As diplomats across the world gathered in Paris in spring 1919 to discuss the peace process, observers asked “Whither India?” Critics wondered how the British government could enact emergency laws such as the Rowlatt Acts at the same time as it introduced the Government of India Act of 1919, which was intended to expand Indian involvement in governing the British dominions on the Indian subcontinent. Because Britain presented itself as a liberal form of empire on the international stage, its willingness to suspend rule of law over its subjects appeared contradictory.Footnote 1 India's support of the Allied powers allowed Indian moderates to represent India in Paris; during the war, Indian subjects had contributed over one million soldiers and suffered influenza, plague, and famine.Footnote 2 The possibility of a new relationship between those governing and those being governed led many Indians to demand an adherence to the rule of law, a guarantee of civil liberties, and the foundations of a government that was for and by the Indian people. In a time of revolution in Russia, and assassinations by anarchists in Italy and France, it seemed foolhardy to repress radicals by censoring the press, preventing the right of individuals to assemble, or detaining suspects before they had committed any crimes.Footnote 3 Lala Lajpat Rai, an Indian political activist who had been part of the progressive wing of the Indian National Congress, wrote from the United States, “India is a part of the world and revolution is in the air all the world over. The effort to kill it by repression and suppression is futile, unwise, and stupid.”Footnote 4
After 1919, revolutionary ideas flowed around the world, as did notions of liberal governance and international cooperation. As Rebecca Karl's essay in this forum shows, the May Fourth Movement in China was part of a series of historical events that generated “an ongoing crisis in global colonial, imperialist, and capitalist arrangements.” In India, the Rowlatt Bills, which were intended to detain without charging political dissidents who were suspected of “anarchical and revolutionary crimes,” were introduced in March 1919. The Rowlatt legislation continued many of the extra-legal practices of the Defence of India Act of 1915, which had been used to detain Germans, as well as radicals, anarchists, and terrorists who were seen to be a threat to the colonial state. During the war, thousands of revolutionaries were kept in jails across India to keep them from participating in what the British called “sedition.” Others considered the publication of radical materials, rallies to challenge the war, and alliances with German forces a form of anticolonial protest. With the war's end, colonial officials worried that the expiration of the Defence of India Act would allow radicals to emerge and disrupt the process of extending responsible government to political elites.Footnote 5
On March 8, 1919, the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, wrote a private letter to the viceroy of India, Frederic Chelmsford, discouraging the promulgation of the Rowlatt Bills. He dismissed the threat of a revolutionary movement in India and warned that protests might undermine the progress of the liberal constitutional reforms that Montagu and Chelmsford had advanced in the form of the Government of India Act of 1919. Remarkably, he appeared to agree with Indian critics such as Bipin Chandra Pal who criticized British laws in India: “The real reason why you [the colonial government] have to resort so often in India to extra-legal processes is that your legal system is so bad.”Footnote 6 Montagu suggested that “extremists” in India, particularly those prone to using political violence for revolutionary ends, were “sensitive, refined, educated” young men and that the government of India should be thinking of “conversion” to the new liberal constitutional arrangement.Footnote 7
The idea of converting radical anticolonial insurgents into liberal subjects of the British Empire suggests just how optimistic liberals like Montagu felt about the resilience of the form of liberal government that had been crafted by the British in colonial India. The Government of India Act of 1919, also known as the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, offered Indian elites an expanded role in the (British) governance of India by creating a system of dyarchy. The central and provincial arms of government were given selected powers. Provincial governments were charged with managing education, public health, public works, and agriculture (the “nation-building” activities); the central government kept control over the military, revenue, and foreign policy (the “law and order” functions).Footnote 8 Montagu and liberal members of Parliament considered this Government of India Act a form of training for Indian politicians, choosing the language of “responsible” government rather than “self-government” to show that—if guided properly—some Indians (but not all) could learn how to participate in a kind of representative government that British liberals imagined for India.Footnote 9
