Nation in Ephemeral Literature: Dynamics of Demonstrative Resistance and Swadeshi Nationhood (1905–11)

Demonstrating Nationhood

The media deployed during this period had a source of origination; most were permanent in nature, in the sense that they did not appear and pass out of public space and vision instantaneously. ¹² As a means of broadcasting information, media maintained a steady presence in the public domain and affiliation to some source. But placards proved to be an inconsistent, untraceable to the roots of its origination. They appeared at different times in response to specific events and incidents. Issue-directed appearance of placards made it at times interventionist in nature, mediating between the people and the issue. The event of the partition of Bengal opened the floodgate following which political placards flooded various parts of Bengal.

Proliferation of surveillance reports suggests that the colonial government was conscious of the immense potential this vernacular medium held and acknowledged their power to rally the people in favour or against some event, issue or government policy. This potential to organize a demonstration or set an example arose from direct and conversational (or chalti) language of the placards. The directional role played by the placards, in the context of the partition of Bengal, engendered a stark contrast between the evilness of the colonizers and the goodness of the colonized, eventually turning into a value system of the Bengalis. The placards, thus, created a value division, compartmentalizing popular view of the events and incidents, and invoked popular emotion based on this division.

In this series, the first placard that draws our attention appeared in the Jalpaiguri district on the day the colonial government put the partition into effect in September 1905. ¹³ The authorities found the placard hung with rope on trees, illustrated with cartoons that caricatured the government, including a grotesque portrayal of the Viceroy, Lord Curzon. There was also an image of two natives, used to mouth native discontent with the partition. Describing the various ill effects of the partition, ‘indecent’ and ‘objectionable’ ¹⁴ language was applied against the perpetrator of the plan, that is, the Viceroy, and a desire to kill him was expressed. The depiction of the Viceroy, the symbolic representation of the Raj in the colony, and the humiliation heaped on him, and by extension on the Raj, brought to fore two features: (a) the natives were empowered to express their opinion freely, particularly their opinion about the Raj and (b) the violent nature of the language in the placard served as a counterpoint to the colonial construct of native effeminacy. These two features characterized the placards that appeared all over Bengal, Eastern Bengal and Assam during this period. In the course of our discussion, we will look closely at these factors and how they were reinforced in the minds of the people to understand the process of dissemination adopted by the revolutionaries of the swadeshi era, and the eventual effect it had on popular imagination.

Where and when the next placard to attract colonial attention appeared was in no way consistent with the placards that initially appeared during the swadeshi age. The next series of placards made its appearance in various districts of Eastern Bengal and Assam in 1907, almost 2 years after the appearance of the first swadeshi placard. The year was one of arson, riots and the growth of several ‘physical force parties’ ¹⁵ committing political dacoity and assassinations in various districts of Eastern Bengal and Assam. New cadre-based political groups appeared. Though claiming to be clubs or political organizations dedicated to the cultivation of a culture of physical training, the groups or Samitis as they were known, worked an underground network of resistance against the colonial government. They worked secretly because of the violent nature of their means of resistance, such as the aforementioned political dacoity and political assassinations, which they justified in their vituperative propaganda network. ¹⁶ Such acts were often conducted with prior notification to inform the masses, thereby associating a notion of invincibility with the notion of the revolutionary organizations, and their modus operandi, in the minds of the Bengalis. The intention of the announcement was to inspire awe among the people. By the bold act of displaying the placard at the post office, the authors sent out a clear message, that they were more powerful than the colonial Raj, on whose symbolic representation they dared to announce their act of dacoity. One such placard was reported to the Director of Criminal Intelligence on 21 May 1907 by the special branch of the police, which found it posted on the walls of the post office in Sherpur, in the Mymensingh district. ¹⁷ The message on the placard notified the readers (the residents of the region) that the post office would be looted that night. However, the reports do not conclusively say whether the dacoity was ultimately carried out or not. The message on the placard was nevertheless considered dangerous enough to be reported. But why was a notification that informed and alerted the policing agency about a future attack on the representations of the colonial administration branded as dangerous? The danger did not lie in the act forecasted but in the boldness with which the act was proclaimed. That it was posted in the busiest part of the town showed they wanted to draw attention; yet, it is clear the author preferred to remain anonymous. Therefore, it appears that the author of the placard wanted to draw the attention of the masses not towards any organization or committee, but wanted to highlight an action, that is, indigenous resistance against the colonial government. The placard demonstrated resistance not just in words but in deeds too, through the posting of the placard on an office building, a symbolic representation of the Raj. The British Raj sustained its royal stature in the colonies through public demonstrations. Though banking heavily upon parades, coronation ceremonies and durbars, the British also depended on public works, particularly colonial public buildings, in order to demonstrate its power. ‘Modern governmental buildings like post office and railway stations’ were built in the European architectural style as they were the ‘Raj’s European representative constructions’. ¹⁸ Hence, the post office, where the placard was posted, represented in architecture the omniscience and omnipresence of the British Raj. The posting of the placard was a direct affront to the administration.

