Following the HSRA’s daring attempt on the life of the Viceroy in December 1929, the Government of India’s search for key members and their sympathizers took on a renewed urgency. In an attempt to trace the revolutionaries and to break ‘the steel frame of the violence movement’, the Intelligence Bureau turned its attention to the distribution of this polemical document. An analysis of modes of distribution of material on the verge of proscription, I argue, enables a more textured understanding of the thrust of revolutionary literature and its reception. This paper therefore aims to inject the spirit of insurgency into the archive by explaining the ways in which a key document of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’, was disseminated.
The paper is organized into three sections. The first section provides a background for the political context of ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’ amid debates about violence and nonviolence in the broader nationalist movement. The second describes the different ways in which the document was disseminated in early 1930, drawing on both revolutionary and intelligence reports. The paper concludes by considering the alignment between the dissemination and impact of the revolutionary manifesto and the bomb itself.
THE POLITICAL CONTEXT OF ‘THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE BOMB’
Written by Bhagwati Charan Vohra in early January 1930, ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’ was a polemical intervention into debates among nationalist circles about the role of violence in the anticolonial movement in India. The moment was a critical one because, as I have argued elsewhere, it presented a key juncture in which violent and nonviolent anticolonialism collided in interwar India. [1] Key leaders in the Congress movement, including Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, collaborated both covertly and openly with members of the HSRA, visiting the revolutionaries in court and in prison, and providing the revolutionaries with strategic and legal advice as well as financial support, much of this without Gandhi’s knowledge. [2] In doing so, the Nehrus, particularly Jawaharlal, sought to radicalize a movement that many had begun to regard as stagnating under Gandhi’s leadership. By late 1929, the overwhelming popularity of the revolutionaries of the HSRA in nationalist circles and the larger Indian public had the effect of shaping anticolonial politics, shifting the discourse of the Congress-dominated nationalist movement from the relatively modest demand of Dominion Status within the British Empire (fought along constitutional lines), to the more radical demand of purna swaraj (usually translated as complete independence). [3]
At the 1929 Lahore Congress, held under the presidency of Jawaharlal Nehru just days after the HSRA’s attempt on the life of the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, animated discussion took place about the use of violence in the movement. [4] The Viceroy survived the attempt to blow up his train on 23 December because the bomb was detonated too early, and although reportedly shaken by the blast, he carried on with a meeting with Congress leaders that the HSRA members who organized the bombing (Yashpal, Bhagwati Charan Vohra and Hansraj ‘Wireless’) had hoped to disrupt. [5] At that meeting and in the following days, Irwin put up a brave public face, quietly hoping that the attempt on his life would buy him sympathy in India and at home, where diehard imperialists in the Conservative Party were despairing of the direction of his negotiations with Congress leaders. [6]
The interwar period was a transitional one for India. Concerted nationalist action sparked by the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919 was followed by the non-cooperation movement (1920–2), then a lull of activity before the arrival of the Simon Commission in India in 1928, protests at which sparked civil disobedience (1930–1, 1933–4). The Civil Disobedience movement, interspersed with Round Table Conferences in London, culminated in reforms of the Government of India Act in 1935. The implementation of this Act would force the recalibration of longstanding relationships between colonized and colonized, as power was devolved to elected Indian ministries at the provincial level. This was short-lived, however, as most of the ministries elected in 1937 resigned in protest at being drawn into another world war, without consultation.
In December 1929 the triumph of nonviolence as the dominant discourse of Indian nationalism was by no means a foregone conclusion. The rise of violence aimed at Britons and their collaborators in the interwar period was a graphic indication that the imperial grasp on India was beginning to be shaken. That these attacks formed the backdrop against which Irwin instigated debates with the Congress and other stakeholders about constitutional reforms seemed all the more outrageous to Irwin’s critics, both in India and at home. Irwin had hoped to stave off Congress threats of civil disobedience with vague promises of Dominion Status, and it was now time to deliver or face nationalist action. In Britain, the Conservative Party had just lost the elections, and Ramsay Macdonald’s minority Labour government (1929–31) incrementally began to advance debates about India’s status within the empire. [7] Irwin made conciliatory but calculated advances towards moderate nationalists, initiating discussions in London about a Round Table Conference and following through with the Irwin Declaration in October, whose details the Viceroy had strategically leaked in India, before he was out-manœuvred by a Conservative-led ‘political storm’ at home. [8] Irwin’s October statement vouched that the government had come to accept that ‘the natural issue of India’s constitutional progress’ was ‘the attainment of Dominion Status’. [9] The Viceroy had to retract the offer of Dominion Status, but hoped that the offer of a Round Table Conference in London would preclude civil disobedience. It was to discuss the terms of reference for this Round Table that he took the Viceregal Special back to Delhi on the morning of 23 December 1929, when the bomb planted beneath the tracks by HSRA members exploded.
