Table Of ContentA REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY OF INTERWAR INDIA
KAMA MACLEAN
A Revolutionary History
of Interwar India
Violence, Image, Voice and Text
HURST & COMPANY, LONDON
First published in the United Kingdom in 2015 by
C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.,
41 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3PL
© Kama Maclean, 2015
Printed in India
The right of Kama Maclean to be identified as the author of
this publication is asserted by them in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book
is available from the British Library.
978-1-84904-366-3 hardback
978-1-84904-332-8 paperback
www.hurstpublishers.com
This book is printed using paper from registered sustainable
and managed sources.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
A Note on Spelling xi
Acronyms xiii
Glossary xv
List of Illustrations xvii
Introduction: Violence and Anticolonialism in India 1
PART I
THE REVOLUTIONARIES OF THE HINDUSTAN SOCIALIST
REPUBLICAN ARMY: HISTORIES, ACTIONS, ACTIVISTS
1. Of History and Legend: Revolutionary Actions in North India, 1928–31 27
2. That Hat: Infamy, Strategy and Social Communication 51
3. The Revolutionary Unknown: The Secret Life of Durga Devi Vohra 81
PART II
POROUS POLITICS: THE CONGRESS AND
THE REVOLUTIONARIES, 1928–1931
4. Intermediaries, the Revolutionaries and the Congress 101
5. The Revolutionary Picture: Images and the Dynamics of Anticolonialism 119
6. ‘Gandhi and Balraj’: From Dominion Status to Complete Independence 147
PART III
THE AFTERMATH: GANDHISM AND THE CHALLENGE
OF REVOLUTIONARY VIOLENCE
7. The Karachi Congress, 1931 183
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CONTENTS
8. Controlling Political Violence: The Government, the Congress
and the HSRA 205
Conclusion: The Dynamics of Anticolonial Violence 221
Epilogue: Congress and the Revolutionaries, 1937–1946 235
Appendix 239
Notes 243
Bibliography 305
Index 321
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I visited Amritsar while on sabbatical in 2007 and couldn’t help noticing pictures
of Bhagat Singh everywhere in the town’s bazaars. Rang de Basanti had recently
been released, and Bhagat Singh was on my mind; I had shown parts of the film,
despite its ahistoricity, to my class. One student became so enthused that she
approached me to write her paper on the way in which the revolutionaries had
impacted on the mainstream nationalist movement. Sure, I said. She soon returned,
disappointed, reporting that there was simply not enough scholarship to support
her thesis. Of course, this gap had been noticed several years earlier by Christopher
Pinney in his engaging book, ‘Photos of the Gods’. That is how this project was born.
Much of the initial archival research was completed while I was employed as
Professorial Research Fellow at the University of the United Arab Emirates in 2009.
I remain grateful to the university and my colleagues in Al Ain for their support
while I was in India, researching; or in absentia, writing; in particular to Rory
Hume and Don Baker for their staunch support for the project. From 2010–2013,
the project was furthered back at UNSW in Sydney. I am especially thankful for
the encouragement of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Christopher Pinney and Michael
Dwyer, each of whom insisted that I draw together the material as a book; Chris
kindly provided the poster on the cover.
I have accrued many other debts to readers, mentors and friends, and am espe-
cially grateful to those who generously pored over and commented on drafts of the
manuscript: Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Geoffrey Batchen, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ian
Copland, Robin Jeffrey, Tom Weber and Ben Zachariah. For their feedback on
ideas, individual chapters and papers, I wish to thank Vinayak Chaturvedi, Frank
Conlon, Assa Doron, Sandria Freitag, Charu Gupta, Max Harcourt, Philip
Lutgendorf, Jim Masselos, Christopher Pinney, Ira Raja, Anupama Roy and Ujjwal
Kumar Singh. I will always be grateful to the anonymous readers who provided
helpful feedback along the way, as I published early chapters and various other
fragments as articles. Audiences at workshops (Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen;
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
La Trobe University; the Australian National University) at conferences (the AHA,
AAS, ECSAS, ASAA, and the South Asia Conference at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison) and at seminars (at the University of Chicago, Northwestern
University, the University of Sydney, Flinders University and the University of New
South Wales) were also constructive.