As the forces aspiring to resist the colonial authorities flexed their muscles, motifs/images that were exclusively Hindu, began to find a place in the political language of the time. ¹⁹ Though the Hindu motifs were the means to justify the usage of the new lingo of ‘violence’ before the public, it had an adverse impact on Hindu–Muslim relations over the course of the year (1906 onwards). In his autobiography, Nirad C. Chaudhuri summarized the Hindu Bengali sentiment:

It appeared that Muslims were doing for the British the dirty work of suppressing the nationalist movement by terrorizing the Hindus in general, and we could not get at them on account of their powerful protectors. ²⁰

The feeling on the part of the Muslims was no less hostile. Organized vitriolic abuse was heaped on Hindus, particularly the zamindar class. The majority of Muslims in Eastern Bengal and Assam were peasants and easily led against the Hindu landlords. The ‘letters and articles in the vernacular press’ and the preaching of some ‘fanatical Maulvis’ ²¹ further incited ill feelings. The bad blood eventually led to communal riots. Though local in nature, restricting themselves to limited areas of Jamalpur, Mymensingh, Faridpur and other districts of the province, the riots created in their wake a general atmosphere of mistrust. Several placard-notices appeared successively in the summer of 1907 in Sitakund, in the Chittagong district, threatening ‘general loot and injury’ ²² to the Muhammadans. ²³ The placards carried the sorry burden of the misunderstood symbolic actions of both the communities. The mistrust of Hindu actions (particularly of the overtly Hindu symbolism of the radical groups) drew the Muhammadan community closer to the Raj. Though the misunderstanding between the two communities earned the colonial administration an ally, it was still a matter of concern because the revelation of the anger and hatred of the Hindu community led to the identification of a foreign ‘other’ identified with the British rule in India.

The Hindu and the Muslim community as a ‘group of people’ shared ‘something in common’. This became their ‘primary referent of identity’. The referent distinguished them ‘from members of other groups’ and enjoined them in a community. ²⁴ However, at the social level, Hindu and Muslim identities were superseded by local identity and class identity that obscured the ‘overt communal self-perception’. ²⁵ If the Western theory of identity formation, which is always referential, is used to define this social structure of Bengal, it may be surmised that the identity of the ‘locality’ and ‘class’ was also formed through the creation of common ties of ‘us’ different from the ‘other’. ²⁶ The identity of ‘locality’ and ‘class’ was forged not in reference to a few commonalties; it also drew upon references against an ‘other’. The referential category of ‘other’ included anyone who did not fit into the framework of ‘their’ sense of locality and class. Therefore, at the psychological plane of demonstration, the ‘other’ referred to in the placard was no doubt the Muslim community, but at a more social level of demonstration, the category intermeshed with outsiders/foreigners. ²⁷ Hence, the threat of ‘general loot’ ²⁸ mentioned in the placards signified an act of resistance directed not against the Muslim community alone but against all outsiders (i.e., the ‘other’). This distinction became explicit in the next series of placard-notices that appeared in Mymensingh and other parts of the province. One from September 1907 expressed disgust for those Hindus who still worshipped those ‘officials under whose brutal administration their religion had been profaned, their images broken, and their women outraged’. ²⁹ The allusion was to the Jamalpur riot, where supposedly the Muslims broke the image of a Hindu goddess. There were also rumours that the Muslim population flouted the chastity of Hindu women. But interestingly, the allusion was used not to demonstrate the villainy of the Muslim rioters, but to display the utter inefficiency of, and deliberate insularity maintained by, the colonial administration regarding this affair. In the wake of this, another placard-notice appeared in October 1907 that ‘contained an allusion to Jamalpur’. ³⁰ It alleged that the people there were ‘deceived by the blandishments and sweet words of the Feringhis’. ³¹ The second placard used a similar trope of riots to reveal the falsity of the colonial administration and of the promises made by them to resolve the grievances of the Hindus.

