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BRITAIN AND THE WORLD

Policing ‘Bengali Terrorism’

in India and the World
Imperial Intelligence and
Revolutionary Nationalism, 1905–1939

Michael Silvestri
 Britain and the World

Series Editors
Martin Farr
School of Historical Studies
Newcastle University
Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

Michelle D. Brock
Department of History
Washington and Lee University
Lexington, VA, USA

Eric G. E. Zuelow
Department of History
University of New England
Biddeford, ME, USA
Britain and the World is a series of books on ‘British world’ history. The
editors invite book proposals from historians of all ranks on the ways in
which Britain has interacted with other societies since the seventeenth cen-
tury. The series is sponsored by the Britain and the World society.
Britain and the World is made up of people from around the world who
share a common interest in Britain, its history, and its impact on the wider
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on the world through this book series, an annual conference, and the
Britain and the World journal with Edinburgh University Press.
Martin Farr (martin.farr@newcastle.ac.uk) is the Chair of the British
Scholar Society and General Editor for the Britain and the World book
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focusing on the pre-1800 period and Eric G. E. Zuelow (ezuelow@une.
edu) is Series Editor for titles covering the post-1800 period.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14795
 Michael Silvestri

Policing ‘Bengali
Terrorism’ in India
and the World
Imperial Intelligence and Revolutionary
Nationalism, 1905–1939
Michael Silvestri
History Department
Clemson University
Clemson, SC, USA

Britain and the World

ISBN 978-3-030-18041-6    ISBN 978-3-030-18042-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18042-3

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

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For my parents
 Acknowledgments

This book has had a long and winding history, and in the process of
researching and writing it, I have piled up an extraordinary number of
debts. I first approached the topic of colonial policing in a PhD disserta-
tion at Columbia University, and although only traces of the original thesis
remain in the present study, the intellectual and financial support I received
at Columbia was critical to this book’s genesis. Sir David Cannadine was
an enthusiastic and supportive dissertation supervisor and I was fortunate
to benefit from the insights of a truly outstanding dissertation committee:
David Armitage, Sugata Bose, Leonard Gordon, and Ayesha Jalal. Ayesha’s
suggestion that I explore Sir John Anderson’s career in Bengal has led me
down many profitable avenues of historical research in subsequent years.
Needless to say, neither she nor any of the individuals mentioned in these
acknowledgments are responsible for any deficiencies of fact or interpreta-
tion in this book.
I owe an enormous debt as well to the archives and libraries in which I
have researched and written this book and in particular to the staff of the
Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections of the British Library. Over the years,
they have been unfailingly helpful with my research questions and research
requests and have made the Asian and African Studies reading room quite
simply the best place in the world to think about, research, and write
about South Asian and British imperial history. At Clemson University, the
staff of the Resource Sharing Office of the Cooper Library have tolerated
my innumerable requests for books, articles, and other materials and have
done an outstanding job of providing them.

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A number of institutions have generously supported the research in the

United States, the United Kingdom, and India on which this book is
based. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Council for European
Studies, Columbia University; the American Institute for Indian Studies;
and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for supporting the initial
research for this project. More recent research was funded by the American
Philosophical Society, which awarded me a Franklin Research Grant; and
by the History Department; the College of Architecture, Arts and
Humanities; the Humanities Advancement Board; and the University
Research Grants Committee of Clemson University.
Some material in this book appeared previously in my article “The
Bomb, Bhadralok, Bhagavad Gita and Dan Breen: Terrorism in Bengal
and Its Relation to the European Experience,” which appeared in Terrorism
and Political Violence in 2009.
I am also grateful to many individuals for inviting me to present my
research at workshops, conferences, and seminars and for sharpening my
fuzzy thoughts on imperial intelligence and “Bengali terrorism.” I thank
Andy Syk, John Horne, and Robert Gerwarth for inviting me to partici-
pate in the joint University College Dublin-Trinity College Dublin con-
ference on Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War in 2010.
Thanks to Satoshi Mizutani for organizing an outstanding 2013 confer-
ence at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan, on the transnational trajec-
tories of the Indian nationalist struggle. Bill Meier invited me to take
part in a very productive workshop on terrorism and violence at the
2014 Midwest Victorian Studies Association conference, while Kim
Wagner organized and led a stimulating and collegial workshop on colo-
nial violence at Queen Mary College, University of London, in 2015.
Audiences at the British Scholar Conference and the Pacific Coast
Conference on British Studies in 2017 provided valuable feedback and
encouragement.
The late Sabyaschi Mukherjee was generous in sharing materials which
he had collected on Calcutta Police Commissioner Charles Tegart. Jeremy
Ingpen provided insights on his grandfather, police intelligence officer
R. E. A. Ray, and shared excerpts from his grandmother Marion Ray’s
diaries. Along with other historians of late colonial Bengal, I am indebted
to Dr. Amiya K. Samanta, former Director of the West Bengal Police
Intelligence Branch. Dr. Samanta facilitated the research process while I
was a graduate student in Kolkata, and his publication of documentary
collections on “Bengali terrorism” has provided a valuable resource for
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

