Introduction
Perhaps not surprisingly, most narratives of the Indian freedom struggle have a tendency to adopt a quite narrowly ‘national’ perspective. External influences and global contexts are often played down or even completely edited out from the histories of what is sometimes described as ‘the nation’s arduous way to self-realization’. The inclination towards nationalistic solipsism often disguises the complex set of global historical constellations, transnational political interaction and translocal ideological exchanges that are constitutive factors of most national movements. Fortunately, there are some exceptions to this rule, even among nationalists themselves. In his book Young India, the Indian political activist and amateur historian Lala Lajpat Rai, for instance, acknowledged the formative impact of global factors on Indian nationalist politics. The book, published in 1917, contains a short chapter on the ‘world forces’ that shaped the Indian national movement. Lajpat Rai even takes an overtly internationalist stance when he states that:
There can be no doubt that Indian Nationalism is receiving a good deal of support from the world forces outside India. […] Indian Patriots travelling abroad […] seek and get opportunities of meeting and conversing with the Nationalists of other countries. Some of them are in close touch with Egyptian or Irish nationalists, others with Persian and so on. Indian Nationalism is thus entering on [sic] an international phase which is bound to strengthen it and bring it to the arena of the world forces.Footnote 1
Particularly the radical wing of the Indian independence movement (popularly known as ‘revolutionaries’ in India and as ‘seditionists’, ‘anarchists’ or ‘terrorists’ among British officials) in the first two decades of the twentieth century is an excellent example of the multilayered and multifaceted global entanglements of nationalist projects. Nevertheless, not many historians have widened the lens beyond the geographical bounds of India and looked at intercontinental connections in their attempt adequately to explain both the political strategies and the ideological contents of Indian nationalism in this crucial phase.Footnote 2 Having said that, it must not be forgotten that the 1970s and early 1980s have produced a couple of interesting survey works on ‘Indian revolutionaries abroad’, mostly authored by scholars with a Marxist background, who seem to have been more inclined towards issues of internationalism.Footnote 3 Besides, there are also assorted case studies on particular aspects of the international networks created by radical nationalistsFootnote 4 as well as useful biographies helping to elucidate this neglected chapter of Indian history.Footnote 5
The present article aims to move a further step in that direction by taking a global perspective on the diasporic networks of Indian revolutionaries that were emerging on the eve of the First World War. It will look somewhat more closely at three important headquarters of their ‘revolutionary’ activities, namely London, New York and Tokyo. The narrative is centred on the ‘India Houses’ that were opened in these three cities and in all cases served as the institutional umbrella units for the revolutionary schemes. Finally, the political alliances forged and the ideological resources tapped in these three settings are sketched out and briefly analysed.
The period under survey is the decade between the Japanese victory over Russia in 1905 and the beginning of the First World War. From the perspective of the history of the Indian freedom movement this episode is of particular interest. For one, it is largely regarded as an in-between phase between two critical stages of nationalist agitation and is hence relatively under-researched.Footnote 6 Indeed, for most of this phase one can observe a certain vacuum of leadership in the Indian National Congress (INC), the main vehicle for political articulation and mobilization, which had been founded in 1885. It was a stage where the older generation of moderate INC leaders was losing credibility owing to a growing radicalization. Concurrently, important figureheads of the extremist wing (leaders like B. G. Tilak or Aurobindo Ghose) were either imprisoned or had withdrawn from politics altogether. Mahatma Gandhi, on the other hand, was still in South Africa and had not yet entered the Indian political stage. This vacuum brought a group of radical ‘transnational nationalists’ to the forefront, who later on became quickly marginalized, when the phase of Gandhian mass mobilization began. Their anti-imperialist activities from abroad were facilitated by the fact that they took place during the first peak of globalization. As quite a few global historians have reminded us, this particular decade, perhaps like none before, was the climax of a period of ‘great acceleration’ that brought about an immense intensification of global exchanges at the economic, political, and cultural level.Footnote 7
The second reason for the choice of this particular period is that it allows us to challenge a view brought forward by historians like Michael Adas, Prasenjit Duara and Akira Iriye, which has come to be accepted quite uncritically in recent years, namely that the First World War was the one event that was crucial in shaking the belief in Western superiority and the ‘civilizing mission’ of the West among the colonized peoples – or at least the elites of those peoples.Footnote 8 By undermining the ideological substructures of colonialism, the argument runs, the First World War ‘proved to be the swan song of empires’.Footnote 9 It is well known that doubts about the imperial world order and the blessings and capabilities of European modernity existed long before the catastrophe of 1914–18. As will be shown in the case study, the same holds true for a sophisticated anti-imperial propaganda and the networks to disseminate it to an increasingly global public sphere. The argument about the watershed character of the First World War, I submit, hence stands in need of some qualification.
Indian elite diasporas and political agitation
The international outlook of the radical brand of Indian nationalism was not merely the outcome of the travel activities of a few elite ‘Indian patriots’, as Lajpat Rai’s account could mislead one to believe. It would hardly have been conceivable without the existence of a much larger number of Indian students studying abroad.The community of Indian students studying abroad was certainly smaller in size than the South Asian labour diaspora and the merchant communities living overseas. Nonetheless, it turned out to be far more important for helping to weave an international web of anti-imperial activism.