Overall, the placards demonstrated the presence of a peripheral ‘unorganized’ ³² resistance against all ‘outsiders’. As an economic category, ‘outsiders’ included both the Muslim population of Bengal and the British. The ire of the demonstrative resistance (that in the long run influenced the rioters) was led against these two categories of people, an ‘other’ different from the socially cohesive group of ‘us’, primarily at the social level (locality) and also at the psychological level. Such displays of resistance quickly incited the psychologically ‘other’ community and soon, a series of placards extremely anti-Hindu in tone appeared in the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, from Jamalpur for instance. These placard-notices encouraged the Muslim community to ‘put down the Hindu Swadeshi agitation’. ³³ The psychological distinction soon became a social category enforced and incited by the overtly Hindu (therefore usually anti-Muslim) symbolism of the organized sector of political demonstration, which irreversibly changed the nature of Indian politics.

At the outset of the year 1908, the placards became widespread and more radical in content. A placard-notice found posted in Tipperah on the house of the local school’s headmaster may give insight into the new political direction that the culture of demonstration and resistance took in Bengal. The weekly report of the Director of Criminal Intelligence summarized a newspaper report, dated 7 January, giving an account of an attempt to set fire to the house of the headmaster. The policing authorities failed to conclusively detect the culprits. Authorities suspected three students of the school who had been recently rusticated for assaulting Captain Anderson of the Indian Military Service. However, what was disconcerting for the policing authority of the Raj was not the act of incendiarism but the placard that was posted on the walls of the house, which stated in the clearest terms:

In consequence of being a traitor to the mother country.

Two assassinations,

Beware,

In the long run even more. ³⁴

This was a unique case of resistance followed and supported by the word of resistance. The demonstration in this case was made in the clearest language against a person of indigenous origin for penalizing the action of assault on—or resistance against—an outsider (i.e., Captain Anderson).

The author inserted multiple ideas into the placard so that it could legitimize the resistance it accompanied. In the first instance, an inversion of the meaning attached to the action occurred through an exaltation of the cause leading to it. The placard identified the country as the mother, a female body, who had to be protected from foreigners as well as traitors. ³⁵ It further stated that two such traitors to the resistance (probably referring to the assassination of Sub-Inspector Nanda Lal Bannerjee and Noren Gossain) had already been punished, and they were used as an example of the fate that awaited other traitors. The demonstration of the placard was twofold—in word and in action. It not only threatened to punish the ‘traitor’, it actually encouraged the legitimized act of serving punishment, a feat eventually achieved by setting fire to the house of the person the revolutionaries branded as a traitor. The attempt was not successful. But the demonstration in itself was potent, because it drew a sharp distinction between the ‘us’ and the ‘other’.

The project of creating the categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the mental plane of the public continued unabated. The policing authorities reported a similar incident from Khulna where incendiaries set ablaze Naldah High English School on 27 April 1908. ³⁶ The perpetrators had supposedly posted a notice threatening the arson before it occurred. The officials of the Raj surmised the refusal of the school authorities to allow the boys of their school to participate in the swadeshi movement as the reason for the crime. What was important was the appearance of another placard of the same genre, as the placard of Tippera, where word was followed by action. The demonstration was a direct challenge to the British attempt to prevent students from participating in political activities. The placard clearly proclaimed the inevitability of an inversion making the event imminent.

