Durba Ghosh - Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947

Critical Perspectives on Empire is a major series of ambitious, cross-disciplinary works in the emerging field of critical imperial studies. Books in the series explore the connections, exchanges, and mediations at the heart of national and global histories, the contributions of local as well as metropolitan knowledge, and the flows of people, ideas, and identities facilitated by colonial contact. To that end, the series not only offers a space for outstanding scholars working at the intersection of several disciplines to bring to wider attention the impact of their work, it also takes a leading role in reconfiguring contemporary historical and critical knowledge, of the past and of ourselves.

A full list of titles published in the series can be found at: www.cambridge.org/cpempire

Gentlemanly Terrorists

Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 19191947

Durba Ghosh

Cornell University, New York

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Durba Ghosh 2017

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First published 2017

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For Robert, Ravi, and Lila

This book is very much a history of the present and was informed by several historical moments. I began thinking about this project in 1997, as India celebrated a half-century of independence, and profiles of former revolutionaries and terrorists appeared in all corners of the vernacular press in Kolkata, where I lived for much of that year as a PhD student. As a result of this major national anniversary, various national and regional newspapers ran pieces about Indias struggle for independence, often reprinting historical front pages from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s and profiling famous figures in the movement to rid India of British colonial rule. Bengali-language newspapers and magazines profiled Bengali freedom fighters who had been involved in some kind of political violence or militant nationalism. Some of the names that appeared in the newspapers were familiar because they were the names of Kolkata streets and monuments: Jatin Das Park and B. B. D. Bag, which stood for Benoy, Badal, and Dinesh, the assassins at the Writers Building in December 1930. English-language newspapers, on the other hand, focused on figures who were well-known nationalists, Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Chittaranjan Das, and Subhas Chandra Bose and their relatively civil and nonviolent protests against the British colonial government. This contrast provoked me to think (again) about why we write history and for whom we write. Because I had been raised and educated in the United States and had learned the history of India only in graduate school, I was struck by how little I knew of these figures and their participation in the struggle for Indias independence. I was surprised to learn that many of these men and women were staples in the textbook education offered to children in West Bengal. In Bengal, most schoolchildren know the importance of figures such as Khudiram Bose, Prafulla Chaki, Kanai Lal Dutta, Surja Sen, Ganesh Ghosh, Bina Das, Kalpana Dutta, and the others who I have written about here.

Initially, I imagined that this project would attempt to reconcile these competing narratives, between English and Bengali histories, between

My imaginary of this project was utterly transformed by the events of September 11, 2001, which changed how many of us in the United States began to think about the relationship between violent acts of terrorism and their growing centrality in national and international politics, as democratic governments confronted the challenges of maintaining civil liberties alongside widely felt anxieties about global security. As a result of the dramatic events surrounding September 11, the United States has been the architect of a growing number of extra-judicial laws to limit the rights of those who are classified as enemy non-combatants. Americas prolonged use of the detention camp at Guantanamo and the inability of successive administrations to close the camp has made Guantanamo, in the words of my late friend, Nasser Hussain, a shorthand for a larger set of formations. In the years since Guantanamo opened in late 2001, detainees have gone on hunger strike, attempted and committed suicide, petitioned for better conditions, been repatriated, and subjected to torture, all in the name of a war on terror that seems to be escalating rather than subsiding.