Decolonizing Anarchism. Maia Ramnath
just one life to lose for his country.[32]
Meanwhile back home, Savarkar’s brother Ganesh had been prosecuted for sedition and sentenced to transportation for life. Documents found at Ganesh’s home and in the hands of accomplices during the proceedings “indicate[d] that the association aimed at some sort of organisation founded upon the model of revolutionary societies in Russia,” including Thomas Frost’s The Secret Societies of the European Revolution, 1776–1876, a book “in which is described the secret organisation of the Russian Nihilists, consisting of small circles or groups affiliated into sections, each member knowing only the members of the circle to which he belonged. This may explain the existence of various small groups of young men who are found in this case to have been working for the same objects and drawing weapons from the same source without personal acquaintance with the members of other groups.”[33]
Enraged at his brother’s conviction, Savarkar called for the murder of English people in India as reprisal. He sent a consignment of twenty Browning pistols and ammunition back to India concealed in a false-bottom box in the luggage of Govind Amin, India House’s resident chef and ammunition buyer. These pistols were then used in the assassination of a district magistrate in Maharashtra. Savarkar was quickly implicated in the killing, thought to be a dual act of revenge for Dhingra’s death and Ganesh’s imprisonment. Demonstrating its transnational perspective, the Indian Sociologist commented, “Allowing for the difference in the longitudes of Paris and Nasik the time of our writing to sympathise with the members of the family of Mr. Savarkar synchronized almost to a minute with that of the assassination avenging the sentence of transportation passed on him. There is a sort ‘poetic justice’ in all this which will, we doubt not, strike the imagination of our readers.”[34]
Savarkar fled to Paris in 1910. Heedless of warnings not to return to London, he did so anyway and was arrested on arrival at Victoria Station under the Fugitive Offenders Act, then deported by ship to India with a stopover in Marseilles. There he attempted to escape by leaping from a porthole into the harbor and swimming to shore, only to be snatched by police waiting on the pier. (One account has it that the comrades who were supposed to meet him and spirit him into concealment had lingered at a café and arrived too late.)
To no avail, high-profile supporters among the British and French Left took up the case. London anarchist Guy Aldred formed a Savarkar Release Committee as soon as he himself got out of jail. He also featured the case in his own fiery paper Herald of Revolt and produced an appeal on the matter in August 1910 addressed “To the English proletariat.”[35]
When the Indian Sociologist was proscribed and its publisher, Arthur Horsley, convicted for printing sedition, Aldred offered his own shoestring Bakunin Press to continue publication. He made it clear that while he did not agree fully with the paper’s content, being an advocate neither of political violence and assassination nor “nationalism, and . . . the Statism it implied,” he did believe in free speech, freedom as a general principle, and resistance to imperial rule.[36] His meager combined office and living quarters were searched, and when three hundred copies of the paper (though no trace of a press) were found, he too was convicted for sedition and sentenced to a year in prison.[37] Printing then shifted to Paris, and the paper continued to appear until 1914, despite several more enforced relocations.
Paris
After the Dhingra incident, London abruptly became too hot for Indian radicals to function freely, though a few did try to maintain an active presence. Now the primary center of Indian overseas radicalism moved to Paris. The political expatriate community there was already well established, centered around Rana and Madame Bhikaji Rustomji Cama, both of whom maintained close ties with the London community.
Besides carrying the cachet of its revolutionary history, France had the advantage of lying outside British jurisdiction. Ironically, France’s own colonial outposts inside India offered them this functional free zone: French Pondicherry became a key location for moving weaponry and literature into the country, and “the great importance of both Pondicherry and Chandernagore from the point of view of the anarchists,” said the officiating director of Criminal Intelligence Department, lay in their independent postal connections with European countries.[38]
Paris was also an unparalleled hub for cross-fertilization among Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Filipino modernist, liberal and Left, anarchist, nationalist, and internationalist movements, hosting exiles from countries throughout East Asia and the Ottoman Empire. The Indians formed particularly strong bonds with the Egyptians.
It was the large population of Russian political exiles, though, whom the Bengali revolutionists looked to as their most significant source of inspiration as well as technical and organizational mentorship. They admired the efficacy of their fellow revolutionists, whose uncompromising calls for emancipation from imperial autocracy they understood to be analogous to their own. These particular Russians were of the maximalist faction of Socialists-Revolutionaries, bearing the mantle of the late nineteenth-century People’s Will Party (Narodnaya Volya). The group was associated with Bakunin’s hyperviolent protégé Sergey Nechayev. It also had been linked to the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881—an act that the Swadeshi militants warmly approved. The most recent wave of exiles had arrived after the postrevolutionary crackdown in 1905; by 1907, the Paris police reported “some 1500 Russian ‘terrorists’” resident there, among them Vera Figner, Vera Zasulich, Vladimir Burtsev, Victor Serge, and Nikolai Safranski, who was regarded as the ringleader and remained under heavy surveillance.
Back in November 1907, Har Dayal had written in the Indian Sociologist, “Every Indian must be convinced that if Russian methods are carried on in our country rigorously by our oppressors, the so-called British rulers, we must meet it with measure for measure.”[39] He repeated the argument for learning “the art of organising secret societies and insurrections” from the Russians in the next issue, December 1907: “It seems that any agitation in India now must be carried on secretly, and that the only methods which can bring the English Government to its sense are the Russian methods vigorously and incessantly applied until the English relax their tyranny and are driven out of the country.”[40] In August 1908, he added, “As to the ethics of dynamite, it may be laid down in a general way that where the people have political power there is no need for the use of explosives. It only promotes reaction. But where the people are utterly defenceless, both politically and militarily, then one may look on the bomb or any other weapon as legitimate. Its employment then becomes merely a question of expediency. We hope to discuss this question, particularly with reference to India, in an early issue.”[41]
Back in Maniktola Garden, Hem Chandra Das (Kanungo) had grown impatient with a string of botched bombing and assassination operations followed by a year of relative inactivity. So he took the initiative to seek more advanced revolutionary techniques through an apprenticeship with the Russians in Paris.[42] Funded by Rana ostensibly to study chemistry—often a convenient route to the science of explosives, it would appear—Kanungo was joined by his Maharashtrian friend Pandurang Mahadev Bapat.[43] Das and Bapat were reported to be in contact with a female anarchist from the United States in Paris who Heehs suggests (rather implausibly, I think) could have been Emma Goldman. Whoever she was, she introduced them to a mysterious figure known as PhD, identified only as a leading figure in a French socialist organization. PhD and one of his comrades, “a former officer belonging to his party,” offered them instruction in “history, geography and economics, along with socialism, communism, etc.,” along with notes on the organization of secret societies, and after some initial hesitation, “got a member of their party to instruct Hem and Bapat in explosive chemistry and demolition.” French police reports are vague on which of these was Safranski, since he was both a former “brilliant” officer in the Russian army, and enrolled in l’Ecole des Langues Orientales.[44]
Another student was Miss Perin Naoroji, granddaughter of the renowned parliamentarian Dadabhai Naoroji, best known for his book on the economic drain theory of British colonial rule. The “Grand Old Man” had her educated in Europe along with her three sisters. Since Perin’s boardinghouse was on Cama’s street, the Boulevard Montparnasse, intelligence surmised the girl had “learned politics from her.” Crossing the English Channel to visit one of her sisters in London, she was with Savarkar at the time of his arrest.