Fictions of sedition and the framing of Indian revolutionaries in colonial India

Sedition as insurgency in F.E. Penny’s The Unlucky Mark

Just as the British colonial authorities suggested that there was a causal relationship between writing that was deemed to be seditious and the execution of acts of revolutionary terrorism, so the rhetoric of terrorism and counter-insurgency in Anglo-Indian fiction of the early twentieth century conflated acts of sedition and acts of terrorism. In F.E. Penny’s novel The Unlucky Mark (1909), the Anglo-Indian character Quinbury likens the seditious “Hindu editor” to a “mad sepoy”, a simile which establishes an explicit parallel between the sepoys of the Indian rebellion of 1857 and the violent, revolutionary actions that took place in early twentieth-century colonial Bengal:

The Hindu editor has a very inadequate sense of his responsibility. He runs amok, so to speak, and uses his weapon as a mad sepoy uses his rifle, producing disorder instead of order. The outcome of both is murder; one directly; the other indirectly. (1909: 75) ¹

To the Anglo-Indian characters in The Unlucky Mark, it is partly this indirect causal link between writing that appears to be seditious and violent acts of counter-insurgency that prevents seditious writers from being caught and prosecuted. As the character Kingsbury exclaims after reading The Flaming Torch of India, “‘It’s the most treasonable stuff I ever read […] Yet though it exudes sedition from every paragraph, there is nothing definite you can lay your finger on’” (76). What is also implicit in Kingsbury’s observation here is the perception that the existing colonial legislation is not robust enough to control and regulate the publication and dissemination of seditious writing.

This perception of the law’s inadequacy is reinforced by Kingsbury’s comment earlier in the same chapter that “if anything appears that is openly seditious, it will be advisable to put the old Act of 1818 into motion, if the Home Government don’t abolish it”. The “old Act” to which Kingsbury refers here is presumably Act III of the Bengal Regulations of 1818, the punishment for which is, as Quinbury explains, “Deportation and trial outside their own particular world” (74). ² The efficacy of such laws to proscribe the seditionists is, however, called into question by Quinbury earlier in the novel when he asserts that this “would do nothing more than manufacture martyrs, heroes and patriots, persons who are essential to the teachers of the new gospel of emancipation” (205). Quinbury’s prediction is further reinforced by a speech delivered by the Indian nationalist Dharma Govinda to a crowd in a public hall at Hosur. In this speech, Govinda quotes from the minutes of the British colonial government in India; he proceeds to argue that the “new Coercion Law is abhorrent”; and calls for the liberation of “India from alien government” (161).

To Indian nationalists such as Govinda, the challenge is to codify his public criticism of the British colonial government in India in such a way that it is not deemed to promote disaffection with the existing political order. At the end of Govinda’s speech to the crowd at Hosur, for instance, the narrator describes how “he had stated the case [for national liberation] admirably and urged the claims of congress without uttering a word that could be called seditious” (163). Yet even though Govinda is able to codify his speeches and articles in such a way that eludes the sedition laws of the colonial authority, the perlocutionary effect that his speeches and articles have on his audiences and readers would seem to promote disaffection with the existing political order. Whereas Kingsbury suggests that there is no specific evidence of sedition in Govinda’s article in The Flaming Torch, the effect of the article on the “fanatical youth” Chandraswamy suggests that the article is de facto seditious because it promotes disaffection, even if Govinda, the author of the article, did not actually intend this meaning:

the sentences […] had a very different effect upon the earnest fanatical youth who read them. Had Govinda been thinking less of himself and more of the consequences of his baneful composition, he might have seen the dangerous light that was kindled in the eye of the reader, indicating the awakening of ill-regulated passions. (84)

While Govinda considers “how he could best express” those “sentiments” enunciated by Chandraswamy “in a form suitable for The Flaming Torch, framing them in such a manner as to veil their sedition and elude the police” (85-6), he was also “flattered as he witnessed the power of his diatribe to stir the spirit” of the young Chandraswamy (85). In a similar vein, at the end of his speech to the crowd at Hosur, the narrator describes how Govinda “felt that thrill of pleasurable excitement attendant on the stirring up of a tiger”, a metaphor which likens the “extravagant and violent” expressions of the young men in response to Govinda’s speech to those of a wild animal. Yet in the published report of this speech in The Flaming Torch, Govinda “repeats in different words and with verbiose [sic] elaboration” the public statements of support for Indian home rule by liberal members of the British Parliament (200). In doing so, he manages to circumvent the British colonial state’s sedition legislation.

