be encouraged to organize amateur
activities, such as sporting clubs, theatre groups, and even start boy scout
organizations in order to keep young men from the clutches of terrorist
recruiters.92 It appeared that Reid did not yet know what police officials
had learned from their informers: B.E.J. Burge, the third district magis-
trate to be assassinated in Midnapore in September 1933, had been killed
playing football with some local youth in a field. Local informers reported
that Burge was deeply resented because of his programs to entice bha-
dralok to participate in sports.93 Ironically, Burge was under the protec-
tion of bodyguards, who had stood on the sidelines. A few months later, in
early January 1934, four young men marched up to a cricket ground in
Chittagong and threw bombs onto the pitch; the bombs did not go off and
two of the men were killed by armed guards who were present to keep
watch over the spectators. The Chittagong Superintendent of Police,
Cleary, had been nearby and had been wounded by a bullet in the hand.94
Just a day after the cricket match attack, the viceroy, the Marquess of
Willingdon, came down from Delhi to speak at the annual European
Association dinner in Calcutta. He began by noting the appreciation he
had for the officers of the government who continued to work hard in spite
of the risks they faced. He noted that poor employment opportunities for
young men and women and Bengal had provided revolutionaries and
terrorists with fertile recruiting ground. He reminded the group that the

91
WBSA, Home Political File 831/33, “Legislation to Control Akharas, Samities,
Gymnasia, under BCLA”; WBSA, Home Political File 899/33, “Propaganda against
Terrorism in Schools and Universities.”
92
WBSA, IB File 1203/34, “Discussion and Summary on Terrorist Menace for Annual
Meeting of the Bengal Civil Service (Executive) Association.”
93
APAC, L/P&J/7/557, “Assassination of B.E.J. Burge, District Magistrate, Midnapore,”
P&J 3361/1931 and P&J 1250/1935.
94
NAI, Home Political File 45/XI of 1934, “Attack on Cricket Match at Chittagong on
7 January 1934 and Special Tribunal Convened to Convict the Accused, Harendra Lal
Chakrabarty and Krishna Kumar Choudhury.”
172 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid

government was committed to “insisting on law and order and pushing on

with constitutional reforms.” In order to combat the threat posed by
terrorists to the goal of representative democracy, he argued that
Europeans needed to “develop the economic future of India in order to
secure greater purchasing power for our people and give wider opportu-
nities for public service to the youth of India at the start of their career.”95
In what seemed a coordinated public relations effort, John Anderson,
governor of Bengal, met with Indian journalists in Calcutta a few months
later. Among those present were Tushar Kanti Ghosh of Amrita
Bazar Patrika, Satyendra Nath Mazumdar of Ananda Bazar Patrika,
P.K. Chakravarty of Forward, B.N. Gupta of Advance, and Satyendra
Kumar Basu of Dainik Basumati. The newspapers had been critical of the
government’s repressive measures at some point. The meeting was osten-
sibly in order to thank the journalists for being judicious in their reporting
of terrorist crimes; instead, Anderson noted that Indian newspapers were
prone to emphasize that revolutionary terrorists had not been convicted
through the ordinary channels of legal procedure. He reminded them that
all procedures were overseen by three highly trained judges, and in line
with methods that had been approved by the Beachcroft–Chandavarkar
report. Anderson encouraged the journalists to continue to support the
government in its efforts to make terrorism less appealing to the public.
He hoped that school improvement and the added opportunities for
youth sports would distract young men and women from being recruited
into terrorist campaigns.96
If Anderson was resolute in overcoming the violent challenges that
revolutionary terrorist groups put in his way, these groups were equally
resolute in keeping up their attacks. The Anushilan Samiti was especially
active; an offshoot of the group, the Anushilan Revolted Group, found
collaborators in the newly formed Sree Sangha group that had been
founded in Dacca.97 Through newly formed networks, revolutionary
terrorists planned an attempt to assassinate the Governor of Bengal,
John Anderson.
In late April 1934, Anderson and the Bengal government moved up to
Darjeeling, as they did every year during the monsoon season. On May 8,
at the heavily guarded Governors’ race at the Lebong race course, two
95
NAI, Home Political File 70 of 1934, “Speech Made by the Viceroy on the Occasion of
the European Association Dinner 9 January 1934.”
96
NAI, Home Political File 45/42/1934, “Interview Given by John Anderson, Governor of
Bengal, to Certain Calcutta Journalists in Connection with a Publicity Campaign against
Terrorism.” “Bengal Governor on Terrorism, Organization of Sports as an Antidote,”
Times of India, July 26, 1934, p. 10.
97
APAC, L/P&J/12/393, “Revolutionary Activities in India,” pp. 45 46; Laushey, Bengal
Terrorism, pp. 65 68.
 Growing Disorder in Bengal and a Charm Offensive 173

young Bengali men, who had dressed as Europeans in order to fit into the
stands of the race course, managed to smuggle in revolvers. While
one created a distraction, the other took aim from eight or ten feet away
from Anderson. Bhowani Bhattacharjee, one of the attackers, was shot
in both thighs, before he was subdued by Bhupendra Narayan Singh,
a prominent landholder from Barwari. Rabindra Nath Banerjee, the other
attacker, fired a shot which wounded an unarmed spectator,
Miss B. Thornton. Anderson left the ground unharmed.98 The police
investigation later showed that both men’s revolvers had jammed.99
Although there were only two shooters, police discovered that the
attack had been supported by another man and woman who had been
at the race course that day, Naresh and Amiya Majumdar. Amiya, also
known as Ujjwala, had been recruited to the movement through her
teacher, Renuka Sen, who was a school mistress at an all-girls’ school in
Dacca; she had traveled to Calcutta and stayed at the home of Sovarani
Dutta, a woman who was known to provide revolutionaries and terrorists
from eastern Bengal safe harbor when they came through Calcutta.
Naresh and Amiya pretended to be married to ward off any suspicion,
and they traveled up to Darjeeling on an overnight train from Calcutta
together in order to bring the revolvers to the two would-be assassins.
On May 5, they checked into the Snow View Hotel, where they stayed in
the same room, something that was seen as especially daring for a young,
unmarried woman who had not met her partner in crime until a few days
before. Naresh visited the two young men in a different hotel, the Lewis
Jubilee Sanitorium, and provided them with guns.
Before the shooting, the assassins had to determine the governor’s
movements, so they spent a few days trying to catch a glimpse of him,
shadowing him through the public schedule of events that appeared in the
daily newspaper. They went to the Chowrasta, the main intersection at
the heart of Darjeeling, so that they could see him when he was expected
to parade through, although they did not dare to shoot him in such an
open space. They attended the Flower Show at the Gymkhana, although
they showed up before the show opened and were turned away by the
police. The plan was nearly foiled when Amiya Majumdar was recognized
by a distant family member, Subodh Chandra Bose, a deputy magistrate

98
WBSA, IB File 715b/34, “Connection of Anushilan Members with Lebong Outrage”;
NAI, Home Political File 45/26 of 1934, “Report Regarding the Attempt on the Life of
Governor of Bengal at the Lebong Races, Darjeeling on 8 May 1934 and Special
Tribunal to Try the Accused.”
99
NAI, Home Political File 45/26 of 1934, “Report Regarding the Attempt on the Life of
Governor of Bengal at the Lebong Races, Darjeeling on 8 May 1934 and Special
Tribunal to Try the Accused.”
174 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid

from the well-policed city of Chittagong, who had traveled to Darjeeling

to provide protection to the Governor. He enquired who the young man
was, and Amiya replied that it was an uncle from her mother’s side.
The police later concluded, “It was unfortunate that Subodh Babu did
not interest himself a little bit more in the matter of seeing his relation
with a strange man.”100
After these mishaps, the two shooters seemed to lose their nerve.
Naresh and Amiya visited the boarding house to encourage them to
remember the names of “Dinesh Gupta [who had been executed for
participating in the Writers’ Building attack], and others of such ilk as
they were about to become heroes.”101 The next day, Naresh and Amiya
went to the race course, identified where the governor was sitting to
Rabindra and Bhowani, and then they returned to the Snow View Hotel
to prepare to take the next train out of Darjeeling.
The police investigation showed a larger conspiracy that stretched to at
least a dozen individuals and several known revolutionary groups that
were linked between cells in Dacca, Calcutta, and Darjeeling. Officials
were especially alarmed because these three sites were separated by an
overnight train ride, and a several-hour car ride through the hilly roads of
Darjeeling. Although the crime occurred in a hill station that had been
designed to create distance between European legislators and their Indian
subjects, Darjeeling was not quite far away enough. It appeared that many
of the recruits came from Dacca in east Bengal; they had congregated in
Calcutta at safe houses or homes of their distant relatives, and then
reconvened in Darjeeling.
Rabindra confessed when he was arrested, while Bhowani remained
silent, presumably because he remained in the hospital for several months
for his wounds. Four young men on holiday in Darjeeling were questioned
because they ended up in a rooming house with Sushil Chakravarti, one of
the planners of the attack. Police in Calcutta and Dacca searched houses
that were under suspicion for harboring terrorists. In a raid in Calcutta in
the middle of the night on June 15, 1934, police arrested two men who
had been suspects in the Lebong case, Madhusudan Banerji, known to be
of Dacca, and Jyotish Chandra Bera, who claimed to be someone else.
In the report, police noted that both men were noted to be Brahmins, but

100
WBSA, IB File 715b/34, “Connection of Anushilan Members with Lebong Outrage:
Report on the Lebong Outrage from Superintendent of Police, Darjeeling,
18 June 1934, to Inspector General of Police, Government of Bengal.”
101
WBSA, IB File 715b/34, “Connection of Anushilan Members with Lebong Outrage:
Report on the Lebong Outrage from Superintendent of Police, Darjeeling,
18 June 1934, to Inspector General of Police, Government of Bengal.”
 Growing Disorder in Bengal and a Charm Offensive 175

suspicion was cast on them because neither was wearing a sacred thread
and both were living in an area populated by Muslims. That they were
found in the middle of the night wearing lungi, commonly not worn by
upper-caste men, suggested that they were trying to hide; they were also
guilty of the ordinance that stipulated that no one should dress in the
clothes of another community. The home of a distant uncle of Sushil
Chakravarti’s was searched because Sushil had stayed there one night as
he evaded police detection.
Jyotish Bera, one of the men found in the Calcutta house (described in
the police report as a two-story tin shed) eventually admitted that he
had been recruited by Bhupal Panda, well known in Contai, Midnapore
district for being a revolutionary. Contai was the village that had
been ransacked in 1930 by police because they were suspected of
harboring the Chittagong Armoury Raiders. Bhupal had introduced
Jyotish Bera to Sukumar Ghose, alias Lantu, who was a member of
Sree Sangha and also the mastermind of the plot. Lantu and another
man, Sushil Chakravarti, had recruited the two shooters and had intro-
duced them to Naresh Babu and Amiya Majumdar. They trained the
two shooters at a range near Dacca, but only Sushil Chakravarti had
gone to Darjeeling. The arms and ammunition had been gathered from
an earlier robbery.
In spite of the extensive emergency legislation that was in place, the
investigation showed that the attack had drawn in a network of house-
holds and underground groups across Bengal, in what appeared to be
a more coordinated plan to assassinate the governor. Although the crime
itself was unsuccessful, it was well planned.102 Unsuspecting relatives,
such as Sushil Chakravarti and Amiya Majumdar’s distant uncles, and
knowing supporters of the movement, such as the Rani of Bhowal, were
drawn into protecting those who were under suspicion. The level of local
support for the movement appeared to give credence to the assertions of
those who wanted more repressive laws that the existing measures were
insufficient.
As in the Pahartali Raid, in which a European club was attacked, and in
Burge’s assassination, in which he was killed on a football field playing
with local youth, British officials expressed particular alarm that revolu-
tionary groups were targeting what were considered “British spaces.”
The attack at Lebong race course by men who had dressed in the
“respectable” European style suggested that revolutionaries were able to
penetrate the spaces in which the British felt the safest.

102
WBSA, IB File 715b/34, “Connection of Anushilan Members with Lebong Outrage:
Copy of Report by a Special Branch Officer, Dated 15 June 1934.”
176 After the Chittagong Armoury Raid

Conclusion
Within a month of the Lebong attack, at the end of July 1934, the Indian
Legislative Assembly reconvened in Simla, the hill station north of New
Delhi, to hear arguments for another supplement to the Bengal Criminal
Law Amendment Act that would make several provisions in the act per-
manent. As in past debates, the legislation had not yet expired, but was due
to lapse soon. This round of legislation would extend the provision to allow
the government to continue to detain suspected terrorists and revolution-
aries from Bengal in jails and camps outside Bengal province. Harry Haig,
of the Home Department, noted that the legislation would allow the
government to transport those whose right to habeas corpus had been
suspended across all British jurisdictions on the Indian subcontinent.
In other words, it would allow the government to detain Bengalis suspected
of terrorism without detaining them in Bengal. He noted, “. . . owing to the
nature of this secret conspiracy, we are not in a position to put into Court
the evidence we have against these men. We must have the power to detain
them without putting the matter before a court.”103
As in previous Legislative Assembly debates, those representing parti-
cular constituencies in Bengal raged against the government as they
had in the 1920s. Satyen Chandra Mitra, who represented the non-
Muhammadan populations of Chittagong and Rajshahi divisions, which
had been targeted by repressive laws, again voiced his opposition to
repressive measures, arguing that they eroded confidence in the govern-
ment. He drew from his personal experience of detention which had
occurred because of his association with Subhas Chandra Bose and
Chittaranjan Das. When he was detained, he had been told by the head
police in Dacca, Inspector Lowman, that the arrest was a “precautionary
measure,” and that no one believed he was a terrorist.104 Mitra’s experi-
ence with detention didn’t end there: he also reported that he had
a nephew who had been incarcerated at Deoli, which was in Rajasthan,
at least a thousand miles from Bengal. Mitra ended his speech by noting
yet another hardship, a feature of the detention camps that he returned to
frequently in the Legislative Assembly: “It is well-known that Bengalees
are fond of fish. At Deoli it is not possible to provide fish.”105

103
APAC, L/P&J/7/20, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment (Supplementary) Act, 1932;
Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Supplementary (Extending) Act 1934,” pp. 10 23,
extract from Legislative Assembly Debates, vol. VI, no. five, dated July 23, 1934.
104
APAC, L/P&J/7/20, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment (Supplementary) Act, 1932;
Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Supplementary (Extending) Act 1934,” pp. 52 53,
extract from the Legislative Assembly debates, vol. VII, no. I.
105
APAC, L/P&J/7/20, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment (Supplementary) Act, 1932;
Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Supplementary (Extending) Act 1934,” pp. 10 23,
 Conclusion 177

Several others, including K. C. Neogy of Dacca (non-Muhammadan,

rural), Abdur Rahim of Calcutta (Muhammadan Urban), and Amar
Nath Dutta of Burdwan (non-Muhammadan, rural) spoke in opposition
to the measure, recalling that the bill made the suspension of habeas corpus
across provincial lines permanent, as well as the continued operation of
jails and detention camps outside Bengal;106 these provisions had been
approved in 1932 because there was overcrowding in Bengal’s jails,
a situation that the government had presented as a temporary problem.
K. C. Neogy drew attention to the impasse in a particularly pointed way,
“When we make complaints, we do not assume that things would have
been better if India were at the present moment being governed by any
other European nation. But it is no compliment to Government to say
that the condition of things in India would have been worse if we were
under Nazi rule.”107
Even though the Roundtable Conferences had concluded and there
was a plan for introducing further constitutional reforms in the
Government of India Act of 1935, this 1934 debate over another legisla-
tive act about detention replayed many of the debates that had been
occurring since the early 1920s when the first round of the Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act was authorized by executive order.
In spite of the government’s claims that the laws were limited in time
and scope, repressive laws multiplied, as did the number of detainees and
camps built to detain them. In the next chapter, I examine how those who
identified as revolutionary terrorists and detained by the British were
treated in a growing infrastructure of detention camps. When they were
out of jail, revolutionary terrorists openly flouted the law; when they
entered jails and detention camps, they demanded their rights to be
treated as political prisoners. By following this strategy, they exposed
some of the weaknesses of a system of legalized detention and made the
space of the jail into a space of political protest.

extract from Legislative Assembly Debates, vol. VI, no. five, dated July 23, 1934, quote
from p. 16.
106
APAC, L/P&J/7/20, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment (Supplementary) Act, 1932;
Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Supplementary (Extending) Act 1934,” pp. 24 43,
extract from Legislative Assembly Debates, vol. VI, no. six, dated July 24, 1934.
107
APAC, L/P&J/7/20, “Bengal Criminal Law Amendment (Supplementary) Act, 1932;
Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Supplementary (Extending) Act 1934,” pp. 24 43,
extract from Legislative Assembly Debates, vol. VI, no. six, dated July 24, 1934, quote
on p. 26.
5 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

The Chittagong Armoury Raid of 1930 was followed by a rash of political

crimes, giving cause to the government to enact additional repressive laws
that targeted specific behaviors associated with revolutionary terrorists,
particularly those in Bengal. A new phase of the revolutionary terrorist
movement coincided with Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience movement, and
by the early 1930s, British officials seemed to have more detainees and
political prisoners on their hands than they could house. New facilities
were constructed in order to detain those under suspicion of planning or
committing terrorist conspiracies in Bengal. Those held in detention by
three-person tribunals under the terms of the Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Act of 1930 and its modifications were classified as detai-
nees, distinguishing them from the nonviolent satyagrahi, who were often
jailed for refusing to pay revenues, picketing in front of liquor shops or
places where foreign goods were sold, or for making salt in violation of the
salt tax. As the emergency legislation required, detainees were tried by
closed special tribunals that were comprised of three judges (ideally, one
Hindu judge, one Muslim judge, and a British judge) who determined
where the person should be detained in the interests of clamping down on
terrorism. Jails and prisons were intended to house those who broke what
was considered “ordinary” law, while detention camps were intended for
those who had planned violent crimes and were subjected to emergency
or extraordinary laws.1
By the end of 1933, nearly 10,000 men and a scattered number of
women had been detained by the Bengal government under suspicion of
terrorism. There were slightly over 2500 Bengal detainees in detention
camps at any one time, with the remaining 7500 or so in jails, or in home
or village domicile. To keep the revolutionary terrorists separate from
other prisoners, the government built four detention camps in the 1930s,

1
APAC, Mss Eur F 165/88, Cornelia Sorabji, “Prisons Detenues and Terrorists in India,”
The National Review (London), vol. 102, no. 611, January 1934, pp. 61 76.

178
 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner 179

designed with the gentlemanly terrorist in mind.2 Detention camps at

Deoli in Rajasthan, Buxa Dooara in the hills of northern Bengal near
Jalpaiguri, and an abandoned building in Hijli, near Kharagpore, were
renovated and reconstructed to house alleged terrorists from Bengal.
In addition to the camps, the Cellular Jail at the Andaman Islands was
reopened in August 1932 to house those who had been convicted of
political crimes. This jail had been closed in 1921, after officials decided
transportation for convicts was much too harsh, and had amnestied
its last political prisoners.3 Of those kept in the Andaman Islands,
largely class A convicts who were seen to be highly dangerous, over
ninety percent came from Bengal and were accused of participating in
the revolutionary terrorist movement.4 The government also sent several
dozen prisoners from Bengal to other provinces, such as Madras, which
was seen not to have a problem with terrorism.
These detention camps and the costs for Bengal’s detainees were paid
for and administered by the Government of Bengal’s Political
Department. The detainees were not considered subject to the rules of
the Jails Department because they were not being charged under the
Indian Penal Code, nor were they convicts. These distinctions were
partially legal in that detainees had different rights while under incarcera-
tion than did criminal convicts or those who were waiting for trials; the
distinctions also built on caste and cultural norms, and there was a widely
shared understanding between officials and detainees that social status
was to be accommodated in the provisions of each camp. There was also
a financial consideration: abiding by the logic that the provincial govern-
ment should pay for those restrained under provincial emergency legisla-
tion such as the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Acts, the Political
Department in Bengal was accountable for the costs of imprisoning
detainees who had been suspected of revolutionary activities. Although
this form of accounting retained its logic even when the camps were
located far outside Bengal province or when detainees were sent to jails
in other parts of India, debates about which bureau was to pay the costs of
detaining thousands of suspected terrorists took up a great deal of admin-
istrative time.5

2
APAC, L/P&J/12/398, appendix V, “The Memorandum on the History of Terrorism
Revised to the End of 1933.”
3
Sherman, State Violence, pp. 92 93.
4
Mukti Tirtha Andaman (Calcutta, 1976), published by the Ex Andamans Political
Prisoners’ Fraternity Circle, Appendix A.
5
NAI, Home Political File 61/31/31, “Proposed Opening of an Internment Camp at Hijli in
Midnapore for the Confinement of Persons Committed to Jail Custody under the Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act,” pp. 5 6.
180 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

The previous chapter examined the details of how repressive laws

expanded in the 1930s and became more detailed. This chapter turns to
the expansion of a system of detention camps in the 1930s that increas-
ingly specified how political prisoners and detainees should be treated by
the colonial government. The passage of the Government of India Act of
1935 and provincial elections in 1937 offered the possibility that political
prisoners would be released from detention. Yet, when Britain entered
the Second World War in 1939, the Congress withdrew its support for
British administration and industries. After several failed efforts to forge
a compromise between the British government and Congress politicians,
Gandhi began the Quit India movement in 1942, which called for the
British to leave India immediately. Many ex-detainees had joined
Congress, which was banned by the government during the war; these ex-
detainees, as well as the entire Congress leadership, were detained yet
again. While many politicians, officials, and detainees imagined that the
1935 constitutional reforms would put an end to detention and emer-
gency laws, the provincial government’s right to keep suspected revolu-
tionary terrorists under surveillance and detention continued until well
into the 1940s.
Throughout this period, from 1930 until about 1948, the category of
the political prisoner became more embedded in the Indian language of
politics, as the state made special arrangements for the gentlemanly
terrorists and those detained used their rights as detainees to protest
their incarceration. Those jailed under Bengal’s repressive laws mobilized
a sense of their own rights by the terms of the rules of detention that had
been specified by the government. Printed booklets issued by the political
department of the Government of Bengal specified the rules of detaining
those classified as “detenus,” with detailed appendices that clarified what
clothes and domestic goods would be provided and what kinds of diet
could be expected.6 In the process of establishing the distinction between
detention camps and jails, detainees advocated for the rights granted
them by the terms of Bengal’s repressive laws, ironically becoming sub-
jects of a government that they were in the process of resisting in a radical
and violent way.
Although colonial authorities felt they were providing special treatment
for detainees, detainees kept up a steady stream of resistance while in
camps, jails, and prisons. Many protested their incarceration by writing
petitions demanding better food, better treatment by their superiors, and
better facilities. The provision of food was a particular concern for Bengali

6
NAI, Home Political 43/XVII/1934, “Bengal Gov’ts Instructions for the Treatment of
Detenus under the BCLA in the Berhampur, Buxa and Hijli Camp Jails.”
 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner 181

revolutionary terrorists and their representatives in the Legislative

Assembly; as well, detainees organized a series of hunger strikes that
stretched the capacity of the government to administer these camps. By
making the space of the detention camp a space of protest, and control over
their bodies a site for government intervention, detainees kept up a steady
drumbeat of resistance against the colonial government. The government,
which was once again in the process of introducing new constitutional
reforms, was put under a great deal of political pressure in Britain and in
India to defend the repressive laws it continued to promulgate.
These conflicts again drew attention to the paradox of detaining “poli-
tical prisoners” without recognizing that these men and women were in
jail for political reasons. As the concept of a “political prisoner” took hold
in nationalist discourse, s/he became a figure whose sacrifices became
a cornerstone of nationalist demands on the British. The figure of the
“political sufferer” – someone who risked prolonged detention or even
martyrdom and was widely acknowledged as a figure who appealed to
nationalist sympathies – provided the grounds for political mobilization.
As Ujjwal Singh has noted, by making demands of the colonial govern-
ment to improve prison conditions for political prisoners, nationalist
elites were able to define themselves as “political” representatives of all
Indians, even if they did not necessarily agree with the terrorists’ tactics.7
As the previous chapter showed, moderate Indian politicians in the
1930s protested the passage of the Bengal Criminal Law, as had their
predecessors over ordinances in 1924 and 1925. Throughout the 1930s,
members of the Legislative Assembly strategically drew attention to the
colonial government’s intransigence in withdrawing repressive laws at
a time of constitutional reform. But by the elections of 1937, in which
some measure of provincial autonomy was granted to Indian politicians
elected to ministries in each province, the matter of releasing political
prisoners became less prominent as a political goal. In part, this was due
to a realignment of political parties. In Bengal, the rise of Fazlul Huq and
the Krishak Praja Party (KPP), which focused on land tenancy rights and
better protections for peasant cultivators, overshadowed the dominance
of Congress-affiliated groups. After the election, the KPP and the Muslim
League formed a coalition to establish the ministries in Bengal. There
were many reasons for this shift, among them was that the KPP disagreed
with their Congress comrades on how much of a priority the release of
political prisoners should be to their ministry.8 As a result, Congress

7
Ujjwal Singh, Political Prisoners.
8
Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932 1947 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 104; see also Neilesh Bose, Recasting the Region:
182 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

leaders who had long supported the plight of the (predominantly Hindu)
detainees found themselves elected to the legislature, but were in the
opposition. As a 1934 debate in the magazine Bulbul shows, there was
a widespread sense that the revolutionary terrorists, who were Hindu,
were not concerned about the redistribution of land or peasant rights.9
In contrast to the 1920s when there had been a national consensus against
repressive laws and the suspension of habeas corpus, by the 1930s, few
politicians at either the national or provincial level had much investment
in the plight of the political prisoners who had spent the better part of the
1930s incarcerated.
After 1937, the issue of political prisoners was devolved into the hands
of newly empowered Indian leadership in the provinces, and over
a thousand Bengali detainees remained in camps across India. Under
pressure from detainee protests and particular political allies, by 1937 and
1938, most of Bengal’s political prisoners were released from jails and
detention camps. Many of the ex-detenus returned to political activism,
for which they were kept under surveillance and even detained again.
Even though officials maintained that there was no such thing as political
prisoners, ex-detainees, former terrorists, and other militant activists
remained a target of state surveillance.

