The Spectre of Communism: Print Surveillance in the Working-Class Movement of Late Colonial Calcutta (1920–1947)

ABSTRACTThis article examines the role that Ireland and Irish people played in the geographical construction of British colonial rule in India during the nineteenth century. It argues that as an important sub-imperial centre, Ireland not only supplied the empire with key personnel, but also functioned as an important reference point for scientific practice, new legislation, and systems of government. Occupying integral roles within the information systems of the colonial state, Irish people provided much of the intellectual capital around which British rule in India was constructed. These individuals were part of nineteenth-century Irish professional personnel networks that viewed the empire as a legitimate sphere for work and as an arena in which they could prosper. Through involvement and deployment of expertise in areas such as surveying and geological research in India, Irishmen and Irish institutions were able to act decisively in the development of colonial knowledge. The relationships mapped in this article centre the Irish within the imperial web of connections and global exchange of ideas, technologies, and practices during the long nineteenth century, thereby making a contribution towards uncovering Ireland's multi-directional involvement in the British empire and reassessing the challenges that this presents to existing British, Irish, and imperial historiography.

Bengali Muslim literary culture comprises a conspicuously under-researched domain of colonial Indian history. That Muslims formed the majority of Bengal’s population by the early twentieth century has been recognized in a variety of sources, but the comprehension of this fact within the cultural and literary histories of colonial India has eluded modern historians. Late colonial Bengal saw the rise of a Muslim literary culture that included intense engagements with Hindus, Muslims of other parts of India, and Urdu linguistic and cultural references. These engagements, detailed in this article, include the rise of folklore collection, the creation of a new literary criticism, and critical engagement with pan-Indian Muslim thought in the 1930s. A visible forum for this engagement was the journal Bulbul (Nightingale), a 1930s magazine that showcased a specifically Bengali Muslim language, literature, and culture that would draw from both Hindu and Muslim elements and aim to situate Bengali Muslim writing and thought into a ‘world-making literature’. In line with recent developments in global intellectual history, this essay argues that Bengali Muslim writers and critics of the inter-war period cultivated ‘world-making’ practices that sought not to create a separate Muslim nation, but to integrate Bengali Muslim writing into a ‘world literature’.

When the nineteenth-century social reformers with their prescribed prac-tices and trenchant pulpiteering failed to revive the virility of bootlick and sycophant Bengali bābus (the genteel class), political cartoonists pompously rose to intercede in the dispute. Political cartoonists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-tury, like Prannath Datta (1840-1886), Gaganendranath Tagore (1867-1938), and Binoy Basu (1895-1959) realized that ākhꞋṛās or gymnasiums, wrestling, body-build-ing, and martial arts were inadequate to trigger a seismic rearrangement in the dis-position of the English-educated debauched and profligate bābus because the prev-alent decadence, corruption, and colonial complicity had already hindered the out-come of such social reforms in the first place. Political cartoonists in late colonial Bengal, therefore, assumed the public role of stripping the bābus of their accoutre-ments of Western modernity with the artistic deployment of satire and caricature. This lecherous, imitative, pretentious, anglophile bābu became a cultural stereotype in late colonial Bengal that allowed it to metastasize into a fecund trope of carica-ture, parody, and literary imagination.