Penny’s description of Chandraswamy as a “fanatical youth” points to a broader anxiety about the impact of British liberal education on young Bengali students, which is recurrent in Anglo-Indian fictions of terrorism and sedition. As the narrator puts it:

Education had left these raw, rudderless youths without discipline – since the rod had been abolished by a benevolent Government from their schools; without religion – since John Stuart Mill’s and Herbert Spencer’s books, with those of their successors, had been placed unreservedly in their hands; and without occupation, since they had all sought to improve their condition and had failed to attain the particular object of their ambition. (156)

Such an anxiety about the adverse effects of the civilizing mission of a British liberal education in India is echoed in Mrs Anwyl’s observation in Irene Burn’s novel The Border Line (1916) that “it’s queer what a strong hold Shakespeare and offensive chemistry can get over the Hindu mind”, and in her wry remark that “it’s better to murder Shakespeare than throw bombs at the secretaries” (106). For Dharma Govinda in The Unlucky Mark, however, it is the impulsive, “hot-headed” character of young Indian students such as Chandraswamy that threatens to undermine the political cause of national liberation. When Chandraswamy takes it upon himself to write an article for The Flaming Torch, entitled “The Arrogance of the Feringhi”, Govinda describes his concluding call to destroy the British with “sticks and stones, with knives and bombs” as “the height of folly” because it “was sufficient to be the undoing of The Flaming Torch and sound its death knell” (281). Moreover, after Chandraswamy fails in his attempt to murder the District Officer at Cornwallis castle with a bomb, Govinda distances himself from Chandraswamy’s action, and criticizes his “ill-judged violence” and “impetuous haste”: “He, Govinda […] had not been at pains to obtain from Europe the latest recipes for the manufacture of bombs merely that this son of a donkey might throw them at his personal enemies” (325-6). And while the ending of the novel sees Chandraswamy “chewing the cud of bitterness in the Andaman islands” (349) – a sentence of “stern repression”, which the British civil servant Dereham predicts will be regarded as “a martyrdom” by “his followers” (328-9) – Quinbury’s desire to “repress the man behind” the “bomb-thrower” (328) reflects a broader concern that the intellectual and spiritual leaders of movements such as the Anushilan Samiti escape prosecution from the Indian Penal Code (Heehs, 2004: 88).

“Indian unrest” in Ethel Winifred Savi’s The Reproof of Chance and Leslie Beresford’s The Second Rising

If The Unlucky Mark lends support for the use of repressive counter-terrorism laws against revolutionary insurgents in British India, other Anglo-Indian novels seem to capitalize on the sensationalism of the radical seditionist. In Ethel Winifred Savi’s novel The Reproof of Chance (1910), the Anglo-Indian character Mrs Golding expresses concern to the colonial bureaucrat Robert Chase about the safety of the Anglo-Indian community in the face of seditious newspaper articles and “terrorist outrages”:

“Don’t pretend, sir,” she said reprovingly. “You know perfectly well that there has been a lot of mischief going on since the Partition of Bengal, and the Bengalis are getting aggressive. The Boltons and Sharps will not bring out their daughters this year on this account, and two or three people I know are sending their wives home since they have transferred to Calcutta. Mrs Playfair is in a state of nerves, and would be away immediately, only she can’t trust her gay boy to behave in her absence. This sedition in the Bengali papers and latterly this throwing of bombs all point to something serious”. (1910: 221) ³