The “Rights” of Political Prisoners: Far from “Home”

but Just like Home
When Indian politicians and political prisoners from Bengal decried the
injustice of the mass detentions and the conditions under which bha-
dralok detainees had to live, many colonial officials noted that the con-
ditions of detention were better for detainees and state prisoners than for
common convicts and criminals. Colonial officials claimed political
prisoners were allowed to associate with one another, had outdoor
exercise twice daily, could read books and newspapers (that were care-
fully vetted by officials and paid for by their families), and they were
supplied with clothing and necessaries by the government that did not
mark them out as criminals, but as gentlemen. As the Governor of
Bengal, Stanley Jackson, reported to the viceroy, Lord Irwin, in 1931
“It has been our aim throughout to administer Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Act in a preventive rather than a penal spirit and with this
object in view . . . we have sought to take them out of jails and to

Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014),
pp. 167 68, 189 98.
9
N. Bose, Recasting the Region, pp. 140 43.
 The “Rights” of Political Prisoners 183

concentrate them in camp where they would have improved facilities for
exercising, reading, studying, etc.”10
Nonetheless, recurring episodes of prison unrest – suicides, scuffles
between prisoners and officials, and hunger strikes – enabled politicians
and detainees to focus on poor prison conditions as a way to draw
attention to the state’s treatment of political prisoners. Officials super-
vising the camps explained detainee discontent by arguing that bhadralok
detainees were unprepared for the rigors of prison life. This logic shifted
the burden of poor prison conditions from the government to the detai-
nees and highlighted one of the peculiar ironies of the system: given that
these detention camps had been created precisely to house this particular
group, or as British officials constantly said, the “better class” of prison-
ers, it was strange that the detainees were considered somehow unfit for
camp life.11
Colonial officials attempted to ensure the same treatment for all detai-
nees across the different camps, but each camp’s location was indexed to
how dangerous were those who would be housed there. Home domicile
was allowed for those least dangerous, in which a detainee could live at
home but had a curfew; village domicile for those who needed to be
separated from their locality, but could be trusted to live alone and
check in daily with the local police. Jails near cities in Bengal, such as
a lower-security camp, adjoined the barracks in Berhampore in Bengal,
and were intended to be holding stations until detainees were shipped
elsewhere. And finally, for those considered the most likely to engage in
political violence, detention camps situated at a distance from cities that
were centers of revolutionary organization. Deoli and Buxa were the
furthest from Calcutta and Dacca, whereas Hijli was more accessible.
Hijli, which could be reached in a day by train from Calcutta or Dacca,
was for those who were considered less violent, while Deoli, in the middle
of the Rajasthan desert, was for those considered in the most need of
isolation.12 As one prison officer noted, Deoli was very inaccessible and
surrounded by a local population that only spoke Hindi. “Any Bengali
who arrived in the area would be spotted immediately.”13
The Hijli detention camp was in an abandoned building that had been
intended as a district collectorate office near Kharagpur and opened first
10
NAI, Home Political File 61/31, pp. 16 17, Letter dated February 17, 1931.
11
Singh, Political Prisoners, pp. 40 41.
12
NAI, Home Political File 31/90/32, Letter D 4189/33, Political, July 10, 1933 to SN Roy,
Secretary, Government of Bengal; APAC, L/P&J/12/391, “Revolutionary Activities in
India, 1932,” File P&J (S) 329/1932, “Brief Regarding the Bengal Criminal Law
(Supplementary) Bill,” pp. 40 46, see also P&J (6) 760/1932, pp. 118 20.
13
P. E. S. Finney, Just My Luck: Memoirs of Police Officer of the Raj (Dhaka: The University
Press, 2000), ch. 10, p. 4, but CSAS, Finney papers, p. 86.
184 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

to house almost 300 detainees. The Berhampore camp was repurposed

from an abandoned hospital near the cantonment. Deoli and Buxa
Dooara, which were both in remote areas, required construction and
modification, so they opened later: Buxa was opened in late 1930, on
the grounds of a small military barracks that had been left in ruin. Perched
on a hill 2000 feet about sea level near the Bhutan border, the Buxa camp
was located several miles on foot from the nearest road, with the last mile
a steep uphill climb.14 Deoli was opened after a year-long renovation to
house 500 detainees and about 200 convicts, who were brought to serve
as servants and cooks to the detainees. Built on the ruins of an abandoned
military cantonment, getting to Deoli required a train journey of two
nights, a bus for half a day, and a boat to cross a river, followed by another
bus through the Rajasthan desert.15
The expansive network of detention camps produced various admin-
istrative problems for the government, as it had to adjust to the unantici-
pated challenges of moving detainees from Bengal, in eastern India, to
other parts of the country. For instance, the government had to deal with
a growing concern about how to transport the detainees between jails,
camps, and village and home domicile. A report filed by Durgadas
Mukerji, a local sub-inspector at Rajshahi jail in east Bengal, complained
about how complicated it was to move detainees from site to site: in the
spring of 1932, he was assigned to bring three detainees to the distant
camp at Buxa. They refused to get on trains, they spoke with their fellow
passengers, and passed notes and communicated with their families who
met them along the way; they managed to delay the trip for over a day.
Thereafter, the Government of Bengal demanded that the detainees be
handcuffed and escorted by armed guard; the Government of India
reluctantly agreed to provide armed escort, but rejected the call for
handcuffs. In another round of disagreement between the central and
provincial government, India officials reminded officials in Bengal that
the detainees were neither convicts or under trial for a crime and should
be handcuffed only when necessary.16
Deoli proved to be a challenging detention camp to administer.
Removing Bengalis from the green, lush, tropical climate of Bengal to
the desert of Rajasthan gave detainees cause to protest the heat, the
dryness, the lack of vegetation, and lack of spaces for quiet reflection.

14
CSAS, Finney papers, “Just My Luck, or Reminiscences,” ch. 9, pp. 1 2.
15
Clipping from Amrita Bazar Patrika, letter from ND Ghosh, professor of physics,
November 1, 1933. CSAS, Finney papers, Box 1.
16
WBSA, IB File 1342/32, “Rules and Orders Regarding Escorts for Detenues and State
Prisoners on Transfer,” see especially Government Circular no. 7332 7355X,
February 29, 1932, for the recommended number of guards per detainee.
 The “Rights” of Political Prisoners 185

Because Deoli’s detainees comprised the leadership of the Jugantar and

Anushilan groups, they were also among the most vocal in pressing for
better conditions and proved to be organized. In a handwritten petition
written after a fortnight of being there, one of many petitions that the
detainees subsequently wrote as a collective, they demanded the “repro-
duction of Bengal conditions,” and drew attention to how different the
conditions at the detention camp in Deoli were from the camps they had
previously been in Berhampore, Buxa, and Hijli. They demanded fans,
noting that the high of 120 degrees was much higher than the average of
100 that they were exposed to in Bengal; they asked for a barber, as they
were unused to shaving themselves; and they noted that they had no room
for games and sports, something that had been available to them in the
other detention camps. They demanded the right to mingle freely as they
had in Bengal, since “most of the detenus are friends, relatives and
colleagues to one another.” Yet the letter noted that the environment at
Deoli was like a “bustling market where there is no privacy or seclusion for
the students to go on with their studies or for the others to say their
prayers and meditate.” They demanded the right to have an education
while there, since so many were “brilliant scholars” and could teach the
others.17 In spite of its distance from Bengal, as their incarceration went
on, Deoli’s detainees were able to coordinate hunger strikes and petitions,
getting their demands heard in the Legislative Assembly and in the Indian
press.18
A member of the Indian Police Service, Philip Finney, who had been in
charge of getting the Buxa detention camp ready for detainees, was seen
to be experienced in the art of constructing a detention camp, and was
sent to supervise the opening of Deoli. In his diary, he represented himself
as a police officer who knew some Bengali, had developed a good working
relationship with detainees, and had a keen sense of what bhadralok
detainees required. He claimed that he consulted with the detainees
before instituting any new measures, and was thus able to avoid any
disciplinary issues. In return, the detainees were respectful to him:
“They always kept their word and were ever mindful of the fact that
they were ‘bhadralok’ – gentlemen.” As a self-described gentleman him-
self, who hunted and went riding every morning, Finney was sympathetic
to their needs, so he allowed them to play musical instruments (other than
bugles and trumpets), have access to reading material, and order

17
NAI, Home Political File 31/115/32, “Alleged Grievance by Deoli Detenus of Bengal
about Lack of Games and Sports Facilities for Their Recreation and Exercise,”
pp. 18 26, 33 40; NAI, Home Political File 44/80/1933, “Hunger Strike of Four
Detenus in Deoli,” pp. 151 61.
18
Times of India, June 22, 1932, p. 10.
186 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

fashionable clothing using their monthly allowance.19 As an advocate of

the detainees, Finney recommended that twenty gallons of water a day be
provided for each detainee for bathing, and five gallons for drinking.
The Bengal home secretary noted that allotment of water seemed exces-
sive when convicts and staff were only to receive five gallons for bathing,
and 2.5 for drinking each day. Finney also encouraged that several open
fields be made to allow the detainees to play games and sports; his
enthusiasm for sports went as far as organizing the guards, convicts, and
detainees in an annual sports day.20
In spite of the much-publicized efforts of colonial officials to create
detention camps away from Bengal but with Bengal conditions, Indian
members of the Legislative Assembly, politicians, and nationalist leaders
found many reasons throughout the 1930s to remind colonial officials
that the conditions in detention camps were awful, particularly because
none of these men had been convicted of any crimes. Among the most
vocal advocates for the political prisoners was Satyen Chandra Mitra,
who had been a political prisoner and whose nephew was being held at
Deoli. Over the course of several assembly sessions from 1932 to 1934,
Mitra drew attention to a range of ills facing those under detention. He
was concerned with the health of the detainees, their diet, their allowan-
ces, their clothing, whether they were able to have meetings with families
and friends, whether they were able to continue studying while in jail, and
a range of issues associated with their care while under restraint. Speeches
by Mitra and his many colleagues showed meticulous attention was paid
to the everyday details of detainees’ lives, publicizing these details to put
pressure on the government to explain its treatment of political prisoners.
The question of food was of constant concern to Bengali detainees and
to the managers of detention camps. As the superintendent of the Deoli
detention camp noted, he spent a good deal of his efforts transporting
vegetables and fish from Bengal for his inmates. Indeed, he complained
that the detainees at Deoli ate better produce and meats than the wealthy
classes in the surrounding district of Ajmer. A spreadsheet of Bengali
vegetables provided to the detenus in June 1932 listed: “eggplant, toma-
toes, mitha kumra [pumpkin]; jhinga; karela [bitter melon]; potol; spi-
nach; onions; potatoes; gur [molasses]; ripe mangoes; green mangoes;
fish four times a week; mutton; eggs; milk; lemons; lady fingers; bedana
[pomegranate].”21 The camp was located 60 miles by truck from the
nearest town so that the fish and produce often arrived stale, rotten, or
inedible, a fact that detainees highlighted in their protests.

19
Finney, Just My Luck, p. 10. 20 NAI, Home Political File 31/89/32, p. 24.
21
NAI, Home Political File 31/90/32, p. 26ff.
 The “Rights” of Political Prisoners 187

Mitra, who represented Rajshahi and Chittagong, districts in which

revolutionary terrorists were active, inquired whether the government
knew that “most members of the Bhadralok class in Bengal have profes-
sional cooks in their homes to cook their food, and that such professional
cooks are generally Brahmins and in some cases Muhammadans and Mog
Baburchis who have great reputations as cooks?” He posed the question of
detainee diets and who was going to cook for them to the detainees’ social
status: “Have any professional cooks been employed in any of the jails in
which State Prisoners and detenus have been kept or in any of the deten-
tion camps? . . . Is it a fact that State Prisoners and detenus have to live on
food cooked by convicts who are either agricultural labourers or belong to
a low strata of society?” Mitra also was concerned that these provisions
needed to be part of the statute and asked specifically: “Do the statutes
under which persons have been detained without trial make it obligatory
on the part of Government to maintain them according to their rank in life
and their normal mode of living?”22
H.G. Haig, Home secretary in Bengal, nominally in charge of these
detention camps, was unmoved by Mitra’s claims that bhadralok detai-
nees needed special cooks and replied that “The cooking, both for State
prisoners and detenus, is done by convict cooks, who in certain cases at
any rate are professional cooks.” Indian politicians noted that baburchis
were provided for colonial officials stationed in detention camps and
should be offered for those in prison.
The question of status dogged the detention scheme at a number of
levels as British and Indian politicians compared the “benefits” offered to
political prisoners against those offered to civil servants and colonial offi-
cials. The issue of monthly allowances that were granted to those who had
not been charged with any crimes, but were under detention, proved to be
among the most contentious. In the “Notes on Revolutionary Matters”
report of November 1931, the Government of Bengal claimed that “the
allowance often makes detainees wealthier than they were before” implying
that going to jail was a moneymaking scheme for political insurgents.23
By the terms of the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1925, which
had offered a monthly allowance of Rs. 32, the colonial government
reduced the allowance to Rs. 20, perhaps hoping to make the allowance
less enticing to detainees.24 These reductions, made in the aftermath of the

22
APAC, L/P&J/7/335, “Allowances to Political Detenus and Their Dependents,” P&J
5074/32; see also “Bengal Political Prisoners: Health and Food, Questions in the
Legislative Assembly,” Times of India, September 14, 1932.
23
NAI, Home Political File 32/12/31, “Action Taken by the Government of Bengal to
Curtail the Allowance of Detenus.”
24
NAI, Home Political File 31/13/32; File 31/44/32.
188 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

riots in the Hijli detention camp, were seen as a punishment to detainees

who were seen to be benefitting from the state’s largess.25 News from
these reports in India filtered back to Britain. In subsequent debates in
the British Parliament, Arthur Molson and Brendan Bracken, both
Conservative MPs from Doncaster in northern England, asked Samuel
Hoare, the secretary of state for India, why detainees, who they assumed
were politicians of the Congress party, were being given generous allow-
ances when the salaries of the Indian Civil Service had just been cut
ten percent. Bracken was referring to newspaper reports that the families
of Sarat Bose and J. M. Sengupta were being given Rs. 1200 and
Rs. 1000 a month, respectively, and derisively referred to the allowances
as a “come-to-gaol scheme.”26
In response, Hoare noted that “most [detainees] receive between 12
annas and Rs.1/8 a day for messing, Rs. 32 for necessaries, such as soap,
clothing, books; a lump sum of Rs. 60 for bedding and initial necessaries.”
A few of the “better class” of prisoners received higher allowances while in
detention and, aside from Bose and Sengupta, the average stipend for
familial dependents was Rs. 160 a month.27 Men such as Bose and
Sengupta also had their life insurance premiums paid by the government
while under detention, and were provided with dentures and spectacles.
The question of the government paying for life insurance provoked some
debate and even outrage in some circles, including Indians such as
Cornelia Sorabji, who was once an Indian nationalist, but had turned
against what she perceived as the radicalism of Indian politics.28
In response, the viceroy and governor of Bengal maintained that the
government was “legally bound” to provide these services to men of
high status whose families depended on a certain income.29
The colonial government’s officials were repeatedly pressed to defend
the provisions to members of the British Parliament, particularly as the
cost of supplies for political prisoners mounted: those detained under

25
NAI, Home Political File 31/25/1932, see especially, pp. 28 32: Printed Confidential
Memo no. 20802/20803 5 X, dated Calcutta November 26, 1931, from A. McD Clark,
Deputy Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Political Department to Inspector
General of Prisons and Commandants at Buxa, Hijli, and Berhampore.
26
HC Deb 24 March 1932 vol. 263 c1190; HC Deb 30 May 1932 vol. 266 cc809 10; see also
HC Deb. July 4, 1932, vol. 268, ch. 5.
27
APAC, L/P&J/7/335 “Allowances to Political Detenus and Their Dependents,” P&J 891/
1933; see also “Political Prisoners: Govt. Statement on Allowances,” Times of India,
September 13, 1932.
28
Cornelia Sorabji, “Prisons Detenues and Terrorists in India,” The National Review
(London), vol. 102, no. 611, January 1934, found in APAC, Mss Eur F 165/88 Sorabji
collection, pp. 61 76.
29
APAC, L/P&J/7/335 “Allowances to Political Detenus and Their Dependents,” P&J 891/
1933; Ujjwal Singh, Political Prisoners, pp. 118 19.
 The “Rights” of Political Prisoners 189

BCLA 1930 would be allowed to wear their own clothing and would be
free to communicate with other prisoners. In these open wards and cells,
the government would provide “a chair, table, light for use until 10 pm,
bell-metal feeding utensils, iron cot, thin mattress, two pillows, two
sheets, four cases, two blankets and a mosquito net.” This equipment
belonged to the detainee, who could bring these supplies as she or he
moved through the various detention sites. As a nod to the concerns about
the socially fraught question of laundry (bhadralok typically did not wash
their own clothes), “Soap should be provided to enable prisoners to wash
their own clothes, but if they are not accustomed to wash their own
clothes, the Superintendent of the Jail should make arrangements for
the regular washing of clothes without cost to the prisoners.”30 As had
been the case after BCLA 1925, prisoners were allowed newspapers as
long as the advertisements were cut out; they would be given the oppor-
tunity for exercise outdoors twice a day for at least ninety minutes in each
session, and they were allowed to correspond with family members.
Officials who supervised the detainees felt these provisions were
abundant. Ernest Baker, one prison official who was stationed in Hijli,
noted in a letter to his parents, “We have 50 detenus in the camp now,
and I was astonished beyond measure by the amount of luggage which
they brought with them. The first 20 of them produced 90 suitcases &
trunks, all new, and all stuffed with brand new clothing, books and toilet
articles brought out of their monthly allowance of government
money.”31 Similarly, another official noted that the coolies of Buxa
were doing a brisk trade bringing up the provisions of detainees at the
detention camp there.32
Bengali prisoners were not unique in their demands when they were
relocated outside their home province; prisoners from the northern pro-
vince of Punjab did much the same when they were transported to the
southern city of Madras. These prisoners demanded jatke meat, green
dhall, tea, milk, sugar, and ghee for hulwa.33 According to a prison
official, “Their position is that being now outside the Punjab, they will

30
APAC, L/P&J/6/1927 Instructions for those confined in jails in Bengal under the Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act and Regulation III of 1818, P&J 3245/34, p. 4.
31
CSAS, Papers of Ernest Brian Hindley Baker, I.C.S. Bengal 1927 1947; Joint Magistrate
and Deputy Collector; Additional District Judge 1946. Letter to his mother, March 12,
1931.
32
Finney, “Just My Luck, or Reminiscences,” ch. 9, p. 5.
33
APAC, L/P&J/6/1780/7620/21, “Copy of Letter from G.W. Clements, Superintendent,
Central Jail, Coimbatore, to the Inspector General of Prisons, 15 October 1921,
Enclosed in Letter from Government of Madras to Government of India, Home
Department, 4 November 1921,” cited in K. Grant, “Hunger Strikes and Political
Fasts.”
190 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

not eat what they might have eaten in the Punjab . . . Unless they are given
what they like . . . they will eat nothing.”34
Officials at Deoli, which housed prisoners from across India,
responded that the detainees had been provided with hand fans and safety
razors to shave themselves. Relying on their knowledge of Bengalis and
caste, they noted that the lack of space for sports was not a critical concern
since Bengali gentlemen were known not to be especially athletic or
physically fit, and that their prolonged detention without the hard labor
that ordinary convicts were exposed to was making bhadralok detainees
into “introspective neurotics.”35 This back and forth between officials
and detainees, with disputes over minutiae such as whether the football
field at Deoli was regulation size and whether the average temperature
was 110 or 120 degrees resulted in some irritation: C. W. Gwynne, Joint
Secretary to the Home Department of the central government wrote in
a margin, “I do not think it is for the Government of India to enter into
a wordy warfare with these megalomaniacs, as the detenus are
becoming . . .” but he eventually acceded to extending the football field
to regulation size.36
Officials feared that the detainees, who could not be compelled to
work because they had not been convicted of any crime, had too much
time on their hands, which gave them ample time to protest the govern-
ment. Indeed, the detainees at Deoli kept up a steady stream of petitions
to which the government was compelled to respond. One official asked
whether the detainees might have teachers visit them to give classes,
or perhaps be allowed to borrow books from the Imperial Library in
Calcutta.37 There was a strong suggestion that the detainees be supplied
with reading material that was “suitable,” chosen from “good
literature.”38 An additional Rs. 600 was even allotted to pay for a clerk
at the Imperial Library in Calcutta for the cost of supplying books from
Calcutta.39
These everyday concerns about prolonged incarceration, however irri-
tating to officials and detainees alike, were quickly trumped by a range of
34
APAC, L/P&J/6/1780/7620/21, “Inspector General of Prisons, Ootacamund, to the
Secretary to the Governor of Madras, 11 November 1921,” cited in K. Grant,
“Hunger Strikes and Political Fasts.”
35
NAI, Home Political File 31/90/32, p. 26.
36
NAI, Home Political File 31/115/32, “Alleged Grievance by Deoli Detenus of Bengal
about Lack of Games and Sports Facilities for Their Recreation and Exercise,” p. 52.
37
NAI, Home Political File 31/90/32, pp. 44 45, Letter from A. McD Clark, Esq, ICS, Deputy
Secretary to Govt of Bengal from Joint Secretary of Govt of India, Home department.
38
NAI, Home Political File 44/126/33, “Question of Providing a Library for the Detenus at
Deoli.”
39
NAI, Home Political File 43/8/1935, cited in NAI, Home Political File 31/90/1932,
“Question of Providing Some Form of Occupation.”
 Crisis Moments 191

crises in the detention camps that precipitated a closer examination of

how well the detention camps were functioning.

Crisis Moments: Suicides and Hunger Strikes

On June 9, 1932, Mrinal Kanti Roy was found at Deoli, hanging from an
electric cord at 4:30 in the afternoon. Very quickly, the conditions at
Deoli became a matter of national concern for Indian nationalists and
members of the British Parliament. Khitish Banerjee, a leader of
Anushilan Samiti who was jailed with Roy, met with Finney, the camp’s
superintendent, to discuss the matter. Banerjee and Finney knew each
other from the detention camp at Buxa where Banerjee had been detained
when Finney was posted there. They disagreed about the causes of Mrinal
Kanti’s suicide. Finney claimed that Mrinal Kanti had been secluded
from the other prisoners by his own request because the other inmates
thought he was a spy; according to Finney, he feared for his safety. Khitish
Banerjee suggested that a prolonged period of isolation had led Mrinal
Kanti to despair.40 In a long handwritten petition, a group of a hundred
detainees claimed that Mrinal Kanti’s exile, the arduous journey to Deoli,
and tuberculosis he and a majority of prisoners had contracted in the
camp had ultimately worn the young detainee down.41 Even as Deoli’s
camp officials had claimed they were taking care after the comfort of
bhadralok detainees, the detainees used prison conditions as a way of
drawing attention to their prolonged incarceration under laws that had
not formally charged them of particular crimes.
Members of the British Parliament and the Indian Legislative
Assembly inquired about the conditions at Deoli, concerned about the
sudden suicide of a detainee. Colonial officials in India were asked to
explain why a seemingly healthy young man of 20-something had hung
himself while in police custody. G. M. Millar, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the
Indian Medical Service, the civil-surgeon of Ajmer, was asked to investi-
gate the medical complaints. Accompanied by Finney, the Deoli camp
superintendent, they conducted a day-long inspection that showed the
detainees seemed especially prone to complain. Millar noted that the
detenus were not like ordinary prisoners, “. . . these detenus are not under
ordinary jail discipline, they cannot be compelled to work, they are paid by
Government, and in fact are in many ways treated as privileged persons.
Many of the detenus appear to me to have ideas of their own importance,
which verge on the grandiose, they consider that their health, welfare, and

40
NAI, Home Political File 31/86/32; Finney, Just My Luck, ch. 10, p. 3.
41
NAI, Home Political File 31/86/32, pp. 76 90.
192 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

privileges are matters of such importance that they demand the immediate
close attention of Government.” He concluded by noting that all was fine
at Deoli, although perhaps the detainees might be allowed the regulation-
recommended 36 square feet of living space, as opposed to the 24 they had.
The governor of Bengal, John Anderson, who had been recruited to come
to Bengal because of his experience quelling terrorism in Ireland, sent
a report to the India Office with the enclosed covering note: “The report
is also of interest as showing the impression that the Bengal terrorist makes
on one not previously acquainted with his type.”42
In the months that followed Mrinal Kanti Roy’s death, the Deoli
detainees carried out a series of protests that capitalized on the attention
brought by the suicide. In late October, two detainees did not answer to
the daily roll call; they were punished with a reduction of their diet and
allowance for two weeks. In retaliation, an even larger number of detai-
nees refused to respond to roll call; officials estimated that about ten of
over a hundred detainees were present when called. A week later, Sudhir
Kishore Bose was singled out and asked to come to report to the super-
intendent, Phillip Finney. He refused the summons and was
surrounded by nearly fifty other detainees who crowded around him to
protect him from the guards. A scuffle between officials and those
detained broke out. Several detainees received cuts and guards had
their shirts torn, but the government reported that the events were
minor.43 Nonetheless, officials at Deoli prepared for a prolonged hunger
strike, and advised the detainees that when the time came, all of the
hunger strikers would be force-fed. This hunger strike at Deoli was fairly
limited in that it lasted a little over two weeks and had about a half dozen
participants. By the end of November, the hunger strike had been aban-
doned, but not before the news spread across India and became a subject
of legislative concern.44
In the Legislative Assembly, Indian members such as Satyen Chandra
Mitra asked the government to respond to these events, demanding to
know about the extent of the injuries and why – if the injuries were as
minor as the government claimed – Satyendranath Sen (the presumed
ringleader) had been transferred to another jail in the Punjab. In addition
to Mitra, C. S. Ranga Iyer asked whether the roll call involved any
“humiliation”; with other Indian members such as Lalchand Navairai,
there was a call that a committee of inquiry be appointed by the assembly

42
APAC, L/PO/6/65, Letter from John Anderson, Governor of Bengal, to Sir Samuel
Hoare, dated July 16, 1932, p. 291.
43
NAI, Home Political File 31/77/1932, “Hunger Strike by Deoli Detenues.”
44
APAC, L/P&J/7/456, “Hunger Strike of Bengal Detenus in Deoli Camp,” P&J 5606/32,
dated November 22, 1932.
 Crisis Moments 193

to investigate the scuffle and its aftermath, particularly the government’s

order that Sen be isolated from other detainees when he was moved out of
Deoli. There was some talk that the hunger strikers at Deoli be returned
to Bengal, but officials in Bengal argued this would be counterproductive
and “that would harm the discipline of camps in Bengal.”45 Reluctantly,
the Government of Punjab accepted Sen into their jail system, noting that
they would hire a Bengali cook to provide “suitable food,” for Sen. Satyen
Sen would be housed with the other Bengali prisoners in the province
(Arun Chandra Gupta, Satya Bhusan Gupta, and Bhupal Chandra
Ghosh) and the government of Punjab assumed that the government of
Bengal would pay for these provisions.46
In the middle of 1933, there was a 45-day hunger strike in the Cellular
Jail in the Andaman Islands that started on May 12 and ended on June 26.
Fifty-eight inmates participated, with 20 going on a work strike as well.
By the middle of June, three hunger strikers had died.47 An experienced
physician, Lieutenant-Colonel F. A. Barker, of the Indian Medical
Service, who had served in the Lahore Central Jail during the hunger
strikes waged by the Lahore Conspiracy prisoners in 1929, was sent to the
Andamans. Arriving in the middle of the hunger strike, he reported that
there were ways to prevent further deaths and administer food to the
hunger strikers without damaging their health further. Among his recom-
mendations for artificial feeding was to moisten the rubber tubes to be
inserted down the nasal passage with warm olive oil, which seemed to
cause little damage to the detainees’ ability to breathe.
As part of his investigation, Barker investigated the demands of the
hunger strikers and the report included nearly 60 individual petitions and
complaints from detainees at all of Bengal’s camps. In this extensive
account, it appeared that the prisoners at Deoli continued to be dissatisfied
with the diet they had been provided; they objected to the lack of privacy
they had when bathing; they were resentful of the treatment they suffered at
the hands of the warders; and they felt that the opportunities for study and
exercise were far below what they had been provided in Bengal. They
accused Philip Finney, the superintendent of the prison, and his underlings
of consistently using draconian tactics to restrain them. And finally, they
drew attention on the example of Mrinal Kanti Roy’s suicide the
previous year as evidence of how difficult it was to be at Deoli.

