Returning Insurgency to the Archive: the Dissemination of the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’

Abstract

Abstract The recent surge of scholarly writing on seditious material in British India tends to focus on the reception and analysis of the content of proscribed publications. We still have scant knowledge of how revolutionary literature was produced and disseminated, partly because of the necessary secrecy in which this took place. Intelligence reports and revolutionary memoirs alike tend to describe the distribution of revolutionary literature in vague terms, almost invariably using the passive voice – ‘offensive pamphlets appeared’ or were simply ‘found’ in such and such a place – as though they somehow distributed themselves. In this paper, I turn my focus to the ways in which revolutionaries of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) distributed ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’ in January 1930. 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 (a four-page riposte to Gandhi’s critique of revolutionary praxis. 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 in early 1930. 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 then concludes by considering the alignment between the dissemination and impact of the revolutionary manifesto and the bomb itself.