In this passage, Mrs Golding articulates what she calls the “state of nerves” that “terrorist outrages” evoked among the Anglo-Indian community in Bengal. More specifically, this fear is displaced onto the bodies of white women, a fear that recalls the colonial fictions of Indian insurgents sexually assaulting white women which circulated in fictions of the Indian rebellion of 1857 (Sharpe, 1993). Yet for Mrs Golding, the historical event that inaugurated the “unrest” in India is not the Indian rebellion of 1857, but the “Partition of Bengal”. While Mrs Golding does not explicitly link the sedition and bomb throwing in Calcutta to the “Partition of Bengal”, she certainly implies that there is a relationship between these events, and in so doing, suggests that the so-called “terrorist outrages” were a response to Lord Curzon’s partition of the Bengali state in 1905. Such an observation is significant because it suggests that the affect of terror experienced by the Anglo-Indian community was a consequence of British imperial policy. The outcome of these events may be uncertain, as the elliptical phrase “something serious” implies, but it is this uncertainty of the future, and more specifically the future of the British in India, that Mrs Golding calls into question.

For the colonial bureaucrat Robert Chase, however, Mrs Golding’s account of the gravity of sedition and bomb throwing exaggerates “the situation” and attaches “too much importance to the boast and bravado of a section of half-educated Bengalis who are chiefly school-boys” (226). Unsurprisingly perhaps, Mrs Golding regards Chase’s attempt to reassure her as a sign of his indifference and the colonial government’s complacency regarding the “Indian unrest”. Yet Chase’s observation that Mrs Golding’s account exaggerates the situation not only denies the legitimacy of Mrs Golding’s concerns; it also identifies the importance of hyperbole in the rhetoric of terrorism. As Alex Houen has argued in Terrorism and Modern Literature (2002), one of the predominant tropes in the rhetoric of terrorism is hyperbole: a trope which “oversteps itself as a term”. In Houen’s account, hyperbole is an exemplary metaphor for terrorism because it describes the ways in which terrorism can produce material events and discursive practices that exceed a particular event of political violence (5-6). While the response of Mrs Golding and that of the Anglo-Indian community to acts of sedition in the Bengali papers and the throwing of bombs in Calcutta may be disproportionate to these events themselves, they do nonetheless anticipate the British colonial state’s subsequent introduction of emergency legislation in India to counter the future possibility of terrorist outrages. As Mrs Golding retorts, “‘Why wait till the whole of the country is disaffected before using strong measures? Prevention is better than cure in all diseases, even in cases of political epidemics such as we are threatened with’” (227).

Just as Mrs Golding’s anxiety about the safety of white women in Calcutta following the 1905 partition of Bengal echoes the colonial anxieties associated with the 1857 Indian rebellion, so Leslie Beresford’s novel The Second Rising: A Romance of India (1910) seems to articulate concerns about Britain’s colonial sovereignty in India. In the author’s prefatory note to the novel, Beresford offers the following disclaimer and explanation:

This novel has not been written with any idea of answering the question, which has of recent years appeared more than once in the Press: “Are we faced with a second Indian Mutiny?”

It depicts, however, a revolution on lines such as, I think, all Anglo-India would admit to be not only within the bounds of conception, but even of practical realisation should existing anarchical and socialistic tendencies be allowed to smoulder unrepressed among the so-called educated classes of our Hindu subjects. (Beresford, 1910: n.p.) ⁴

Like the character of Mrs Golding in Savi’s The Reproof of Chance, Leslie Beresford expresses anxieties about the possibility of a revolution in colonial India if the radical politics of the “so-called educated classes of our Hindu subjects” are not repressed by the colonial state. And while Beresford claims that her novel is not intended to answer the question frequently raised in the press about whether seditious writings and terrorist outrages in Bengal prefigure a second Indian Mutiny, the title of her novel certainly implies a connection between the “anarchical and socialistic tendencies” of the educated Hindu bhadralok classes in early twentieth-century India and the Indian rebellion of 1857.