The cult of the bomb that came to epitomize resistance in 1908 found a platform in another immensely seditious placard-notice placed in the Kishoreganj sub-division of the Mymensingh district in the latter half of March. The placard-notice was reportedly so seditious that it found its way from the office of the local administration to the Home Department of the Government of India. ³⁷ It declared:

Brethren. Are you blind to the study of the time? Are you ever to sleep the slumber of centuries? What are you thinking? What are you puzzling your heads? Are you to slip away every opportunity that comes you? Don’t you hear that many of the whites are now engaged in the frontier with the Zakka Khels? Is this not the best opportunity for you to rise? Why are you then waiting? ³⁸

The language of the placard was the clearest incitement to rebel. It asked the public to take advantage of the British being distracted by the engagement with the Zakka Khels at the northwestern borders. Interestingly, the placard not only incited the masses to rebellion; it also informed the masses about the clash at the frontier. During this period, the colonial government was engaged in a punitive expedition against the turbulent Afridi tribes in the northwestern part of India, particularly with the Zakka Khel, a notorious Afridi clan. ³⁹ The information about the Zakka Khel rebellion was provided to demonstrate before the masses its symbolic and strategic significance. Symbolically, the rebellion of the small clan meant that the British Raj was not infallible and if the united resistance of a small clan like the Zakka Khel could concern them, then a united resistance of the Bengalis could definitely topple the Raj. Thus, it demonstrated the notion upheld by the Bengali revolutionaries that a sword is the ‘arbiter of nation’s destiny’. ⁴⁰

From a strategic point of view, the engagement of the colonial administration at the frontier meant their attention would be less towards internal administration. The authors of the placard calculated it to be the ideal time to stage a resistance and destabilize the government so that the Raj can be irreparably weakened and eliminated. The notice further elucidated on the method to be adopted to achieve this end:

Why don’t you then take it up and show your worth? What are you wanting? Rifles; they are enough in the police stations, snatch them. And money; much in Banks and Post Offices. Why then do you wait? Take the life of English male, female and children in every station and you get half the victory. Do dare war; nation is ready, march on forward. Don’t fail or falter. ⁴¹

The words were dangerous because it was a call to action. The methods of resistance that the placard talked of were two-fold the political assassination of the ‘English’ and political dacoity in the colonial outpost of communication and surveillance. It demonstrated the efficacy and the necessity of warfare and the use of brute force to rid the nation of foreigners. Above all, it made a clear distinction between the indigenous population and the foreigners.

The demonstrative resistance of the placards assumed a new dimension between March and April 1908. The target changed from the foreigners themselves to their purses, that is, the goods they imported and sold in Bengal. Agitators discarded the early practice of picketing shops selling foreign goods. Instead, a new method of curtailment was adopted in which placard-notices threatening severe actions against shops failing to observe boycott in their daily transactions, were posted in major bazaars and commercial centres of the Bengal and Eastern Bengal and Assam province. In March 1908, two placard-notices were found on a lamppost in Jhalakati. Both placards warned shopkeepers, who dealt in foreign goods, ‘unless they mended their ways their houses would be set on fire’. ⁴² They were given a deadline of 2 April to ‘remove their stock’ of foreign goods. ⁴³ In April, a similar placard-notice was found in the Kechua bazaar (Khulna district), which used the fate that befell Lohagarah bazaar as an example to threaten shopkeepers selling foreign goods. ⁴⁴ In both placards, reference was made to the incident at Lohagarah bazaar, which occurred in February, after Mukunda Das’s (the owner of a famous swadeshi jatra/folk-theatre company) party gave a performance. Soon, a notice was stuck up in the bazaar premises threatening incendiarism if any foreign articles were sold. Consequently, the bazaar was set fire to by four men from Lohagarah and the nearby localities of Joypur and Kalagachhi; these men were later booked by the District Magistrate of Jessore under section 436 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). ⁴⁵ The arson was used to intimidate shopkeepers. British sources reported the resulting uneasiness among the bazaar people ‘who have no doubt heard of the fires at Sohargarah and elsewhere’. ⁴⁶

Along with force, other persuasive means were used to threaten shopkeepers. To that effect, a printed placard-notice was circulated at the Sitalda Mohududra mela in April 1908 that used promises of honour and exemption from taxation as a lure to make shopkeepers sell swadeshi articles. ⁴⁷ The placard also stated that a pecuniary punishment of ₹1 or ₹40 would be imposed on any shopkeeper who would bring foreign things to the mela. The police reports held these placards as proof of the failure of the boycott movement. They alleged that these placards were used to display the force of the revolutionaries because they believed that the movement ‘can be kept alive only by very strong measures’. ⁴⁸ These placards only threatened force and explained in the clearest possible term the necessity of such force. This, indeed, was a ‘very strong measure’, because the perpetrators of violence assumed for themselves the status of arbitrators who could decide the distinction between ‘them’ and ‘us’, the foreigners and indigenous.

