Interwar India Research Articles

Revolutionaries, coercive institutions and the crisis of collaboration in interwar India

Earlier generations of historians interpreted revolutionary politics of the interwar period within a paradigm of failure, on the basis that it did not bring about an immediate shift in the colonial dominance in South Asia. Following the ‘revolutionary turn’ in South Asian history, scholars have suggested that revolutionary politics needs to be read for the ways in which it shifted mainstream nationalist strategies and influenced other outcomes, both intended and unintended. This article deepens this analysis, by considering an unexplored outcome of the revolutionary politics of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA): its impact on Indians employed in British institutions, especially coercive institutions such as the police and prisons. These employees may not have resigned from their posts, and ultimately these coercive institutions remained coercive and violent at a macro level. However, based on the evidence presented here, it is clear there was a faintly discernible but important micropolitics emerging from within these institutions, which indicates that some exhibited admiration and sympathy for revolutionary prisoners, quietly and surreptitiously working to ameliorate systems of coercion and punishment, in the process undermining coercive institutions from within. Such a reading prompts a rethinking of paradigms of collaborators as colonial enablers, allowing us to see the withdrawal of cooperation with the colonial regime as a process, which becomes perceptible in the context of anticolonial movements in the late interwar period.

Deliberate Surrender? The Impact of Interwar Indian Protection

Abstract What is the role of trade policy in promoting intra-Empire trade? We address the question in the context of interwar India, whose trade policies have been accused of harming British export interests. We quantify the impact of trade policy on the value and composition of Indian imports, using novel disaggregated data on both trade policies and imports for 114 commodity categories coming from 42 countries. We find that, even though Indian protection lowered total imports, it substantially boosted imports from the United Kingdom. Despite the rising tariff barriers facing British exporters, trade diversion from other countries ensured that Indian trade policy benefited them overall.

German Lessons: Comparative Constitutionalism, States’ Rights, and Federalist Imaginaries in Interwar India

AbstractThis article reveals the hold that German history and constitutionalism had on Indian federalists in the interwar period. A range of federalists from Indian princely states and British provinces, eager to see India become a federation rather than a unitary state fashioned on the English model, looked to Imperial Germany for constitutional lessons. They saw in German history and constitutionalism a federal solution to the so-called “Indian problem,” wherein the rights of the states would be primary over those of individuals or groups. This German-inspired federal tradition, I argue, departed not only from political pluralism and association-based federalism, but also from the nationalist vision of placing individual rights over state rights. This article presents an alternative genealogy of comparative constitutional thought in India, and examines a post-national worldview that sidestepped the nation-states. By bringing a comparative approach to bear on political and constitutional histories, it escapes the national insularity that often characterizes such histories in colonial India, and places them in the comparative and global context of the interwar circulation of federalist ideas. German-inspired federal ideas of the period offer a counterpoint to corralling futuristic visions of India, and its founding, on the twin axes of anticolonial nationalism and popular sovereignty to the exclusion of state-centric ideas articulated by the princely states.

Contested "automobility": Peasants, townsfolks, and infrastructures of road transport in interwar central and western India (c. 1919-39).

Infrastructure-making in interwar India was a dynamic, multilayered process involving roads and vehicles in urban and rural sites. One of their strongest playgrounds was Bombay Presidency and the Central Provinces in central and western India. Focusing on this region in the interwar period, this paper analyzes the varied relationship between peasant households and town-centred modernizing agents in the making of road transport infrastructures. The central argument of this paper is about the persistence of bullock carts over motor cars in the region. This persistence was grounded in the specific regional environment, the effects of the 1930s economic depression, and the priorities of social classes. Pinpointing these connections, the paper highlights that "modernization" of infrastructure was not a simple, linear process of progressivist change, nor did it mean the survival of apparently "old" technologies in the modern era. Instead, the paper pays attention to conflicting social complexities, implications, and meanings of the connection between infrastructure and modernity that modernization assumptions often overlook. Here, the paper shows how technological change occurred as a result of real, material class interests pulling infrastructural technology in different directions. This was where and why arguments of road-motor lobbyists and cart advocates eventually clashed, and Gandhian social workers resisted motor transport in defense of peasant interests.