At the Lahore Congress a week later Gandhi introduced a motion to condemn the bombing and congratulate the Viceroy and Vicereine on their ‘fortunate and narrow escape’. [10] The resolution, first proposed in the Subjects Committee of the Congress on 27 December, was criticized by some present as ‘practically a loyalty resolution’, but it passed nonetheless by 117 to 69. [11] In the open session of Congress it created heated debate, and was initially voted down, with 763 votes against it and only 664 in favour. [12] Gandhi was forced to do a great deal of cajoling behind the scenes to find the numbers to support his resolution. [13] The resolution was put to the vote a second time, and it eventually passed by 990 to 796, indicating that additional delegates had been mustered. An agent working for the Intelligence Bureau observing the proceedings wrote that ‘Mr Gandhi was able to carry his resolution intact, but only by haggling methods which satisfy neither the moderates … nor the extremists’. [14]
A surge of flags declaring ‘Up with Revolution’, open hostility to and physical assault on intelligence officers present, and the distribution of an ‘HSRA Manifesto’ at the Congress gathering were all counted by intelligence reporters as signs of the radicalization of the Congress party, and a disregard for its stated creed of nonviolence. [15] This malaise prompted Gandhi to write ‘The Cult of the Bomb’, his critique of revolutionary praxis, published in Young India on 2 January 1930. Addressing not the revolutionaries of the HSRA, whom he considered ‘so much saturated with violence as to be beyond the pale of reason’, but those nationalists who supported their actions, in ‘The Cult of the Bomb’ Gandhi deplored the bombing of the Viceregal train. [16] He argued that political violence in India merely prompted the Government to enhance military expenditure and expedite repressive action. He warned that anticolonial violence targeted against ‘the foreign ruler’ would easily turn into ‘violence to our own people whom we may consider to be obstructing the country’s progress’. He defended nonviolence as a generative force, a means of ‘converting the opponent’, rather than driving him out by violence. In closing, Gandhi called for all nationalists to condemn violent attacks, ‘so that our deluded patriots may for want of nourishment to their violence spirit realise the futility of violence and the great harm that violent activity has every time done’. [17]
* * *
The HSRA’s Central Committee was incensed at Gandhi’s dismissive intervention, especially the inference that they were deluded and beyond reason, and at a meeting in early January they decided to write a riposte to the Mahatma. [18] Although the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’ is often included in collected writings of Bhagat Singh, it was Bhagwati Charan Vohra who wrote the tract, in consultation with the party’s leader Chandra Shekhar Azad, under the pseudonym ‘Kartar Singh’ (recalling a Ghadr revolutionary executed in 1915). At the time, of its writing, in early January, Bhagat Singh was in prison in Lahore; yet according to HSRA worker Rajendrapal Singh ‘Warrior’ he read and approved the draft. [19] It was most likely smuggled in by Vohra’s wife, Durga Devi, who in her 1972 oral history interview mentioned having visited Bhagat Singh in prison, disguised in a burqa. [20] ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’ was primarily a critique of nonviolence that sought to explain the thinking behind revolutionary actions. Vohra’s retort to Gandhi drew ‘a distinction between “violence” as physical-force applied to commit injustice, and physical-force itself, which can serve a just cause as readily as soul-force’. [21] Described by intelligence officers as a ‘well-written and highly inflammable document’, [22] the main thrust of ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’ was its scathing critique of Gandhi.