Montagu's concerns were well warranted. When the Rowlatt Bills had initially been announced by the viceroy, Indian liberals who supported the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, such as V. S. Srinavasa Sastri, Tej Bahadur Sapru, and Surendranath Banerjea, argued that the rule of law should not be suspended in a time of political reform.Footnote 10 Mohandas Gandhi and a group of his followers filed a petition that they would begin a satyagraha—a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience—if the Rowlatt law was promulgated.Footnote 11 Gandhi relied on the value of moral force, referring to Woodrow Wilson's words about self-determination, which Gandhi called swaraj.Footnote 12 Jawaharlal Nehru, on the other hand, had recently read Bertrand Russell's Roads to Freedom, and considered the ways that socialism might fit into India's goals.Footnote 13 The responses to the Rowlatt Acts spanned the range of political thought, part of a “fluid intellectual economy,” in which Indian political activists came together to oppose the Rowlatt legislation even as they debated how to protest Britain's continued occupation of India.Footnote 14
For much of the twentieth century, the events of 1919 were narrated by historians of India as central to the rise of Gandhi and the Indian National Congress.Footnote 15 For historians of the British Empire, Montagu and Chelmsford's plans for dyarchy were an innovation in liberal governance that was disrupted by the protests against the Rowlatt Acts.Footnote 16 In recent years, however, an internationalist framework has shaped the historiography of India in 1919, as scholars have compared various strands of liberalism against revolutionary alternatives.Footnote 17 In some accounts, 1919 marked a moment of deep reckoning about a new international order that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century and carried on into the interwar years.Footnote 18 This shift from the national to the international in the historiography has broken down a teleological narrative of India's independence that began with the Rowlatt Bills, followed by mass protest, and ended with independence in 1947. With transnational and transcolonial historical analysis in mind, the history of India after 1919 can be rewritten with a larger range of developments that draws our attention to an emergent global language of self-determination, sovereignty, rule of law, and rights. The global and national events of 1919 generated a series of “contingent outcomes,” and “a new vocabulary of rights,” in which the British colonial government's obligations to its Indian subjects were realigned.Footnote 19
The dramatic events surrounding the Rowlatt Bills are well known in histories of India's struggle for independence: On April 6, 1919, Gandhi organized a hartal, a nationwide work stoppage. Just a week later, General Reginald Dyer and his armed forces gunned down several hundred civilians who had gathered in Jallianwala Bagh in the town of Amritsar. Confrontations between armed officers of the British raj and ordinary Indians escalated through the months of March and April; martial law was declared in the Punjab, and several hundred political agitators were brought to closed trials and sentenced either to death or prison for life.Footnote 20 Punjab, which was the province from which many soldiers were recruited, was up in arms. Ironically, police reported that protests in Bengal, whose revolutionary terrorists were the primary target of the Rowlatt reforms, were minimal.Footnote 21
In retrospect, historians have explained the end of the First World War in 1919 in competing ways: revolution (that would result in socialism or communism) versus liberalism, internationalism versus nationalism. While Montagu imagined that liberal forms of government would convert radical youth in India, many Indian revolutionaries and intellectuals were inspired by a wave of revolutions around the world that were founded on popular self-determination and anti-monarchical fervor. The downfall of several world empires—from the Habsburgs, the tsarist regime in Russia, and the dethroning of the Ottoman Empire to the end of the Qing Empire in China—showed that many empires were in crisis.Footnote 22 Challenges to the British Empire in places such as Ireland, Egypt, Singapore, Malaya, and Burma drew anticolonial activists from these regions into transcolonial dialogue. Soldiers who had been loyal during the war were sympathetic to revolutionaries who wanted to bring down the empire; students worked with farmers, doctors, intellectuals and other professionals.Footnote 23 As a range of international groups such as the League of Nations and the Third Communist International gathered to orchestrate the war's aftermath, intellectuals and anticolonial activists felt that 1919 was a critical moment in changing the world order.Footnote 24 In cities such as Berlin, London, Moscow, and Paris, revolutionaries found resonance with anticolonial activists, even as they debated whether imperialism should be overturned before a socialist revolution.Footnote 25 Despite the polarized teleologies implied by “revolution” versus “liberalism,” the idea of self-determination proved popular on both ends of the ideological spectrum.Footnote 26 As Erez Manela noted, “To many around the world, and especially in the colonial world, Wilson and Lenin appeared to be more similar than different.”Footnote 27