Interwar India through Bhimrao Ambedkar’s Eyes

This article is an analysis of the political thought of Bhimrao Ambedkar, anti-caste activist, author of the Indian constitution and first law minister of independent India. His personal writings are analyzed, and the origins of his ideas are situated within larger contexts- both national and international. He was representative of the increased radicalism of the Indian nationalist movement in the 1920s and 30s, but he stood apart from the mainstream of the movement on key issues. Above all, the most formative influence on his political philosophy was the fact that his experience of interwar India was mediated through his position at the lower rungs of the caste hierarchy. He brought his unique perspective to bear on some of the most pressing topics that radical nationalists were debating in the interwar period: communism and political economy, defining nationhood, and the caste system. A discussion of Ambedkar’s views on these three key subjects forms the analytical basis of this article, with an eye towards the continued relevance of his thought.

Sovereignty, Federation, and Constituent Power in Interwar India, ca. 1917–39

Abstract For nearly three decades prior to 1947 federation was the dominant and most plausible model for reforming Britain's Indian Empire. Federation offered a capacious framework for innovating upon the sovereign landscapes of empire, for imagining a wide array of nonnational futures, and for elaborating questions of rights and democracy. This essay examines official projects of federation in interwar India, efforts that culminated with the “Federation of India” envisioned by the 1935 Government of India Act. These projects sought to codify the Raj's uncodified, plural, and ambiguous imperial regime of sovereignty. As a result, the nearly six hundred “princely states” or “Indian States” had a major influence over the course of India's constitutional development. The 1935 Act inaugurated the most decisive phase in late colonial India's political and constitutional development by unleashing a competition over sovereignty in the subcontinent. It was in this context that a fully sovereign constituent assembly was adopted by the Indian National Congress as their fundamental demand. Federation played a decisive role in the development of republicanism in India.

Review essay: Alternative histories of revolutionaries in modern South Asia: context, chronology, and archives

This review essay discusses two recent monographs on revolutionaries and political violence in South Asia, Kama Maclean’s A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (2015) and Durba Ghosh’s Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919-1947 (2017). Ghosh and Maclean’s books contribute to an expanding body of scholarly work on anticolonial politics in India, a rich historiography on liberalism in the British Empire, and studies of visual culture and oral histories in modern South Asia. Specifically, Maclean’s A Revolutionary History centers on the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA) in Punjab and Delhi in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Maclean reconfigures the political terrain of India’s independence struggle and illustrates the importance of revolutionary violence in nonviolent politics through unstudied visual sources and oral histories. In turn, Ghosh’s Gentlemanly Terrorists focuses on Bengal, particularly revolutionaries in the Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar from 1919 to 1947. Complicating the history of colonial constitutionalism as a gradual expansion of rights and representation, Ghosh demonstrates how constitutional reforms that aimed to promote liberal governance in India were tied to repressive emergency legislation. This review essay addresses how Gentlemanly Terrorists and A Revolutionary History contribute to ongoing efforts to rethink both the political chronology and the wider political landscape of interwar India by incorporating revolutionaries into the story of independence. It also considers how Maclean and Ghosh creatively utilize non-state archives and vernacular sources, in conjunction with colonial records, to follow the retelling of revolutionary histories in different media.

