Bakhle Sedition and Savarkar

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Janaki Bakhle

Savarkar (1883–1966), Sedition andSurveillance: the rule of law in a

colonial situation1

INTRODUCTION

On 20 July 1910, The (London) Times reported a daring escape attempt by a young Indian law

student who was being extradited to India for trial on a charge of treason and abetment of

murder. En route to India, the ship in which he was being transported docked in the port of

Marseilles. He jumped out of an open porthole and swam to shore in the hope that he might

be handed over to the French authorities. Apprehended as soon as he reached the shore, he

was returned to the British detectives in charge of him. Had he been any other student, it is

unlikely that he would have received much attention in Britain’s most prominent national

newspaper, but he was no ordinary student. His name was Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a

young Indian nationalist, uncompromising in his conviction that armed struggle was the only

way for India to free itself from British colonial rule.

At the time of Savarkar’s arrest, the main voice of anti-colonial nationalism in India was that

of the Indian National Congress (INC), founded in 1885.2 A moderate body in its early years,

the mission of the INC was largely defined by leaders such as G. K. Gokhale who worked with

the British to achieve greater participation in affairs of state. However, a number of young

Indian nationalists became increasingly impatient with the INC, which in 1907 divided into

two factions. The factionalism concerned different approaches to the protest against the

1I would like to thank Janet Blackman, ParthaChatterjee, Valentine Daniel, Mamadou Diouf,Nicholas Dirks, Saurabh Dube, Michael Hassett,Rashid Khalidi, Elizabeth Kolsky, Adam Kosto,Claudio Lomnitz, Mark Mazower, Mae Ngai,Keith Nield, Gyanendra Pandey, Susan Pedersen,Sheldon Pollock, Anupama Rao, Satadru Sen,Dorothea von Mucke and the reviewers of SocialHistory for their critical comments and suggestions.

2On the Indian National Congress, see N. R.Ray, Ravinder Kumar and M. N. Das, Concise

History of the Indian National Congress 1885–1947,ed. B. N. Pande (New Delhi, 1985). See alsoRichard Sisson and Stanley A. Wolpert (eds),Congress and Indian Nationalism: Pre IndependencePhase (Berkeley, 1988); Edwin Hirschmann ‘WhiteMutiny’: The Ilbert Bill Crisis in India and Genesis ofthe Indian National Congress (New Delhi, 1980);and D. A. Low (ed.), Congress and the Raj: Facets ofthe Indian Struggle, 2nd edn (Oxford and NewDelhi, 2004).

Social History Vol. 35 No. 1 February 2010

Social History ISSN 0307-1022 print/ISSN 1470-1200 online ª 2010 Taylor & Francishttp://www.informaworld.comDOI: 10.1080/03071020903542286

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partition of Bengal in 1905 by Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India.3 Bengal’s partition was

widely seen as a colonial attempt to divide and rule on communal grounds, and to break the

back of a revolutionary nationalism that had gathered momentum in the previous decade.

Moderate nationalists in the INC favoured a regionally restricted peaceful protest. They were

opposed by the ‘extremists’ who denounced partition in the strongest terms, and spearheaded a

nationwide agitation called the Swadeshi (self-rule) movement.

During those years, Indian nationalist activity in London revolved around a figure named

Shyam Krishnavarma.4 In 1905, Krishnavarma had founded a monthly called the Indian

Sociologist which published critical essays about the colonial government in India. He had also

started a secret society called the ‘Indian Home Rule Society’ which, following the Irish

example and in the context of the partition of Bengal, agitated for the complete withdrawal of

Britain from India. Krishnavarma owned a house in Highgate – called ‘India House’ – which

was turned into a mess-cum-hostel for Indian students studying in England. It soon became a

hotbed for young Indian revolutionaries, many of whom were drawn to the activities of

anarchists, and Russian and Italian nationalists.5 These young revolutionaries were placed

under intense surveillance and viewed by the British as extremely dangerous.

Savarkar was an undergraduate college student in India when the Swadeshi movement

commenced, and he had come to the attention of the nationalists with his fiery speeches

against partition. His affiliation with the extreme wing of Indian nationalism, however, was

apparent even earlier when as a high school student he had organized a secret revolutionary

society, ‘Mitra Mela’ (‘Society of Friends’), in his home town of Nasik.6 As a result, when he

arrived in England in 1906 to study for the bar at Gray’s Inn, he was a well-watched figure in

the secret world of colonial surveillance. The Pune police in India had informed officials in

England of his arrival, and as soon as he set foot in the UK, Scotland Yard took over the

surveillance.7

This surveillance raises several questions, the most important concerning the differential use

of sedition law between the metropole and the colony, and the use of dangerous words as

evidence of conspiracy. At the historical moment when J. S. Mill’s On Liberty made it a

citizen’s right to be critical of the government, and when sedition law was increasingly

unusable in Britain, in the British colony of India sedition not only became the legal means by

which anti-colonial nationalist conspiracies were prosecuted, it also acquired a prominence it

no longer had at home. This raised the issue that the real danger posed by revolutionaries lay in

a violence that was far more rhetorical and symbolic than physical, as they questioned the

fundamental legitimacy of colonial rule.

Revolutionary nationalism is an important (and largely ignored) feature of Indian nationalist

history, not merely because it provided the historical backdrop for the spectacular emergence

3See Sumit Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement in Bengal,1903–1908 (New Delhi, 1973), passim.

4See T. R. Sareen, Indian Revolutionary Move-ment Abroad (New Delhi, 1979). See also Dha-nanjay Keer, Veer Savarkar (Bombay, 1950), inparticular chap. 2, 28–55; and Chitragupta, Life ofBarrister Savarkar (Madras, 1926), 35.

5Keer, op. cit.6See Arvind Godbole, Ase Ahet SavarkarI (Pune,

2005), 19.

7British Library, London, Oriental and IndiaOffice Collections (hereafter OIOC), IOR/HomePolitical/A, no. 37, Confidential, December 1909.A letter from India Office, Whitehall, on 10

September 1909, stated that the Director ofCriminal Intelligence was in contact with ScotlandYard about the activities and movements of thestudents in India House. See also Godbole, op. cit.,20.

52 Social History vol. 35 : no. 1

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of a nationalist movement based on Gandhi’s non-violent civil disobedience. Perhaps the most

lasting legacy of revolutionary nationalism (and its successful suppression by the British) was a

militant and masculinist Hindu nationalism, of which Savarkar became the leading exponent.

The possible connection between British colonialism and the specific brand of secular Hindu

political fundamentalism Savarkar exemplified is a critical question for colonial historiography.

Here I will examine a prior question, focusing on how the colonial state’s response to

revolutionary nationalism gave rise to two principal colonial weapons against all anti-colonial

nationalism, ranging from Savarkar’s call for armed rebellion to Gandhian non-violent non-

cooperation. The first weapon was surveillance, a developing technology of state control that

placed an increasingly large number of young revolutionaries under systematic monitoring.

Some of these revolutionaries were learning about guns and bombs while others were engaged

in fiery nationalist rhetoric. Both sets were placed under surveillance to monitor not just what

they were doing, but also what they were thinking, writing and speaking. Related to this

surveillance, the second and perhaps more important weapon of the colonial state in India was

sedition law.

The connection between surveillance and sedition law reveals a great deal about the

precision with which a case was developed against anti-colonial conspiracies. The colonial

state, of course, had to worry about guns, bombs and political assassinations. But student

revolutionaries were often amateurish and more often than not their planned attacks came to

nothing.8 What was far more of a threat was the seditious potential of revolutionary rhetoric.

While violent acts could be pre-empted and violent offenders could be put away, sedition –

the incitement to disaffection – was much harder to control or contain. Seditious words were,

in effect, a propaganda apparatus that ensured a constant supply of fresh recruits to the cause.

For that reason, the word itself became the evidence of a crime, and leaders of so-called

conspiracies had to be implicated primarily by proving that the conspiracy lay in the particular

use of words.9 Leaders of conspiracies were rarely those who pulled a trigger, but they could

provoke others to do so through their words. Since control of dangerous words fell under the

purview of sedition law, what we see is the emergence of sedition law as both the chief

weapon of the colonial state and the offence with which generations of Indian nationalists

would be charged. Historians of Indian nationalism have usually argued that sedition law was

introduced into the Indian Penal Code by the British as a way of warding off the threat posed

by groups such as the Wahhabis, student revolutionaries, and nationalists such as Savarkar. As a

way of rethinking the causal relationship between sedition and terror in the Indian colonial

context, I offer the following argument. Sedition law in India was not put in place to avert

terrorism. To continue to believe such an argument is to mistake the symptom for the cause.

The real terror was neither guns and bombs, nor anarchism or nihilism. It was Indian

disaffection with colonial rule.

Sedition as a criminal offence was introduced into the Indian Penal Code (IPC) in 1870 as

the offence of ‘exciting disaffection’ against the colonial government. At the same time, in

8See Chitragupta, op. cit., 40–3. This is theearliest known biography of Savarkar, written bysomeone who knew him well during his Londondays. Chitragupta describes the numerous timeswhen young revolutionaries blew off their own

hands, or lost eyes, or were duped by bogusEuropean revolutionaries.

9I am grateful to Partha Chatterjee for thisinsight.