Like The Reproof of Chance, The Second Rising displaces anxiety about the threat of violent anti-colonial insurgency to British colonial sovereignty onto the body of the white female heroine, who becomes the object of an Indian Prince’s affections. The Indian Prince uses a conspiracy planned by a group of revolutionaries, including Bepin Lal, Barendra Nath, and Ramchandra Dass, as a pretext for abducting the protagonist’s wife Muriel Barton. Lal and Dass approach the Prince to lead the revolution, but they subsequently realize that “Barton’s wife” concerns the Prince more than the successful outcome of the revolution, which “troubled him not at all” (125). By articulating the revolutionary struggle as a quest for the gratification of masculine heterosexual desire, Beresford not only rehearses a colonial stereotype of Indian male sexuality, but also questions the political commitment of the Bengali revolutionaries. Such a representation of the Indian revolutionary movement as disaggregated, self-interested, and lacking a coherent political vision is further borne out by Barton’s confrontation with an angry crowd, which the narrator likens to a “rogue elephant” (171). In response to the charge made by a spokesman for the crowd that “the Raj is no more” (172), Barton questions the crowd’s political will, and suggests that their “disobedience” is inauthentic because it has been paid for “by the breathers of sedition” (174). In spite of the efforts of the “feckless Bengali leadership” who led the “fanatical and irresponsible mob” against the British colonial government, who were intimate “with Governmental machinery”, and who were “cunning enough to take advantage of anarchical principles” (205), the narrator asserts that “the arguments of those who […] pleaded on behalf of home rule for India” fell “like a building of playing-cards blown down by a breath” (206).

Such a dismissive representation of the Indian revolutionaries’ political threat to the stability and authority of the colonial government is further reinforced by the police commissioner, who declares: “Even admitting a rising takes place, it is ten to one that the Bengali leaders will split again at the crucial moment, and the whole thing will fizzle out. They will never pull it off” (98). Despite the police commissioner’s complacency about the efficacy of Indian revolutionary plots, however, the British Indian male protagonist, George Barton, invests much time and energy in attempting to avert a conspiracy that would overthrow British colonial rule. Barton’s fear of a conspiracy is prefigured at the start of the novel in a conversation with Muriel about the continued presence of sedition in India. In a passage that reworks Edmund Burke’s distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, Muriel compares the political situation in India to a volcano upon which she doesn’t “feel safe”:

Muriel shivered involuntarily. “That is the worst of this country – the uncomfortable feeling that, although it is very beautiful and very grand on the surface, there is a volcano of brute force bubbling underneath. When I came here first, I suppose I was dazzled by the brightness and the bizarre colouring of it all. I remember that, as I landed at Bombay, my first impression was one of light-heartedness. Everybody seemed so happy and so full of life; so different from home and its fogs. But now, since I have had time to learn more of what India really is, I – don’t feel safe”. (20)

In response to Muriel’s fears about the political situation in India, George Barton initially tries to reassure her by saying that “You don’t think for a moment that we should ever allow the possibility of a return to the old order of things”, but he then adds that

you are not wrong as to your volcano. The volcano is always below us […] If we Occidentals were to continue ruling India for ever, the result would be the same — perpetual intrigue, eternal sedition under the surface. But there it must and will stop. (21)

The efficacy of the British Indian counter-insurgency campaign in The Second Rising is, however, entirely dependent upon the intelligence gathering of Munshir Khan, an informant who learns of a planned revolutionary conspiracy from a dancing girl who is jilted by one of the Bengali revolutionaries (7-8). Indeed, the narrator suggests via a series of passive constructions that Munshir Khan, or “the Khan”, as he is frequently described, is such an effective informant that information, like the “gold of the Raj”, seems to magically circulate without Munshir Khan having to do anything:

The gold of the Raj found its way into his pockets, whilst the whispers of bazaars, the gup of cities, the murmurs that underlay the dolorous intonations of the temples, were, in turn, transferred from the hearing of Munshir Khan to the irrefutable records of the Criminal Intelligence Department of the Government of India. So it came that he crossed the path of the Great Conspiracy of the East. So it came that he laid hold of the outer strands of a coil of sedition, in the disentangling of which Munshir Khan set a seal upon the work of his life. (2)

