Policing ‘Bengali Terrorism’ in India and the World

Policing ‘Bengali Terrorism’ in India and the World Imperial Intelligence and Revolutionary Nationalism, 1905–1939
Michael Silvestri
Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
Washington and Lee University Lexington, VA, USA
Eric G. E. Zuelow Department of History
University of New England Biddeford, ME, USA
Britain and the World is a series of books on ‘British world’ history. The editors invite book proposals from historians of all ranks on the ways in which Britain has interacted with other societies since the seventeenth century. The series is sponsored by the Britain and the World society.
Britain and the World is made up of people from around the world who share a common interest in Britain, its history, and its impact on the wider world. The society serves to link the various intellectual communities around the world that study Britain and its international influence from the seventeenth century to the present. It explores the impact of Britain on the world through this book series, an annual conference, and the Britain and the World journal with Edinburgh University Press.
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More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14795
and the World Imperial Intelligence and Revolutionary
Nationalism, 1905–1939
Britain and the World ISBN 978-3-030-18041-6 ISBN 978-3-030-18042-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18042-3
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu- tional affiliations.
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Michael Silvestri History Department Clemson University Clemson, SC, USA
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This book has had a long and winding history, and in the process of researching and writing it, I have piled up an extraordinary number of debts. I first approached the topic of colonial policing in a PhD dissertation at Columbia University, and although only traces of the original thesis remain in the present study, the intellectual and financial support I received at Columbia was critical to this book’s genesis. Sir David Cannadine was an enthusiastic and supportive dissertation supervisor and I was fortunate to benefit from the insights of a truly outstanding dissertation committee: David Armitage, Sugata Bose, Leonard Gordon, and Ayesha Jalal. Ayesha’s suggestion that I explore Sir John Anderson’s career in Bengal has led me down many profitable avenues of historical research in subsequent years. Needless to say, neither she nor any of the individuals mentioned in these acknowledgments are responsible for any deficiencies of fact or interpreta- tion in this book.
I owe an enormous debt as well to the archives and libraries in which I have researched and written this book and in particular to the staff of the Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections of the British Library. Over the years, they have been unfailingly helpful with my research questions and research requests and have made the Asian and African Studies reading room quite simply the best place in the world to think about, research, and write about South Asian and British imperial history. At Clemson University, the staff of the Resource Sharing Office of the Cooper Library have tolerated my innumerable requests for books, articles, and other materials and have done an outstanding job of providing them.
Acknowledgments
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A number of institutions have generously supported the research in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India on which this book is based. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Council for European Studies, Columbia University; the American Institute for Indian Studies; and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for supporting the initial research for this project. More recent research was funded by the American Philosophical Society, which awarded me a Franklin Research Grant; and by the History Department; the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities; the Humanities Advancement Board; and the University Research Grants Committee of Clemson University.
Some material in this book appeared previously in my article “The Bomb, Bhadralok, Bhagavad Gita and Dan Breen: Terrorism in Bengal and Its Relation to the European Experience,” which appeared in Terrorism and Political Violence in 2009.
I am also grateful to many individuals for inviting me to present my research at workshops, conferences, and seminars and for sharpening my fuzzy thoughts on imperial intelligence and “Bengali terrorism.” I thank Andy Syk, John Horne, and Robert Gerwarth for inviting me to partici- pate in the joint University College Dublin-Trinity College Dublin conference on Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War in 2010. Thanks to Satoshi Mizutani for organizing an outstanding 2013 conference at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan, on the transnational trajec- tories of the Indian nationalist struggle. Bill Meier invited me to take part in a very productive workshop on terrorism and violence at the 2014 Midwest Victorian Studies Association conference, while Kim Wagner organized and led a stimulating and collegial workshop on colonial violence at Queen Mary College, University of London, in 2015. Audiences at the British Scholar Conference and the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies in 2017 provided valuable feedback and encouragement.
The late Sabyaschi Mukherjee was generous in sharing materials which he had collected on Calcutta Police Commissioner Charles Tegart. Jeremy Ingpen provided insights on his grandfather, police intelligence officer R. E. A. Ray, and shared excerpts from his grandmother Marion Ray’s diaries. Along with other historians of late colonial Bengal, I am indebted to Dr. Amiya K. Samanta, former Director of the West Bengal Police Intelligence Branch. Dr. Samanta facilitated the research process while I was a graduate student in Kolkata, and his publication of documentary collections on “Bengali terrorism” has provided a valuable resource for
ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
historians at a time when access to colonial-era materials on this subject can still be difficult.
A number of other individuals have provided important critical perspectives, assistance, and encouragement. I thank in particular Brian Drohan, Richard Hill, Harald Fischer-Tiné, Durba Ghosh, Eunan O’Halpin, Heather Streets-Salter, and Kim Wagner. Conversations with Kate O’Malley have helped me to understand the mentalities of both imperial intelligence officers and anticolonial activists, while my colleague Mou Banerjee has not only provided warm encouragement but also shared her deep knowledge of colonial India. My visits with Ed, Claire, and William Moisson have been the highlight of my research trips to London.