February 2010 Savarkar, Sedition and Surveillance 53

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England, sedition as a criminal offence had become unusable in British common law, except in

a few cases pertaining to Irish agitators. The sole successful prosecution for sedition in Britain

after 1896 involved a critique of British colonialism in India, and support for an Indian

revolutionary nationalist.10 While sedition had a long history in Britain, the modern history of

sedition was in fact inextricably linked to colonial rule. Sedition not only seemed to gain a new

lease on life under conditions of colonial occupation, it became a key issue, and tool, for the

colonial state. Sedition law was widely used in India to arrest and convict revolutionary

nationalists, and with each judicial interpretation and each trial of an anti-colonial nationalist,

the parameters of this law became wider and wider. By the time Gandhi was tried for sedition

in 1922, sedition had become a catch-all category encompassing all anti-colonial expression,

extending from bombs and political assassinations to discursive challenges in books and

pamphlets, including even the harbouring of negative feelings against colonial rule. As a result,

sedition was both the signature colonial problem and the means by which most forms of anti-

colonial nationalism were checked, when they were not, as in the case of revolutionary

nationalism, suppressed outright.

It is with this historical genealogy of colonial sedition that we return to Savarkar and his

designation as a revolutionary nationalist. As the surveillance documents show, Savarkar was

less a skilled revolutionary warrior than a rhetorical revolutionary – i.e. a seditionist. His lasting

impact on the Indian political scene had more to do with changing the terms and scale of the

discourse of Indian history and, by extension, the British Raj as well. To say this is by no

means to ignore his gun-running or his romance with violent revolution. But of the charges

Savarkar faced at the time of his arrest, which included abetment to murder, treason and

conspiracy, I argue here that the most important concerned the charge of sedition, for it

highlighted some of the most salient colonial contradictions revolutionaries and revolutionary

nationalism posed to the state.

After the 1857 Rebellion, a diverse group comprising intellectuals, poets, mystics,

philosophers, novelists, reformers and spiritual leaders from around the country cultivated a

distinctly Hindu anti-colonial nationalist discourse that combined inward spiritual develop-

ment with external political freedom. It emerged from the anguished belief that despite India’s

ancient culture and civilization her heirs had allowed themselves to be defeated by a foreign

country with a far inferior civilization. The spread of western attitudes among the small but

growing middle class in urban colonial India only made matters more urgent. In response to

the diffusion and deepening of the colonial apparatus in India, this group reacted by turning

away from the industrialized and mechanized materialism of the West and towards traditional

Hindu religion and ethics. The anglicized and deracinated Indian became a figure of ridicule at

the same time as the immediate withdrawal of the British from India was being advocated.11

The group’s ideology came to be known as ‘extremism’ by both the colonial regime and a

moderate Indian nationalism.

10Guy Aldred, an anarchist and communist,wrote a proscribed pamphlet, ‘The white terror inIndia’, which was a left-driven criticism of Englishcolonial sedition laws. See OIOC/EPP/1/3 (Pro-scribed Publications in European Languages),August 1910.

11See Amles Tripathi, The Extremist Challenge:India between 1890 and 1910 (Calcutta, 1967); andLeonard Gordon, Bengal: The Nationalist Movement1876–1940 (New York, 1974). See also DavidJohnson, The Religious Roots of Indian Nationalism:Aurobindo’s Early Political Thought (Calcutta, 1974).


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Extremist thought in colonial India had several regionally distinct genealogies.12 While each

such strand differed in its approach to Hinduism, the means by which to attain independence,

and the texts (and languages) used as the source of an argument, all of them rejected the idea of

the Victorian civilizing mission, using instead an idealized ancient (if also modern) Hindu India

as the source for imagining a different future. Extremists – pacifist and militant – idealized an

ancient Indian polis as the source from which all modern Indian political conceptions – ethical,

social and legal – could be derived. Indian rejuvenation was conceptualized in the language of

vitality, and physical and emotional strength. They used inspirational figures from India’s

literary past, such as the exiled leader (King Rama from the ancient Sanskrit epic Ramayana),

or the divine teacher of duty (Krishna from the Mahabharata), and from the more immediate

historical past the courageous guerilla chieftain Chattrapati Shivaji, who rebelled against the

might of the Mughal Empire. Revolutionary nationalists combined what they had read about

European nationalism, anarchism and nihilism with a Sanskritic concept of duty (dharma) taken

from a section of the Mahabharata called the Bhagavad Gita.13 To this mix they added the figure

of India as a chained and captive mother beseeching her sons to rescue her. Many young men

across the country were inspired by such a vision. Devoid of any conviction that independence

from British rule could be acquired by gentlemanly negotiation, they chose instead guns,

bombs and political assassination as the means by which to convince the British to leave. This

potent mixture of Hindu devoutness, nationalist duty and anarcho-terrorist tactics made up

Indian revolutionary nationalism.

Influential and stirring as it was, neither extremism as an ideology nor revolutionary

nationalism as a tactic became the dominant mode of Indian nationalism. From its founding in

1885, the Indian National Congress (INC) bore a different agenda than that imagined by the

extremists, and it was the INC that became the dominant mouthpiece of nationalism in India.

The extremist wing of the INC dissented sharply from what they saw as a far too moderate

criticism of colonialism, and they laboured to move the INC in a different direction.14 The

tension between moderate and revolutionary nationalism was resolved only when Gandhi

finally assumed control over the nationalist movement. When Gandhi returned to India from

South Africa in 1915, the nationalist milieu was very different from what it had been either

during the last quarter of the nineteenth century or the first decade of the twentieth. Gandhi

would pursue a different model of popular mobilization than that of either the parliamentarian

12The poet and novelist Bankimchandra Chat-topadhyaya (1838–94) and the philosopher SwamiDayananda (1863–1902) in Bengal, V. S. Chi-plunkar (1850–82) and B. G. Tilak (1856–1920) inwestern India, and Dayananda Saraswati (1824–83)in Punjab were key figures. On BankimchandraChattopadhyaya, see Partha Chatterjee, NationalistThought and the Colonial World: A DerivativeDiscourse? (Minneapolis, 1995), chap. 1; on B. G.Tilak, see Ram Gopal, Lokmanya Tilak (NewDelhi, 1956); Stanley Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale:Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India(New Delhi, 1961); and Theodore Shay, Legacy ofthe Lokamanya: The Political Philosophy of BalGangadhar (Bombay, 1956). On Dayananda Sar-aswati, see J. T. F. Jordens, Dayananda Saraswati:

His Life and Ideas (Delhi, 1978) and Shri RamSharma (ed.), History of the Arya Samaj: An Accountof Its Origin, Doctrines, and Activities, with aBiographical Sketch of the Founder by Lajpat Rai(Bombay, 1967). For Aurobindo’s view of thetriumvirate of Bankim, Tilak and Saraswati, seeBankimchandra Chattopadhyaya, B. G. Tilak andDayananda Saraswati, 2nd edn (Calcutta, 1947).

13See Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Conscious-ness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Forma-tion of Nationalist Discourse in India (New Delhi,1995).

14The INC extremists were led by Lala LajpatRai (1865–1928) from Punjab, Bipin Chandra Pal(1858–1932) from Bengal and B. G. Tilak (1856–1920) in Maharashtra.


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moderates or the revolutionary nationalists (to whom he was opposed), in part because he

realized it would be more difficult for the British to suppress a movement based on non-

violence. Nevertheless, the British would use against him some of the very tactics they had

developed – both legal and extra-legal – in their programme against the early revolutionary

nationalists of the first decade of the twentieth century. Indeed, they would treat Gandhi as if

he were the worst terrorist of them all. But before him, they had to deal with Savarkar.

THE CASE OF SAVARKAR

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was born on 27 May 1883, into a middling Brahmin family in what

is today the modern Indian western state of Maharashtra in a small village (Bhagur) near the

city of Nasik.15 When he was nine years old, his mother died of cholera. His older brother

Ganesh (Babarao) married a young woman named Yashoda Phadke, and she all but raised

Savarkar and his younger brother (Narayan). In 1899, both his father and his uncle succumbed

to the plague which had moved into Bhagur. The plague years (1896–9) were tough years for

the Deccan and they were made worse by insensitive colonial actions.16 Savarkar and a couple

of his friends founded a secret society called ‘Rashtrabhakta Samuha’ (‘Patriots’ Society’) in

1899 which became the ‘Mitra Mela’ (‘Society of Friends’) a year later (1901).17 It was as the

Mitra Mela that the society came to the attention of the police.

There are few original documents concerning this society because the members destroyed

them all to prevent them falling into the hands of the British.18 The society met in the attic of a

friend’s house in Nasik, and its main activities consisted of organizing public festivals in

opposition to the ban on organizations, and using these festivals to rouse people to anti-

colonial sentiment. In this sense the Mitra Mela was a consciousness-raising society, holding

more lectures than anything else.19 In Savarkar’s memoirs, these early days of political activism

are described in a manner that makes clear that he believed he could single-handedly change

the direction of Indian history. He had the foresight to persuade other members of the Mitra

Mela to eschew liberal politics, and that he alone was born to lead. Education was the means

by which to radicalize society, but not by reading only the canonical western writers. Savarkar

was aware of the need to have the concept of history become all-important to everyday

people, and history could only be the history of a nation. He insisted that members read works

dealing with major historical figures, biographies of Mazzini, Garibaldi, Napoleon Bonaparte

and, along the way, study a little bit of Spencer and Mill. His populist agenda was to produce

through such an education a specifically Indian nationalist and historical consciousness, even

among villagers. Politics, Savarkar recounts, could only be waged by turning history and

historical words into a weapon. As a political act, this vision was far more threatening than his

romance with weapons of individual destruction.20

The late nineteenth century in Maharashtra was a time in which there were active debates

about history, the role it played in the life of a nation and its use as a corrective to colonial

15I have used Dhananjay Keer’s Veer Savarkar(Bombay, 1957) as well as Savarkar’s memoirs inMarathi to compile this brief sketch of his life, inparticular vol. 1 of Samagra Savarkar Vangmaya(Bombay, 2000), hereafter SSV.

