Michael Silvestri

“The Sinn Féin of India”: Irish Nationalism and the Policing of Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal

A recent article in the Calcutta magazine Desh outlined the exploits of a revolutionary fighting for “national freedom” against the British Empire. The article related how, during wartime, this revolutionary traveled secretly to secure the aid of Britains enemies in starting a rebellion in his country. His mission failed, but this “selfless patriot” gained immortality as a nationalist hero. For an Indian—and particularly a Bengali—audience, the logical protagonist of this story would be the Bengali nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose, the former president of the Indian National Congress, assumed the leadership of the Indian National Army with the support of the Japanese imperial government during the Second World War in the hopes of freeing India from British rule. The subject of the story, however, was not Bose, but the United Irishmen leader Theobald Wolfe Tone and his efforts in 1796 to secure assistance for an Irish rebellion from the government of Revolutionary France. The article went on to narrate how Ireland had been held in the “grip of imperialism” for an even longer period of time than India and concluded that the Irish and Indian nationalist movements were linked by a history of rebellion against British rule. As the Desh article illustrates, the popular image of the relationship between Ireland and India within the British Empire has been that of two subject peoples striving for national freedom. This linkage of Irish and Indian history has had particular resonance in Bengal.

‘A Fanatical Reverence for Gandhi’: Nationalism and Police Militancy in Bengal during the Non-cooperation Movement

ABSTRACT Police militancy and strike actions featured prominently throughout the British Empire in the years after the First World War. While the demands of police for greater pay and better conditions of service were rooted in economic circumstances, police in diverse locales also forged tentative alliances with labour and trade union movements, sparking government fears of police ‘Bolshevism’. In the Indian province of Bengal, Indian police officers took a more radical stance and expressed widespread sympathy with the non-cooperation campaign of Mohandas Gandhi and its goal of swaraj or independence. Police discussed Gandhian teachings, threatened strike actions and formed the first association of non-European policemen in India, the Bengal Police Association. While ultimately the police remained loyal to the British Raj, the events in Bengal demonstrate the continuing links of colonial policemen to social, economic and political currents within the societies in which they operated, the force of nationalism in Bengal during the noncooperation movement and the strategies used by the colonial state to maintain police loyalty. An interrogation of Bengal police support for Gandhi not only complicates our portrait of the policemen who upheld the raj, but also sheds light on a significant moment in the ‘modernisation’ and professionalisation of colonial police forces and the tensions between their role in upholding colonial authority and their relationship to emerging labour and nationalist movements.

‘Paddy Does Not Mind Who the Enemy Is’: The Royal Irish Constabulary and Colonial Policing

The Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) occupied a prominent place in the British imperial imagination as a model for policing the empire. Sir Charles Jeffries of the Colonial Office observed in 1952 that ‘the really effective influence on the development of colonial police forces … was not that of the police of Great Britain, but that of the Royal Irish Constabulary’.1 In this formulation, the police forces of the British Empire, typically armed and under centralized state control, with military or quasi-military features, sought to replicate the organization, functions and ethos of the RIC. Yet historians have more recently cautioned us to be wary of sweeping generalizations regarding colonial police forces essentially based on an ‘Irish’ model, and we should be skeptical about the idea of an RIC model being transported intact to the colonial Empire.2 As Elizabeth Malcolm has observed in her study of The Irish Policeman, ‘no colonial constabulary was ever an exact replica of the RIC’.3 Indeed, the relationship between policing in the United Kingdom and its counterpart in the British Empire was neither one-way traffic exporting of metropolitan models to the colonies or of importing colonial models to Britain, but rather a process of ‘cross-fertilization’ in which policing models, technologies and personnel were shared between metropole and Empire.4

‘Lord and Master Nikkal Seyn’: The Construction of John Nicholson as a British Imperial Hero

The climax of Flora Annie Steel’s novel On the Face of the Waters, written almost 40 years after the Indian Rebellion, takes place as the British attempt to recapture the Mughal capital of Delhi from rebellious sepoys in September 1857. Steel’s fictional characters interact with real-life figures, imperial heroes who were well-known to late nineteenth-century Britons. The greatest of these heroes is a 35 year old East India Company officer named John Nicholson. Known to the sepoys as ‘Nikalseyn,’ his powers seem to verge on the superhuman. Steel writes of how the heart of one rebel soldier positively ached as he listened to the tale told in the heart of Delhi of the man whom other men worshipped—the man who took forts single-handed, and said that, given the powers of a provost-marshal, he would control a disobedient army in two days! …. he, and half the good soldiers in Delhi, were mad with themselves for having chosen the losing side, for with Nikalseyn on the Ridge, what chance had Delhi?

