Abstract
“We have never been able to achieve anything except when we compelled England to rule us with the naked sword,” Irish politician Éamon de Valera declared in 1920. It is, of course, always by the sword that she has maintained herself in Ireland, as in India, but she prefers to maintain herself with the sword in its scabbard if she can. The English are very sensitive to what the world thinks of them. (p. 126)
Last Weapons begins with an account of what Britons knew about the physical process of starvation before proceeding, over three central chapters, from England to Ireland and, finally, to India. Grant shows that self-starvation was densely meaningful but labile. With resonance in religion, popular culture, medicine, and revolutionary politics, the choice to starve could symbolize anything, or nothing. It appeared in Christian, Hindu and Celtic religious tradition as sacred suffering, a sign of grace, and a tool of vengeance. In the late 19th century, the mad starved themselves in asylums, Russian radicals in prisons, and “hunger artists” and “human skeletons” in freak shows and public performances. From 1890, during the rise of militant suffragist activism in England, to 1948, the year after Partition and Indian independence, Grant argues that self-starvation acquired a new, explicitly political connotation in the British world. Hunger strikes, inspired by Russian populist narodniki in czarist prisons, were taken up by middle-class women in England, presenting a wrenching problem for British authorities. Officials could bow to prisoners’ demands, or face public condemnation for allowing the men and women in their custody to die in agony. Force feeding was a poor solution. Hunger strikers decried it as torture while prison staff struggled with the daily chore of forcing tubes into the stomachs of their charges (p. 55).
From England, the so-called “Russian method” of political self-starvation travelled to Ireland, where it was first adopted by Irish suffragettes. Protesters Incorporated starvation into existing cultural and religious forms, forging new personal and national narratives. Grant resists nationalist accounts of 20th-century Irish hunger striking as a simple revival of pre-Christian or Catholic traditions, arguing instead that the politics of starvation were unstable and context-specific. While some Irish men and women who starved described their suffering in religious terms, most did not. Every protester, Grant shows, imbued starvation with multiple, shifting meanings. His account of how gender inflected starvation is especially interesting. For example, the activists of the Irish Women’s Franchise League, some of whom embarked on hunger strikes for release from Dublin’s Mountjoy prison in 1913 and 1914, saw their campaign as evidence of women’s superior capacity for self-discipline and spiritual devotion (p. 78). During the 1916 Irish republican Rising, both men and women starved. And while some framed their starvation as a uniquely masculine emulation of Christ, most believed that hunger striking was a political weapon that women and men could wield with equal authority (pp. 86–92).
Mohandas K Gandhi and his famous fasts haunt Last Weapons. Gandhi’s repeated resort to self-starvation, which he insisted were “fasts” grounded in Hindu spiritual tradition, became the stuff of global, anti-colonial myth. Grant argues that Gandhi’s legend has overshadowed a wider history of fasting and hunger striking among a diverse coterie of Indian nationalists for whom starvation could symbolize “militancy and nonviolence, patriotism and insurrection, unity and exclusion” (p. 102). Grant writes that these nationalists claimed a common devotion to the figure of “Mother India,” the chief goddess of a new civic religion, whom they praised in a patriotic hymn, “Bande Mataram” (Hail the Mother) (p. 101). At times, Grant’s account of Indian nationalism, including his emphasis on its fundamentally religious – even mystical – dimensions, is less precise than his treatment of other anti-colonial and anti-state movements.
In the book’s brief fifth chapter, Grant turns from the motivations of starving prisoners to those of the English, Irish, and Indian officials who were the targets of their protests. Here, he explores in greater detail how governments across the British Empire dealt with the logistical hassle and political embarrassment of hunger striking. Starving prisoners knew that officials were often willing to make concessions to avoid scandal, especially when demands were for modest improvements in prison conditions. Despite officials’ fear that fasting prisoners might damage the legitimacy or international standing of British imperial rule, even successful hunger strikers generally achieved very little; the right to wear one’s own clothes or an early release rarely sparked revolution (pp. 149–150).
While Grant highlights interconnections among England, Ireland, and India, especially between English and Irish suffragettes and Irish and Indian nationalists, he does not propose a causal relationship or a chain of transmission of political starvation among movements or colonies. Hunger, he argues, was too polyvalent, both for the starving and those who interpreted their starvation. It could be an act of faith, violence, despair, or solidarity; feminine self-sacrifice or masculine courage. People did it to shame and to entertain, and they did it because they were mentally ill. Last Weapons is an engaging contribution to the histories of punishment, political movements, and anti-colonial activism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Grant admirably captures the complexities of self-starvation for its practitioners. However, the book is quite lean and might have benefited from more attention to the imperial ideology, professional networks and wider legal and penal contexts that made hunger striking politically salient. De Valera reminds us that the world was watching England. What did Britons want the world to see?