16Wolpert, op. cit.

17SSV, vol. 1, 122–5.18See S. R. Date, Bharatiya Swatantryache

Ranazhunzhaar: Abhinava Bharat Smarak Chitrapra-bodhini (Pune, 1970).

19SSV, vol. 1, 28–9.20ibid., 140–5.


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denigrations of India’s past.21 No stranger to these debates, and the social controversies of the

late nineteenth century in Pune involving caste and gender, Savarkar wrote patriotic poetry as

a high school student, extolling the figure of mother India. In 1901 Savarkar married; the

following year he went to Ferguson College in Pune. He studied the writings of international

anarchists and anti-colonial nationalists, especially the Boers. As a student activist, he organized

the first bonfire of foreign cloth in 1905.

After leaving college, Savarkar wrote editorials for a Bombay weekly called Vihari.22 In 1906

he left for London to study law at the Inns of Court. Almost as soon as he arrived, he

embroiled himself in various anti-colonial nationalist activities, most of which were

educational and literary. He wrote short descriptions of political and social life in London

which he sent to the Marathi magazine Kaal. Within six months of his arrival, he translated

Mazzini’s biography into Marathi. By the end of the year he had started a secret, revolutionary

society called the ‘Abhinava Bharat’ society, organizing weekly lectures on nationalism. The

fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the 1857 Rebellion, 10 May 1907, was observed in

London as a day of thanksgiving in honour of the final British victory over the rebels. In

response, Savarkar wrote and distributed a fiercely patriotic leaflet, ‘Oh Martyrs!’

commemorating the leaders of the rebellion as Indian martyrs which attracted police attention

both in India and in England.23

Over the next two years (1908–9), Savarkar completed his own monumental history of the

1857 Rebellion. It was the first systematic analysis of the Rebellion as a failed war of national

independence. Attuned to nationalism as a historical force around the globe, he argued that the

revolt of 1857 had reflected the unified (Hindu and Muslim) nationalist desire of India to free

itself from the oppressive yoke of British rule. The list of authors whose books he consulted

included Alexander Duff, Kaye and Malleson (all six volumes of their canonic history), Henry

Mead, Meadows Taylor and George Trevelyan, among others. He wrote his work in Marathi,

using English primary sources precisely to highlight the ideological biases in the imperial

perspective on the subject, in order to make his powerful argument that ‘the nation ought to

be the master and not the slave of its own history’.24 The 484-page book contained detailed

accounts of historical events such as the Siege of Delhi, as well as analytical descriptions of

many of the Rebellion’s leaders, both Hindu and Muslim. He argued that a nationalist

ideology was the motivating factor behind the 1857 Rebellion, something he said that English

writers were too prejudiced to accept. ‘Is it possible?’ he asked. ‘Can any sane man maintain

that all embracing Revolution could have taken place without a principle to move it? Could

that vast tidal wave from Peshawar to Calcutta have risen in blood without a fixed intention of

throwing something by means of its force?’25 Savarkar proceeded to discount all the usual

colonial arguments about the causes of 1857: the greased cartridge, the economic motives of

21See Prachi Deshpande, Creative Past: HistoricalMemory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960(New York, 2007). See also Mahadev Apte‘Lokahitavadi and V. K. Chiplunkar, spokesmenof change in nineteenth-century Maharashtra’,Modern Asia Studies, VII, 2 (1973), 193–208; andRichard Tucker, ‘Hindu traditionalism and na-tionalist ideologies in nineteenth-century Mahar-ashtra’, Modern Asian Studies, X, 3 (1976), 321–48.

22Keer, op. cit., 24.23Reprinted in SSV, vol. 3 (History), part II.24Author’s introduction, The Indian War of

Independence (London, 1909), i. I am citing herepage numbers only from the original Englishtranslation of the book. The entire text in Marathican be found in SSV, vol. 3 (History), part II.

25ibid., chap. 1, 3.


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the elite, the annexation of Oudh.26 In chapter after chapter, he noted that 1857 had ushered

in a new era – in particular the end in perpetuity of Hindu–Muslim enmity – and he imagined

a future for India with two distinct religious communities bound together in an unshakeable

unity. He also indicted the British for conspiring to ‘trample the Hindu religion and the

Muslim faith’ or, as he also put it, for being filled with contempt ‘for the Hindu and Muslim

faiths – the two principal religions of India’.27 The Rebellion failed not for lack of planning, he

wrote, but because it lacked a clear sense of the future.

With the authorship of the book about 1857, Savarkar had added another entry to an already

long list of publications. The book did not call for widespread revolution or for anarchist

violence. Its true political potential lay not in its inaccuracies or passionate rhetoric, or the fact

that it would stir the natives to action. Works of history have not, by and large, ever had much

autonomous success in fomenting revolution against the state. Instead, Savarkar intended to

give India a history of her own, to change the subject of history from the colonial state to a

national state. In his Introduction to the book he made clear that ‘history’ did important work

for a nation and a national community, as he recognized it had done for England. He was

going to do the same for India.

In one sense, writing a work of linear history using English language sources was the perfect

example of the success of the civilizing mission. But in another sense, by turning the argument

around as he did, he was also the proverbial asp in the bosom. In the dominant English

historiography of the time, 1857 was an example of native ingratitude for the beneficence of

colonial rule. The successful suppression of the Rebellion was also claimed in several pulpits

across England as an instance of God’s grace shining on the British Empire. In his rewriting of

the history of 1857, Savarkar not only took on the big guns of English historical authorship but

also a popular English understanding of the event. He challenged the diminishing of the

Rebellion as a contained and containable mutiny, restricted to a small section of the army

which spread irrationally in a limited part of the country. He identified the ideological

underpinning of English accounts of 1857 as British nationalism. He castigated English writers

for not acknowledging the nationalism of their scholarship. He called English historians to task

for not recognizing Indian nationalism even when a rebellion confronted them as evidence.

Finally, having skewered English scholars for their unacknowledged nationalism, he was going

to pay them back in kind by setting in motion an Indian nationalist rewriting of both British

and Indian history. He not only reconceptualized the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ of 1857 as an Indian

national (unified) and nationalist (ideological) rebellion, he did so in the most extreme

historical detail over close to 500 pages. His semantic transvaluation would alter the terms of

Indian historical discourse once and for all.

The hermeneutic innovation of his 1857 book was to broadcast the importance of history

for the nationalist expectations of its readers.28 Savarkar was claiming that Indians were not and

had never been an infantilized population that needed shepherding into the modern world by

their British overlords. The addressee of his book was the Indian nation. By exploding the

scale of the argument, he asserted that India had always been a nation and that the events of

1857, the Rebellion’s eventual failure notwithstanding, demonstrated that she could be unified

once again in her struggle against foreign rule. In a crucial sense, he was almost ignoring or

26ibid., 5, 7.27ibid., chap. 5, 46, 47, 50, 73, 76.

28I am grateful to Dorothea von Mucke for thisinsight.


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bypassing the British altogether and appealing directly to the national community he knew was

buried in there, somewhere underneath colonial rule. Small wonder that the manuscript of this

book was sent to Scotland Yard by an informant and the work was banned before it was even

published.

Savarkar’s friends at India House translated the manuscript into English and in defiance of

the ban used their contacts in Germany to have it published in 1909.29 In the same year, both

of Savarkar’s brothers were arrested. It was only a matter of time before Savarkar was brought

under control, but for what exactly? So far the mainstay of his revolutionary activity, whether

in India or in England, was his writing. As it turned out, one of his two trusted translators,

Koregaonkar, who was also a member of India House, turned informant for the government.

In his statement to the police, while he notes the desire on the part of India House members to

spread revolution all through India, he could not provide much detail about where guns were

to be acquired or how bombs were to be placed. He was able to provide some information

about Madanlal Dhingra’s plans to assassinate an English official, however, and about the

translation and distribution of Savarkar’s 1857 book. But very little in his statement was new to

the police. What stands out, however, is the attention the members of India House paid to a

work of history.

For this reason, Savarkar, a voracious reader of a vast range of literature from the Iliad and

Odyssey to Sanskrit epic literature and commentaries, Marathi devotional works and modern

writings in Europe on the subject of nationalism, might more accurately be termed a literary

figure rather than a revolutionary in the classic sense of the term.30 Over the course of his life

he wrote editorials, poetry, prose, speeches, plays, novels, satires and pamphlets. While in

London he started a periodical called Tarvaar (‘Sword’) and wrote nationalist editorials in it, as

well as contributing to Irish periodicals about Home Rule. In the absence of other information

about Savarkar’s activities, from Koregaonkar’s statement to the police we get the sense of a

romantic revolutionary but also a rhetorician, a polemicist, a speech-maker and an historian.