Yashpal, one of the ‘absconding’ organizers of the HSRA who became a noted writer in independent India, writes in his memoirs that the tracts were printed in Calcutta at the revolutionaries’ own printing press, where copies of V. D. Savarkar’s Indian War of Independence were also printed. [23] The Intelligence Bureau, however, believed that Azad had the tract printed in a press in Kanpur. [24] The leaflet was published in great numbers – an informer reported that Yashpal received a trunk in Lahore containing four thousand copies – under a striking masthead of ‘The Hindustan Socialist Republican Association Manifesto’ (Fig. 1). [25] Bimal Prasad Jain, the HSRA member responsible for its distribution in Meerut and Delhi, noted that the manifesto was specifically timed ‘to be distributed on 26th January [the day nominated by the Congress to be observed as Independence Day] throughout India, especially in the main cities’. [26] Hale’s Political Trouble notes that at the same time as the leaflets were being distributed in Delhi, ‘large purchases of cartridges for rifles, automatic pistols and 12 bore guns were made from a dealer’. [27] The circulation of the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’ thus coincided with the re-armament of the revolutionaries.
Because it recommended the efficacy of anticolonial violence – in the words of one analyst, because it ‘vomits venoms against Lord Irwin’ – it was promptly proscribed by the government. [28] This meant that those caught distributing it could be charged under section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code, which enabled the punishment of anyone who ‘by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the Government established by law in India’. [29]
To affirm its strategy of proscription, the government drew links between incitement and action. Testimonies from revolutionaries show that, as with much police intelligence, not all of their assumptions were correct. For example, the Intelligence Bureau connected the distribution of a leaflet in Gujarati entitled ‘Gandhi or Bhagat Singh’, that was sent in the post ‘from large numbers from Baroda to Bombay’, to an attempt to bomb the home of Khan Bahadur Abdul Aziz, one of the investigators of the Lahore case; and to the shooting attack on Sargent Taylor and his wife in Bombay. [30] They were wrong in each case, as both attacks were organized by revolutionaries who were themselves doing the inciting, rather than responding to it. The attack on Aziz was co-ordinated by Asthi Chakkar, an offshoot of the HSRA that tasked itself with targeting Indian collaborators; and the attack on Taylor and his wife was organized by Durga Devi Vohra, in response to the death sentence imposed on Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev in October 1930. It is true, however, that some seditious material was indeed the inspiration for anticolonial violence. [31]
DISSEMINATION OF PROSCRIBED PUBLICATIONS IN BRITISH INDIA
The scholarly literature on proscribed publications in British India rarely engages with how seditious materials were distributed. N. Gerald Barrier’s book, Banned: Controversial Literature and Political Control in British India 1907–1947, in part a register of tracts, provides an overview of the content and context of such publications. [32] More recently, Shukla Sanyal’s monograph, the most focused intervention into revolutionary propaganda to date, draws out the content and impact of texts distributed in Bengal with a view to providing a window onto the ‘narrative construction of a “revolutionary nationalist identity” in the early twentieth century’. [33] The past decade in particular has seen a burst of research into revolutionary movements, drawing extensively on banned literature and imagery, with a pronounced visual turn in South Asian Studies informing attempts to use such material in the construction of historical narrative. [34] Some of these works note in passing the means by which seditious literature was circulated, but modes of distribution have not yet been the focus of any detailed study. [35]
Part of the difficulty in tracing the means of circulation lies in the colonial archive, and especially the confusion and obfuscation in the colonial Intelligence Bureau. The Government of India’s order to proscribe seditious literature in British India came with the command that all copies be surrendered to the Government of India, which was neither realistic nor feasible. [36] In the case of the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’ it is striking, given its notoriety and status as a manifesto and the quantity produced, that very few copies of the document survive in archival collections of proscribed publications. [37] Yet from intelligence reports it can be shown that the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’ was widely distributed in the public sphere. Almost invariably, these reports are made in the passive voice: the tract was chanced upon, ‘discovered’ or ‘distributed’, with very little sense of agency. In the case of the intelligence and police staff tracking the movement of subversive literature, this is partly a product of the unknown, but also, I would argue, an attempt to play down the extent of the delivery and the impact of seditious literature.
Take, for example this passage from the Weekly Report of the Intelligence Bureau on 30 January 1930:
In the Weekly Report No. 2 of 1930, reference was made to the distribution, during Congress week, of a leaflet of the Hindustan Republican Association. A similar ‘manifesto’, apparently produced by the same Association, and obviously printed at the same press, has appeared in considerable numbers in the Punjab and the United Provinces. Although it is not well printed, the subject matter is skilfully presented, and its subject appears to be to secure adherents to the revolutionary cause by presenting the case for violent revolution in the most favourable light. [emphasis added] [38]
The passive voice here is indicative of the failures of the colonial state to effectively monitor the document’s movements, and to trace its distributors and authors. Also notable is the dismissal of the production values of the document – ‘it is not well printed’ – when in fact, relative to contemporaneous tracts such as Congress Bulletins (which were cyclostyled), the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’ is professional: typeset, with a distinctive letterhead, its arguments set out with an introduction and subheadings, and precisely filling four pages.
The ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’ sets out its argument against nonviolence, and critiques Gandhi, before concluding with a flourish:
There is no crime that Britain has not committed in India. Deliberate misrule has reduced us to paupers, has ‘bled us white’. As a race and a people we stand dishonoured and outraged. Do people still expect us to forget and to forgive? We shall have our revenge – a people’s righteous revenge on the Tyrant. Let cowards fall back and cringe for compromise and peace. We ask not for mercy and we give no quarter. Ours is a war to the end. Victory or Death! [39]
The twin threat contained in the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’ – to the Viceroy and to Gandhi’s nonviolent methods, by this stage the government’s preferred form of anticolonial resistance – made it urgent for the Intelligence Bureau to track the revolutionaries. Quite recently, on 30 September 1929, the police had succeeded in arresting Shivaram Rajguru (alias ‘M’), one of the gunmen in the Lahore Conspiracy Case, who had been on the run since December 1928. The Intelligence Bureau discovered Rajguru’s whereabouts by tracing the distribution of a proscribed publication, a version of a 1925 leaflet produced by the Hindustan Republican Army (the HSRA’s precursor), ‘The Revolutionary’, in Poona. Rajguru had organized its republication and ‘the quiet investigation’ of its production led the police to him, a consignment of proscribed pamphlets, and a cache of weaponry and ammunition. [40] Adopting this approach, the police then set about tracing the production and distribution patterns of the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’, which was ‘seen for the first time on the night of 23rd January 1930 in the United Provinces’. [41]
The distinctive font used in the document’s header was analysed and identified as a 30-point ‘Ornamental Shaded’ typeface: investigation into which publishers had purchased the font threw up a handful of presses, including a suspiciously-named ‘Red Printing Press’ in Jamnagar. This evidence was not sufficiently conclusive, however, and the line of inquiry turned to its actual distribution. A memo compiled by the Director of the Intelligence Bureau, David Petrie, claimed that the ‘secret and simultaneous distribution of the leaflet in many places connotes, beyond any doubt, the existence of a live and efficient organization’. [42] The means of dissemination, the investigation found, were quite comprehensive, and daringly relied upon the state’s own infrastructure, including the Royal Mail.
* * *
The revolutionaries of the HSRA had long relied on services of the Royal Mail to communicate between themselves, and to distribute party propaganda. They had a good understanding of the operations of the postal service. Shiv Verma, one of the party’s prominent workers from the United Provinces, was the son of a post-office clerk; [43] and another revolutionary, Kailashpati, worked as a clerk in a post office in Gorakhpur. Indeed in 1928 he embezzled Rs. 3200 from the post office ‘for revolutionary propaganda’, before fleeing on a bicycle and moving to Kanpur, where he went underground. [44] Not only was the Royal Mail exploited to distribute seditious literature, but its resources were appropriated to fund revolutionary endeavours as well. Revolutionaries frequently mailed manifestoes to the editors of newspapers in an endeavour to have them published in newspapers; [45] they also made use of the mail to send threats and parcel bombs to people who gave statements to the police or in court against them, raising new alarms around postal transmissions. [46]
From at least 1928, party workers had established the practice of using aliases and third parties as ‘post boxes’ to handle their mail, so as not to alert postal authorities and therefore the police to their whereabouts. However by 1929, it is evident that the police were aware of most of the main aliases used by the HSRA, and of their respective ‘post boxes’. Sanyal indicates that in Calcutta police had started to stake out post offices in order to trace distribution points of incendiary materials. [47] By 1930, Gajanand Potdar recalled, using the post to communicate became impossible, and the party was forced to resort to foot-messengers even over long distances – ‘we had to go hundreds of miles personally, just to take a small message. We could not use the post’ – to reliably transmit information. [48] The revolutionaries began to communicate by passing notes using an elaborately organized network of women and children, who were less likely to be confronted than male youth. This ruse did not last long, however; children were punished for being suspected of running messages between revolutionaries. In her oral history testimony, Mrinalini Desai told how when she was confronted by police as a child she ate a note she was secretly conveying rather than give it up. [49]
