In 1917, the British Indian government appointed the Sedition Committee headed by Justice Sidney Rowlatt, to investigate “criminal conspiracies connected with revolutionary movements” in India. The committee submitted its recommendations in 1918. These recommendations led to the Rowlatt Act of 1919. We look into this report at the outset, because even after independence, the narrative it sought to set was not rejected outright. Some of our historians, initially, called the revolutionaries terrorists. Later, facing fierce criticism, eminent scholars adopted the term “revolutionary terrorism” to retain the pejorative term ‘terrorist’ under the cover of ‘revolutionary’.
It is the legacy of a colonial perspective borne by the non-violence brigade. Let us now briefly examine the Sedition Committee’s report. The Report referred to the Chitpavan Brahmins’ rise to power in the Deccan as peshwas (the chief ministers) and the decline in their power after their government was overthrown by the British. The first revolutionary upsurge, the Report said, was witnessed among these Chitpavan Brahmins of Poona. This was stated to show that the revolutionary movement from the beginning was limited to the upper caste. The Report also said that revolutionaries of Maharashtra were anti-Muslim, as they were inspired by the Maratha fight against Muslim rule led by Shivaji.
It is true that Bal Gangadhar Tilak started public observance of Ganapati Utsav and Shivaji Utsav to mobilise Hindus against the British. But Tilak’s movements were not directed against the Muslims. Tilak sought Hindu- Muslim unity in the Lucknow Pact between Congress and the Muslim League in 1916. So much so, that he gave up his earlier objections to separate electorate for Muslims. The Committee emphasised that the movement was limited to certain pockets of certain areas only. This was factually wrong. At the end of the 19th century, a war was waged against the British by the crown prince of Manipur, Tikendrajit Singh, and an anti-British armed struggle was launched by Birsa Munda, a tribal leader, in the Chotanagpur region (present-day Jharkhand).
During this period, in plague devastated Poona (Pune), unspeakable tortures were perpetrated upon people under the Chief Plague Commissioner, Walter Rand. The accumulated anger of the people led to the Chapekar brothers’ decision to eliminate him. On 22 June, 1897, Balakrishna and Damodar Chapekar killed Rand and his military escort, Lieutenant Ayerst. The twentieth century saw an increase in revolutionary actions both at home and abroad. In 1908, Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki threw a bomb, in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, at the carriage which they thought was carrying Magistrate Douglas Kingsford.
But it was carrying Barrister Kennedy’s family. The family died. Both Khudiram and Prafulla were members of the revolutionary organisation, Jugantar. They were assigned by this organisation, to eliminate Kingsford who used to order brutal punishment and torture of freedom fighters. The action was not driven by any individual motive of revenge. It was an organisational decision to fight back against colonial repression. A significant contribution to revolutionary activities was made by ‘India House’ in London founded by Shyamji Krishna Varma, an unsung hero of India’s freedom struggle.
Vinayak Savarkar, Lala Hardayal and Virendra Nath Chattopadhyaya (Chatto) were associated with India House. Shyamji started a monthly called “Indian Sociologist” which helped the spread of revolutionary ideas, and established the Indian “Home Rule Society” to voice the demand of India’s complete independence. India House eventually became inclined towards armed rebellion. At that time, Savarkar was the leader of revolutionary actions both in India and in England. By 1909, members of India House started reading, in their Sunday meetings, several passages from his book ‘the Indian war of Independence, 1857’.
Savarkar managed to send 20 Browning Pistols and ammunition to Abhinav Bharat, a revolutionary group in Maharashtra. Sikander Hayat Khan and Mirza Abbas brought those weapons from Paris. The cook of India House, Chaturbhuj Amin, brought them to India. With one of those Browning pistols, Anant Laxman Kanhere, a member of Abhinav Bharat Society, assassinated Arthur Mason Jackson, the District Magistrate of Nasik in December 1909. Jackson after arresting Vinayak Savarkar’s brother, Ganesh Savarkar (Babarao Savarkar), a founding member of Abhinav Bharat Society, paraded him hand-cuffed through the streets of Nasik. Challenging this British policy of intimidation and repression, Kanhere acted in defiance. In 1909, another incident took place.
A member of India House, Madanlal Dhingra of Amritsar, assassinated Curzon Wyllie in London. Wyllie was the political Aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State for India, Lord Morley. He was working for surveillance of India House members. After his arrest, when Dhingra was brought to court, he argued, in his statement read out by the court’s clerk, that the fight against the British was as patriotic as an Englishman fighting foreign occupation. One article in the London newspaper, ‘The New Age’, said that it was the beginning of the end of British rule in India.
New Age published articles on Dhingra between July and September 1909. Meanwhile, Vinayak Savarkar was named prime accused in the assassination of Jackson as one of the pistols he had sent to India was seized from the residence of an accused in the Jackson murder. Vinayak went to Paris and stayed at the great Indian revolutionary, Madam Bhikaiji Cama’s place. On his return to London, he was arrested and sent back to India for trial. On the way back, he made a daring escape to France and sought asylum there. Madam Cama contacted a young socialist, Jean Longuet to launch a campaign through the press, for Savarkar’s release. Languet, the grandson of Karl Marx (from daughter’s side) wrote a series of articles for this purpose in the socialist paper, L’ Humanite.
A Socialist leader, Jean Jaures, who was then the mayor of Marseilles, described Savarkar’s extradition as illegal and violative of his right to political asylum. Tension between the French and British authorities followed. Eventually, the British succeeded in bringing him to India and sentenced him to 50 years’ imprisonment. Lala Har Dayal who, in Paris, edited Madam Cama’s paper ‘Bande Mataram’, moved from France to the USA and formed the Ghadar Party in San Francisco in 1913 with Taraknath Das, Sohan Singh Bhakna, Kartar Singh Sarabhe and others. The objective was to incite rebellion against British rule in India. In 1914, in Germany, a centre for Indian revolutionaries called the Berlin Committee, was set up by Indian expatriates with a similar aim.
Its key members were Virendra Nath Chattopadhayaya, Bhupendra Nath Datta (Swami Vivekananda’s brother) and Lala Har Dayal. The Berlin Committee sought to send volunteers and weapons to India, Middle East and Afghanistan to trigger anti-British resentment. It sent, from Germany, Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh of Uttar Pradesh, and Maulana Barkatullah of Madhya Pradesh to Kabul in 1915. They formed a Provisional government there. This government did not have its own army which the Provisional Government of Azad Hind established by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, had.
Towards the end of 1921, a peasant uprising called Ekta movement of Uttar Pradesh, which initially took place as part of the Non-Cooperation movement, turned into a violent rebellion against colonial authorities led by Madari Pasi, a grass root peasant leader. A tribal rebellion in the Rampa region of the hills of Andhra Pradesh was launched by Alluri Seetha Rama Raju in 1922. While touring India as a monk, he came into contact with Chittagong revolutionaries. Influenced by their ideas, he started, back home, an armed revolt against the Raj. The saga of the Indian revolution against the Raj did not end here. A lot more happened beyond the initial outbursts. One has to look into them to find out the link between them that existed beneath the surface.
(The writer is former Head of the Department of Political Science, Presidency College, Kolkata)