Predictably enough, Britain was by far the most important destination for Indian students in the period under survey. As the bulk of them hoped for careers in the colonial Government services, it was only logical to receive a university education in the imperial ‘motherland’. Thus, the numbers of Indians enrolled in British universities grew rapidly from the last two decades of the nineteenth century onwards. In 1880 there were barely a hundred students, but by the outbreak of the First World War it had reached 1,800.Footnote 10 The number of Indian students who increasingly ‘began to form their own social circle and thus cut themselves adrift […] from the beneficial influence of English life’ was growing so conspicuously that it soon became a focus of anxieties in the English press.Footnote 11 Though on a far smaller scale, central European universities had also become much sought-after destinations for Indians in quest of foreign university degrees. In the first decade of the twentieth century, American colleges and universities followed suit. Initially students tended to head for New York, but with the growth of an Indian diaspora on the Pacific Coast, Californian universities became the major points of attraction for Indian students.
Last but not least, Tokyo needs to be mentioned in this context. Japanese universities had been attracting students from China, Korea and other Asian countries for some time.Footnote 12 Ever since influential Hindu reformers such as Swami Vivekananda had toured the country in the 1890s and recommended its educational institutions as ideally suited for the technical training of Indians, a few students from South Asia found their way to the capital of the Meiji Empire, too.Footnote 13 Subsequent to Nippon’s triumph in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the number of Indian students grew steadily – much to the concern of the British-Indian government.Footnote 14 It rose from fifteen in 1903 to fifty-four in 1906 to more than one hundred in 1910.Footnote 15 By 1911 there were several dozens enlisted in Tokyo University alone, and there were smaller groups in other places as well. As we shall see, many of them were under the influence of the nascent pan-Asian movement.
Nationalists in exile
In India, 1905 was seen as an annus mirabilis not merely on account of the Japanese victory at Port ArthurFootnote 16 and the first revolution in Russia. It was also the year that witnessed the launch of the first nationalist mass campaign in Bengal. Following the unpopular decision of the British to divide Bengal into a Hindu and a Muslim part, the so-called Swadeshi movement calling for the boycott of British goods and institutions caused a stir in wide areas of the country.Footnote 17 According to the leading Indian intellectual Benoy Kumar Sarkar, 1905 was hence the year in which a new age had begun, the year in which ‘Young India announced itself born’.Footnote 18 Subsequently, violent attempts at overthrowing British rule were undertaken by some of the champions of the ‘Young India’ idea and the British-Indian government reacted with the hard hand of repression.Footnote 19 In the wake of these turbulent events many of the more radical-minded among the Indian nationalists decided to leave the country and pursue their political work in exile where they could operate in comparative liberty. In addition to the mostly English-educated Indians coming from the milieu of the extremist faction of the Indian National Congress, there were religious missionaries from several of the many Hindu, or Sikh reform movements or Muslims inspired by pan-Islamic agitation. In some cases, their quick integration into various host societies was facilitated by the presence of pioneering Indian political émigrés, some of whom had left their home country already before the events of 1905 and prepared the ground for the influx of a growing tide of dissidents after 1907. In the United States, for instance, religio-cultural activities of two Swamis paved the way for the political activities of later immigrants from India.Footnote 20 On the other side of the pond, a few well-to-do Indian nationalists had settled in Europe in the 1890s and early 1900s in search of allies for their cause. Their residences became nodal points in the transnational movements of the Indian revolutionary diaspora and important hubs of communication. It was here that newly arrived Indian dissidents would first meet their fellow countrymen, funds would be distributed and contacts with the networks of sympathisers from various backgrounds would be established.