Despite evidence that the Royal Mail was becoming an unreliable vector of their propaganda, the revolutionaries of the HSRA attempted to distribute the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’ through the post. The tell-tale postmarks on the envelopes into which the copies were folded made it easy to trace their towns of origin, and the addresses of recipients indicated the identities of potential sympathizers. Copies were sent from Benares, Lahore, Lucknow, Agra, Ambala, Calcutta, Bombay and Delhi: these multiple points of distribution suggest the presence of operatives across north India. Copies postmarked Delhi were sent to major nationalist newspapers which in the past had published or discussed revolutionary tracts in their pages – the Leader, Pioneer, Pratap, and further away, the Rangoon Mail – and to individuals in Calcutta and Chittagong. Perhaps, at times, the risk associated with getting caught posting the incendiary publication was too great. A package of fifty-three leaflets was found in a bundle left in the Bombay GPO, as though the sender was interrupted, or otherwise unable to complete the task. [50]
Alternatively, we could read the abandonment of the bundle as itself a form of distribution. Leaving copies of the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’ in public places, either in stacks or pasted page by page onto walls, emerges as one of the ways in which the tract was most often encountered, at least by police. They found 200 copies lying near the tank of Khalsa College, which were being picked up by students. A copy was found in Bombay on the wall of Mandir Shivaji; and another was pasted in Peshawar city. This last was thought to have been sent via the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, an HSRA affiliate which had a strong presence in the city. In Moradabad, montages containing extracts from the leaflet were placarded around the town. In the princely state of Jhansi, where Azad and other party members were known to hide, original copies appear to have been scarce, for excerpts were typed up and pasted around the town. [51] Scarcity of the original manifesto could thus be made up for with locally-produced facsimiles and extracts. An obvious limitation to the document’s incendiary potential is that it had to be read to be effective, and it was therefore beyond the reach of the illiterate, or those not fluent in English. However, the manifesto was translated into other languages, and evidence also suggests that in Calcutta at least sections of seditious documents were read out in public. [52]
According to an Intelligence Bureau report, the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’ ‘was noticed pasted up’ (a double passive) in Beadon Square in Calcutta, and ‘promptly removed by the police on duty there’; another copy was found pasted up in Bhowanipur. [53] The revolutionaries soon began to factor the removal of the posters by the state and its loyalists into their distribution patterns. In Calcutta’s Kishoreganj, a copy was found pasted on the wall of the Bar Library, with the warning: ‘Don’t risk your life by tearing it’. [54] This can be seen as a contestation for public space in urban colonial centres. There were obvious logistical difficulties in pasting a document in public without being caught. In Benaras, Kidar Nath Tiwari and Vidya Rana Sharma were discovered pasting up copies of the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’, and were convicted under section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code, serving four months in prison and fined Rs. 50. [55] They might have learned from an anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, from the non-cooperation movement about Chandra Shekhar Azad’s methods of pasting seditious literature in public spaces. In 1922, asked by Sampoornanand, a member of the All India Congress Committee, to distribute a poster, Azad is said to have ‘stuck the notice lightly on his back and put a lot of glue on the other side. Then, he stood leaning against a pole near a police station. A policeman came by and started talking to him: little did he realise what Azad was up to and Azad very smartly managed to paste the notice right under his nose’. [56]
* * *
Peripheral members of the HSRA and sympathizers were key to the distribution to the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’. The 1936 edition of Political Who’s Who for the United Provinces lists a number of individuals who were suspected of distributing the leaflet in the province, including Bhagirath Lal of Delhi; [57] Bishambhar Sahai was named as posting HSRA leaflets to ‘high officials’; [58] and Chhailbehari Lal, the assistant editor of the newspaper Vartman and a poet, allegedly ‘had a hand’ in the distribution of the leaflets in Kanpur. [59] Intelligence reports noted that they were distributed in great numbers by boys and students, indicating ‘their open flouting of authority’. [60] The revolutionaries seem to have targeted students, for the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’ was distributed by hand in educational institutions in Lucknow, Agra, Allahabad, Cawnpore, Aligarh, Brindaban, Meerut, [61] and in Benares on 24 and 25 January. Similarly, in Punjab approximately 2,000 copies of the tract were ‘broadcasted in colleges and hostels on 26th January’. [62] It was extensively disseminated through educational institutions in key centres in United Provinces – Agra, Lucknow, Allahabad, Kanpur, Aligargh, Brindaban, Meerut, and Benares. Youth Leagues seem to have been behind this organization. [63]