A draft chapter benefitted from a critical reading by Heather Streets- Salter, while an early version of the introduction benefitted from the comments of my friends and colleagues Steve Marks and James Burns. The students in my graduate seminar on empire in the Fall 2018 semester buoyed my spirits and helped me refine my arguments as I completed the final manuscript. Gail Nagel was a careful and critical reader and an enthusiastic supporter of this project.
At Palgrave Macmillan, I thank Molly Beck, Maeve Sinnott, and the series editors for their enthusiasm about this book and for their help with the publication process. The careful and critical reading of the anonymous reader at Palgrave provided comments and suggestions that have immea- surably improved the final manuscript.
Ellie, Lizzie, and Bear care little, as far as I can tell, about British history, but I am grateful for their daily reminders that there is more to life than writing books.
As with past projects, my biggest thanks are reserved for my wife and fellow British historian Stephanie Barczewski. Stephanie has been hearing about imperial intelligence and revolutionary nationalism in various forms for as long as she has known me; nonetheless, she has never complained when I have inflicted my work upon her and her careful and critical comments have helped me shape this book from its earliest unwieldly and inchoate incarnations. Even more importantly, I value beyond words what Stephanie has contributed to our life together.
This book is dedicated to my parents, John and Carol, who have offered unstinting love, support, and encouragement over the years.
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Part I Policing Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal 23
2 The “Bomb Cult” and “Criminal Tribes”: Revolutionaries and the Origins of Police Intelligence in Colonial Bengal 25
3 Surveillance, Analysis, and Violence: The Operations of the Bengal Police Intelligence Branch 75
4 Intelligence Failures, Militarization, and Rehabilitation: The Anti-Terrorist Campaign After the Chittagong Armoury Raid 127
Part II The Wider World 185
5 Transnational Revolutionaries and Imperial Surveillance: Bengal Revolutionary Networks Outside India 187
contents
7 Intelligence Expertise and Imperial Threats: Bengal Intelligence Officers in North America, Europe, and Asia 279
8 Epilogue: Bengal Intelligence Officers and the Second World War 327
Bibliography 341
Index 353
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Table 3.1 Bengal Police Central Intelligence Branch Staff 80 Table 3.2 Bengal Police District Intelligence Branch Staff 82
list of tAbles
1© The Author(s) 2019 M. Silvestri, Policing ‘Bengali Terrorism’ in India and the World, Britain and the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18042-3_1
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Imperial Intelligence and a Forgotten Insurgency
In February 1939, the Governor of Bengal, Lord Brabourne, toured the town of Midnapore in western Bengal. The highlight was a somber visit to the graves of three British District Magistrates, which lay “side by side” in a local cemetery. At the beginning of the decade, Bengali nationalist revolutionaries had assassinated the three men. James Peddie was shot from behind at close range while attending an exhibition at a local school on 7 April 1931. Just over one year later, Robert Douglas was shot dead while presiding over a meeting of the District Board. His successor, B. E. J. Burge, was murdered at a local football match on 2 September 1932. For a British intelligence officer, writing in the year of Burge’s shooting, the sequence of assassinations served as a “tragic” reminder “that the Government are a long way yet from having been able to suppress the terrorist movement in Bengal.”1
By the time of Brabourne’s visit, however, the revolutionary movement had been crushed by colonial security forces and the use of mass detention without trial against revolutionary suspects.2 The political situation in Bengal had been transformed by the establishment of Indian ministries under the 1935 Government of India Act, while the revolutionaries’ own political tactics had shifted from individual acts of violence to communist- inspired political organization of Indian peasants and workers.3 Nonetheless, colonial officials feared a return to revolutionary violence in what had been one of the centers of “Bengali terrorism.” “The streets were empty,” Brabourne reported to the Viceroy,
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and closely watched by the police and plain clothes men and the shutters of houses on the streets had been closed under police directions. The opinion of the local officers was that it would probably have been possible to carry out this informal visit without such precautions … but that, knowing the past history of Midnapore and what they consider to be the untrustworthy nature of the people, and knowing also the present attitude of mind of the group which has been responsible for much of the trouble in Midnapore in the past, no responsible officer would have been prepared to take the risk of waiving strict precautions.4
In the following month, intelligence indicated that some of the revolutionary groups were “definitely preparing to collect such old arms as they have.” Brabourne added that the “‘naming’ of the present District Magistrate of Midnapore, by one group, as a potential obstacle that might have to be removed is a matter that cannot be lightly ignored.”5
Brabourne’s account of the elaborate security precautions in Midnapore reflected colonial fears that had evolved over thirty years of revolutionary activism in Bengal. An anticolonial revolutionary movement, which came to be known to colonial authorities as “Bengali terrorism,” began prior to the 1905 Partition of Bengal and did not come to an end until more than three decades later.6 During that time, revolutionaries conspired to disrupt the administration of the Raj, assassinate British and Indian colonial officials and their agents and informers, and commit robberies to obtain funds for arms and ammunition in preparation for a mass uprising. In 1930, revolutionaries carried out an attack on the Writers’ Building, the seat of the Government of Bengal in Calcutta, and in the same year attempted to re-stage the 1916 Easter Rising, substituting the eastern Bengal port city of Chittagong for Dublin. After this act of intra-imperial emulation of Irish revolutionary tactics, known as the Chittagong Armoury Raid, a renewed offensive in eastern Bengal began to approximate a campaign of guerilla warfare in which the revolutionaries commanded widespread support from the local population. Women also began to join the revolutionary societies and committed some of the most high-profile assassinations and attempted assassinations in this period. In total, the Bengal Police Intelligence Branch (IB) estimated that the revolutionaries committed more than 500 “revolutionary crimes” between 1905 and 1935. In addition, the IB recorded another 200 cases of “revolutionary activity” from 1917 to 1935 alone, including cases of loss or recovery of arms, ammunition, and explosives.7 As Brabourne’s account demonstrates, a revival of
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“Bengali terrorism” remained a near-constant fear of colonial officials until 1947.
