Mataram of January 1913, “The enemy entered formally Delhi on the 23rd December 1912, but under what an omen? . . . This bomb-throwing was just to announce to the whole world that the English Government is discarded, and verily, whenever there is an opportunity the Revolutionaries are sure to show their mind, spirit and principle in Hindustan!”[56] Cama’s comments made it clear that whether or not the target had been killed or injured was irrelevant; its message exceeded the bomb’s immediate effect. The catalyzing act to rouse the laggard and latent to action was at the heart of the ideal. Sure enough, the spectacular deed ignited a new series of murders and attempted murders carried out by both the major groups in Bengal.
Many socialists and nationalists considered the adoption of this kind of action a sign of impatience—the voluntaristic belief that a single autonomous will could jump-start the change rather than waiting for its conditions to ripen through the slower processes of parliamentary modification, mass education, molecular shifts, or structural impasse. It also indicated an analysis that saw oppression as stemming from an external source, relatively easy to excise, rather than from internal and systemic contradictions, which would require a more profound transformation to correct. Such an externalization of oppression was particularly easy to adopt under conditions of colonial rule.
Anarchism?
A special police unit had tagged Shridar Vyankatesh Ketkar (later sociologist and historian) as a member of the Savarkar brothers’ old group, which had “carried out experiments in explosives, and entered into correspondence with the anarchists of Bengal.” He later traveled to the United States to study, and wrote a letter from there in June 1909 “to a high official in India suggesting that Government should deal with the anarchist youths through the extremist leaders” to whom he claimed to have access. He said he had “discussed the subject of nihilism” with nationalist firebrand Bal Gangadhar Tilak, “nearly two years before the first bomb outrage. I had advocated nihilism while Mr. Tilak condemned it outright as injurious to the interest of the country.”[57]
What did he mean by nihilism? What uses would he have associated it with? In one sense it was reminiscent of the French illegalists’ utter rejection of social norms and institutions. But in Russia, nihilism was associated primarily with urban students and intellectuals. While they likewise rejected the governmental, educational, legal, and disciplinary institutions then existing in their society, they also proposed a more positive alternative vision for what might come after or alongside the ecstasy of destruction. The nihilists’ Narodnik or populist outgrowth began to idealize the peasantry as not only the revolutionary class but also the bearer of the true spiritual essence of the Russian people and maintainer of its preindustrial organic social and economic formations. As the argument ran, there was no need to pass through the prescribed stages of capitalism only to end up, after much suffering, back where they had started, with some form of romanticized stateless socialism based on the village commune or mir. Furthermore, to the Narodnik Slavophile, the true soul of Russia was in effect an Asian village soul, and many of the same mystical stereotypes that Indians bore were attributed to it. Such a true Russian felt the czar’s enforced modernization as an alien Western encroachment no less than the Indian villagers did their modernization at British hands. In this too the urban intellectual Swadeshists resembled the Russian Slavophiles.
In the meantime, Criminal Investigation Department director William Cleveland had another, more menacing take on the true nature of the Indian soul. In his introductory remarks on “anarchism,” written for his assistant Ker’s 1919 documentary compilation Political Trouble in India, he diagnosed the “psychology of the politico-criminal activities of Indians” as none other than a fervidly intense religious nationalism.[58] To characterize this, he enlisted the aid of an extended quotation from John Nicol Farquhar’s Religious Nationalism, published in 1912.[59]
Farquhar identified this new trend (in contrast to the thin, bloodless old politicism) as a species of religious nationalism indicating the maturation of “racial” confidence, which produced greater independence of thought as well as greater demands for full political independence. Marked by its commitment to a comprehensive revitalization of national life, it was “fired” by deep devotion and self-consecration “to God and India.” And he claimed that “finally, whether in anarchists or men of peace, the new nationalism is willing to serve and suffer. The deluded boys who believed they could bring in India’s millennium by murdering a few white men were quite prepared to give their lives for their country; and the healthy movements which incarnate the new spirit at its best spend themselves in unselfish service.” Here he pointed to a divergence between anarchists and Hindu revivalists, for whom, given their possession of such a plainly superior civilization, it was “a religious duty to get rid of the Europeans and all the evils that attend him.”[60]
But Farquhar nevertheless identified “a general attitude . . . common to the revivalists and the anarchists. It is clear as noonday that the religious aspect of anarchism was merely an extension of that revival of Hinduism which is the work of Dayananda, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and the Theosophists.” Farquhar was thus setting up an unproblematic equivalence between anarchism and the religious nationalism that would later spawn a noxious Indian variant of fascism, while actually misrepresenting both sides of the equation.
This distorted characterization of Hinduism was not new. Cleveland’s descriptions of a cult of “furious devotion to some divinity of hate and blood” recall in nearly identical terms those of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department’s sensationalized obsession with Kali-worshipping bandits dating from nearly a century earlier—an obsession enshrined as a timeless trope from William Sleeman’s books in 1815 to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984. The Thuggee and Dacoity Department was reconstituted in 1903 as the Criminal Investigation Department with a new focus on seditious activity. Granted, the revolutionists did not help matters with passages such as this one from the Yugantar of May 2, 1908:
The Mother is thirsty and is pointing out to her sons the only thing that can quench that thirst. Nothing less than human blood and decapitated human heads will satisfy her. Let her sons, therefore, worship her with these offerings, and let them not shrink even from sacrificing their lives to procure them. On the day on which the Mother is worshipped in this way in every village, on that day will the people of India be inspired with a divine spirit and the crown of independence will fall into their hands.[61]
Like many Orientalist fantasies, this was a cocreated myth.
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