45
APAC, L/P&J/7/456, “Hunger Strike of Bengal Detenus in Deoli Camp,” P&J 5693/32,
dated November 25, 1932.
46
NAI, Home Political File 31/77/1932, “Hunger Strike by Deoli Detenues.”
47
Pramod Kumar, Hunger strike in Andamans: Repression and Resistance of Transported
Prisoners in Cellular Jail, 12 May 26 June 1933 (Lucknow: New Royal Book Company,
2004).
194 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

Barker was restrained in responding to their complaints but, as a

physician, noted what he felt were important medical facts. First, he
suggested that the provisions of diet were inadequate and that the provi-
sioning of vegetables was insufficient for those under detention. He
speculated that perhaps the condition of already being hungry meant
that a hunger strike was appealing as a form of protest. He noted that
hunger strikes were difficult for the staff, particularly the medical staff.
Because they were asked to administer feedings through artificial meth-
ods three times a day to 55 hunger strikers, the staff was working nonstop
without much rest. He feared that mistakes in the form of medical
accidents or infection were becoming more likely, so he recommended
administering feeding tubes to each hunger striker twice a day. As Barker
noted, hunger strikers protested the reduction in the number of times they
would be forcibly fed because it reduced their contact with prison officials
and the effectiveness of using a hunger strike to disrupt the jails operation.
Instead of an additional feeding, a glass of milk was put within reach each
hunger striker.48
Promode Kumar Roy, one of the hunger strikers who was at the
Andamans at the time, recalled later that Barker’s intervention had
been successful; shortly after Barker’s visit, the demands made by the
prisoners were met and the hunger strike ended.49 Nonetheless, there
were more deaths. Just a few months later, another detainee, Sailesh
Chandra Chatterjee, died of malaria at Deoli. Officials concluded that
he had not taken the full dose of the medicine that was prescribed and
speculated that he had done so deliberately in order to assign “blame” to
the doctors and camp officials.50
In a chilling series of correspondence between Harry Haig, the Home
secretary in Delhi and Finney, the camp superintendent at Deoli, who
had witnessed this string of deaths by suicide, hunger strikes, and illness,
Haig expressed his fears that hunger strikes had become too common as
a form of protest. Finney wanted the hunger strikes to end at their
“natural conclusion,” to which Haig rebuked him and expressed hope
that intervention was considered a possibility before the “point of
death.”51

48
NAI, Home Political File 44/80/1933, “Hunger Strike of Four Detenus in Deoli,”
pp. 7 12: Letter from Lieutenant Colonial F. A. Barker, OBE, IMS, Inspector
General of Prisons, Punjab to the Secretary of Govt of India, Home Department,
Simla, dated June 22, 1933.
49
NMML, Oral History Transcripts, Promode Kumar Roy, accession no. 854.
50
NAI, Home Political File 44/117/33, “Report on the Death of Detenu Sailesh Chandra
Chatterjee at Deoli.”
51
NAI, Home Political File 43/2/1934, “Hunger Strike at Deoli,” Correspondence
dated December 23, 1933, pp. 24 27.
 Detainees and the Government of India Act 195

When Philip Finney left Deoli after five years’ service, he was com-
mended for dealing well with a “body of neurotic and highly educated
youth, fired to a spirit of high fanaticism by a real, although misconceived
sense of patriotism, whom confinement often made abnormally morbid
and sensitive.”52 Again, the disposition of those detained was the cause of
their own physical weakness, rather than a barometer for how well the
government was doing in managing its detainee population. A few
months later, in part because of his handling of the Deoli hunger strike,
Finney was recognized for his services at Deoli with a knighthood – Order
of the British Empire – granted at King George’s Birthday Honours
in May 1934. The citation commended him for his ability to “administer
the jail with firmness and yet without causing unnecessary friction.”53

Detainees and the Government of India Act,1935

The conflict between the colonial government and Indian politicians
over the fate of the political prisoners – most of them detainees who had
not been convicted – was an important subject of discussion as the
Government of India Act of 1935 was under discussion in 1934 and
1935. In anticipation of the new reforms, in December 1934, Deoli’s
camp superintendent reported that the detainees seemed to have settled
into their routines at the camp as they imagined their imminent release:
“Their complaints have diminished in quantity . . . They believe that the
majority will be released either on the occasion of His Majesty’s anniver-
sary next year or on the inauguration of the new Government next
autumn.”54 Many Indians, legislators and detainees alike, believed that
political reforms to devolve the responsibility of government to Indian
leaders would include some concession to political prisoners, and that as
more Indians took charge, security laws would become less the norm.
The 1935 Government of India Act granted a larger measure of auton-
omy over each province to govern itself and moved beyond the provisions
of the Government of India Act of 1919. The 1935 act expanded the
franchise, increased the numbers of Indians elected to the central
Legislative Assembly, and expanded the provincial assemblies so that
those elected could form majorities. At long last, it seemed as if self-
government might be in sight, although – as Indian nationalists across
the subcontinent noted – whether the goal was dominion status or

52
CSAS, Finney Papers, Box 1, pp. 41 42.
53
NAI, Home Political File 43/24/34, “Request for Mr. P.E.S. Finney for a Statement of
His Services at Deoli.”
54
NAI, Home Political File 43/61/34, “General Appreciation of the Situation at Deoli
Camp Jail.”
196 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

complete independence was not specified. While British politicians

claimed the act as part of the progression toward constitutional reforms,
Indian politicians noted that the viceroy of India and Governor-General
of each province retained the right to veto any bills put forward by the
legislature; moreover, the viceroy or Governor-General could promulgate
ordinances or make proclamations “as circumstances require.”55
Because the act coincided with King George V’s silver jubilee celebra-
tions in 1935, liberal Britons and Indian politicians pressed for the release
of political prisoners as a show of good faith toward the constitutional
reforms, much as the royal amnesty of political prisoners had worked in
1919.56 The Indian National Congress called for an All-India Political
Prisoners’ Day on May 19, 1935, to draw attention to the issue, and half
a dozen Bengali- and English-language newspapers published editorials
demanding the release of political prisoners as integral to political reform;
Lokmanya, published in Calcutta, wrote, “Our advice to government is
either to release these detenus in the name of humanity and civilization, or
to institute cases against them.” Dainik Basumati, also published in
Calcutta, noted that “where there is no individual liberty, political liberty
is a mere mirage.”57 Also called “Detenu Day,” the organizers asked for
donations to the fund for detainees and their families, as well as support in
answering a questionnaire that polled detainees on their incarceration,
their economic status, and how long they had been held. Several meetings
were held across Calcutta, as nearly a thousand gathered at the Albert
Hall that evening to hear speeches by various leaders, such as Nellie
Sengupta, J. M. Sengupta’s widow; Sengupta had died in Ranchi while
under detention.58
In spite of these passionate entreaties, there was no royal pardon for
political prisoners in 1935. In a Cabinet meeting held on January 22,
1936, “the Cabinet concurred with the Home Secretary that in modern
conditions amnesties on the accession of the Sovereign to prisoners
undergoing sentence were an anachronism and that the King should not
be advised to grant them.”59
55
The full text of the act is available at www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1935/2/pdfs/ukp
ga 19350002 en.pdf [accessed June 30, 2016]; Chapter 2, sec. 43.
56
NAI, Home Political File 43/21/35, “Articles in the Bengal Press Advocating the Release
of the Detenus, Etc., on the Occasion of the King’s Silver Jubilee.”
57
NAI, Home Political File 43/21/35, “Articles in the Bengal Press Advocating the Release
of the Detenus, Etc., on the Occasion of the King’s Silver Jubilee.”
58
NAI, Home Political File 3/10/35, “Congress Campaign in Favour of Bengal Detenus and
Their Families. Counter Measures Adopted by the Govt of Bengal to Suppress Publication
of News Relating to ‘Detenus Day’ and Allied Subjects that Sympathise with Terrorists”;
WBSA Home Political File 505/35 (1 3), “Issue of Notification Re: Detenu Day.”
59
APAC, L/P&J/7/460, part I, “Release of Gandhi and Political Prisoners in India: Policy of
Government of India, Extract from a Cabinet Meeting, Dated 22 January 1936.”
 Detainees and the Government of India Act 197

Although members of the British cabinet argued that the fate of poli-
tical prisoners should not be the prerogative of the king, but of the
government, several months later, groups as diverse as the Indian mem-
bers in the Legislative Assembly and the British Women’s International
League pressed British officials to release political prisoners in India on
other royal occasions, of which there were many in 1936–1937. In
March 1936, as Edward VIII acceded to the throne, the Women’s
International League asked that “political prisoners in India not con-
victed of violence should be released.”60 A year later, after Edward had
abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson and George VI was made king, the
National Council for Civil Liberties wrote to Stanley Baldwin, then prime
minister in Britain,
There is a widespread feeling that the occasion of the Coronation of His Majesty,
King George, might be suitably marked by an amnesty (over and above any
general remission of sentences) being granted to political prisoners in Northern
Ireland, British India, British Crown Colonies, protectorates, and mandated
territories with a view to bringing about a general appeasement which is indis
pensable to the establishment of more cordial relations between the British people
and the people subject to British rule.61
Among those who signed the petition included the economist, John
Maynard Keynes, as well as the novelists Vera Brittain, E. M. Forster,
H. G. Wells, Rebecca West, and Sir Stafford Cripps, the left-leaning
Labour politician. Stanley Baldwin responded for the government that
there would be no coronation gesture, but that individual cases might be
considered.62 The Quakers published a pamphlet, “Political Prisoners in
India,” in which they referred to the detention camp as a “concentration
camp,” unbecoming of a liberal government.63
The calls for a royal pardon or clemency were accompanied by a series of
measures by Indian members of the Legislative Assembly who repeated
their efforts to pass resolutions that would show mercy toward those who
had been detained. In April 1936, Indian and European members debated
a resolution to release those who had been detained without trial. Akhil
Chandra Datta, elected to represent the rural non-Muhammadans of
Chittagong and Rajshahi districts, noted that that “whole case of the
60
APAC, L/P&J/7/460, part I, “Release of Gandhi and Political Prisoners in India: Policy of
Government of India, Petitions from Women’s International League, Dated
31 March 1936,” pp. 98 99.
61
APAC, L/P&J/7/460, part I, “Release of Gandhi and Political Prisoners in India: Policy of
Government of India, Dated 22 March 1937,” pp. 14 15.
62
APAC, L/P&J/7/460, part I, “Release of Gandhi and Political Prisoners in India: Policy of
Government of India, Dated 22 March 1937,” pp. 14 15.
63
APAC, L/P&J/12/314, “Professor Horace Gundry Alexander, Quaker: Visit to India,
Publication of Pamphlet Political Prisoners in India, 1930 37,” P&J 229/1937.
198 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

Government against these people [is that] they are potential terrorists and
not actual terrorists.” He argued that if they had committed crimes, they
should be tried under the ordinary law.64 Basanta Kumar Das, represent-
ing Shillong near the tea plantations in northern Bengal, reminded the
chamber that the political prisoners were the “best type of young men and
women of India who are detained merely on the suspicion of terroristic
proclivities.”65
Europeans in the chamber challenged these characterizations.
A. S. Hands, who had served as District Magistrate in Chittagong after
the Armoury Raid objected vehemently; he noted that of 1435 persons
detained without trial across India, 1428 were Bengali, implying that
Bengalis were prone to planning acts of terrorism. Henry Craik, Home
member, was even more aggressive in drawing attention to the campaign
of targeted assassination, noting that in the last five years, 24 officials had
been murdered and 36 injured, and 20 non-official Europeans murdered
and 44 injured, but not a single member of the Indian National Congress
had been harmed. From these figures, Craik concluded that the Congress
was the party of terrorism.66 These claims – directed toward Bengalis and
members of the Congress Party – were met with loud jeers. Instead,
Bengali representatives in the Legislative Assembly reiterated their claims
that Bengalis were not terrorists, but rather wished to abide by rule of law
as they had learned it from the British. Pandit Lakshmi Kanta Maitra
restated what had been said many times before about the value of rule of
law to Indians: “We in this country, who have been bred on British
constitutional law and British history, have learnt to value this right of
individual liberty more than anything else, and we must strenuously
oppose any measure of the Government which tends to bring it into
jeopardy.”67 The bill to release the political prisoners did not pass.
British officials, however resistant they were to release the political
detainees, were already planning for the eventuality that those in deten-
tion camps would return to political violence when they were released.
Partly as a response to the political pressure to release detainees, and
partly in fear that detainees would return to campaigns of violence if
released, the provincial government in Bengal initiated what it called

64
APAC, L/P&J/7/460, part I, “Release of Gandhi and Political Prisoners in India: Policy of
Government of India, Legislative Assembly Debates, Dated 7 April 1936,” pp. 56 62.
65
APAC, L/P&J/7/460, part I, “Release of Gandhi and Political Prisoners in India: Policy of
Government of India, Legislative Assembly Debates, Dated 7 April 1936,” pp. 66 69.
66
APAC, L/P&J/7/460, part I, “Release of Gandhi and Political Prisoners in India: Policy of
Government of India, Legislative Assembly Debates, Dated 7 April 1936,” pp. 51 56,
78 84.
67
APAC, L/P&J/7/460, part I, “Release of Gandhi and Political Prisoners in India: Policy of
Government of India, Legislative Assembly Debates, Dated 7 April 1936,” pp. 69 74.
 Detainees and the Government of India Act 199

a program for “training of detenues for agricultural and industrial occu-

pations” As John Anderson, governor of Bengal, explained to the
Legislative Assembly after the passage of the Government of India Act,
although it was clear there was “continued terrorist activity,” he urged
that “ameliorative measures may be justifiably undertaken,” to help
detainees become “useful citizens.”68 He noted that the government
was faced with severe overcrowding in its jails and detention camps,
with nonviolent civil disobedience prisoners mixing with suspected ter-
rorists and becoming radicalized. Moreover, the plan of segregating the
most dangerous and senior members of revolutionary groups in Deoli and
Buxa meant that they were able to educate and train a younger cohort
who were sent there; there was strong evidence that revolutionary con-
spiracies were being planned in the detention camps. Additionally, high
levels of unemployment and a demand for government jobs meant that
those who had been college or university educated were struggling to find
work. So Anderson endorsed a plan to train detainees in occupations that
would help them subsist after they were no longer receiving a detainee
allowance.
The plan was designed by S. C. Mitter, the Director of Industries of
Bengal, who was a member of the Indian Civil Service and among the
more high-ranking Indian members of Bengal’s administration. In a letter
to the political department of Bengal that laid out the rationale for setting
aside money for such a plan, he noted that such a program would produce
“good will toward the Government,” and that “the Government can very
well take the wind out of the sails of the agitators and hope to silence those
who are making capital out of the detention policy.” Mitter’s plan to train
the detainees had a particular political goal, which was to subvert ideas of
land redistribution that were being promoted by political groups in
Bengal, particularly those who were identified with socialism. He noted
that “Setting up young men in rural areas . . . will gradually bring about
a living and dynamic contact between the middle-class population on one
side and ignorant illiterate peasantry on the other.”69
The government was willing to provide training in either agriculture or
small-scale industry. District magistrates were asked to recommend
detainees who were in village or home domicile, or perhaps even those

68
WBSA, IB File 989/1935, “Training of Detenues for Agricultural and Industrial
Occupations,” in printed pamphlet, “Outline of a Scheme of Training for Agricultural
and Industrial Occupations,” cited from a speech given by the governor on August 28,
1935.
69
WBSA, IB File 989C/1935, “Training of Detenues for Agricultural and Industrial
Occupations,” Letter from S. C. Mitter to Additional Secretary, Government of
Bengal, Political Department, dated June 6, 1936.
200 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

in lesser detention centers such as Berhampore. The initial group of those

recommended ranged in educational level from high school graduates to
those who had engineering degrees. The agricultural side opened
in December 1935, to take advantage of the dry season in Bengal; the
start of the industrial training was a little more flexible.
To start with, there were three agricultural camps that trained 25
detainees each. Each training site had 500 bighas of land, with 50 desig-
nated for dorms and places to conduct experiments. Each detainee would
stay in the dorms for three seasons, learning a full cycle of farming and
harvesting; they would receive a monthly living allowance and stipend
from the government, and an additional sum to help them buy or settle on
a piece of land when they completed the program. Government officials
acknowledged that “it may be true that middle-class youths may be averse
to cultivation” because of “their temperament and tradition,” but they
could learn to grow crops that “do not require manual labour.”70 In the
applications that came into the political department for this scheme, it
became quickly clear that many of the gentlemanly terrorists came from
landed families because local officials reported that those who volun-
teered for agricultural training had family land to cultivate.71
The industrial training scheme planned for 14 training sites with 15
detainees in each with a grant of about Rs. 1700 when they completed the
program to help them begin their own workshops. In this scheme, detai-
nees once trained were assigned to apprenticeships with local businesses
until they could start their own companies. As in the case of agriculture,
officials suspected that bhadralok were unlikely to want to make umbrel-
las, but with some training, they could supervise those doing small-scale
industrial work. By the end of 1937, about four hundred men had gone
through the training scheme and nearly Rs. 50,000 had been disbursed by
the government.72
Officials in Bengal hoped the camps would re-educate those inclined to
political violence and make them more “hardworking,” as one official
wrote. Yet, these ambitions were often stymied. In April 1936, shortly
after the DumDum industrial camp had opened, a well-known ex-
revolutionary terrorist, Barindra Ghosh, who had been incarcerated in

70
WBSA, IB File 989/1935, “Training of Detenues for Agricultural and Industrial
Occupations,” printed pamphlet, “Outline of a Scheme of Training for Agricultural
and Industrial Occupations,” part III.
71
WBSA, IB File 989/1935, “Training of Detenues for Agricultural and Industrial
Occupations,” Letter dated February 20, 1936 from C. J. Minister, IP, Superintendent
of Police, Bakarganj, C.E.S. Fairweather, Deputy Inspector General of Police, IB, CID
and Letter dated February 13, 1936 from T. Woodcock, commandant of Berhampore to
J. N. Talukdar, Additional Deputy Secretary, Political Department.
72
APAC, L/P&J/12/395, “Revolutionary Activities in India, 1938 41,” p. 108.
 Detainees and the Government of India Act 201

the Andamans in the 1910s and released by royal amnesty in 1919, visited
the trainees “with a view to preach loyalty and to tell the detenues the
consequences of terrorism and anarchism.” But officials reported that by
training them in yoga, he had made them “vacant-minded,” in other
words, the very opposite of hardworking and useful.73
Although the programs filled quickly and there were more applicants
than could be accepted, some detainees resisted what they saw as
a governmental effort to train the gentlemanly terrorists into employment
that was beneath their social status. Once again, Deoli’s detainees proved
to be the most vocal in protesting the government: in a report filed by the
commandant at Deoli camp in September 1935, of the 250 detainees
there, he noted that many knew they were going to be released soon and
were not keen to apply for additional training. Many of the detainees felt
they were overqualified for the program, noting that they were “lawyers,
engineers, doctors, and journalists.” In a written petition, some detainees
expressed the fear that the government was trying to erode the social
status of the gentlemanly terrorists and undermine the formation of a new
nation-state: “The middle-class is always the brains of a nation and in
Bengal terrorists come from the middle class. Government’s policy is to
suppress terrorism by exterminating the middle class . . .”74 As several of
these men later reported, they spent their time in detention reading
Marxist texts, educating themselves on socialist ideas, and earning uni-
versity degrees.75
As British officials, Indian politicians, the detainees, and advocates
for the detainees debated when political prisoners would be released
from internment camps, most imagined that the promulgation of the
Government of India Act would change the relationship between the
political prisoners and the government because each province would
have legal oversight over their own prisoners. The 1935 Act devolved
the authority to manage political prisoners to each province, provided
there was no risk to national security. Technically, Section 125 of the act
put the matter of all prisons and prisoners in the hands of the provincial
governments, something that was widely hailed as political progress. But
section 126 preserved the executive’s authority over security and put the
matter back into the hands of the central government by stating that any
prisoners who were seen to be a threat to the security of the state would
remain incarcerated.

73
WBSA, IB File 77/36, “Detenus incidents at DumDum Industrial Camp.”
74
WBSA, IB File 989/1935, “Training of Detenues for Agricultural and Industrial
Occupations,” Copy sent to Intelligence Branch, Calcutta on September 22, 1935, by
Commandant, Deoli.
75
Laushey, Bengal Terrorism, pp. 102 10.
202 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

Throughout 1936 and early 1937, Indian politicians began to

campaign for provincial elections. Some politicians, particularly those
who were Hindu and belonged to the Indian National Congress, ran for
election to the Bengal Legislative Assembly by campaigning on a platform
of unconditional release of all political prisoners. The issue of political
prisoners remained at the forefront of public outrage.
At the close of 1936, several more Bengal detainees suddenly committed
suicide. In September 1936, Nabajiban Ghosh hung himself in Faridpur
district, where he was detained on village domicile; he had been under
detention since April 1934.76 A month later, Santosh Chandra Ganguli,
who had been detained at Deoli, was found hanging in his room after
he was told that the surgery to remove his appendix was delayed.77
In November, Krishna Pankaj Goswami committed suicide in Malda
district, where he had been imprisoned.78 Leading figures who were usually
on opposite ends of the political spectrum, such as Rabindranath Tagore,
the poet and literary scholar, and B. C. Chatterjee, president of the Bengal
Hindu Mahasabha, allied together and demanded an inquiry. Chatterjee,
among others, called for a “ceaseless agitation for the release of Bengal
detenus . . .”79
This rash of suicides was unusual in that two of the three had been
incarcerated either in home or village domicile, which was considered
a lesser form of imprisonment than the detention camps; as Mohan Lal
Saxena, a member of the Legislative Assembly noted, even when they
were detained in home or village domicile, these internees felt isolated,
particularly after the “companionship” of camp life.80 Kept from seeing
their family and friends, several left notes in which they spoke to the
question of their “segregation” from their communities. Nabajiban
Ghosh, who was in village domicile in Faridpur district, a place that he
had been for nearly eighteen months after he had been released from
internment at Berhampore, wrote in English: “I am compelled to put
myself into death by Government, for the troublesome punishment of
detention, especially of internment. I have to lead a segregated life here.
Being away, from my parents for three years and without association.”
In Bengali, he left a different note that was (poorly) translated as “Please

76
NAI, Home Political File 43/35/36, “Suicide of Krishna Pankaj Goswami under Home
Domicile.”
77
NAI, Home Political 43/29/36, “Suicide of Santosh Chandra Ganguli at Deoli.”
78
NAI, Home Political File 43/35/36, “Suicide of Krishna Pankaj Goswami under Home
Domicile.”
79
NAI, Home Political File 43/35/36, “Suicide of Krishna Pankaj Goswami under Home
Domicile.”
80
NAI, Home Political File 43/39/35, “Allegations Made by Mr. Mohan Lal Saxena, Re:
Treatment of Bengal Detenus in Village or Home Domicile . . .”
 Detainees and the Government of India Act 203

forgive me for the misdeed, I am going to do I know it to be a cowardly

death but unable to bear the segregation of mind I am doing this thing
[sic].”81
By the time provincial elections were held under the terms of the
Government of India Act in the March 1937, over 2500 suspected revo-
lutionary terrorists remained in British detention camps and jails across
Bengal.82 The Indian National Congress had won the majority of seats in
most provinces, except in Bengal and in Punjab, where coalitions of other
political parties had won. In United Provinces and Bihar, Indian ministers
authorized the release of all political prisoners and then resigned when the
viceroy vetoed a large-scale release.83 In Bengal, elected members of the
Congress were in the political opposition and they attempted to form
a coalition with the Krishak Praja Party (KPP), which fell through, leav-
ing the fate of political prisoners uncertain. The issue of the Bengal
detenus, which had been central during the election campaign, fell into
the background of political discussion as issues having to do with peasant
and communal unrest became more prominent. The coalition between
Fazlul Haq’s Krishak Praja Party and the Muslim League drew attention
to issues affecting land tenancy, agricultural debt, and wider access to
educational institutions. These were all issues that attempted to reform
the standards of living at non-elite groups rather than the bhadralok
population. Crucially, the newly elected Huq ministry, which was seen
by its opponents to represent interests of peasant cultivators in eastern
Bengal, many of whom were Muslim, seemed to show little concern for
the political prisoners, most of whom were upper-caste Hindus from the
same parts of Bengal, whose landed interests were seen to be in conflict
with peasant cultivators’ interests.84
There was talk of closing Deoli down, but as colonial and provincial
officials noted, the Government of Bengal did not have an alternative site
to place over 300 detainees who were still housed there.85 Negotiations
had been underway for several months between colonial officials and the
chief minister of Bengal, Fazlul Huq, but there had been little agreement
over how to deal with political detainees. It fell to the Bengal Provincial

81
NAI, Home Political File 43/35/36, “Suicide of Krishna Pankaj Goswami under Home
Domicile,” D. O. no. 581 X, Calcutta January 6, 1937.
82
APAC, L/P&J/7/460, part I, p. 48; APAC, L/P&J/12/395, “Revolutionary Activities in
India, 1938 41,” pp. 106 7.
83
Sherman, State Violence, pp. 102 10.
84
Chatterji, Bengal Divided, Introduction and Chapter 3, esp. pp. 104 08; Bose, His
Majesty’s Opponent, Chapters 3 and 4.
85
NAI, Home Political File 24/14/36, “Proposed Resolutions in the Legislative Assembly
Regarding Repressive Policy and Recommending the Release of State Prisoners and
Detenus.”
204 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

Congress and the Bose brothers, in particular, to actively negotiate for

release of political prisoners. Between the elections in 1937 and 1945,
the issue of political prisoners in Bengal – which had been a national
issue that had been addressed in the British Parliament and in the Indian
Legislative Assembly – became a regional and communal issue that built
upon other causes for discontent among the largely Hindu bhadralok,
who felt that they had been abandoned both by the colonial state and
local politicians.
As government officials and Indian politicians debated what to do
with the detainees who had been kept in detention camps, there was
a wave of hunger strikes in Bengal’s detention camps. It started with
hunger strikes in the Cellular Jail on the Andaman Islands on July 27,
1937, where out of a total 300 prisoners, 259 were from Bengal.86
A telegram from prison officials in the Andamans alerted mainland
officials that 180 of the “terrorist convicts” had gone on hunger strike
and demanded the “(1) unconditional release of all detenus, State
prisoners, and convicted political prisoners; (2) withdrawal of orders
of internment and repeal of repressive laws; (3) abolition of system of
deporting political prisoners to the Andamans and return of those at
present there to India; (4) all political prisoners to be treated as division
2 (b class) prisoners.”87 Within a week, Reuters reported that 250
detenues at Berhampore had also taken up a hunger strike.88 A week
after that, 202 detainees at Deoli went on hunger strike.89 By the end
of August, between the four detention camps holding Bengali detainees,
nearly 800 were on hunger strike as officials wondered how a seemingly
coordinated effort at hunger striking emerged from camps located at
such a distance from one another.
The Bose brothers, Subhas and Sarat, and Bengal’s great literary figure,
Rabindranath Tagore, came together to persuade the Government of India
to release the political prisoners before any more died in the government’s
custody. The Government of India responded that no releases would be
made until the hunger strikers ended the strike. They attempted to put
pressure on the hunger strikers, promising that release was imminent.
On August 27, a month after the hunger strike began, Gandhi sent
a telegram to the hunger strikers: “I venture to add my advice to
Gurudev Tagore’s and Working Committee’s request to abandon strike
relying upon us all trying best to secure relief for you. It would be graceful
on your part to yield to nationwide request.” To this plea, Gandhi asked
86
APAC, L/P&J/7/1297, P&J no. 3489/37, pp. 169 71.
87
APAC, L/P&J/7/1297, P&J no. 3327/37, p. 185.
88
APAC, L/P&J/7/1297, P&J no. 3787/37, p. 119.
89
APAC, L/P&J/7/1297, P&J no. 3889/37, p. 73.
 Detainees and the Government of India Act 205

that any who had abandoned terrorism make an assurance that they would
not return to terrorist activity if they were released.90
In the aftermath of the hunger strikes of 1937, prison officials pro-
ceeded with negotiations that had been suspended during the hunger
strike to transfer some of the prisoners – those with medical conditions –
to prisons in Bengal.91 Some sixty prisoners returned to the mainland on
a boat from the Andamans on September 22, less than a month after the
hunger strike ended. From the end of August until early November,
almost 600 prisoners were released from the various detention camps
and prisons, including those who had less than 18 months left to serve on
their sentences. In late November, in the course of ten days, some 1100
detainees were released into the general population.
Although British officials dithered about releasing political prisoners,
once these prisoners started to be released en masse from late 1937
onward, the momentum increased and all but six hundred remained in
detention at the end of 1937. British officials in India and in Great Britain
explained that the release of prisoners had always been part of the plan
and that the problem of revolutionary terrorism was now in the hands of
the Bengal provincial ministries.92

Detained or restricted Detained or restricted

on August 9, 193793 in December 1937

Under Regulation III 16 16

In jails and camps under section 2 732 246
In home domicile 367 261
In village domicile 758 11
In training camps 76 107
Externed from Bengal 38 37
In jail or under trial 25
Released conditionally or under minor 571
forms of restraint

Of the six hundred men and women who continued to be detained for
their activities in conspiracies, slightly over 250 remained in jails or
detention camps, slightly fewer than 250 remained in home or village
domicile, and three dozen were considered dangerous enough to be
90
APAC, L/P&J/7/1297, P&J 3888/37. 91 APAC, L/P&J/7/1297, P&J no. 3916/37.
92
APAC, L/P&J/12/395, “Revolutionary Activities in India, 1938 41,” pp. 106 07.
93
APAC, L/P&J/12/395, “Revolutionary Activities in India, 1938 41,” pp. 106 07 from
a printed leaflet, “Note on the Policy and Activities of the Terrorist Parties in Bengal from
1937 to August 1939,” compiled from records in the Intelligence Branch,
C. I. D. Bengal, Bengal Government Press, Alipore, 1940.
206 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

externed outside the province.94 Gandhi was brought in by the British

government to visit those in detention camps in order to implore them to
sign an assurance that if they disavowed all violent activities, they would
be released and amnestied by the British government.95 Between Gandhi
and the British government, this was a moment of accord and political
opportunity. By requiring the revolutionary terrorists to declare them-
selves Gandhian, Gandhi could achieve a political victory for nonviolent
methods. The government, which wanted to release the political prison-
ers because of the financial costs, could represent the release of political
prisoners as something for which Gandhi had taken responsibility.
Gandhi went about visiting the detainees in and around Calcutta and
attempted to persuade them to accept nonviolence as their creed. Many
revolutionary terrorists, Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty, Bina Das, Kamala
Dasgupta, Bhupati Majumdar, Arun Chandra Guha, Shanti Ghosh, and
others later recalled these (and other) conversations with Gandhi in their
memoirs.96 Throughout, on the advice of lawyers, most detainees refused to
sign such declarations, arguing that since they had never been lawfully tried
in a court, they could not refuse to commit acts for which they had never
been convicted. Many also remained committed to using political violence
as a vehicle to press the British to leave India, although the Jugantar group
encouraged their members to join Congress, which Bina Das, Kamala
Dasgupta, and Shanti Ghosh did upon their release in 1938.97
In April 1938, Gandhi released a statement to the press that explained
that he accepted the refusal of some detainees to sign assurances: “They
[the detenus] have made it absolutely clear to me that they would give no
assurance to anyone for the purpose of purchasing their freedom . . .
As a civil resister, I would not be guilty of inducing any political prisoner
to give such assurances.”98 Through this public statement, Gandhi
offered recognition that those espousing political violence were also civil
resisters who adhered to their own beliefs and were willing to sacrifice
a great deal to stand by their principles. Although he disagreed with them,
Gandhi continued to agitate on behalf of those who had been detained