Historians have explained the aftermath of the First World War as a moment of international cooperation, even as nationalist movements and demands escalated. The emergence of new international alliances and institutions were simultaneously imperial and anti-imperial; even as empires were in crisis, diplomats and politicians from Britain, France, Germany, Japan, the United States, Russia, and other would-be superpowers worked to limit claims made by anticolonial activists and created new interstate forms of cooperation to revive colonial practices.Footnote 28 The British government attempted to rationalize its administrative infrastructure and coordinated between the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, the India Office, and the War Office, so that it could more effectively combat challenges from Indian, Turkish, and Egyptian nationalists; the pan-Islamic movement; Bolshevik activities; and Indian revolutionaries in Europe, America, and Asia.Footnote 29 As anticolonial insurgents went global and found new ways to challenge imperialism, intelligence officials fanned out across different colonies to coordinate an effective response.Footnote 30
The events of 1919—veering from the promises of international cooperation, constitutional reform, and revolutionary regimes to the crushing disappointment of state violence and emergency law—might understandably have given most political activists whiplash. In India, these events gave rise to a wide range of political actors who convened, discussed, and debated what was meant by independence and how it might be achieved. Thinkers of this period were inspired by international imaginaries as they rejected pasts that were defined exclusively by European occupation and looked toward new futures.Footnote 31
As the British and their European allies negotiated the Paris peace process during 1919, the emergence of transnational and transcolonial solidarities between colonies and areas we now think of as the Global South gave rise to conversations about how a new world order guided by communism, pan-Asianism, pan-Islamism, and negritude might look.Footnote 32 As Michele Louro has shown, political activists in India generated a “blend” of their ideological commitments, engaging with ideas about socialism and popular sovereignty based on anticolonial and anti-capitalist positions.Footnote 33
The rise of Gandhi's leadership on a national and international stage in 1919 is well known because of his prominence in leading and inspiring mass nonviolent struggles. Perhaps less visible are the accounts of figures such as Lala Lajpat Rai, M. N. Roy, Subhas Chandra Bose, or Jawaharlal Nehru and how the events of 1919 changed their political and personal trajectory. Their connections to one another show a network of diasporic Indian political activists who tried to make sense of this new national and international moment as each considered how India should respond to Britain and a new world order. Lajpat Rai, who was part of a triumvirate of “extremists” among nationalist leaders who pressed for self-government, spent much of the war in the United States attempting to rally American liberals to challenge the continued existence of the British Empire. He was opposed to the Rowlatt Acts, but he was also convinced—following Gandhi—that violent challenges to the empire would be ineffective. Although he had been in touch with the radicals in the Ghadar Party through the war, he did not think that Indians should seek the support of Germany in unseating the British in India.Footnote 34 Lajpat Rai met another Indian exile in the United States, M. N. Roy, who had fled India in 1915 when he was known as Nagendra Nath Bhattacharya. Roy had previously been a member of an underground secret cell; accused of terrorist conspiracy, he fled first to Southeast Asia and then to the United States in 1915. He met Lajpat Rai in New York in 1917, before Roy left for Mexico.Footnote 35 Roy debated Lenin about which should go first, the defeat of imperialism or the defeat of capitalism. These debates, as well as Roy's involvement in founding the Communist Party of Mexico and the Communist Party of India, made Roy a key figure of resistance against Britain's imaginary for a postwar global order.Footnote 36
Among nationalist leaders who became prominent in the interwar years, many later narrated the events of 1919 as central to their activism. Jawaharlal Nehru, who had returned to India in 1912 after being admitted to the bar in London, became increasingly active in Congress as Gandhi emerged as a national leader in 1919. Nehru visited Punjab in August as part of a deputation to investigate what had happened after the massacre in Amritsar; he reportedly overheard General Dyer on an overnight train gloating about how many had been killed at Jallianwala Bagh.Footnote 37 Bhagat Singh, who reportedly visited Amritsar shortly after the massacre in 1919, took away a vial of soil, which animated his militant response to the government after the beating of Lala Lajpat Rai in 1928.Footnote 38 Subhas Chandra Bose, who had famously been expelled from Presidency College for protesting a European teacher's conduct against Indian students in 1916, went to England in 1919 to take the civil service exam, which he passed. Even though his father was a supporter of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, Bose declined to join the Indian Civil Service and instead committed himself to political activism.Footnote 39