historians at a time when access to colonial-era materials on this subject

can still be difficult.
A number of other individuals have provided important critical per-
spectives, assistance, and encouragement. I thank in particular Brian
Drohan, Richard Hill, Harald Fischer-Tiné, Durba Ghosh, Eunan
O’Halpin, Heather Streets-Salter, and Kim Wagner. Conversations with
Kate O’Malley have helped me to understand the mentalities of both
imperial intelligence officers and anticolonial activists, while my colleague
Mou Banerjee has not only provided warm encouragement but also shared
her deep knowledge of colonial India. My visits with Ed, Claire, and
William Moisson have been the highlight of my research trips to London.
A draft chapter benefitted from a critical reading by Heather Streets-­
Salter, while an early version of the introduction benefitted from the com-
ments of my friends and colleagues Steve Marks and James Burns. The
students in my graduate seminar on empire in the Fall 2018 semester
buoyed my spirits and helped me refine my arguments as I completed the
final manuscript. Gail Nagel was a careful and critical reader and an enthu-
siastic supporter of this project.
At Palgrave Macmillan, I thank Molly Beck, Maeve Sinnott, and the
series editors for their enthusiasm about this book and for their help with
the publication process. The careful and critical reading of the anonymous
reader at Palgrave provided comments and suggestions that have immea-
surably improved the final manuscript.
Ellie, Lizzie, and Bear care little, as far as I can tell, about British his-
tory, but I am grateful for their daily reminders that there is more to life
than writing books.
As with past projects, my biggest thanks are reserved for my wife and
fellow British historian Stephanie Barczewski. Stephanie has been hearing
about imperial intelligence and revolutionary nationalism in various forms
for as long as she has known me; nonetheless, she has never complained
when I have inflicted my work upon her and her careful and critical com-
ments have helped me shape this book from its earliest unwieldly and
inchoate incarnations. Even more importantly, I value beyond words what
Stephanie has contributed to our life together.
This book is dedicated to my parents, John and Carol, who have offered
unstinting love, support, and encouragement over the years.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Imperial Intelligence and a Forgotten

Insurgency  1

Part I Policing Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal  23

2 The “Bomb Cult” and “Criminal Tribes”: Revolutionaries

and the Origins of Police Intelligence in Colonial Bengal 25

3 Surveillance, Analysis, and Violence: The Operations of the

Bengal Police Intelligence Branch 75

4 Intelligence Failures, Militarization, and Rehabilitation:

The Anti-Terrorist Campaign After the Chittagong
Armoury Raid127

Part II The Wider World 185

5 Transnational Revolutionaries and Imperial Surveillance:

Bengal Revolutionary Networks Outside India187

xi
xii CONTENTS

6 Spies, Sailors, and Revolutionaries: Bengal Revolutionaries,

Indian Political Intelligence, and International Arms
Smuggling233

7 Intelligence Expertise and Imperial Threats: Bengal

Intelligence Officers in North America, Europe, and Asia279

8 Epilogue: Bengal Intelligence Officers and the Second

World War327

Bibliography341

Index353
 List of Tables

Table 3.1 Bengal Police Central Intelligence Branch Staff 80

Table 3.2 Bengal Police District Intelligence Branch Staff 82

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Imperial Intelligence

and a Forgotten Insurgency

In February 1939, the Governor of Bengal, Lord Brabourne, toured the

town of Midnapore in western Bengal. The highlight was a somber visit to
the graves of three British District Magistrates, which lay “side by side” in
a local cemetery. At the beginning of the decade, Bengali nationalist revo-
lutionaries had assassinated the three men. James Peddie was shot from
behind at close range while attending an exhibition at a local school on 7
April 1931. Just over one year later, Robert Douglas was shot dead while
presiding over a meeting of the District Board. His successor, B. E.
J. Burge, was murdered at a local football match on 2 September 1932.
For a British intelligence officer, writing in the year of Burge’s shooting,
the sequence of assassinations served as a “tragic” reminder “that the
Government are a long way yet from having been able to suppress the ter-
rorist movement in Bengal.”1
By the time of Brabourne’s visit, however, the revolutionary movement
had been crushed by colonial security forces and the use of mass detention
without trial against revolutionary suspects.2 The political situation in
Bengal had been transformed by the establishment of Indian ministries
under the 1935 Government of India Act, while the revolutionaries’ own
political tactics had shifted from individual acts of violence to communist-­
inspired political organization of Indian peasants and workers.3
Nonetheless, colonial officials feared a return to revolutionary violence in
what had been one of the centers of “Bengali terrorism.” “The streets
were empty,” Brabourne reported to the Viceroy,

© The Author(s) 2019 1

M. Silvestri, Policing ‘Bengali Terrorism’ in India and the World,
Britain and the World,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18042-3_1
2 M. SILVESTRI

and closely watched by the police and plain clothes men and the shutters of
houses on the streets had been closed under police directions. The opinion
of the local officers was that it would probably have been possible to carry
out this informal visit without such precautions … but that, knowing the
past history of Midnapore and what they consider to be the untrustworthy
nature of the people, and knowing also the present attitude of mind of the
group which has been responsible for much of the trouble in Midnapore in
the past, no responsible officer would have been prepared to take the risk of
waiving strict precautions.4

In the following month, intelligence indicated that some of the revolu-

tionary groups were “definitely preparing to collect such old arms as they
have.” Brabourne added that the “‘naming’ of the present District
Magistrate of Midnapore, by one group, as a potential obstacle that might
have to be removed is a matter that cannot be lightly ignored.”5
Brabourne’s account of the elaborate security precautions in Midnapore
reflected colonial fears that had evolved over thirty years of revolutionary
activism in Bengal. An anticolonial revolutionary movement, which came
to be known to colonial authorities as “Bengali terrorism,” began prior to
the 1905 Partition of Bengal and did not come to an end until more than
three decades later.6 During that time, revolutionaries conspired to disrupt
the administration of the Raj, assassinate British and Indian colonial offi-
cials and their agents and informers, and commit robberies to obtain funds
for arms and ammunition in preparation for a mass uprising. In 1930,
revolutionaries carried out an attack on the Writers’ Building, the seat of
the Government of Bengal in Calcutta, and in the same year attempted to
re-stage the 1916 Easter Rising, substituting the eastern Bengal port city
of Chittagong for Dublin. After this act of intra-imperial emulation of
Irish revolutionary tactics, known as the Chittagong Armoury Raid, a
renewed offensive in eastern Bengal began to approximate a campaign of
guerilla warfare in which the revolutionaries commanded widespread sup-
port from the local population. Women also began to join the revolution-
ary societies and committed some of the most high-profile assassinations
and attempted assassinations in this period. In total, the Bengal Police
Intelligence Branch (IB) estimated that the revolutionaries committed
more than 500 “revolutionary crimes” between 1905 and 1935. In addi-
tion, the IB recorded another 200 cases of “revolutionary activity” from
1917 to 1935 alone, including cases of loss or recovery of arms, ammuni-
tion, and explosives.7 As Brabourne’s account demonstrates, a revival of
 1 INTRODUCTION: IMPERIAL INTELLIGENCE AND A FORGOTTEN… 3