94
APAC, L/P&J/12/395, “Revolutionary Activities in India, 1938 41,” pp. 106 07.
95
CWMG, vol. 72, pp. 160 61
96
WBSA, IB File 422/40, “Bina Das,” which shows that she was in detention from 1941 to
1945, then joined the Congress; T. Chakrabarty, Thirty Years, pp. 220 21; NMML, Oral
History Transcripts, Bhupati Majumdar, accession no. 235, who writes that he, Shanti
Ghosh, and Suniti Sengupta (the two women who had assassinated the district magistrate
of Tippera), met with Gandhi in Midnapore in 1939; NMML, Oral History Transcripts,
Arun Chandra Guha, cited in Rama Hari Shankar, Gandhi’s Encounters with the
Revolutionaries (New Delhi: Siddarth Publications, 1996), p. 156.
97
NMML, Oral History Transcripts, Shanti Das, accession no. 648.
98
CWMG, vol. 73, p. 80
 The Ex detainee as Political Activist 207

without charge for many years and demanded that all political prisoners
be released by April 13, 1939. By the end of 1938, the government
released all several dozen men and women, even though very few had
taken a vow to abandon political violence.99 Several more went on hunger
strike in July 1939, causing another round of public controversy. A widely
circulated letter on behalf of the Political Prisoners’ Subcommittee of the
Bengal Provincial Congress Committee was published in a half dozen
newspapers in August 1939, again drawing attention to the plight of
revolutionary terrorists who had been detained under suspicion of sedi-
tion, but not been charged of any crime. Written by ex-detainee Bimal
Pratibha Devi and addressed to the International Committee for Political
Prisoners in New York, it noted that the introduction of “responsible
government in the provinces,” should have improved matters, but that
suspected revolutionary terrorists remained in detention.100

The Ex-detainee as Political Activist, 1938–1942

The Government of India Act of 1935 put the burden on administering
detainees and political prisoners on the ministries in each province, which
were led by Indian ministers and civil servants. Emergency laws were
allowed to lapse, guided by the logic that Indian ministries and leaders
would not be so appealing to revolutionary terrorists. In theory, provincial
governance was intended to provide Indian politicians and activists with
political autonomy. But in practice, colonial officials from the prime
minister’s cabinet on downward kept close track of what was happening
in Bengal, particularly with Bengal’s detainees, who had been released
into the general population. In the quarterly surveys that the secretary of
state for India provided to his colleagues in the British cabinet, in the
provinces where Congress had formed ministries, the secretary of state
reported that “there has been a widening breach between . . . the followers
of nonviolence and left-wing extremism.” He argued that the government
was overworked because Congress officials were inefficient and politically
misguided. Yet, he noted approvingly that Bengal was being led by a non-
Congress ministry in which the problem of terrorism was being ably
handled by the Huq ministry.101
99
APAC, L/P&J/12/395, “Revolutionary Activities in India”; L/P&J/8/695, collection
117 G 2.
100
WBSA, Home Political File 427/39, “Letter by Bimal Pratibha Devi on Behalf of the
Political Prisoners’ Subcommittee of the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee to the
International Committee for Political Prisoners, New York.”
101
PRO, CAB/24/276, Memorandum by the Secretary of State for India, “Survey of the
Political and Constitutional Position in India from 1st November 1937 to
31st January 1938,” p. 19; CAB/24/284, Memorandum by the Secretary of State for
208 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

Soon after the Huq ministry took office in Bengal, intelligence and
police officials who had long been involved with Bengal’s detainees
expressed grave concerns about what would happen when the detainees
were released. As one report by the Intelligence Branch noted, “detention
gave them opportunities which they had never had to the same extent
before, to meet together, to exchange ideas, to . . . prepare plans for the
future, to arrange meetings after release.” Officials feared that detention
had enabled revolutionary terrorist groups to reorganize; moreover, offi-
cials believed that the leaders and members of secret societies who had
been underground throughout the late 1920s and 1930s were, after a long
period of detention, able to form bonds with leaders from other areas in
Bengal.102 Camp officials noted that many detainees had studied com-
munism, Marxism, and socialism while in jail in the 1930s (supported by
the government’s program in loaning books from the Imperial Library),
and debated how an “armed revolution of the masses” might be brought
about in India. In spite of the radical politics that detainees were said to
embrace, there were rifts between the leadership and membership of the
two main revolutionary societies, Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar.
The Jugantar group explicitly rejected terrorism and sided with the
Congress as it planned to work with the Bengal Provincial Congress to
bring about Indian independence; this was much the same strategy this
group had used in the early 1920s, when Jugantar members had joined
Congress during the Non-Cooperation Movement.103 The Anushilan
group did not fully abandon violence; intelligence reports suggested
various members joined radical offshoot groups such as Congress
Socialist Party (CSP), Revolutionary Communist Party of India
(RCPI), Anushilan Revolted Group, and the Communist Party of India
(CPI).104 Some reports suggested that there was confusion among revo-
lutionaries about who the enemy was now that provincial autonomy had
granted Indian officials to govern selective administrative portfolios
across India. The shift toward provincial autonomy meant there were

India, “Survey of the Political and Constitutional Position in India from

1st November 1938 to 31st January 1939,” Appendix, pp. 39 43.
102
APAC, L/P&J/12/395, “Revolutionary Activities in India, 1938 41,” pp. 106 07 from
a printed leaflet, “Note on the Policy and Activities of the Terrorist Parties in Bengal
from 1937 to August 1939,” compiled from records in the Intelligence Branch,
C. I. D. Bengal, Bengal Government Press, Alipore, 1940.
103
APAC, L/P&J/12/395, “Revolutionary Activities in India, 1938 41,” pp. 110 15 from
a printed leaflet, “Note on the Policy and Activities of the Terrorist Parties in Bengal
from 1937 to August 1939,” compiled from records in the Intelligence Branch,
C. I. D. Bengal, Bengal Government Press, Alipore, 1940.
104
APAC, L/P&J/12/395, “Revolutionary Activities in India, 1938 41,” pp. 19 20, P&J
(S) 1178/1938, dated New Delhi, December 3, 1938, file no. 47; see also pp. 85 85,
P&J (S) 1106/40, dated April 15, 1940. Laushey, Bengal Terrorism, pp. 110 34.
 The Ex detainee as Political Activist 209

fewer colonial officials to target. Instead of targeted assassination, revolu-

tionary terrorists appeared to be active in critiquing abstract ideas such as
“imperialism” and “capitalism.” Other official reports expressed con-
cerns that plans for a mass uprising might again devolve into individual
acts of terrorism and lead to further political instability.105
There was an uneasy peace between former political prisoners
and intelligence and police officials in Bengal. Between early 1938,
when the majority of detainees were released, and the end of 1939,
when the Second World War began, officials continued to monitor
those who had been identified as politically dangerous or subversive.
But there were few legal ways to arrest or detain anyone who had not
committed a crime, yet might be planning a conspiracy against the state.
Officials complained that the government was vulnerable if there was
another recrudescence of terrorism. As correspondence between the
government in Calcutta and India Office in London showed, the
Government of India Act had changed the definition of what constituted
sedition: since all provincial decisions could be overridden by the British
Viceroy, Indian ministers who were now governing provincial matters
were not considered “persons appointed to administer executive govern-
ment.” Because attacks on Indian ministers did not legally constitute
sedition, the government was hamstrung if it wanted to clamp down on
these groups.106
Reports suggested the radical political change was on the agenda of
those who had been active in revolutionary terrorist groups, which now
appeared to include a large number of smaller associations. From the
perspective of intelligence branch officials, the Bose brothers had moved
the Bengal Congress into a more radical direction with the support of ex-
detainees. Furthermore, Subhas Chandra Bose was elected to the pre-
sidency of the Indian National Congress in early 1939 and police officials
monitored his ties with revolutionary terrorist groups. The Bengal
Provincial Congress was eventually expunged from the Indian National
Congress for being so recalcitrant on the issue of its leftist politics, which
left Bose and his supporters without a national political strategy.107

105
APAC, L/P&J/12/395, “Revolutionary Activities in India, 1938 41,” pp. 26 41, P&J
(S) 284/1939, dated New Delhi, January 9, 1939, no. 4; pp. 69 72, dated November 12,
1939, letter from Government House Calcutta, to Sir Findlater Stewart, under
secretary of state for India, dated November 12, 1939; pp. 63 64, P&J (S) 533/1938,
dated May 19, 1939, Simla to India Office, London.
106
APAC, L/P&J/12/395, “Revolutionary Activities in India, 1938 41,” pp. 69 72,
dated November 12, 1939, letter from Government House Calcutta, to Sir Findlater
Stewart, under secretary of state for India, dated November 12, 1939.
107
Chatterji, Bengal Divided, pp. 126 30.
210 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

Throughout 1938 and 1939, the Intelligence Branch continued to keep

track of former detainees, building on the information they had gathered
from their observations of those kept in detention camps. After detainees
were released, district intelligence officials were asked to note what sorts
of social and political activities they were participating in. In a survey of
activities in each district, magistrates were asked to document whether
there had been receptions or demonstrations held to honor those who had
been detained. In a number of districts, ex-detainees had been garlanded
by their followers, made speeches, and appeared at rallies to gain support
for the political parties they supported, whether it was Congress or
another group.108 In districts such as Tippera, where 81 detainees
returned to their homes, they were “praised as heroes” in public rallies
and meetings.109 Speeches about their “high ideals” kept the political
goals or a revolution at the forefront of public discourse, even though
there were many competing ideas of revolution and anticolonial resis-
tance. At the end of 1939, district reports listed ex-detainees or ex-
convicts who had opened libraries that were associated with the different
political parties, supervising study circles that were mainly teaching
the young or those interested in the Communist Party, while many
had become involved with peasants’ and workers’ organizations.110
Intelligence officials continued to monitor the press, who they noted
were being run by leaders of Jugantar and Anushilan Samiti, or other
kinds of “hooligans.”111 In annual reports that filtered back to the
Intelligence Branch, revolutionary literature, much like the kind that
had circulated in the 1920s, was in circulation once again, extolling the
virtues of those who had been martyred for the revolutionary cause.112
Calendar art of revolutionary terrorists such as Khudiram circulated
widely, showing him on the cusp of his execution.
The surveillance provoked many who were under surveillance to com-
plain. About a dozen ex-detainees living in Dacca complained of being
harassed by the police, being woken up in the middle of the night, being

108
WBSA, Home Political File 65/38, “Reception or Demonstrations Held in Honor of
Released Detenues or Prisoners Collection of Reports for H. E.’s Information”;
WBSA, Home Political File 47/38, “Report of Meeting to Welcome the Return of
Detainees.”
109
WBSA, Home Political File 47/38, “Report of a Meeting Organized by Kamini Kumar
Datta to Welcome the Return of the Detenues,” extract from D. O. 39/C,
dated January 10, 1938, from Commissioner of the Chittagong Division to Chief
Secretary, Govt. of Bengal.
110
WBSA, IB File21/39, Publications (official) note on the activities on ex terrorists in
1939; Chatterji, Bengal Divided, pp. 124 25.
111
APAC, L/P&J/12/395, “Revolutionary Activities in India, 1938 41,” pp. 44 46, P&J
(S) 395/1939, dated New Delhi, March 25, 1939, New Delhi.
112
WBSA, IB, File 250A/37, “Publications (Terrorist) Brought to the Notice of IB.”
 The Ex detainee as Political Activist 211

followed, and having their families interrogated when they had done
nothing wrong. The newly elected home minister, Khwaja Nazimuddin,
issued orders that these practices be “strictly forbidden,” although they
carried on.113 Even a year after his order, Kamala Chatterjee, who had
been detained from 1932 to 1937 on suspicion for her involvement in
a number of conspiracies had her home searched by police. The police
report noted that she had been seen with Kalpana Dutta, a friend from her
days in jail, who had delivered a suitcase full of Communist Party litera-
ture. The police found no banned books in Kamala Chatterjee’s posses-
sion and police surveillance had managed to annoy her neighbors.
Enrolled in classes at Calcutta University, she complained her life was
disrupted by the constant shadowing of police officers.114
Even if police officials used the category of the ex-detainee to closely
monitor the pace of politics in Bengal, the era of detaining political
prisoners was not coming to a close. When the Second World War started
on September 1, 1939, officials drew on wartime provisions to enhance
their ability to prevent acts of political violence. The enactment of the
Defence of India Rules in 1939 meant that wartime emergency rules
were in effect against those felt to be Britain’s enemies. Enacted from
September 3, 1939, to April 1, 1946, the act eventually comprised 200
pages of amendments and directions about how to “ensure the public
safety and interest and the defence of British India.”115 This included
targeting Germans, Italians, and Japanese, many of whom were rounded
up and put in internment camps. Deoli was repurposed to house a new
group of detainees.116
Although they were not directly named in the rationale of passing these
rules, the group most affected by these rules were former revolutionary
terrorists, whose subversive activities amounted to organizing rallies,
publishing political tracts, and becoming involved in peasant and labor
organizations. In an order issued by the provincial government on July 26,
1941, the Government of Bengal noted that “The policy of conditional
release has recently been reconsidered and Government have come to the
conclusion that the conditions in which it was justified no longer
obtain.”117 As one Indian official noted, it made little sense to detain
those who were seen to be opposed to the national interest (foreigners
113
WBSA, Home Political File 330/39, “Complaint by Ex detenus and Political Prisoners
Regarding Harassment by the Police.”
114
WBSA, Home Political 394/40, “Case of Kamala Chatterjee, Ex detenue.”
115
APAC, L/P&J/8/552, Collection 117/A15: Defence of India Act, 1939, and Ordinances,
see P&J 6024/1939, p. 47; APAC, L/R/5/292, “Defence of India Rules 26.”
116
WBSA, Home Political File W 153/44 and W 153/44, part I.
117
WBSA, Home Political File 20/1940, serial no. 2. Order no. 2484HJ, dated Calcutta,
July 26, 1941.
212 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

from Axis nations) while releasing terrorist prisoners, although he did not
clarify how political dissent was inimical to wartime needs.118
The Second World War, and in particular, Britain’s entry into it with-
out the support of politicians from the Indian National Congress, signifi-
cantly realigned the politics of India. There were some efforts and
compromise, such as the effort led by Stafford Cripps to promise India
self-government and dominion status within the empire if Congress
cooperated. But these efforts faltered because they were insufficient to
the demand for full independence. The Congress refused to support
Britain’s entry into the war, while the Muslim League and Communist
Party of India remained cautiously optimistic that supporting Britain
would lead to greater concessions after the war.
By 1941, the Bengal Government promulgated its own security mea-
sures with the support of the elected Legislative Assembly, passing the
Bengal Security Act to detain anyone suspected of disorder against the
province, leaving the question of disorder broadly defined. Just four years
after political prisoners cum revolutionary terrorists had been released
under the terms of the Government of India Act, the newly elected Bengal
government put about 400 ex-terrorists and ex-detainees back in deten-
tion, putting them in jails and detention camps. Many were arrested for
addressing crowds, possessing seditious literature, or distributing com-
munist literature, crimes for which they had fallen under suspicion under
British rule.119
By the middle of 1942, in the months before the Quit India campaign
began on August 8, 1942, more ex-terrorists found themselves in jail for
a wide range of dissenting activities having little to do with Quit India or
with Congress. Many were members of opposing political groups, mainly
of socialist-minded groups. In a series of interviews conducted by the
Intelligence Branch, detainees at the Hijli jail said that parties in the jail
included the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), Forward Bloc,
Jugantar, and Bengal Volunteers, groups that had welcomed ex-
detainees when they had been released in 1937.120
The Defence of India Rules had given the government the ability to
detain suspected revolutionary terrorists who were seen to threaten the
government’s war efforts. Yet, in a series of challenges posed in the
Calcutta Supreme Court, the act was seen to be legally problematic

118
WBSA, Home Political File 20/1940, serial no. 2.
119
WBSA, IB File 288A 39, “Re: List of Ex detenus, Ex state Prisoners, Terrorists and
Ex convicts Convicted (after Release) under the IPC Explosive Substances Act, Arms
Act, CPC and BSTO Act.”
120
WBSA, IB File 80/42, “Periodical Interviews with Security Prisoners in Hijli Special
Jail.”
 The Ex detainee as Political Activist 213

because those detained were not informed of what the cause for their
detention was, nor was there periodic review to release those who were no
longer under suspicion. The Chief Justice noted, “It was a surprise to me
when I found that there was no provision under rule 26 to inform the
detenu of the grounds on which he was detained and no provision for his
being allowed to show cause against his detention.”121 To rectify this
problem, the government passed the Restriction and Detention
Ordinance to specify that a cause had to be shown before detention.
The Defence of India Rules were supplemented by several other laws,
each tailored to contain the threat of political crimes. Because they were
no longer considered “political prisoners,” – the battle for increased
political representation in India had been won in the provisions of the
1935 act – the legislation created a new category, that of “security prison-
ers,” which necessitated a new set of printed instructions about their
status. As they had under British ministries, these newly classified security
prisoners filed a range of petitions to be recognized as a special class of
prisoners who should not be handcuffed, as political prisoners had not
been under British rule. Their petitions, which ranged from demanding
the right to having unrestricted correspondence with their families, to
demanding the right to contribute to humanitarian causes such as cyclone
relief or funding the Indian National Army, or asking for materials to
sketch and paint, kept officials busy in defining what the rules for deten-
tion should be under an Indian ministry.122 Six former terrorist detainees
who found themselves in Hijli in 1941 wrote: “It is morally wrong and
unjust to handcuff a prisoner still more to handcuff a security prisoner,
who deserves sympathetic and gentlemanly behavior and who has been
detained without trial is disgraceful.”123 As a cascade of petitions reached
the desks of the home department, R.E.A. Ray, the home secretary, wrote
with an evident lack of sympathy, “A dying grandmother is not in my
opinion a valid reason for letting a security prisoner out on leave.”124
Throughout the 1940s, many of whom had been unconditionally
released in 1937 and 1938, were detained again by the provincial govern-
ment. For instance, Ramesh Chandra Chatarji, a member of Sree
Sangha, spent much of the 1930s in and out of jail for his involvement
in a shooting case in Narayangunj, Dacca. He was released uncondition-
ally in June 1937, and rearrested in 1941, spending five years in Dacca,

121
NAI, Home Political File 44/57/43, “Observations of the Chief Justice, Calcutta High
Court Comparing the Right of Detenus under Defence Rule 26, Regulation III of 1818,
and UK Regulation 18B,” Letter dated October 26, 1943.
122
WBSA, IB File 309/40, “Rules, Allowances, History Sheets of Security Prisoners.”
123
WBSA, IB File 607/41, “Use of Fetters and Handcuffs on Political Prisoners.”
124
WBSA, IB File 309/40, “Rules, Allowances, History Sheets of Security Prisoners.”
214 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

Hijli, Rajshahi, Buxa, and DumDum. Chatarji was eventually released

April 1946.125 Similarly, Haralal Saha, who had spent four years in
detention at Berhampore, had also been unconditionally released in
1938, and found himself detained under the Bengal Security Act between
1941 and 1946.126 He was a member of Anushilan Samiti, which he
joined under the leadership of Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty, a well-
known revolutionary terrorist who had spent over thirty years in deten-
tion. Trailokya Nath, who is a subject of the next chapter, was detained
during Quit India and only released in 1946 from Dum Dum jail.
In March 1942, Fazlul Huq, the chief minister, announced that secur-
ity prisoners would be released once they agreed to a 15-minute interview
with a special tribunal in order to publicly give up their attachment to
violent forms of political protest. A number of detainees agreed to do this,
but refused to ride in the prison van, as they did not consider themselves
to be ordinary criminals.127 Unlike satyagrahis or nonviolent activists
involved in the Quit India movement, who were described as “keen on
flocking to jail,” security prisoners who had been accused of terrorism
protested vehemently against all conditions of detention, from an inade-
quate diet to being put in handcuffs, and kept prison officials busy with
their petitions and complaints.128
As the war came to a close and Britain made its plans for transferring
more power, Congress politicians in Bengal reiterated their demand that
all political prisoners be released. In a memo dated July 26, 1945, from
H.S.E. Stevens, of the Government of Bengal, he listed the demands put
forth by Congress and solicited the views of various officials, including the
Deputy Inspector General, Intelligence Branch. Again, Sarat Bose and
the Bengal Congress Committee demanded that detainees should be
released unconditionally, whether they were detained by the central
government or by provincial government; restrictions on movements of
detainees and political prisoners should be removed; cases of those con-
victed of political crimes should be reconsidered by a “popular judicial
tribunal”; arrest warrants of “absconders” should be cancelled; and all
prisoners who had served 14 years should be released.129 Based on

125
WBSA, IB File 259/33, “Ramesh Chandra Chatarji.”
126
WBSA, IB File 1560/33, “Haralal Saha.”
127
WBSA, IB File 166/42, “Production of Security Prisoners before the Tribunal in
Connection with the Review of Their Cases.”
128
Quote is from WBSA, IB File 607/41, “Use of Fetters and Handcuffs on Political
Prisoners”; see also WBSA, IB File 309/40 (2), “Rules, Allowances, History Sheets of
Security Prisoners.”
129
WBSA, IB File 575/40, part I, “Re: Absconders Untraced Members of Terrorist and
Communist Groups.” A handwritten note from June 6, 1946, suggests that a number of
Quit India agitators were still in detention, even though the war had ended.
 The Ex detainee as Political Activist 215

a report from the Bengal Congress, the working committee of the Indian
National Congress noted that there were an estimated 265 security pris-
oners still in jail, with ten being members of the All-India Congress
Committee. These included Bhupendra Kumar Dutta and Arun
Chandra Guha, who had spent much of the 1920s and 1930s under
government detention.130 Nearly two years later, the new Home
Secretary of the Government of West Bengal announced that all political
prisoners arrested at the time of the “Congress disturbances” would be
released – this meant most of those arrested during Quit India were
unconditionally released, but those belonging to the Tebhaga movement,
which had then gripped the countryside, were to stay in detention.131
Importantly, because the Communist Party had not been banned during
Quit India as Congress was, resentment against the Communist Party
when Congress came to power in West Bengal meant that communists or
those suspected of communism were detained.132
Those detained for their involvement in Tebhaga remained in deten-
tion for several years, often rearrested by the terms of the West Bengal
Security Act of 1948, which continued some of the repressive legislation
that had been enacted before British officials had transferred power to
Indians. As the rationale for this act explained, it was designed for “the
suppression of subversive movements,” with the definition of “subver-
sive” drawn from the Bengal Special Powers Ordinance of 1936 and the
Indian Press (Emergency Powers) Act of 1931, which had both been used
to great effect by the colonial government.133
In March 1948, the Communist Party was banned; by then, many ex-
detainees and terrorists, many of whom had spent time in detention under
the British, had become communists and thus found themselves detained
once again, this time under Congress party rule. Figures such as Ganesh
Ghosh, involved in the Chittagong Armoury Raid, and Suhasini Ganguly,
who had harbored the Chittagong raiders when they absconded, were
communists. Suhasini was detained between 1942 and 1945 for support-
ing her Congress colleagues in the Quit India movement, which the
Communist Party of India did not participate in. Both Suhasini and
Ganesh subsequently spent several months in 1948 and 1949 under the

130
NMML, All India Congress Committee papers, G 38, File 1487 (1945 46), “Political
Prisoners.”
131
WBSA, IB File 575/40, part III, Memo no. 827 P, dated October 14, 1947.
132
Sanjoy Bhattacharya, “An Extremely Troubled Relationship: The British Colonial State
and the Communist Party of India, 1942 44,” in Bishwamoy Pati, ed., Turbulent Times,
India 1940 44 (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1998), pp. 138 66.
133
National Library, Kolkata, GP 351.75 (5415) W52, Government of West Bengal,
Judicial and Legislative Department, West Bengal Security Act, 1948.
216 From Political Prisoner to Security Prisoner

West Bengal Security Act of 1948 in detention for their attachments to

communism.134
Over time, what had been called temporary repressive measures
became more or less permanent. These measures may have been enacted
to deal with the “special” situation of revolutionary terrorists or militant
nationalists in the 1920s and 1930s, but by the 1940s, even the reformed
provincial government comprised of Indian officials and ministers used
very similar emergency legislation to suppress political dissenters of all
stripes.

Conclusion
When the release of political prisoners became a campaign issue in the
provincial elections in 1937, many believed that when the matter of
political prisoners reverted to provincial ministries in the aftermath of
the Government of India Act of 1935, detentions without charge would
be discontinued. As moderate Indian politicians had promised through-
out the 1930s, if the colonial government abandoned emergency and
extraordinary laws to prevent terrorism and granted India political auton-
omy, conspiracies against the state would drop. These claims were only
partially true: after the 1937 elections, provincial ministries were made up
of a combination of British officials, elite Indian ICS officers, and elected
members of the different political parties. But detentions were not fully
abandoned as a strategy to suppress political opposition. In spite of
vociferous opposition to repressive legislation empowering the state to
detain political prisoners without charges or trials, when Indian politi-
cians of various party affiliations took office, they adopted many of the
same repressive legislative tactics of their colonial forbears. The Second
World War provided an occasion for a new round of imperial and pro-
vincial security laws, as the political disagreements about whether to
support the British effort in the war gave rise to a new round of surveil-
lance. When the Constitution of India was enacted in 1950, bans against
members of various political groups, including many ex-terrorists and ex-
detenus, were released unconditionally once again, only to be restrained
again under postcolonial emergency laws.

134
WBSA, IB File 752/30, “Suhasini Ganguly, a.k.a. Putu, Daughter of Late Abinash
Chandra of Khulna, Dacca, and Calcutta”; DNB, entries for Suhasini Ganguly and
Ganesh Ghosh.
6 Revolutionary Autobiographies: Postcolonial
Tellings of Nationalist History

By the time India became independent on August 15, 1947, several

thousand revolutionary terrorists, members of groups such as Anushilan
Samiti, Jugantar, Sree Sangha, and other underground secret societies
were freed from detention and imprisonment. Many had been in British
jails, detention camps, or village or house arrest for a decade or more.
At this incipient moment of nationhood, there was another surge of
autobiographies, memoirs, and accounts. Eager to stake their claim to
the history of India’s independence, memoirs and autobiographies by
those who identified as militants and revolutionaries from the 1910s
through the 1940s appeared in rapid sequence from the late 1940s
onward. Distinct from the memoirs and autobiographies that appeared
in the early 1920s, this round of autobiographies situated the revolution-
ary terrorist movement as an important antecedent in the emergent
history of India’s independence. Even before it was clear what India’s
independence would look like, or what shape the nation’s political for-
mation would take, revolutionary terrorists wrote histories that directed
attention to the individuals and events they felt were critical to under-
standing the subcontinent’s historical and political trajectory.
They were engaged in a historical debate about the future of postcolo-
nial India, which had special resonance for the province of Bengal.
In 1947, when India gained its independence, Bengal was divided.1
West Bengal, which was comprised of a Hindu majority population,

1
For the transition from colonial to postcolonial, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona
Majumdar, and Andrew Sartori, eds., From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and
Pakistan in Transition (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007); Ramachandra Guha,
India after Gandhi (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2007); Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997); Taylor C. Sherman, William Gould, and
Sarah Ansari, eds., From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and
Pakistan, 1947 70 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). For accounts specific
to West Bengal, see Sekhar Bandopadhyay, Decolonization in South Asia: Meanings of
Freedom in Post independence West Bengal, 1947 52 (London: Routledge, 2009) and
Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: 1947 1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007).