‘An Assertion of Liberty Incarnate’: Irish and Indian Nationalists in North America

The 1920 Saint Patrick’s Day parade in New York was noteworthy for a number of reasons. The first was the size of the crowd that watched it. The New York Times commented on ‘what appeared to be the biggest turnout since the city had a St. Patrick’s Day,’ observing that there was not an unoccupied inch of sidewalk along the line of march on Fifth Avenue. The Irish World and Industrial Liberator estimated that one million spectators watched the parade.

‘The Sinn Féin of India’: The Reception of Irish Revolutionary Nationalism in Bengal

On the evening of 18 April 1930, colonial officials in the province of Bengal in eastern India were startled to hear reports of an armed uprising in the port town of Chittagong. Over 60 young Bengali Hindu men, armed and dressed in military-style khaki uniforms, had carried out an attack on government installations there. They attacked and burned the local Police and Auxiliary Force armories, seized weapons and destroyed the local telegraph office. For several hours, until they retreated into the hills surrounding the town, the Bengali revolutionaries controlled Chittagong. Intelligence reports acknowledged the ‘careful organization and daring’ of the raiders, as well as the fact that their ‘coup’ was ‘unprecedented in the annals of terrorist crime in Bengal or any other province in India.’1

‘The Remains of Ireland’s Loneliest Martyr’: The Commemoration of the Connaught Rangers Mutiny

On 3 July 1920, the India Office received two ‘clear the line’ telegrams from the Government of India, which featured urgent reports on the behavior of two companies of British Army regiments stationed in the Punjab. The Government reported that a company of the Connaught Rangers, stationed at the Wellington barracks in Jullundur, had refused to work on 28 June as a protest against the activities of the British Army in Ireland, ‘where they consider their friends are being oppressed.’ The attitude of the men, according to the telegram, was respectful, and the soldiers had deposited their arms in one of the barracks and placed a guard in charge. They were, however, ‘obdurate in their refusal to perform any military duty.’ After hearing word of the events at Jullundur, members of the Connaught Rangers stationed at Solon similarly refused to perform any military duties. They too handed in their arms, but on the evening of 1 July, some 30 members of the company attempted to recapture them from the armory. The guard, members of the same company as the mutineers, opened fire, killing two men and wounding another. The incident effectively brought the mutiny to an end, and the Government of India was able to report that ‘the detachment has been disarmed and all is now reported quiet.’1

An ‘Irish Paladin’: John Nicholson as an Ulster and Irish Imperial Hero

On 12 April 1960, a crowd of 200 people assembled on a cold, windy, rainy afternoon at the Royal School Dungannon in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. The occasion was the rededication of a statue of one of the heroes of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, John Nicholson. Brought to Northern Ireland two years earlier, the statue had stood in Delhi for over 50 years. The honor of unveiling the statue on its new site fell to the man who had been the last viceroy of British India, Lord Louis Mountbatten. In his remarks, Mountbatten said he ‘well remembered’ the statue when it stood outside the Kashmir Gate in Delhi. He praised Northern Ireland’s prime minister, Lord Brooke-borough, for his efforts in bringing the statue to Ulster, and concluded by stating ‘he hoped the statue would serve to remind coming generations of Britain’s great connection with India—a connection of which they could always be proud.’1

‘Enemies of the Empire’? The Imperial Context of the Connaught Rangers Mutiny

At a Calcutta bookstall in 1920, an Irish soldier named Shane O’Neill meets and falls in love with a young Bengali woman named Aparajita as they peruse the Selected Poems of William Butler Yeats. During their discussion of the poem ‘September 1913,’ their talk turns from literature to political nationalism. O’Neill confesses that he is a ‘rebel at heart’ in spite of his British Army uniform: his father was a Fenian, his grandfather took part in the Young Ireland uprising of 1848, and his great-grandfather ‘was hanged for being a rebel in ninety-eight.’ He is surprised to learn from Aparajita ‘that India, too, has fought for freedom thru the centuries’: ‘Freedom for India,’ cried Shane,’ sure I haven’t heard a word about it. I didn’t know your people were thinking that way. Sure, why shouldn’t ye have freedom if ye want it?’ he went on. ‘What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If freedom is good for Ireland, it ought to be good for India. I know we want freedom in Ireland. We’ve fought for it for seven hundred years.’