Q. “The very idea of the bomb and the secret society, and of propaganda through action and sacrifice were import from the West.” Critically examine. [UPSC, 2015] 

Ans:

Indian revolutionaries adopted actions like bombing, assassinating the European officials to demoralize the official class and uproot the enemies of freedom, established secret societies, spread propaganda through action and sacrifice and to finance their projects they adopted the acts of looting of government wealth. ©selfstudyhistory.com

Writing to John Morley, the Secretary of State in India, a few days after the first bomb was thrown by a Bengali, the Viceroy Lord Minto declared that the conspirators aimed at the furtherance of murderous methods hitherto unknown in India which have been imported from the West.

• Times correspondent Valentine Chirol wrote that Bengalis had of all Indians been the most imitators of the West, as represented by the Irish Fenian and the Russian anarchist.
  • Chirol said that European works on various periods of revolutionary history figure amongst seizures whenever the police raids some centre of Nationalist activity. This indicated that Bengali revolutionary terrorism was simply a takeoff on the European variety.
  • According to him, the only indigenous element in it was the infusion of Hindu religious element.
• Though the revolutionary groups did not take shape in Bengal until around 1906, a quarter-century before this a number of  ‘secret societies‘ were set up in Calcutta that were consciously modelled on the Carbonari and Mazzini’s Young Italy Society.
  • Midnapore Secret Society, Atmannyoti Samiti and Anushilan Samiti were founded.
  • Yogendranath Vidyabhusan published Bengali lives of Mazzini in 1879-80 and Garibaldi in 1904-05.
  • Around the same time Jatindranath Banerji, one of the founders of Bengal’s first revolutionary group Anushilan Samiti, published a series of articles on the ‘Italian Revolution’ in a Calcutta monthly.
  • At Nasik, Savarkar had set up an association called Mitra Mela which in 1904 had been merged into the secret society called Abhinav Bharat after Mazzini’s Young Italy.
  • Bhupendranath Datta, a member of Anushilan Samiti, wrote after independence: ‘the inspiration of Mazzini thrilled the youth for half-a-century or more’.
  • This inspiration must have been of a very general nature.
    • Bengali readers of Mazzini’s life would have been affected only by the essentials:
      • resistance to foreign occupation,
      • attempts to unify a divided nation,
      • advocacy of active methods,
      • the utility of secret societies.
    • Similar lessons were learned from such books as The Rise of the Dutch Republic, a favourite of Jatin Banerji’s, and accounts of the American and French revolutions.
• Another book of European Revolutionary history that influenced young Indians was Thomas Frost’s Secret Societies of the European Revolution.
  • Frost’s book contained accounts of the heroic doings of Irish, Italian, Russian and other societies.
  • Of particular interest to Indian revolutionaries was his description of the hierarchical structure of the Russian Nihilists, in which rank-and-file members knew only those in the same circle, and members of the directing committee were known only to one another.
  • When revolutionary secret societies were formed in Bengal and Maharashtra around 1906, the leaders made some effort to organize the groups in this way and also to adopt other practices described by Frost as characteristic of secret societies, for instance oaths of secrecy and rituals of initiation.
• Some of the pioneers of revolution in Bengal were influenced by their study of European history.
  • Aurobindo Ghose, who with Jatindranath helped to organize the first revolutionary group in Bengal with a well-thought-out programme, read widely in the history of Europe while a scholar at St Paul’s School, London, and Kings College, Cambridge.
    • Shortly after his return to India in 1893 he wrote that France gained freedom ‘not through any decent and orderly expansion, but through a purification by blood and fire‘.
    • Aurobindo also cited examples from Roman and Irish history to support his thesis that when men wanted a radical change of government, revolutionary action counted for much more than the sort of endless discussion that the members of the Indian National Congress engaged in.
• Aurobindo and Jatindranath met in Baroda in 1899. Both became members of a ‘secret society’ of Bombay with which Bal Gangadhar Tilak was associated.
  • Tilak contacted the Russian consul in Bombay in an effort to get Aurobindo’s friend Madhavrao Jadhav admitted to a military school in Russia.
  • This plan fell through, but Madhavrao was eventually sent to Europe and enrolled in the Swiss military academy in Bern.
  • Neither Tilak nor Aurbindo was interested in terrorism of the sort that is usually associated with secret societies, but rather in a disciplined military uprising.
    • According to a statement written during the 1940s, Aurobindo’s idea was to prepare for ‘an armed insurrection’ that would consist of ‘guerrilla warfare accompanied by general resistance and revolt’ including, if possible, ‘a general revolt of the Indian army’.