Reviewed by: Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka, and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony by Sujit Sivasundaram Neilesh Bose Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka, and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony. By sujit sivasundaram. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 384 pp. $45.00 (cloth). Sri Lanka occupies a curious place in historiography as the island nation-state, just south of India, sits on the edges of South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Indian Ocean history. Sitting on the edges of regions that all feature their own distinctive historiographies blurs the fact that Sri Lanka holds complicated histories that display a crossroads of cultures and politics as well as a distinctive historical trajectory in the midst of many forces from elsewhere that became quickly domesticated. These forces from elsewhere include the long history of Buddhism, the long history of close political connections with southern India, the long history of Portuguese and Dutch trading settlements, and the somewhat shorter history of British company and crown rule. Independent Sri Lanka (1948–present) has inherited the politics of the public sphere, ethnicity, racial difference, and linguistic community that began in earnest during the nineteenth century. This historical context produces a challenge to write the history of Sri Lanka in a manner accessible to the nonspecialist scholar that would both enliven the sources of the Sri Lankan past and integrate those sources into broader debates about colonialism and the origins of present-day political institutions and cultural identities in Sri Lanka. Sujit Sivasundaram’s Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka, and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony promises to meet this challenge by providing a broad and analytically ambitious account of Sri Lanka’s political, cultural, and intellectual history in the period from the 1770s to the 1830s, the ascendancy of the British in Sri Lanka as well as India. Sivasundaram offers a thematic approach toward understanding the fall of the Kandy kingdom in 1815 accompanied by the rise of British power on the island as both a part of the broader history enveloping Southern Asia as well as a distinctively Sri Lankan experience. His goal is to “open up new ways of thinking about the consolidation of colonialism in South Asia” (p. 5) and to avoid dichotomies of kingdom and colonial state, indigenous and colonial, and highland and coastal in the history of Sri Lanka. Positioned as a response to the literature on the history of India’s transition into colonial rule, marked by an absolute rupture, Sivasundaram invites readers to consider terms like “recycling,” “islanding,” and “partitioning” that embody the transition to British rule from 1815 onward. Given that mainland India in 1815 was part of the East India Company and Lanka a crown colony, it was “through the colonial state that Lanka was repositioned in the ocean [End Page 222] as an island” (p. 14), so Sri Lanka was “islanded” and “partitioned” through a complex process that, unlike India’s 1947 partition, started at the beginning of British rule, not at the end of it. Furthermore, the process by which this occurred was due not only to British power, ideas, or agency, but, through British redefinition of “preexisting,” to Sri Lankan patterns of rule. As many readers of this book will be unable to assess Sivasundaram’s sources and Sri Lankan historiography through specialist lenses, this review will examine the book’s thematic usage of “islanding” and “partitioning” as well as discuss the strengths and challenges of this approach. Islanded’s introduction ends with a vignette about the travels along the road between Colombo (the seat of British power from 1815, on the southwestern coast) to Kandy, in the center of the island and the seat of the Kandyan kingdom. On this road in 1825, Governor Barnes accompanied a bishop, Rev. Heber from Calcutta, and the bishop’s wife on a journey to Colombo. Along the way, they encountered elaborately dressed Sri Lankan elites on the way to Kandy, who exchanged pleasantries with the traveling British procession. The pleasantries demonstrate for Sivasundaram how “it is striking that both British colonizers and Kandyan elites could use the new road like this, as a site for procession” (p. 26), and sets the stage for how...

This article tries to reconstruct the world of the property-owning, mortgage-holding and money-lending women in late colonial Bengal and especially in Calcutta, the commercial capital of British India until the First World War. It argues that as all poor women occupying the urban space were not either sex workers or domestic servants, similarly all middle-class women in colonial Calcutta were not dependent housewives, teachers and doctors. At least a section of them engaged in other gainful economic activities. However, existing scholarship sheds very little light on those women who chose other means of survival than the bhadramahila: those who bought and sold houses, lent money for interest, acquired mortgages, speculated in jute trade and even managed indigenous banking business. Evidence of court records suggests that they, along with the lady teacher, the lady doctor, the midwife and the social worker or later members of political organisations, could be found in considerable numbers in late colonial Calcutta. Due to the enactment of stringent laws to control moneylending, on the one hand, and the commercial decline of Calcutta, on the other hand, these women were possibly driven out of the shrinking market of the 1940s and 1950s.

This paper presents an analysis of how historical transitions occurred, emphasising human actions and their interactions with the natural world, geography, climate, and the planet Earth. Anthropogenic actions have influenced changes in ecology and the environment throughout history. This impact intensified since the Industrial Revolution in England during the nineteenth century, spreading across the globe through the colonial and imperial pursuits of Western European nations. The paper adopts a methodological framework for understanding how historical transitions unfolded within the realm of political ecology in the Global South, drawing examples from colonial India under British rule. British colonial rule and its politically and economically driven ideologies drastically affected India’s natural environment, including its flora and fauna. This led to a reduction in ecological biodiversity from the latter part of the nineteenth century until the end of their rule in 1947. By employing transition theory as the primary method of historical investigation, this study aims to illustrate how the colonial state and its ideologues and officials influenced the Indian environment and society and how the transition framework can inform significant ecological changes in the Indian subcontinent during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Unions, Strikes, Shaw (Unions, Strikes, Shaw: “The Capitalism of the Proletariat.”)

The paper attempts to understand ways in which gender and racially defined communal ideologies worked simultaneously to produce Muslim women in colonial Bengal as invisible within nationalist historiography. It argues that the negative representations of Muslim women underpinned the construction of other identity categories in colonial Bengal, and highlights the participation of Hindu/Brahmo women writers in this process.

This research paper provides a comprehensive examination of the anti-British uprisings among peasants and the role played by tribes during British rule in India. By delving into the political and socio-economic dimensions of tribal communities, it seeks to unravel the underlying causes of peasant unrest and the challenges faced by tribes in the colonial era. Through meticulous analysis of historical events, socio-economic factors, and tribal dynamics, the paper illuminates the intricate interplay between colonial oppression and indigenous resistance. The investigation into the causes of peasant uprisings during British rule unveils a complex web of factors, including economic exploitation, agrarian distress, cultural marginalization, and political disenfranchisement. Simultaneously, the exploration of tribal empowerment issues underscores the disparities in access to resources, education, healthcare, and basic rights faced by tribal communities. By examining historical narratives and contemporary realities, the paper highlights the enduring legacy of colonialism on the socio-economic fabric of Indian society. Overall, the research underscores the importance of contextualizing peasant movements and tribal empowerment within the broader historical and socio-economic context of colonial India. By elucidating the challenges and struggles faced by peasants and tribes, the paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the complexities of anti-colonial resistance and indigenous resilience. Moreover, it underscores the imperative of addressing historical injustices and socio-economic disparities to promote inclusive development and social justice in contemporary India. KEYWORDS: Peasant uprisings, Tribes, British rule, Socio-economic aspects, Political dynamics, Tribal empowerment, Colonial India.