217
218 Revolutionary Autobiographies

joined India, while east Bengal, comprised of a Muslim-majority popula-

tion, became the eastern wing of the newly formed state of Pakistan.2
Many revolutionary terrorists, whose ancestral homelands were in eastern
Bengal, found themselves refugees living in west Bengal, or members of
a religious minority in east Pakistan.
Decolonization and partition gave rise to new and rapidly evolving
ideas of political and social formations among Indians who had been
active in opposing the British. Autobiographical accounts tethered the
individual life stories of revolutionary terrorists to a broader narrative
about the emergent community of an incipient nation-state. From
Jawaharlal Nehru’s Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal
Nehru and Gandhi’s An Autobiography: Or the Story of My Experiments
with Truth, to Nirad Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian,
the Indian autobiography emerged as a powerful genre for engaging
political and social ideas.3 Many of these autobiographies were politically
oriented, advocating for particular positions, as they constructed
a narrative of social and cultural traditions that were to be guides for
future conduct.4 Figures living through this important historical moment
of the Indian nation appeared fully aware that they were experiencing
historical shifts of national and perhaps global importance. The past tense
is very much in evidence in these memoirs, but so is the subjunctive
tense – what might have been or should be possible. In this subjunctive
mode, the lives of revolutionary terrorists, particularly those who lived
into the postcolonial era, gained a new purchase in the postcolonial
period.5
Earlier revolutionary terrorist accounts, which were the subject of
Chapter 2, detailed the need for revolutionary violence in order to over-
throw the British government. Intended in part to challenge the rise of the
Indian National Congress and figures such as Gandhi who promoted
nonviolent protest in the 1920s, revolutionary autobiographies had been
intended to recruit followers and explain how individuals could generate

2
Sana Aiyar, “Fazlul Huq, Region and Religion in Bengal: The Forgotten Alternative of
1940 43,” Modern Asian Studies 42.6 (2008): 1213 49; Haimanti Roy, “A Partition of
Contingency? Public Discourse in Bengal, 1946 47,” Modern Asian Studies 43.6 (2009):
1355 84.
3
Jawaharlal Nehru, Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru (London: John
Lane, 1936); Gandhi’s An Autobiography: Or the Story of My Experiments with Truth
(Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust, 1940); Nirad Chaudhuri’s, The Autobiography of an
Unknown Indian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951, 1968).
4
Javed Majeed, Autobiography, Travel, and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru, and Iqbal
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
5
Chris Moffat, “Experiments in Political Truth,” Postcolonial Studies 16:2 (2013):
185 201.
 Revolutionary Autobiographies 219

the conditions that were necessary for revolutionary change. These

accounts created historical links between Khudiram Bose and Kanai Lal
Dutta, assassins who had targeted a colonial official and a state informant,
and those who had been jailed for conspiracy against the state at the
Andamans, such as Barindra Ghosh, Ullaskar Dutta, Upendra Banerji,
and Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty. By linking different figures, revolution-
ary autobiographies of the 1920s provided a history of the movement and
created a sense of the networks that had supported the movement.
Accounts published in the late 1940s updated the lineages of the 1920s
with events and personalities of the intervening years. Many of the parti-
cipants in the movement had been tried in secret tribunals or kept in
preventive detention; as India became independent, they could openly
document their efforts to support armed struggle against the British.
While newspaper reports announced the attacks at the Writers’
Buildings or the Chittagong Armoury Raid at the time they occurred,
most police and intelligence records were sealed to the public. Revealing
the existence of secret plots, failed political actions, and networks that had
long been clandestine, these life histories told the history of Indian inde-
pendence from the perspective of figures who had spent long periods of
the 1920s and 1930s in detention or jail. Even as autobiographies indivi-
dualized the experience of exceptional figures, the life stories of the
revolutionary terrorist provided models for new forms of patriotism
appropriate for postcolonial citizens.
In this chapter, I focus on self-authored texts in order to better under-
stand how revolutionary subjects made the transition from a life lived
underground to become public figures at a moment of great debate and
historical possibility. I return to the autobiography written by Trailokya
Nath Chakrabarty, whose account I drew from in Chapter 2 to describe
what life in the Andaman Islands looked like; here, I focus on his account
of the movement through the 1920s and 1930s. The second half of the
chapter focuses on the autobiographies of several women revolutionary
terrorists: Bina Das, Kalpana Dutta (later Joshi), and Kamala Dasgupta
wrote accounts of their involvement in the revolutionary terrorist
movement.6 Women emerged as important political figures in the 1930s
across the political spectrum. In nationalist campaigns, women were
highly organized in debates about age of consent, widow remarriage,

6
The following section builds on material that has been published in two separate articles,
“‘History Makes Women Well behaved’: Revolutionary Women, Nationalist Heroes,”
Gender and History 25.2 (August 2013): 355 75 and “Gandhi and the Terrorists,” article
for special issue on “Writing Revolution; Practice, History, Politics in Modern South
Asia,” edited by Daniel Eelam, Kama Maclean, and Chris Moffat, South Asia: Journal of
South Asian History 32.23 (September 2016): 560 76.
220 Revolutionary Autobiographies

and women’s suffrage.7 These three women were well-known partici-

pants in the revolutionary terrorist movement in Bengal, although
Kalpana’s and Bina’s participation had been much better known to the
public because of their spectacular acts. By the middle of the twentieth
century, West Bengal became one of two Indian provinces (the other was
Kerala) that were widely known for progressive policies such as high rates
of literacy, particularly among women.
This incipient moment of nationhood might be called, following David
Scott, “after postcoloniality,” in which “after” constitutes the moment in
which those who had been colonized and rendered voiceless could shed
coloniality and write histories of their telling, drawing selectively from
past events and developments to begin to voice political claims and
imaginaries for the future.8 Drawing from Manu Goswami’s arguments
about the “utopian aspirations,” of the mid-century, the idea of revolu-
tion “was grounded less in a common or pre-given collective experience
than in a disjuncture between experience (the imperial present) and
expectation (a non-imperial future).”9 As narratives of India’s freedom
struggle emerged from various sources, Gandhi’s nonviolent campaigns
and the movement led by the Indian National Congress appeared to gain
center stage and explanatory power for the rise of India’s postcolonial
democracy. In Bengal, where Congress occupied the provincial ministry
in the transition period between 1947 and 1952, the views of Congress
merged into the views of a putatively unified nation.10 To contest this
trend, revolutionary biographers, memoirists, and historians pressed for
an alternative history that represented a more radical set of politics.
In addition, films about the Chittagong Armoury Raid and Khudiram
Bose appeared in Bengali cinema houses in the late 1940s, fueling popular
support for these movements.11
As alumni of groups such as Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar joined the
postcolonial citizenry, the autobiographies explained political choices

7
Geradline Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996); Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006);
Radha Kumar, A History of Doing (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1997).
8
David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999), ch. 4.
9
Manu Goswami, “Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms,” American
Historical Review 117.5 (2012), p. 1463.
10
In his preface, Trailokya Nath’s translator noted that as he was translating, the Freedom
Project, a government sponsored project narrating the history of Indian independence,
had omitted accounts of the Bengali revolutionaries. Translator’s preface, Thirty Years,
pp. 7 8; see also Bandopadhyay, Decolonization, pp. 67 69, 160 61; Vinay Lal,
The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2003), pp. 81 97.
11
Bandopadhyay, Decolonization, Chapter 2, fn 231.
 Revolutionary Autobiographies 221

available to those on the left. Some opted to join Congress and pressed
them to be more progressive; others joined the Communist Party, while
still others joined left-leaning parties, such as the Revolutionary Socialist
Party (RSP) and the Revolutionary Communist Party of India (RCPI).12
Those who joined Congress, such as Trailokya Nath, were jailed again
between 1942 and 1945, when the British government banned Congress
because it refused to support Britain in the war. The Communist Party
was banned in 1948. Although there were Congress ministries in West
Bengal starting in 1947, the CPI gained political visibility in Bengal
through the 1950s. The CPI comprised the major opposition party in
1952 in the first constitutional elections of the West Bengal Legislative
Assembly. Even though the party split and became the CPI (Marxist) in
1964, it eventually gained a majority in the provincial government in
Bengal in 1967. Those who had participated in the Chittagong
Armoury Raid in 1930 were released in the late 1940s; some proved to
be among the most active biographers and history-writers. Ganesh Ghosh
and Ananta Lal Singh published multiple accounts of Surja Sen’s life and
career as the leader of the raid in 1930 who had been hanged in 1933.13
Ganesh Ghosh was elected to the West Bengal Legislative Assembly as
a member of the Communist Party of India from 1952 to 1967, and then
became a member of the Lok Sabha, the national assembly.14 Their
colleague, Kalpana Dutta, became a member of the CPI as well, and in
the final chapter, she is contrasted with her friends, Bina Das and Kamala
Dasgupta, who joined the Congress.
By generating a postcolonial history of revolutionary terrorism, auto-
biographies began the process of making the terrorist into a freedom
fighter, one whose actions and sacrifices garnered public, and eventually,
government recognition. These men and women had been called many
things – terrorists, political prisoners, detenus, state prisoners, security
prisoners, and eventually, political sufferers. Although the category of
“political sufferer” might seem open-ended, it most often described
members of revolutionary terrorist groups who had been jailed or
detained in the previous two decades of anticolonial unrest. There had
been a modest political sufferers’ allowance given by Congress from the
late 1920s. In West Bengal, from 1947 annually through the early 1950s,
the state government approved an allowance to support those who could

12
Laushey, Bengal Terrorism, ch. 6.
13 .
Gan.eśa Ghosha, Biplabı̄ Sūrya Sena (Kalikata: Kalikata Biśvabidyalaya, 1976); Ananta
.
Singh, Mahānāyaka Sūrya Sena O Cattagrāma Biplaba (Kalikata: Granthaprakaśa, 1376.
[1970]); Ananta Singh, Sūrya Senera ˙Svapna
˙ o Sādhanā (Kalakata: Biśvaban.ı Prakaśanı,
1384 [1977]).
14
DNB, vol. II, pp. 40 42.
222 Revolutionary Autobiographies

not support themselves. By the end of 1950, 1600 political sufferers had
received some kind of financial support, with nearly a thousand receiving
government pensions and the right to take college and university exams.15
As revolutionary terrorists told the story of their actions and struggles,
enhancing and revising what had been reported in the press and by the
police, those active in the interwar decades became advocates for
a particular history of Indian independence that was rooted in Bengal,
and in particular, Bengal’s experience of being partitioned in 1947. East
Bengal, which comprised the ancestral homelands of many revolutionary
terrorists, joined Pakistan, which was created as a homeland for Muslims.
West Bengal became a part of India, and was comprised of a Hindu
majority. Many who had been involved in the revolutionary movement
became refugees and found themselves in Calcutta, the capital city of
West Bengal.16 Amid the disappointment of partition, they placed their
individual struggles amid the nation’s struggles, thus projecting an indi-
vidual and collective sense of their own historical importance into the
nation’s independence movement. By writing their own history, they
made themselves into historical subjects of a new nation that had a new
homeland.
The partition and their territorial displacement was an ironic twist for
many participants of the movement, because the first partition of Bengal
in 1905 had catalyzed the formation of groups such as Anushilan Samiti
and Jugantar. Moreover, the involvement of revolutionary terrorists in the
swadeshi campaigns of 1905 to 1911 had been credited as reversing the
1905 partition in 1911. The second partition and the loss of homeland
lurked behind these texts, as authors came to terms with communal
violence between Hindus and Muslims. As they reckoned with what
would happen in the aftermath of 1947, those who wrote memoirs ges-
tured to the ways that their particular history should be integrated into
a national narrative that was under construction.
In early August 1948, members of the “All-Bengal Political Sufferers’
Conference” met in Calcutta to consider how the case of political suf-
ferers, those detained or convicted for crimes of a political nature, should
have their contributions to India’s freedom struggle acknowledged.
Among the tasks the group set for itself, a subcommittee was appointed
to “write the lives of Indian martyrs and a history of India through the eyes

15
National Library, Kolkata, GP 354.5415, W52th, The Third Year of Freedom in West
Bengal (Calcutta: Director of Publicity, West Bengal, 1950), p. 44; G. P. 354.5415,
W52ff, The Fourth Year of Freedom in West Bengal (Calcutta: Director of Publicity, West
Bengal, 1951), pp. 71 72.
16
Romola Sanyal, “Hindu Space: Urban Dislocations in Post partition Calcutta,”
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39.1 (2014): 38 49.
 Maharaj Biplabi Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty 223

of the revolutionary movement.”17 A half-dozen men were involved,

including Bhupendra Kumar Dutta, whose historical essays from
Bengali periodicals had been revised into a full-fledged volume, Biplaber
Padachinha (On the Trail of Revolutionaries), which appeared as a single
volume in 1953.18 Among the other members of the group were Professor
Jyotish Ghosh, Dr. Bhopal Basu, Paramesh Roy Choudhury, Jamini Pal,
and Upendra Banerji, who had published his memoir shortly after he was
released from the Andamans by royal amnesty, and had worked with
Chittaranjan Das’s Swarajya Party in the 1920s.
Ex-detainees and security prisoners took control of their own history
and the nation’s historical narrative by explaining how they – most of
them elite, upper-caste, and educated – became involved in political
violence. Some admitted that the revolution they imagined had not
materialized as they had hoped, but felt that documenting their pasts
might provide others with inspiration for a different range of political
possibilities.

Maharaj Biplabi Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty

Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty’s autobiography, Jele Tris Bachar, or Thirty
Years in Jail, was written in Bengali during his last stint in jail in Dum-
Dum in 1944–1945. First published in 1946, it was translated and revised
into English in 1963. It was then reissued in Bengali, with a foreword
from the author that acknowledged the political protests in 1968.19
The Naxalbari uprising in western Bengal was ongoing, and a group of
students had led a Maoist insurrection against landlords who had dispos-
sessed peasant farmers of their land. Like many other revolutionary
terrorists, Trailokya Nath was born in eastern Bengal and identified
himself as a Brahmin; unlike most revolutionaries, however, after 1947,
he moved to Dacca, which became part of East Pakistan in 1947. He was
eventually elected a member of the Legislative Assembly in 1954, in
which he served until 1958, when martial law was declared across
17
WBSA, IB File 33/44, Report of the All Bengal Political Sufferers, conference held on
7 8 of August 1948.
18
Bhupendra K. Datta, Biplabēra Padacinha (Kalikata: Sarasbatı Laibrerı, 1953).
19
There are two versions in Bengali: Jele triśa bachara o Pāka Bhāratera svādhı̄natā saṃ grāma
[trans: 30 Years in Jail for India’s Freedom Struggle] (Mymensingh1968), and Biplabi
trilokya chakravarti atma kahani [trans: Rebel Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty’s Own Story]
(Dakshin. a Catara, Uttara 24 Paragan. a: Sam . gathanı Paricalaka Sam . sada, 1987);
Cakrabartı, Trailokya Natha Thirty Years in ˙Prison: Sensational Confessions of
Revolutionary. English ed. (Calcutta: Alpha Beta Publications, 1963). I have had pro
longed access to the English version from 1963 and the Bengali version of 1968; I briefly
looked at the 1946 Bengal edition in Bengali in 2009 at the National Library in Kolkata
and took some brief notes, but the book is now listed as lost.
224 Revolutionary Autobiographies

Pakistan and a military coup installed General Ayub Khan in power.

An elected official in east Pakistan, he lived in his natal village in
Mymensingh district until the final months of his life when he went to
Calcutta for medical treatment, where he died in 1970. The street that runs
in front of Writers’ Building, the central administrative office of West
Bengal, was renamed in his honor in August 1971, and is now known as
Biplabi Maharaj Trailokya Sarani.20 Ironically, there are few commemora-
tions to him in Bangladesh, where he lived much of his postcolonial life.
Written largely as a chronicle of his life, Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty
explained that he had long been a member of the Anushilan Samiti,
a secret society that was founded around the start of the century to over-
throw British rule in India through armed struggle. Unusually among
revolutionaries who documented their lives, he had been active in the first
wave of revolutionary activity in the 1900s and 1910s. He described his
initiation into Anushilan Samiti, his work to recruit when he was a leader
of a cell when he was still a teenager in school, and the work he did
through the period of his multiple incarcerations. Arrested and found
guilty of a conspiracy, he had spent nearly a decade in the Cellular Jail on
the Andaman Islands. After his release from the Andamans in 1921, he
became a peripatetic political activist who attended meetings of the
Indian National Congress as well as meetings in safe houses for revolu-
tionaries who were evading arrest. By the 1920s and 1930s, he was
considered a high-profile security risk by the government and kept
under detention using Regulation III and the Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Act (1925), which were the most serious of the govern-
ment’s detention laws. His participation in the 1942 Quit India move-
ment resulted in his final detention, from which he was released in 1945.
His full-time career as a revolutionary terrorist and political activist
spanned the final four decades of British rule and the first two decades
of an independent India and Pakistan. The details of Trailokya’s life,
which had been lived underground until he was nearly 50, became public
with the publication of his memoir. He published another memoir,
a series of short stories, and an explication of the Bhagavad Gita, which
was an important source of spiritual guidance for political activists ran-
ging from Gandhi to more radical thinkers such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak,
Sri Aurobindo, and Vinayak Savarkar.21

20
P. T. Nair, A History of Calcutta’s Streets (Calcutta, 1987), pp. 223 25.
21
Cakrabartı, Biplabı̄ Trailokya Cakrabartı̄ra ātmakāhinı̄; The influence of the Gita in
various quarters of Indian intellectual life, particularly those holding more radical
views, has been the subject of a number of excellent recent essays, including three from
a forum on the Bhagavad Gita: Andrew Sartori, “The Transfiguration of Duty in
Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita,” Modern Intellectual History 7. 2 (2011): 319 34;
 Maharaj Biplabi Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty 225

Jele Tris Bachara allowed Trailokya to tell the story of his life and situate
it within a longer history of Indian independence. Although he was known
to the public through newspaper accounts, his autobiography provided
a detailed account about what it had been like to participate in Bengal’s
long-running underground movement for Indian independence. He
revealed the many unknown details of his exploits, an account of those
he worked with, who he encountered in various jails and detention camps,
and how he understood India’s postcolonial condition. Dedicated to the
“brave patriots who sacrificed their lives . . . but whose names are
unknown to the Indian public,” his book drew attention to those who
had not been publicly acclaimed.
Trailokya’s text might be read in multiple ways. In Chapter 2, I focused
on his repeated refrain of the sacrifices that he and his group made over
the course of their lives. They lived on very little food and wore simple
clothes in order to disguise themselves as boatmen and laborers. Their
experience in the Andamans defined their commitments to the revolu-
tionary cause, with Trailokya suffering hunger strikes and hard labor.
This chapter focuses on new revelations, particularly as they were repre-
sented in distinct ways in the Bengali and English accounts. Between the
translations and different editions, various changes were made to the text,
with omissions or, alternately, supplementary information. Whether
Trailokya anticipated a different readership in English is unclear,
although his translator clarified that the account was informative for
a wider audience beyond Bengal.22
The most obvious difference between the various translations and
editions were in the subtitles – Thirty Years in Jail had a suggestive sub-
title, “Sensational Confessions of a Revolutionary,” while the Bengali
Jele Tris Bachar was subtitled “Pak Bharatera Sangrama” which could
be translated as “The Campaign for a Pakistan and India.” While
“Sensational Confessions” may have been intended to attract readers,
“Pak Bharatera Sangrama” more openly situated his life as part of a longer
movement that included the area of east Bengal where he continued to
live. The Bengali version was divided into chapters that described differ-
ent phases of the struggle for India’s independence, while the English
version was more narrowly marked by periods in prison and detention
and time in-between in which he continued to organize for Anushilan

Vinayak Chaturvedi, “Rethinking Knowledge with Action: V. D. Savarkar, the Bhagavad

Gita, and Histories of Warfare,” Modern Intellectual History 7. 2 (2011): 417 35; see also
Michael Silvestri, “The Bomb, Bhadralok, Bhagavad Gita, and Dan Breen: Terrorism in
Bengal and Its Relation to the European Experience,” Terrorism and Political Violence 21
(2009): 1 27.
22
Translator’s preface, Thirty Years, pp. 7 8.
226 Revolutionary Autobiographies

Samiti, the group he had joined as a young man. Remarkably, in the

English version that promised “sensational confessions,” the confessions
came at the end of the book and were added in 1963; in the Bengali
version, the admissions that he committed crimes appear throughout.
The book opened with a lamentation: “My life has not been
successful.”23 Trailokya explained that by some measure, whether suc-
cess was defined as earning a great deal, or winning honors, his life had
been a failure. He expressed frustration that the goal of independence had
not been fully reached. Even though he himself had not been cowardly or
afraid of death, the movement had not succeeded in bringing about full
independence for India.24 His account offered a kind of manifesto for
a movement that had only partially succeeded – the British had left India,
but India was not yet free. He argued that the goals of the movement had
been to uplift the lives of ordinary people, and that these goals had not
been advanced. He repeatedly noted that there was a difference between
“those days” and “nowadays,” as he mobilized his past to convey lessons
for the postcolonial subjects of the nation.
From this introductory passage, the English account briefly departed
from the Bengali account. The English version skipped and condensed
the first twenty pages of Trailokya’s account, which was a detailed retell-
ing of India’s history. In this potted history of India, Trailokya validated
the plot points in a historical timeline of India’s campaigns for indepen-
dence that had been articulated in other revolutionary accounts, while he
consolidated the contributions that Anushilan Samiti had made in raising
awareness among ordinary folk.25 Trailokya’s Bengali account took
a long detour through the history of Bharatvarsh, a land that had long
been occupied by foreigners, but had not fully developed a nationalist
spirit. Crediting the rise of Indian nationalism to British colonial policies,
Trailokya noted that Indians had long been protesting British rule, point-
ing to the 1857 revolts and the Mappila revolts in Malabar in the 1920s.26
He then narrowed to an account of the Anushilan Samiti, its founding
around the time of the swadeshi campaigns, and the important leaders of
both Anushilan and swadeshi who recruited followers in Barisal,
Calcutta, Dacca, Chittagong, Comilla, Rajshahi, and other places
where the group was strong. He explicitly linked the swadeshi campaigns
of 1905–1911 to the large and small leaders of Anushilan Samiti.
Alongside well-known Congress leaders such as Surendranath Banerjea

23
Jele Tris Bachar, preface.
24
Jele Tris Bachar, preface; Thirty Years, pp. 9 10; Bandopadhyay, Decolonizaation, passim.
25
Jogesh Chandra Chatterji, In Search of Freedom (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay,
1967), pp. 1 33.
26
Jele Tris Bachar, pp. 1 5.
 Maharaj Biplabi Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty 227

and Bramandhab Upadhyay, Chittaranjan Das, Subhas Chandra Bose,

and J. M. Sengupta were lists of local figures who would have been less
visible to the public and the police.27 By showing the personal links
between the public face of the Bengal Congress with those who were
pressing for armed rebellion, Trailokya’s accounts showed how two see-
mingly distinct campaigns for Indian independence, one militant and
another moderate, had been intertwined.
In spite of the success of the independence movement, he expressed
regret that India’s independence had not addressed the aspirations of the
leaders of Anushilan Samiti. He noted that the theory behind Anushilan
Samiti was to provide a way for every person, man or woman, to become
cultivated, both spiritually and physically; in this way, he and the leaders
of the movement believed that character, industriousness, and ethics of
asceticism could be developed. In India’s failure to address what we might
call inequality, he felt that the goals of the movement had not been
met. He described the character-enhancing training he went through –
learning how to do martial arts, drill, and lathi play, as well as how to fire
a gun and revolver. He detailed the vows that each initiate took, vows not
to lie, to follow orders and be compliant to the samiti’s leaders, and vows
not even to smoke bidis, the hand-rolled cigarettes commonly smoked by
young men. Trailokya emphasized that anushilan represented a higher
form of culture and cultivation, both moral and physical, and that the goal
of the group was to create the possibility of self-improvement for all,
which had a long history in Bengal.28
In addition to offering a fuller explanation of the ideological alternatives
offered by Anushilan Samiti, this Bengali version of the history of actions
carried out by Anushilan Samiti offered new information, naming figures
who had escaped police surveillance. Many who had participated in
smaller actions – robberies and bombing attempts – were not widely
known because they had not been leaders in the movement, but were
instead recruits and followers who participated in various small and large
actions throughout the 1910s and 1920s. Named for their acts of bravery
in Trailokya’s account, they became identified with the movement. For
instance, in a passage describing the Barha dacoity of 1908, Trailokya
relayed that the raid was conducted during the swadeshi campaigns in an
area that had been actively recruiting young men for participation in
Anushilan activities. In the dacoity, a zamindar’s home was raided by

27
Jele Tris Bachar, pp. 6 10, the complete lists appear on p. 8, 10, and 11; see also Thirty
Years, p. 153; Jele Tris Bachar, p. 145.
28
Jele Tris Bachar, pp. 9 10; see John Rosselli, “The Self image of Effeteness,” 121 48;
Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
228 Revolutionary Autobiographies

about 30 men for cash and jewelry; they escaped by night and rowed
themselves through a canal in the Dhaleswari river. When villagers were
alerted to the robbery, they chased the boats, carrying guns and spears;
the local police joined the battle, which raged from one evening into the
next day. A storm interrupted the chase and the dacoits were able to
escape without being caught. Here, the English account omitted the list of
names that appeared in the Bengali account: Trailokya identified Gopal
Sen of Anushilan Samiti, who was killed, and two others who were
wounded. He then recognized the contributions of ten other men, who
had come from various local groups and had participated in the dacoity,
some of whom had never been tried or arrested. Trailokya did not reveal
whether he knew about the attack in Barha before it happened, but the
account swept this smaller story of local participants into a larger story of
a movement, crediting a dozen foot soldiers of the movement for fighting
tirelessly for a national cause.29
Aside from naming the foot soldiers of the movement, Trailokya’s
account revealed the involvement of high-level political figures in the
revolutionary terrorist movement that he had met or been supported by.
High-ranking police and intelligence officials had long claimed that there
was collusion and coordination between the underground movement and
political leaders in Bengal.30 Trailokya provided specific details of what
these engagements looked like. In a passage when he described how he
evaded arrest, he identified a prominent figure, Rai Sahib Jamini Das,
who held a position in the Bengal Legislative Council. Jamini Das was
a Mymsensingh landholder who had a home in Dacca that Trailokya hid
out in while fleeing the police. In a passage excised from the English
version, Trailokya explained that several of Jamini Das’ relatives were
involved in a local Anushilan Samiti cell.31 Moreover, Trailokya devel-
oped relationships with well-known figures such as Chittaranjan Das and
Subhas Chandra Bose, who had long been suspected by the British of
having ties with underground groups.
In 1921, after Trailokya had been released from the Andamans, he
spent ten months in jail, then another stint as a state prisoner under
Regulation III of 1818. These periods of imprisonment came at the height
of the Non-Cooperation Movement and put him into close contact with
29
For examples of names named in the Bengali text that are not present in the English
version, Jele Thris Bachar, pp. 33, 39, 40 52, pp. 95 109. For an example of a list of
names that appeared in the English version, with their locations and time spent in the
revolutionary movement, see Thirty Years, p. 153; Jele Tris Bachar, pp. 145.
30
WBSA, Home Political File 26/32, “Brief Note on the Alliance of Congress with
Terrorism in Bengal”; also in Terrorism in Bengal, vol. III.
31
The reference to Rai Sahib Jamini Das appears in Jele Tris Bachar, p. 78, but not in Thirty
Years, p. 79.
 Maharaj Biplabi Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty 229

the Bengal leaders of the Indian National Congress, Chittaranjan Das and
Subhas Chandra Bose, who were both held at Alipore jail in Calcutta at
the same time. Chittaranjan Das invited Trailokya to eat with him, while
Subhas Chandra Bose served them their meal.32 By narrating this act of
commensality, Trailokya indicated that he was treated as their equal,
a partner to the cause. Even though Trailokya was less famous in the
freedom movement then either of these men, these short vignettes
revealed the ties that existed between the public face of the movement
and its followers. Several years later Trailokya, Subhas Chandra Bose,
and Satyen Chandra Mitra were detained together and sent from
Calcutta to Rangoon and then to Mandalay Jail; it was a trip that he
recalled with some affection.
By the time Trailokya’s account appeared for the first time in 1946,
both of his traveling companions were widely known. Mitra had been
elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1924 and represented Bengal,
where he spoke regularly and vociferously on the cause of political prison-
ers throughout the decade. He was identified in this account as an
“enthusiastic member of Anushilan Samiti.”33 Subhas Chandra Bose
was one of the primary leaders of the nationalist movement, pressing
the Congress to move politically to the left. In the account of their travels
to Burma, Trailokya explained that Subhas Chandra was an ideal pris-
oner: although he had been born in a wealthy family, he never complained
about the jailhouse diet, nor did he ask for special treatment. They played
sports together, and when Trailokya had a knee injury from playing
tennis, Subhas Bose massaged oil infused with neem on his leg to reduce
the swelling. Subhas Bose and Trailokya led a fast to protest the lack of
facilities to celebrate Durga Puga in Mandalay Jail, and gained an allow-
ance for prisoners to observe religious holidays.34 Building from these
close relationships developed while in jail, Trailokya’s acquaintance with
Subhas Chandra Bose continued into the 1930s; after Bose was elected to
be president of the Indian National Congress, Trailokya went to Delhi to
meet him and was introduced to members of the Forward Bloc.35
Interestingly, Subhas Chandra Bose had been reported dead in an air-
plane crash in June 1945 over Taiwan in what many considered suspi-
cious circumstances; there is no mention of these events in Trailokya’s
account.
In part because of the length of his career, he could compare different
moments of India’s nationalist movement. Throughout his account, he

32
Thirty Years, pp. 154 55; Jele Tris Bachar, p. 147.
33
Thirty Years, p. 178; Jele Tris Bachar, p. 166.
34 35
Thirty Years, pp. 181 82; Jele Tris Bachar, p. 168. Thirty Years, p. 226.
230 Revolutionary Autobiographies

repeatedly gestured to what happened “then” and what was true “now,”
even though what was defined as now or contemporary was unclear. He
noted that jail conditions had been much worse in the early years –
prisoners were tortured, subjected to harsh labor, and given poor food
and few forms of leisure or entertainment. In acknowledgement of the
1919 jail reforms report that had closed down the Andaman Islands,
Trailokya noted that the revolutionary political prisoners of an earlier
generation had suffered a great deal more than those emerging from jail in
the more recent past.36 He classified the treatment as “file, gile, dial,”
which had an evocative rhyming scheme, but were a mix of English and
Bengali. He interpreted file to explain that initially prisoners were not
permitted to mingle freely, but were required to march in a line to go to
the toilet, bathe, eat, and march. He might have used “bile” for “gile,”
which was translated as “abuse,” to mark the verbal and physical abuse
meted out by prison guards. Dial was intended to mean the pulses, or
lentils (dal in Hindi and Bengali), they were restricted to eating.37 Here,
the English translation omitted a passage from the Bengali version: the
Bengali version noted that there was no meat or fish offered in the jails in
these early days, and relatively fewer provisions for clothing and bedding
supplied by the government. In what seemed an implicit criticism of
the activism of political prisoners who had complained about prison
conditions, Trailokya noted that there were very few distinctions between
political prisoners and those called common criminals. When he
described the death of Jatin Das after the hunger strike in Lahore
in September 1929, Trailokya noted that the jail reforms that followed
marked and divided the prison population into various classes, which
differentiated political prisoners from others. From Trailokya’s perspec-
tive, the goals of prison protest had been to improve prison conditions for
all, not only those with gentlemanly status.38 His narrative of the jail
reforms served as a reproach to those who had advocated for political
prisoner status, representing a tension between those who had founded
the revolutionary terrorist movement in the 1910s and those who had
joined it in the second phases in the 1920s and 1930s and had gained
prominence for their prison protests. Narrating these anecdotes as ideals
for ethical behavior, Trailokya Nath’s framing of his past, particularly the
time in jail, explained how the higher goals and ambitions of Anushilan
Samiti had been eroded, even in the moment that his book was being
translated into English for a wider audience.