Interfaces and interpreters: ‘India Houses’ and revolutionary networkers on three continents
London: the den of the British lion
Paradoxically, the earliest and arguably the most important base of radical anti-imperial nationalism was situated right in the heart of the empire. The first so-called ‘India House’ was founded by Shyamji Krishnavarma (1857–1930) in London in 1905.Footnote 21 It was to become a template for several similar institutions in other corners of the world that were modelled in its image. Krishnavarma is a pivotal figure in the set-up of a transnational anti-imperialist network. His career is particularly fascinating since he had turned from a collaborator with the imperial establishment into an ardent fighter against British imperialism in India and elsewhere. In the early 1880s, he spent four years in Oxford where he was not only the first Indian to receive an MA degree, but also worked as lecturer teaching Sanskrit and Gujarati to future members of the Indian Civil Service.Footnote 22 Partly due to personal disillusionment with British rule during his postings as minister in several of the formally independent princely states in India, he decided to move to London in 1896 and devote his energy and his considerable personal fortune to the cause of India’s home rule.Footnote 23
After having rather discreetly built up contacts with English, Irish and international sympathisers with the Indian cause, Krishnavarma used the atmosphere of revolutionary enthusiasm prevailing in 1905 to enter active politics. In close co-operation with the British radical socialist Henry Mayers Hyndman (1842–1921), he took three steps to promote his radical vision of India’s political future. The same pattern was later reproduced in other settings. The founding of an Indian Home Rule Society in January with the object to ‘secure Home Rule for India, and to carry on a genuine Indian propaganda in this country by all practicable means’Footnote 24 was the first of these measures. The second consisted in the publication of a journal. Krishnavarma launched a monthly called The Indian Sociologist,Footnote 25 which was going to be the most important mouthpiece of the Indian revolutionaries in the diaspora until it was gradually replaced after the first publication of the famous Ghadar in 1913.Footnote 26The Indian Sociologist was distributed not only to India but also to virtually every place on earth where there was an Indian diaspora.Footnote 27 The title of the paper is somewhat misleading, as the articles carried almost exclusively straightforward political messages and hardly ever contained sociological reflections of scholarly interest. Nonetheless, there were countless references to Herbert Spencer, the father of sociology in Britain and the godfather of Krishnavarma’s anti-imperialist ideology.Footnote 28 Already the motto reproduced on the paper’s masthead gives clear hints as to the appeal of Spencer’s teachings for the Indian revolutionaries: ‘Resistance to aggression is not simply justifiable but imperative. Non-resistance hurts both altruism and egoism.’ The discovery and skilful appropriation of British voices that were critical of England’s imperial enterprise remained one of the favourite strategies of Krishnavarma and his disciples.Footnote 29
In the first issue of The Indian Sociologist, the Oxford graduate made it clear that the paper was not merely addressed to Indians abroad and at home but had the not less important task ‘to enlighten the British public with regard to the grievances, demands and aspirations of the people of India and its unrepresented millions’.Footnote 30 Quite boldly, he presented himself as the ‘genuine Indian interpreter’Footnote 31 in the United Kingdom, authoritative enough to represent Indian interests abroad, even if his own radical position was rather contested in the wider national movement still dominated by moderates.
Krishnavarma’s third move specifically targeted the South Asian student community in the UK and reflected his conviction that Indian independence could only be achieved under the leadership of a small intelligentsia educated abroad:
It is painful to observe that the funds provided by Indians are wasted on delegates of the Indian National Congress in England, on the British Committee of the Congress […], and such other fads which do more harm than good […]. If the money so squandered were spent on the education of promising young Indians on independent lines in Europe, America, or Japan, we feel sure that the emancipation of India would be easily achieved at no distant date.Footnote 32
With a view to attracting students to the national movement, the impending opening of a hostel for Indian students was announced in the pages of the The Indian Sociologist.Footnote 33 Krishnavarma had rented a huge building in Highgate, North London, which was to serve as a hostel and meeting point for Indian students in the capital. The house was eventually opened in July 1905. The provision of cheap accommodation for up to twenty-four studentsFootnote 34 was combined with a package of travelling fellowships for gifted Indian graduates. Up to five candidates were elected each year. A precondition for receiving the stipend was not only the award of an excellent degree by an Indian university; in true Swadeshi spirit, the candidates had to declare additionally that they were never going to work for or collaborate with the colonial bureaucracy in India.Footnote 35 The most famous beneficiary of this scheme was V. D. Savarkar (1883–1966), best known as the father of Hindutva-nationalism, who arrived in 1906 and had to leave the country following the assassination of a British official by an Indian student resident at ‘India House’ in 1909.Footnote 36
The ‘India House’ soon came to be regarded by the British intelligence services as a ‘sinister and evil’Footnote 37 haunt of sedition and was put under close surveillance, not least because its importance far transcended the narrow circle of Indians in academia. Apart from the fellows, a number of illustrious leaders from India showed up as short-term visitors. The list of guest reads like a ‘who’s who in Indian nationalism’: M. K. Gandhi, Lala Lajpat Rai, Har Dayal, Asaf Ali and others all found their way to Highgate. The networking activities were not restricted to Indians alone. Krishnavarma made it a point that his guests were also introduced to his local friends and allies. Lala Lajpat Rai, for instance, recalls in his autobiographical writings that he put him in touch with various British critics of the Empire such as Henry Hyndman and other radical socialists as well as with leaders of the Irish freedom movement.Footnote 38
Moreover, London was a focal point from which to forge alliances with other anti-colonial movements, too. Thus in 1906, Shyamji Krishnavarma attended a reception hosted by the Pan-Islamic Society at a London restaurant in honour of the Egyptian Nationalist Mustapha Kamil Pasha (1874–1908) and declared his solidarity with the people of Egypt in their attempt to throw off the British yoke.Footnote 39 To foster mutual co-operation, an Indo-Egyptian Club was founded three years later by some of the ‘political missionaries’ operating from ‘India House’.Footnote 40 But the interest in other anti-imperial movements did not stop at the level of mutual declarations of sympathy. Two members of the ‘India House’ circle left London for Morocco in January 1909 to join the Rif-Rebellion led by Abd al-Karim.Footnote 41 Part of their motivation certainly was the intention to provide an example for international anti-imperialist solidarity, but they were also lured by the opportunity to get acquainted with the practice of guerilla warfare.Footnote 42
In the last years of the first decade of the twentieth century, London’s time as the most important hub of diasporic revolutionary activities was drawing to a close. Due to the tightening of security surveillance by the British authorities in the wake of the assassination of a British official referred to earlier, many of the key figures of the revolutionary movement decided to leave the city. Krishnavarma shifted his headquarters to Paris as early as 1908. Many others followed suit in the subsequent years. Thus, Indian nationalist activities in the heart of the empire had virtually come to a standstill by the end of 1911.Footnote 43 Meanwhile other important nodal points had emerged in various corners of the world. The cases of Paris and San Francisco have already received some scholarly attention, but New York and Tokyo were also important centres of Indian revolutionary networking and propaganda, although this fact is only scarcely reflected in the existing literature. Let us have a look at the ‘Big Apple’ first.