“Bengali terrorism” remained a near-constant fear of colonial officials

until 1947.
Lord Brabourne’s pilgrimage to the graves of British martyrs to Bengali
terrorism also demonstrates how the growth of Indian revolutionary orga-
nizations in the first decades of the twentieth century brought about a
parallel growth of imperial intelligence agencies. The Security Service
(MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6), which came into
existence prior to the Great War and greatly expanded their operations
during the conflict, were staffed by a considerable number of officers with
colonial police and military experience.8 The small office of Indian Political
Intelligence (IPI), established in 1909, worked closely with MI5 (respon-
sible for security intelligence within the United Kingdom and the British
Empire) and SIS (responsible for intelligence beyond the empire’s bor-
ders) to coordinate intelligence efforts against Indian nationalists and
revolutionaries around the globe.9 In the decade around the Great War,
imperial authorities bolstered their networks of intelligence-gathering and
surveillance of Indian revolutionaries in North America, Europe, and
Asia.10 In the interwar era, intelligence agencies played a crucial role in
establishing and maintaining British control over their newly expanded
empire in the Middle East.11
Empire and intelligence thus developed in tandem and were closely
intertwined.12 Calder Walton in his study of post-Second World War
intelligence and empire observes that “from the earliest days of the British
intelligence community, which was established in the early twentieth cen-
tury, there was a close connection between intelligence-gathering and
empire. It is not an exaggeration to say that in its early years British intel-
ligence was British imperial intelligence.”13 In no part of the British
Empire was the growth of colonial intelligence more striking than in
Bengal. At a time when the personnel of both MI5 and MI6 dramatically
contracted from their peak during the Great War, the intelligence struc-
tures of the Bengal Police continued to expand.14 Prior to 1907, the
intelligence apparatus of the Bengal Police was practically non-existent.
By 1936, however, the Central Intelligence Branch of the Bengal Police
in Calcutta numbered close to 650 police officers, with more than 400
intelligence staff distributed throughout the province’s districts.15 Bengal
thus became both the focus of British fears of Indian terrorism and of the
most concerted police intelligence efforts that attempted to eradicate
revolutionary activity in the empire prior to the Second World War. While
recent historians have emphasized the important role of intelligence
4 M. SILVESTRI

­ uring the era of post-Second World War decolonization, the extensive

d
intelligence apparatus directed against the Bengali revolutionaries sug-
gests that the roots of imperial intelligence as a sustained practice lie in
the interwar era.16
While the revolutionaries’ anticolonial campaign was largely based in a
single Indian province, Bengal, and largely limited to a specific social and
religious group within Indian society, the Bengali Hindu elite or bhadralok,
who made up the ranks of these “gentlemanly terrorists,” its ramifications
were global.17 In the imperial imaginary, to use Kris Manjapra’s formula-
tion, South Asian “anticolonial movements were said to contain only lim-
ited and self-serving nationalisms,” limited, for example, to a particular
religion, social group, or ideology.18 Yet Bengali revolutionaries, like many
anticolonial activists, drew upon eclectic political and cultural inspirations
from within and outside India and made repeated efforts to form alliances
with other nationalist, anticolonial, and revolutionary groups.19 During
the Great War, Bengali revolutionaries formed part of global efforts by the
German imperial government and Indian radicals to deliver substantial
quantities of arms and ammunition to India.20 These anticolonial alliances
became further pronounced after the Russian Revolution. As Ali Raza,
Franziska Roy, and Benjamin Zachariah have asserted, the interwar era
comprised “a window of time in which an array of movements comprising
mostly nonstate or supra-state actors were linking up with each other.”21
Any analysis which seeks to understand the colonial response to the
Bengali revolutionary movement must thus adopt a similarly transnational
perspective.
This book examines the development of intelligence and policing
directed against the Bengal revolutionaries from the first decade of the
twentieth century through the beginning of the Second World War. It
explores the emergence of modern police intelligence in colonial India
and how in turn the policing of revolutionaries in Bengal was connected
to and influenced police and intelligence work within the wider British
Empire. The analytic framework of this study thus encompasses local
events in one province of British India and the global experiences of both
revolutionaries and intelligence agents. The focus is not only on the British
intelligence officers who orchestrated the campaign against the revolu-
tionaries but also on their interactions with the Indian officers and infor-
mants who played a vital role in colonial intelligence work, as well as the
perspectives of revolutionaries and their allies, ranging from elite anticolo-
nial activists to subaltern maritime workers.
 1 INTRODUCTION: IMPERIAL INTELLIGENCE AND A FORGOTTEN… 5

