Abstract
Gandhi famously advocated pacifism, but Indian opposition to British rule was not exclusively non-violent; many physical force nationalists used the Irish (violent) model as their blueprint. The two episodes that are looked at in this chapter, namely the Chittagong Uprising of 1930 and the wartime activities of Subhas Chandra Bose, offer examples of Indian physical force nationalism that are relatively little-known outside of India. The violent nature of these events cuts against an accepted historical narrative of the Gandhian non-violent struggle against the Raj. These overlooked moments in the Indian nationalist movement illustrate the influence of an appropriated memory of the Irish 1916 Easter Rising—one that helped shape both the actions of Indian insurgents and the British Indian administration’s reactions.
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- 1.
See for example Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, Cosmopolitan Nationalism in the Victorian Empire: Ireland, India and the Politics of Alfred Webb (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
- 2.
See Kate O’Malley, “Ireland and India: Post-independence Diplomacy,” Irish Studies in International Affairs 22 (2011): 145–62.
- 3.
For further reading on this aspect of Irish involvement in India see Scott B. Cook, Imperial Affinities: Nineteenth-Century Analogies and Exchanges Between India and Ireland (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1993) and Keith Jeffery, ed., An Irish Empire?: Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).
- 4.
There are few mentions of Ireland in many core texts on British decolonisation. When it is referenced it relates to general concerns in the wake of the Easter Rising or later, in relation to the development of “dominion status.” Often Ireland’s neutrality during the Second World War is presented by British historians of Empire as proof that Commonwealth membership was compatible with such autonomy and/or that countries had, in the post-war world, the freedom to leave the organisation should they wish. See references to Ireland in, for example, Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation 1918–68 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) or John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
- 5.
Michael O’Dwyer , India As I Knew It (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1988), 9.
- 6.
See Rehana Ahmed and Sumita Mukherjee, eds., South Asian Resistances in Britain, 1858–1947 (London: Continuum, 2012).
- 7.
Jawaharlal Nehru to Motilal Nehru, 12 September 1907, cited in Dorothy Norman, Nehru: The First Sixty Years. Volume I (New York: John Day Company, 1965), 12. See also Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru. A Biography. Volume I: 1889–1947 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), 22.
- 8.
Arpita Sen, “The Proscription of an Irish Text and the Chittagong Rising of 1930,” Indian Historical Review 34, no. 2 (2007): 97–121.
- 9.
For more on this see Richard J. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence (London, Frank Cass, 1995).
- 10.
D. Ghosh and D. Kennedy, eds., Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006), 270.
- 11.
See Kate O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-Irish Radical Connections, 1919–64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008) for more on Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) an agency of the British Intelligence Services which monitored Indian nationalist and revolutionary activities outside India.
- 12.
Michael Silvestri, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 51.
- 13.
Ghosh and Kennedy, eds., Decentering Empire, 284.
- 14.
Mihir Bose, Raj, Secrets, Revolution: A Life of Subhas Chandra Bose (London: Grice Chapman, 2004), 49.
- 15.
O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire, 96.
- 16.
Manini Chatterjee, Do and Die: The Chittagong Uprising 1930–34 (New Delhi: Penguin, 1999), 45–55 and passim.
- 17.
Sen, “Chittagong Rising,” 11.
- 18.
Ashis Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 43.
- 19.
Sen, “Chittagong Rising,” 48–63.
- 20.
Chatterjee, Do and Die, 70.
- 21.
Those involved in the Rising encountered logistical problems both before and during Easter week. For a thorough treatment of the 1916 Rising see, Fearghal McGarry, The Rising: Ireland: Easter 1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
- 22.
Chatterjee, Do and Die, 56–57.
- 23.
Sen, “Chittagong Rising,” 118.
- 24.
Silvestri, Ireland and India, 70–72.
- 25.
Ibid., 72.
- 26.
Patrick French, Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (London: Penguin, 1998), 202. On 14 May 1999 the Indian Government entrusted Justice (retd.) M. K. Mukherjee of the Supreme Court with an in-depth inquiry into the disappearance of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.
- 27.
Bose and Collins also have something in common in death. Controversy has surrounded Michael Collins’ death with historians deliberating over whether he was murdered or if his shooting was an accident. For contrasting views see John M. Feehan, The Shooting of Michael Collins: Murder or Accident? (Cork: Mercier Press, 1981) and Meda Ryan, The Day Michael Collins was Shot (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1989).
- 28.
For more on these connections see O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire, chapter 3.
- 29.
French, Liberty or Death, 204.
- 30.
Ibid., 205. French puts the number of voluntary INA recruits in the Far East at 10,000, other perhaps more accurate estimates go so far as to suggest 40,000; see Leonard A. Gordan, Brothers Against the Raj. A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (Rupa and Company: Calcutta, 1997), 498.
- 31.
Bose to Woods, 21 Dec. 1935, reproduced in Netaji: Collected Works: Letters, Articles, Speeches and Statements, 1933–1937, eds. Sisir Kumer Bose and Sugata Bose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 125.
- 32.
The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA), Records of the Dominions Office (DO), 35/2059.
- 33.
See Ben Zachariah, “Gandhi, Non-Violence and Indian Independence,” History Review 69 (March 2011): 30–35.
- 34.
Sumantra Bose, “Why Do National Self-Determination Movements Embrace Armed Struggle?,” paper delivered to the “Globalising the Rising: 1916 in International Context” conference, University College Dublin, 5 September 1916.
- 35.
Anne Dolan, Commemorating the Irish Civil War: History and Memory, 1923–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 113.
- 36.
Kate O’Malley , “Ireland and Egypt: Anti-Imperialism at Bay,” in The Irish Revolution 1919–21: A Global History, eds. Tommy Graham and Brian Hanley (Dublin: History Publications, 2019).
- 37.
Ronan Fanning, Michael Kennedy et al., eds., Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, Vol. X: 1951–1957 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2016), 60, 573–74.
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O’Malley, K. (2019). Violent Resistance: The Irish Revolution and India. In: Roberts, D., Wright, J. (eds) Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25984-6_11
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