I am grateful for discussions about politics and pictures—real time and virtual—
with David Arnold, Greg Bailey, Chris Bayly, Adam Bowles, Harald Fischer-Tiné,
Peter Friedlander, Durba Ghosh, Kajri Jain, Shruti Kapila, Chaman Lal, Rochona
Majumdar, the late S. L. Manchanda, Anil Nauriya, A. G. Noorani, Ursula Rao,
Sanjay Seth and Ian Tyrrell, which provided food for thought. The final stages of
this project were happily invigorated by exchanges with friends and colleagues who
took part in the ‘Reading the Revolutionaries’ workshop and double-panel at the
Annual South Asia Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in October
2012, partly published as a Special Issue of Postcolonial Studies in 2013. Special
thanks must go to Daniel Elam and Chris Moffat for their engaged and thoughtful
insights. And I am very thankful to Hurst’s anonymous readers, whose astute com-
ments made this book (I hope) so much better, and to Hurst’s editorial team—par-
ticularly Rob Pinney, Alasdair Craig and Jon de Peyer—for assistance with
copyediting, permissions and other niceties that bring a book to publication.
While thanking all of the above, I also must duly indemnify them: the interpre-
tation herein is mine.
This research could not have be completed without the assistance and enthusi-
asm of the dedicated archivists at Teen Murti, particularly Shashi Anand and
Sanjeev Gautam; Jaya Ravindran and Rajmani Srivastava at the National Archives
of India; Rajesh Prasad, Curator at the Supreme Court of India Museum; Richard
Bingle and Antonia Moon at the British Library; Kevin Greenbank at Cambridge
University’s Centre for South Asian Studies; and Jim Nye at the Regenstein Library,
University of Chicago. I am also grateful for periodic research assistance by
Aparajita Mukhopadhyay, Amit Sarwal, Reema Sarwal, and Aarti Rastogi; transla-
tions from Panjabi by Gurmeet Kaur, from Awadhi by Amit Ranjan, from French
by Rachel Routley, interpretations of colonial legislation from Graham Greenleaf
and generally helpful orientations from Pradip Krishen, and the hospitality of the
whole Raja family. I am obliged to my colleagues in the Faculty of Arts and Social
Sciences at UNSW, particularly Paul Brown, Ian Tyrrell, Ursula Rao, Duncan
McDuie-Ra, Kristy Muir and Sally Pearson; as well as Glenn Forbes and Julie
Nolan in the University Library. And it goes without saying that the support of my
family, Michael and Clodagh, has been crucial throughout the project.
This book is a testament to the generosity and inspiration of friends, and it is to
those friends that it is dedicated.
Early or partial versions of the chapters herein have been published as:
viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
‘Imagining the Nationalist Movement: Revolutionary Images of the Freedom
Struggle’, Journal of Material Culture, Vol. 19, 1, 2014, pp. 7–34 (a small section
of Chapter Five is elaborated on in substantial depth in this article, which stresses
the multivocality of imagery).
‘What Durga Bhabhi Did Next: Or, Was there a Gendered Agenda in Revolu-
tionary Circles?’, South Asian History and Culture, 4(2), 2013 pp. 176–195
(Chapter Three).
‘The History of a Legend: Accounting for Popular Histories of Revolutionary
Nationalism’, Modern Asian Studies, 46(6), 2012, pp. 1540–1571 (part of the
introduction and some of Chapter One).
‘The Portrait’s Journey: The Image, Social Communication and Martyr-Making
in India’, Journal of Asian Studies, 70(4), November 2011, pp. 1051–1082 (an early
version of Chapter Two; the argument in this book is extended substantially—the
article now strikes me as too tentative).
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