Fictions of sedition and the framing of Indian revolutionaries in colonial India

Abstract

In the context of British colonial India in the early twentieth century, legal and literary narratives of sedition worked together – often in mutually reinforcing ways – to provide an important technique of power and control. In this respect, literary and legal representations of sedition as a form of criminality can tell us much about the relationship between the law and colonial governmentality. By tracing the ways in which India’s “revolutionary terrorists” were framed and criminalized in colonial novels of counter-insurgency, this essay suggests that a critical reading of the literary prose of counter-insurgency can raise important questions about the operation of colonial stereotypes and the limitations of colonial authority in legal narratives of counter-insurgency. It concludes with a brief assessment of the way in which transportation to the Cellular Jail at the Andaman Islands was figured as a form of punishment for anti-colonial resistance, and considers the significance of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s reflections on sedition in the context of colonial India. By returning to these records and narratives of colonial law and policing, and to narratives of anti-colonial insurgency, this essay suggests that there are parallels and continuities between colonial formations of counter-insurgency in early twentieth-century British India and techniques of counter-terrorism in the colonial present.