The shift from the passive sentence structures in the first two sentences to the active construction in the last sentence highlights the shift in Khan’s approach to intelligence gathering from one of “child’s play” to a more serious strategy, which is prompted by the knowledge that “the safety of the Raj lay in the palm of his hand” (3). Moreover, the narrator’s figuration of “sedition” as a “coil” is a metonym of a snake, an image of which is also inscribed in white on the red background of the book’s clothbound cover. Such a metonym is significant not only because it reinforces an Orientalist stereotype of the Indian seditionist, but also because it prefigures a scene at the end of the novel in which the Anglo-Indian character Mrs James is incarcerated in a room guarded by cobras inside the revolutionaries’ house. This follows an earlier scene in which Barton is led to believe that Mrs James has been killed by a bomb “that was thrown at night by some revolutionaries” (212) into her bungalow in Delhi. In both of these scenes, it is a fear for the safety and life of the white woman that prompts the British counter-insurgency, a fear that also equates the Indian revolutionaries with venomous snakes. Such a stereotype projects an anxiety about the maintenance of colonial sovereignty onto an Orientalist metaphor of the “Indian revolutionary terrorist”, and in doing so, effaces the violence of the colonial state that represses the struggle for Indian national independence.

The ending of Leslie Beresford’s novel The Second Rising re-asserts British colonial sovereignty in India in a scene which inverts the image of the British under siege in some fictional representations of the Indian rebellion of 1857 (Chakravarty, 2004: 133). For in this scene, it is the Indian revolutionaries who are besieged by the British colonial forces. In chapter twenty four, the “pettifogging native pressman”, and “rank revolutionary” (306-7) turned loyalist, Ramchandra Dass, “described vividly the state of siege within the walls, from which his hearers gathered that the revolutionaries were in a state of desperation bordering on madness, and that the walls would probably be defended with fanatical fury to the last” (309). Such an account is subsequently confirmed when the house is destroyed by a bomb which is detonated by one of the revolutionaries, Naryan Dass [sic]. Since it is not clear whether Dass survives the bomb blast, his wilful destruction of the house from his position on the roof could be interpreted as an act of suicide bombing, an interpretation which is consistent with Ramchandra Dass’ characterization of the revolutionaries as fanatical. Such a characterization also serves to discredit the political cause of the Indian revolutionaries, and suggests that there is no viable alternative to British colonial government in India.

Discourses of sedition and degeneracy in Henry Bruce’s The Eurasian

In contrast to The Second Rising, Henry Bruce’s novel The Eurasian (1913) is less optimistic about the ability of the British colonial government to prevent a “terrorist conspiracy” in India. Such a lack of optimism is exemplified when the district colonial officer Andrew Atkins starts to lose his stiff upper lip and becomes slightly hysterical when a young English girl briefly goes missing: “Here I am, controlling the anarchism of this district, like a tamer in a wild beast’s cage. I cannot control him any longer. He advances upon me. He has me!” (1913: 58). ⁵ Located in and around the Maratha town of Tulsipur, the novel traces the burgeoning social and political consciousness of its Anglo-Indian male protagonist, Robert Slow, against the backdrop of growing British-Indian fears about sedition and “the disrespectful behaviour of natives towards Europeans” (49). In doing so, the novel collapses the disaffection associated with the legal discourse of sedition and the racist discourse of degeneracy associated with the hybrid figure of the Eurasian.

Significantly, the novel contains oblique references to seditious activities and terrorist outrages in both Bengal and Bombay. It details, for instance, how the fictional character Narayan Wasu, a young radical intellectual, composed “several inflammatory nationalist songs in Marathi, which lived on the lips of the more disaffected portion of the populace” (147). One of these songs is the “Song of Shivaji” (193), a song that bears an uncanny resemblance to “Shivaji’s Utterances”, the poem that was reprinted in B.G. Tilak’s Marathi newspaper the Kesari. Yet in contrast to the other “good songs” that “have been made about Shivaji”, Narayan declares that his “is the best”, partly because it is “a song which the Maratha people will love”, but also because “[i]t will be forbidden by the Government” (153). For in contrast to lyrics such as “Shivaji’s Utterances”, which may have contained coded references to the British, Narayan’s Song of Shivaji boldly declares that “We loathe the leprous English race” (155).