New York: Indo-Irish alliances in the ‘home of the free’
As has already been observed, it was Swami Vivekananda who played a pioneering role and had first roused the American interest in Hinduism and Indian affairs more generally through his speeches at the World Parliament of Religions in 1893.Footnote 44 Two years later, the Swami established the Vedanta Society in New York. This institution – according to a British secret report, ‘a great success, principally with the ladies of the richer class of Americans’Footnote 45 – was run by Swami Abhedananda,Footnote 46 who was considered to be a ‘seditionist’ by the British.Footnote 47
However, it was only from 1906 onwards, that co-ordinated political action began to take shape. This was unquestionably facilitated by the fact that the erstwhile minuscule number of Indian students in the city was growing fast, but although the critical mass necessary to start serious political work was reached by that time, the development was chiefly the result of the ‘diasporic conspiratorial work’Footnote 48 of the leaders of the ‘India House’ in London. The United States was attractive as an operational base for the Krishnavarma group because of its liberal press laws. Thus, The Indian Sociologist and other seditious pamphlets could not only be circulated freely in North AmericaFootnote 49 but also shipped to other parts of the world. Moreover, as we have seen, Krishnavarma had established close contacts with the Irish Republican movement, and this movement was particularly strong and dynamic in America.
Perhaps the most spectacular proof of both the possibilities for propaganda work in the States and the potential of a united Indo-Irish front was the transcontinental co-operation between Krishnavarma’s Indian Sociologist and the Irish nationalist weekly the Gaelic American, published in New York since 1903. From 1906 onwards, selected articles from The Indian Sociologist were reprinted in the Irish nationalists’ mouthpiece and vice versa.Footnote 50 Apart from the reprint of borrowed articles, both papers were full of mutual declarations of sympathy. A writer in the Gaelic American even went so far as to openly reassure potential Indian readers that ‘should the Indian people at any time in the near future resort to what are spoken of as “Russian methods” in self-defence, we shall not be among those to blame them for it.’Footnote 51 As a result of such frank statements in favour of targeted terrorist attacks, both papers were proscribed in British India from September 1907 onwards.Footnote 52
Two Americans of Irish origin connected with the Gaelic American became noteworthy for their role in the founding of the first Indian revolutionary associations on American soil and in the opening of the ‘India House’ in New York. Usually, the Pan Aryan Association is credited with having been the first institutional manifestation of this Indo-Irish alliance. It was clearly modelled on the first Indian Home Rule Society in London and founded in September 1906 as a result of the joint efforts of a small Indo-Irish group under the leadership of S. L. Joshi, Maulana Barakatullah and George Freeman (i.e. George Fitzgerald). Barakatullah forms the link to the London group since he had been in close contact with Krishnavarma while studying in England.Footnote 53 Moreover, he was also active in the pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist networks; and in this connection we will meet him again when exploring Indian political activities in Tokyo. Freeman, on the other hand, was a leading member of the Clan na Gael, an Irish republican organization in America, and sometime editor of the Gaelic American.Footnote 54
Just how close the entanglement was between Krishnavarma’s mother society and the new offshoot on the American East coast, can already be guessed from the extensive coverage of the inaugural speeches in the pages of The Indian Sociologist.Footnote 55 This becomes even more obvious if one considers that Madame CamaFootnote 56 – one of Krishnavarma’s closest confidantes and political associates in Europe – was invited to give a series of lectures in the United States under the auspices of the newly founded association.Footnote 57
The second major step undertaken by the pro-India lobby in New York was the establishment of an ‘India House’ as a residence and rallying point for Indian students. An exact copy of the London original, the ‘India House’ in Manhattan was more or less the brainchild of one single person, the wealthy lawyer Myron H. Phelps,Footnote 58 who was also of Irish descent and whose interest in the Indian cause had been roused by a meeting with Swami Vivekananda.Footnote 59 He had announced the opening of the ‘India House’ in the last of eight open ‘Letters to the Indian People’, published in the Gaelic American in the latter half of 1907. In co-operation with the Pan Aryan Association, he eventually inaugurated the institution in January 1908. Not surprisingly, Phelps was also in communication with Krishnavarma and a regular reader of The Indian Sociologist.
