Abstract
The introduction surveys how Bengal became the focus both of British fears regarding Indian terrorism and of concerted police and intelligence efforts to eradicate anticolonial revolutionary activity in the years between the 1905 Partition of Bengal and the outbreak of the Second World War. While recent historians have emphasized the important role of intelligence during the era of post-Second World War decolonization, the extensive intelligence apparatus directed against the Bengali revolutionaries suggests that the roots of imperial intelligence as a sustained practice lie in the interwar era. The book explores the emergence of modern police intelligence in colonial India and how in turn the policing of revolutionaries in Bengal was connected to and influenced police and intelligence work within the wider British Empire. Intelligence experience acquired in Bengal contributed to the construction of a British “intelligence culture” which after the Second World War was disseminated throughout the empire in a new and more intensified fashion. The focus throughout is on the British intelligence officers, Indian officers, and informants and revolutionaries and their allies, ranging from elite anticolonial activists to subaltern maritime workers.
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Notes
- 1.
Lord Brabourne to Lord Linlithgow, 22 February 1939, R/3/2/6, APAC BL; and “Memorandum on the History of Terrorism in Bengal 1905–1933,” (1933) in TIB I: 822.
- 2.
Colonial authorities, seeking to delegitimize the actions of nationalists who deployed violence as a strategy, typically labeled them as “terrorists,” although the use of the terms “anarchists” and “revolutionaries” to describe members of the revolutionary samitis (societies) persisted into the 1930s. While some of the Bengali revolutionaries’ actions conformed to classical definitions of terrorism (such as political assassination), others did not (such as plans for broad-based uprisings). Accordingly, the present study uses the terms “revolutionaries” and “revolutionary terrorists” to refer to the advocates and practitioners of anticolonial violence in Bengal. “Bengali terrorism” refers to colonial assumptions about the revolutionaries, which form the subject of this book. For further discussion of the issues involved in defining terrorism, see Charles Townshend, Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction (2nd edition: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–20.
- 3.
David M. Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left: Aspects of Regional Nationalism in India, 1905–1942 (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1975).
- 4.
Lord Brabourne to Lord Linlithgow, 22 February 1939, R/3/2/6, APAC BL.
- 5.
“Extract from Report from Governor of Bengal dated 6th March, 1939,” L/P&J/12/395/62, APAC BL.
- 6.
The key studies analyzing the history of “Bengali terrorism” are Durba Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India 1900–1910 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993). For aspects of the history of the Bengali revolutionaries, see Hiren Chakrabarti, Political Protest in Bengal: Boycott and Terrorism 1905–1918 (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1992); Manini Chatterjee, Do and Die: the Chittagong Uprising 1930–34 (New Delhi: Penguin, 1999); Partha Chatterjee: The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012), 276–291; Durba Ghosh, “Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s,” Gender & History 25: 2 (2013) 355–375; Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal: Political Violence in the Interwar Years,” in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, eds., Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006), 270–292; Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left; Alexander Lee, “Who Becomes a Terrorist? Poverty, Education and the Origins of Political Violence,” World Politics 63: 2 (2011), 203–245; and Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–08 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973), 465–492. Leonard A. Gordon, Bengal: The Nationalist Movement 1876–1940 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974); Rajat Kanta Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal 1875–1927 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Tanika Sarkar, Bengal 1928–1934: The Politics of Protest (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987) also include much valuable analysis of the revolutionaries.
- 7.
H. J. Twynam and R. E. A. Ray, Enquiry into Temporary Establishments of the Central and District Intelligence Branches of the Bengal Police (Alipore: Bengal Government Press, 1936), 9–10. A copy of this report is in L/S&G/7/231, APAC BL.
- 8.
Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009); and Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). MI5 and MI6 came into existence in 1909 as part of one organization, known as the Secret Service Bureau.
- 9.
Kate O’Malley, “Indian Political Intelligence (IPI): The monitoring of real and possible danger?” in Eunan O’Halpin, Robert Armstrong and Jane Ohlmeyer, eds., Intelligence, Statecraft and International Power. Historical Studies XXV. (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 2006), 175–185; and Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-Irish Radical Connections, 1919–1964 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). The question of the respective jurisdictions of MI5 and SIS was resolved in 1931, when the former was given responsibility for security intelligence within the British Empire and commonwealth, while the latter was restricted to operating three miles outside British territories. Calder Walton, Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire (London: HarperPress, 2013), 23–24.
- 10.
Richard J. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire 1904–1924 (London: Frank Cass, 1995).
- 11.
Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2008).
- 12.
As Martin Thomas concludes, “Intelligence and empire were inextricably linked in a symbiotic relationship, the growth of one nourishing the consolidation of the other.” Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, 13.
- 13.
Emphasis in original. Walton, Empire of Secrets, 1.
- 14.
Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, 117–122; and Jeffery, MI6, 245–248. By 1925, MI5, for example, had only four percent of the staff it had possessed at the end of the Great War. Andrew, Defence of the Realm, 122.
- 15.
The vast majority of these officers were Indian. These numbers include both permanent and temporary appointments to the IB. Twynam and Ray, Central and District Intelligence Branches, 17 and 64.
- 16.