Lord Brabourne’s pilgrimage to the graves of British martyrs to Bengali terrorism also demonstrates how the growth of Indian revolutionary organizations in the first decades of the twentieth century brought about a parallel growth of imperial intelligence agencies. The Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6), which came into existence prior to the Great War and greatly expanded their operations during the conflict, were staffed by a considerable number of officers with colonial police and military experience.8 The small office of Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), established in 1909, worked closely with MI5 (responsible for security intelligence within the United Kingdom and the British Empire) and SIS (responsible for intelligence beyond the empire’s borders) to coordinate intelligence efforts against Indian nationalists and revolutionaries around the globe.9 In the decade around the Great War, imperial authorities bolstered their networks of intelligence-gathering and surveillance of Indian revolutionaries in North America, Europe, and Asia.10 In the interwar era, intelligence agencies played a crucial role in establishing and maintaining British control over their newly expanded empire in the Middle East.11
Empire and intelligence thus developed in tandem and were closely intertwined.12 Calder Walton in his study of post-Second World War intelligence and empire observes that “from the earliest days of the British intelligence community, which was established in the early twentieth century, there was a close connection between intelligence-gathering and empire. It is not an exaggeration to say that in its early years British intelligence was British imperial intelligence.”13 In no part of the British Empire was the growth of colonial intelligence more striking than in Bengal. At a time when the personnel of both MI5 and MI6 dramatically contracted from their peak during the Great War, the intelligence structures of the Bengal Police continued to expand.14 Prior to 1907, the intelligence apparatus of the Bengal Police was practically non-existent. By 1936, however, the Central Intelligence Branch of the Bengal Police in Calcutta numbered close to 650 police officers, with more than 400 intelligence staff distributed throughout the province’s districts.15 Bengal thus became both the focus of British fears of Indian terrorism and of the most concerted police intelligence efforts that attempted to eradicate revolutionary activity in the empire prior to the Second World War. While recent historians have emphasized the important role of intelligence
1 INTRODUCTION: IMPERIAL INTELLIGENCE AND A FORGOTTEN…
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during the era of post-Second World War decolonization, the extensive intelligence apparatus directed against the Bengali revolutionaries sug- gests that the roots of imperial intelligence as a sustained practice lie in the interwar era.16
While the revolutionaries’ anticolonial campaign was largely based in a single Indian province, Bengal, and largely limited to a specific social and religious group within Indian society, the Bengali Hindu elite or bhadralok, who made up the ranks of these “gentlemanly terrorists,” its ramifications were global.17 In the imperial imaginary, to use Kris Manjapra’s formula- tion, South Asian “anticolonial movements were said to contain only limited and self-serving nationalisms,” limited, for example, to a particular religion, social group, or ideology.18 Yet Bengali revolutionaries, like many anticolonial activists, drew upon eclectic political and cultural inspirations from within and outside India and made repeated efforts to form alliances with other nationalist, anticolonial, and revolutionary groups.19 During the Great War, Bengali revolutionaries formed part of global efforts by the German imperial government and Indian radicals to deliver substantial quantities of arms and ammunition to India.20 These anticolonial alliances became further pronounced after the Russian Revolution. As Ali Raza, Franziska Roy, and Benjamin Zachariah have asserted, the interwar era comprised “a window of time in which an array of movements comprising mostly nonstate or supra-state actors were linking up with each other.”21 Any analysis which seeks to understand the colonial response to the Bengali revolutionary movement must thus adopt a similarly transnational perspective.
This book examines the development of intelligence and policing directed against the Bengal revolutionaries from the first decade of the twentieth century through the beginning of the Second World War. It explores the emergence of modern police intelligence in colonial India and how in turn the policing of revolutionaries in Bengal was connected to and influenced police and intelligence work within the wider British Empire. The analytic framework of this study thus encompasses local events in one province of British India and the global experiences of both revolutionaries and intelligence agents. The focus is not only on the British intelligence officers who orchestrated the campaign against the revolutionaries but also on their interactions with the Indian officers and informants who played a vital role in colonial intelligence work, as well as the perspectives of revolutionaries and their allies, ranging from elite anticolonial activists to subaltern maritime workers.
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The book is divided into two parts, which together seek to explain how intelligence-gathering in Bengal became a central part of the colonial state apparatus in the twentieth century. Part I explores how colonial anxieties about “Bengali terrorism” led to the development of an extensive intelligence apparatus within Bengal. The Intelligence Branch of the Bengal Police and the Special Branch of the Calcutta Police carried out surveillance of revolutionary suspects and ran networks of agents and informers who were the primary source of information about the revolutionaries. The immense archive generated by police intelligence was utilized to arrest and (more frequently) to detain without trial suspected revolutionaries and neutralize their efforts at political assassination and armed insurgency. While anxieties about Indian terrorism remained prominent until the end of colonial rule, and the revolutionaries over time exposed the weaknesses of police intelligence, intelligence officers in Bengal established a growing conviction that they could understand and predict the actions of revolutionaries.