Thus, even if the scale of activity and the number of the actors involved could certainly not be compared to London or Paris, the intensity of Indian nationalist agitation in New York was definitely on the rise by 1908 and the co-operation with Irish republicans continued ever more intensely. The growing importance of New York as a platform for anti-imperialist agitation is also reflected in the fact that Free Hindusthan, the first revolutionary journal published in North America, moved from Vancouver and Seattle to this East Coast metropolis.Footnote 60 The Free Hindusthan, described by an English police officer as ‘an imitation of The Indian Sociologist in general get up and also in style’Footnote 61 was launched by Taraknath Das, a Bengali who had previously been active in the terrorist circles of Calcutta and later became a key figure in the so-called ‘Hindu–German conspiracy’ during the war. A British secret report observed that he collaborated closely with George Freeman for two years. Until Free Hindusthan was eventually proscribed in 1910, due to British diplomatic intervention, it was Freeman who supervised the publication of the paper from the office of the Gaelic American.Footnote 62
Similar to developments in London, however, the decline of New York as a hub for revolutionaries began after 1910, when the centre of activities increasingly shifted to the Bay area of San Francisco. With the continuing concentration of the Indian Community on the West Coast and the arrival of the charismatic Har Dayal, who eventually managed to bridge the gap between the intellectual agitators and the majority of Punjabi labour migrants, the small intellectual circles in New York had become marginalized. The story of Har Dayal’s involvement in the Ghadar movement, however, has quite often been told elsewhere,Footnote 63 and we rather direct our attention across the Pacific to the third metropolis that hosted an ‘India House’: Tokyo.
Tokyo: symbol of Asian modernity
The invigorating effect of the Japanese triumph of 1905 on Indian radical nationalism had not gone unnoticed in British India. For many educated Indians, Japan suddenly replaced the Western world as a reference point for successful modernization. It embodied the potential of a different, indeed Asian, modernity.Footnote 64 The Indian press speculated about the establishment of an ‘Asiatic federation’ under Japanese leadershipFootnote 65 and prominent Indian nationalists like Lala Lajpat Rai pushed the Asianist argument further by invoking the ‘fundamental unity between India, China and Japan’ to fight back against ‘Western influences’.Footnote 66 Almost immediately after the Japanese victory at Port Arthur, Viceroy Lord Curzon warned that Indian students in Japan were ‘likely to be influenced with sentiments tending towards discontent and even disloyalty’.Footnote 67 The procedure of applying for a student visa was considerably complicated by the British Indian bureaucracy in subsequent years. Nonetheless, as already noted, a small but constantly growing number of Indian students found their way to Japan. Some of them actively tried to spread the gospel of Indian nationalism not only in their host society by writing articles in Japanese newspapers,Footnote 68 but also among fellow students from other Asian countries. In April 1907,Footnote 69 for instance, Tokyo’s Indian student community invited Chinese activists as well as prominent Japanese politicians to celebrate the Shivaji-Festival. This tradition had been invented by the die-hard extremist B. G. Tilak in the 1890s to fuel nationalistic sentiment.Footnote 70 The appearance of top-ranking Japanese politicians like the former prime minister Count Okuma (who allegedly turned the event into a ‘Pan-Asiatic demonstration’Footnote 71) at the gathering caused diplomatic turbulence. The Government of India sent a strong protest note, reminding the Japanese leadership that, after all, Japan and Britain had signed a treaty of alliance in which they recognized their respective interests in Asia.Footnote 72 Given the diplomatic delicacy of the situation, the official Japanese position was understandably more reserved in subsequent years.
Members of other Asian minorities living in Tokyo were more receptive than the Japanese majority. Shortly after the Shivaji commemoration meeting, Indian and Chinese activists founded an Asian Solidarity Society designed to promote ‘mutual assistance among any and all people who were engaged in struggles for national and cultural independence in Asia’.Footnote 73 Interestingly, the Indian members seem to have been in close contact with Krishnavarma. The latter was well aware of the strategic possibilities Tokyo had to offer. Nonetheless, he had been reluctant to invest financial and human resources for building up another revolutionary hub in the Japanese capital because of the political alliance between Japan and the British Empire. Furthermore, what he found lacking in Japan were leaders capable of channelling the patriotic zeal of the Indian student population into sustained political work. Eventually, around the year 1907, an ‘India House’ was founded in Tokyo on the initiative of a few students and a visiting revolutionary from Bengal who left after a few months.Footnote 74 One of the residents wrote a letter to The Indian Sociologist stating that ‘We, the students staying in Japan, have at last got what we desired long. We have no Shyamaji Krishnavarma among us yet, but [his] spirit […] is not lacking in many of us.’Footnote 75
Krishnavarma was obviously flattered, and the opening of the Japanese ‘India House’ was duly celebrated in The Indian Sociologist in 1907.Footnote 76 In spite of initial difficulties the new institution made good progress. By 1908, no fewer than sixteen students from all parts of India and even from Ceylon lived in the ‘India House’. One of the students proudly wrote to Krishnavarma boasting that the success of peacefully living together in the microcosm of the ‘India House’ for people of such diverse linguistic, ethnic, religious and caste backgrounds demonstrated India’s capability for future self-government.Footnote 77 The profile of the ‘India House’ as a laboratory for the future was apparently strengthened by the relative isolation of the Indian students among their Japanese hosts. Plans to build a broad base for Indian nationalism on the grounds of common pan-Asianist values continued to be difficult to realize. Moreover, the belief in the existence of such ideals had been considerably shaken among the Indian intellectuals in Tokyo and at home by Japan’s imperialist policy in Korea.Footnote 78