Another significant representation of Indian revolutionaries in the novel is the reference to the Kingsbury murders, the event that forms the source of the district commissioner’s “loss of his nerve” (65). In a conversation between Cherry and Robert Slow that takes place at the site of these murders, Cherry expostulates: “To think of those poor sweet ladies, blown into the air here where we’re standing, by just such devils as your mutineer friend Narayanrao” (116). And the third-person narrator proceeds to gloss this statement by explaining how the “great hollow made by the explosion a year and a half before had been filled up with soft pounded earth” and a “shaft of polished grey ashlar” commemorating their death was laid there (117). While the novel does not go into any further detail about the circumstances of the Kingsbury murders, the representation of their death in The Eurasian recalls the infamous Alipore Bomb case in which a bomb intended for the unpopular Chief Presidency magistrate Mr Kingsford murdered two British women in a Calcutta railway car in 1908 (Aggarwal, 1995: 51-2). Moreover, the site of the Kingsbury murders is described as a “fearsome place” that strikes terror into the hearts of the Atkins children for whom Cherry is responsible, and prompts them to ask her whether “the natives are going to treat us all like that?” (Bruce, 1913: 118).

If the Kingsbury murders are the cause of the district collector and magistrate losing his nerve, it is also clear that the rise of sedition in Tulsipur is linked to the politically repressive colonial government of British India. For not only is Atkins “greatly hated in the district for being a tyrant” (88) but his fictional subordinate, Edward Vincent, the Third Assistant Collector at Tulsipur, is a strict disciplinarian, who “believed in prompt, stern methods of punishment for sedition, and even for any marked disrespect towards the members of the ruling race” (156). Indeed, it is Vincent’s brutal assault of the Indian civil servant, Narayan, with his riding whip, for provoking him with an “insolent, triumphant look” (159) following Narayan’s delivery of an inflammatory speech about Shivaji to a small crowd that strengthens Narayan’s resolve to fight against British colonial rule in India. While Vincent’s superior Hugh Rendell condemns his use of physical violence against Narayan as an outdated and ineffective form of colonial rule, it is nonetheless clear from Rendell’s dialogue with Vincent that such forms of discipline were condoned “fifty, or possibly even fifteen, years ago” (163). In this respect, Vincent’s violent actions towards Narayan mirror the violence of the colonial state, which the state attempts to efface by presenting such acts of violence as exceptional acts of individual disgrace. As Rendell puts it, “You’ve done the unforgiveable thing. You’ve given away your side. You’ve put your race in the wrong, as Jameson once did in Africa, but as hardly any white has ever done in India” (162).

In response to Vincent’s act of violence, Narayan Wasu travels to London and to Paris to meet with “ardent Indian patriots […] at work against the British Empire” (231). Reading recursively, Bruce’s representation of Narayan’s visit to London and Paris could be seen to mirror the politicization of Indian migrants by Shyamaji Krishnavarma, the Oxford graduate and editor of the radical newspaper The Indian Sociologist who ran a hostel for Indian students in Highgate, North London, which was called India House. For it was from India House that one of the students, Madan Lal Dhingra, went on to assassinate Colonel Sir William Curzon Wiley, the political aide-de-camp to the secretary of state for India at the Imperial Institute in London in July 1909 (Tickell, 2003: 73-82). Yet rather than assassinating a leading colonial bureaucrat, Bruce’s terrorist anti-hero Narayan plots a spectacular terrorist outrage on board an ocean liner bound for Bombay. In the following passage from chapter twenty-five of The Eurasian – titled “An Explosion at Sea” – this outrage is described in detail through the use of free indirect discourse:

An entire Eastward-bound steamer, with hundreds of public servants, of the daughters and children of England upon it, blown to nothingness in the cause of India! This had not happened before: this should happen. Not in mid-ocean, either, with not a witness of the event. At the gates of India, as the ship entered Bombay harbour! It should be a spectacle for Gods and men, something to shake the pillars of English rule! (255)

The short fragmentary statements and the repetition of exclamation marks in this passage suggest that these are the words of Narayan Wasu. Yet the narrator’s refusal to explicitly distance herself from Narayan’s thoughts as they are represented here encourages readers to identify with his plot to destroy the steamer. Although the ship’s steward, Henry Smithson, overpowers Wasu and ultimately prevents him from carrying out this plot (253), Bruce’s fictional representation of a foiled plot to destroy an ocean liner bound for India is significant in that ocean liners were regarded as “flagships of empire” in the British imperial imagination (Harcourt, 2006). For this reason Bruce’s terrorist fiction of a spectacular plot to destroy an ocean steamer “at the gates of India” poses a threat to the image of British colonial authority in India, as well as rehearsing colonial stereotypes of the “Indian revolutionary terrorist”.