Part II explores how this intelligence expertise was applied globally— particularly in the interwar period—both to the policing of Bengali revolutionaries and to other anticolonial threats. While the twentieth century was a century of decolonization for the British Empire, imperial intelligence in Bengal increased during the same decades that officials in London and New Delhi were planning some form of political devolution for India. Bengal Police and Indian Civil Service officers formed part of a cadre of men with imperial police and intelligence experience upon whom British authorities could draw upon for intelligence work. They contributed to the construction of a British “intelligence culture” which after the Second World War was disseminated throughout the empire in a new and more intensified fashion.22 Bengal intelligence officers thus contributed not only to imperial intelligence institutions but also to an enduring sense of British expertise in intelligence matters in the latter half of the twentieth century.23
In seeking to understand the origins and working of imperial intelligence in Bengal and its impact elsewhere in the British Empire, this book links two separate historiographies: the history of colonial knowledge, specifically what C. A. Bayly called the information order of British India, and the transnational history of anticolonial radicalism and imperial intelligence.24 Colonial intelligence in the campaign against the Bengali revolutionaries stands in a period of transition between the nineteenth-century empire and the development of what might be considered “modern” intelligence agencies. Colonial police officers who became the authorities
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on Indian revolutionary movements were not trained specifically in intelligence work or in counter-terrorism, but rather as colonial police officers, and the colonial context was something which cannot be separated from their intelligence work. The early careers of imperial intelligence officers in Calcutta, for example, encompassed mundane tasks of colonial policing as the enforcement of plague measures and parking arrangements for vicere- gal functions.25
The cultural world of these officers shaped their intelligence work, in India as in other parts of the empire.26 These officers in turn created a new colonial ethnography of the “Bengali terrorist,” which both added to and drew upon the corpus of colonial ethnographies of similar collective threats to British colonial rule in South Asia, such as the thugs, dacoits, and criminal tribes. In time, they emerged as experts on imperial policing and revolutionary terrorism.
In addition, the emergence of counter-terrorism practices in Bengal helps us to understand the contribution of empire to the development of British intelligence around the globe prior to the Second World War. Intelligence work against the Bengal revolutionaries involved cooperation (and occasionally conflict) among local, national, and imperial agencies. It also demonstrates how intelligence practices were diffused throughout the British Empire, as prominent police officers and civil servants involved in the campaign against the revolutionaries in Bengal took up positions as intelligence officers and advisors assisting colonial governments with issues of intelligence work, anti-terrorism, and counter-insurgency. By the Second World War, officers from Bengal had served as intelligence and security officers in North America, Europe, Palestine, and Southeast Asia.
The primary intelligence agencies which monitored the activities of Bengali revolutionaries were located in Calcutta, New Delhi, and London. Within Bengal, colonial intelligence organizations were housed within the police: the Special Branch of the Calcutta Police and the Intelligence Branch (IB) of the Bengal Police. The latter was part of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Bengal Police, established in 1904 on the recommendation of the Indian Police Commission. The Bengal Police IB’s central office in Calcutta also collected information from the province’s District Intelligence Branches (DIBs). Operating as part of local police forces, the DIBs were established prior to the Great War in areas that were centers of revolutionary activity, and by the interwar period were located in every Bengal district. Until the 1930s, military intelligence remained separate from police intelligence in India, but during that
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decade, military officers with intelligence backgrounds were recruited to the Bengal Police during the most intense period of the anti- revolutionary campaign.
The Department of Criminal Intelligence (DCI) in New Delhi, renamed the Intelligence Bureau in 1920, collected political intelligence from Bengal and other Indian provinces, carried out investigations, and forwarded reports and analyses to the India Office. With the development of provincial autonomy after the 1937 elections that resulted from the Government of India Act, the Intelligence Bureau placed its own officers, known as Central Intelligence Officers, in Indian provinces. The Intelligence Bureau also liaised with the small office in London known as India Political Intelligence (IPI) which collected intelligence on Indian anticolonial activists worldwide. IPI was a “‘catch-all’ co-ordination of information about anything relating to India and to Indians within the empire.”27 IPI was housed within the Public and Judicial Department of the India Office and assembled its intelligence not simply from Indian sources but also from agents and information gathered by MI5, SIS, and the Special Branch of Scotland Yard. Intelligence from other colonial intelligence agencies, such as the Political Intelligence Bureau of the Singapore Police, and consular reports also found their way into the IPI archive.