    • The first step in this direction would be a work of ‘revolutionary propaganda and recruiting‘ and activities that might be helpful for ultimate military action, such as riding, physical training, athletics of various kinds, drill and organized movement.’
  • Early on, Jatindranath joined forces with Pramathanath Mitra, a barrister who during his training in England had become fascinated with European secret societies.
    • The group that grew out of this collaboration was the Calcutta Anushilan Samiti.
• In 1905, Shyamji Krishna Varma founded the India Home Rule Society, started the journal Indian Sociologist and established the India House to help fund Indian students studying abroad.
  • The India House became a meeting place for other revolutionary leaders like P. M. Bapat, Virendranath Chattopadhyay, Lala Hardayal, Bhai Parmanand, Madanlal Dhingra, V. V. S. Aiyar, Madam Cama and Savarkar, who had left for London in 1906.
  • Jackson, the collector of Nasik, was assassinated in retaliation, and Madanlal Dhingra shot dead Curzon Wyllie, an officer from the India House. Dhingra was hanged in May, 1909.
  • Madam Cama continued propaganda in favour of revolutionary activities in Europe.
• Two non-Indians had some involvement in the formation of the Anushilan Samiti: the Irishwoman Margaret Noble, known as Sister Nivedita, and the Japanese Kakuzo Okakura.
  • In 1895 Nivedita met Swami Vivekananda and three years later went to Calcutta. During her early years in India she considered herself a loyal subject of the Queen; but by 1901 she had become convinced of the moral indefensibility of the Raj.
  • In a letter written to a friend during the Boer War, she said: What India needed was ‘the ringing cry, the passion of the multitude, the longing for death’ in the country’s service.
  • Between 1899 and 1901 Nivedita was in Europe and America. At this time she read a book by anarchist Peter Kropotkin that, she wrote in a letter of 1901, confirmed her in her ‘determination towards Anarchy‘.
  • The Russian knew ‘more than any other man what India needs’, she thought, in particular ‘the utter needlessness of Governments’.
  • Nivedita apparently had met Kropotkin in England and had remained in touch with him.
  • Nivedita is known to have encouraged Satish Bose, the young man who founded the physical-culture group that was amalgamated with Jatin Banerji’s society to form the Anushilan Samiti.
  • She was in touch with Aurobindo Ghose and other leaders and was in general agreement with them on the need for active and if necessary violent resistance to British rule.
  • She also influenced the rank and file of the society by giving them her collection of books on revolutionary history and delivering lectures to them on their duty to the motherland.
  • A statement by a society member inferred that she helped him gain access to a chemical laboratory for the purpose of learning bombmaking.
• It can be concluded about the foreign influences on revolutionary terrorism is:
  • that a number of young Indians were superficially inspired by written accounts of revolutionary activity in Europe;
  • some of the leaders had studied such accounts in more depth and tried to put something of what they read into practice; and
  • some foreigners like Nivedita were active in Calcutta at the time the first revolutionary secret society was founded and apparently had something to do with this development.
  • None of this can be characterized as the direct influence of European on Indian revolutionary activity.
• The only example of direct influence during the 1902-08 period was the association between Hemchandra Das and certain European anarchists and socialist revolutionaries in Paris in 1907.
• Hemchandra Das’s contacts with European Revolutionaries:
  • In 1906, Hemchandra Das, disgusted with the Anushilan Samiti’s ineffectiveness, decided to go to America to learn the art of war. He reached Marseilles in September 1906 and a few weeks later arrived in Paris.
  • Hemchandra decided to remain in Paris, as it was the best place for joining secret societies.
  • In July 1907 —Hemchandra read about the trial and sentencing of ‘Libertad’, a man he understood to be ‘one of the supreme leaders of anarchism’.
    • Thinking that ‘anarchist’ was simply another word for ‘revolutionary’, Hemchandra decided to make Libertad’s acquaintance.
    • Libertad welcomed Hemchandra and his friend Bapat into the fold and got them part-time work at the Anarchie press.
    • The two Indians attended meetings of various anarchist and socialist groups.
    • Hemchandra found the doctrines of anarchism unconvincing and after a month he stopped attending the meetings.
  • But by this time Hemchandra and Bapat was introduced to the leader of a group of socialists, known as ‘Ph.D.’ The two Indians were admitted to Ph.D.’s party.
  • Badly in need of money, they decided to approach Shyamji Krishnavarma, who had recently come to Paris.
    • Hemchandra introduced Krishnavarma to Ph.D., who was able to win him over, because Krishnavarma were impressed by the growing maturity of the Indian nationalist movement as evidenced by the writings of the Calcutta Extremist papers Jugantar and Bande Mataram.
  • Ph.D. began giving Hemchandra and Bapat instructions on how to organize secret societies and information on bomb-making —information the two students eagerly noted down in their notebooks.