Propagation of the idea of resistance adopted a more dangerous line of dissemination when in the latter half of 1908, a new genre of placards appeared in parts of Bengal that broadcasted not just oppositional catch-lines but offered a philosophical discourse on resistance. Resistance was no longer an impulsive act of revenge. It now attained the form of a cosmic reality, an inevitable fate decreed by Providence. Several placards referring to the death of the revolutionary Khudiram Bose—who has hanged for revolutionary activities—adopted a similar tone. These placards appeared in the Dacca district in 1908. These were discovered posted all over Dacca town by the police. Of these, six were brought to H. L. Salkeld, Magistrate on special duty. All the six placards carried the same message,

Bharat Basigan jago-

Khudiramer phans ⁴⁹

[Indians Awake! Khudiram will be hanged].

Colonial authorities discovered similar placards posted in the second-class passenger hall at the Sealdah Railway station ⁵⁰ and other public places in Calcutta. ⁵¹ In July 1908, another Khudiram placard came to the notice of the police authorities posted at the steamer ghat of the Bakarganj district. The placard was an improvised version of the already circulated Khudiram placards, adding:

Awake Bengalis—Khudiram will be hanged. See oh friends and countrymen! How long are you to suffer this oppression? Come forward and look to your duty; don’t hesitate to sacrifice hundred and hundreds of lives. See Khudiram has sacrificed his life for his country. Don’t hesitate to follow his example. ⁵²

These placards gave the event of Khudiram’s execution a new form and character. The colonial authorities had ordered his execution as a symbol of colonial prowess that would act as a warning to those who planned to oppose the Raj. But the authors of the Khudiram placards inverted the meaning by depicting the act as one of self-immolation, where Khudiram willingly embraced death. The placard repeatedly stressed the trope of Khudiram embracing death for the country that was divinely ordained. Khudiram’s ‘duty’ was pre-ordained by Providence so that his act could be an example for the people of this country. One of the placards even added the words maro boma [throw a bomb], thereby encouraging people to follow the example set by Khudiram. In Narayanganj in the Bakarganj district, some placards had the words ‘bombs ready for Europeans’. ⁵³ The authorities suspected the Brati Samiti, started by one Manoranjan Guha of Giridha, as the mastermind behind this act. ⁵⁴ Another set of placards appeared after the execution of Khudiram following the narrative constitution of its immediate predecessor. These placards read, ‘Even now arise; for one head take a hundred Firinghi heads’. ⁵⁵ The notices clearly directed the people to use bombs and other violent means to exterminate the foreigners, particularly the Firinghi.

Reading into the imagery created by the placards, a division appeared in the imagination of the readers—on one side stood the indigenous population, and on the other the oppressor of the indigenous population. The words of the placards asked the readers to pick a side. The authors of the placard began to entice the public, particularly the youth, with promises of various incentives. One such incentive was eternal fame in popular memory, through the image of executed assassins who were later christened as martyrs. Thus, martyrdom became a coveted fate and was used to arouse the public into a greater body, and community.

Glorification of martyrdom as a duty, demonstrated through the image of the political assassinators, became a prime feature of the placard culture of the age. After the Khudiram ones, placards appeared in November in praise of Kanai Lal Dutta, the revolutionary accused and executed for murdering the Alipore under-trial, and government witness, Narendra Nath Gossain. On the day of his execution (10 November 1908), placards of a violent nature appeared in Dacca denouncing the Europeans and calling on the people to murder them. ⁵⁶ In December 1908, the fortnightly report from the government of Eastern Bengal and Assam reported a placard found at the local Bindu Bashini School, Tangail. The placard proclaimed vengeance on all boys who would attend school on the day of Kanai Lal Dutta’s execution. ⁵⁷ On the same day, another chain of placards appeared in Faridpur which asked the people ‘to rise and slaughter Europeans’. ⁵⁸ The placards declared 10 November as the day of Kanai and warned the Europeans that they ‘must remember the day, because they would die by the bombs and the sword’. ⁵⁹ The placard further claimed:

Hark! Satyendra and Kanai are free from worldly Trammels. They are dancing in the air with blood besmeared body and haranguing us all with a thundering voice. ⁶⁰

The placard talked not only of Kanai but of Satyendra Nath Bose as well, the second accused and convict in the murder of Narendra Nath Gossain. It demonstrated the eternal glory that both had attained through their sacrifice. At a metaphorical level, it equated death with freedom, where the body gained freedom from the ‘trammel’ or nets of worldly duties, and in this case from the control of the foreigners. The placards adopted a philosophical tone concerning death.