In spite of the multiplicity of imperial intelligence agencies, the persistent anxieties of imperial officials about the Bengali revolutionary movement would at first glance seem to be unwarranted by their achievements. The Bengali revolutionaries never achieved their goal of a widespread armed revolt against the British Raj, and many of their assassination attempts went awry. Even so, the British response was forceful, in terms of police action, judicial punishments, and elaborate security precautions for colonial officials.28 By the 1930s, however, even “robust police action” could not contain the revolutionaries, and the anti-terrorist campaign underwent a considerable militarization.29 Bengali revolutionaries thus contributed to what Antoinette Burton has recently termed the “choppy, irregular terrain” of the British Empire. That imperial terrain “was shaped as much by the repeated assertion of colonial subjects as by the footprint of imperial agents; it is to argue that empire was made—as in, constituted by—the very trouble its efforts and practices provoked.”30
This reminds us that anticolonial movements that failed could have as much of an impact as those that succeeded.31 In the case of late colonial India, historians have demonstrated that revolutionary movements were
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far from marginal to the trajectory of Indian nationalism. Rather, these movements now appear more broad-based, more cosmopolitan and transnational in their scope, and more influential than they had previously appeared to be.32 According to Kama Maclean, “The presence of the revolutionaries on the political landscape … strengthened the anticolonial front, even as they tested and ultimately redefined the policy of nonviolence.”33
From the perspective of imperial authorities, this meant, as Mark Condos has recently argued, that the British state in colonial India was an “insecurity state.”34 The scale of the colonial archive regarding “Bengali terrorism” is testimony to the seriousness with which colonial authorities approached the threat posed by revolutionaries. Extensive records regarding police and intelligence work against the revolutionaries are located in Kolkata, New Delhi, and London. The six-volume compilation of documents from the library and records of the former Intelligence Branch, titled Terrorism in Bengal, totals nearly 7000 pages and contains only a sampling of analyses and correspondence relating to police intelligence during the final decades of colonial rule. Intelligence Branch records from the colonial era continued to be deployed by the postcolonial Indian state and have been considered confidential well into the twenty-first century.35
The seriousness with which the intelligence effort against Indian revolutionaries was regarded was illustrated by the India Office’s concern over the publication of a novel titled Drums of Asia in 1933.36 The London publisher Lovat Dickson approached the India Office to enquire whether the book, which presented a fictionalized version of Indian revolutionary plots and British intelligence efforts to foil them, might be considered objectionable. The result was over six months of discussions within the India Office and meetings and correspondence with the publisher. Indian Political Intelligence strenuously objected to the book’s publication without substantial revisions. The author had intended the book as an historical account of Indian revolutionaries during the Great War and a tribute to British secret service officers. In consultation with MI5, IPI presented a five-page list of changes to be made prior to publication, beginning with an objection to the dedication, which presented the book as being based in fact. The requested changes included the removal of any indication that British secret service officers operated on foreign soil. MI5 observed that
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In a nutshell, the situation is that writers may say or invent what they like about imaginary agents, but must not state that Britain deliberately places or instructs agents on any foreign soil or secretly anywhere. If their story requires the presence of agents in such circumstances, it must appear that their actions are voluntary and entirely free from British direction or support.37
IPI was also concerned to remove references to real-life Indian nationalists, and accordingly a reference to the Punjabi nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai as a “brainless seditionist” was removed.38 In particular, IPI was concerned about references to both British agents and to Indian nationalist activity in California during the Great War, and action originally set in San Francisco was moved to the fictional Mexican city of “Santo Morelos.” Here the concern was the continuing strength and activity of the Ghadar Party, the revolutionary anticolonial movement which had its origins among expatriate South Asians on the West Coast of North America.39 IPI observed that “The situation as regards California, where the Ghadar Party is of course, still functioning, is, as it happens, particularly delicate at the present moment.”40 Although the publisher complained that the changes “seemed to amount to making a more or less historical novel into a Ruritanian romance,” the requested changes were implemented, and the novel was published in 1934 with a prefatory note which stated that “All British Intelligence officers and agents attached to the British Intelligence Service, in this book, are imaginary persons, and their actions and meth- ods have no foundation in fact.”41
The colonial archive on “Bengali terrorism” also reveals the extensive efforts to monitor, analyze, and predict the actions of revolutionaries. Although the police of colonial India were “often ill-informed, ineffective and at times frankly amateurish,” recent scholarship has highlighted how they were embedded in colonial society and exercised extensive powers not only of coercion but also of surveillance.42 While the intelligence apparatus of the Bengal Police was never as comprehensive or effective as colonial police officers envisioned, the campaign against Bengali revolutionaries demonstrates how considerable state power could still be brought to bear upon opponents of colonial rule. Albeit within a narrow sphere of colonial society, colonial authorities in Bengal constructed an effective apparatus for surveillance, which was, to those who were its objects, often overbearing.