  • One of Hemchandra’s three socialist teachers was the Russian revolutionary Nicolas Safranski.
    • In 1907 the police, in a search, obtained photographs of a 127-page explosive manual. They also learned that he was planning to go to India.
    • At the same time, there had been an attempt in Bengal to blow up the train carrying the Lieutenant-Governor of the province. Thinking that this was the work of one of Safranski’s Indian students, Police sent a note to the British government. On the 30th of the month Lord Morley wired Lord Minto: ‘The French Government has furnished a memorandum by the Paris Police in which it says that Nicolas Safranski, Russian Anarchist, has been instructing natives of India at Paris in manufacture of explosives.’
  • To put their new knowledge to use, Hemchandra and Bapat had decided to return to India to set up secret societies there.
  • Hemchandra reached Bombay, he got to Bengal (after spending a fruitless fortnight in Maharashtra trying to link up with Maratha revolutionaries) he tried to interest his old comrades in his new knowledge.
    • Barindrakumar Ghose was happy to have his information on bomb-making, which was far in advance of anything he and his associates had been able to get hold of.
    • Aurobindo and Charuchandra Dutta had set up a religious school and bomb making factory at Manicktala, and used Hemchandra’s expertise.
  • The actual material Hemchandra brought from Paris was seized when he and his accomplices were arrested three months later. They show that Hemchandra’s information on Russian revolutionary organization did reach Bengali revolutionaries.
    • One document, known as ‘General Principles‘, sets forth a strict organizational model, with absolute division of branches and severe discipline. Secrecy and the use of ciphers were enjoined.
    • Development was to be gradual, starting with the educated classes and spreading to the masses. When the public had been sufficiently prepared by propaganda and agitation, the time was ripe for rebellion.
    • Many of the procedures recommended in the Russian organizational document, including the acquisition of money by means and arms by armed robberies, were used by later revolutionaries.
      • e.g. Dhaka armory raid by Anushilan Samiti.
    • The police had reason to believe that ‘General Principles’ influenced the organization of the most important revolutionary organization in Bengal.
    • The another document was a brief guide to the fabrication of explosives written with Indian conditions in mind.
  • Between February and April 1908 Hemchandra made three bombs that were used and a dozen others that were kept ready.
  • On 1 May 1908 Hemchandra and some thirty others were arrested after one of his bombs killed two Englishwomen whose carriage was mistaken for that of the District Judge of Muzaffarpur (Alipore Bomb Case).
    • But his material had already entered into circulation. Copies of the bomb manual were found not only in Calcutta, but also in Nasik and Lahore.’
  • After 1908 the use of bombs became fairly widespread in India, and Bengal was always a principal centre of their manufacture and use.
    • The most important bombs used in India before the first world war, including the one that almost killed the Viceroy Lord Hardinge in 1912, were made in Chandernagore by revolutionaries who had been in direct touch with Hemchandra’s society.
  • Hence techniques imported from Russia via Paris did have some influence on Indian revolutionaries involved in the freedom movement.
• The anarchist Emma Goldman came in contact in 1908 with an active group of Indian revolutionaries in Vancouver, and proposed to go from there to India, where she would ‘support the National Movement in India.
• Between 1907 and the end of the first world war many Indian revolutionaries, used Europe, North America and the Far East as bases for their activities.
  • In 1907 Taraknath Das and his associates formed in California the Indian Independence League.
    • Its object was lo spread revolutionary ideas among Indians living in the United States. Lala Hardayal was one of the active members of the League.
  • In 1916, Chandrakanta Chakravarty, with promise of help from Germany, planned an uprising against British imperialism in Asia. However, the ambitious fizzled out.
  • The Ghadar party was organized in the USA and they planned to liberate India through direct action.
• After the First World War, the major influence was that of the Russian Revolution and the success of the young Socialist State in consolidating itself.
  • The youthful revolutionaries were keen to learn from and take the help of the young Soviet State and its ruling Bolshevik Party.
  • The young Bhagat Singh was the main ideologue of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), and gave the movement a clear Marxist-Socialist orientation.
• In 1928, Surya Sen along with his friends established the Indian Revolutionary Association (IRA) in Chittagong, on the lines of the Irish Sinn Fein.
  • Chittagong armoury raid by Surya Sen was inspired by the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland and led by Surya Sen.
  • The raiders were members of revolutionary Indian Republican Army (on the basis of  Irish Republican Army), who favoured armed uprisings as a means to achieve India’s independence from British colonial rule.

