Terrorism, Literature and Sedition in Colonial India

Abstract

Chapter two considers the ways in which acts of sedition and revolutionary terrorism in British colonial India were invoked by the British authorities to justify emergency measures in the Indian Penal Code. By tracing the state of emergency that India’s revolutionary terrorists were deemed to have created in the colonial imagination, the chapter assesses the extent to which Anglo-Indian fictions of terrorism and sedition, such as Edmund Candler’s Siri Ram Revolutionist (1912) reveal the violent foundations that underpin the liberal rhetoric of the civilising mission in British India. The Anglo-Indian characters in British literary representations of counterinsurgency often claim to demystify the psychological and social causes of revolutionary terrorism in colonial Bengal. However, enigmatic revolutionary figures such as the Doctor in Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s novel Pather Dabi (1926) constantly elude the gaze of the colonial authorities, providing a literary inspiration for subsequent revolutionaries and showing how sedition is a crucial rhetorical and political strategy in the struggle against colonialism and the permanent state of emergency underpinning it.