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Bengali Hindus of nationalist sympathies certainly felt the intrusive nature of such surveillance. In 1915, Gandhi’s friend C. F. Andrews, then residing at the Bengali poet and educator Rabindranath Tagore’s school Santiniketan at Bolpur in rural Bengal, complained of constant surveillance and harassment by the Bengal Police. Andrews complained to the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, that his correspondence had been “tampered with repeatedly,” while Tagore’s students and faculty had suffered much worse:
At Bolpur our school is spied upon systematically, our teachers’ lives are harassed, we have had guests coming to us who were CID men in disguise. Sir Rabindranath Tagore is constantly troubled by the CID, his letters opened, his movements watched as though he were a criminal. In Calcutta things are so bad that students live in a state of fear bordering on panic. I can only compare it to what I have read of the German Spy Mania at home. Everyone knows that the CID had employed students as paid spies in the hostels; and the most innocent students are in fear of some bogus case being got up against them. They suspect all their fellow-students. They spend their days now in a hot-house atmosphere of suspicion…. What is certain beyond question is this, that the CID in Bengal, by the agents they have employed, have created such terrible distrust and fear, even in the best men’s minds, that nothing is regarded as too low or too mean for them to do; and so the ball of distrust rolls on and on getting larger and larger.43
In reply, the Governor of Bengal, Lord Carmichael, admitted that “all educated Indians, whom I have met in Bengal … apparently believe that the police are spying on them continually,” and that they had “good grounds for this belief. I have never yet met an educated Indian here who trusts the police,” Carmichael added. “I doubt if I have met one who does not hate and despise them.”44
The type of surveillance and information-gathering that C. F. Andrews angrily denounced is at the core of this analysis. Part I of the book examines how colonial anxieties about the novel threat of “Bengali terrorism” gave rise to new and extensive systems of colonial intelligence. Chapter 2 explores the origins of the revolutionary movement and police intelligence in colonial Bengal. It analyzes how the rise of new modes of anticolonial opposition in Bengal prior to the First World War sparked responses from colonial authorities that drew upon older colonial fears of rebellion and resistance. The revolutionaries became the subject of colonial “information panics” which, as this chapter argues, had practical application to
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colonial police and intelligence work against the revolutionaries. For many colonial officials, the new revolutionary groups—seen as murderous, reli- giously inspired, conspiratorial secret societies—represented a new variant on earlier manifestations of Indian criminality—thugs, dacoits (gang rob- bers), and “criminal tribes”—rather than an entirely new phenomenon. In similar fashion, the institutions that developed to police the revolutionaries—the Bengal Police Intelligence Branch and the Department of Criminal Intelligence of the Government of India—bore a similar debt to earlier institutions—the Special Branch and the Thagi & Dakaiti Department—devoted to the suppression of what were regarded as dis- tinctively Indian forms of collective criminality.
The Bengal Police Intelligence Branch was a pioneering police institu- tion not only within India but also the British Empire. Chapter 3 examines the structures and practices of police intelligence in colonial Bengal, and addresses the questions: How did colonial intelligence work in practice? How was this intelligence gathered, ordered, and understood? The chapter explores both the routine practices of police intelligence and the in- depth analyses produced by intelligence officers which sought to understand the history of the revolutionary movement and to predict the future actions of the revolutionaries. The establishment of District Intelligence Branches throughout the province attempted to enhance sig- nificantly the intelligence-gathering capacity of the police regarding the revolutionary movement, and to remedy the persistent information- gathering deficiencies of the colonial state.
As in other parts of the British Empire, human intelligence in the form of agents and informers provided the primary source of information about and lens through which intelligence officers viewed the revolutionary movement. This chapter will thus highlight the crucial role in the colonial state’s counter-terrorism campaign played by Indian intelligence officers, who were the primary mode of contact between informants and British officers. It will also explore an issue which was rarely discussed by colonial officials, but was sometimes a factor in revolutionaries’ decisions to give confessions to the police or become informants: the use of torture and coercion. Lastly, this chapter will address the ways in which intelligence officials sought to convert the masses of information they collected to histories of the Bengali revolutionaries which sought to predict their future actions. While the hopes of police officials for an all-encompassing intelligence structure failed to materialize, intelligence work nevertheless played an important role in one of the major weapons deployed by the
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colonial state against revolutionaries: the widespread use of detention without trial.
Chapter 4 concludes the book’s first section by examining the Bengal revolutionaries’ escalation of their anticolonial campaign in the early 1930s and the response of colonial authorities. While ambitious plans for a large- scale rising never took place, the revolutionaries were successful in their efforts to assassinate colonial servants and disrupt colonial administration. The Chittagong Armoury Raid of April 1930 demonstrated the revolutionaries’ capacity to carry out more ambitious attacks on colonial officials and institutions. The revolutionaries’ intensified campaign of violence also created a sense of panic on the part of the white community in Bengal, who demanded summary justice and reprisals against the revolutionaries. Although India was not a colony of white settlement, the responses of the European community within India bore a resemblance to that of other settler communities to the threat of anticolonial violence. Defense associa- tions (the most prominent of which was known as “The Royalists”) formed to protect the British community, and threatened violence against Bengali Hindus.
The failure of the Bengal Police to prevent assassination attempts or to quickly apprehend those responsible for the Armoury Raid led to the deployment of new strategies to deal with “Bengali terrorism.” British and Indian Army troops were stationed in key districts of the province, and military officers (known as Military Intelligence Officers) bolstered the ranks of the Intelligence Branch. The militarization of the counter- terrorist campaign and the responses of the British community both anticipated colonial counter-insurgency campaigns following the Second World War. As the use of military force and punitive policing achieved successes against the revolutionary movement by the mid-1930s, colonial authorities intensified efforts to “reform” and “rehabilitate” many of the thousands of terrorist suspects detained during these years in an effort to achieve the elusive imperial goal of eliminating the threat of revolutionary violence in Bengal.
