I am always intrigued by the debates that continue to erupt over the use of the term, ‘terrorists’, for the armed revolutionaries of colonial Bengal / India. Although historians, from Sumit Sarkar (The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908) to Durba Ghosh (Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919-1947), have freely used this term — not to echo the colonial State but to capture the fear they inspired in the raj — many prefer the more anodyne term, ‘revolutionary nationalists’, a modern construction that grants them a self-consciously crafted legitimacy denied to other imaginations at odds with the State.
Also, since we associate the term, ‘revolution’, with the ‘democratic’ or ‘Atlantic’ revolutions of modern Europe and America, which sowed the seeds of republicanism as a template for the modern world, we are biased against ‘counter-revolution’ and, thus, against people like the royalists of Vendée in revolutionary France, or the White Army trying to defeat the Bolsheviks after the Russian revolution. In contrast, the irrepressible legitimacy of the expression, ‘counter-terrorism’, especially since 9/11, is visible in the chart-busting popularity of web series like The Family Man and Special Ops, the Israeli series, Fauda, or American series like Homeland or 24.
But this piece is less about semantics than about historical practice. In the last five years, I have been involved in two projects on India’s revolutionaries — one, a new gallery named Biplabi Bharat (‘Revolutionary India’), inaugurated in the Victoria Memorial Hall in 2022, and the other, my current workplace, the Alipore Museum, which grows out of the erstwhile Alipore Central Jail, and tells the story of the thousands of freedom fighters and revolutionaries incarcerated there, with several dying on the gallows and many more sent across the kala pani to rot away or die in the notorious Cellular Jail in the Andamans. The immense amount of time and labour expended in both projects got me thinking about why it is more difficult to cobble together a reasonably organised history of revolutionary activities, than, say, the activities led by the Congress under M.K. Gandhi. Why are archival sources on revolutionary activities, with a few notable exceptions, so scattered and fragmentary?
Is this because revolutionary nationalism was perhaps sporadic and limited in its overall impact? The Indian population was systematically disarmed after the Revolt of 1857, so arms had to be manufactured in rudimentary, ‘country-made’ style, or looted from the British forces, or obtained through clandestine overseas shipments from ‘friendly’ countries like Germany. And the revolutionaries were often ineffectual, their gambits laid low by failed attempts, including bombs exploding in their hands, assassinations of innocent bystanders, and large-scale arrests and detentions.
Yet, revolutionary terrorism haunted administrative and public imaginations at a scale disproportionate to their desired impact. Indeed, it was always a spectral presence in paranoid colonial minds. British officials feared that isolated violence might spark a wider insurrection among Indian troops. In short, India’s biplabis often punched above the weight of the colonial bodies they felled, so their claim for a rightful place in the archives is no less than anybody else’s.
The surfeit of archiving-worthy textual material that mainstream nationalism produced is obvious enough. The Congress organisation paralleled the tentacular structure of the raj, so all of its meetings at all levels produced a paper trail that found its way into repositories like the All India Congress Committee papers in the erstwhile Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi alongside the private papers of leading Congress politicians. Thus, any researcher exploring some aspect of Congress nationalism in virtually any region of colonial India can begin with an accessible, structured archive.
On the contrary, revolutionary nationalism left no such trail. The secret societies were covert organisations, and plans for assassinations, political dacoities, or arms robberies were seldom put on paper. As a result, the source material relevant to them remains limited to police files and confidential reports on revolutionaries (usually termed “terrorists” or “anarchists”), trial records, surviving issues of their periodicals (Yugantar, Bande Mataram and so on), incendiary pamphlets proscribed by the raj, and newspaper accounts.
Deeply unsettled by the ever-present threat of ‘terrorist’ violence, the Intelligence Branch of the Bengal police compiled extensive records, much of it now in the West Bengal State Archives, with the most important collated and edited by Amiya K. Samanta in a mammoth, six-volume collection of documents, Terrorism in Bengal. However, not many of the proscribed pamphlets and books with revolutionary content have survived. Hiranmoy Bhattacharya’s book, Raj and Literature: Banned Bengali Books, lists 555 such titles but states that only 120 are available in the archives and the libraries of India and the United Kingdom. Other fragments exist, like the records of the Alipore Bomb Case of 1908 in a small district court archive, meticulously maintained files in the Kolkata Police Museum, and, of course, the published memoirs of the revolutionaries themselves, like Barindra Kumar Ghose’s The Tale of My Exile or Upendranath Bandyopadhyay’s Nirbasiter Atmakatha (The Autobiography of an Exile).
And yet, a lot is lost or irrecoverable. The 400-odd names of revolutionaries inscribed on marble plaques in Port Blair’s erstwhile Cellular Jail — bearing testimony to Bengal’s peerless role as the frontrunner of revolutionary nationalism in colonial India — belong mostly to ‘unsung heroes’, likely young men from the districts in their late-teens or early-twenties whose valiant acts of self-sacrifice in freedom’s cause have, sadly, vanished in prison, at the gallows, or into a sea of anonymity. Few of those who survived after 1947 have left their testimonies for scholars. Leonard Gordon’s pioneering book, Bengal: The Nationalist Movement, 1876-1940, mentioned quite a few interviews with ‘ex-revolutionaries’ but Gordon himself confesses that the transcripts are lost forever. NMML’s famed collection of Oral History Transcripts — while bustling with all manner of Indian National Congress functionaries — has those from a few figures of Bengal’s revolutionary history, but usually only when they had some links with Congress nationalism. Kamala Dasgupta, who had once supplied Bina Das with the revolver she used to try to shoot the Bengal governor, Stanley Jackson, in 1932, but later joined Congress in 1938, is a case in point.
It seems that we have spent more energies in debating the nomenclature of India’s revolutionaries than in recovering and documenting their histories. And yet, the recent years have seen something of a ‘revolutionary turn’ in South Asian historiography. Along with Durba Ghosh’s aforementioned book, Kama Maclean’s A Revolutionary History of Interwar India and Michael Silvestri’s Policing ‘Bengali Terrorism’ in India and the World exemplify this trend. These works highlight both the gaps in colonial archives and the need to dig deep into the shadow lines blurred by these gaps, namely the whispers, hearsay and rumours, oral histories, vernacular sources, and popular visual sources like posters, prints, and calendar art, through which revolutionaries were imagined and remembered.
The threat of revolutionary violence for British officials, alongside its appeal for Indians, often had a greater impact than the actions of the revolutionaries. The British (and subsequently the postcolonial Indian) category of ‘terrorism’ was an a priori justification of State-sanctioned violence. The spectre of revolutionary violence spawned a hypervigilant, security State whose paranoia continues to linger in anti-terror laws within India’s democratic dispensation, such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and its amendments among other legislations.
As Maclean writes, “the term terrorism... operated discursively then as it does now: to excise violent actions from the circle of reason and justifiability, and to enable the full brunt of state violence to be unilaterally unleashed, regardless of legal niceties.” That, perhaps, is a sobering thought for us to keep in mind.
Jayanta Sengupta is Director, Alipore Museum; jsengupt@gmail.com