Savarkar’s actual revolutionary acts were significant, but not nearly as widespread or as

successful as colonial officials or subsequent hagiographers have made them out to be. He

despatched a few friends from India House to Paris to learn about bomb-making, and while he

had grandiose plans, as Koregaonkar’s statement suggests, for sending India House members to

Belgium, Switzerland and Germany for military training, they never materialized. He did,

however, make copies of bomb manuals which he sent to India, along with a few pistols for

political assassinations. One of those pistols was used by seventeen-year-old Anant Kanhere to

assassinate a colonial official in Nasik.31 When caught, Kanhere implicated, among others, the

Savarkar family. As a result, Savakar’s older brother and some family friends were arrested and

sentenced to transportation for life in the Andaman Islands. Savarkar’s younger brother was

also arrested in connection with a different conspiracy case in the same year. Back in England,

Savarkar and other members of India House were already under surveillance. Despite the close

29OIOC, Foreign Confidential, R/1/1/1076,1910. In his statement, Koregaonkar names himselfand a W. V. Phadke as the two translators ofSavarkar’s book. This is confirmed by Keer, op.cit., 31.

30SSV, vol. 1, 144–6.

31See V. M. Bhat, Abhinava Bharat athavaKrantikarakanchi Krantikarak Gupta Sanstha (Mum-bai, 1950) for a candid account about therevolutionaries and their activities, and how easilyAnant Kanhere, being only seventeen, gave up allmembers of the group.


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scrutiny, Madanlal Dhingra, one of the members of India House, assassinated a British MP, Sir

Curzon Wyllie, in July 1909.

My intention here is neither to downplay Savarkar’s role in revolutionary terrorism nor to

trivialize political assassinations, even when in the name of anti-colonial nationalism. But it is

important to put Savarkar’s real political role in revolutionary terrorism into a larger

perspective, and there is little reason to suspect that Savarkar was anything more than an

amateur in his bomb-making proficiency and his ability to acquire guns. Even more

importantly, for my argument, if those were the activities that alarmed the colonial

government it could have arrested him at any point during their five-year surveillance. Even as

Savarkar was engaged in reading or smuggling bomb-making manuals and guns into India, his

literary output and consequent ideological reach were much more dangerous. Although he

wrote with great passion against the disarmament of India, and had a naive romance with guns,

tanks and even submarines, it is not clear that he even knew how to fire a gun.32 What is far

more apparent was that he could inspire others, through his words, to pick up guns and bombs,

and in the building of the case against him it was the words themselves that became the

evidence of a conspiracy.

To arrest Savarkar, evidence was gathered from two main sources. The first was letters he

had received or written, mainly to and from family members, and publications such as bomb-

making manuals. The second, and more important, included surveillance documents and the

testimony of informants. In India House, there were at least three informants – H. C.

Koregaonkar, Sukhsagar Dutt and Kirtikar – who were spies for the English authorities.

Savarkar knew about one, suspected another, but it was the third who gave him up.33 Savarkar

attempted to place his own double agent (M. P. Tirumalachari) to convey misinformation to

Scotland Yard, but Tirumalachari was also under surveillance, as was Sukhsagar Dutt.34 The

placement of these agents suggests that Savarkar was inserted into a complex web of

surveillance whose span extended to Europe and India as well as England. It was a web of

surveillance from which he was never to escape.

Savarkar was certainly not the only Indian nationalist to advocate violent resistance to the

colonial state by means of political assassinations and fiery rhetoric. Yet the colonial

government did not simply arrest him for attempted violence. While four rather weighty

charges including treason and conspiring against the government of the king were laid before

Savarkar, the charge that sticks out is that of sedition. The sedition for which he was arrested

32SSV, vol. 1, 210.33Sukhsagar Dutt was the nom de plume of Sajani

Ranjan Banerjea, who was engaged by theDirector of Criminal Intelligence as an informantfrom October 1909 until June 1913. His passage,fees for admission to the bar and the price of lawbooks were all provided, as was a monthlyallowance of £20 for the 45 months of hisemployment. He claims he turned informant topay off his family debt. His expenses and educationwas paid for by Scotland Yard (OIOC/IOR/L/PS/8/67, 1912). He reported to a SuperintendentQuinn on the ‘seditionist movement’ and wasdeemed very useful because he was assessed as

having ‘the great merit of reporting, truthfully, andnot making sensational statements in order tomagnify his usefulness’. Dutt wanted to take ascience course, which was approved because ‘itgave him better opportunities of mixing with theIndians and getting information, and the sciencecourse is one that appeals to Indians with extremisttendencies’ (my emphasis), 31, 32. See also R. A.Padmanabhan, V. V. S. Aiyar (New Delhi, 1980)for a biographical account of the surveillance onIndia House.

34Home Political/Branch A/December 1909,no. 37, Confidential (National Archives, NewDelhi).


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took place four years earlier, when Savarkar was a college student in Pune – not for anything

he wrote or said in London. Indeed, Savarkar’s surveillance shows us the emphasis the colonial

police placed on his long history of writings rather than his short history of gun-running. The

unspoken fear in all the surveillance documents is that sedition and its effects were the real

threat the colonial police had to contain, and to illustrate this I turn now to the story of the

surveillance of Savarkar.

SURVEILLANCE

The first indication of Savarkar’s activities from the police history sheet on him concerns an

anti-colonial speech he made at Fergusson College during his first year there (1901). Savarkar,

it was noted, ‘possessed neither religious nor moral scruples and was a fluent and fiery speaker’.

Furthermore, it was claimed that ‘Vinayek advocated the speedy emancipation of India from

British control by the direct method of revolution’ and took for its model ‘the secret

organizations of the Russian Nihilist’. The revolution would be preceded by ‘a reign of terror

inaugurated by the assassination of high Government officials, European and Indian’.35 The

next note is in 1902, when it was reported that he had written ‘a rather objectionable essay on

‘‘Why festivals of Historical persons should be celebrated’’’. Everything about this essay was

noted, where and by whom it was published, and by which Government Order it was

proscribed. The ‘reign of terror’ about which the colonial government was concerned never

happened, in large part because of how well the terrorists were monitored.

When Savarkar left for London, Scotland Yard was alerted.36 The correspondence between

various colonial policemen and officials from the Home Political File of the year 1908 reveals

the extent of their surveillance.37 On 10 May 1908, Savarkar distributed his leaflet, ‘Oh

Martyrs!’ in India House to an assembled gathering.38 Less than a month later, on 8 June 1908,

C. J. Stevenson-Moore of Criminal Intelligence wrote that ‘Home Department should see the

leaflet ‘‘Oh Martyrs’’ which apostrophizes the mutineers of 1857 and prophesies a revolution

in 1917. The type of the leaflet is similar to that of the Indian Sociologist.’39 The Indian Sociologist

was the mouthpiece of Shyam Krishnavarma and the India House group in London. Two days

later, the Home Department in India noted that it was quite possible that the leaflet had been

written in England because ‘[t]he phraseology is better than usual, and unlike other

fulminations we are accustomed to here’.40 On 15 June 1908, the Home Department received

a confidential letter from the government of UP. ‘By the Lieutenant Governor’s direction I

send you in original a copy of the pamphlet which was received from England. . . . It might be

possible to take some action in England to stop the printing of these pamphlets.’41 The local

and central Police Departments were in on the act as well. The Police Commissioner’s office

35Savarkar Police History Sheet (Calcutta,1935), 8.

36For the surveillance game that Savarkar playedwith the colonial police, see Y. D. Phadke, ShodhSavarkarancha (Bombay, 1984). See also DavidGarnet, The Golden Echo (London, 1953), 157, inwhich the author notes that there was always aScotland Yard policeman hanging about on thestreet outside India House.

37Home Political/Deposit/December 1908

(National Archives, New Delhi).38Godbole, op. cit., 24.39Home Political/Deposit/December 1908

(National Archives, New Delhi).40ibid., 8 June 1908.41ibid., June 1908.


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noted that an ‘Inspector Favel has returned from Nasik and brought with him the papers etc.

referred to in the attached copy of the Panchnama. 175 (written out) copies of the life of

Marzani were seized in the search. 173 have been kept here in the custody of the Nasik police

and two brought to Bombay.’ But the police were after more than this. They reported

disappointment about not finding anything about Savarkar’s 1857 book, saying: ‘Nothing has

been discovered which throws any light on the book we are searching for.’42

In June 1908, Savarkar’s brother was arrested on the charge of waging war against the king

and sedition; the family home was searched for suspicious literature.43 Two months later, in

Allahabad, Madan Mohan Malaviya, who would emerge as the leader of the Hindu nationalist

party, sent warning of the pamphlet to the UP government. He wrote to J. W. Hose:

I enclose a most seditious leaflet which I received yesterday with the English mail.

Evidently it is a copy of the same to which his Honour referred in his speech on the

political situation. I was going to tear and throw it away as I did not wish that it should fall

into the hands of any person; and as I thought it was not necessary to send it to

Government as the contents of it are already known to them. But it struck me that I

should yet inform you that this incendiary leaflet is still being mailed out to this country,

so that the Government may take such further steps as it may deem proper to prevent the

circulation of such poisonous matter.44

The web of surveillance around Savarkar included not just local and international police, but

even some nationalists who were willing to turn him in for his writings. Madan Mohan

Malaviya made no mention of Savarkar’s violent activities, only of his seditious leaflet.