Part II shifts the focus outside of Bengal to examine how intelligence personnel from Bengal contributed to a British imperial “intelligence culture” which sought to neutralize anti-imperial threats. Chapter 5 explores how imperial intelligence agencies responded to the global dimensions of the Indian revolutionary movement during and after the Great War. From the outset of the revolutionary movement in Bengal, revolutionaries trav- eled abroad to forge alliances with other anticolonial figures and learn
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about revolutionary ideologies and tactics such as practical instruction in bomb-making. The Bengal Police’s intelligence and surveillance work also ranged beyond the borders of the British Empire, as revolutionaries used the nearby French colonial enclave of Chandernagore, north of Calcutta, as a base for their activities.
Bengali revolutionaries formed a prominent part of what Tim Harper has recently referred to as “the Asian underground” of nationalists, revolutionaries, and political activists.45 This chapter will examine the lives and revolutionary aspirations of some of the prominent Bengali revolutionaries who lived abroad, and how imperial intelligence networks sought to monitor their activities and thwart their revolutionary plans. While a number of Bengali revolutionaries lived transnational lives, often seeking ref- uge beyond the boundaries of the British Empire, they maintained links with revolutionaries in the province of Bengal. The prominent Bengali radical anticolonialists discussed in this chapter include M. N. Roy, the revolutionary who became the founder of the Communist Party of India; Sailendranath Ghose, leader of an Indian revolutionary organization in New York City; and Rash Behari Bose, revolutionary and Pan-Asianist who lived in exile for almost three decades in Japan. Other figures with more complex relationships to the revolutionary movement in Bengal also came under the scrutiny of imperial intelligence agencies; these included both the Latvian-born revolutionary known variously as Hugo Espinoza and Abdur Raschid and the Bengali nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose, considered by imperial intelligence officers to be one of the leaders of “Bengali terrorism.”
Chapter 6 focuses on the issue of arms smuggling, a continual concern to the Government of Bengal during the three decades during which the revolutionary movement was active. While efforts to bring in large-scale arms shipments repeatedly failed, revolutionaries were able to bring in numerous shipments of small quantities of arms and accumulate an arsenal of imported firearms. Revolutionaries relied primarily on networks of maritime workers, which included not only European sailors but also Indian seamen known as lascars. This chapter explores the motivations of lascars and their relationships with Indian revolutionary movements, and the efforts of imperial authorities in London, New Delhi, Calcutta, and elsewhere in the British Empire to prevent the flow of arms to Bengali revolutionaries. While this process at times revealed tensions between provincial and imperial intelligence agencies, it also illustrates the diverse techniques, ranging from the deployment of agents in European ports to special
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legislation in Bengal, in the effort to prevent the clandestine movement of weapons. These efforts made use of both colonial legislation designed to control Indian criminality and international bodies such as the League of Nations and the emerging concept of international terrorism.
The problem posed by the mobility and geographic range of the revolutionaries and their allies created a demand for imperial intelligence expertise on the “Bengali terrorist” overseas. While in the early years of the revolutionary movement, prior to the First World War, authorities in Bengal had sought the assistance of British police in attempting to counter the revolutionary threat, by the First World War, officers with Bengal intelligence experience had begun to serve the empire in locales outside of India. Both Indian Police and Indian Civil Service officers with experience of the revolutionary movement were not only deployed abroad in order to counter Indian revolutionaries but also were also dispatched to other parts of the empire to counter revolutionary and anticolonial activism.
* * *
Indian Civil Service officer Percival Griffiths, Burge’s successor as District Magistrate of Midnapore, survived assassination attempts, and after a long
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career in imperial administration and business, authored a history of the Indian Police, To Guard My People (1971). Griffiths’ quasi-official history, written with substantial input from former police and intelligence officers, accorded the Indian revolutionary movement and the Government of Bengal’s anti-terrorist campaign a prominent place. In a section titled “Four Years of Murder and Crime,” he offered the judgment that by the 1930s, “the Bengal intelligence service was unsurpassed anywhere in the world.”46 We do not have to endorse Griffiths’ hyberbolical claim or the lavish praise he heaped on the police as defenders of the Raj to appreciate that the police intelligence establishment in Bengal was substantial, and that the campaign against Indian revolutionaries was both sustained and connected to a larger global context of anticolonial activity.
By examining imperial policing and intelligence work against the Bengali revolutionaries within and outside India, this study seeks to illu- minate an important strand of imperial history in the years prior to the Second World War. A study of police intelligence and revolutionary nationalism in Bengal helps us to better understand not only the nature of colonial power in late colonial India but also persistent and pronounced imperial anxieties. It can help us to better grasp not only the nature of elite revolutionary activity in India but also networks of anticolonial activists outside the Raj. The extensive intelligence and police operations against the Bengali revolutionaries illustrate how both imperial intelligence and forms of anticolonial resistance designated as “terrorism” were an important feature of the interwar period. As we will see, intelligence officers from Bengal impacted intelligence and counter-insurgency work in the British Empire and the wider world, and contributed to a growing sense of British expertise in intelligence matters. Their intelligence experience was rooted in the practices of colonial rule in India, and it is to that subject that we will first turn.