Conclusion

Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee has suggested that the central importance of the juridical to the formation of empire has a long history, which stretches from the days of the British Raj to the “war on terror”. Writing in 2003, Mukherjee asserts:

Over the last decade US sanctions and the war on Iraq, its future plans for Iran and North Korea, the US-led UN war against Serbia and the subsequent trial of Milosovic, and the so-called “war on terror” have all been performed through a language where the ethics for such actions is manufactured through concepts of crime and policing. (Mukherjee, 2003: 1)

One significant contemporary instance of this connection between empire, criminality, and the juridical can be found in the figure of the enemy or “unlawful” combatant that was produced by the US departments of Defense and Justice, and the State department during the war on terror. This designation of prisoners as unlawful combatants served to place prisoners taken during the war in Afghanistan beyond the protection of the normal rule of law, and to detain these enemy combatants indefinitely in a space outside the law. This term, as the American legal scholar Karen J. Greenburg explains, “mixes confusingly several legal and military concepts”. “What those who adopted it were searching for was a term that could indicate prisoners in the war on terror who were not conventional prisoners of war. […] In creating this nebulous class, the Bush administration exploited a lack of clarity in international law”, which allowed them to conclude that members of al Qaeda and the Taliban militia are not covered by the laws of armed conflict (2008: x).

The Bush administration’s framing of Muslims captured in Afghanistan as “unlawful enemy combatants” is a powerful example of the way in which a state exercises its sovereign power over a territory and a people through a quasi-legal discourse of criminality. Indeed for commentators such as Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Julian Reid, and Derek Gregory, the indefinite detention of unlawful enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay is a compelling example of the limits of legal jurisdiction and the violence of state sovereignty. Yet such formations of sovereignty are hardly unprecedented, and can be linked to a longer history of colonial formations of sovereign power and violence. As Amy Kaplan has argued, the history of Guantánamo is haunted by “a logic of imperialism, whereby coercive state power has been routinely mobilized beyond the sovereignty of national territory and outside the rule of law” (cited in Gregory, 2009: 66). The connections between the colonial law of sedition and the framing of anti-colonial freedom fighters as “terrorists” in early twentieth-century colonial India are a significant example of this imperialist logic, which lives on in contemporary formations of sovereignty, law, and policing.

We have already seen how the denouement of F.E. Penny’s 1909 novel The Unlucky Mark suggests that deportation to the Andaman Islands was understood as a just punishment for acts of sedition and terror in the British colonial imagination. What the ending of this literary narrative of counter-insurgency also implies is that the threat of political resistance to colonial sovereignty could be countered by transportation for life across the Indian Ocean. Such a representation echoes predominant views of transportation in the discourse of colonial criminal justice. “The greatest merit of transportation in the eyes of the colonial government”, according to the historian Ujjwal Kumar Singh, “was the magnification of the “peculiar fear” and the “great terror” it inspired” (1998: 50). The practice of deporting prisoners across the Indian Ocean can be traced to Macaulay’s racist observations that there is something culturally specific about the Indian prisoners’ fear of transportation and banishment across the sea that might heighten the punitive effect of this punishment. As Macaulay put it in Appendix A of the Indian Penal Code:

It will be seen that, throughout the Code, wherever we have made an offence punishable by transportation, we have provided that the transportation shall be for life. The consideration which has chiefly determined us to retain that mode of punishment is our persuasion that it is regarded by the natives of India, particularly by those who live at a distance from the sea, with peculiar fear. The pain which is caused by punishment is unmixed evil. It is by the terror which it inspires that it produces good; and perhaps no punishment inspires such terror in proportion to the actual pain which it causes as the punishment of transportation in this country. Prolonged imprisonment may be more painful in the actual endurance; but it is not so much dreaded beforehand; nor does a sentence of imprisonment strike either the offender or the bystanders with so much horror as a sentence of exile beyond what they call the Black Water. This feeling, we believe, arises chiefly from the mystery which overhangs the fate of the transported convict. The separation resembles that which takes place at the moment of death. The criminal is taken for ever from the society of all who are acquainted with him, and conveyed by means of which the natives have but an indistinct notion, over an element which they regard with extreme awe, to a distant country of which they know nothing, from which he is never to return. (Macaulay et al., 1888: 94)