The government did not, however, take immediate action. Savarkar was not arrested for

another two years, during which time the government carefully, and stealthily, developed its

case. In March 1909, the District Superintendent of Police in Nasik, Savarkar’s home town,

wrote to the District Magistrate. Referring to translations of eight of Savarkar’s letters to his

brother, he noted: ‘Vinayak has repeatedly asked his brother to send him the Bande Mataram

essay.’45 Excerpts from this essay had been cited as evidence in the full text of Savarkar’s trial

judgment. He wrote further that ‘VDS is a well-known rank extremist and it will be observed

from one of his letters to Ganesh, that he advocated a defiant stand being made by the

extremists should Government prevent the holding of the Congress at Nagpur in December

last.’ The letter went on to state about Ganesh Damodar Savarkar that, ‘Apart from the

offences he is at present charged with, the correspondence seized in his house after his arrest

fairly indicates that he has been conspiring with others to subvert British rule in India.’ From

all this, the suggestion was made that ‘Govt may be moved to ask the Home authorities to have

the belongings of VDS, whose address is India House London thoroughly searched for

incriminating documents in English and Marathi’.46 On the basis of a letter asking for an essay,

it was considered legal to have his domicile in England searched. These were dangerous words

indeed.

42Home Department/Political/60-A, 1908–9,S3 (National Archives, New Delhi).

43ibid. See also Keer, op. cit., 65.44Home Department/Political/60-A, 23 August

1908 (National Archives, New Delhi).

45Home Department/Political/60-A, S21 (Na-tional Archives, New Delhi).

46ibid.


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We know from David Garnet’s first-hand account of being grilled by Scotland Yard that

there were always watchers around India House.47 We also know that there were three moles

in India House. In addition, back in India, the Director of Criminal Intelligence, and the

Deputy Inspector General of Police, worked to put a case together that would force Savarkar’s

extradition from England. The subject of discussion was how to justify his arrest and whether

the evidence was strong enough to do so. Could letters showing his connection to his brother

suffice? Or would the fact that he distributed seditious leaflets work?48 While the government

had clear evidence to justify arresting his brother – including bomb-making manuals – so far

Savarkar was only guilty of association with his brother, and of founding a secret society. The

tangible evidence the colonial government had against him was his own words in a leaflet, a

pamphlet and a book.

In July 1909, a memorandum was circulated on the anti-British agitation among the natives

of India in England.49 Savarkar was in England under close watch, one of his brothers (Ganesh

Damodar Savarkar) had been sentenced to transportation for life in the Andamans, while his

other brother (Narayan Damodar Savarkar) was under surveillance.50 But what was blinking

quite conspicuously on the colonial radar screen was Savarkar’s book on the 1857 Mutiny. A

telegram from the Bombay government proposed banning the book under the terms of the Sea

Customs Act.51 The matter was referred to the Director of Criminal Intelligence, C. J.

Stevenson-Moore, who agreed that it was a good idea even though he didn’t believe the

‘London Extremists’ were doing very much with the book.52 As it turned out, they were busy

translating the work into English and arranging for its international distribution, as

Koregaonkar would reveal in his role as informant.53

Towards the end of the year, the Bombay government was working out the details: ‘I think

that the Customs might be warned to test for fake bottoms in the boxes of Indian students

returning from Europe’ and, doubtless wondering about how to make more indictments,

‘whether a prosecution for sedition would stand in the case of a man in whose box a copy of

the book might be found on landing in Bombay. Perhaps it is worthwhile having this

considered and orders issued?’54 The government was considering whether the sweep of

sedition law could be extended to the possession of a book. But even if the colonial

government was going to use the Sea Customs Act, they needed to amend it. A proposal was

made that they add the term ‘seditious’ after the word ‘obscene’ so that the terms of the Act

would now read: ‘By section 18(c) of the Sea Customs Act the bringing into British India of

any obscene and seditious book, pamphlet, paper, drawing, painting, representation, figure or

article is prohibited.’55 However, Sea Customs Officers, it was pointed out, could not possibly

adjudicate about what was and what was not ‘seditious’, and the discussion moved to passing a

47Garnet, op. cit., 153.48Home Department/Special/60-A, 1909–22

(National Archives, New Delhi), 5, 11, 19. Seecorrespondence between the DIG Police (MrGuider) and the Director of Criminal Intelligenceon the question of the legal justification forSavarkar’s arrest.

49Home Political/Deposit/July 1909, no. 19

(National Archives, New Delhi).50Home Political/Deposit/October 1909, no.

29 (National Archives, New Delhi).

51Home Political/A, August 1909, nos 23–7

(National Archives, New Delhi).52ibid.53See Godbole, op. cit., 23.54Home Department/Political/60-B, 1910 (Na-

tional Archives, New Delhi), 55, 58.55Home Political/Deposit/May 1910, no. 1

(National Archives, New Delhi).


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new Press Act. The Press Act in India was designed to monitor local newspapers to ensure

nothing critical of the British government was printed. In light of these events, Savarkar’s book

might well have occasioned the passing of a new Press Act in 1910.

Savarkar’s book was carefully watched as it made its way across Europe and then on to India.

For all that Savarkar’s friends were trying to camouflage the book, there was little about its

distribution that seems to have been unknown to the police. The banning of the book by using

the Sea Customs Act appears to have been successful, and it was noted in the police history

sheet that ‘In 1909, Vinayek published an English translation of ‘‘The Indian War of

Independence of 1857’’ and printed 3000’ copies but that it received a small circulation owing

to its prohibition under the Sea Customs Act.56 The 1857 book remained banned until two

years after Indian independence. Alongside the banning of his book and the monitoring of his

work, the Benchers at the Inns of Court were planning to prevent Savarkar from getting his

law degree.57 They postponed his call to the bar and, once he was arrested, the colonial

authorities even stripped him of his bachelor’s degree. The colonial government was like a

patient if somewhat disconcerted bird of prey setting a trap. And it was not just setting out to

arrest Savarkar, but to prevent him from speaking or writing ever again.

What emerges from the historical record is a world of extreme secrecy, of cat and mouse

intrigue, moles, informants and double agents. From the moment Savarkar set foot on English

soil, responsibility for his surveillance moved back and forth from Bombay to London. The

colonial authorities in India were keen to arrest him and took pains to alert the authorities in

England about their wishes.

We know that Savarkar has been manager of the India House and also that he has

had some examination before him. It occurs to me that it might be worth while

writing to the India Office to tell them that you have papers showing a close

connection between Savarkar and his brother who has now been committed for trial

on charges of waging war and sedition, in whose possession was found a voluminous

typed document giving detailed instructions as to the manufacture and use of bombs,

besides the draft of a most violent essay in praise of various Bengal murderers. If the

Indian Office laid this information before the proper authorities, their hesitation

should give way to decision presuming the student in question is Savarkar, and the

effect would be excellent.58

In other words, all that the British authorities had to do was correctly to identify Savarkar as

the author of a ‘violent essay’. Once that was done, his relationship to his brother was enough

to suspect him.

All telegrams containing any reference to Savarkar were scrutinized for any clues about his

movements or plans. All telegrams arriving from or despatched to Europe, or to or from

Bombay, between 13 December 1909 and 13 January 1910, ‘which contain or are suspected to

56Savarkar Police History Sheet (Calcutta,1935), 12.

57Home Department/1909/Telegrams 135,Telegram to Secretary of State, 15 May 1909,regarding VDS; Telegram 136 from Secretary of

State, stating that the Benchers have postponed thecall to the bar of VDS and Harnam Singh(National Archives, New Delhi).

58Home Political/Deposit, May 1910, no. 1



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contain references to the movements or plans of V. D. Savarkar shall be disclosed to the

Deputy Commissioner of Police, Bombay’.59 It was noted that ‘Bombay at last sanctioned

Savarkar’s case, but he left for Paris sixth. Get Orders for Director General of Telegraphs

instruct cable companies for scrutiny by Vincent of wires sent last 30 days and for retention of

any suspicious.’60 Finally the trap was sprung. ‘Director of Criminal Intelligence should see

after issue with as little delay as possible. I believe he intends to discuss with the Bombay

authorities the possibility of framing a charge under section 121-A against V. D. Savarkar and

obtaining his surrender under the Fugitive Offenders Act.’61 But why the Fugitive Offenders

Act (FOA)? On what grounds could he be considered a fugitive? We shall come to this

presently.

Savarkar was still in London when Anant Kanhere assassinated the collector of Nasik. A

young English student, David Garnet, who would go on to become a novelist and member of

the famed Bloomsbury Group, became friends with members of India House. His memoir,

The Golden Echo, was condescending in its descriptions of Indians, but written in a mildly

confessional tone for harbouring some initial (and short-lived) sympathy for the Indian

nationalist cause. It also provides first-hand information about Savarkar in London. Garnet

recalled that, to try him in India, the authorities needed to ‘dig up or manufacture, evidence of

crimes committed’, eventually alighting on speeches Savarkar had made four years earlier.62

On the basis of these speeches, the Bombay government issued a telegraphic warrant for his

arrest under the FOA of 1881. As soon as Savarkar returned to London from Paris, on 13

March 1910, he was arrested as a fugitive.

