Bengali version of Jan S. Bloch’s Modern Weapons and Modern War.[14] The book contained information on weapons, army organization, and guerrilla tactics, recommended as “the mode of fighting adopted by a nation which is weak, disarmed and oppressed by conquerors, but resolved to break the bondage of slavery.” In such a war, the author predicted that the native troops and mountain tribes would be sure to join in; irregular warfare would forge the country’s youths into heroes, leading ultimately to popular uprising on a much larger scale; and a protracted conflict could only benefit the people while wearing down the enemy.[15]
But Bartaman Rananiti also drew on the concept of karma yoga. An early chapter was a reprint of an October 1906 Yugantar article that stated, “‘War is the order of creation.’ After explaining that destruction is creation in another form”—a rather Bakuninesque sentiment—“the writer proceeds, ‘Destruction is natural and war is, therefore, also natural.’” Gangrenous body parts, he pointed out, must be removed to save the whole. Therefore “war is inevitable when oppression cannot be stopped by any other means whatsoever, when the leprosy of slavery corrupts the blood of the body of the nation and robs it of its vitality.”[16] The article went on to invoke Krishna, Rama, and Kali as exemplars of divine sanction for an avenging (and purifying) destruction—making this too a potential seed text for both anarchist- and Hindu nationalist–inflected radical rhetorics.
Significantly, in the process of a dedicated practice by which the vanguard’s hearts were to be forged and tested, while rousing and inspiring the people, conventional morality became irrelevant: for “A nation yearning for freedom . . . the power of discriminating between right and wrong is gone. Everything is sacrificed at the feet of the goddess of liberty.”[17]
The author of Mukti Kon Pathe claimed that if the revolution was being brought about for the welfare of society, then it was perfectly just to collect money from society for the purpose. Admittedly theft and dacoity are crimes because they violate the principle of the good of society. But the “political dacoit” is aiming at the social good: “so no sin but rather virtue attaches to the destruction of this small good for the sake of some higher good. Therefore if revolutionists extort money from the miserly or luxurious wealthy members of society by the application of force, their conduct is perfectly just.”[18]
Beyond levying “donations” from the rich, the final stage of the funding plan called for robbing government treasuries. “This also is justified because, from the moment the kingly power tramples upon the welfare of the subjects, the king may be regarded as a robber from whom it is perfectly right to snatch away his stolen money.” For the social bandit, apparently, property was theft, and redistribution a function of a moral economy—although in this case, the text somewhat mysteriously added, “to defray the expenses of establishing the future kingly power.”[19] Again two tendencies coexist. Which would prevail? Or would they diverge?
Thus prepared, the Maniktola Garden gang launched a series of bombings, dacoities, and assassination attempts between 1906 and 1908.[20] Harsh punitive reaction then enforced a lull in militant activities, effectively muzzling the radical press, preventing meetings, and accelerating convictions and deportations. All of this, by making open dissent so difficult within British India, simply increased clandestine activity and injected fresh blood into the radical community overseas.
London
Oxford lecturer and sometime-theosophist Shyamaji Krishnavarma had founded the Indian Home Rule Society in London a mere six months before the partition of Bengal.[21] He stated three official objectives for the organization: to secure Indian home rule (obviously), carry on propaganda in the United Kingdom for this purpose, and spread among the people of India greater knowledge of the advantages of freedom and national unity.[22] An important element of this enterprise was the notoriously “seditious . . . penny monthly”[23] the Indian Sociologist, which Krishnavarma founded and edited with the aid of long-term ally Henry Mayers Hyndman, a “high-minded English gentleman” and prominent socialist. Printed in English as “an organ of freedom, and of political, social, and religious reforms,” the periodical’s intent was “to plead the cause of India and its unrepresented millions before the Bar of Public Opinion in Great Britain and Ireland,” striving “to inculcate the great sociological truth that ‘it is impossible to join injustice and brutality abroad with justice and humanity at home.” It was also meant as a tool for developing the revolutionary student movement, on the presumption that the well-educated young rebels would likely hold prominent and influential positions on their return home.[24]
In Highgate, Krishnavarma also set up a headquarters dubbed India House to serve as a boardinghouse and training center for neophyte revolutionaries. With financial help from wealthy patriot Sardar Singh Revabhai Rana, a Paris-based pearl merchant, he made several attempts at funding fellowships to bring Indian students to London for a political awakening. Fellows were required to spend a minimum of two years in Europe or the United States studying a profession of their choice, living at a home or hostel on an allowance of sixteen shillings per week. On returning to India, each was to “solemnly declare” that he would never accept any “post, office of emoluments, or service under the British Government.”[25] Scholarship recipients began arriving in 1906, just as Swadeshi activities were picking up in Bengal.
In contrast to the fervid Swadeshi papers, the Indian Sociologist had a plain affinity with the progressive libertarian thinking of the time. Quotations from Herbert Spencer crowned the masthead: “Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man”; “Resistance to aggression is not simply justifiable but imperative. Non-resistance hurts both altruism and egoism.”[26] Eschewing links with any political party, Krishnavarma expanded on these ideas in an introduction to the first issue: “The British people . . . can never succeed in being a nation of freemen and lovers of freedom so long as they continue to send out members of the dominating classes to exercise despotisms in Britain’s name upon the various conquered races that constitute Britain’s military Empire.” Spencer, he said, had proven that “all despotisms, whether political or religious, whether of sex, caste, or of custom, may be generalized as limitations to individuality, which it is the nature of civilization to remove.”[27] Hyndman stated in the same issue that “Indians must learn to rely upon themselves alone for their political salvation, i.e., the forcible expulsion of the British rule from India and not hope for anything from the changes of governors and governments.”[28]
Every Sunday, meetings and discussions open to all Indians took place, focusing on issues of independence, and often featuring patriotic speeches, lectures, songs, and magic lantern projections of martyred resistance heroes. Scholarship winner Vinayak Damodar Savarkar read weekly excerpts from his historical work “The Indian War of Independence of 1857,” and a commemoration was held on May 10, 1907, the fiftieth anniversary of the uprising.
Meanwhile, more serious activities were unfolding in the shadows. Since August 1906, arms trafficking occurred under cover of Nitisen Dwarkadas and Gyanchand Varma’s Eastern Export and Import Company in Gray’s Inn Place.[29] In June, a Dr. Desai who was studying at London University “gave a lecture at the India House on the making of bombs, justifying their use and explaining what ingredients were required. He reportedly said, ‘When one of you is prepared to use a bomb at the risk of his life, come to me and I will give full particulars.’”[30]
By then the India House community also functioned as a recruiting ground for a more exclusive inner circle dominated by Savarkar, the Abhinava Bharat. Although one of the young militants recalled that “under [Savarkar’s] direction we were training ourselves as propagandists of revolutionary nationalism,” the special intelligence branch assigned to them described them yet again as “the anarchist gang.” The young men were also under constant surveillance from Scotland Yard. A pair of detectives followed each one, and some even grew to be on friendly terms with their escorts.[31] By spring 1908, informants were reporting that “the policy of assassinations was advocated at regular Sunday meetings.” Some of the Abhinava Bharat inner core had taken up target practice at a shooting range on Tottenham Court Road. On July 1, 1909, one of the budding sharpshooters, a student called Madan Lal Dhingra, successfully targeted William Curzon-Wyllie, aide to the secretary of state for India. Dhingra was hanged, then lauded as a revolutionary martyr