The Tragic Revolution: Two Perspectives on the Indian Revolt
The innermost essence, the core, the whole meaning and content of the policies of the imperialist capitalist countries is the continuous and incessant tearing apart of all countries and peoples so that they can be gradually devoured and digested by capitalism. …And, consequently, the working class must draw the conclusion that imperialism, war, plundering countries, haggling over peoples, breaking the law, and the policy of violence can only be fought against by fighting capitalism, by setting social revolution against global genocide.
-Rosa Luxemburg
Yes, this is the logic of the Nation. And it will never heed the voice of truth and goodness. It will go on in its ring-dance of moral corruption, linking steel unto steel, and machine unto machine; trampling under its treat all the sweet flowers of simple faith and the living ideals of man.
-Rabindranath Tagore
The present policy of the International Union of Revolutionary Marxists seems to consist in throwing the Indian proletariat and peasantry into the maw of British imperialism, so that we may avoid the hard task of confronting it ourselves.
-Anton Pannekoek
Mosse, George. 1959. “A Failed Bourgeois Revolution: The INC and the Indian Revolt.” The Journal of Social History.
In the accumulated index of failed bourgeois revolutions, the Indian experiment must be accorded a special place. Only the naked brutality of British colonialism could have compelled the parasitic rentier landowners, the reformist professional classes, and the nationally-conscious peasantry into a revolutionary alliance; only in the heady days of proletarian revolution and Leninist anti-imperialism could the Marxist states of Europe believe that the Indian revolt was a prelude to a social revolution rather than what is really was - an attempt to dam up the revolutionary discontent of the Indian lower-classes.
Let us begin in 1914, before the outbreak of war. What was the character of Indian resistance at this point? Twofold: either consisting of revolutionary terrorism in the anarchist mold, carried out overwhelmingly by the sons of Zamindars(landowners), industrialists, and other middle-class professionals, or a kind of milquetoast reformism, which reached at its most extreme no further than the boycott of British goods. The Indian National Congress, the purported representative body of the national-bourgeoisie, was no more than a debating society which met every year, passed its formulaic denunciations of British excesses, and then dispersed. The most robust bourgeois activism took place outside its purview, as in the boycott movement of 1908, and even here, there was little real connection to the broader Indian population. Mass unrest of the Indian proletariat and peasantry, when it did occur, was sporadic, uncoordinated, and generally apolitical. Tellingly, rioters and strikers were as likely to engage in communalist violence against perceived religious enemies as they were to target British rule.
What do these forms of resistance indicate about the social composition of Indian radicalism? Simply this: that it was perpetually frightened of the great mass of Indian people, and unwilling in principle to work with them. Perhaps this may have been excused in more propitious circumstances, but the Indian bourgeoisie was too feeble to carry out a revolution on its own, and its highest sections, such as the Bombay industrialists, were frequently its most reformist elements. True radicalism was concentrated among lawyers, civil servants, clerks, and other members of the mittelstand; their utter failure to forge active connections with the mass of Indian laborers and peasants must be judged a world-historical mistake on par with the failures of 1848. Perhaps the task of bourgeois revolution is too important to entrust to the bourgeois alone.
When the war came, the British accomplished what the INC could not: they roused the discontented lower-classes, politicized the simmering tensions at the base of Indian society, and precipitated a turn toward revolutionary nationalism amongst sections of the population that ought to have been steadfastly loyal to British rule. One does not need to look far for an explanation of these phenomena: the war forced the British to dramatically intensify their exploitation of the colony. The “drain of wealth” theory had long been a staple of nationalist rhetoric: now it became an unavoidable lived reality. As Bryan tightened the purge-strings of American financiers, the British pound began to precariously teeter, and domestic protest in England spread in response to rising prices. Naturally enough, the colonies were made to bear the fiscal burden of the British war machine.