The placard further portrayed Kanai and Satyendra ‘haranguing’ people to take the right path. It was a clear (re)enactment of the Gita, where Krishna lectures Arjun to use violence to suppress injustice. The setting of the Gita was used to demonstrate Kanai and Satyendra’s access to cosmic consciousness, gained through the commission of their Providence-ordained duty. The placard portrayed this through the image of Satyendra and Kanai’s ‘blood besmeared body’. The image was shared with the people to inspire awe for the path of violence adopted by the revolutionaries and to encourage them to choose the path of violence as their divinely ordained ‘duty’.

Along with the explication of the duty of the people, the Khudiram placards beset another new trend in placard demonstration. These placards gave the nation a human and more imaginable form. Though the mother figure of the nation had emerged much earlier in the nineteenth century with Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novel Anandamath, the placards freed the image from the pages of the book and gave the form of Mother a ‘polysemic figure of mother-goddess’. ⁶¹ The placards no longer harangued the people to observe their duty for an abstract nation, but for a Mother who lay disgraced ‘at the feet of the Foreigners’. The duty of the people, her children, was to rescue her from her fallen state and ‘tinge the earth with the blood of the Feringhis’ and ‘make a present of their head at the feet of the Mother’ to make amends for the misery and humiliation she has faced. The placards did not attack the colonial government directly. But the imagery of a mother trampled by the Feringhi (the British) painted the Raj in an inglorious and villainous light. It inverted the image of fair play cultivated by the colonial administration. The demonstration also resisted the colonial portrayal of the revolutionaries as anarchists and terrorists. The consternation between the group of revolutionaries and the Raj was moved to another level, where they fought and resisted not merely with bombs and pistols but with words slandering the Raj, legitimizing the revolutionaries’ actions.

This violent rhetoric continued to be featured in placards well into 1909. The placard that appeared in Rajshahi in September of 1909 thus began, ‘Beware, Englishmen, Rajshahi’. It broadcasted a word of caution to the English as well as their native collaborators. The placard pointed out that it was duty of the people to terminate the English race and their collaborators who were traitors to their country. ⁶² This was the eternal vow that ‘must be accomplished’ and if not, one must lay down their body in the attempt. The duty was deemed sacred, as it was a form of worshipping the Mother (Bande Mataram), both the goddess and her earthly form. Moreover, the accomplishment of the vow/duty held promises for ‘Lokantar or the other world’. Promises for the future and life after death were used to awake the people from their torpor. It called upon both Hindus and Muslims to act like the ‘race of men’ and the ‘sons of the Aryas’, and like a ‘race of worms’ or ‘slaves’. The placards further pointed out that being men and Aryas, they should not serve ‘jackals’, and if they failed to act their part they would bring disgrace on their ancestors.

The placard broadcasted to all—the colonizers and the colonized alike—the fate that they were destined to. The fate of their native flatterers also found mention in the placard:

You also, O traitors to the country, who are a disgrace to the Indian race, you also take care! You will meet your death in the same way in which Noren Gosain died. ⁶⁴

The fate of Narendra Nath Gossain became a point of demonstration. A clear message was sent out that by arresting and deporting a handful of people, the Raj would not be able to contain the wrath of the children of Mother.

The placard-notices of the following year were less bloodthirsty in nature. They preached the ideas of swadeshi and boycott rather than demonstrating in words, followed by relevant action, the righteousness of use of violence (as adopted by the revolutionaries) against the colonial rulers. But there were still a few violent ones. Four inflammatory placards were reported by the provincial administration for the year 1910. Two of them were first noted in Kamrup on the notice board of the Cotton College and on the veranda of the Muslim hostel. ⁶⁵ They gave a call for unity among Hindus and Muslims. But what made it seditious was the incitement to rebellion against the tyrant. The placard was dangerous as it demonstrated in favour of rebellion, which was equated with the show of obedience to God. Thus, the political war against the colonial government was turned into a religious war of the righteous oppressed against the bad tyrant. The idiom of religious war drew heavily upon the Gita, where it was stated that whenever there is injustice God reincarnates to put an end to it. It further stated that God sends his agents, who are his incarnations on earth, to exterminate the source of wrongdoing.

