(some by implicit moral terms, others, especially after 1920, by explicit Marxian analysis);
militantly revolutionist, opposed to constitutional methods or any compromise with the existing system;
in temperament audacious, dedicated, courageous unto death; in aesthetic romantically capable of gestures such as declaiming a bold slogan, witticism, or verse of farewell poetry at the foot of the gallows (the exemplary Ghadarite in this sense was the prototypical figure of Kartar Singh Sarabha, executed at the age of nineteen or twenty for his role in the attempted uprising of 1915, on whom Bhagat Singh later consciously modeled himself).
As for the Ghadarite goal, it grew increasingly sharper of outline and ambitious of scope over the years: from dignity and respect as Hindustanis at home and abroad
to a free Hindustan
to a free Hindustan, along with a free Ireland, Egypt, and China,
to a free Indian democratic-republican federation, plus a free Ireland, Egypt, and China,
to a free Indian democratic-republican socialist federation, plus a free Ireland, Egypt, and China,
to a free Indian democratic-republican socialist federation, and an end to all forms of economic or imperial slavery anywhere in the world.
The juxtaposition that was so incomprehensible to Chirol, who deemed it clear evidence of the muddleheaded irrationality of the insurgents, is exactly what I want to explore here, by seeking to understand the logic by which the insurgents selected, combined, adapted, and applied tactical and ideological content into a form that continued to develop, dynamically and yet consistently, throughout the trajectory of the revolutionaries abroad.
TRANSPOSITIONS
Beyond Nationalism
Ghadar’s definitive early theorist and propagandist, Har Dayal, in an October 1912 Nation Day speech to Indian students and select faculty at the University of California, declared himself an internationalist who did not believe in “narrow views of nationalism.” Perennial “seditionist” Taraknath Das, speaking at the same event on the “scope and aim of Indian nationalism,” pledged that beyond autonomy from Britain, Young India must “demand a revolution in social ideals so that humanity and liberty would be valued above property, special privilege would not overshadow equal opportunity, and women would not be kept under subjection.”15
The research that has culminated in this book began in an attempt to escape the reductive equation of anticolonialism with nationalism. Given numerous reservations about that project, both analytical and political, I hoped to identify precedents for ways of conceiving anticolonialism that transcended or critiqued it, and that were capable of proposing alternative visions of a liberated society that neither mirrored the logic of imperialism (and Orientalism) nor replicated the extractive and disciplinary institutions of the modern state while merely replacing foreign with local control. On the other hand, the historical salience and emotional power of a national liberation struggle in undertaking the work of decolonization is impossible to deny. Yet as the revolutionaries of Kirti and the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army well knew, truly liberatory struggle is not only against that which restricts freedom, but also for that which facilitates or produces freedom. The ejection of foreign rule is one thing, and the implementation of a postindependence socioeconomic and political order based on maximizing substantive liberty, equality, and solidarity quite another. What does the independent society actually look like?
A comprehensive radical critique of colonial rule entailed more than an analysis of the foreignness of the regime; it also required a response to the regime’s very structure and character. Colonization imposed complex processes of rationalization, bureaucratization, and technical-industrial development, as well as insertion into the unprecedented expansion of global capitalism.16
Regardless of what alternate forms of modernity would have emerged in the absence of European intervention, that intervention did produce a situation in which the material conditions, social destabilizations, and economic transformations associated with the modernization process were perceived as corollaries of colonization. By contextualizing the revolutionary movement abroad relative to the shift s, trends, and currents of international radicalism over the first few de cades of the twentieth century, we may see the configuration of factions within the Indian independence struggle mirroring the spectrum of possible responses to these conditions manifest within Western movements of opposition and critical resistance, including varieties of accommodation, incorporation, synthesis, transcendence, resistance, and rejection.
Three Anticolonial Discourses
In my exploration of ways of conceptualizing anticolonial struggle that transcended nationalism during this globally turbulent period (1905–1930), two major antisystemic movements stood out as transnational vehicles for opposition to Western imperialism and critique of modern capitalist society, both of which were available in various forms to Indian radicals: Socialism and Pan-Islamism. Yet any attempt to define either of these complex, multifold terms is fraught with as many contradictions and counterexamples as in the case of nationalism.
If we approach the three “isms” not as ideological monoliths but as heteroglossic discourses,17 we can recognize an analogous range of positions within each of them on the debates then in progress over how to respond to the confrontation with modernity—whether by espousing Enlightenment rationalism or by embracing its various antitheses, whether defined as spiritual, mystical, nihilist, millenarian, or romanticist.
Rationalism forms an important axis in the intellectual history of revolution, cutting across leftist, nationalist, and religious responses. While this epistemological axis does not replace those based in material economic or political structures, it is nevertheless necessary to take account of modes of resistance that cannot be “legitimated by a post-enlightenment rationalist frame,”18 and furthermore to acknowledge that such modes cannot be wholly identified with religious movements; rather, mystical/romantic or antiliberal modalities occur within all three discourses alongside those modalities legible to a rationalist, material interest–based analysis, whether of the liberal or socialist orientation. I suspect that in actuality both modalities may almost always be operating at once, and that it is simply a matter of relative proportion in each case. Ghadar and its analogues certainly contained elements of both.
In such a way (e.g., by positing nationalist, leftist, and Islamist modalities) each as a discourse or flexible idiom in which various ideological statements could be made, and a range of political and philosophical positions taken, rather than a unified ideology itself—the interaction of the three movements during this period could be reframed as a transposition of analogous ideas, goals, and aspirations among them. The Ghadarite network, through its various alliances and alignments, was capable of engaging with those who were making compatible utterances—that is, statements of militant anti-imperialism, economic egalitarianism, and social emancipation—in any of these three languages.
The Limits of Translatability
In order to recognize functionally comparable statements within separate “semantic fields,” a practical theorist must look underneath form for content, within idiom for intent, behind problematic for thematic.19 More directly, an organizer must ask whether alliances and coalitions are all necessarily provisional, based only on a negative term; whether a shared opposition is their common immediate goal. But is this enough? How much compatibility is necessary between the positive terms of multiple alternative visions to enable their adherents to work together beyond resistance? Which differences are semantic and superficial, and which are substantive and prohibitive?
Some of the confusion