Many members of militant nationalist movements in India, such as Barindra Kumar Ghosh, Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty, and Upendranath Dutta, had been jailed in the Andaman Islands because they were involved in conspiracies against the colonial government; they were released on the occasion of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms by a royal amnesty at the end of 1919. For those detained under the Defence of India Act, the government offered detainees grants and assistance in finding jobs, noting, “It has always been the policy of Government to assist released detenues to obtain work in the hope that they will settle down as peaceful citizens.”Footnote 40 These men worked within Congress committees during the noncooperation campaign between 1920 and 1922, and after 1922, with local militant groups to undermine the government.Footnote 41 As they went in and out of jail in the 1920s, underground radical activists linked the different provincial revolutionary movements between Bengal, Bihar, United Provinces, Punjab, and Burma and created an underground network of radical and revolutionary activists who hoped to bring about a dramatic change in the governance of the extended British dominions in India.Footnote 42 For those in this network of secret cells, the vision of India's path to independence did not include dyarchy, as Montagu and Chelmsford had planned; rather, those who identified as revolutionaries hoped to force the British to leave India quickly.
The distinctions between revolution and liberalism did not seem so stark at the time given the elite, and relatively male, nature of these debates. Indeed, as many scholars have noted, few political leaders imagined the masses involved in governing India, either as voters or as representatives of the public.Footnote 43 Nonetheless, ideas about liberty and freedom were crucial, as was an idea of rights. As Gi-Wook Shin and Rennie Moon note in their article in this issue on the March First Movement in Korea, the idea of independence from colonial rule and popular sovereignty emerged from the events of 1919. In the case of British rule in India, Gandhi noted repeatedly that the British were a “liberty-loving” people, but that the Rowlatt Acts were “unjust, subversive of the principle of liberty and justice, and destructive of the elementary rights of individuals.”Footnote 44
In the interwar years, a new form of Indian liberalism shifted the focus away from an agonistic conception of the self and directed Indian subjects to collective action.Footnote 45 This shift was based on the idea of a language of rights that focused on self-determination, or in Gandhi's words, swaraj or self-governance. Gandhian activists took pledges of nonviolent civil disobedience, women activists mobilized around opposition to child marriage, farmers refused to pay exorbitant rents, soldiers reconsidered their loyalty to the British army, and others living under colonial rule forged a collective political and legal subjectivity that advanced the idea that they had rights that should be protected by law. Rather than be left to the regulations of an autocratic colonial state, Indians from various social groups agitated for self-determination. By changing the scope of who governed whom, political activists in India relied on the rule of law and the idea of individual rights to press British officials to leave India. After 1919, Indians mobilized the international grammars of equality and justice engendered by the Treaty of Versailles and the socialist vision of the Communist International and turned the logic of colonial rule against the British: after 1919, figures such as Gandhi, Lajpat Rai, Roy, Bose, and Nehru used these global discourses to argue that the British were no longer fit to rule India because colonialism was a form of unlawful occupation.
One might argue that 1919 was a confrontation between liberal and revolutionary forms of government. But among Indian liberals and revolutionaries who were focused on overthrowing colonialism, there was a shared idea that India could be governed fairly and justly. This common ground explained why there was such outrage against the Rowlatt Acts, which were seen to be a violation of the rule of law. Gandhi's protests in 1919 reclaimed the space of the law as independent of the British. Montagu grasped this problem: while Montagu publicly backed the Rowlatt legislation, he privately worried that Indian politicians had a point about the lawlessness of the Rowlatt Acts, and indeed the colonial laws of India. While Montagu imagined a conversion to liberalism, Gandhi imagined a different kind of conversion as he actively tried to persuade former revolutionary terrorists about the importance of nonviolence.Footnote 46
A century on from 1919, we know that the promises of liberation for colonized nations were not realized until after another world war. Nonetheless, the international and diasporic developments of 1919 crystalized national opposition to British rule on the subcontinent and generated a range of political possibilities that became the basis of India's postcolonial experiment with democracy.
