In this monograph Professor Shukla Sanyal (Presidency University, Kolkata) explores revolutionary propaganda in Bengal between 1908 and 1918. Long years in gestation (p. vii), the book is based on primary sources found in the archives at Kolkata, Mumbai, and New Delhi. The documentation comprises not just the newspapers, pamphlets and leaflets produced by the insurgents themselves, but also police reports, trial records, and memoirs. The author anchors her approach in the grand theoretical insights of Benedict Anderson and Jürgen Habermas, along with the ideas of Bengali scholars of the nineteenth century and more recent studies by prominent Indian historians. The main text comprises five thematic chapters framed by an introduction and conclusion, all confined within 195 pages. One section of the monograph appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies in 2008.
‘Propaganda’, a new weapon in the local political arsenal, was used by the mutineers to influence public opinion and to publicise their programmes and ideologies. Acts of terrorism were ‘propaganda by deed’ (p. 3). The revolutionary nationalists originally set up a series of short-lived vernacular newspapers, most notably Jugantar (‘New Age’, 1906–8, which attained a peak circulation of twenty thousand); after these were closed down by the government, they switched to pamphlets and leaflets, which, being unregistered, were much more difficult for the authorities to control. The pamphleteers made intelligent use of cultural symbols to convey their thoughts, ideas and emotions to their readers; they repeatedly employed “certain arguments, images, stories, figures and messages that had deep resonance in Indian society as they were drawn from the rich reservoir of Indian mythology, philosophy, religion, history and contemporary politics” (p. 99).
The pamphlet-writers were mainly young men recruited from educated, upper-caste (bhadralok) Hindu backgrounds. This political community was regarded as an armed brotherhood, who would not only dedicate their lives to the achievement of national independence but also take a vow to remain celibate until this task was achieved. A favourite image was that of the mother-nation dependent upon her sons for protection. The role of women was to give up their husbands and sons to the revolutionary endeavour; but there was no hostility to the idea of women's participation in the public sphere (pp. 176–180).
The spur for the uprising came from the Partition of Bengal in October 1905, “implemented by a high-handed British administration in total disregard of the intense opposition that the proposed plan had provoked among important sections of Bengalis” (p. 24; also p. 101). Constitutional agitation having failed (p. 25), unveiling the fist would be the only thing that the firinghis would understand.
The author's thesis is that no assessment of the revolutionary nationalist movement would be complete without a corresponding dissection of revolutionary propaganda (p. 50). The focus of the study is “the political ideas, value systems, hopes and aspirations of the revolutionaries that found expression through the medium of seditious pamphlets” (p. 2). The aim of the rebels was to prepare the country, through examples of heroism and supreme sacrifice, for the larger war against colonialism that was expected to follow (p. 3). The purpose of their publications was “to persuade the target audience that the prevalent state of affairs was so unacceptable and so irremediable that the only available course of action was to put an end to it through revolution” (pp. 4, 88).
Chapter Two analyses the political vision that the pamphleteers sought to articulate through their discourse of the ‘nation’. Their arguments “were inscribed in an intellectual fabric woven together with themes and ideas that were an integral part of the political culture of contemporary Bengal” (p. 15). The writer examines the ideas of three representative thinkers, namely Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838–94), Swami Vivekenanda (1863–1902), and Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950) (pp. 64–74, 83–84). One problem was how an upper-caste Hindu movement could attain a wider appeal in a fragmented society. At this time, however, religion was not such a divisive force as it would become in later decades (pp. 80–81).
The core of the book comprises Chapter Three, which examines the justifications put forward for violence, and Chapter Four, which analyses the colonial response to the revolutionary movement. Chapter Five is a ‘summing up’.
Violence had to be legitimised to public opinion by the insurgents (p. 88). Attempted defences were derived from both indigenous sources (the Mahabharata and Ramayana) and from foreign exemplars, such as Young Italy, Irish Nationalists, and Russian Nihilists (p. 114). The revolutionaries, who had God on their side (pp. 97–98) and were an instrument of the divine will (pp. 108, 114), were however, sometimes disappointed to discover that even some of their fellow Indians denounced their methods (p. 99).
Press laws merely drove the movement underground whilst trials had the counter-productive effect of spreading revolutionary ideas and boosting public sympathy for the ‘terrorists’. The successor pamphlets comprised those under the Om Jugantar brand (1908–16) and the Swadhin Bharat series (from 1910). Liberty leaflets were issued from May 1913 (p. 94). Despite the best efforts of the government, most attempts to trace the origins of the pamphlets ended in failure. Distributors were rarely caught red-handed. The leaflets were printed by hand presses, of which there were thousands in Calcutta alone (pp. 134–140). And so the battle continued: “The colonial discourse, condescending and contemptuous of the ruled, was countered with a revolutionary discourse that painted the rulers as deceitful, unjust and undeserving of loyalty. These two alternative discourses, representing fundamentally different images and perceptions of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, structured the worldviews of the rulers and ruled, providing the rationale behind and justifying their actions in the fractured world of a colonial society” (p. 150).
Overall, the pamphlets were an important medium through which the claims of the colonial régime were contested. They destroyed the legitimising assumptions of foreign rule by asserting that the power of the state could not be allowed to override the interests of the nation; and they set about constructing an alternative vision of a nation-state within which a national community would fulfil its destiny (p. 194).