The full damage done to the Indian economy and the full decline in Indian living standards over the half-decade of the Great War is likely impossible to calculate. There was, firstly, a marked increase in taxation as Indians were forced to pay for the over 2.5 million-man army raised on behalf of Britain. This led to a more than seven-fold increase in income tax revenue, predominantly impacting the middle and upper-classes. Secondly, wartime expenditure, transport bottlenecks, and spiralling inflation caused a more than threefold increase in the price index, even as real wages lagged behind this considerably. British manipulation meant that the prices of most imports went up dramatically, while the value of exports stayed mostly level, a situation that impoverished many wealthy peasants who depended on British agricultural equipment. New excise taxes placed on exports hit Indian industries as well, harming traders and industrialists. Perhaps most injurious, however, was the use of coercive practices of conscription to target both skilled workers and potential army recruits. In the Punjab, the proportion of drafted soldiers changed over a single year from 1:150 to 1:38. Workers were “recruited” under manifestly unfree conditions to work in English factories and peasants were press-ganged into regiments that served on the western front. The loss of skilled agricultural and industrial labor stoked nationalist sentiments greatly. Combined, British measures greatly expedited the drain of wealth from India, forced a decline in the living standards of Indians of every class, created systemic obstacles to indigenous capitalist growth, shattered the livelihoods of both poor and wealthy peasants, and decimated the remaining artisan handicraft industry.
The first wave of resistance occurred in 1917-1918 under the leadership Tilak and Besant, who, inspired by the recent events in Ireland, advocated for Indian “Home Rule”. The British attempted a mixture of repression and conciliation here, exiling both Tilak and Besant, but not before each were able to make some major inroads amongst the general population. Balfour issued a declaration offering Indians some degree of “self-government”, but in light of its tepidness and ambiguity, it was widely viewed as unsatisfactory.
The INC moderates were not explicitly targeted by the law, and they continued to meet under the leadership of the new president Molital Nehru. Yet despite the radicalism of the new body, which called for India to be accorded self-rule and dominion status within five years, there were little real efforts to resist the war effort. As late as September 1919, there is evidence of the INC cooperating with British officials to implement wartime measures. In short, the leadership of the national-bourgeousie remained utterly divorced from the radicalized sections of the Indian population.
Popular radicalism had an uneven and markedly regional character. Despite the failure of the first Ghadar Mutiny, many of their transnational networks remained intact, and Lala Lajput Rai, flush with American dollars and German marks, used them to coordinate a highly effective “no-conscription” campaign in the Punjab over 1919. Punjab’s Sikhs traditionally bore the brunt of British recruitment efforts, though in the great war, they were extended to the region’s substantial Hindu and Muslim communities. The coercive measures of the Punjab Governor O’dwyer, who enlisted Lambardards (village chiefs) to forcibly conscript peasants, had already led to unrest in the province during the 1917-1918 home-rule protests: now Lajput Rai, in concert with Ajit Singh and a pre-existing network of Punjabi radicals, helped villagers resist the efforts at conscription, which was likened to kidnapping. They were helped by an unusual degree of communal amity between Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus.
Some of the first proletarian protests broke out in Bengal around the same time. Workers demanded an end to the war, the beginning of home-rule, and for factories to be operated on the “Russian model”. A number of sympathetic home-rule politicians such as H.B. Mandavale, Janji Dwarkadas, and Umar Sobhani supported them, helping them achieve a compromise settlement which led to a 60% wage increase and a formal recognition by their Anglo-Indian employers of the right to form trade unions. Buoyed by this first victory, unionization in the Bengali textile mills started expanding at a rapid clip.
Perhaps the most explosive pre-revolt social movement, however, took place in the country-side around the city of Bombay. A traditional stronghold of radicalism, it was nonetheless plagued by internal caste divisions. The Brahman caste dominated most clerical and civil-service positions - compared to most other provinces, there was a particularly firm distinction between castes. Peasant revolts began in early 1919, when they refused to pay rents and expropriated Brahmin-owned farmlands. They were led by Mukundaro Patil, the intellectual spokesman of the Satyashodhak Samaj, a social reform society and advocacy group for the Dalits. The insurgency was mostly put down in the late summer, but it continued to simmer, and burst forth again during the beginning of the First Revolutionary Era. A number of radical movements also emerged in Madras, particularly in the Andhra Delta and Tirunelveli, where similar populist lower-caste organizations helped coordinate resistance to both Brahman and British rentier rule.