The FOA presumed that the suspect in question had been guilty of a crime and had fled to

evade arrest. But when Savarkar came to England as a student, it was not as a fugitive. He had

arrived like any other Indian student, to study law. He had not been previously charged with a

crime, or evaded arrest, or fled either India or England. Yet the only way he could have been

extradited to India was to produce charges of an unresolved crime in India. To this end, the

only crime the colonial authorities could come up with was the charge of sedition based on

speeches he had made as a college student in Pune. At the time, Savarkar was under

surveillance and could easily have been charged and arrested there, had his sedition seemed

dangerous. But the colonial government in India did not do so, only charging him four years

later while he was in England. The trumped-up nature of the charge was apparent to all his

supporters, yet it was important for the colonial authorities to use the FOA and try Savarkar for

sedition in India, for two reasons.

Sedition as a criminal offence was all but obsolete in British common law at the time, and it

would have been much more difficult to secure a conviction in London. At the same time,

given the severity of sedition law in India, a conviction was much more likely to yield a harsh

sentence. Sedition was one thing in metropolitan England and quite another in colonial India.

And so Savarkar was apprehended as a fugitive and arrested on five charges, including

delivering seditious speeches in India from January to March 1906 and in London from 1908 to

59Home Political/A/ February 1910, Telegramnos 31–2 (National Archives, New Delhi).

60Home Department/Political/1910, Notes ofthe Criminal Intelligence Office, Telegram fromthe Director, CI, dated Nasik, 13 January 1910


61Home Political/Deposit, May 1910, no. 1

(National Archives, New Delhi).62Garnet, op. cit., 153.


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1909.63 However, as we have seen, the surveillance focused almost entirely on his writings. He

was extradited to India, and tried twice by two separate courts for separate offences.64 In his

second trial in the Bombay High Court, he was convicted and given the maximum sentence of

two life-terms on the Andaman Islands. In July 1911, Savarkar was taken to Port Blair to serve

out his sentence in the cellular jail.

SEDITION LAW

As a criminal offence, sedition came under the jurisdiction of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

The IPC had been drafted in its entirety in 1837 by Thomas Babington Macaulay while he was

serving as Law Member of the Governor General’s Council. For the next thirty years or so,

while the debate about the codification of law raged in England, Macaulay’s draft for India

remained untouched. The question of codification in England was eventually settled in

Blackstone’s favour, in 1870, which meant that hereafter British common law would remain

traditional and uncodified.65 But what prevailed in the metropole did not extend to the

colonies. Tradition, while important, was not granted the same status in India as it had in

England, with colonial law-makers arguing that the only way to resolve the chaos of the

different legal systems in India (Hindu and Muslim) was to codify Indian law. However,

codification in India posed its own and particularly colonial problems. The chief law and order

problem confronting the East India Company (EIC) from the late eighteenth century until

about 1860 was the lawlessness and rampant savagery of a varied group of white non-official

Britons and EIC army personnel. Codified law would bring white miscreants and criminals

under its purview and, as Elizabeth Kolsky has demonstrated, this posed an untenable racial

problem for a supposedly impartial and fair colonial legal apparatus. Codification, by

definition, would have to address the problem of colonial judges adjudicating differentially

between white settlers and native subjects.66 In the meantime, across one part of the country

there had been growing sentiment against colonial occupation. The result was the 1857

Rebellion, which was brutally suppressed by the EIC over the course of two years. The

territories of the EIC were annexed by the Crown in the wake of the Rebellion and, two years

later, in 1861, Macaulay’s 1837 draft Code became law.

The original draft of the Code contained a section (113) that had a provision for sedition,

but it was left out of the 1861 Indian Penal Code (IPC). The reasons for such an omission,

which concerned the different legal and political climates in England and India at the time,

cannot be explored in this article; however, ten years later the rise of revolutionary activity in

India prompted an amendment to the IPC. The 1870 amendment first introduced ‘exciting

disaffection’ against the government as a criminal offence, and when the IPC was re-enacted in

1898 section 124-A replaced the crime of ‘exciting disaffection’ with ‘sedition’. It is with this

new 1898 amendment that sedition law comes into its own in colonial India. While it

embodied one aspect of the law of seditious libel taken from English law, the new amendment

63Keer, op. cit., 72.64Godbole, op. cit., 40.65Michael Lobban, The Common Law and English

Jurisprudence, 1760–1850, in particular the chapter onBlackstone and codification (Oxford, 1991).

66Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice: White Vio-lence and the Rule of Law in British India (Cam-bridge, 2009).


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was much harsher than the previous one, in that it anticipated possible defences, not something

present in the 1870 iteration.67 The terms of the 1898 IPC, section 124-A, read as follows:

whoever by words either spoken or intended to be read, or by signs, or by visible

representation, or otherwise brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or

excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards her Majesty or the Government

established by law in British India shall be punished with transportation for life, or for a

term which may extend to three years.68

By the second decade of the nineteenth century, in England, ‘offending words’ were being

scrutinized almost entirely in contextual terms – where the words were uttered, in what

context, to whom, and how they were received. The last of these criteria became ever more

important. It was permissible to hold personal political views in opposition to the government

(disapprobation); it was quite another to have those views influence others to action that might

bring the lawful government into ‘hatred and contempt’. As Michael Lobban has argued, with

the expansion of the public sphere and public debate on political issues in nineteenth-century

England, the charge of sedition became increasingly unusable because it depended entirely on

the jury’s ability and willingness first to interpret the offence as seditious and then to deliver a

conviction, something English juries were increasingly unwilling to do.69 As sedition

increasingly became linked to the question of public order, any meeting that took as its intent

the task of spreading sedition, of either rousing people to insurrection or instilling terror in

them, was seen as an unlawful assembly. The actual words themselves, whether spoken or

written, were of far less concern than their potential effect to incite anti-government feeling.

Given the technical difficulties involving case presentation, as well as the political sensitivity of

sedition trials, it became easier simply to stop depending on a jury to determine seditious intent

and sidestep the whole issue. Sedition, while still on the books as a misdemeanour, could be

better controlled by subsuming it under the law against unlawful assembly.70

67I am grateful to Philip Hamburger for thisclarification.

68See H. P Gupta and P. K. Sarkar, Law relatingto Press and Sedition in India (Bombay, 2002), 157.On the development of seditious libel in England,see Philip Hamburger ‘The development of thelaw of seditious libel and the control of the press’,Stanford Law Review, XXXVII, 661 (February 1985),662–765. Hamburger argues that over the courseof the seventeenth century, the Crown wascompelled to abandon other forms of control overthe press such as treason, heresy, libel, ScandalumMagnatum and Tudor felony statues, and only thendid the law of seditious libel come to prominence.

69Michael Lobban, ‘From seditious libel tounlawful assembly: Peterloo and the changing faceof political crime, c. 1770–1820’, Oxford Journal ofLegal Studies, X, 3 (Autumn 1990), 307–52, arguesthat sedition all but vanishes from Englishcommon law because of the dispute between

judge and jury about the determination of‘seditious libel’ which brought together the legalquestion of fact, on the one hand, with subjectiveinterpretation on the other. ‘Sedition’ was a matterfor the jury to determine since it addressed thequestion of the state of mind of the seditionist andthe purported effect the alleged sedition had on agroup of people; ‘libel’, on the other hand, was amatter of law which could be ruled on by thejudge. As a law, it became increasingly unusable,Lobban argues, not least because defence counselargued hard to protect the rights of the free-bornjury to determine such matters. In the process,seditious libel on account of the technicaldifficulties related to case presentations gave wayto an easier and more usable legal instrument that,in effect, avoided the thorny questions of fact andinterpretation of seditious content.

70ibid.


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Towards the end of the nineteenth century the concept of sedition was still used in England,

albeit sporadically, and mainly to deal with the phenomenon of Irish nationalism.71 The

actions of Irish nationalists (or English anarchists, for that matter) were not regarded by the

police or the government (at least not overtly) as signs of a new anti-colonial political language.

As in India, they were seen instead as the callous and dastardly actions of murderous thugs, or

as terrorist acts. The commonality of perception of Irish and Indian anti-colonial activity is

hardly coincidental. The first act of ‘terrorism’ on English soil was the failed attempt by a

group of Irish Fenians in 1867 to rescue their comrades from Clerkenwell prison in the City of

London. The rescue attempt failed because Dublin police intelligence and informant testimony

had alerted the London police to the plans ahead of time. None the less, parts of Clerkenwell

prison were blown up and twelve people died as a result. Six conspirators were arrested, and

one of them was executed. Outraged by the lone execution, Queen Victoria made her views

on Irish suspects clear: ‘They should be lynch-lawed and on the spot.’72 Irish nationalism was

murder, not politics. In the wake of the subsequent sustained Irish bombing campaign between

1881 and 1885, a special force was created within England – the ‘Irish’ branches of both the

Metropolitan Police and Scotland Yard – to monitor suspicious political figures.73 Within this

web of police surveillance, which went back and forth between Ireland, England and Europe,

a large group of people was monitored, including Irish nationalists, English anarchists and

Indian nationalists. But while Irish nationalists could be monitored, and even arrested,

convicting them for sedition was difficult and other means were used. In India things were

different.