The movement only gained new momentum with the arrival of Maulavi Barakatullah, who was ordered to Tokyo by Krishnavarma and Freeman in 1909, after the revolutionary centre in New York began losing importance.Footnote 79 He joined the School of Foreign Languages at Tokyo University as a Professor of Urdu and threw himself immediately into revolutionary propaganda work. Right from the outset, he was responsible for the East Asian distribution of The Indian Sociologist and other revolutionary writings from Europe. In 1910 he additionally took over the publication of the Islamic Fraternity, a small English monthly financed by the Ottoman Government and pan-Islamic networks. Before long, he transformed it into an anti-British mouthpiece dealing not only with Muslim solidarity but also with issues related to the Indian freedom struggle.Footnote 80 Significantly, he invited Krishnavarma to contribute articles and the latter returned the favour by warmly recommending the new journal to the readers of The Indian Sociologist.Footnote 81
Quite remarkably for a pan-Islamist,Footnote 82 Barakatullah always tended to advocate close co-operation between Muslims and Hindus in the struggle for India’s independence. This ecumenical stance is even more outstanding given the growth of Hindu–Muslim tensions and ‘communalist’ politics in India in the wake of the Swadeshi agitation. Precisely because he was such a unique pivotal figure at the intersection of pan-Asianism, pan-Islamism and radical Indian nationalism, he was a thorn in the flesh of the British Empire. Following massive intervention by the British-Indian Government, the Japanese authorities eventually banned the Islamic Fraternity in 1912.Footnote 83 Barakatullah then published several pamphlets in Urdu that were circulated among Indian communities all over the Pacific Rim. Besides, he was much more successful than any of his predecessors in winning over some high-profile Japanese politicians for the Indian nationalist cause.Footnote 84 He befriended the influential Japanese pan-Asianist thinker Ōkawa Shūmei, who probably was behind the publication of an article by Barakatullah with the provocative title ‘Japan is my homeland’ that appeared in the journal Michi in November 1913.Footnote 85 Well aware of the danger to the British Empire implied in Barakatullah’s networking activities, the British CID followed his steps very closely; and again due to high-level British diplomatic pressure, he was denied tenure at Tokyo University. Thus he was compelled to leave the country when his five-year contract ran out in early 1914.Footnote 86
Local allies and ideological resources
Already from this brief account of the Indian revolutionary network-building over three continents, it should be obvious that local alliances were forged in a number of different directions. Likewise, ideological borrowings were made from various sides. If one looks systematically at the strategies of alliance-building and ideological mobilization, it is possible to identify certain patterns. In the remaining paragraphs I will try to shed some light on these patterns by discussing the impact of selected actors or groups who represent certain ideologies that proved useful for sustaining and strengthening the anti-imperial agenda of the small network of expatriate radical nationalists set up by Shyamji Krishnavarma.
English radical socialism
The first and arguably the most important alliance established in London was with England’s radical left, as represented by Henry Mayers Hyndman. After his conversion to Marxism he founded the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1881 and became the editor of a weekly paper, Justice, three years later. Apart from fighting for typical socialist issues like the eight-hour day, he made British imperialism the target of relentless attacks in the pages of Justice. Moreover, he was convinced that the twentieth century would belong to the Asian nationsFootnote 87 and from an early point on had developed a special interest in India.Footnote 88 Hyndman was a particularly harsh castigator of British rule in the subcontinent on the grounds of its disastrous effect on the economic situation of the Indian people. In a speech held in London in 1907, for instance, he mercilessly denounced the British colonial regime as ‘blood-sucking’:
We will neither have any part in allowing these horrors to continue, nor will we permit any repression of the people of India ‘rightly’ struggling to be free. But we will pledge ourselves to take up an attitude of stern opposition to such a policy now and henceforth. Then at last will come a period when this awful nightmare of British misrule and British blood-sucking will be ended, and India, free to work out her own social salvation, will once more be a wealthy, glorious and happy country.Footnote 89
Hyndman’s critique of imperialism was much more fundamental and outspoken than that of other socialist groups like the Fabian society or the Labour Party. Such a position was obviously easy to reconcile with the programme of the ‘India House’ group. Some examples can illuminate the multifaceted character of Hyndman’s contribution to the Indian nationalist cause: in 1905, at the opening the ‘India House’ in London, Hyndman delivered the inaugural speech, declaring provocatively to the predominantly Indian audience that ‘loyalty to Britain would mean treachery to India’.Footnote 90 Over the years, he invited Indian revolutionaries regularly to meetings of the SDF and introduced them to the platforms of international socialist conferences.Footnote 91 Last but not least he granted permission to reprint selected articles he had written on Indian affairs for Justice in The Indian Sociologist. Consequently, the mouthpiece of the Social Democrats was prohibited in India together with the Sociologist and the Gaelic American.
