Violence, Image, Voice and Text
Kama Maclean
Penguin
305 pages; Rs 599
Serious writing on the history of India is always welcome because so many myths and mythologies are in vogue. If popular culture is to be cleared of a mythical construction of the past, the task has to be performed by professional historians who painstakingly collect facts to refute non-historical received knowledge that is made popular by social and cultural pretenders. This process applies as much to the role and contribution of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA) founded by Bhagat Singh and Chandra Shekhar Azad.
The mainstream "official" and sometimes "nationalist" history, whether academic or political, has simplified the debate on the role of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru, Chandra Shekhar Azad and other dedicated revolutionaries to a question of "practitioners of violence" versus the Gandhi-led mass movement based on non-violence. This book shows that the revolutionaries of the HSRA played a significant role in the inter-war period in north India, and their significance in the anti-colonial struggle was noticed and noted by the British, who ruthlessly tried to suppress the movement.
Kama Maclean, the author of this important study, has set for herself the goal of probing a larger question: to demonstrate "the important role that the revolutionaries played in influencing Congress policy and provoking colonial responses in the process bringing India closer to independence". In fact, Ms Maclean says, the interaction between Gandhi's Congress and the revolutionary movement of north India is much deeper than routinely understood.
If a section of Indian and foreign historians had tried to downplay the contribution of the revolutionary martyrs (shaheeds), the British colonisers were clear that those who has killed John Poyantz Saunders or those who threw a bomb at the Legislative Assembly were "terrorists" and "conspirators". For them, the Lahore conspiracy cases under the Sedition Act were the appropriate responses for which, on March 23, 1931, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were hanged.
The first issue the study examines is the role of Gandhi and his studied and widely unpopular silence when the shaheeds were hanged. This did not go down well because of the widespread popular sympathy for the revolutionaries. But the immediate impact of the hanging was the Gandhi-Irwin pact of 1931, which raised the issue of Dominion Status for India.
The message of this study is that history cannot be seen in black and white. The revolutionaries evolved a strategy of making lengthy statements against the colonisers during the Assembly Bomb Case trial, and all of India read with great interest the rationale behind their acts. Their acts were a response to the death of the popular Punjabi leader Lala Lajpat Rai after being assaulted by the police. The idea of personal sacrifice for freedom carried weight with Indians. The revolutionaries, thus, cannot be reduced to the status of bombers or mindless killers, she argues. She quotes Bhagat Singh's views on the "limits of violence" and how violence can never become the mainstream political line but could be used to "lift people out of their torpor".
The revolutionaries propagated socialism and republicanism and Ms Maclean shows that the Congress Party's Karachi Resolution on fundamental rights was partly impacted by this ideology. To underline the point that the revolutionaries were not mindless believers in the cult of the bomb, Ms Maclean establishes the inter-connections between inter-war European ideological and political developments like communism and socialism, which influenced Indian thinkers profoundly.
Adding to the richness of the study is the chapter on Durga Devi Bohra, a housewife who not only played a significant role in the escape of Bhagat Singh from vigilant British police but in shooting two British officials (for which she was arrested).
This book fills in the gaps in pre-independence revolutionary history in which a disproportionate amount of attention has been focused on Bengal. Drawing on untapped oral histories, interviews, memoirs, photos and colonial archives, Ms Maclean shows how the presence of north Indian inter-war revolutionaries on the political landscape served to radicalise the Congress, which, in turn, injected a fresh urgency into the slow process of constitutional reform. She shows how Motilal Nehru, a votary of Dominion Status, emerged a changed person after the Assembly Bomb case, and his attitude towards the revolutionary bombers witnessed a sea change. The Congress and the revolutionaries were not antagonists; they were looking at the cause of Indian freedom from different viewpoints. Yet, says the author, "historians have come to see violence and non-violence as a rival form of political action… But it is in fact more productive to see all of these movements as a part of a single formation of anti-colonial nationalism".
In doing so, she has provided a new perspective on an important facet of Indian history.