Finally, we must discuss Bengal itself. The traditional heartland of radicalism, Bengal saw little open protest during 1919, in large part because it was under a state of de facto military rule. A brutal massacre of protestors in February led to a brief period of sustained protest, and then prolonged quiet. Discontent and revolutionary activism continued to flourish just below the surface; many middle-class prewar Bengali terrorist networks were reconstituted, though they held their bombs and assassination plots in abeyance for the time being. The British were more concerned about the Sikh soldiers posted in the area, who frequently fraternized with Bengali civilians. They were worried that in the event of a major uprising they might prove untrustworthy, an anxiety that was to be mostly confirmed by the end of the year.
Revolution Betrayed?
The November Revolutions were the signal for a world-wide proletarian, anti-imperialist revolt. Unfortunately, the social forces were not yet present in India for such a revolution to be led principally by workers - or even workers and peasants. While over half of Bombay and Calcutta workers were on strike by November 11th, the largest strike actions occurred after the mutiny of most Indian soldiers in the north had already begun. There was, of course, little chance for the under 30,000 white British soldiers in India to contain the spreading unrest; more than a few of them determined that they wanted to play no further part in the British imperial venture. Yet the revolutionary networks that connected the mutinying soldiers and striking workers were intended principally to coordinate resistance, nor to construct a new government. These were not “interstitial institutions” of the classic type. Simultaneous revolts in Bombay, the Punjab, and Bengal were not able to link up and communicate for over a week. A general strike of northwestern railway workers on the Gujarat-Gujranwal- Lahore-Amritsar-Delhi line did paralyze the British response, but it also made it more difficult for a unified national-revolutionary administration to be formed.
What was the role of the INC in the opening stages of the revolution? Nil. Its leadership were, naturally enough, dispersed across India; around half were located in the Bombay Presidency and the rest were concentrated in Bengal and the United Provinces. Molital Nehru was reportedly relaxing in his large, family home in Allahabad when he first heard of the revolt; he walked into the city center and saw that a Hartal(mass protest) had broken out in the city. After several failed attempts to purchase a newspaper, he retired for the night. The next morning, he read of the events that had broken out across India, and alarmed, attempted to correspond with other members of the INC located in Bengal, only to find the post office workers were also on strike. He was forced to travel to Calcutta, and on the way, he read several sensationalistic reports which made it appear as if India itself was on the verge of social revolution, and England already drowned in one. The INC, he wrote privately, had to “take power to ensure an orderly transition to the new republic”. He feared that failing to do so would lead “anarchic elements” to come to power. Briefly, he contemplated whether “some deal” could be made with the British, but he was assured by his colleagues that the new prime minister, Winston Churchill, would refuse any cooperation, and besides had his hands full himself with a brewing worker’s revolution.
The INC possessed what all of the revolutionary organizations lacked: a truly nation-wide network of activists which had some pretense of national political legitimacy. Thus when Nehru issued his declaration of independence, the mutinying soldiers, striking workers, and most of the peasant movements (safe some of the lower-caste ones) swore loyalty to the new government. The zamindars soon did the same, believing (with fairly good reason) that they could preserve their privileges in the new order. The radicalized Muslim League was brought in by a promise of co-rule and potential federalization once the British were kicked out; barring this, the electoral agreement made in the Lucknow Pact would be preserved.
Nehru and the rest of the INC overestimated both the extent of British weakness and the degree of social radicalism in India itself. In fact, across vast expanses of the United Provinces, many peasants had not even heard that a revolution was taking place. A good deal of the “revolutionary” discontent had a narrowly economic focus. The first of many defeats inflicted on the INC came when the princely states declared their loyalty to Britain and raised several divisions which marched on Bombay, extinguishing the allied city government and keeping the revolutionary upheaval sequestered from Dravidian Southern India. Yet, having declared their own insurrectionary intentions, the leadership of the INC had little option but to continue onward.
Only in the states of Bengal and Bihar did the INC have the administrative personnel necessary to form anything like a functioning central government. In regions like the United Provinces (outside of Benares and Lucknow) and the Punjab, local administrations were formed from pre-existing elites who frequently were more concerned with their own aggrandizement than they were with the success of the new revolutionary order. Control over populous Bengal, Bihar, and Assam did allow massive armies to be raised; revolutionary enthusiasm in Bengal was particularly high, and at first, the government had to turn down many volunteers whom it could not arm and equip.