The book is divided into two parts, which together seek to explain how
intelligence-gathering in Bengal became a central part of the colonial state
apparatus in the twentieth century. Part I explores how colonial anxieties
about “Bengali terrorism” led to the development of an extensive intelli-
gence apparatus within Bengal. The Intelligence Branch of the Bengal
Police and the Special Branch of the Calcutta Police carried out surveil-
lance of revolutionary suspects and ran networks of agents and informers
who were the primary source of information about the revolutionaries.
The immense archive generated by police intelligence was utilized to arrest
and (more frequently) to detain without trial suspected revolutionaries
and neutralize their efforts at political assassination and armed insurgency.
While anxieties about Indian terrorism remained prominent until the end
of colonial rule, and the revolutionaries over time exposed the weaknesses
of police intelligence, intelligence officers in Bengal established a growing
conviction that they could understand and predict the actions of
revolutionaries.
Part II explores how this intelligence expertise was applied globally—
particularly in the interwar period—both to the policing of Bengali revo-
lutionaries and to other anticolonial threats. While the twentieth century
was a century of decolonization for the British Empire, imperial intelli-
gence in Bengal increased during the same decades that officials in London
and New Delhi were planning some form of political devolution for India.
Bengal Police and Indian Civil Service officers formed part of a cadre of
men with imperial police and intelligence experience upon whom British
authorities could draw upon for intelligence work. They contributed to
the construction of a British “intelligence culture” which after the Second
World War was disseminated throughout the empire in a new and more
intensified fashion.22 Bengal intelligence officers thus contributed not only
to imperial intelligence institutions but also to an enduring sense of British
expertise in intelligence matters in the latter half of the twentieth century.23
In seeking to understand the origins and working of imperial intelli-
gence in Bengal and its impact elsewhere in the British Empire, this book
links two separate historiographies: the history of colonial knowledge, spe-
cifically what C. A. Bayly called the information order of British India, and
the transnational history of anticolonial radicalism and imperial intelli-
gence.24 Colonial intelligence in the campaign against the Bengali revolu-
tionaries stands in a period of transition between the nineteenth-century
empire and the development of what might be considered “modern”
intelligence agencies. Colonial police officers who became the authorities
6 M. SILVESTRI

on Indian revolutionary movements were not trained specifically in intel-

ligence work or in counter-terrorism, but rather as colonial police officers,
and the colonial context was something which cannot be separated from
their intelligence work. The early careers of imperial intelligence officers in
Calcutta, for example, encompassed mundane tasks of colonial policing as
the enforcement of plague measures and parking arrangements for vicere-
gal functions.25
The cultural world of these officers shaped their intelligence work, in
India as in other parts of the empire.26 These officers in turn created a new
colonial ethnography of the “Bengali terrorist,” which both added to and
drew upon the corpus of colonial ethnographies of similar collective
threats to British colonial rule in South Asia, such as the thugs, dacoits,
and criminal tribes. In time, they emerged as experts on imperial policing
and revolutionary terrorism.
In addition, the emergence of counter-terrorism practices in Bengal
helps us to understand the contribution of empire to the development of
British intelligence around the globe prior to the Second World War.
Intelligence work against the Bengal revolutionaries involved cooperation
(and occasionally conflict) among local, national, and imperial agencies. It
also demonstrates how intelligence practices were diffused throughout the
British Empire, as prominent police officers and civil servants involved in
the campaign against the revolutionaries in Bengal took up positions as
intelligence officers and advisors assisting colonial governments with issues
of intelligence work, anti-terrorism, and counter-insurgency. By the
Second World War, officers from Bengal had served as intelligence and
security officers in North America, Europe, Palestine, and Southeast Asia.
The primary intelligence agencies which monitored the activities of
Bengali revolutionaries were located in Calcutta, New Delhi, and London.
Within Bengal, colonial intelligence organizations were housed within the
police: the Special Branch of the Calcutta Police and the Intelligence
Branch (IB) of the Bengal Police. The latter was part of the Criminal
Investigation Department (CID) of the Bengal Police, established in 1904
on the recommendation of the Indian Police Commission. The Bengal
Police IB’s central office in Calcutta also collected information from the
province’s District Intelligence Branches (DIBs). Operating as part of
local police forces, the DIBs were established prior to the Great War in
areas that were centers of revolutionary activity, and by the interwar period
were located in every Bengal district. Until the 1930s, military intelligence
remained separate from police intelligence in India, but during that
 1 INTRODUCTION: IMPERIAL INTELLIGENCE AND A FORGOTTEN… 7

decade, military officers with intelligence backgrounds were recruited to

the Bengal Police during the most intense period of the anti-­
revolutionary campaign.
The Department of Criminal Intelligence (DCI) in New Delhi,
renamed the Intelligence Bureau in 1920, collected political intelligence
from Bengal and other Indian provinces, carried out investigations, and
forwarded reports and analyses to the India Office. With the development
of provincial autonomy after the 1937 elections that resulted from the
Government of India Act, the Intelligence Bureau placed its own officers,
known as Central Intelligence Officers, in Indian provinces. The
Intelligence Bureau also liaised with the small office in London known as
India Political Intelligence (IPI) which collected intelligence on Indian
anticolonial activists worldwide. IPI was a “‘catch-all’ co-ordination of
information about anything relating to India and to Indians within the
empire.”27 IPI was housed within the Public and Judicial Department of
the India Office and assembled its intelligence not simply from Indian
sources but also from agents and information gathered by MI5, SIS, and
the Special Branch of Scotland Yard. Intelligence from other colonial
intelligence agencies, such as the Political Intelligence Bureau of the
Singapore Police, and consular reports also found their way into the
IPI archive.
In spite of the multiplicity of imperial intelligence agencies, the persis-
tent anxieties of imperial officials about the Bengali revolutionary move-
ment would at first glance seem to be unwarranted by their achievements.
The Bengali revolutionaries never achieved their goal of a widespread
armed revolt against the British Raj, and many of their assassination
attempts went awry. Even so, the British response was forceful, in terms of
police action, judicial punishments, and elaborate security precautions for
colonial officials.28 By the 1930s, however, even “robust police action”
could not contain the revolutionaries, and the anti-terrorist campaign
underwent a considerable militarization.29 Bengali revolutionaries thus
contributed to what Antoinette Burton has recently termed the “choppy,
irregular terrain” of the British Empire. That imperial terrain “was shaped
as much by the repeated assertion of colonial subjects as by the footprint
of imperial agents; it is to argue that empire was made—as in, constituted
by—the very trouble its efforts and practices provoked.”30
This reminds us that anticolonial movements that failed could have as
much of an impact as those that succeeded.31 In the case of late colonial
India, historians have demonstrated that revolutionary movements were
8 M. SILVESTRI