Jury convictions were not difficult to secure in colonial India. The IPC still required a jury

conviction for sedition, as in England, but juries in India were three-quarters white European

and one-quarter native Indian. These juries were not reluctant to convict, and sedition became

increasingly important as a means by which to contain anti-colonial nationalists across the

generations. Sedition trials per se were no less politically explosive in India than in England, but

the outcome could be guaranteed because the juries could be counted on to convict. The legal

definition of sedition made no real separation between word and deed, intention and

implementation, representation and reality. In India, sedition became the pre-emptive as well

as the ex post facto legal mechanism that allowed the colonial state, in anticipation of a

dangerous act, to proscribe all thought, writing or language that might produce it. At the same

71Alexander Sullivan was prosecuted and con-victed for seditious libel in 1868 for articles he hadpublished in November and December 1867 aboutthe execution of three Fenians. In his judgment,Justice Fitzgerald noted that sedition was a crimeagainst society, closely allied to and frequentlypreceding treason by a short interval. He alsowrote that the tendency of sedition was to invitepeople to insurrection. See R v. Sullivan (1868) 11

Cox CC 44, 45, 54. Fenians were more likely,however, to be prosecuted under the 1848

Treason Felony Act, under which it was a felony,punishable with life imprisonment, to levy waragainst the king. Under the old 1351 Statute, it wastreason to imagine the death of the king, i.e. toplot or plan such an act, but the charge of levying

war required an actual act of hostility. The newStatute allowed people to be prosecuted withoutactually engaging in any acts of hostility. I amimmensely grateful to Michael Lobban for point-ing me to these cases, and for clarifying thedifference between sedition used in Irish trials, andsedition as it was later used in India.

72M. E. Hassett, ‘The British Government’sReaction to Mainland Irish Terrorism, c. 1867–1979’ (Ph.D., Open University, 2007), chap. 2, 4–5.

73For details on the creation of the CriminalInvestigation Department and its connection withthe Special Irish Branch of the MetropolitanPolice, and the ‘Fenian Office’ of Scotland Yard,see Hassett, ibid., chap. 2.


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time, sedition also allowed for a post-event round-up and arrest of everyone even remotely

connected with the actual act, on the grounds that their rhetoric had clearly been the cause of

incitement of the natives to agitate against the government. At the moment of its demise in

England, because of its association with illiberalism, sedition was reborn in India with colonial

occupation as the midwife.

One of Savarkar’s heroes, B. G.Tilak, was charged with sedition in 1897 (the year before the

new amendment was enacted) for writing a poem praising the Marathi chieftain Shivaji for his

bravery in resisting foreign rule, and an article in his Marathi newspaper, Kesari. In his defence,

he made much of a European jury’s inability to understand the nuances of a language they did

not know. On the last day of Tilak’s trial, the judge was reported as clarifying that

disaffection . . . meant hostility or ill-will of any sort towards the Government, feelings of

ill-will, great or small, intense or mild and any attempt to excite such feelings brought the

offender within the section. . . . It was not action but feeling that was the test. . . . . In this

case the test was whether the writer intended to excite feelings of disaffection [defined as

want of affection] towards the Government in any way by anything he wrote, whether an

editorial article, a poem, or a disquisition concerning some hero.74

In this clarification, the judge was being perfectly consistent with the legal definition of

sedition as it was laid down in English common law, but he was simultaneously expanding the

parameters of the term beyond its original meaning. How, for instance, could one monitor

‘feelings of ill-will, great or small, intense or mild’? (My emphasis.) What instructions could be

given to the average policeman? The entire population of the country could potentially be

guilty of sedition.

The lack of discrimination in the law did not pass without comment by prominent

nationalists such as Tilak, as we see in his second trial for sedition. This trial was occasioned by

an incident from the other side of the country. In Calcutta, in April 1908, Khudiram Bose

hurled a bomb at a District Judge’s carriage, mistakenly killing two Englishwomen who were

using it that afternoon. Tilak, ever irrepressible and out of jail at that point, wrote that the

bomb was a product of the ‘exasperation produced by the autocratic exercise of power by the

unrestrained and powerful white official class’. Furthermore, he argued that repression bred

violence and the way to eliminate such bomb throwing was for the government to grant self-

rule to the people.75 Two weeks later, he was arrested again.

In this second trial, Tilak spoke explicitly of a political language that borrowed from

international anarchism. ‘The authorities’, he said, ‘have spread the false report that the bombs

of the Bengalis are subversive of society.’ Tilak argued that such a report was simply untrue and

gave clear reasons for why that was so.

There is an excess of patriotism at the root of the bombs in Bengal, while the bombs in

Europe are the product of hatred felt for selfish millionaires. The Bengalis are not

anarchists, but they have brought into use the weapons of the anarchists, that is

all. . . . The anarchist in America who murders a millionaire for the only reason that he is

74The (London) Times, ‘The trial of Mr Tilak’,15 September 1897.

75A. G. Noorani, Indian Political Trials: 1775–1947 (New Delhi, 1976), 124.


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a millionaire is one man, while the exasperated Russian patriot who throws a bomb in

despair because the Tsar’s officers do not grant the rights of the Duma in Russia is

different. No one should forget that the bombs in Bengal do not belong to the first

category but to the second.76

Sedition in India, Tilak was suggesting, could not be reduced to an anarchist politics that was

critical both of capitalism and of the state; the problem had instead to do with the state in

question. Sedition was patriotic anti-colonial nationalism.

In insisting on the specificity of the colonial situation in India, Indian extremists were

engaged in politics at several levels. Since colonial sedition law made the boundary between

non-violent words and violent actions porous, and made no distinctions between generalized

resentment and anti-colonial politics, it could spread itself far and wide. No distinction was

made between actual acts of violence and inflammatory rhetoric or mild criticism. As a result,

sedition became the umbrella term under which nationalists of all stripes were placed under

surveillance, arrested and tried. Tilak used the idea of sedition to suggest that the issue was not

so much the means of resistance (which can be graded or calibrated) but the fact of resistance

(which can only be deemed true or false) to colonial rule. The former would allow for

‘splitting’, the latter only for ‘all are guilty’. And sedition, thereby, became the colonial

flashpoint that it did precisely because it posed a fundamental challenge to colonial legitimacy

by holding it to its own standards of certainty, with no room for equivocation.

Yet some proof was needed in court. On the one hand, sedition could be immediately

apparent. If, for instance, upon hearing a seditious pamphlet read by its author the assembled

audience rushed off to burn a government building, the case could easily be made for intention

to insurrection. But where the offending material was underground literature, such as that

written and surreptitiously published by firebrand nationalists like Savarkar, it was much harder

to prove. This proof could only be acquired through surveillance which aimed at eliminating

guesswork about the actual intent of the seditious material. Furthermore, given the judge’s

clarification in Tilak’s trial that ‘disaffection’ meant feelings of ill will, small or great, mild or

strong, the reach of the colonial state was now virtually limitless since it allowed for no

distinction between politics and generalized ill will.77

At the same time, the potential expansion of sedition law into the unfathomable and

invisible sentiments of colonized subjects also brings out one of the many instances of the

colonial government straddling an uneasy line. On the one hand, sedition law itself suggests

that the colonial regime could not fail to recognize that Indians across a wide spectrum

resented and even despised colonial rule. On the other hand, there was the simultaneous

production of an elaborate mythology about how much the Indians wanted and loved English

rule. This contradiction was resolved by making distinctions between the normative subjects

of empire, who were loyal, and the pathological subjects of empire, who were disloyal. The

latter were ‘extremists’ or ‘anarchists’ or ‘terrorists’ and colonial sedition law was both part of

the mechanism of that resolution and its product.

In the official correspondence, it was clear that Savarkar was a threat, but there was also

some uncertainty about the nature of the threat. ‘A case should be put up against Savarkar even

76The (London) Times, ‘The trial of Mr Tilak’,22 July 1908.

77I am grateful to Satadru Sen and ElizabethKolsky for this insight.


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though its [sic] not very strong. If he is convicted of being a member of a conspiracy the second

conviction is by no means unprovable. If he is acquitted of course the whole petition drops.’78

Much was known about him, as the earlier section demonstrates, but not much that was

concrete enough for a court of law. In the official correspondence there was also caution. ‘It

should be clearly understood,’ it was noted in a confidential telegram to the Secretary of State

in London, that ‘there is chance of acquittal on charge of abetment of murder whereas in all

probability sentence on conspiracy charge will be transportation for life which would be

probably maximum on conviction on other charges. If such a sentence now given, effect

might actually be to induce clemency at a second trial. Political effect of second trial would be

most unfortunate as vindictiveness of Govt would be alleged.’79 In other words, they wanted

to nail Savarkar the first time, not risk the political fallout of a second trial. But they also

wanted to nail him on conspiracy charges, not on abetment of murder, and for that all they had

were his words.

In the text of Savarkar’s trial judgment, published in The (London) Times, he was described

as ‘the leader of a group of ardent revolutionaries’ and accused of ‘despatch[ing] to India

inflammatory pamphlets styled ‘‘Oh Martyrs!’’ in praise of those Indians who fell on the rebel

side during the Mutiny’.80 His major crime, as the text of the judgment put it, was to have

been ‘occupied with other associates at the India House in manifolding a number of typed

copies of a work dealing with the preparation of bombs and dangerous explosives suitable for

anarchical outrages’. As evidence of this crime, passages from the confiscated pamphlet entitled

‘Bande Mataram’ were quoted:

Terrorize the officials, English and Indian, and the collapse of the whole machinery of

oppression is not very far. The persistent execution of the policy that has been so

gloriously inaugurated by Khoodiram Bose, Kanailal Dutt, and other martyrs will soon

cripple the British Government in India. This campaign of separate assassinations is the

best conceivable method of paralysing the bureaucracy and of arousing the people. The

initial stage of the revolution is marked by the policy of separate assassinations.81

Thus the case against Savarkar was made by treating specific and particular words as evidence

of a conspiracy.