This article deploys children's bodies as an analytical lens to examine the political significance of knowledge production and childhood in British colonial projects in late colonial India. Scholars have theorised the ‘body as method’ of history to argue that bodies are imbued with meanings, become stakes in power struggles and are sites of knowledge and power. I examine this theme by investigating a key locus of knowledge production for children – the colonial school and its curriculum, specifically physical education. To underline the multi‐stranded processes and loci of colonial knowledge production, I examine nationalist pedagogies of two Bengali children's magazines (Amaar Desh and Mouchak) as a form of informal schooling. I argue that the colonial state's engagement with physical education in schools stemmed from anxieties to both discipline native children's bodies, and to discourage students’ ‘seditious’ political activism. Second, I demonstrate that for Bengali educated elites, children embodied a political space for contestation and undertaking their projects of re‐masculinising the youth. These nation‐building projects placed a premium on masculinity, influenced boy cultures to imitate adult male cultures, and inscribed gender roles on the bodies of Bengali boys and girls. By doing so, these colonial encounters restructured and redefined childhood in crucial ways.

Instead of studying the histories of national or elite club teams, this article seeks to explore the social and cultural forces that shaped local sporting heroes in mid-twentieth century India. Using a prosopographic approach the article uses a case study of a single talented student-sportsman, Santimoy Pati, growing up in colonial Bengal and Princely Orissa in the closing years of the Raj to explore the reasons why young people took to sport, the nature of their sporting exploits and the ways in which their sporting activities helped to shape their social lives. Though focussed upon a single life-story, through it, this micro-historical study touches upon the broader political, social and cultural currents of the day. It also highlights that the culture of youth sport of the day was not specifically related to any particular sport but inspired the same youth to take up multiple sports. Such varied sporting interests were moreover often highly politicized and sportsmen saw their sporting activities as part of a larger nation-building process. However the precise doctrinaire form of the politics espoused by youth sportsmen could and did vary widely.

This chapter illuminates how samaj mediated the fragmentation of Indian society in vertical terms that is as a hierarchical chain where each caste/group knows its own place and has fixity, as well as in regard to peripheries or outer margins. Such mediations set the discourse on 'lower orders' in finer and nuanced contexts of multiple layers of inclusion, co-opting and situational exclusion of specific groups and categories. In late colonial Bengal, caste and class intertwined in restructuring groups and imbuing them with social status, which did not derive solely from high caste affiliation. Class, seen as social rank, paralleled and intersected with the importance deriving from inherited kula (caste) identity and status. The racial-cum-cultural divide of Aryan and non-Aryan was closely connected to the differential of caste. Tribes such as the Santhals, Mundas, Nagas and Kukis were regarded as descendants of non-Aryans, born of Dravidian stock.Keywords: Bengali samaj; colonial Bengal; low caste; lower order; Non-Aryan tribes

This paper envisages how the concept of ‘Inequality’ has been perceived by the Trade Unionists in late colonial Bengal. Informed by the ideology of Communism, these activists penned down a myriad of insightful analytical tracts, primarily in vernaculars, ranging from propaganda pamphlets to articles in the party organs. Their critique of Imperialism, and how it precipitates economic and socio-political inequalities was grafted in the ethos of class struggle. Through delineating their stark ideological differences with Gandhian mass politics, and by focusing on their intellectual endeavours concerning various structural inequalities of class, religion, caste, and gender it aims at charting out the indigenous response to the global doctrine of Communism. Often overlooked as conventional intellectuals, their literature brings to fore an alternative discourse on anti-colonialism in South Asia, overwhelmed by the theme of Nationalism. This paper is a methodological probe in doing intellectual history from below, adding to the edifice of the existing scholarship on Decolonisation, Communism, and Inequality in the Global South.

The stereotype of the ‘effeminate’ Bengali babu, much promoted by the colonial official and semi-official discourse, provoked a reaction among middle-class Bengalis to prove the falseness of this perception by promoting physical culture among Bengali youth. The circus was one arena in which physical and acrobatic feats could be displayed. So first there came akharas, and then the modern circus, in which Bengalis collaborated with, as well as challenged European practitioners. Circus thus attained an eminent position as a medium of entertainment in late colonial Bengal, which later on it ceased to hold.

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.