Irish nationalism
Students of imperial history are aware of the fact that the relationship between Ireland and India was an ambivalent one.Footnote 92 Irish actors had right from the outset been conspicuously involved in the establishment and defence of the Raj on all conceivable levels from the common foot soldier to the Viceroy.Footnote 93 Yet, Irish nationalists, from an early point on, saw parallels between the English oppression, exploitation and quasi-racial arrogance they encountered in their own country on the one hand and the nature of British rule in India on the other.Footnote 94
The attraction was mutual. While seeking inspiration for his political work during his early London years, Shyamji Krishnavarma and his disciples not only studied Italian risorgimento nationalismFootnote 95 but also the Irish Home Rule Movement and became ardent admirers. Krishnavarma consequently befriended the Irish MP O’Donnell, who was President of the Democratic League.Footnote 96 At the 1905 session of the Democratic League Krishnavarma moved a resolution for ‘Home Rule all round, Ireland first, India included’.Footnote 97 The Irish nationalist press, in turn, was quite outspoken in support of the Indo-Irish anti-imperial coalition. An article in the Irish Freedom declares it to be the duty of every patriotic Irishman to refrain from supporting the British Empire in India:
We would rather remain a nation of political serfs than become a nation of imperial parasites. Better far for Ireland never to be free than to win freedom by joining in with the pirate Empire […]. There are other ways of obtaining freedom, and one of them is by joining hands with our Indian brothers so that they and we be stronger to fight against English tyranny.Footnote 98
Even more than their fellow-countrymen resident in the United Kingdom, the zealous Irish activists who had emigrated to the US regarded Indian extremists as natural allies in their struggle against the British oppressors. The previously mentioned ‘Russian methods’ must have been particularly appealing for the Fenians in the USA who had turned to bomb-making and terrorist violence already by the 1880s.Footnote 99 Their organizational platform, the Clan na Gael, founded in 1867, was interested in the growing radicalization of the national movement in India during and after the Swadeshi phase. The objective of Clan na Gael was to secure an independent Ireland and to assist the Irish Republican Brotherhood back home in achieving this aim. To this end, the Clan’s leaders were prepared to enter into alliances with anyone willing to fight against the British.Footnote 100
The example of George ‘Freeman’ Fitzgerald, who became the most important figure in the Indo-Irish conspiracy in America, is most instructive in regard to this politics of useful alliances. He had been prominent in the Irish Land League agitation of the early 1880s and later on spent five years in Canada as a farmer. During this period he advocated the separation of Canada from Britain and became head of the Separation Party. In order to unite the Canadian movement with the Clan-na-Gael, he went to New York where he eventually made the Indian connection.
As far as it is documented in the available sources, the relationship between the experienced Irish freedom fighters and the emerging revolutionaries from India seems to have been by no means paternalistic or hierarchical. The general tone in the correspondence and in the newspaper articles dealing with the ‘Indo-Irish front’ is one of mutual respect. Thus, George Freeman was not only interested in getting Krishnavarma’s opinion on various ‘questions of European and world politics’,Footnote 101 he was also ready to be integrated into the latter’s global propaganda network. For several years, he was instrumental in smuggling revolutionary literature (most importantly The Indian Sociologist) from North America into India.Footnote 102 Moreover, he was on the payroll of the Indian network in Europe as the CID files clearly reveal.Footnote 103
Pan-Asianism
The most important ideological resource drawn upon by the revolutionary Indian expatriate community in Tokyo was pan-Asianism. It was an ambivalent ideology, since, in its original version, it was hard to combine with the revolutionary violence preached by Krishnavarma and his group. The idea that there was an underlying Asian quality, a shared mentality of the ‘oriental races’ was a running trope in Western orientalism. In Japan this idea had found some resonance by the 1880s.Footnote 104 In India this idea of Asian specificity was later picked up by various religious reformers of whom Swami Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore are just the most outstanding examples. The manifesto of this type of pan-Asianism was written by the Japanese art historian Okakura Kakuzo.Footnote 105 Convinced that all Asia was one and ‘Asiatic races form[ed] a single mighty web’,Footnote 106 Okakura, who had toured India and met both Tagore and Vivekananda in 1901/02,Footnote 107 called for the cultural and implicitly also political renaissance of the Asian countries.Footnote 108 His lofty ideals had a tremendous appeal to educated Indians. As has been pointed out several times in this article, the coincidence of the Swadeshi movement in India with the Russo-Japanese War not only strengthened the freshly discovered sentiment of Asian solidarity, but also provided it with a new twist. Japan’s military prowess and industrial achievements now seemed to be far more intriguing than the putative common spiritual heritage.Footnote 109
As has further been mentioned, the aggressively imperialist policy adopted by the Japanese soon provoked a disillusion with all-too-optimistic Asianist ideals.Footnote 110 Besides, Okakura’s sympathy for fellow-Asians was not shared by everyone in the political establishment of his country, where a sentiment of superiority towards the ‘nations in serfdom’ was widespread. Nonetheless, Indian agitators managed to find some support in Tokyo and the idiom of Asian cultural unity continued to be resorted to both by Japanese politiciansFootnote 111 and by Indian radicals who were less spiritually-minded than Tagore and Okakura.Footnote 112 Barakatullah, for instance, invited members of the Japanese elite to hear the lectures of Indian guest speakers at the ‘India House’ and declared that ‘India would regain her liberty one day through the combined assistance of China and Japan.’Footnote 113 As shown earlier, he convinced at least a certain segment within the Japanese society to share his Asianist ideals.Footnote 114