Naturally enough, the INC attempted to draw in a “broad front” of social forces - this was also, of course, the policy which IntRevMar advocated. In practice, however, this meant something quite different from what most of Lenin’s allies at IntRevMar imagined: nascent socialist elements were placed in subordinate positions to the moderate leadership, lower-caste organizations were ignored entirely, and Zamindar representatives were placed in the commanding heights of the provincial administrations, which frequently had more power than the central government.
Hindu nationalists and other “extremists” presented a difficult problem for the INC. These figures often held considerable popularity among the general population and common soldiers. Some of the old-guard, such as Lagput Rai, Bipin Chandra Pal, and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, entered the cabinet of the Bengal government, thereby neutralizing a potent source of opposition. Younger individuals involved in the Ghadar Conspiracy could not be brought into the government so easily, as they were severe critics of the INC, and many of them believed they were the rightful leaders of India. At the insistence of IntRevMar, the Ghadar conspirator Bhai Bhagwan Singh and some of his allies were permitted entrance into the diplomatic corps. More hardline Hindu nationalists, such as Savarkar, were not given government posts due to the protestations of the Muslim League.
Perhaps the greatest indictment of the INC government was that it lost the loyalty of its own people within the space of just a few years. Of course, the war would require sacrifices from the population, and perhaps it was impossible for any administration to fully meet the millenarian hopes of the Indian peasantry. Yet the INC government made little effort to ensure an adequate distribution of war-burdens. Its leadership continued to insist on a class-collaborationist, nationalist mythology in which proletarian workers could not truly be repressed by their own national-bourgeoisie. By refusing to place meaningful conditions on the shipment of arms, the Leninist majority at IntRevMar covered itself in ignominy, sanctioning not just the repression of the rural peasantry, but also the INC’s utter unwillingness to embark on meaningful programs of social reform for fear of losing conservative-nationalist support. Beginning in late 1921, peasants in the United Provinces and Rajputana began revolting against harsh conscription measures. Fearful of Bengali dominance of the new government, the Punjab administration refused to meet its fiscal obligations, and ensured that the majority of Soviet Arms did not reach the east. To meet its own financial and economic needs, the Bengal government was forced to resort to increasingly desperate measures, which finally led to scattered peasant revolts breaking out amongst Muslims in East Bengal during 1922, and then in Bihar. Once again, the timidity of the bourgeoisie had doomed the national revolution - the “broad front” was little more than a mirage to cover for bourgeois rule and peasant-proletarian subjection.
Habib, Mohammed. 1961. “The Indian Revolt: Assessing Luxemburgist Revisionism.” The Journal of Social History.
It is quite curious that many esteemed Marxist historians, who have written systematic exculpations of the Russian Revolution’s authoritarian turn, are liable to direct such furious heat and ire toward the leaders of the Indian Revolt. We are told by the same authors that the Russian Revolution’s betrayal of Soviet rule can be excused because of the exigencies of German imperialism, but that all the mistakes of the Indian Revolution may be attributed forthrightly to the voluntary decisions of the Indian Government. Apparently, a century and a half of British imperialism and the miserable conditions it created may be brushed aside as so much historical detritus. One standard for the Russian, then, and another for the Indian - it appears we Europeans have not rid ourselves completely of imperialism after all.
George Mosse writes that the INC declared independence to avert a social revolution, and yet he admits in the same paper that there were not adequate forces to launch such a revolution in the first place. What ought the INC have done in this situation, then? Can anyone doubt that without any central authority, the British would be reconquered India in not 4 years, but 4 months? And what, then, of our treasured European Revolutions?
It is impossible to deny that the INC failed to fully direct the forces of social radicalism against the British, but any comparison to 1848 is mere hyperbole. The colonized bourgeoisie of India did not abandon the revolution, they did not turn themselves and their conspirators into the British, but continued to fight, and to die, for the cause of national independence. If the German bourgeoisie showed the courage of the Indian in 1848, then perhaps the proletariat would not have had to wait for the Great War’s bloodletting to assume power.