36
Thirty Years, p. 46; Jele Tris Bachar, pp. 54 55.
37
Thirty Years, p. 47; Jele Tris Bachar, p. 54.
38
Jele Tris Bachar, pp. 56 57; see also p. 147 and p. 159.
 Maharaj Biplabi Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty 231

The English translation of 1963 included some new chapters that more
fully explained some of the violent acts that Trailokya had participated in.
From a chapter on Bhagat Singh to the chapter on assassination, these
chapters appeared at the end of the English version, but were situated
throughout the 1968 Bengali version in roughly chronological order.
The translator noted they “are new and have been included in this
[1963] English edition in view of the present political status of India,”
without clarifying what he meant.39 The chapters narrated how dacoities,
or “actions,” were organized. Chapters titled “Weapons Gathering,
Bomb Factory” and “Assassination” broke down how robbery, bombs,
and assassination were components of the armed revolutionary terrorist
struggle.40 Alternating between the first person singular and first person
plural, as well as the third person voice, Trailokya described the
mechanics of his participation, going down to the details of his efforts to
forge currency and carry arms without detection.41
While many of the details about the groups’ organization had been in
circulation at least since the publication of the Rowlatt report in 1919, this
account provided new information. As Trailokya acknowledged, the
Rowlatt report had given a version of the history of this movement, but
“The actual or true history of the revolutionary movement cannot be
written before the dawn of Independence.”42 Each cell, or group had
a leader, who supervised the different components of the raid – guarding,
breaking in, safe-breaking, and collecting – and in an ideal scenario,
inhabitants of the house, particularly women, would be left unharmed.
The booty gained from robberies, the dues paid by members of the samiti,
and the donations made by wealthy figures (lawyers, doctors, and land-
holders) funded the acquisition of arms, which were then used to plan
assassinations of key figures.
In the chapter titled “খুন” in Bengali, which might be simply translated
as killings or murders, the translator rendered this word into “assassina-
tions.” This specific translation rendered murder into a political act, one
that targeted particular figures who had betrayed the movement and
enabled the continued occupation of India. In this chapter, Trailokya
offered a reason for why young educated men of his generation had taken
up arms. Trailokya noted that Bengalis were often called cowardly, but
that they were not afraid. Through revolutionary actions, revolutionary
terrorists showed that they knew how to fight, and indeed, were equal to
the heroic soldiers of any independent country. The idea that Bengalis
were “effeminate,” long a staple of colonial stereotypes, was an idea that

39
Thirty Years, p. 265. 40 Thirty Years, pp. 291 317; Jele Tris Bachar, pp. 40 52.
41
Jele Tris Bachar, p. 163. 42 Thirty Years, p. 149; Jele Tris Bachar, p. 143.
232 Revolutionary Autobiographies

Trailokya repeatedly returned to: as he wrote about the Barha dacoity,

“By committing this dacoity, the young men showed extraordinary valor
and proved that the Bengalees as a race are not coward [sic], they know
how to fight.”43 He believed that the revolutionaries were wrongly called
“terrorists” by the police, the public, and by the Indian National Congress,
but this did not deter them from their patriotism for their country.44
The chapters added to the revised editions of the 1960s ended in a
personal admission, “In occupied India, I committed many dacoities,
assassinations, thefts and forged currency in the name of independence . . .
[but] To commit dacoity or murder was not our profession.”45 Even when
committing crimes against other Indians, the revolutionaries recognized
that these were members of their own communities. Acknowledging the
limited power of those recently released from prison, Trailokya argued that
if revolutionaries held political power, they would grant allowances to the
heirs of those who had suffered through dacoities and other crimes, “But
alas, the political power of free India has not come in the hands of the
revolutionaries.”46
This lament – that the movement had not been as successful as its
participants had hoped – informed many autobiographical accounts writ-
ten by revolutionary terrorists; yet, they all aspired to shape the future
politics in India as they continued to advocate for political progress. In the
next section, I turned to three accounts by women who worked together
when underground. Written in the years surrounding India’s indepen-
dence, their accounts are structured toward explaining their different
political affiliations in the postcolonial period.

Three Women: Bina Das, Kalpana Dutta, Kamala

Dasgupta
Although women comprised a very small number of those involved in the
revolutionary terrorist movement, they were part of a network, having
trained in shared venues and circulating through the same women’s jails
and prisons in the interwar years.47 Born several years apart – Kamala in
1907, Bina in 1911, Kalpana in 1913 – they attended university in
Calcutta at the same time and were involved in a series of spectacular
crimes between 1930 and 1932. Kalpana Dutta had gone underground in
the aftermath of the Chittagong Armoury Raid in April 1930, and Bina

43
Jele Tris Bachar, p. 32. 44 Thirty Years, p. 309; Jele Tris Bachar, pp. 47 48.
45
Thirty Years, p. 316; Jele Tris Bachar, p. 52.
46
Thirty Years, p. 317; Jele Tris Bachar, p. 52.
47
Tirtha Mandal, The Women Revolutionaries of Bengal, 1905 1939 (Calcutta: Minerva,
1991).
 Bina Das, Kalpana Dutta, Kamala Dasgupta 233

Das attempted to murder the governor of Bengal, Stanley Jackson,

on February 6, 1932, with the support of Kamala Dasgupta, who was
detained but never convicted. As I have argued elsewhere, Kalpana
Dutta’s account, in particular, argued for the centrality of women in the
movement, explaining how hard it was for women to be accepted and how
they exceeded all expectations by behaving in modest and obedient ways
as foot soldiers in the larger struggle for independence.48
Their shared history began with Chattri Sangha, a women’s student
group that had branches in local colleges and universities and promoted
revolutionary training in the form of informative reading and martial arts
training. Friends as college students, Bina, Kalpana, and Kamala were
alumnae of Bethune College, the premier women’s institution in Bengal;
Kamala had been Bina Das’ resident advisor when Bina moved into
a boarding house.49 They eventually joined the Jugantar group and
Kalpana became involved with the followers of Surja Sen, the leader of
the Chittagong Armoury Raid. All three had trained together in martial
arts, learning sword and stick play from Dinesh Majumdar, who was later
involved attacks on Charles Tegart, the chief commissioner of police.
Kalpana Dutta and Kamala Dasgupta learned how to swim and row in
water tanks at Victoria Memorial, along with Bina Das and her sister,
Kalyani.50 This shared history went long into the postcolonial period. All
three women lived well into old age – Bina Das died in 1985, Kalpana in
1995, and Kamala in 2000 – their political prominence enhanced by their
shared history of revolutionary activism as young women.
Their autobiographical accounts appeared within a few years of India’s
independence: Kalpana Dutta published the Chittagong Armoury Raid
Reminiscences in 1946, Bina Das wrote Srinkhal Jhankar in 1948, and
Kamala Dasgupta wrote Rakter Aksharer in 1954.51 These accounts
summarized how they had come to be involved in the revolutionary
terrorist movement and spelled out their political choices as they moved
into politics in the 1940s and 1950s. During her incarceration, Kalpana
Dutta kept in touch with her colleagues from the Chittagong Armoury
Raid, Ganesh Ghosh and Ananta Lal Singh, who persuaded her to
become a communist. Kalpana Dutta became a member of the
Communist Party of India and married the party’s secretary,
48
Ghosh, “History Makes Women Well behaved,” pp. 362 67.
49
Mandal, Women Revolutionaries, pp. 27 33.
50
WBSA, IB File 493/31, “Kalpana Dutt”; see also Kamala Dasgupta, interviewed by Smt
Aparna Basu, NMML, Oral History Transcripts, acc. no. 95, January 7, 1969.
51
Bina Das, Srinkhal Jhankar (Calcutta, 1956); Bina Das: A Memoir, translated by
Dhira Dhar (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2010); Kamala Dasgupta, Rakter Akshare (Calcutta:
Sourendra Basu, 1954) [www.hdl.handle.net/10689/18696, accessed September 14,
2014].
234 Revolutionary Autobiographies

P. C. Joshi, in 1943; the other two women joined Congress, and even-
tually became active in local politics in West Bengal. Bina and Kamala
wanted to drive Congress in a more leftward direction, as did many of
their male counterparts.52 They pressed Congress officials to offer uni-
versal programs of social welfare, such as elementary education, sanita-
tion, medical care, and affordable housing to everyone in Bengal. They
framed their involvement with Congress as working from within,
acknowledging Congress’ dominance on the Indian political scene, but
also adhering to their radical ideals.
Perhaps the best known of these autobiographical texts is Kalpana
Dutta’s Chittagong Armoury Raiders: Reminiscences, which focused on
one of the most spectacular actions undertaken by members of the revo-
lutionary terrorist movement in April 1930. First written in Bengali and
quickly translated into Hindi, Urdu, and English between 1945 and
1948, the book was reprinted in 1980 on the fiftieth anniversary of the
raid.53 Indicative of how the different versions were revised, in the preface
to the second edition, Kalpana Dutta noted that although the revolution-
aries had been called “terrorists” by “British imperialists and the bour-
geois historians,” they had recently been “recognized as freedom-fighters
alongwith [sic] their Congress counterparts.” She also wished she had not
called the book “Reminiscences of the Chittagong Armoury Raiders,”
because “the young boys who had participated . . . were not raiders; they
were revolutionaries.”54
Chittagong Armoury Raiders Reminiscences is a hybrid text. Partly an
autobiography about a young woman coming of age and eventually find-
ing her way toward communism, the Reminiscences comprised thirteen
chapters, eleven of which were about figures in the movement. As her
account suggested, those involved in the raid were folk nationalist heroes
in the areas around Chittagong, where a mythology of their invincibility
and commitment to revolution was widely known. Because Chittagong
had been under martial law throughout much of the 1930s, an enhanced
police presence had pushed the revolutionary terrorist movement further
underground. Yet, Kalpana Dutta’s account showed that there was wide
popular support for the movement where oversized myths followed the
key figures of the raid, what Purnima Bose calls a “heroic-nationalist
individualism” that overlooked mass mobilization as an important

52
Laushey, Bengal Terrorism, p. 126 writes: “By the end of 1938 then, virtually all terrorists
whether Marxist or not, were members of Congress and most were tending to support
one or the other leftist group inside Congress.”
53
Kalpana Joshi, Chittagong Armoury Reminiscences (Calcutta: People’s Publishing House,
1948, 1980).
54
Joshi, Reminiscences, pp. xii xiii.
 Bina Das, Kalpana Dutta, Kamala Dasgupta 235

dynamic.55 The chapters began with an account of the charismatic leader,

Surja Sen, and moved on to others who Kalpana Dutta encountered in
the course of her career. This format of structuring a narrative around
mini-biographies of others was popular among revolutionary terrorists,
suggesting the networks in which they were involved and demonstrating
a collective infrastructure of support that had existed to support the
revolutionary terrorist movement.56 Even though the events recounted
are not presented chronologically – indeed, because of the prosopogra-
phical structure of the book, she retells the same events several times – the
Reminiscences document that its author and the key figures of the move-
ment were historically important actors in a well-known event. When the
book was published in 1948, shortly after Trailokya’s Bengali account in
1946, it provided testimony for a sense of revolutionary purpose at
a moment when it was unclear what the revolution might look like.
Although the text operated in part as a first-person account, situating
Kalpana Dutta as an eyewitness to historical events, she never met several
figures involved in the raid, such as Ananta Lal Singh and Ambica Charan
Chakravarti.57 Indeed, in spite of a title that focused attention on the four-
day siege in Chittagong in April 1930, she did not participate in the actual
raid: she came to Chittagong several weeks after the raid, and through
various political networks, came to meet Surja Sen and his associates
while they were in hiding. In May 1930, Kalpana was eighteen years old
and returned from college to visit her parents in Chittagong; the raid had
just occurred and she heard stories about its participants, most particu-
larly Surja Sen, for whom there was a great deal of popular support. She
was summoned to meet him in June 1931, and so, late one evening, she
went to a safe house far from the city to meet the leader of the Chittagong
Armoury Raid, who was known as Masterda. After the raid, Sen and his
followers had escaped into the hills around Chittagong, and moved from
hideout to hideout as they continued to plan actions against British
officials and institutions. Kalpana helped to keep the group in hiding,
occasionally traveling with them, and transporting provisions from safe
houses in Calcutta to their hideouts.
Kept hidden by local villagers, several of the fugitives of the raid
managed to evade arrest for three years. Much of the account is about
these efforts as Kalpana Dutta recounted the support they received from
villagers in the countryside. They survived several harrowing police raids
and attacks, including one in which she had a sleepless night in a safe
55
Bose, Organizing Empire, ch. 3, and esp. p. 130.
56
Kamala Dasgupta. Svādhı̄natā sam . iāra Nārı̄ [The Freedom Campaign’s
. grāme Bām
Bengali Women] (Calcutta: Manoram Printers, 1963).
57
Joshi, Reminiscences, p. 17 and 31.
236 Revolutionary Autobiographies

house and was able to alert the others to a raid at dawn, from which they
narrowly escaped arrest.58 Kalpana was eventually drawn into another
plot to take over the European Club at Pahartali, in which she and Priti
Waddedar, another woman revolutionary terrorist, were deputed to dress as
young men and take over the club. In September 1932, Kalpana Dutta was
arrested for the first time on suspicion of terrorist activities, several weeks
before the planned action; the police were drawn to her suspicious behavior
because she was dressed as a man, which she explained to police was to get
away from her strict parents. The attack on the European Club went on as
planned, with Priti Waddedar as its leader. Priti committed suicide at the
scene by taking a dose of cyanide.59 When Kalpana was released on bail
on December 27, 1932, she met with Surja Sen again and he encouraged
her to become a fugitive in order to avoid further detentions. Subsequently,
she went into hiding with Surja Sen and Tarakeshwar Dastidar, staying at
each hideout no more than three or four days.60
After several attempts by the police, Surja Sen was arrested
in February 1933; by Kalpana’s account, he had stayed behind to help
her find a way out of the village they were in, but he was caught, while she
escaped with Tarakeswar Dastidar. She and Tarakeswar were arrested
in May 1933 in the home pictured here; Surja Sen and Tarakeswar
Dastidar were hanged after a short trial, while Kalpana was given
a sentence of six years on appeal, reduced from life imprisonment because
of her age and the fact that she was a woman.61
When she went to jail, she was reunited with her friends from univer-
sity. She became reacquainted with Suhasini Ganguly, known to her as
Putudi, who had been older than her at Bethune College and had men-
tored her. Suhasini had been arrested for harboring several of the
Chittagong Armoury Raiders in a house in Chandernagore, just outside
Calcutta; she pretended to be married to another revolutionary in order to
make it seem that theirs was an ordinary household. As Kalpana Dutta
described it, this disguise proved to be scandalous – it would be unthink-
able that an unmarried woman would reside with men unrelated to her –
but it was a criticism that Putudi ignored.62 Whether Kalpana told this
story as a way of defending her own unusual career – she had been in
hiding for many months with a group of male fugitives – was unclear.

58
Joshi, Reminiscences, p. 14.
59
Simonti Sen, ed., They Dared: Essays in Honor of Pritilata Wadder, ch. 1.
60
Ishanee Mukherjee, “Scaling the Barrier: Women, Revolution, and Abscondence in Late
Colonial Bengal,” Indian Journal of Gender Studies 6 (1999): 61 78.
61
The entire episode of the Chittagong Armoury Raid has been captured by Manini
Chatterjee, Do or Die.
62
Joshi, Reminiscences, pp. 38 43.
 Bina Das, Kalpana Dutta, Kamala Dasgupta 237

Figure 6.1 Kalpana Dutta’s hideout with Tarakeshwar Dastidar, with

permission from Centre of South Asian Studies archive, Cambridge,
Tegart Collection

Kalpana continued to be politically active while in jail, writing that she

knew that she wanted some direction when she was released, so she read
widely: Marx, Lenin, and about the Russian revolution. From the per-
spective of jail officials, Kalpana was seen to be a difficult prisoner.
In 1937, Bina and Kalpana were jailed in Dinajpur along with Shanti
Ghosh (who had assassinated the district magistrate of Tippera) and they
were charged with jailhouse disorder for attacking a woman warden who
was assumed to be torturing then.63
Kalpana Dutta was eventually released from jail in May 1939, after
C. F. Andrews and Rabindranath Tagore interceded on her behalf.64 She
joined the Communist Party of India, becoming active in distributing
leaflets around Chittagong, organizing workers and peasants, even
though she was being closely monitored by the police. When Rangoon

63
WBSA, IB File 493/31, “Kalpana Dutt,” in a memorandum titled Dinajpur, 12 January
1937, no. 107/40 37, From E. Springfield, District IB, to C. E. S. Fairweather, Deputy
Inspector General of Police, IB.
64
WBSA, IB File 493/31, “Kalpana Dutt”; Joshi, Reminiscences, pp. 72 73.
238 Revolutionary Autobiographies

fell to the Japanese in January 1942, prices went up as foodstuffs all but
disappeared for the poor and underprivileged. Through this wartime
experience, and the 1943 famine that occurred in Bengal, Kalpana
Dutta became more committed to communism as a preferred form for
the revolution she believed she had invested her life in. She established
a clear link between “terrorism,” which had given her and her comrades
“self confidence,” and “communism,” which gave a path toward mean-
ingful social and economic change. Her book is a communist conversion
narrative that resembles several others that were published by male revo-
lutionary terrorists who joined the Communist Party of India and later
explained their choices.65
Kalpana Dutta’s interest in history as a way to narrate her life and explain
her political choices continued after the publication of Chittagong Armoury
Reminiscences. In the early 1970s, she planned to write a definitive account
of the Chittagong Armoury Raid using government documents, which
included surveillance reports, informers’ statements, and police blotters.
She used the National Archives in New Delhi to examine records stored
there and took notes. She checked out many of the same files I checked out
as I researched this topic; I felt as if I was shadowing Kalpana Joshi.66
According to Tanika Sarkar, a historian who was doing research in the
National Archives in 1970s when Kalpana (then) Joshi was a regular in the
reading room, Kalpana left her notebooks in the back of a taxi one day and
lost her notes. So she never wrote that definitive account.67 This “unfin-
ished” history leaves us with some tantalizing questions (what did she hope
to find in the archive?).
Kalpana Dutta’s colleagues, Bina Das and Kamala Dasgupta, took
a different political trajectory. In spite of their militant activism, which
had been opposed to the moderate and nonviolent methods of Congress
in the early 1930s, Bina and Kamala joined the Indian National Congress
after they were released from jail in 1938 and 1939. By joining Congress,
they decided against joining the Communist Party.
Both women had been in British jails through much of the 1930s.
Kamala Dasgupta was detained March 1, 1932, a few weeks after Bina
Das’ assassination attempt against Governor Jackson, and released
in June 1938. Bina Das went to jail in March 1932, and was eventually
65
Hem Chandra Kanungo, Amiya Samanta, ed., Account of the Revolutionary Movement in
Bengal (Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2015); Ananta Singh, Keu Bale Biplabı̄, Keu Bale
dākāta (Kalikata: Śaibya, 1386 [1979]).
66 ˙See, for instance, NAI, Home Political File 13/32, “Reports on the Operation of the
Bengal Emergency Ordinance in the District of Chittagong”; NAI, Home Political File 4/
33, “Legislative Proceedings Regarding BCLA.”
67
Professor Tanika Sarkar confirmed that this is what Kalpana Dutt, later Joshi, had
planned but abandoned. Personal communication, December 17, 2009.
 Bina Das, Kalpana Dutta, Kamala Dasgupta 239

released from jail in 1939. Upon her release, she became secretary of the
South Calcutta District Congress Committee. Active in the women’s
wing of Congress, when Congress refused to support Britain’s entry
into the war and started the Quit India movement in 1942, both women
were put into detention, where they remained from 1942 through 1945.
Shortly after their release, both women joined Gandhi when he went to
Noakhali at the end of 1946, in the aftermath of riots between Muslims
and Hindus in that district.68 From 1946 to 1951, Bina Das served as
a member of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly; first as a member of
the chief minister’s cabinet, and latterly on the bench. In an assembly
debate in February 1948, she reminded her colleagues that Congress was
committed to redistributing land so that all Indians could benefit from
economic independence; over a year later in March 1949, she returned to
this theme when she accused Congress leaders of favoring industrialists
and businessmen over ordinary Bengalis.69
By the time Srinkhal Jhankar was published in 1948, Bina Das’ assas-
sination attempt on the governor was well known through press accounts.
Her confession and short trial had been widely reported in the national
and international press.70 Of these three women, Kamala Dasgupta was
perhaps least well known to the public because she had been suspected,
but never convicted, of being an accomplice in Bina Das’ assassination
attempt on Stanley Jackson and multiple failed attempts to assassinate
Charles Tegart. Although the police never found evidence to bring
Kamala to trial, she revealed had helped Bina secure the funds to buy
the revolver and ammunition that Bina used; she had even coached Bina
on how to use the gun. She also revealed that she had been instrumental in
a number of well-known terrorist acts that occurred between 1930 and
1932, including the assassination attempts on Charles Tegart that had
sent her colleague, Dinesh Majumdar, to jail and eventual execution in
1934.71 Because Kamala was not imprisoned in jail, but in detention, she
lost contact with Kalpana and Bina during the 1930s, although all three
women re-established contact after their release from jail.72
Aware that they had just lived through a momentous historical period
that was capped by a momentous event, both women were attentive to the
problem of India’s postcolonial future. Bina Das’ account was written

68
Ghosh, “Gandhi and the Terrorists.” 69 Bandopadhyay, Decolonization, pp. 88, 90.
70
“Bengal Governor Shot at Five Times by Girl Student,” Times of India, February 6, 1932,
p. 9; “Girl Gets Nine Years for Bengal Shooting,” New York Times, February 16, 1932, p. 7.
71
Kamala Dasgupta, Rakter Akshare; Chapters 7 and 8; NMML, acc. no. 95.
72
WBSA, IB File 422/40, “Bina Das,”; WBSA, IB, 493/31, “Kalpana Dutt” The files begin
with surveillance reports from the Intelligence Branch, 1931 1932, and carries through
the late 1960s.
240 Revolutionary Autobiographies

quickly in the six weeks that preceded India’s partition in August 1947
and published soon after. Recently translated into English, the book
began with “The fifteenth of August is drawing near . . . we are becoming
free at last.” Yet, she noted that everyone around appeared depressed and
anxious. She asked, “Is this the ‘freedom’ of our dreams?”73 Echoing
Gandhi’s concerns about what a freedom gained by violence might look
like, Bina Das’ account showed that she felt daunted by the idea of
“freedom,” which was unfamiliar.74 Kamala Dasgupta’s book began
with Republic Day in January 1950, when the transition to power was
considered complete, but many questions remained unresolved. She
wrote: “Today, our ties to the British are completely severed . . . and
India (Bharatvarsh) is free (swadhin).” But she writes that much work
lies ahead. “Those doors that had been closed to us are now open, but we
have to work hard and work together.” 75 The sense of historical destiny is
mixed with a sense of uncertainty, a world of possibilities, and yet a sense
that the nation was liberated from foreign occupation, but had not yet
decided on what its political path should be.76
By telling the stories of their lives, both women explained the range of
political choices that had been available to them – revolutionary politics,
socialism, and communism. Both became committed socialists, who
acknowledged the dramatic inequalities within India and wanted social
welfare to be a priority.
Among the political choices that were explained in autobiographical
texts was the relationship that several revolutionary terrorists developed
with Gandhi. Even for revolutionary terrorists, whose plans for radical
action were far from Gandhian strategies, the figure of Gandhi loomed
large and he was a conspicuous feature of accounts written by revolutionary
terrorists. Both Bina and Kamala had corresponded with Gandhi as ado-
lescents in the late 1920s, participated in planning terrorist actions between
1932 and 1933 met with Gandhi when he toured jails and detention camps
in 1937–1938, and subsequently joined Gandhi as he marched across
Noakhali in eastern Bengal at the end of 1946 in the aftermath of violence
between Hindus and Muslims. Their prolonged engagement with
Gandhi is a necessary coda to this chapter. Kamala wrote a letter to
Gandhi when she was just 20, in July 1927, asking if she could come to

73
Das, A Memoir, p. 1; Das’ concerns about the many futures of freedom echoed by others,
Bandhopadhyay, ch. 1.
74
Uttara Chakraborty, “The Girl was Twenty one . . .” in Simonti Sen (ed.), They Dared:
Essays in Honour of Pritilata Wadder (Calcutta: Gangchil, 2011), pp. 34 56.
75
Dasgupta, Rakhter Akshare, p. 1.
76
Bandopadhyay, Decolonization, argues that the different meanings of freedom permeated
political debate between 1947 and 1952.
 Bina Das, Kalpana Dutta, Kamala Dasgupta 241

Sarbamati Ashram and work with Gandhi; he replied that she would need
her parents’ permission. He asked her to write again with more details so
that he could advise her further, but it seemed that by then, she had joined a
revolutionary group at her college.77 Just over a year later, in October 1928,
Bina Das wrote to Gandhi about the use of “physical force.” Gandhi
replied: “I have nowhere advocated the use of physical force even for self-
defence.” But he made an important caveat, “it is wrong not to use force
when we have a mind to do so but which do not use because we fear to die.
What I do advocate is the courage to die . . .”78
Notably, all four of the subjects of this chapter had refused to sign an
undertaking administered by Gandhi to give up political violence.
According to newspaper accounts, Gandhi spent several hours with
political prisoners when he went to Calcutta in April 1938.79 The auto-
biographical accounts gave more details of these jailhouse encounters.
Trailokya reported that he and his fellow inmates refused to agree to any
terms for release because they had not been charged with any crimes.80
Bina Das recalled that while she was in Hijli jail with some other women
prisoners, among them Shanti Ghosh, Suniti Choudhury, and Kalpana
Dutta, they were told that Gandhi would be meeting with political prison-
ers. They were brought to Calcutta, where they met with Gandhi at
Alipore jail, and he asked about their plans. They demurred, answering
that they would know better once they were released.81 Kalpana Dutta
revealed that Gandhi informed her that the government was not especially
keen to release those who had been involved in the Chittagong Armoury
Raid, but she was released anyway a year later.82 Bina Das’ relationship to
Gandhi became quite close; she had visited him in Bombay, even though
Bina Das’ father had been the teacher of Subhas Chandra Bose, one of
Gandhi’s arch-rivals for power in the Indian National Congress in the
1930s. When Bina opted to join Congress instead of Bose’s Forward
Bloc, Bose invited her to his home for a meeting and she explained her
decision. Several days after this meeting, she heard that Bose had escaped
house arrest and fled.83
As violence between Hindus and Muslims erupted in late 1946, Bina
Das and Kamala Dasgupta decided to join Gandhi in Noakhali as he tried
to heal the wounds of communal strife in this district from December
1946 to the early part of February 1947.84 They accompanied Gandhi as

77
CWMG, vol. 39, p. 317. 78 CWMG, vol. 43, p. 119.
79
“Mr. Gandhi Meets Prisoners,” Times of India, April 9, 1938, p. 13 [accessed ProQuest
Historical Newspapers, July 7, 2011].
80
Thirty Years, pp. 220 21. 81 Das, A Memoir, pp. 41 42.
82
Joshi, Reminiscences, p. 80. 83 Das, A Memoir, pp. 54 55.
84
Das, A Memoir, chapter 21; NMML, Dasgupta, Oral History Transcripts, acc. no. 95.
242 Revolutionary Autobiographies

he walked from village to village, preaching nonviolence and urging

villagers to live harmoniously. As national discussions unfolded about
a timeline for the British to leave India, whether there would be two
nations, and what the terms of the transfer of power would look like,
Kamala Dasgupta and Bina Das made meals, fetched water, and counseled
poor women on becoming educated, cleaning themselves and their chil-
dren properly, and the importance of good nutrition. They traveled across
an impoverished district that was frequently hit by cyclones and made
farming difficult, if not impossible, for the majority Muslim peasantry.
They acknowledged that they were meeting a class and category of people
with whom they had had little contact, of whom they had little knowledge.
They met girls who wanted to learn how to read, mothers who knew that
they could take care of their children better, and old women who needed
medical attention. Kamala apparently wrote to Gandhi about a case that
appeared to be one about sexual violence, and he cryptically responded that
he would respond when there was a “bona fide” case.85
Gandhi’s mission in Noakhali was a mixed success: after the initial riots
in October 1946, there were no further outbreaks and it appears that his
personal travels through the region had the effect of quelling large-scale
violence. In the hopes of keeping communal violence to a minimum, he
was in Calcutta on August 15, 1947, the day that the country became
independent and was partitioned. The district of Noakhali was eventually
partitioned, with one part joining India, and another joining Pakistan.
After independence, both women became full-time political activists.
Bina Das was elected to the West Bengal Legislative Assembly in 1946 to
represent the women’s constituency in South Calcutta for Congress; she
was active in promoting the redistribution of land to peasants while
challenging her own party’s leaders when they sought to promote busi-
ness interests over those of workers.86 The Intelligence Branch continued
its surveillance of Bina Das; her file shows that she was active in organiz-
ing strikes in 1948 and 1949, and subsequently became an activist on
behalf of refugee women who had left east Bengal to move to the west. She
was arrested on April 24, 1964, and detained for a month in Presidency
Jail under the Defence of India Act of 1962 as a result of her advocacy on
behalf of refugees from east Pakistan.87 Bina Das and Kamala Dasgupta
stayed in close contact. Bina Das eventually went to work as a school
teacher in South Calcutta, where many refugees from east Pakistan had
settled, and she was also a writer for the women’s magazine, Mandira,
85
CWMG, vol. 93, p. 146.
86
Times of India, “Bengal Assembly Elections,” June 27, 1946; Bandopadhyay,
Decolonization, pp. 88 90.
87
WBSA, IB File 422/20, “Bina Das.”
 Conclusion 243

which Kamala edited. Later in life, Kamala wrote the entries for Bina Das
and Suhasini Ganguly for the Dictionary of National Biography; although
Suhasini Ganguly had joined the Communist Party after 1947, the
women had remained close friends. Bina Das died in 1986, Kalpana
Joshi died in 1995, and Kamala Dasgupta lived to be 93 and died in
the year 2000.