It must not be forgotten that Japan was not the only target for pan-Asianist alliances. The collaboration with Chinese students in Tokyo has already been mentioned. However, this was not the only instance of an attempt to join forces with other Asian Nationalists. As one observer later put it, ‘Camaraderies and intimacies between Young India and Young Asia […] were fostered somewhat effectively in the educational and political centres of Eur-America during this period’.Footnote 115 In 1909, The Indian Sociologist published a call for the organization of a pan-Asian Parliament in Paris as a first step towards liberating the entire continent:
There are educated Indians, Osmanlis, Egyptians, Japanese, Chinese, Arabs, Armenians, Parsees, Persians, Siamese and others to be found at Paris. A Pan-asian Parliament could be easily organised, which would coordinate the ambition and policy of an emancipated East.Footnote 116
Apparently, Shyamji Krishnavarma was following events in China with particular interest. He met Sun Yat Sen in Paris in 1910; and after the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty, he sent him a letter of congratulation stating that he wished his own ‘countrymen had one tenth of the grit and ardent love of liberty which yours have so admirably demonstrated to the whole world’.Footnote 117
Conclusion
The present article has a twofold aim. First, it has attempted to highlight an often-forgotten perspective on the Indian freedom struggle in the decade immediately preceding the outbreak of the First World War by exploring its global dimensions, or, as the rhetoric of the times had it, ‘the world forces’ that shaped it. The particular focus in this endeavour was on the strategies of network-building used by the tiny elite of Indian radicals in the diaspora. It has been shown how they established, within a few years, a well-organized and tightly knit anti-imperial web over three continents. Skilfully using the latest technology in communication, travel and mass media, the initial core group in London around Shyamji Krishnavarma, the ‘godfather’ of radical diaspora nationalism, not only managed to spread its political propaganda (centred around its journal The Indian Sociologist) all over the globe. The group also succeeded in enhancing its influence by establishing Indian revolutionary cells in North America and East Asia. As we have seen, the fact that ‘India Houses’ were founded in New York and Tokyo is significant, since this shows how the strategies and organizational structures tested in London were used as the blueprint for similar endeavours in other parts of the world. In none of the three cases did Indian revolutionaries so much as attempt to mobilize the masses of their respective host society or the Indian labour diaspora communities. Their nationalist agitation was rooted in the belief that a small, well-educated and (paradoxical as it may sound) ‘transnational-nationalist’ revolutionary elite would be sufficient to effect political change through the forging of strategic alliances, concerted lobbying and ideological borrowing from other anti-imperialist outfits. It would be a rewarding project for the future to look in greater depth into the actual contents and effects of these ideological loans from various groups normally not discussed within the context of Indian nationalism. Due to constraints of space, they could only be sketched out very briefly in this paper.
The second objective of this paper has been to provide a litmus test for the hypothesis that the First World War constituted a turning point in the relationship between colonized and colonizing peoples, and thus can be seen as the beginning of the end of the imperial world order. To be sure, this war brought about new opportunities in terms of finance, arms supply, and transmission channels to spread the anti-imperial gospel as well as prospects to build new political coalitions.Footnote 118 It is equally obvious that the atrocities on the European battlefields provided particularly powerful ammunition for anti-Western agitation.Footnote 119 However, from a South Asianist’s perspective one is led to conclude that the importance of 1914 has been overstated at the expense of another global moment, namely the year 1905, which witnessed the coincidence of the Russo-Japanese War, the Swadeshi movement and the launch of The Indian Sociologist. As the history of the rapid growth of Krishnavarma’s worldwide anti-imperial web has once more underscored, it did not take the butcheries of Verdun and Gallipoli to instil doubts about European superiority and the legitimacy of existing global power-structures into the minds of colonized elites. Nor were they required to provide the discursive resources and organizational set-up to effectively challenge the ideological justifications of those structures.
One of the crucial questions for a historian emerging from the results of the present study is the following: why did its protagonists disappear from the screen relatively quickly after the end of the war? Why did Indian nationalism take a completely different turn in the 1920s with the arrival of Gandhian mass politics? Since the period under consideration in this article ends in 1914, it cannot be answered conclusively, and a close investigation into the fate of diasporic nationalists during and after the war would be needed to make an authoritative statement on this point. However, it might be safe to assume even from the limited results of the present investigation that two factors certainly will have contributed to the decline of ‘transnational nationalism’. In the first place, the anti-imperial discourse of Krishnavarma and his group was highly elitist and hardly ever attempted to build bridges to the wider population. Even a brief perusal of The Indian Sociologist shows that the use of the language of sociology, the constant invocation of Spencer, Mazzini and other European figures, was hardly suited to win over an urban Indian shopkeeper or clerk, not to mention the bulk of the Indian population living in the countryside.
Secondly, even large parts of the educated elites would have had difficulties with the eclectic character of the group’s ideology that had already become plain in the choice of such diverse allies: Socialism, pan-Asianism, and internationalism did not really fit together well with the constant reference to cultural nationalism (using both Hindu and Muslim icons!). The diasporic lifestyle of the revolutionaries, one might further suspect, probably did not help enhance their credibility at home.