Comrade Ryan, International Trade Unionism and White Australia: Global Communism, Trade Unionism and Empire in Interwar India

ABSTRACTThis paper considers the parallels and disconnections between leftist thought in Australia and India at a key moment in the interwar era, as the Comintern transitioned from its Second to its Third Period, eschewing the united front with nationalist and parliamentary parties. It does this by tracing the movements of the Australian communist Jack Ryan, who visited India in 1928 representing the Pan-Pacific Trade Union (PPTU), a Comintern organisation that sought to build solidarities between workers in the Asia Pacific region. Arriving in Bombay at a critical time when leftist organisation in India was on the rise, Ryan was trailed by government intelligence organisations that monitored his activities, letters and speeches. Although the formal purpose of his visit – to affiliate Indian Trade Unions with the PPTU – failed, Ryan’s journey to India had a substantial political impact. Coinciding with the interventions of a number of other foreign communists in India, it escalated attempts to legislate against the movement of political dissidents in the empire, by launching the Meerut Conspiracy Case. Back in Sydney, Ryan’s transnational movement gave him an international prominence that fired domestic communist jealousies, contributing to his expulsion from the Communist Party of Australia, in 1930. Finally, by highlighting the inability of Australian Trade Unions to form lasting solidarities across boundaries of race, Ryan’s politics revealed a substantial faultline in Australian leftist thought.

Clarified Commodities: Managing Ghee in Interwar India.

This article explores genealogies of food, taste, nutrition and questions of governance through attempts to regulate the production and sale of vanaspati ghee in interwar India. It explores the "ghee wars" of 1927-29, when Punjab Province pushed to regulate the production of ghee alternatives so as to ensure the quality of the products on offer and regulate the trade in mass-produced food commodities. The possibility of a regulatory system brought to the fore a series of questions about the role of the Raj and the power of provincial legislatures as interwar structures of governance in India took hold: what was the responsibility of the provincial government to its citizens? Could taste and desire be gauged in rational terms? Could authenticity and fraudulence be measured? Finally, could food be governed? This article uses these questions to examine the unusual debates about clarified butter, its forgeries, and the context of interwar citizenship.

Kama Maclean. A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text.

The visual turn in history has expanded the archive beyond the mass of official images that were always a part of it to include the wider world of visual materials circulating in culture more broadly. From a drawing in of heterodox familial, religious, commercial, and political images has come a widening of historians’ engagements with anthropology, art history, and media studies, and a dramatic shift in how we think with images, how we “read” them. If they are no longer to be viewed as inert evidentiary objects that merely support arguments that have been crafted largely with texts—what Carlo Ginzburg once called a “physiognomic” reading of artistic material—then how do images function differently from texts? Indeed if images are now understood to not only bear histories of their own but actually generate questions of their own, how do they allow historians to intervene in existing historiographic debates, and, perhaps most importantly, offer a different “sensibility” to the politics of the past?

Book Review: Stephen Legg, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India

Book Review: Stephen Legg, <i>Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India</i>

Legg, Stephen; Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India

Legg, Stephen; Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India

The Johnstone Affair and Anti-Communism in Interwar India

In 1928, British colonial authorities in India detained and held J.W. Johnstone, a US citizen, for nearly a month before deporting him first to Europe and then back to the USA. Johnstone’s eventual arrest and deportation became a major ‘affair’ with far-reaching implications for India, the British Empire and even the USA. In the weeks after Johnstone’s arrival, the colonial state launched an extensive and worldwide investigation into his identity and potential ties to communism. In analyzing the story of the Johnstone affair, this article highlights British colonial anxieties and preoccupations with the spread of international communism in interwar India. Moreover, this article also argues that the response to the Johnstone arrest – in India and the United States of America especially – produced a number of unintended consequences. Both the American working class movement and the Indian trade unionist movement appropriated the Johnstone affair to call for global solidarities against the oppression of British and US imperialism worldwide.

Domestic Modern: Redecorating Homes in Bombay in the 1930s

In the 1930s, upper-class residents of Bombay were bombarded with ideas and products intended to make their homes modern. Showrooms, exhibitions, advertisements, and design books all addressed a consuming public newly interested in “the art and comfort of the home.” As Abigail McGowan demonstrates in Domestic Modern: Redecorating Homes in Bombay in the 1930s, attempts to remake Indian homes were hardly new; from the late nineteenth century on, sanitary reformers, girls’ educators, and urban planners introduced new principles of home management and hygiene into domestic space. In 1930s Bombay, attention shifted from household practices to style—a distinctively modern look expressed through new architectural spaces and the latest consumer goods. Recent scholarship has explored new building styles and practices in interwar India; McGowan argues that new kinds of furnishings and decor were equally important in defining what “the modern” meant in the city in this period.

Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India by Stephen Legg

Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India, by Stephen Legg. Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2014. xi, 281 pp. $94.95 US (cloth), $25.95 US (paper). It is only fairly recently that the historiography of prostitution and the attempts at its control or eradication has moved into the interwar era, a period in which there was a distinctive shift away from regulation and segregation, largely due to the development of a wider discourse of hygiene and the role of the citizen in combating venereal diseases. Legg writes as an urban geographer with a particular interest in India, and while this work addresses theoretical debates particular to these fields, it is also extremely valuable to the historian, especially to historians of sexuality who are examining the varied roles of space. It provides useful ways of thinking about changing ideas of public space and civic life in the era of modernity and demonstrates the importance of bringing particular material sites of the urban environment into the picture. This study does not however take the very granular approach that we find in Julia Laite's Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960 (New York, 2012) or that of Catherine Lee's Policing Prostitution, 1856-1886: Deviance, Surveillance and Morality (London, 2013) on Kent. Legg is more interested in the ways in which the problem was being addressed at a variety of interconnecting levels, from the League of Nations' concern over the Traffic in Women and Children to what happened on specific streets, via a range of different government bodies, imperial, national and local, and civil organizations. While paying tribute to Philippa Levine's magisterial work, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2003), Legg registers an important proviso that Levine, and other historians, have tended to present India as a more monolithic entity than in fact it was. In particular he points out the complex, even at times incoherent, interplay between different governmental levels--transnational, imperial, national, local--further complicated by the involvement of various voluntary organizations engaged in campaigning and activism, as well as particular factors that came into play at specific sites at particular times. Legg brings a particularly useful insight into the role of sexology (itself more strongly influenced than is sometimes credited by late nineteenth century movements of moral reform as well as movements for public health) as an influence upon policy toward prostitution. This builds upon scholarship that has already gained significant recognition, regarding the influence of campaigns of moral reform (emerging from the UK protests against the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s) and a rising paradigm of preventive medicine and public and individual hygiene. …

Book Review: Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text

Book Review: Kama Maclean, <i>A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text</i>

Symbolism of Japanese tiles in interwar India

Symbolism of Japanese tiles in interwar India

Legg, Stephen. Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014.

Legg, Stephen. Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014.

Revolutionary history of interwar India: violence, image, voice and text

Focussing on the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA), A Revolutionary History delivers a fresh perspective on the ambitions, ideologies and practices of this influential organisation, formed by Chandrashekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh and inspired by transnational anti-imperial dissent. It is a new interpretation of the activities and political impact of the north Indian revolutionaries who advocated the use of political violence against the British. Kama Maclean contends that the actions of these revolutionaries had a direct impact on Congress politics and tested its policy of non- violence. In doing so she draws on visual culture studies, demonstrating the efficacy of imagery in constructing - as opposed to merely illustrating - historical narratives. Maclean analyses visual evidence alongside recently declassified government files, memoirs and interviews to elabo- rate on the complex relationships between the Congress and the HSRA, which were far less an- tagonistic than is frequently imagined.

Profiling the profiloscope: facialization of race technologies and the rise of biometric nationalism in inter-war British India

The history of race and technology in British India has avoided engaging with the way in which this played out amongst nationalists. The history of biometrics too has similarly overlooked the role of anti-colonial nationalists. The history of the now-forgotten profiloscope allows us to address both oversights. But the history of the profiloscope is more than just a history of a technological apparatus. It is also the trace of a forgotten political imaginary, viz. biometric nationalism. Biometric nationalism sought to deploy biometrics in developing a dynamically anti-essentialist and non-individualistic conception of nationhood at a time when the nation-form had come to largely monopolize mainstream of anti-colonial political discourse.