Savarkar’s role in the actual violence was not the major concern of the colonial state. In any

event, revolutionary groups were amateurish and often incompetent, leaving behind many

careless clues that led to their eventual capture.82 On occasion, they may have carried their

assassination plans to fruition, but most of the time the groups lacked any real training to carry

out their schemes, despite their conversations about bomb manuals, terror and pistols. Besides,

for every one assassination committed by the revolutionaries, the colonial state upped the ante

and showed great efficiency and speed in suppressing a wide variety of activities that in today’s

terminology would be called ‘insurgency’. The colonial state altered legislation with great

speed, and the intrusive scope of a number of Acts (the Arms Act in 1878, the Sea Customs Act

78Home Department/Political/Notes, 60-B,1910 (National Archives, New Delhi), 269.

79ibid., 271.80The (London) Times, ‘The Savarkar case. Text

of the judgment’, 14 January 1911.

81ibid.82Garnet, op. cit., 157, 159.


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in 1898, the Press Act in 1910) was expanded to shut down or monitor the activities of

suspicious young students. The government confiscated student knapsacks, ransacked student

belongings upon their return to India from abroad, intercepted letters and monitored all

communication in student hostels.83 Given the colonial state’s efficient surveillance, and

prompt response to sedition, we have all the more reason to rethink the relationship between

sedition and terror. And it is with this as background that it becomes especially important to

note that the same sedition law that was given its new colonial form in relation to

revolutionaries and terrorists was also used to target the leader of non-violent nationalism in

India, the Mahatma himself.

CONCLUSION

Unlike Tilak and Savarkar, Mohandas Gandhi had no fondness for extremist ideology or

tactics. Gandhi had successfully led a movement using his technique of non-violent resistance,

honed through his work over many years in South Africa. When he embarked on what he

called a ‘non-cooperation’ campaign across all of India, that began in 1919 and continued until

1922, he was quite clear that violence was not part of his agenda. As a result, after a violent

attack on a police station, Gandhi famously called off the campaign, lamenting that Indians

were not ready for the challenge of non-violence. Tried in 1922 on the charge of inciting

‘disaffection’ against the ‘British government by law established’, Gandhi brought the question

of sedition and terror full circle. If sedition was the crime of harbouring and attempting to

spread ‘disaffection’ against the government, Gandhi readily accepted that maintaining

‘affection’ for the government was the right thing to do. Indeed, he claimed that he had in the

past felt a great deal of it for the British Empire and government, as demonstrated by his actions

during the Boer War and the Zulu rebellion. But, he argued, he no longer had any affection

left for a government that was ceaselessly oppressing the people. Gandhi’s shrewdness shows in

his completely literal reading not only of sedition law but the assumptions that underlay it. By

1922, after the Rowlatt bills, the massacre of Jallianwala Bagh and the repression directed at the

non-cooperation movement, he had lost all ‘affection’, and was actively encouraging other

Indians to follow suit.

Unlike Tilak (whom he admired) and Savarkar (whom he did not), Gandhi accepted the

rule of law and repeatedly claimed that non-violence was the first and last article of his creed.

But the colonial government had lost its conscience and, as a result, no affection could be

extended to it. Gandhi took the lion by its whiskers and in the first of four articles that would

be cited as seditious, titled ‘Disaffection – a virtue’ (15 June 1921), wrote that ‘I hold it to be

the duty of every good man to be disaffected towards the existing Government, if he considers

it as non-cooperators consider it evil.’84 In a second article, ‘Tampering with loyalty’ (29

September 1921), he went a step further. ‘[S]edition has become the creed of the Congress,’ he

wrote, adding that ‘every non-cooperator is pledged to preach disaffection towards the

Government established by law. Non-cooperation, though a religious and strictly moral

movement, deliberately aims at the overthrow of the Government and is therefore legally

83Home Department/Special/71, 1908 (Na-tional Archives, New Delhi).

84Mulk Raj Anand (ed.), The Historic Trial ofMahatma Gandhi (New Delhi, 1987), 15.


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seditious in terms of the Indian Penal Code.’85 Gandhi conceded that the government had the

right to change its policy when its very existence was under threat, but he also made clear that

neither he nor the other non-cooperators were asking for any special dispensation. ‘We ask for

no quarter; we expect none from the government. We did not solicit the promise of immunity

from prison, so long as we remained non-violent. We may not now complain if we are

imprisoned for sedition.’86 Sedition and disaffection were now to be embraced as the creed of

non-cooperation.

On 18 March 1922, Gandhi was tried in Ahmedabad. The charge was sedition on the basis

of four of his articles in Young India. He gave his occupation as weaver and farmer, offered no

defence, and in his introductory remarks acknowledged that he had

no desire whatsoever to conceal from this court the fact that the preaching of disaffection

towards the existing system of government has become almost a passion with me. . . . It is

the most painful duty with me, but I have to discharge that duty knowing the

responsibility that rests upon my shoulders. . . . I know I was playing with fire. I ran the

risk and if I was set free I would still do the same.87

But in his statement, he felt he needed to explain why he had made the move from affection to

disaffection, despite his earlier history of raising a volunteer ambulance corps in London to

support the war effort. The change came after the Rowlatt Act and Jallianwala Bagh. ‘I came

reluctantly to the conclusion,’ he said in court

that the British connection had made India more helpless than she ever was before

politically and economically . . . the Government established by law in British India is

carried on for [the] exploitation of the masses. No sophistry, no jugglery in figures, can

explain away the evidence that the skeletons in many villages present to the naked

eye . . . the law itself in this country has been used to serve the foreign exploiter. In my

opinion the administration of the law is thus prostituted consciously or unconsciously, for

the benefit of the exploiter.88

Since the law was corrupt, sedition and disaffection were the only conscionable form of

resistance.

In typical Gandhian fashion, he did not indict the British indiscriminately and admitted that

I am satisfied that many Englishmen and Indian officials honestly believe that they are

administering one of the best systems devised in the world and that India is making steady

though slow progress. They do not know that a subtle but effective system of terrorism

and an organized display of force on the one hand, and the deprivation of all powers of

retaliation or self-defence on the other, have emasculated the people and induced in them

the habit of simulation.89

85ibid., 18.86ibid., 19.87ibid. Introductory remarks by Mahatma

Gandhi before reading his statement, 39.

88ibid., 45.89ibid., 46.


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In other words, the real terrorists in India were the British, whose system of rule and law had

lost all legitimacy.

Lastly, Gandhi took on the actual charge of sedition. ‘The section 124-A, under which I am

happily charged, is perhaps the prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code

designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen.’ In the passage most germane to our concern

here, he said:

Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a

person or system one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so

long as he does not contemplate, promote, or incite violence. But the section under

which [I am charged] is one under which mere promotion of disaffection is a crime. I

have studied some of the cases tried under it, and I know that some of the most loved of

India’s patriots have been convicted under it. I consider it a privilege, therefore to be

charged under that section. . . . I have no personal ill will against any single administrator,

much less can I have any disaffection towards the King’s person. But 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. India is less manly under the British rule than she ever

was before. Holding such a belief I consider it to be a sin to have affection for the

system.90

With these words Gandhi brought sedition and disaffection, both of which, as we have seen,

were linked to terror and violence, into a different domain of non-violence and political

legitimacy.

If Tilak had preached violent rhetoric and Savarkar had engaged in violent sedition, Gandhi

turned the tables on all of them, including colonial administrators and all earlier forms of

nationalist thought. He used the language of sedition and disaffection to demonstrate that the

English had abandoned all claims to rule – indeed, all their claims in India to fair play, justice

and freedom. The British could therefore no longer claim the right of affection on the part of

the ruled. In so doing, Gandhi redefined the ideas of sedition and terror, while at the same

time taking sedition law literally – demonstrating that words were indeed more powerful than

the sword. Not only was Gandhi promulgating a method more powerful than that of the

extremists before him, he was also conceding the concerns previously held by the British about

a figure like Savarkar, that his writing was more dangerous than his gun-running. Perhaps the

British were right to treat him as the ultimate terrorist, but in doing so they allowed Gandhi to

become a symbol of the illegitimacy of colonial rule in India.

In invoking the category of ‘terror’ alongside sedition, there is obviously some relevance to

contemporary times and the post-9/11 obsession with terrorism as an isolated and inexplicable

activity. But that has not been my main interest in this article. The terror of sedition, captured

in the surveillance, is a terror produced and generated through the constitutive condition of

colonial occupation. En passant we may also note that the colonial occupiers in the case of

India were the very same English who were seen as the champions of free speech and liberty in

Europe.

90ibid.


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Winston Churchill’s judgment that two men – Hitler and Gandhi – had been the most

dangerous for the twentieth century becomes, in retrospect, a more powerful indictment of

British colonialism than anything Gandhi himself might have said. But because Churchill

spoke for the imperial establishment, the British were keen to prevent Gandhi from speaking

again. After his 1922 trial, the colonial administration learned that letting Gandhi speak was a

major mistake. From this point onwards, they imprisoned him without a trial. His embracing

of sedition was not a form of terror they wanted to broadcast. Sedition as both offence and

symptom, when examined in a historical arc that moves from Savarkar, the militant nationalist,

to Gandhi, the opposite, shows us that it is no accident that sedition law survived, and indeed

flourished, in a colonial situation long after it had been abandoned as a relevant legal option for

the home country itself.

Columbia University


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Bakhle Sedition and Savarkar

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