Until 1909, the cult of bomb, rather its use by the revolutionaries for their righteous war, was a matter of demonstration in most of the placards. But the placard discovered in Pabna in the third week of August 1910 demonstrated the bomb itself. It was found posted on the walls of the government school at Pabna and contained word-for-word ‘the Yugantar recipe for bomb-making’. ⁶⁶ The recipe was earlier published under the title of Bartaman Rana Niti, which was reproduced in book form in 1907. ⁶⁷ The bomb did not scare the Raj; the dissemination of the method of producing it disconcerted them. The placard made the bomb an object of public consumption and was an attempt at removing the stigma of criminality from it. A placard that appeared in November 1910 in Dinajpur added onto this image of the bomb. Thus, it proclaimed:

The Mother can no longer be worshipped with fruits and flowers. The Mother’s hunger can no longer be appeased with words.

Blood is wanted!

Heads are wanted!

Workers are wanted!

Heroes are wanted!

Bands of followers are wanted and firm resolves!

The Mother can no longer be worshipped with fruits and flowers. ⁶⁸

The placards transformed anarchists into heroes, and followers of the Motherland, and the bomb emerged as the weapon meant for extracting the blood, and heads, much needed for the worship/freedom of the Mother.

New identities emerged in the wake of these placards. Notions of nationhood as discussed in the intellectual circles suddenly came face to face with popular ideas. The extraordinary meeting of the two created images and visions hitherto unrealized in the popular sphere. A powerful psyche was created, the potential of which was yet unfathomed and unrealized.

II

Demonstration affected by the placards encouraged a new lingo of political communication. The new lingo communicated notions of nationhood among the masses by means of active ‘othering’, and frequently by means of subversion. But at a more psychological level, demonstration was also an act of persuasion that required the people to place their faith in the images the placards demonstrated before them as ‘reality’. To do so, the image in the minds of the people—that of the idea of British permanency—first had to be replaced. The idea of British permanency was imprinted into the minds of the people of the subcontinent through various civilizing missions of the British Empire in India. Religious missionaries, civil servants, novelists (Rudyard Kipling being the standard example) and medical missionaries constructed an image of the British Empire as the paramount power, superior to the natives and paternalistic towards their miserable and ignorant condition. ⁶⁹ The familial trope of Mai–Baap created and sustained by the imperialist propaganda formed the foundation of the British Raj in India. ⁷⁰ The idea of permanency, therefore, had a strong hold over people’s mentality. The placards challenged and attacked the idea of permanency by trying to make people believe that the Raj was neither permanent nor were the British superior to the natives. The process of replacement required glorification of the demonstrated image, and subversion of the image of the British Raj. Therefore, it necessitated the ‘subversion’ of the existent image of reality and the ‘glorification’ of a new replacement image.

Placards affected a replacement by qualitatively representing the reality in terms of various known and popular forms and figures. Swadeshi placards put to use various motifs and symbols in the portrayed image that contradicted British ‘reality’ in the popular mentality. The motifs and symbols closely associated with the religious and cultural believes of the masses was demonstrated as being hindered and sabotaged by the British Raj. The scenes of degradation, humiliation and segregation of Bengal, imagined as a Mother, pictures of the British coterie of flatterers and loyalists (branded as ‘traitors’), and pictures of the mixing of cow bones and blood in foreign sugar simultaneously used motifs of caste, religion and the nation embodied as a mother to play upon the sense of fear and shame, and to stir patriotism so that the image demonstrated by the placards would constitute the new reality.

