Savarkar (1883–1966), Sedition and Surveillance: the rule of law in a colonial situation

Abstract

In March 1910, after two years of sustained surveillance by the colonial government, a young Indian revolutionary nationalist, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966), was arrested in London and extradited to India for trial. Among the charges he faced was the curious one of sedition. Using Savarkar as the starting point – and concluding with Gandhi's own encounter with sedition – this essay argues that sedition law had a critical, and extended, life in the colonial context, allowing the use of what were seen as dangerous words to be evidence of conspiracy long after the metropole had abandoned the practice. The colonial state's response to revolutionary nationalism gave rise to two principal colonial weapons against anti-colonial nationalism (whether manifested in Savarkar's call for armed rebellion or Gandhian nonviolent noncooperation). The first weapon was surveillance, a developing technology of state control that placed an increasingly large number of young ‘revolutionaries’ under systematic monitoring. They were placed under surveillance to monitor not just what they were doing, but also what they were thinking, writing, and speaking. The second and perhaps more important weapon of the colonial state in India was sedition law. While sedition had a long history in Britain, the modern history of sedition was in fact inextricably linked to colonial rule. The history of colonial surveillance and the development of sedition law strongly suggests that the real danger posed by all nationalists, revolutionary and otherwise, lay in a violence that was far more rhetorical and symbolic than physical, for what was really at stake was the fundamental legitimacy of colonial rule.