issue: “The British people . . . can never succeed in being a nation of freemen and lovers of freedom so long as they continue to send out members of the dominating classes to exercise despotisms in Britain’s name upon the various conquered races that constitute Britain’s military Empire.” Spencer, he said, had proven that “all despotisms, whether political or religious, whether of sex, caste, or of custom, may be generalized as limitations to individuality, which it is the nature of civilization to remove.”[27] Hyndman stated in the same issue that “Indians must learn to rely upon themselves alone for their political salvation, i.e., the forcible expulsion of the British rule from India and not hope for anything from the changes of governors and governments.”[28]
Every Sunday, meetings and discussions open to all Indians took place, focusing on issues of independence, and often featuring patriotic speeches, lectures, songs, and magic lantern projections of martyred resistance heroes. Scholarship winner Vinayak Damodar Savarkar read weekly excerpts from his historical work “The Indian War of Independence of 1857,” and a commemoration was held on May 10, 1907, the fiftieth anniversary of the uprising.
Meanwhile, more serious activities were unfolding in the shadows. Since August 1906, arms trafficking occurred under cover of Nitisen Dwarkadas and Gyanchand Varma’s Eastern Export and Import Company in Gray’s Inn Place.[29] In June, a Dr. Desai who was studying at London University “gave a lecture at the India House on the making of bombs, justifying their use and explaining what ingredients were required. He reportedly said, ‘When one of you is prepared to use a bomb at the risk of his life, come to me and I will give full particulars.’”[30]
By then the India House community also functioned as a recruiting ground for a more exclusive inner circle dominated by Savarkar, the Abhinava Bharat. Although one of the young militants recalled that “under [Savarkar’s] direction we were training ourselves as propagandists of revolutionary nationalism,” the special intelligence branch assigned to them described them yet again as “the anarchist gang.” The young men were also under constant surveillance from Scotland Yard. A pair of detectives followed each one, and some even grew to be on friendly terms with their escorts.[31] By spring 1908, informants were reporting that “the policy of assassinations was advocated at regular Sunday meetings.” Some of the Abhinava Bharat inner core had taken up target practice at a shooting range on Tottenham Court Road. On July 1, 1909, one of the budding sharpshooters, a student called Madan Lal Dhingra, successfully targeted William Curzon-Wyllie, aide to the secretary of state for India. Dhingra was hanged, then lauded as a revolutionary martyr with the aid of a much-republished courtroom speech, in which he expressed regret not for his deed but rather for having just one life to lose for his country.[32]
Meanwhile back home, Savarkar’s brother Ganesh had been prosecuted for sedition and sentenced to transportation for life. Documents found at Ganesh’s home and in the hands of accomplices during the proceedings “indicate[d] that the association aimed at some sort of organisation founded upon the model of revolutionary societies in Russia,” including Thomas Frost’s The Secret Societies of the European Revolution, 1776–1876, a book “in which is described the secret organisation of the Russian Nihilists, consisting of small circles or groups affiliated into sections, each member knowing only the members of the circle to which he belonged. This may explain the existence of various small groups of young men who are found in this case to have been working for the same objects and drawing weapons from the same source without personal acquaintance with the members of other groups.”[33]
Enraged at his brother’s conviction, Savarkar called for the murder of English people in India as reprisal. He sent a consignment of twenty Browning pistols and ammunition back to India concealed in a false-bottom box in the luggage of Govind Amin, India House’s resident chef and ammunition buyer. These pistols were then used in the assassination of a district magistrate in Maharashtra. Savarkar was quickly implicated in the killing, thought to be a dual act of revenge for Dhingra’s death and Ganesh’s imprisonment. Demonstrating its transnational perspective, the Indian Sociologist commented, “Allowing for the difference in the longitudes of Paris and Nasik the time of our writing to sympathise with the members of the family of Mr. Savarkar synchronized almost to a minute with that of the assassination avenging the sentence of transportation passed on him. There is a sort ‘poetic justice’ in all this which will, we doubt not, strike the imagination of our readers.”[34]
Savarkar fled to Paris in 1910. Heedless of warnings not to return to London, he did so anyway and was arrested on arrival at Victoria Station under the Fugitive Offenders Act, then deported by ship to India with a stopover in Marseilles. There he attempted to escape by leaping from a porthole into the harbor and swimming to shore, only to be snatched by police waiting on the pier. (One account has it that the comrades who were supposed to meet him and spirit him into concealment had lingered at a café and arrived too late.)
To no avail, high-profile supporters among the British and French Left took up the case. London anarchist Guy Aldred formed a Savarkar Release Committee as soon as he himself got out of jail. He also featured the case in his own fiery paper Herald of Revolt and produced an appeal on the matter in August 1910 addressed “To the English proletariat.”[35]
When the Indian Sociologist was proscribed and its publisher, Arthur Horsley, convicted for printing sedition, Aldred offered his own shoestring Bakunin Press to continue publication. He made it clear that while he did not agree fully with the paper’s content, being an advocate neither of political violence and assassination nor “nationalism, and . . . the Statism it implied,” he did believe in free speech, freedom as a general principle, and resistance to imperial rule.[36] His meager combined office and living quarters were searched, and when three hundred copies of the paper (though no trace of a press) were found, he too was convicted for sedition and sentenced to a year in prison.[37] Printing then shifted to Paris, and the paper continued to appear until 1914, despite several more enforced relocations.
Paris
After the Dhingra incident, London abruptly became too hot for Indian radicals to function freely, though a few did try to maintain an active presence. Now the primary center of Indian overseas radicalism moved to Paris. The political expatriate community there was already well established, centered around Rana and Madame Bhikaji Rustomji Cama, both of whom maintained close ties with the London community.
Besides carrying the cachet of its revolutionary history, France had the advantage of lying outside British jurisdiction. Ironically, France’s own colonial outposts inside India offered them this functional free zone: French Pondicherry became a key location for moving weaponry and literature into the country, and “the great importance of both Pondicherry and Chandernagore from the point of view of the anarchists,” said the officiating director of Criminal Intelligence Department, lay in their independent postal connections with European countries.[38]
Paris was also an unparalleled hub for cross-fertilization among Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Filipino modernist, liberal and Left, anarchist, nationalist, and internationalist movements, hosting exiles from countries throughout East Asia and the Ottoman Empire. The Indians formed particularly strong bonds with the Egyptians.
It was the large population of Russian political exiles, though, whom the Bengali revolutionists looked to as their most significant source of inspiration as well as technical and organizational mentorship. They admired the efficacy of their fellow revolutionists, whose uncompromising calls for emancipation from imperial autocracy they understood to be analogous to their own. These particular Russians were of the maximalist faction of Socialists-Revolutionaries, bearing the mantle of the late nineteenth-century People’s Will Party (Narodnaya Volya). The group was associated with Bakunin’s hyperviolent protégé Sergey Nechayev. It also had been linked to the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881—an act that the Swadeshi militants warmly approved. The most recent wave of exiles had arrived after the postrevolutionary crackdown in 1905; by 1907, the Paris police reported “some 1500 Russian ‘terrorists’” resident there, among them Vera Figner, Vera