far from marginal to the trajectory of Indian nationalism. Rather, these

movements now appear more broad-based, more cosmopolitan and trans-
national in their scope, and more influential than they had previously
appeared to be.32 According to Kama Maclean, “The presence of the revo-
lutionaries on the political landscape … strengthened the anticolonial
front, even as they tested and ultimately redefined the policy of
nonviolence.”33
From the perspective of imperial authorities, this meant, as Mark
Condos has recently argued, that the British state in colonial India was an
“insecurity state.”34 The scale of the colonial archive regarding “Bengali
terrorism” is testimony to the seriousness with which colonial authorities
approached the threat posed by revolutionaries. Extensive records regard-
ing police and intelligence work against the revolutionaries are located in
Kolkata, New Delhi, and London. The six-volume compilation of docu-
ments from the library and records of the former Intelligence Branch,
titled Terrorism in Bengal, totals nearly 7000 pages and contains only a
sampling of analyses and correspondence relating to police intelligence
during the final decades of colonial rule. Intelligence Branch records
from the colonial era continued to be deployed by the postcolonial Indian
state and have been considered confidential well into the twenty-first
century.35
The seriousness with which the intelligence effort against Indian revo-
lutionaries was regarded was illustrated by the India Office’s concern over
the publication of a novel titled Drums of Asia in 1933.36 The London
publisher Lovat Dickson approached the India Office to enquire whether
the book, which presented a fictionalized version of Indian revolutionary
plots and British intelligence efforts to foil them, might be considered
objectionable. The result was over six months of discussions within the
India Office and meetings and correspondence with the publisher. Indian
Political Intelligence strenuously objected to the book’s publication with-
out substantial revisions. The author had intended the book as an histori-
cal account of Indian revolutionaries during the Great War and a tribute
to British secret service officers. In consultation with MI5, IPI presented
a five-page list of changes to be made prior to publication, beginning with
an objection to the dedication, which presented the book as being based
in fact. The requested changes included the removal of any indication
that British secret service officers operated on foreign soil. MI5
observed that
 1 INTRODUCTION: IMPERIAL INTELLIGENCE AND A FORGOTTEN… 9

In a nutshell, the situation is that writers may say or invent what they like
about imaginary agents, but must not state that Britain deliberately places or
instructs agents on any foreign soil or secretly anywhere. If their story
requires the presence of agents in such circumstances, it must appear that
their actions are voluntary and entirely free from British direction or
support.37

IPI was also concerned to remove references to real-life Indian national-

ists, and accordingly a reference to the Punjabi nationalist leader Lala
Lajpat Rai as a “brainless seditionist” was removed.38 In particular, IPI was
concerned about references to both British agents and to Indian national-
ist activity in California during the Great War, and action originally set in
San Francisco was moved to the fictional Mexican city of “Santo Morelos.”
Here the concern was the continuing strength and activity of the Ghadar
Party, the revolutionary anticolonial movement which had its origins
among expatriate South Asians on the West Coast of North America.39 IPI
observed that “The situation as regards California, where the Ghadar
Party is of course, still functioning, is, as it happens, particularly delicate at
the present moment.”40 Although the publisher complained that the
changes “seemed to amount to making a more or less historical novel into
a Ruritanian romance,” the requested changes were implemented, and the
novel was published in 1934 with a prefatory note which stated that “All
British Intelligence officers and agents attached to the British Intelligence
Service, in this book, are imaginary persons, and their actions and meth-
ods have no foundation in fact.”41
The colonial archive on “Bengali terrorism” also reveals the extensive
efforts to monitor, analyze, and predict the actions of revolutionaries.
Although the police of colonial India were “often ill-informed, ineffective
and at times frankly amateurish,” recent scholarship has highlighted how
they were embedded in colonial society and exercised extensive powers
not only of coercion but also of surveillance.42 While the intelligence appa-
ratus of the Bengal Police was never as comprehensive or effective as colo-
nial police officers envisioned, the campaign against Bengali revolutionaries
demonstrates how considerable state power could still be brought to bear
upon opponents of colonial rule. Albeit within a narrow sphere of colonial
society, colonial authorities in Bengal constructed an effective apparatus
for surveillance, which was, to those who were its objects, often
overbearing.
10 M. SILVESTRI

Bengali Hindus of nationalist sympathies certainly felt the intrusive

nature of such surveillance. In 1915, Gandhi’s friend C. F. Andrews, then
residing at the Bengali poet and educator Rabindranath Tagore’s school
Santiniketan at Bolpur in rural Bengal, complained of constant surveil-
lance and harassment by the Bengal Police. Andrews complained to the
Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, that his correspondence had been “tampered
with repeatedly,” while Tagore’s students and faculty had suffered
much worse:

At Bolpur our school is spied upon systematically, our teachers’ lives are
harassed, we have had guests coming to us who were CID men in disguise.
Sir Rabindranath Tagore is constantly troubled by the CID, his letters
opened, his movements watched as though he were a criminal. In Calcutta
things are so bad that students live in a state of fear bordering on panic. I can
only compare it to what I have read of the German Spy Mania at home.
Everyone knows that the CID had employed students as paid spies in the
hostels; and the most innocent students are in fear of some bogus case being
got up against them. They suspect all their fellow-students. They spend their
days now in a hot-house atmosphere of suspicion…. What is certain beyond
question is this, that the CID in Bengal, by the agents they have employed,
have created such terrible distrust and fear, even in the best men’s minds,
that nothing is regarded as too low or too mean for them to do; and so the
ball of distrust rolls on and on getting larger and larger.43

In reply, the Governor of Bengal, Lord Carmichael, admitted that “all

educated Indians, whom I have met in Bengal … apparently believe that
the police are spying on them continually,” and that they had “good
grounds for this belief. I have never yet met an educated Indian here who
trusts the police,” Carmichael added. “I doubt if I have met one who does
not hate and despise them.”44
The type of surveillance and information-gathering that C. F. Andrews
angrily denounced is at the core of this analysis. Part I of the book exam-
ines how colonial anxieties about the novel threat of “Bengali terrorism”
gave rise to new and extensive systems of colonial intelligence. Chapter 2
explores the origins of the revolutionary movement and police intelligence
in colonial Bengal. It analyzes how the rise of new modes of anticolonial
opposition in Bengal prior to the First World War sparked responses from
colonial authorities that drew upon older colonial fears of rebellion and
resistance. The revolutionaries became the subject of colonial “informa-
tion panics” which, as this chapter argues, had practical application to
 1 INTRODUCTION: IMPERIAL INTELLIGENCE AND A FORGOTTEN… 11

colonial police and intelligence work against the revolutionaries. For many
colonial officials, the new revolutionary groups—seen as murderous, reli-
giously inspired, conspiratorial secret societies—represented a new variant
on earlier manifestations of Indian criminality—thugs, dacoits (gang rob-
bers), and “criminal tribes”—rather than an entirely new phenomenon. In
similar fashion, the institutions that developed to police the revolutionar-
ies—the Bengal Police Intelligence Branch and the Department of
Criminal Intelligence of the Government of India—bore a similar debt to
earlier institutions—the Special Branch and the Thagi & Dakaiti
Department—devoted to the suppression of what were regarded as dis-
tinctively Indian forms of collective criminality.
The Bengal Police Intelligence Branch was a pioneering police institu-
tion not only within India but also the British Empire. Chapter 3 examines
the structures and practices of police intelligence in colonial Bengal, and
addresses the questions: How did colonial intelligence work in practice?
How was this intelligence gathered, ordered, and understood? The chap-
ter explores both the routine practices of police intelligence and the in-­
depth analyses produced by intelligence officers which sought to
understand the history of the revolutionary movement and to predict the
future actions of the revolutionaries. The establishment of District
Intelligence Branches throughout the province attempted to enhance sig-
nificantly the intelligence-gathering capacity of the police regarding the
revolutionary movement, and to remedy the persistent information-­
gathering deficiencies of the colonial state.
As in other parts of the British Empire, human intelligence in the form
of agents and informers provided the primary source of information about
and lens through which intelligence officers viewed the revolutionary
movement. This chapter will thus highlight the crucial role in the colonial
state’s counter-terrorism campaign played by Indian intelligence officers,
who were the primary mode of contact between informants and British
officers. It will also explore an issue which was rarely discussed by colonial
officials, but was sometimes a factor in revolutionaries’ decisions to give
confessions to the police or become informants: the use of torture and
coercion. Lastly, this chapter will address the ways in which intelligence
officials sought to convert the masses of information they collected to
histories of the Bengali revolutionaries which sought to predict their
future actions. While the hopes of police officials for an all-encompassing
intelligence structure failed to materialize, intelligence work nevertheless
played an important role in one of the major weapons deployed by the
12 M. SILVESTRI

colonial state against revolutionaries: the widespread use of detention

without trial.
Chapter 4 concludes the book’s first section by examining the Bengal
revolutionaries’ escalation of their anticolonial campaign in the early 1930s
and the response of colonial authorities. While ambitious plans for a large-­
scale rising never took place, the revolutionaries were successful in their
efforts to assassinate colonial servants and disrupt colonial administration.
The Chittagong Armoury Raid of April 1930 demonstrated the revolu-
tionaries’ capacity to carry out more ambitious attacks on colonial officials
and institutions. The revolutionaries’ intensified campaign of violence also
created a sense of panic on the part of the white community in Bengal,
who demanded summary justice and reprisals against the revolutionaries.
Although India was not a colony of white settlement, the responses of the
European community within India bore a resemblance to that of other
settler communities to the threat of anticolonial violence. Defense associa-
tions (the most prominent of which was known as “The Royalists”)
formed to protect the British community, and threatened violence against
Bengali Hindus.
The failure of the Bengal Police to prevent assassination attempts or to
quickly apprehend those responsible for the Armoury Raid led to the
deployment of new strategies to deal with “Bengali terrorism.” British and
Indian Army troops were stationed in key districts of the province, and
military officers (known as Military Intelligence Officers) bolstered the
ranks of the Intelligence Branch. The militarization of the counter-­terrorist
campaign and the responses of the British community both anticipated
colonial counter-insurgency campaigns following the Second World War.
As the use of military force and punitive policing achieved successes against
the revolutionary movement by the mid-1930s, colonial authorities inten-
sified efforts to “reform” and “rehabilitate” many of the thousands of
terrorist suspects detained during these years in an effort to achieve the
elusive imperial goal of eliminating the threat of revolutionary violence
in Bengal.
Part II shifts the focus outside of Bengal to examine how intelligence
personnel from Bengal contributed to a British imperial “intelligence cul-
ture” which sought to neutralize anti-imperial threats. Chapter 5 explores
how imperial intelligence agencies responded to the global dimensions of
the Indian revolutionary movement during and after the Great War. From
the outset of the revolutionary movement in Bengal, revolutionaries trav-
eled abroad to forge alliances with other anticolonial figures and learn
 1 INTRODUCTION: IMPERIAL INTELLIGENCE AND A FORGOTTEN… 13