Conclusion
When Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty, Bina Das, Kalpana Dutta, and
Kamala Dasgupta wrote their autobiographies in the late 1940s, they
had little idea of what the future held for a newly independent and
partitioned India. Even as they laid claim to those futures through
a narration of the revolutionary underground movement in which they
had been involved, their accounts remained in a status of subjunctive
limbo, tracking between a past they had witnessed and was not widely
known to the public, and a present and future that remained uncertain.
As they reminded readers of the revolutionary goals of a movement that
advocated armed struggle against British colonizers, these authors kept
the ideals of a more radical and militant political project alive, while
acknowledging that the revolutionary movement had not lived up its
aspirations.
Many of the new details that were revealed in the course of these
accounts – Kalpana Dutta’s narrative about how she became a fugitive,
and Trailokya’s account of his relationship with Subhas Chandra Bose –
documented the links between well-known leaders and those who kept an
underground movement going for several decades while the British
enacted a regime of laws to suppress terrorism. These accounts chal-
lenged the emergent nationalist narrative of the Indian National
Congress, one in which the well-known campaigns organized and orche-
strated by figures such as Gandhi, Non-Cooperation from 1920 to 1922,
Civil Disobedience in 1930–1932, and Quit India from 1942 to 1945,
were solely responsible for India’s independence from British rule. As in
the 1920s, these postcolonial accounts and subsequent revisions created
a lineage for the movement and identified those who had been active.
By telling the story of the revolutionary terrorist movement from the
perspective of those who had been participants, these accounts broadcast
the importance of those who had largely been living underground or
behind bars for much of the interwar period.
 Conclusion

Even though India did not have a revolution, it has a large number of
revolutionaries. As India transitioned from a British colony to the world’s
largest liberal democracy, the history of revolutionary terrorism in the
province of Bengal generated two simultaneous and linked developments.
Although participants of underground groups, such as Anushilan Samiti
and Jugantar, did not always work in concert, the history of different
actions came to seem as part of a coordinated revolutionary campaign,
marked by famous high points, including the 1908 Muzzafarpur Bomb
Outrage and the 1930 Chittagong Armoury Raid. This lineage created
a sense that members of these groups were adherents to a shared cause of
violent anticolonial protests that spanned a generation of young activists
who emerged in the 1910s to those who were active in the 1920s, 1930s,
and 1940s. Historical accounts, generated by British intelligence officials
and by Indian participants, such as Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty, became
an important source of information as Indians began to write the history of
the nation after 1947. Accounts of the revolutionary terrorist movement
provided evidence of a history of militant nationalism that had resisted the
British through acts of political violence and challenged an emergent
government-endorsed narrative of progressive constitutionalism.
At the same time, the Indian government adopted and adapted colo-
nial-era laws targeted toward terrorists, revolutionaries, and political
dissidents of various kinds. As scholars have shown, this postcolonial
legislation has developed from colonial laws such as the Defence of
India Act of 1915 and Rowlatt.1 From the passage of the West Bengal
Security Act in 1948, to the promulgation of a series of extraordinary laws

1
Jinee Lokaneeta, Transnational Torture: Law, Violence, and State Power in the United States
and India (New York: New York University Press, 2011), pp. 168 69; Anil Kalhan,
Gerald P. Conroy, Mamta Kaushal, Sam Scott Miller, Jed Rakoff, “Colonial
Continuities: Human Rights, Terrorism and Security Laws in India,” Columbia Journal
of Asian Law 20.1 (Fall 2006): 93 234, especially pp. 125 41; A. W. B. Simpson, “Round
up the Usual Suspects: The Legacy of British Colonialism and the European Convention
on Human Rights,” Loyola Law Review 41 (1996): 629 712.

244
 Revolutionary Terrorism and Its Archives 245

at the national and provincial levels that escalated after 9/11 and the
attacks on India’s parliament building in December 2001, India’s grow-
ing security state apparatus has expanded and consolidated the govern-
ment’s ability to detain those suspected of sedition, leading to a revival of
colonial-era laws that are targeting a range of student protesters, Dalit
activists, tribal groups, and others seeking a change in the political order.2
These two parallel developments have produced a framework for post-
colonial citizenship that discriminates between “good” citizens and “bad”
ones, in which patriotism requires political agreement with the state.3
While the postcolonial government of India has recognized the contribu-
tions of militant nationalists in the colonial period, it has escalated its
efforts to contain militant political opposition through an expansion of
security legislation. The government’s security legislation requires the
state to distinguish between freedom fighters and terrorists, rendering
the freedom fighter as a figure of national honor and the terrorist as
a figure outside the nation who cannot be prosecuted using ordinary
laws. By targeting terrorists through extraordinary laws, the postcolonial
government of India has drawn from the logic of protecting democracy as
a rationale, a logic that would have seemed familiar to colonial officials of
the interwar years. Ujjwal Singh, a political scientist at the University of
Delhi, argues, “In this framework ‘extraordinary situations’ are seen as
emerging due to the openness and freedom which democracy allows.”4
By collapsing the state with the exceptions it can generate, both the
colonial and postcolonial states have used the logic of protecting democ-
racy and democratic norms and rights as a way of rationalizing a growing
security apparatus. In terms of making laws and writing histories, the
continuities between the colonial and postcolonial period show some of
the central features of the world’s largest democracy.

A Postcolonial History of Revolutionary Terrorism

and Its Archives
The voluminous archives of terrorism testify to a sense of insecurity and
created a kind of documentary “papereality” that instantiated the threat
of terrorism. Archival materials in the form of history sheets, police

2
Durba Ghosh, “100 Years Past Due: Why It’s Time to Retire Colonial era Laws,” www
.huffingtonpost.com/durba ghosh/100 years past due whyit b 9853496.html; Shruti
Kapila, “Once Again, Sedition Is at the Heart of Defining the Nation,” www.thewire.in
/2016/02/28/once again sedition is at the heart of defining the nation 22763/
[accessed March 8, 2016].
3
Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (New York: Pantheon, 2004).
4
Singh, State, Democracy, and Anti terror Laws, p. 16.
246 Conclusion

reports, memorandums, and reports documented the continued exis-

tence of a terrorist threat to the government in India until well into the
1940s.5 Until India gained its independence in 1947, confidential printed
reports by the Intelligence Branch were filed away in archives across India
and in Britain, read by a select few who had access to secret and classified
information. Since the early 1950s, copies and versions of these reports
have been available in select libraries and archives. Much of the corre-
spondence between high-ranking officials, such as the secretary of state
for India, the viceroy, governors, and officials in British government
offices in Delhi, Kolkata, Simla, and Darjeeling, are stored at the British
Library in London, where any researcher can request them through the
online system.
In Delhi and Kolkata, there is a similar mountain of material about
these groups and it illuminated the concerns and anxieties of officials in
India. In Delhi, many of the files have been lost or were “not transferred”
by the relevant bureau or ministry. In Kolkata, these files are strictly
regulated. As should be clear from the footnotes, I used the documents
from the West Bengal State Archives. The West Bengal State Archives are
divided into three branches – the Home Political, the Intelligence Branch,
and the main branch that contains all documents until 1911, when the
capital of India was moved to New Delhi. Until recently, all IB documents
in the state archives were subjected to redaction by officials in the Home
ministry to whom researchers have to submit their notes for scrutiny
before they can be used in research. In recent years, only documents
that were dated after 1947 were exposed to this scrutiny. What this
obscures is that many files were “reconstructed” several times; first, in
the 1950s, when the postcolonial Intelligence Branch used files of poli-
tical activists they were following (communists, peasants and labor orga-
nizers, refugee activists) by using the colonial-era file numbers, and then
in the 1970s, when a government scheme rendered some men and women
eligible for a pension.
While the files of the Intelligence Branch continue to be transferred to
the archives, a shortage of staff has made the cataloging process difficult;
I was granted special permission to see the materials in the Intelligence
Branch itself (not the archives) in the spring of 2009, but many of my
notes – again, evidence of the ways that revolutionary terrorists continued
to be under state surveillance into the 1960s – were redacted. The West
Bengal State Archives branch that was located in the Writers’ Buildings
that include all the Home Political documents after 1911 continue to
closely regulate which documents researchers have access to, barring the

5
Raman, Documenting the Raj; Hull, Government of Paper.
 Revolutionary Terrorism and Its Archives 247

use of laptops and digital photographs. I took all notes by hand and
submitted them to the archivists who scanned my handwritten notes at
the end of each day. Many of these records were marked “lost” when
I returned in subsequent trips, perhaps because they were not properly
returned to the shelf.6
The colonial archive on terrorism casts a long shadow in terms of how
the movement might be understood by historians, particularly those who
were keen to represent the history of the new nation in positive terms.
In newly independent India, politicians and the historians who were
commissioned to write an authorized account of India’s freedom struggle
used history as a lesson for the future, documenting Gandhi’s nonviolent
movements and the widespread involvement of India’s masses as the
grounds for an emergent democracy: as Rajendra Prasad, the first pre-
sident of the Indian republic, noted in a speech to the All–India History
Congress, he hoped that “historians of India would be cognizant of
the unique importance of the new technique of resistance forged by
Gandhi,” as he encouraged historians to see that “non-violence has
victories more glorious than war.”7 Prasad’s call to action was followed
by a government-funded project on writing the history of India’s freedom
movement.8 A group of eminent historians was gathered in 1950, includ-
ing R. C. Majumdar, an eminent Bengali historian of ancient India, and
the board asked state officials to forward materials to New Delhi so they
could gather information and construct a narrative. According to
Majumdar, he submitted a draft of the first volume to the board, it was
approved, but then mysteriously, the approval was withdrawn and the
board of historians was disbanded. At issue with Majumdar’s account was
the over-emphasis on Bengal and its revolutionaries.9 Majumdar’s three-
volume account appeared at the same time as the final volume of the
government-sponsored History of the Freedom Movement, written by Tara
Chand, which appeared in 1972; throughout the three volumes,
Majumdar singled out militant nationalism and revolutionary movement
as an important subject ignored in other accounts.10
6
The four part series by Dinyar Patel, New York Times, India Ink blog, March 2012,
details the challenges faced by Indian archives.
7
Rajendra Prasad, “The Role of History,” in Speeches of Rajendra Prasad, 1952 56 (New
Delhi: Government of India, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Publications
Division, 1958), pp. 103 08, cited in Lal, History, p. 82.
8
Lal, History, pp. 84 88.
9
R. C. Majumdar, History of the Freedom Movement in India, vol. 1 (Calcutta: Firma
K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1971), pp. xi xii, pp. 445 57.
10
Tara Chand, History of the Freedom Movement in India, 4 vols (New Delhi: Government of
India, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Publications Division, 1961 1972);
Majumdar, vol. 1, pp. 370 412; vol. 2, pp. xvii xix, pp. 265 327; vol. 3 pp. 488 529,
pp. 872 73.
248 Conclusion

Majumdar was perhaps the most eminent Bengali historian to claim,

against an official nationalist consensus, that Bengal’s history of militant
nationalism had been central to forging the necessary politics for an antic-
olonial movement. He relied on vernacular accounts to write his narrative,
arguing that they were corroborated by government documents. In addi-
tion to the arguments he made in History of the Freedom Movement, he
became a patron of others who lamented what appeared as a widespread
ignorance of Bengal’s contributions to India’s freedom struggle. In
a foreword to another historian’s book, Majumdar noted that “In spite of
the attempts in some quarters to minimize the role of the revolutionaries in
the history of the freedom movement in India, their countrymen are now
becoming gradually conscious of the deep debt of gratitude they owe to
these heroes for the achievement of Indian independence.”11
Among participants of the underground groups, there were widespread
concerns throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s that the history of
revolutionary terrorism would be forgotten. In countless commemorative
texts, collections of images and documents, and historical accounts,
writers repeatedly drew attention to the relative inattention historians
and public figures had paid to the important contributions of the revolu-
tionary movement. Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee, a Bengali ex-detainee and
political prisoner who had been mainly active in the United Provinces,
was the driving force behind the conference, which began its planning in
1951. The conference was eventually convened in New Delhi and held
in December 1958 to consider the idea of commemorating the movement
through building monuments at historical sites, writing histories of the
movement, and marking particular anniversaries. Barindra Kumar
Ghosh, Bhupendranath Dutta, Suniti Choudhury, (now Ghosh), and
others who had been active in Bengal attended. Bina Das and Trailokya
Nath Chakrabarty telegrammed their support from Calcutta and Dacca,
respectively.12 At the conference, a group of former revolutionaries
were deputed to write a new history of the freedom movement.
Chatterjee recorded that the participants “spoke in very strong terms
against the nefarious conspiracy to falsify history and give all credit to
a particular section of the fighters for freedom . . . It was claimed and
proved that the revolutionaries were the first to raise the slogan of com-
plete independence.”13 Aside from this high-profile national event, there
was a good deal of local activity surrounding revolutionaries who had

11
R. C. Majumdar, “Foreword,” in Uma Mukherjee, Two Great Indian Revolutionaries:
Rash Behari Bose and Jyotindra Nath Banerjee (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay,
1966).
12
Chatterjee, Indian Revolutionaries, pp. 53 54.
13
Chatterjee, Indian Revolutionaries, pp. 67 68.
 Revolutionary Terrorism and Its Archives 249

relocated to west Bengal. Many became historical activists who joined

associations such as the Anushilan Bhavan, which was set up in 1960 in
south Calcutta to serve as a meeting place for former detainees and
political sufferers.14 The Ex-Andaman Political Prisoners’ Fraternity
Circle was founded in 1969 by Ganesh Ghosh, a member of the
Chittagong Armoury Raid group, when he and a group of ex-detainees
became involved in preserving the Cellular Jail as a historical site, which
occurred in 1979.15
These associations served as a form of grassroots historical activism
that evolved into a vehicle for claims-making, eventually putting enough
pressure on government archivists to acknowledge the contributions
made by the revolutionary terrorist movement. In recent years, a range
of central and provincial governments have promoted the historical study
of revolutionary terrorism. The volume, Political Trouble in India,
1907–1917, which had originally been produced as a precursor to the
Rowlatt report, was reprinted in 1973. Jamna Das Akhtar, the editor,
noted in the foreword: “The book contains details of revolutionary
activities which are generally unknown to modern historians . . . this
documentary collection [reveals] to hitherto unknown young men who
had devoted their lives to the armed struggle for liberation of the
motherland.”16 Akhtar was “proud to state” that he had met many of
those whose lives were described in the book, and was a protégé. Using
records from the Intelligence Branch, scholars writing in independent
India hoped to restore the history of revolutionaries, whose violent acts
and sacrifices had been forgotten. Political Trouble in India, 1917–1937 by
H. W. Hale was first published by the Government of India in 1937, and
was reprinted in 1974. In the 1974 foreword, Dr. Ishwari Prasad noted,
“Before India became free, it would have been impossible to produce
a work of this kind . . . a history of those brave men who worked, suffered
and died for the freedom of the country.”17 Prasad noted (much as Indian

14
Buddheva Bhattacharya, ed., Freedom Struggle and Anushilan Samiti (Calcutta: Board of
Trustees, Anushilan Bhawan, 1979), pp. xiii xiv; see also, DNB, Ashutosh Kali
(1891 1965) and Kedareswar Sen Gupta (1894 1961) were credited with founding
the association. Sen Gupta broke his leg in the building in 1961 and Kali died after an
accidental fall down the stairs in 1965.
15
NMML, Ganesh Ghosh collection, section 2, “Notes, Articles and Related Printed
Material Relating to the Cellular Jail and Andaman and Nicobar Islands”; S.N.
Aggarwal, The Heroes of the Cellular Jail (Chandigarh: Punjab University, 1995; New
Delhi: Rupa Publishers, 2006), p. 284.
16
J. C. Ker, Political Trouble in India, 1907 1917 (originally published by the Government of
India, 1917; Delhi: Oriental Publishers, 1973, reprint), p. v.
17
H. W. Hale, Political Trouble in India, 1917 1937 (Allahabad: Chugh Publications, 1974,
reprint), p. v.
250 Conclusion

politicians predicted in the 1930s) that “The terrorist activity [sic] came
to an end with the announcement of Independence.”18
In West Bengal, by the 1980s and 1990s, under the auspices of
the West Bengal Government, and the leadership of Amiya Samanta,
director-general of the Intelligence Branch of West Bengal, the West
Bengal State Archives brought out a six-volume compendium of printed
material from the Intelligence Branch titled Terrorism in Bengal, so that
scholars could have greater access to sources to study the movement.19
In 2008, on the hundredth anniversary of Khudiram Bose’s execution for
the deaths of Mrs. and Miss Kennedy at Muzzafarpur, the West Bengal
State Archives staged an exhibition to honor the movement. Even though
Khudiram had not killed his intended target, he retained his status as
a young revolutionary a hundred years after this death. The Government
of India produced a commemorative pamphlet through its publications
division for Khudiram, noting, “sadly, the [sic] historians have not given
adequate attention to the history of [the] military revolutionary move-
ment in India.”20 In 2013, the West Bengal State Archives staged another
exhibition titled “Women Revolutionaries of Bengal: Indian Freedom
Movement” that featured profiles of key figures such as Kalpana Dutta,
Pritilata Waddedar, and others.21
As the history of revolutionary terrorism became integrated in official
histories of Indian nationalism authorized by government archives, revo-
lutionary terrorists have been recognized as freedom fighters by the
national government. Recognition of their special status originated in
the colonial era, when successive administrations granted political prison-
ers particular rights and benefits while in detention that distinguished
revolutionaries from the “common” or “habitual” criminal. From their
status as “detenus,” with a right to allowances that compensated for lost
income, they became “political sufferers” who received small grants first
from Congress, and later, from the postcolonial government to enable
them to meet their family’s needs. On the occasion of India’s 25th
anniversary of independence, the Government of India promulgated
a Freedom Fighters’ Pension Scheme that granted eligible former freedom
fighters and their families a pension of up to Rs. 400 per month, based on
the number of dependents and financial need. The criteria was broad –
those imprisoned for more than six months, living underground evading
a detention or arrest order, or in village or house arrest. Their status had

18
Hale, Political Trouble, p. vi.
19
Amiya Samanta, ed., Terrorism in Bengal (Kolkata: West Bengal State Archives, 1995).
20
Hitendra Patel, Khudiram Bose: Revolutionary Extraordinaire (New Delhi: Government of
India, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Publications Division, 2008), 2.
21
www.wbsadte.in/exhibitions 2013.php [accessed May 26, 2016].
 Revolutionary Terrorism and Its Archives 251

to be confirmed by the relevant official documents, which often meant

colonial-era records. The Freedom Fighters’ Pension was superseded by
the Swatantrata Sainik Samman Pension Scheme in 1980, which granted
the pension to all those eligible notwithstanding their financial need.22
The Government of India also granted pensioners and their families free
railways passes in first-class or second-class air-conditioned cars, installa-
tion of telephones and half the cost of phone rental, free medical care in
central government facilities, and accommodation (if they needed) in the
Freedom Fighters’ Home established in central New Delhi. For those
who had been imprisoned at the Andamans, the government granted an
annual trip to the islands for each freedom fighter and a companion.
The state benefits defined who is considered a freedom fighter to
include those who were members of the Indian National Army, involved
in the Telengana struggles in Hyderabad, or who challenged the French
in Pondicherry or the Portuguese in Goa, as well as older struggles such as
the Mappila rebellions and the Ghadar uprising.23 Although members of
the underground groups in Bengal were not listed as part of a movement
or campaign, their time in jail qualified many for the pension. In 2008,
when I was working in the West Bengal State Archives branch in the
Writers’ Building, I discovered that the Freedom Fighters’ Pension office
was just across the alley. I visited the office one day, and was told by the
clerk that the office was responsible for distributing and processing
slightly over 4000 pensioners each month. When I asked how he verified
who should receive the pension, he directed me to a green bounded book
that listed in neat, printed columns, alphabetically by district, those who
had been detained under Regulation III of 1818, the Bengal Criminal
Law Amendment Act of 1930, the Bengal Suppression of Terrorist
Outrages Rules of 1932, and anyone who had been convicted on involve-
ment in “revolutionary and anarchical conspiracy” by the Indian Penal
Code. I had seen this book before – in the British Library in London – but
I had not seen a copy of it in an Indian archive. I asked whether this was
the only copy there was and the gentleman in the office responded in the
affirmative, noting that there was one copy in West Bengal and it was
needed for verifications by the West Bengal Freedom Fighters’ Pension
office.24 When the first pensions were granted in 1972, the green book
22
www.mha.nic.in/sites/upload files/mha/files/FFR Annexture1 100513 0.pdf [accessed
March 5, 2016].
23
www.factly.in/independence day what the indian government is doing for freedom
fighters/ [accessed May 31, 2016].
24
APAC, L/P&J/12/676, “Marked SECRET: List of Persons in Bengal Warned or Dealt
with (since 1930) under Regulation III of 1818, the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment
Act, 1930 (Act VI of 1930), and 16A of the Bengal Suppression of Terrorist Outrages
Rules, 1934, Including Members of the Revolutionary and Anarchical Conspiracy
252 Conclusion

provided guidance to the Intelligence Branch, who was tasked with

releasing documents having to do with former terrorists; if the original
files were lost, the green book gave some basic facts (birthplace, father,
education, and periods in detention) to government officials as they
reconstructed each freedom fighters’ career as a revolutionary terrorist
and their right to a pension.25 This particular document’s continued use
speaks to the ways in which the history of revolutionary terrorism remains
very much a live concern.
The making of revolutionaries into freedom fighters remade anticolo-
nial protesters, many of whom believed in militant action as a political
strategy, into citizens of the postcolonial state. This transition, however,
does not mean that the postcolonial Indian state no longer views political
violence as a threat against the state. Instead, as I show below, the laws
that were used to detain erstwhile freedom fighters were re-enacted and
resurrected to manage a new generation of protesters against the govern-
ment’s policies. Concomitant to the emergence of revolutionary terrorists
as freedom fighters, the government of India adopted more emergency
legislation. These may appear as paradoxical processes, but I argue these
closely linked developments clarified who poses a threat to the security of
the nation. Although India and Indians pride themselves on being mem-
bers of a liberal democracy, one in which representative institutions, rule
of law, universal suffrage, freedom of speech and the right to assemble are
held as constitutional rights by each citizen, repressive laws designed by
colonial officials to repress the revolutionary terrorist movement have
been revived; first in the early years of the Indian republic, through
India’s secessionist battles in the 1950s and 1960s, and latterly in the
post–9/11 world.