As the war went on, the INC grew more, not less radical. Socialist soldiers such as Kari Nazrul Islam and Brijpal Singh were promoted as generals, and future communists such as M.N. Roy, Abani Mukherjii, and Virendranath Chattopadhyay ascended into upper government posts. Plans for land reform were drawn up. Indian nationalists accepted the alliance with IntRevMar, and swore to implement progressive social policy in the postwar period. The presence of reactionary provincial governors attests much more to the weakness of the Bengal Government than it does to alleged conservatism.
Some point to the eventual failure of the Indian Revolt, and it is here that they claim to locate the great failures of the government. They point too, to the peasant revolts, the strike actions, and the increasing discontent on the home front. Yet it is far more useful to ask not why the revolution failed, but how it was able to succeed for so long. The Indian Republican Army faced a vastly superior force that possessed a crushing disparity of firepower and technology. Its soldiers frequently could not speak to or understand one another, and were often completely untrained. And, of course, the government was cut off from global commerce and trade, even while they ruled a territory that had been engineered to be a dependent and peripheral adjunct of London.
How, then, were the British held off for nearly four years? Traditionally, historians have praised the heroism of the Indian soldier, particularly the returning divisions of the western front, who by all accounts were some of the most well-disciplined and effective fighting forces of the Anglo-Indian war. Yet paeans to martial prowess fail to account for the larger, structural factors at play. The INC successfully mobilized the populations of Bengal, Bihar, and Punjab in defense of the national revolution. They directed popular support for the revolution into a variety of channels, recasting the traditional Indian movements of Swadeshi , Samiti, and Swaraj into modern forms.
Swadeshi, initially a movement for self-strengthening and self-sufficiency, came to the fore in Bengal, Bombay, and Punjab in the early 20th century. The nascent bourgeousie attempted to build up national industry and enterprise in the face of British repression. During the Indian Revolt, Swadeshi became a call for service to the nationalist-revolutionary government. Businessmen pledged generous loans to Calcutta, particularly in Bengal, allowing the government to finance the purchase of discounted Soviet landships and other high-end military equipment. They also built up munitions factories, even when these yielded far smaller profits than other industries. Swadeshi ensured the government the material means it required to survive.
The Samitis were national volunteer groups which came to prominence at a similar time to Swadeshi. Most were open bodies engaged in a variety of activities: physical and moral training, social work, religious festivals, and practicing the techniques of passive resistance. A minority turned to revolutionary terrorism. A national samiti union was declared by the government, and all existing samiti groups were unilaterally enrolled in it. At first, there was no obligation for citizens to form additional samitis, but they nonetheless did so in droves. The youth were particularly active in them; samitis helped repair infrastructure, coordinate the provision of aid to soldiers, and assisted in construction projects. In Bengal, it is estimated that over 40% of males aged 15-30 participated in the samitis at one point: the value of their labor was likely worth over 25% of the government budget.
Finally, there is the concept of Swaraj, or “self-rule”. Admittedly, the Indian government made only halting progress toward a real democratization of Indian political life, yet the mere promise of Swaraj electrified large sections of the Indian population. Whatever its flaws, a great many Indians were willing to make enormous personal sacrifices for the new government, something which cannot be said for the colonial regime. Here, the ideology of “self-rule” is key: the promise of Indian government over India did a good deal to inspire loyalty to the INC, even in the face of economic deprivation and rising poverty. The soldiers of the princely states may have only infrequently mutinied, but they were far quicker to surrender than their northern counterparts, who only rarely permitted themselves to be taken prisoner. The propaganda drive of Swaraj accounts for the difference.
In short, the INC government successfully mobilized the territories of Northern India in defense of the revolution and cultivated a national-revolutionary anti-colonial consciousness. The long afterlife of the INC’s efforts should be evident enough in the continuing terrorism, unrest, and guerilla resistance which plagued British rule in the Northern provinces for the next two decades. If IntRevMar was less equivocal in its support for the Indians, and America less willing to throw its substantial weight behind the British imperial project, then there is some chance that the revolution would have been successful. Yet it was a remarkable achievement in any case. The martyrs of the first revolution prepared the groundwork for the second.
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