Abbreviations Used in the Endnotes
APAC BL Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London
CS Chief Secretary CSAS Centre of South Asian Studies Archive, Cambridge
University DIG Deputy Inspector General DM District Magistrate
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EB&A Eastern Bengal and Assam GOB Government of Bengal GOEB&A Government of Eastern Bengal and Assam GOI Government of India Home Home Department IB Intelligence Branch, Bengal Police IG Inspector General IO India Office NA UK National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew,
London NAI National Archives of India, New Delhi Pol Political Pol (Conf.) Political Confidential file Sec. Secretary SP Superintendent of Police Tegart memoir K. F. Tegart, “Charles Tegart of the Indian Police,”
MSS Eur. C 235, APAC BL TIB A. K. Samanta, ed., Terrorism in Bengal: A Collection of
Documents, 6 vols. (Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1995)
WBSA West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata
Notes
1. Lord Brabourne to Lord Linlithgow, 22 February 1939, R/3/2/6, APAC BL; and “Memorandum on the History of Terrorism in Bengal 1905– 1933,” (1933) in TIB I: 822.
2. Colonial authorities, seeking to delegitimize the actions of nationalists who deployed violence as a strategy, typically labeled them as “terrorists,” although the use of the terms “anarchists” and “revolutionaries” to describe members of the revolutionary samitis (societies) persisted into the 1930s. While some of the Bengali revolutionaries’ actions conformed to classical definitions of terrorism (such as political assassination), others did not (such as plans for broad-based uprisings). Accordingly, the present study uses the terms “revolutionaries” and “revolutionary terrorists” to refer to the advocates and practitioners of anticolonial violence in Bengal. “Bengali terrorism” refers to colonial assumptions about the revolutionaries, which form the subject of this book. For further discussion of the issues involved in defining terrorism, see Charles Townshend, Terrorism: A Very
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Short Introduction (2nd edition: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–20.
3. David M. Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left: Aspects of Regional Nationalism in India, 1905–1942 (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1975).
4. Lord Brabourne to Lord Linlithgow, 22 February 1939, R/3/2/6, APAC BL.
5. “Extract from Report from Governor of Bengal dated 6th March, 1939,” L/P&J/12/395/62, APAC BL.
6. The key studies analyzing the history of “Bengali terrorism” are Durba Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India 1900–1910 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993). For aspects of the history of the Bengali revolutionaries, see Hiren Chakrabarti, Political Protest in Bengal: Boycott and Terrorism 1905–1918 (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1992); Manini Chatterjee, Do and Die: the Chittagong Uprising 1930–34 (New Delhi: Penguin, 1999); Partha Chatterjee: The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012), 276–291; Durba Ghosh, “Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s,” Gender & History 25: 2 (2013) 355–375; Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal: Political Violence in the Interwar Years,” in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, eds., Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006), 270–292; Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left; Alexander Lee, “Who Becomes a Terrorist? Poverty, Education and the Origins of Political Violence,” World Politics 63: 2 (2011), 203–245; and Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–08 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973), 465–492. Leonard A. Gordon, Bengal: The Nationalist Movement 1876–1940 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974); Rajat Kanta Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal 1875–1927 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Tanika Sarkar, Bengal 1928–1934: The Politics of Protest (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987) also include much valuable analysis of the revolutionaries.
7. H. J. Twynam and R. E. A. Ray, Enquiry into Temporary Establishments of the Central and District Intelligence Branches of the Bengal Police (Alipore: Bengal Government Press, 1936), 9–10. A copy of this report is in L/S&G/7/231, APAC BL.
8. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009); and Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). MI5 and MI6 came into existence in 1909 as part of one organization, known as the Secret Service Bureau.
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9. Kate O’Malley, “Indian Political Intelligence (IPI): The monitoring of real and possible danger?” in Eunan O’Halpin, Robert Armstrong and Jane Ohlmeyer, eds., Intelligence, Statecraft and International Power. Historical Studies XXV. (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 2006), 175–185; and Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-Irish Radical Connections, 1919–1964 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). The question of the respective jurisdictions of MI5 and SIS was resolved in 1931, when the former was given responsibility for security intelligence within the British Empire and commonwealth, while the latter was restricted to operating three miles outside British territories. Calder Walton, Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire (London: HarperPress, 2013), 23–24.
10. Richard J. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire 1904–1924 (London: Frank Cass, 1995).
11. Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2008).
12. As Martin Thomas concludes, “Intelligence and empire were inextricably linked in a symbiotic relationship, the growth of one nourishing the con- solidation of the other.” Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, 13.
13. Emphasis in original. Walton, Empire of Secrets, 1. 14. Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, 117–122; and Jeffery, MI6, 245–248.
By 1925, MI5, for example, had only four percent of the staff it had pos- sessed at the end of the Great War. Andrew, Defence of the Realm, 122.
15. The vast majority of these officers were Indian. These numbers include both permanent and temporary appointments to the IB. Twynam and Ray, Central and District Intelligence Branches, 17 and 64.
16. Patrick Major and Christopher R. Moran, eds., Spooked: Britain, Empire and Intelligence Since 1945 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009); Rory Cormac, Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Walton, Empire of Secrets.
17. Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, 1. 18. Kris Manjapra, “Introduction,” in Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, eds.,
Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 10.
19. For Bengali revolutionaries’ engagement with Irish republicanism, see Michael Silvestri, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 46–75.
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