Patrick Major and Christopher R. Moran, eds., Spooked: Britain, Empire and Intelligence Since 1945 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009); Rory Cormac, Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Walton, Empire of Secrets.
- 17.
Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, 1.
- 18.
Kris Manjapra, “Introduction,” in Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, eds., Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 10.
- 19.
For Bengali revolutionaries’ engagement with Irish republicanism, see Michael Silvestri, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 46–75.
- 20.
Heather Streets-Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 88–141.
- 21.
Ali Raza, Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah, “Introduction: The Internationalism of the Moment—South Asia and the Contours of the Interwar World,” in Raza, Roy and Zachariah, eds., The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and Worldviews, 1917–1939 (New Delhi; Thousand Oaks, CA; London and Singapore: Sage, 2015), viii. Emphasis in original.
- 22.
Philip Murphy, “Creating a Commonwealth Intelligence Culture: The View from Central Africa 1945–1965,” Intelligence and National Security 17: 3 (2002), 131–162.
- 23.
For the conviction that British anticolonial counter-insurgency represented an exemplary model to be followed in the deployment of intelligence and military force against insurgents, see Brian Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2017), 1–9; and David French, The British Way in Counterinsurgency 1945–67 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–7.
- 24.
C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- 25.
Tegart memoir, 38–41 and 68–69.
- 26.
Patrick A. Kelley, Imperial Secrets: Remapping the Mind of Empire (Washington, DC: National Defense Intelligence College, 2008); and Satia, Spies in Arabia.
- 27.
O’Malley, “Indian Political Intelligence,” 175.
- 28.
Simon Ball, “The Assassination Culture of Imperial Britain, 1909–1979,” Historical Journal 56 (2013), 231–256. Ball identifies 17 “significant” imperial assassinations between 1909 and 1979. Of the nine such assassinations up to 1940, seven either took place in India or involved Indian colonial officials; four of the seven were in Bengal.
- 29.
Ball, “Assassination Culture,” 239. The civil-military campaign against the Bengali revolutionaries will be discussed in Chap. 3.
- 30.
Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 11.
- 31.
Burton, Trouble with Empire, 218.
- 32.
Harald Fischer-Tiné, Shyamji Krishnavarna: Sanskrit, Sociology and Anti-Imperialism (London: Routledge, 2014); Michele L. Louro and Carolien Stolte, “The Meerut Conspiracy Case in Comparative and International Perspective,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33: 3 (2013), 310–315; Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2011); and Seema Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance and Indian Anticolonialism in North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
- 33.
Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3.
- 34.
Mark Condos, The Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making of Colonial Power in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
- 35.
For a discussion of this, see Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, 245–247. The present author had to submit his notes on confidential files to the Intelligence Branch and Home Department of the Government of West Bengal for approval during his research in the West Bengal State Archives during the mid-1990s.
- 36.
Charles Trevor, Drums of Asia (London: Lovat Dickson, 1934).
- 37.
Emphasis in original. “Explanatory Notes of the Reasons for the Suggestion in Regard to the Re-Editing of ‘Drums of Asia,’” L/P&J/12/469, APAC BL.
- 38.
IPI observed that Lajpat Rai, “although an extreme Nationalist and at times in his career, a seditionist, can scarcely be described as brainless. The passage would give much offense in Nationalist circles in India.” IPI, “Passages Open to Possible Objection” [July 1933] L/P&J/12/469, APAC BL.
- 39.
Ramnath, Haj to Utopia.
- 40.
“Explanatory Notes of the Reasons for the Suggestion in Regard to the Re-Editing of ‘Drums of Asia’,” L/P&J/12/469, APAC BL.
- 41.
Clauson to Seton, 4 August 1933, L/P&J/12/469, APAC BL; and Trevor, Drums of Asia, np.
- 42.
For the “amateurish” and “ineffective” nature of the police, see David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras 1859–1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 230. For police surveillance of colonial society, see Erin M. Giuliani, “Strangers in the Village? Colonial Policing in Rural Bengal, 1861–1892,” Modern Asian Studies 49: 5 (2015), 1378–1404; Radha Kumar, “Seeing Like a Policeman: Everyday Violence in British India, c. 1900–1950,” in Philip Dwyer and Amanda Nettelbeck, eds., Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 131–149; and Radhika Singha, “Punished by Surveillance: Policing ‘Dangerousness’ in Colonial India, 1872–1918,” Modern Asian Studies 49: 2 (2015), 241–269.
- 43.
C. F. Andrews to Lord Hardinge, Viceroy, 1 August 1915, 90/1/93, Hardinge Papers, Cambridge University Library [CUL].
- 44.
Lord Carmichael, Governor of Bengal, to Lord Hardinge, 20 August 1915, 90/1/138, Hardinge Papers, CUL.
- 45.
Tim Harper, “Singapore, 1915, and the Birth of the Asian Underground,” Modern Asian Studies 47: 6 (2013), 1782–1811.
- 46.
Percival Griffiths, To Guard My People: A History of the Indian Police (London: Ernest Benn, 1971), 269.
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Silvestri, M. (2019). Introduction: Imperial Intelligence and a Forgotten Insurgency. In: Policing ‘Bengali Terrorism’ in India and the World. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18042-3_1
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