Critical views: 

• Rooted in India:
  • Akharas propagated a ‘physical culture’ and an interest in militant politics and were set up in many parts of Bengal in the 1860s and 1870s.
  • These were the precursors to the earliest secret societies in Bengal which came up around 1902 in Calcutta and Midnapore.
    • Sarala Ghoshal started a gymnasium for sword and lathi-play to train revolutionaries for action;
  • The youth of Bengal was exhorted to worship Bhawani as the manifestation of Shakti and to acquire mental, physical, moral and spiritual strength.
    • The emphasis was on Karma and Action.
• Unlike their Italian exemplars, the Bengali secret societies groups were without ‘any serious plan or policy of political action aiming at the liberation of their people from the British yoke’.
  • They were in fact simply undergraduate clubs, long on nebulous ideals but short on action.
• The influence of European organizations on revolutionary groups was mostly limited to literary or imaginative.
• Apart from a few remarks to Bhupendranath Datta, Nivedita does not seem to have spoken to the youths about Kropotkin or anarchy.
  • The claim that she was responsible for the Samiti’s turn to revolutionary terrorist activities or even that she directed these activities herself is dubious.
    • Even Sankari Prasad Basu, the most capable of her advocates, admits that there is no documentary evidence to support his claims either in government files or in the revolutionaries’ memoirs.
  • The memorial literature indicates is that Nivedita played an important role in the foundation and early direction of the society (with earlier activities of recruitment, indoctrination and physical training) that later turned to violence.
  • Society member Bhupendranath Datta emphasized that Nivedita was connected with the society only during its early (non-terroristic) days and characterized the inflated version of her participation as a ‘fairy tale’.
• The Bengali revolutionaries had been trying to make bombs since 1906. Ullaskar Dutt had taught himself sufficiently well to be able to make fairly powerful devices before Hemchandra returned from Paris.
  • Bombs would have been used in Bengal even if there had been no western influence at all.
  • By 1900 portable bombs had entered the public domain, and their use by non-Europeans cannot be said to be due entirely to western influence.
• Indian revolutionaries admitted to being inspired by European revolutionary movements; but they believed that their acts were a natural and necessary response of a subject people to an oppressive foreign government.
  • Upendranath Banerjee, one of the members of the group of Hemchandra, wrote in his memoirs: ‘The revolutionary movement of 1902-08 had its origin in the activities of some secret societies, which arose from a longing for national freedom. . . . The same forces that brought about revolutions in Italy, Poland and Ireland and other countries were operating in India as well and drove some people into daring and violent paths.’
  • Bhagavati Charan wrote in a pamphlet issued by the Hindustan Socialist Revolutionary Army in 1930: ‘The revolutionaries believe that the deliverance of their country will come through revolution. . . . Here in India, as in other countries in the past, terrorism will develop into the revolution and the revolution into independence, social political and economic.’
  • Given the lack of evidence of sustained foreign influence on the revolutionary movement in India, there is reason to accept the assertions of Banerjee and Charan that it was a natural and indigenous response to British imperial domination.
• Government officials often found it convenient to portray violent revolutionary acts as parts of a great international plot. But reports of international terrorist links seem often to be exaggerated.
  • The cry of ‘foreign hand’ is a handy way of discrediting the claims of groups that revolt against the established authority.
  • When Minto wrote after the Muzaffarpur incident that he viewed the bombs ‘as the products of an anarchical conspiracy originating in the Western world’, he added that ‘the public at home will make a fatal mistake if they ascribe outrages such as that at Muzufferpur to the efforts of a people struggling to relieve themselves from an oppressor.’
  • No one would agree with Minto that Bengali revolutionary violence of 1907-08 was part of the international anarchist movement and not part of a genuine movement of national liberation.
• The only direct link between European ‘anarchists’ and Indian revolutionaries was the one established by Hemchandra Das.
  • This was of very brief duration, though the anarchist influence may have persisted through written material that Hemchandra brought from Europe.
  • But the only lasting influence of Hemchandra’s material was technical, not ideological, and Western technical advances would doubtless have been adopted whether or not there was any direct influence.

Historians have rejected the imperialistic assumptions underlying Minto’s and Chirol’s assertions which exaggerated importance assigned to the Western influence on Indian revolutionary movement. Indian revolutionaries may have been inspired by accounts of 19th century Western secret societies and influenced by the words of foreigners like Nivedita. But there is no reason to believe that the revolutionary movement had a western origin. The Indian revolutionaries may have arrived at the procedures on their own (rather than directly influenced by the West) forced into them by a similar situation vis-a-vis a repressive government.©selfstudyhistory.com