about revolutionary ideologies and tactics such as practical instruction in

bomb-making. The Bengal Police’s intelligence and surveillance work also
ranged beyond the borders of the British Empire, as revolutionaries used
the nearby French colonial enclave of Chandernagore, north of Calcutta,
as a base for their activities.
Bengali revolutionaries formed a prominent part of what Tim Harper
has recently referred to as “the Asian underground” of nationalists, revo-
lutionaries, and political activists.45 This chapter will examine the lives and
revolutionary aspirations of some of the prominent Bengali revolutionar-
ies who lived abroad, and how imperial intelligence networks sought to
monitor their activities and thwart their revolutionary plans. While a num-
ber of Bengali revolutionaries lived transnational lives, often seeking ref-
uge beyond the boundaries of the British Empire, they maintained links
with revolutionaries in the province of Bengal. The prominent Bengali
radical anticolonialists discussed in this chapter include M. N. Roy, the
revolutionary who became the founder of the Communist Party of India;
Sailendranath Ghose, leader of an Indian revolutionary organization in
New York City; and Rash Behari Bose, revolutionary and Pan-Asianist
who lived in exile for almost three decades in Japan. Other figures with
more complex relationships to the revolutionary movement in Bengal also
came under the scrutiny of imperial intelligence agencies; these included
both the Latvian-born revolutionary known variously as Hugo Espinoza
and Abdur Raschid and the Bengali nationalist leader Subhas Chandra
Bose, considered by imperial intelligence officers to be one of the leaders
of “Bengali terrorism.”
Chapter 6 focuses on the issue of arms smuggling, a continual concern
to the Government of Bengal during the three decades during which the
revolutionary movement was active. While efforts to bring in large-scale
arms shipments repeatedly failed, revolutionaries were able to bring in
numerous shipments of small quantities of arms and accumulate an arsenal
of imported firearms. Revolutionaries relied primarily on networks of mar-
itime workers, which included not only European sailors but also Indian
seamen known as lascars. This chapter explores the motivations of lascars
and their relationships with Indian revolutionary movements, and the
efforts of imperial authorities in London, New Delhi, Calcutta, and else-
where in the British Empire to prevent the flow of arms to Bengali revolu-
tionaries. While this process at times revealed tensions between provincial
and imperial intelligence agencies, it also illustrates the diverse techniques,
ranging from the deployment of agents in European ports to special
14 M. SILVESTRI

l­egislation in Bengal, in the effort to prevent the clandestine movement of

weapons. These efforts made use of both colonial legislation designed to
control Indian criminality and international bodies such as the League of
Nations and the emerging concept of international terrorism.
The problem posed by the mobility and geographic range of the revo-
lutionaries and their allies created a demand for imperial intelligence
expertise on the “Bengali terrorist” overseas. While in the early years of
the revolutionary movement, prior to the First World War, authorities in
Bengal had sought the assistance of British police in attempting to counter
the revolutionary threat, by the First World War, officers with Bengal
intelligence experience had begun to serve the empire in locales outside of
India. Both Indian Police and Indian Civil Service officers with experience
of the revolutionary movement were not only deployed abroad in order to
counter Indian revolutionaries but also were also dispatched to other parts
of the empire to counter revolutionary and anticolonial activism.
Chapter 7 explores how police and civil servants involved with the
policing of revolutionary terrorism in Bengal attempted to apply their
expertise elsewhere in the British Empire and beyond against other nation-
alist and anticolonial threats. These intelligence officers served in Canada,
the United States, Ireland, London, Southeast Asia, Palestine, and the
British Caribbean. They epitomized a trend, visible in MI5, SIS, and other
imperial intelligence agencies in the first half of the twentieth century, for
men with imperial expertise to continue their careers with intelligence
agencies elsewhere. This worldwide deployment of imperial policing and
intelligence expertise was necessitated by the fact that anticolonial activists
were themselves highly mobile and utilized networks of Indian expatriates
and other expatriate nationalists, revolutionaries, and anticolonial activists
in order to challenge the British Empire. The lives of these imperial intel-
ligence officers reveal the complex spatial nature of empire and the ways in
which the revolutionary activity and imperial policing extended from a
single Indian province across the globe. Their careers also raise the ques-
tion of how information and ideas were transferred across the empire, and
how intelligence and counter-insurgency expertise were shared in the
decades prior to the Second World War.