The mother motif was often featured in placards as a way to instil a sense of shame and patriotism. Posters using such motifs and inspiring similar emotions appeared in various parts of Bengal and Eastern Bengal and Assam simultaneously between 1908 and 1909. The Satyendra-Kanai placard reported from Faridpur in December 1908 used this mechanism on the one hand, expressing disgust at the public’s indifference to the insults heaped upon the men by the colonizers and towards the Motherland’s humiliation at the feet of the foreigners. The figure of the Mother as Shakti (primordial force) and as a nurturer was deeply embedded in the religious psyche of the Hindus acquiring a polysemic character with the popularization of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Bande Mataram or Mother-nation song. The Mother was, therefore, not just Shakti but a symbolic representation of the genteel femininity and Bengali domesticity. Thus, the humiliation of the Mother at the ‘feet of the Foreigners’ also stood for the insult of and incursion into the domestic/private domain of the Bengalis. Such images invoked a deep sense of shame in the minds of the male Bengali public. The goal of the placards was to make the indigenous population feel ashamed of the trust they had placed on the righteousness of the colonizers, despite evidence to the contrary. The process of persuasion used by the placard, therefore, guided the Bengali public opinion against the image of the Raj imprinted on their mind. The same placards further inspired patriotism using the mother motif. Following Bankim Chandra’s lead in Anandamath, the placard recalled the glorious past of the Mother. The ‘past’ referred to, no doubt, hinted at the idyllic Bengali life before the coming of the colonizers. The contrast of the images of the present and past conditions of the Mother tried to arouse a strong sense of patriotism in the public mind.

Religious motifs found frequent mention in the placards, particularly during 1907, the year of riots. A complicated equation was established between the threat that Hindu religion faced and the colonial power. The Muslim riots mentioned in the placards served as a tool to establish a relation between the threatened Hindu religion and an indifferent administration. One such placard from September 1907, while mentioning an incident involving the breaking of the image of a Hindu goddess by a Muslim rioter at Jamalpur, blamed the foreign officials’ ‘brutal administration’ due to which their ‘religion had been profaned’. Therefore, what this placard tried to do was guide the sense of fear of the public against the ‘brutal administration’ of the foreigners. This had the potential to subvert the image of reality, associated with the British Raj, in the public mind.

Subversion as an act of persuasion engaged in process of negating the image of reality, rooted in public mind. Reality as perceived by the public was moulded to subvert the image of the colonizers. The appeal the placards made to the sense of fear, shame and patriotism guided the public imagination to redraw the image of the colonizers in a negative light. There can be little doubt that the negative imaging of the colonizers was an attempt to persuade people to develop contempt against them, but to persuade the target-audience to support the anti-government agitations, a glorified image of the agitation had to be presented. To do so, the invocation of fear, awe and patriotism is required, which resulted in the use of images of violence and martyrdom.

Martyrdom had deep roots in the Hindu psyche. Sacrificing one’s life for the cause (puja) of the Mother (Adya Shakti) was deeply resonant in the Bengali Tantric ⁷¹ tradition, in which an act of sacrifice was considered necessary to empower and satiate the primordial force or the Mother. Thus, the reference to Khudiram Bose, Kanai Lal Dutta and Satyendra Nath Bose as martyrs was made in the same light, as men who sacrificed their lives to empower the mother nation. Such images inspired patriotic sentiments and the belief that martyrdom should be coveted and practised to empower the Mother.

Since persuading the people depended on them understanding the messages, language of the placards had to be simple. Therefore, vernacular in its most comprehensible form was used in the placards. Language that would be deemed ‘indecent’ and ‘abusive’ was used. Thus, the placards combined popular and political lingo to effectively persuade the public.

A new language was thus invented, and it was the one that people began to use themselves, a language of violence, and by extension of subversion. The language used dwelt on use of brute force and made oblique reference to the need of bloodshed, to bring about the inversion of power, and hence to demarcate the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Violent language became the staple of the swadeshi placards to demonstrate their ‘propagandized truth’ and to engender, in the process, a community of shared opinion and feeling. This created an illusion in the minds of the audience. Symbols and metaphors used in the placards had a sociocultural life of its own, endowed with specific meaning. Therefore, the symbols instantly established a connection between the text of the placard and the context in which it appeared. These references attempted to invert the images of colonial superiority and native effeminacy, and use the subversion as a platform to establish a communion between the ‘us’, through a referential difference from the foreign ‘them’. Demonstrative resistance enacted in the placards, especially in its language, established an order of indigeneity in the imagination of the people, which paved the path for the realization of swadeshi nationhood.