I have quoted this passage at length because I think it demonstrates some important points about the way in which the colonial state mobilized a language of terror and horror to assert its sovereignty over the body of the convicted criminal or political prisoner. By invoking a colonial stereotype of a generalized Indian society and culture as superstitious and fearful of crossing the sea, Macaulay implies that the British colonial legal system can exploit this perception of transportation across the Indian Ocean to their advantage. The lexicon of pain and violence in Macaulay’s appendix also suggests that the punishment of transportation displaces the colonial state’s recourse to direct forms of violent punishment. Instead of physical pain, it is the emotional affect of pain and horror associated with transportation and permanent separation from one’s home and community that underpins the use of transportation in the context of colonial India.

If the colonial authorities figured the Cellular Jail at the Andaman Islands as a spatial trope for the colonial state’s sovereignty over the bodies of those it deemed to be dangerous individuals, such a trope also marks a point of resistance in the fabric of colonial discourse and power – a point that has wider implications for understanding the limitations of colonial sovereignty. During his trial for sedition, Gandhi once declared that he considered it a privilege to be tried under section 124A of India’s penal code because “some of the most loved of India’s patriots have been convicted under it” (1965: 187). For Gandhi, the sedition trial provided a political platform for questioning the legitimacy of the British colonial state on moral grounds: “I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected towards a government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any previous system” (187-8). Here, Gandhi’s speech suggests that sedition is a crucial rhetorical and political strategy in the struggle against colonialism and its techniques of sovereignty. By challenging the law of the colony on moral grounds, Gandhi raises questions about what it means to be criminalized by the colonial state. In so doing, he also foregrounds the political significance of the bodies incarcerated on the Andaman Islands for sedition.

There was, in other words, a mutually reinforcing relationship between the prose of counter-insurgency and the techniques of violent counter-insurgency mobilized in colonial India. As Nasser Hussain has suggested, the “establishment of law” in colonial India not only echoes “the discourse of a civilizing mission”; it also regulates and administers violence and “the deployment of extralegal force” (2004: 68). The tension between the liberal discourse of colonialism as a civilizing mission and the deployment of extra-legal force symbolized by the Amritsar massacre is exemplified in Winston Churchill’s address to the English House of Commons of 1920, in which he argued that the massacre “is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation” (1920: 1725). By defining the Amritsar massacre as an exception, Churchill disavowed the violence and brutality of the colonial state, and the importance of emergency measures to the maintenance of colonial power and sovereignty (Bose and Lyons, 1999: 199-229). The emergency measures introduced and implemented during the early twentieth century in colonial India were part of a very particular series of discourses that were produced in response to the figures of the “Indian seditionist” and the “revolutionary terrorist”, and the threat to British colonial sovereignty that these figures were deemed to pose.

As this article has suggested, a critical reading of colonial fictions of counter- insurgency can help to illuminate the ways in which the law was used as a technique of colonial governmentality to frame sedition as the cause of violent revolutionary insurgency, and the use of emergency measures to contain such insurgency. If, as Robert J.C. Young has argued, terror “violates the smooth transition between causes and effects” (Young, 2009: 307), the discourse of counter-insurgency mobilizes an army of tropes and narratives to mask and obfuscate the violence of colonial sovereignty. By reading the literary prose of counter-insurgency against the grain, I have suggested that the framing of the seditionist and the revolutionary as dangerous individuals is an example of metalepsis, in which opposition to colonial rule is presented as the cause of repressive emergency measures rather than a revolutionary political response to a repressive and exploitative system of colonial sovereignty. This is not to suggest, however, that such legal and literary narratives of sedition are totalizing. As Gandhi’s reflections on section 124A demonstrate, the authority of legal narratives are as open to political challenge and contestation as literary narratives – an insight which should give us pause for reflection in the wake of the lawful violence associated with the “war on terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Northern Pakistan, Palestine, and Kashmir.