Intelligence reports mentioned distribution of the document by people in disguise; a person ‘believed to be dressed like a peon’ was reported to have distributed it in New Delhi and in the old city on 25 January. In the Boarding House of Hindu Sabha College in Amritsar, copies were distributed by ‘some one dressed in English costume’. [64] Distribution by hand had the advantage of garnering the feedback of the recipient. In his oral history interview, Party worker Bimal Prasad Jain recalled that he was delegated with distribution in Meerut and Delhi, where he ‘faithfully distributed [it] in all the advocates’ bars and colleges. And the pamphlet was very much appreciated’. [65]
* * *
The obvious problem with distribution of the document by hand was the risk of being caught in the act. Perhaps it was for this reason that, according to a number of accounts collected by the Intelligence Bureau, copies of the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’ were flung at potential readers. According to a telegram, at a flag-hoisting ceremony in Bombay, ‘pamphlets of Hindustan Socialist Republican Association advocating extreme violence [were] thrown into crowd. Investigation (is) proceeding’. [66] And in Calcutta, ‘a young man aged about 18 years and of medium height and complexion was noticed throwing a copy of this leaflet into a passing tram car at the junction of Dharamtalla Street and Wellington Street. The leaflet was immediately thrown out by the occupant and was picked up by a Special Branch officer’. [67] In Agra, ‘an envelope containing a copy of the leaflet was thrown to a student from a moving car’, and again in Calcutta, copies of the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’ were ‘scattered from a moving car by a young man’. [68] The throwing of the document in such a way as not to be affected by its impact therefore curiously mimics the throwing of incendiary devices that the manifesto lauds. Just as a bomb must be detonated at a safe distance if it is not to kill its maker, so a seditious document must be distributed without being traceable to its authors.
The ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’ was followed by a spate of similar tracts, ‘many of them attacking nonviolence and predicting its speedy failure because of the inherent defects in its “ideology”.’ [69] At least some of the methods employed for tracing its authors and distributors were successful, for by the end of 1930, a total of forty-eight HSRA members and affiliates were rounded up and accused of, among other things, the attempt to kill the Viceroy, and distributing the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’. [70]
BY WAY OF CONCLUSION
When we encounter proscribed publications in the archive, there is a great sense of sterility about them. They lie before us, securely contained in neat plastic or paper envelopes, captured in the act of disrupting the Raj. Descriptions of the documents in intelligence reports are parsed in terms that seek to strip them of their potency. Sarcasm and deprecation of not only revolutionary praxis but also nonviolent ‘ideology’ (as in the above quote, for example) permeates the Intelligence Bureau’s analysis and description of the proscribed material. We have seen above that seditious documents are frequently disparaged as poorly produced, their status as manifestos questioned. An underlying anxiety in the language used in these reports belies a realization of the disruptive potential of the text.
The collection of seditious material in colonial archives necessarily shaves them of the dynamic manner in which they were distributed – posted, pasted, abandoned, and thrown. I want to suggest that there is a striking similarity between the distribution methods of the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’ and the bomb itself. The primary modes through which the document was distributed in January and February of 1930 – through the post, by leaving it in public spaces, by hand, and by throwing – parallel the ways in which the revolutionaries deployed actual bombs. [71] In British analysis then, the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’ becomes indistinguishable from the bombs that it defends. Indeed, one of the adjectives frequently used to describe seditious literature in colonial records is ‘inflammatory’. [72] This analogy is perhaps made more potent by the fact that the author of the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’, Bhagwati Charan Vohra, died on the banks of the Ravi on 30 May 1930, after a bomb he was holding exploded prematurely, the hand in which he was holding it completely severed. [73]
Kama Maclean is Associate Professor of South Asian and World History at the University of New South Wales, editor of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2010–), and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. She is the author of Pilgrimage and Power: the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad (Oxford University Press, New York, 2008); A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (Oxford University Press, New York, and Hurst & Co., London, 2015); and British India, White Australia: Indians Overseas, Intercolonial Relations and the Empire, 1901–1947 (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2020), plus numerous articles.
Kama Maclean
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