Decolonizing Anarchism. Maia Ramnath
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Thereafter she could be found “working hard in the Extremist ranks,” and within a few months she was reportedly being tutored in bomb making by W. Bromjevski, described as “a young Polish engineer, believed to be an anarchist, who visited her and her sister constantly at their flat for months.” The sisters returned to India at the end of the year, yet remained in communication with Cama, “with whom [Perin] had arranged a simple but effective cipher before she left Paris.”[45]
What of the local French anarchists? Soon after arriving in Paris, Kanungo had been introduced to Albert (Joseph) Libertad, founder of the journal L’anarchie, as someone who might be able to provide expertise in explosives and clandestine organization. According to Kanungo’s memoir, when Libertad invited him to attend anarchist meetings, Kanungo went, under the impression that “anarchism was just another word for revolution.”[46] But once he realized what they were talking about, he withdrew. Libertad was an exponent of illegalism, an amoral and extreme individualist school of thought. L’anarchie’s rhetoric favored criminality as an antinomian lifestyle and expressed antipathy to all forms of organization. None of this interested Kanungo, dedicated as he was to a militant cause with a focused goal. The reason he had become so frustrated with his Swadeshi comrades in the first place was what he saw as their aimless ineffectuality; this was not the remedy he sought. Ironically, the fabled rampage of the Libertad-inspired outlaw Bonnot gang in 1911–12 may have borne some resemblance to the Samiti’s dacoities, albeit more purely nihilist in their hatred of the bourgeoisie, lacking the additional motive of funding an anticolonial struggle.[47]
When French law enforcement officials got wind of the rumor that the notorious “Russian anarchist [Safranski was] instructing natives of India . . . in manufacture of explosives,” they were quick to inform their British counterparts.[48] But the detectives arrived too late; the suspect was gone, and the information successfully transmitted to India and the United States. Their prize was “a single cyclostyled copy of a manual of explosives” whose opening sentence declared, “The aim of the present work is to place in the hands of a revolutionary people such a powerful weapon as explosive matter is.”[49]
Full Circle
In late 1907 or early 1908, with their training complete, Kanungo and Bapat left to bear their new skills and information back to India. Thereafter the Criminal Investigation Department recorded, “Special emissaries . . . moved from time to time between India and Europe for arms and bomb manuals.”[50] Kanungo’s manual contained three sections: preparation of explosive substances, fabrication of shells, and use of the finished products. In the estimation of James Campbell Ker, assistant to the director of Criminal Intelligence,
The subject is exhaustively and scientifically treated; the amount of attention given to detail may be gathered from the fact that the composition and manufacture of thirty different explosives of one class only, namely those containing salts of chloric and chlorous acids, are described. The reason why it is necessary to be able to make explosives of various substances is given as follows: “In revolutionary practice we have often to use not the explosives we should like to use, but those which we can prepare with the materials at hand. . . . Again in the time of armed conflict the expenditure of explosives is considerable, and it is necessary to expropriate pharmaceutical shops (just as armouries are expropriated) and out of useful substances to prepare what is needed.”[51]
The remainder of the manual, Ker explained, gave specialized instructions for making percussion and fuse bombs, with fuses ranging from instantaneous detonation through lengths of seconds or minutes, up to eight or nine hours. Possible uses for the results of such handiwork included street fighting, assassination, and destroying bridges or buildings. Heehs too goes into some detail about the explosives used (picric acid, sulfuric acid, fulminate of mercury, and nitroglycerine) and construction of bombs: shells made of forged spheres, or cleverly concealed in hollowed-out bedposts or books, as in the instance of the deadly but maddeningly unexploded Cadbury cocoa tin packed with detonators and explosive material, all encased in a copy of Herbert Broom’s Commentary on the Common Law, intended to kill Chief Presidency Magistrate Douglas Kingsford in 1908.[52]
Above all else, it was the use of the bomb that drew the Bengalis into focus as anarchists in the colonial government’s eyes. More than just a tactical instrument, at times it manifested for them as the focus of a viscerally intense cult of devotion to annihilation that shaded imperceptibly into sacrificial devotion to the mother goddess-as-nation. The bomb was also personified as the “benefactor of the poor . . . [which] has been brought across the seas. Worship it, sing its praises, bow to it. Bande Mataram.”[53]
The quotation is from Har Dayal’s “Shabash! In Praise of the Bomb,” a pamphlet written from San Francisco on the occasion of a grenade blast heard by Indian expatriates around the world—namely, the attempt on Viceroy Lord Hardinge’s life during his elephant-borne ceremonial entrance into Delhi to reinaugurate the city as the seat of empire in December 1912.[54] Maniktola Garden veteran Rash Behari Bose had masterminded the attack. But the actual bomber was a young man named Basanta Kumar Biswas, to whom Bose had imparted both the “political indoctrination and practical training he would need to carry out his mission.”[55] Disguised as a woman with the significant alias of Lakshmibai (the rani of Jhansi, heroine of the 1857 mutiny), Biswas flung the bomb from a balcony overlooking the parade route. Although the blast seriously wounded the viceroy, it did not kill him; the Indian attendant riding behind him was less fortunate.
Cama commented in the Bande Mataram of January 1913, “The enemy entered formally Delhi on the 23rd December 1912, but under what an omen? . . . This bomb-throwing was just to announce to the whole world that the English Government is discarded, and verily, whenever there is an opportunity the Revolutionaries are sure to show their mind, spirit and principle in Hindustan!”[56] Cama’s comments made it clear that whether or not the target had been killed or injured was irrelevant; its message exceeded the bomb’s immediate effect. The catalyzing act to rouse the laggard and latent to action was at the heart of the ideal. Sure enough, the spectacular deed ignited a new series of murders and attempted murders carried out by both the major groups in Bengal.
Many socialists and nationalists considered the adoption of this kind of action a sign of impatience—the voluntaristic belief that a single autonomous will could jump-start the change rather than waiting for its conditions to ripen through the slower processes of parliamentary modification, mass education, molecular shifts, or structural impasse. It also indicated an analysis that saw oppression as stemming from an external source, relatively easy to excise, rather than from internal and systemic contradictions, which would require a more profound transformation to correct. Such an externalization of oppression was particularly easy to adopt under conditions of colonial rule.
Anarchism?
A special police unit had tagged Shridar Vyankatesh Ketkar (later sociologist and historian) as a member of the Savarkar brothers’ old group, which had “carried out experiments in explosives, and entered into correspondence with the anarchists of Bengal.” He later traveled to the United States to study, and wrote a letter from there in June 1909 “to a high official in India suggesting that Government should deal with the anarchist youths through the extremist leaders” to whom he claimed to have access. He said he had “discussed the subject of nihilism” with nationalist firebrand Bal Gangadhar Tilak, “nearly two years before the first bomb outrage. I had advocated nihilism while Mr. Tilak condemned it outright as injurious to the interest of the country.”[57]
What did he mean by nihilism? What uses would he have associated it with? In one sense it was reminiscent of the French illegalists’ utter rejection of social norms and institutions. But in Russia, nihilism was associated primarily with urban students and intellectuals. While they likewise rejected the governmental, educational, legal, and disciplinary institutions then existing in their society, they also proposed a more positive alternative vision for what might come after or alongside the ecstasy of destruction. The nihilists’ Narodnik or populist outgrowth began to idealize the peasantry as not only the revolutionary class but also the bearer of the true spiritual essence of the Russian people and maintainer of its preindustrial organic social and economic formations. As the argument ran, there was no need to pass through the prescribed stages of capitalism only to end up, after much suffering, back