* * *

Indian Civil Service officer Percival Griffiths, Burge’s successor as District

Magistrate of Midnapore, survived assassination attempts, and after a long
 1 INTRODUCTION: IMPERIAL INTELLIGENCE AND A FORGOTTEN… 15

career in imperial administration and business, authored a history of the

Indian Police, To Guard My People (1971). Griffiths’ quasi-official history,
written with substantial input from former police and intelligence officers,
accorded the Indian revolutionary movement and the Government of
Bengal’s anti-terrorist campaign a prominent place. In a section titled
“Four Years of Murder and Crime,” he offered the judgment that by the
1930s, “the Bengal intelligence service was unsurpassed anywhere in the
world.”46 We do not have to endorse Griffiths’ hyberbolical claim or the
lavish praise he heaped on the police as defenders of the Raj to appreciate
that the police intelligence establishment in Bengal was substantial, and
that the campaign against Indian revolutionaries was both sustained and
connected to a larger global context of anticolonial activity.
By examining imperial policing and intelligence work against the
Bengali revolutionaries within and outside India, this study seeks to illu-
minate an important strand of imperial history in the years prior to the
Second World War. A study of police intelligence and revolutionary
nationalism in Bengal helps us to better understand not only the nature of
colonial power in late colonial India but also persistent and pronounced
imperial anxieties. It can help us to better grasp not only the nature of elite
revolutionary activity in India but also networks of anticolonial activists
outside the Raj. The extensive intelligence and police operations against
the Bengali revolutionaries illustrate how both imperial intelligence and
forms of anticolonial resistance designated as “terrorism” were an impor-
tant feature of the interwar period. As we will see, intelligence officers
from Bengal impacted intelligence and counter-insurgency work in the
British Empire and the wider world, and contributed to a growing sense
of British expertise in intelligence matters. Their intelligence experience
was rooted in the practices of colonial rule in India, and it is to that subject
that we will first turn.

Abbreviations Used in the Endnotes

APAC BL Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library,

London
CS Chief Secretary
CSAS Centre of South Asian Studies Archive, Cambridge
University
DIG Deputy Inspector General
DM District Magistrate
16 M. SILVESTRI

EB&A Eastern Bengal and Assam

GOB Government of Bengal
GOEB&A Government of Eastern Bengal and Assam
GOI Government of India
Home Home Department
IB Intelligence Branch, Bengal Police
IG Inspector General
IO India Office
NA UK National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew,
London
NAI National Archives of India, New Delhi
Pol Political
Pol (Conf.) Political Confidential file
Sec. Secretary
SP Superintendent of Police
Tegart memoir K. F. Tegart, “Charles Tegart of the Indian Police,”
MSS Eur. C 235, APAC BL
TIB A. K. Samanta, ed., Terrorism in Bengal: A Collection of
Documents, 6 vols. (Calcutta: Government of West
Bengal, 1995)
WBSA West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata

Notes
1. Lord Brabourne to Lord Linlithgow, 22 February 1939, R/3/2/6, APAC
BL; and “Memorandum on the History of Terrorism in Bengal 1905–
1933,” (1933) in TIB I: 822.
2. Colonial authorities, seeking to delegitimize the actions of nationalists who
deployed violence as a strategy, typically labeled them as “terrorists,”
although the use of the terms “anarchists” and “revolutionaries” to
describe members of the revolutionary samitis (societies) persisted into the
1930s. While some of the Bengali revolutionaries’ actions conformed to
classical definitions of terrorism (such as political assassination), others did
not (such as plans for broad-based uprisings). Accordingly, the present
study uses the terms “revolutionaries” and “revolutionary terrorists” to
refer to the advocates and practitioners of anticolonial violence in Bengal.
“Bengali terrorism” refers to colonial assumptions about the revolutionar-
ies, which form the subject of this book. For further discussion of the issues
involved in defining terrorism, see Charles Townshend, Terrorism: A Very
 1 INTRODUCTION: IMPERIAL INTELLIGENCE AND A FORGOTTEN… 17

Short Introduction (2nd edition: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011),

1–20.
3. David M. Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left: Aspects of
Regional Nationalism in India, 1905–1942 (Calcutta: Firma K. L.
Mukhopadhyay, 1975).
4. Lord Brabourne to Lord Linlithgow, 22 February 1939, R/3/2/6, APAC
BL.
5. “Extract from Report from Governor of Bengal dated 6th March, 1939,”
L/P&J/12/395/62, APAC BL.
6. The key studies analyzing the history of “Bengali terrorism” are Durba
Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in
India, 1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) and
Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in
India 1900–1910 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993). For aspects of
the history of the Bengali revolutionaries, see Hiren Chakrabarti, Political
Protest in Bengal: Boycott and Terrorism 1905–1918 (Calcutta: Papyrus,
1992); Manini Chatterjee, Do and Die: the Chittagong Uprising 1930–34
(New Delhi: Penguin, 1999); Partha Chatterjee: The Black Hole of Empire:
History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2012), 276–291; Durba Ghosh, “Revolutionary Women
and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s,” Gender & History
25: 2 (2013) 355–375; Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal: Political Violence in
the Interwar Years,” in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, eds., Decentring
Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (Delhi: Orient
Longman, 2006), 270–292; Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist
Left; Alexander Lee, “Who Becomes a Terrorist? Poverty, Education and
the Origins of Political Violence,” World Politics 63: 2 (2011), 203–245;
and Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–08 (New Delhi:
People’s Publishing House, 1973), 465–492. Leonard A. Gordon, Bengal:
The Nationalist Movement 1876–1940 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1974); Rajat Kanta Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in
Bengal 1875–1927 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Tanika
Sarkar, Bengal 1928–1934: The Politics of Protest (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1987) also include much valuable analysis of the revolutionaries.
7. H. J. Twynam and R. E. A. Ray, Enquiry into Temporary Establishments of
the Central and District Intelligence Branches of the Bengal Police (Alipore:
Bengal Government Press, 1936), 9–10. A copy of this report is in
L/S&G/7/231, APAC BL.
8. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of
MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009); and Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of
the Secret Intelligence Service (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). MI5 and MI6
came into existence in 1909 as part of one organization, known as the
Secret Service Bureau.
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