A Postcolonial History of Emergency Laws

Extraordinary or emergency legislation was vociferously challenged in
colonial India, not just by revolutionaries, but also by those considered
‘moderate’ Indian politicians; yet emergency laws have proved distress-
ingly ordinary in the postcolonial period. Over time, a long chain of
temporary emergency legislation has become more or less permanent.26
As the India’s postcolonial nation-state has adapted security legislation

Convicted under the Indian Penal Code, the Arms Act and Explosives Substances Act or
Bound Down under the Preventive Sections of the Criminal Procedure Code,”
Government of West Bengal, Intelligence Branch, 1939.
25
WBSA, IB File “Himangshu Sen, a.k.a. Sengupta,” File number redacted.
26
Singh calls this the “permanence of the temporary”: Singh, State, Democracy, and Anti
terror Laws, pp. 63 78, 302 10.
 A Postcolonial History of Emergency Laws 253

to protect the world’s largest democracy, new groups of detainees,

political prisoners, and security threats have been identified as risks to
the state’s sovereignty. Distinct from the case of interwar Bengal, few
contemporary officials make the case that today’s insurgents are “gen-
tlemanly terrorists” whose interests were “honourable” even if their
methods were dangerous.
Between 1947 and 1952, the early years of independent India, as the
government of India began a project of national consolidation, it resorted
to classifying opposing political movements such as communism, trade
union organization, and battles for land redistribution as threats to
national security. As Sekhar Bandopadhyay, a historian of this period,
has argued, “In the first few years of freedom, in the name of protecting
the freedom of the state, the Congress movement sought to curb the civic
freedom of its citizens.”27 Detaining those who threatened the state was
supported by a number of ordinances, starting with the Bengal Special
Powers Ordinance and then the West Bengal Security Act (WBSA).28
The ordinances targeted “subversive movements,” and authorized any
police official to “use such force as may be necessary even to the causing of
death in order to stop the commission of the offence.”29 In Bengal, the
passage of the West Bengal Security Act in 1948 was vehemently pro-
tested in the Legislative Assembly by figures such as Sarat Bose and Jyoti
Basu, then a young communist, and later the chief minister of West
Bengal. Both were aware of the colonial resonances: Jyoti Basu said in
the Legislative Assembly, “It seeks to perpetuate the hated Defence of
India Act of an alien Government. It is contrary to democracy and is in
clear violation of all that Congress has stood for and fought for so many
years.”30 The next month, when told that Nehru and Gandhi had sup-
ported the security act, Sarat Bose noted, “It is impossible for me or the
West Bengal public to forget that Gandhiji’s opposition to the Rowlatt
Bill was uncompromising.”31
Yet, the West Bengal Security Act was enacted and 582 people were
arrested by the middle of June 1949; by the end of the year, 953 had been
arrested and 589 were under detention.32 The law was due to expire after
a year, yet was reenacted multiple times. In 1950, a clause was added that
barred any legal action against the government, and that clause found its

27
Bandopadhyay, Decolonization, p. 94. 28 Bandopadhyay, Decolonization, pp. 73 74.
29
National Library, Kolkata, GP 351.75 (5415) W52, Government of West Bengal,
Judicial and Legislative Department, “West Bengal Security Act, 1948,” Chapters 2 3.
30
Quoted from West Bengal Legislative Assembly Proceedings, vol. 1, no. 1, 27
November 1947, pp. 48 50 in Bandopadhyay, Decolonization, p. 74.
31
Cited in The Statesman, 20 December 1947, in Bandopadhyay, p. 76.
32
Bandopadhyay, Decolonization, pp. 110 11.
254 Conclusion

way into other legislation. Through multiple expirations and reenact-

ments, the West Bengal Security Act remained in force until 1968.
At the national level, repressive legislation such as the Preventive
Detention Act (1950) reinforced the terms of the WBSA, and members
of the Communist Party of India were detained in large numbers, as
documents from the Intelligence Branch show. By the time the first
elections were held in 1952, the Ministry of Home Affairs in New Delhi
reported that about 165 detainees belonging to the CPI remained in the
Buxa jail under the terms of the Preventive Detention Act. The govern-
ment was reluctant to release these detainees on the grounds that “the
creed of the Party, namely, to seize power by the use of violence remains
completely unchanged,” but several groups of detainees were released
later that spring, largely in order that they might run for office in the 1952
elections.33
Until the 1960s, Indian officials appeared to be aware of a colonial
history of detention from which the government’s measures drew inspira-
tion. In a series of memos between the Jails Department of West Bengal
and the Intelligence Branch dated sometime around 1959, officials in
Bengal debated how to define “terrorist.” They were discussing the
number of interviews detainees ought to be granted. One official noted
that the rules for granting interviews had been “issued in the days of the
British regime as a more cautious and restrictive measure against the so-
called terrorist convicts of those days. Since independence we have no
separate groups as terrorists.” Another official noted that the interview
rules were based on the Defence of India Rules of 1939, which could not
apply to the current detainees: “It has to be remembered that these rules
[1939] were applied to a number of persons who were then fighting for the
political freedom of the country . . . This latter category of persons has
committed . . . treason by any standard.”34
Provincial and national legislation has enacted an interlocking regime
of emergency laws in the postcolonial period.35 From frontier legislation
that targeted places such as Assam, Manipur, and Nagaland on the
northeastern frontier, to Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir in the north-
west, legislation such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA)

33
West Bengal Home Political, Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, New
Delhi, to all state governments, including Jammu and Kashmir, February 5, 1952, file
number redacted; West Bengal Home Political, “Review of Cases of Detenu Candidates
against Whom There Are Orders under the Preventive Detention Act,” file number
redacted; West Bengal Home Political, Special Branch, confidential, “Review of
Detenu Cases,” file number redacted.
34
West Bengal Intelligence Branch, file name and number redacted.
35
Extraordinary Laws in India: A Reader for Understanding Legislations Endangering Civil
Liberties (New Delhi: Indian Social Institute, 2002).
 A Postcolonial History of Emergency Laws 255

of 1958 allowed the army and state police officials the right to arrest and
detain insurgents in “disturbed areas,” raid houses in search of evidence,
and perhaps, most controversially, the right to shoot or kill anyone who
did not obey police orders. AFSPA was first used in the northeast in 1958
to suppress tribal movements in the northeastern region of India that
called for self-determination; the act was subsequently extended to
Jammu and Kashmir in 1990. The act guarantees that military officials
working in areas where AFSPA is in force will be immune to prosecutions,
with the result that hundreds, if not thousands, of extra-judicial killings,
rapes, and robberies by armed forces have been committed.36
Provincial measures such as the West Bengal Security Act and AFSPA
have paved the groundwork for much of the security legislation that has
followed, including the Defence of India Act (1962), which was enacted
during the Sino–Indian War and used in Bengal to detain members of the
Communist Party who were seen to be pro-Chinese. Deoli, which had
served to house detainees in the colonial era, was used in this period as an
internment camp for Indians with Chinese ancestry. Nearly 3000 Indians
of Chinese descent were transported from West Bengal to Rajasthan and
detained for five years.37 The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (1967),
the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (1971), the Prevention of
Terrorism Act (1974), and the Terrorism and Disruptive Activities
Prevention Act (1987) have extended emergency legislation to make
India into, as the jurist A. G. Noorani notes, “a security state.”38
Collectively, this legislation has outlawed particular associations on the
grounds that they posed a threat to the integrity of the nation, allowed the
use of forced confessions in trials, allowed trials without legal representa-
tion for the defendant, and enabled the long-term detention of those
suspected of terrorism in the name of preventing attacks. Although
POTA had expired in 1995, 9/11 and the attack on the Indian parliament
in December that year led to the passage of POTA in March 2002; it
lapsed two years later in 2004. Yet, as Singh has argued, “The jubilation
over its repeal, moreover, shrouded other laws that continue to be in
operation in parts of India.” The Indian government has since changed
the right to maintain one’s silence, making it easier to have confessions
be admissible in court; these reforms lowered the state’s burden to prove
36
A briefing by Amnesty International summarizes some of these episodes and the inves
tigations that followed: www.amnestyusa.org/sites/default/files/asa200422013en.pdf
[accessed May 26, 2016].
37
James Griffith, “India’s Forgotten Chinese Internment Camp,” The Atlantic, August 9,
2013, www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/08/indias forgotten chinese internment
camp/278519/ [accessed June 14, 2016].
38
A. G. Noorani, “India: A Security State,” Economic and Political Weekly 44.14 (April
4 10, 2009): 13 15.
256 Conclusion

a crime and facilitated the prosecution of political dissidents.39 The

ordinary law has been transformed by the longstanding existence of
extraordinary and emergency laws.
Emergency laws evolved from targeting members of underground
revolutionary groups in the colonial period, to communists in the early
years after Indian independence, to detaining Maoists, tribal leaders and
Dalit activists, whose political protests have been viewed as a security
threat to the government. From the interwar years onward, as British
officials devolved political authority from the center to the provinces and
expanded Indian representation in governing India, emergency laws were
used to protect the process of democratic and constitutional reform from
the disruptions posed by political violence. The kind of colonial liberalism
that was held by India’s British rulers has been replicated within the
political formations of postcolonial liberal India, sometimes by the same
figures who were subjected to illegal detention. Jawaharlal Nehru, who
protested extraordinary laws and advocated for full universal suffrage at
India’s independence, authorized the passage of the Preventive Detention
Act in 1950, and AFSPA in 1958. In both the colonial and postcolonial
periods, political leaders rationalized emergency laws as a way of protect-
ing the process of democracy, even as the civil liberties of political groups
have been eroded and the executive power of the armed forces has been
enhanced.
This trajectory toward more emergency laws, rather than less, shows
the ways in which colonial occupation produced particular outcomes.
India’s colonial history of revolutionary terrorism is very much a part of its
present, a legacy of colonial occupation and liberal ideals as they devel-
oped in concert through the twentieth century.

39
Singh, State, Democracy, and Anti terror Laws, p. 287.
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 Index
Aiyangar, C. Duraiswami, 114, 116
Alipore Conspiracy Case, 1910, 9, 41, 42,
60, 68, 70, 72, 77, 79, 84, 100, 107,
108, 112
Alipore Conspiracy Case, 1924, 108
Alipore jail, 71, 72, 74, 80, 122, 229, 241
amnesty, 27, 35, 45, 50 55, 56, 58, 60, 67,
132, 158, 196, 197, 201, 223
Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act.
See Rowlatt Act of 1919
Andaman Islands, 33, 36, 51, 55, 58, 65,
67, 68, 69, 72, 73 76, 77 79, 80,
81 82, 83, 87, 100, 179, 193 94, 201,
204 5, 219, 223, 224, 225, 228,
230, 251
Anderson, John, 132, 156, 170, 172 73,
192, 199
Andrews, C. F., 237
Anushilan, 185
Anushilan Revolted Group, 154,
172, 208
Anushilan Samiti, 5, 65, 81, 86, 94, 98, 109,
123, 169, 172, 191, 208, 210, 214,
217, 220, 222, 224, 226, 227 28, 229,
230, 244
Armed Forces Special Powers Act
(AFSPA), 1958, 255
Ashanullah, Inspector Khan Bahadur,
150 51
Aurobindo, Sri, 40 41, 72, 86, 224
autobiography, 4, 59, 60, 64, 65, 66, 80, 81,
90, 101, 218, 219
Baldwin, Stanley, 97, 197
Banerji, Upendra Nath, 59, 68, 69 73, 74,
75, 76, 77, 80, 82, 83, 85, 90, 91, 100,
107, 121, 219, 223
Barker, Lieut. Col. F. A., 193 94
Basu, Jatindra Nath, 146
Basu, Jyoti, 253
Basu, Narendra Kumar, 147, 156, 167
BCLA ordinance, 111
270
Beachcroft Chandavarkar report, 44, 51,
57, 146, 172
Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act
(BCLA) 1925, 12, 16, 95, 107,
112 18, 119 20, 121, 122, 123, 127,
133 34, 136 37, 138, 139, 146, 147,
150, 177, 179, 187, 189, 224
Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act
(BCLA), 1930, 12, 16, 126, 143 44,
145 47, 148, 159, 160, 176, 178,
179, 182
Bengal Criminal Law Amendment
Ordinance, 1924, 111
Bengal Criminal Law Amendment
Ordinance, 1931, 147
Bengal Emergency Powers Ordinance,
1932, 144, 149, 159, 160, 161,
162, 163
Bengal Provincial Congress Committee,
68, 98
Bengal Public Security Act, 1932, 144, 159
Bengal Suppression of Terrorist Outrages
Act, 1932, 159, 160 61, 164, 251
Benn, Wedgewood, 128, 130, 131, 132 34,
140 41, 143 44
Bera, Jyotish Chandra, 174 75
Berhampore, 183, 184, 185, 200, 202,
204, 214
Bethune College, 102, 155, 233, 236
bhadralok, 6, 13, 24, 63, 91, 121, 127, 149,
159, 165, 171, 182, 183, 185, 187,
189, 190, 191, 200, 203, 204
bhadralok dacoits, 20, 155
bhadralok dacoity, 6, 185
Bhattacharjee, Bhowani, 173 74
Bhowal, Rani of, 175
bicycles, 164 65
Bihar, 203
Birkenhead, Earl of, 30, 117, 129, 130
Bose, Benoy, 141 43
Bose, Khudiram, ix, 23, 68, 71, 72, 84, 86,
102, 112, 219, 220, 250
 Index
Bose, Sarat Chandra, 120, 188, 204,
214, 253
Bose, Subhas Chandra, 66, 93, 99, 100,
107, 112, 122, 125, 129, 176, 204,
209, 227, 228 29, 241, 243
Brittain, Vera, 197
Brockway, Fenner, 131
Burge, B.E.J., 171, 175
Burma, 45, 107, 122, 140, 229
Buxa Dooara, 179, 183 84, 185, 189, 191,
199, 214, 254
Calcutta Corporation, 99, 100, 107
Cellular Jail. See Andaman Islands
Central Provinces, 49
Chaitanya, 84, 87, 88
Chaki, Prafulla, 68, 71, 84, 102, 112
Chakrabarty, Trailokya Nath, 59, 74,
80 83, 90, 91, 206, 214, 219, 221,
223 32, 235, 241, 243, 244, 248
Chakravarti, Ambica Charan, 108, 235
Chakravarti, Sushil, 174 75
Chandernagore, 84, 236
Chapekar brothers, 36, 88
Chatterjee, Jogesh Chandra, 94, 248
Chatterjee, Kamala, 233
Chatterjee, Partha, 96
Chatterjee, Sailesh Chandra, 194
Chaudhuri, Nirad, 218
Chaudhuri, Pramode Ranjan, 86
Chelmsford, Frederic, 28, 48, 53, 103 4
Chittagong, 86, 103, 150, 151, 155, 160,
161 65, 168, 169, 171, 174, 176, 187,
197, 198, 226, 237
Chittagong Armoury Raid, 23, 138,
139 40, 144, 146, 147, 149, 150, 154,
155, 165, 166, 170, 175, 178, 215,
219, 220, 221, 232, 233, 234 36, 238,
241, 249
Choudhury, Suniti, 152, 153, 241, 248
civil disobedience, 10, 24, 60, 90, 92, 93,
119, 121, 158, 168
Civil Disobedience movement, 11, 137,
141, 144, 145, 148, 178, 199, 243
commissions, 20, 31, 33, 57
Communist Party of India (CPI), 208,
212, 215 16, 221, 233, 237, 243,
254, 255
Congress Socialist Party (CSP), 208
Congress, Indian National, 11, 33, 45, 49,
58, 60, 65, 88, 98, 99, 105, 107, 108,
110, 128, 131, 188, 196, 202, 206,
209, 212, 215, 218, 221, 224, 229,
234, 239, 241, 243, 250, 253
All India Congress Committee, 105, 215
271
Bengal, 241
leaders, 114, 226
Conservative Party, 30, 97, 129, 188
Contai, 141, 148, 157, 161, 175
Craik, Henry, 198
Criminal Tribes Act, 1911, 7 8
Cripps, Sir Stafford, 197, 212
Curzon, Lord George, 41
Curzon Wyllie, William, 37, 39
Dacca, 70, 100, 101, 141, 145, 148,
154, 155, 169, 172, 173, 174, 175,
176, 177, 183, 210, 213, 223, 226,
228, 248
Dacca Conspiracy Case, 42, 100
Darjeeling, 124, 143, 145, 156, 168,
172 74, 246
Das, Basanta Kumar, 198
Das, Bina, 81, 102, 152 53, 155, 156 57,
206, 219 20, 221, 232 33, 234, 237,
238 43, 248
Das, C. R., 150
Das, Chittaranjan, 77, 93, 99 100, 107,
109, 117, 120, 176, 223, 227, 228 29
Das, Jatin, 94, 102, 123 24, 125, 131,
153, 230
Das, Pulin Bihari, 74
Dasgupta, Kamala, 102, 206, 219, 221,
233, 234, 238 39, 240 43
Dastidar, Tarakeshwar, 236
Datta, Ullaskar, 91
Day, Ernest, 105, 112, 133
Defence of India Act, 1915, 9, 18, 31 32,
38, 42, 43 44, 51, 54, 55, 95, 96, 110,
135, 244, 253
Defence of India Act, 1962, 242, 255
Defence of India Rules, 1939, 211, 212,
213, 254
Defence of India, 1915, 98
Deoli, 149, 176, 179, 183, 184 86, 190,
191 93, 194 95, 199, 201, 202, 204,
211, 255
detainees, ex , 100, 180, 182, 209, 210 12,
215, 223, 249
detainees/detenus, 98, 117, 187 88, 195,
213, 221
allowance, 65, 118, 121, 122, 151, 156,
170, 186, 189, 192, 199, 200, 221 22,
229, 232, 250
diet, 45, 46, 49, 50, 64, 82, 121, 124,
126, 180 81, 186 87, 192, 193 94,
214, 225, 230
government training scheme, 199 201
petitions, 20, 120, 152, 180, 185, 190,
193, 214
272 Index
detainees/detenus (cont.)
release, 23, 24, 51, 53 55, 66, 67 68, 96,
107, 112, 129
transportation, 74, 84, 121, 165, 176,
179, 184
treatment, 9, 118 19, 121, 122 23,
126 27, 180, 183, 186, 193
detention camps, 12, 16, 18, 19, 24, 67, 83,
119, 120, 123, 176, 177, 178 79, 180,
182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 191,
198 99, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 210,
212, 217, 225, 240
Dhingra, Madanlal, 39
Dipali Samiti, 155
Douglas, R., 151 52
Dudziak, Mary, 17
Durno, L. G., 154
Dutta, Akhil Chandra, 197
Dutta, Amar Nath, 116, 157, 177
Dutta, Bhupendra Kumar, 59, 60 62, 63,
81, 83 84, 86 88, 90, 99, 121, 122,
215, 223
Dutta, Bhupendranath, 41, 69, 78, 248
Dutta, Kalpana, 81, 155, 164, 211, 219,
221, 232 38, 239, 241, 243, 250
Dutta, Kanai Lal, 71 72, 84 85, 86, 102,
112, 219
Dutta, Ullaskar, 67, 68 69, 70 71, 74, 76,
77 80, 81, 82, 85, 90, 107, 219
dyarchy, 28 29
Dyer, General Reginald, 44
Edward VII, 197
Egypt, 28
emergency legislation, 3, 12, 15, 16 18, 19,
26, 31, 32 33, 36, 38, 43, 44, 57, 95,
96, 98, 104, 111, 118, 120, 126, 128,
131, 134 35, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141,
144 45, 156, 160, 167, 169, 175, 178,
179, 180, 207, 211, 216, 252 54,
255, 256
Fairweather, C.E.S., 166
Fanon, Frantz, 22
Faridpur, 103, 169, 202
Finney, P.E.S., 185 86, 191, 192, 193,
194 95
Forster, E. M., 197
Forward Bloc, 212
France, 5, 45, 63, 149
Fraser, Lieutenant Governor Andrew, 9, 71
freedom fighters, 3, 4, 24, 221, 245, 250,
251, 252
Freedom Fighters’ Pension Scheme,
250, 251
Gandhi, Mohandas K., 10, 11, 24, 33,
60, 66, 81, 88, 96, 99 100, 105 6,
110, 117, 118, 119, 128, 131, 132,
135, 218, 220, 224, 240 42,
247, 253
and revolutionary terrorists, 204,
206 7, 239
campaigns, 34 35, 41, 50, 58 59, 61, 64,
68, 87, 90, 92 93, 103, 109, 137, 141,
144, 145, 178, 180, 243
Ganguli, Santosh Chandra, 202
Ganguly, Suhasini, 215 16, 236, 243
Garlick, R. R., 148, 151
George V, 51, 78, 196
George VI, 197
Ghose, Sukumar, 175
Ghosh, Barindra Kumar, 41, 59, 67, 68 69,
72, 73 77, 78, 80, 81 82, 83, 84, 85,
90, 91, 107, 200, 219, 248
Ghosh, Ganesh, 121, 150, 215 16, 221,
233, 249
Ghosh, Nabajiban, 202
Ghosh, Shanti, 152, 153, 206, 237, 241
Goswami, Krishna Pankaj, 202
Goswami, Narendra, 84
Government of India Act of 1919, 12, 27,
28 29, 30 31, 35, 48, 51, 56, 58, 64,
96, 113, 159, 201
Government of India Act of 1935, 12, 59,
145, 159, 177, 180, 195 96, 199, 203,
207, 209, 212, 216
Grassby, C.C.G., 154
Guha, Arun Chandra, 121, 206, 215
Gupta, Dinesh, 142, 143, 148, 174
habeas corpus, 16, 17, 31, 44, 92, 103, 104,
113, 114, 115, 134, 135, 144, 146 47,
176, 177, 182
Haig, H.G., 176, 187, 194
Hale, H.W., Political Trouble in India,
1917 1937, 249
Hijli, 151, 152, 157, 161, 168, 179,
183 84, 185, 188, 189, 212, 213,
214, 241
Hili Railway station, 169
Hindustan Socialist Republican Army, 65,
94, 131, 140
Hoare, Samuel, 159, 165, 170, 188
home domicile, 123, 130, 178, 183, 184,
199, 202, 205
hunger strikes, 75, 82, 122, 125 26, 128,
181, 183, 185, 207, 225
Andaman Islands, 204 5
Deoli, 192 94
Lahore, 123 25, 126, 230
 Index
Huq, Fazlul, 203, 214
Hussain, Nasser, 18
in camera, 166
Indian Criminal Law Amendment Act,
1908, 9, 42, 43
Indian Jails Commission Report, 27, 34,
45 46, 124
Indian Press Act, 1910, 44, 84, 88
Indian Prisons Act, 1894, 49
Indian Republican Army, 139 40
Indian Statutory Commission. See Simon
Commission
Intelligence Branch, 20, 35 38, 60, 69, 84,
85, 87, 89, 93, 100, 101, 109, 121,
122, 126, 129, 148, 156, 161, 166,
208, 209, 210, 212, 214, 242, 246,
249 50, 252, 254
Ireland, 5, 6, 18, 28, 38, 85, 102, 105, 116,
125, 132, 156, 158, 168, 169, 192, 197
Irwin, Lord, 124, 128, 129, 130, 131 33,
134, 140
Italy, 4, 5, 6, 78, 102
Jackson, Stanley, 127, 129 30, 133 34,
153, 156, 157, 182, 233, 239
Jallianwala Bagh, 35, 44, 53, 55, 58
Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 114, 115
Joshi, Kalpana. See Dutta, Kalpana
Jugantar, 5, 65, 94, 98, 109, 122, 149, 185,
206, 208, 210, 212, 217, 220, 222,
233, 244
Jugantar magazine, 68, 69
Kanungo, Hem Chandra, 67, 74, 82, 87
Ker, J. C., Political Trouble in India,
1907 1917, 36, 249
Keynes, John Maynard, 197
Khan, Ambica Charan, 122 23
Khilafat, 28, 95, 98
Kingsford, Douglas, 41, 71, 73
Koselleck, Reinhart, 61, 70
Krishak Praja Party (KPP), 181, 203
Labour Party, 30, 97, 128, 129, 130, 131,
140, 158, 165, 197
Lahore Conspiracy Case, 1929 30, 94 95,
123, 126, 131, 132, 153, 193
Lala Lajpat Rai, 94, 131
Lebong Outrage, 172 75, 176
Legislative Assembly, 11, 16, 20, 28, 29, 47,
94, 95, 96, 97, 107, 111, 117, 124,
133, 135, 146, 159, 168, 181, 185,
186, 191, 192, 195, 197, 199, 202,
204, 229
273
Bengal, 202, 212
debates, 103 4, 112 17, 125 26,
156 58, 176 77, 197 98
East Bengal, 223
West Bengal, 221, 239, 253
Legislative Council, 93, 99
Bengal, 28, 29, 96, 113, 115, 134, 136,
143, 145, 146, 150, 152, 156, 158,
159, 167, 168, 169, 228
Imperial, 35
Punjab, 48
Liberal Party, 97, 131
liberalism, 9, 15, 16, 21, 53 54, 56, 90, 110,
129, 135, 167, 169, 256
democracy, 244, 252
history of, 53 54, 168 69
reforms, 10, 13, 19, 27 31, 34, 35, 51,
116, 133, 137
representative government, 13, 15, 21,
62, 136
timeline, 13 14, 16, 22, 62 63
Lowman, Francis J., 130, 141, 143,
149, 176
Macaulay, Thomas, 1, 2, 13, 40, 168
Maclean, Kama, 11, 22
Madras, 36, 53, 79, 114, 116, 131, 179, 189
Mahabharata, 75
Maharastra, 36, 39, 83, 88
Mahasai, Munindra Deb Rai, 146, 156, 167
Maine, Henry, 14
Maitra, Pandit Lakshmi Kanta, 198
Majeed, Javed, 66
Majumdar, Amiya, 173 74, 175
Majumdar, Bhupati, 121, 206
Majumdar, Dinesh, 142, 233, 239
Majumdar, R. C., 247 48
Malaviya, Madan Mohan, 125, 132
Manicktolla, 68, 70, 71
Meerut Conspiracy Case, 94, 131
memoirs. See autobiography
Midnapore, 41, 120, 141, 148, 149, 151,
157, 160, 161, 164, 169, 171, 175
Midnapore Conspiracy Case, 9
Mill, John Stuart, 13
Mitra, Satyen Chandra, 113, 157, 176, 186,
192, 229
Mitter, Provash C., 113
Mitter, S. C., 199
Moberly, A. N., 130, 134
Montagu, Edwin, 28, 33, 47 48, 50, 51,
53 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 103, 158
Montagu Chelmsford reforms. See
Government of India Act of 1919
Mussoorie, 124
274 Index
Muzzafarpur, 41, 71, 112, 244, 250
Mymensingh, 169, 224
Natesan, G. A., 114, 115, 116
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 131, 132, 218,
253, 256
Nehru, Motilal, 116, 125, 128
Neogy, K. C., 177
Nepal, 70, 162
New Violence Party, 94
Non Cooperation Movement, 11, 50, 58,
61, 68, 92, 93, 95, 98, 99, 100 1, 103,
105, 109, 127, 135, 208, 228, 243
Noorani, A. G., 255
Pahartali, 154, 175, 236
Pal, Bipin Chandra, 77, 93, 115 16
Parliament, Great Britain, 15, 45, 52, 97,
127, 129, 131, 145, 158, 165, 167,
188, 191, 204
Parliament, India, 245, 255
Partition
1905, 5, 41, 69, 73
1947, 218, 222, 240, 242
Pather Dabi. See Saratchandra
Peddie, James, 148, 149
Permanent Settlement, 1793, 13
political prisoners, 8, 18, 27, 51, 56, 96,
97 98, 128, 131, 170, 177, 178, 181,
197, 201 2, 203, 204, 207, 209,
214 15, 216, 221, 230, 253
All India Political Prisoners’ Day, 196
allowance and benefits. See detainees, or
“detenus,” allowance
and Gandhi, 206, 241
definition of, 26, 33, 34, 45 50, 75,
118 20, 126, 132 33, 198, 204
Ex Andaman Political Prisoners’
Fraternity Circle, 249
treatment. See detainees, or “detenus”
political sufferers, 4, 65, 106, 113, 124, 181,
221 22, 249, 250
Prentice, W.D.R., 146, 156, 157
Punjab, 49, 106
purna swaraj, 29, 58, 92, 135
Quinton, H., 154
Quit India, 180, 212, 214, 215, 224,
239, 243
Rama Krishna, 40
Raman, Bhavani, 19
Ramayana, 74
Rammohun Roy, 84, 88
Ray, R.E.A., 148, 213
Ray, Shanti Shekhareswar, 167
Regulation III of 1818, 9, 42, 44, 51, 55, 57,
98, 107, 108, 109, 112, 113, 117, 119,
120, 121, 126, 224, 228, 251
Reid, Robert N., 160, 166, 171
Repressive Laws Committee, 95, 103, 146
repressive legislation. See emergency
legislation
Revolutionary Communist Party of India
(RCPI), 208, 221
Roundtable Conferences, 128, 136, 145,
159, 160, 161, 177
Rowlatt Act of 1919, 12, 16, 18, 32 33,
34 35, 42, 43 44, 51, 56 58, 59, 92,
95, 96, 97, 104, 109, 110, 135, 136,
244, 253
as history of terrorism, 35 36, 39 42,
231, 249
Rowlatt Commission, 27, 32, 38 39, 42,
45, 113
Rowlatt, Sidney, 32, 38
Roy, Indu Bhusan, 74, 79, 80
Roy, M. N., 93
Roy, Mrinal Kanti, 191, 192, 193
Roy, Promode Kumar, 194
rule of law, 3, 5, 13, 15, 16 17, 32, 34 35,
44, 56, 62, 97, 103, 104, 114, 120,
129, 134 35, 136, 145, 146, 167, 169,
198, 252
Russia, 5, 36, 85, 102, 140, 149, 158, 237
Saha, Gopinath, 86, 105, 112
resolution, 105 6, 107
Sanyal, Sachindranath, 94
Sanyal, Shukla, 65
Sapru, Tej Bahadur, 49, 95, 96, 103, 128
Saratchandra, Pather Dabi, 4, 102
Sarkar, Tanika, 102, 238
Saunders, J. P., 94, 131, 149
Savarkar, Vinayak, 66, 74, 224
Saxena, Mohan Lal, 202
Scott, David, 19, 220
Scott, J. A., 94
security prisoners, 4, 213, 214, 215,
221, 223
Sen Gupta, Naresh Chandra, 146, 167
Sen, Surja, 108, 139 40, 154, 221, 233,
235, 236
Sengupta, J. M., 81, 120, 188, 196, 227
Sengupta, Nellie, 196
Shafi, M., 49
Sharma, B. N., 49
Sherman, Taylor, 120
Simla, 47, 118, 124, 176, 246
Simon Commission, 94, 127 28, 136, 137
 Index
Singh, Ananta Lal, 108, 150, 221, 233, 235
Singh, Bhagat, 94, 140, 231
Singh, Ujjwal, 120, 181, 245
Sree Sangha, 94, 154, 172, 175, 213, 217
state prisoners, 4, 8, 55, 97, 119, 120, 122,
126, 182, 187, 204, 221
Stephen, James Fitzjames, 14
Stevens, C.G.B., 152
Stoler, Ann, 20
Suhrawardy, H. S., 153, 157
swadeshi, 4, 5 6, 9, 41, 68, 77, 101, 222,
226, 227
Swami Vivekanand, 40, 86
Swarajya Party, 93, 98, 99 100, 106, 107,
109, 111, 112, 117, 223
Tagore, Rabindranath, 6, 77, 204, 237
Tegart, Charles, 105, 127, 130, 132, 133,
142, 143, 148, 233, 239
terrorism, revolutionary, 1 3, 5, 11, 13, 15,
18, 19, 23, 32, 39, 45, 55, 58, 59, 68,
81 82, 95, 101, 107, 109, 113, 117,
119, 120, 138, 145, 147, 150, 151,
156, 158, 159, 161, 164, 170, 171,
198, 205, 207, 208, 209, 214, 216, 238
archive of, 3, 19 20, 245 47
history of, 20, 21, 23, 24, 35 38, 59,
60 62, 63 64, 66, 73, 84, 86 88,
89 90, 101 2, 112, 148, 219, 222 23,
244, 248 50
275
timeline to independence, 62, 248 50
terrorists, gentlemanly, 1 3, 4, 5, 13, 16,
33, 47, 54, 56, 97, 98, 103, 155, 179,
180, 200, 201, 213, 230, 253
terrorists, revolutionary, 2
Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 36, 224
Tippera, 152, 169, 210, 237
tribunals, 113, 134, 165, 166, 169,
178, 219
United Provinces, 49, 92, 94, 106, 114,
203, 248
United States, 5, 6, 17, 63, 116, 149
Verhoeven, Claudia, 23
village domicile, 123, 130, 178, 183,
202, 205
Waddedar, Pritilata, 81, 155, 164, 236, 250
Wells, H. G., 197
West Bengal Security Act, 1948, 215, 216,
244, 253 54, 255
West Bengal State Archives, 38, 246 47,
250, 251
West, Rebecca, 197
World War I, 3, 9, 18, 27, 30, 31, 56,
73, 110
World War II, 180, 209, 211, 216
Writers’ Building, 142, 148, 174, 219,
224, 246, 251