Given the recent demonstrations against police in the United States, Michael Silvestri's monograph on colonial police in Bengal could not be more timely. It also blends Chris Bayly's groundbreaking historiographical work on colonial knowledge production and Heather Streets's work on the “martial races” of India with Tim Harper's most recent work on transnational anticolonialism. Meticulously researched and highly readable, Policing “Bengali Terrorism” finds the origins of modern intelligence agencies in colonial police officers who were untrained in intelligence or counterterrorism but “created a new colonial ethnography of the ‘Bengali terrorist’” and, over time, “emerged as experts on imperial policing and revolutionary terrorism” (p. 6).
In part one, Silvestri artfully describes the creation and deployment of a massive intelligence apparatus in the early twentieth century and shows the heavy dependence of white officers on Bengali subordinates who were ultimately the ones committing acts of torture, coercion, and “alteration of evidence” with “the tacit approval” of their superiors against fellow Bengalis suspected of terrorism (p. 88). He reminds us that “both everyday violence and more systematic forms of state violence were intrinsic to colonial rule in India and other parts of the empire,” but he notes that the government only acknowledged the violence committed by revolutionaries instead of the police as “a strategy of deflection away from colonial deployment of violence toward the liberal and ‘civilizing’ vision of imperial rule” (p. 100). When accusations of torture and abuse were levied against the state or individual officers, the authorities treated them as lies and fabrications.
British attempts to gather information on revolutionary Bengalis were fueled by a mutiny mindset and by colonial ethnographies that conflated these men with earlier “criminal tribes” (p. 11). Moreover, homosexual practices were not uncommon among revolutionaries, which only served to reinforce British perceptions of them as “non-martial,” even though they planned assassinations. Yet “effeminate” and “overly emotional” Bengali Hindus were also considered ideal spies because of their “cunning or calculated cleverness” (p. 89).
Chapter 4 centers on the Chittagong Armoury Raid of 1930 and British responses to it, which Silvestri skillfully contextualizes with Gandhi's salt march and the renewed civil disobedience campaign. As Silvestri unpacks diverse strategies to find the men responsible for the raid, he depicts Bengal as “an ‘insecurity state’” in which “violence and the threat of violence was a marked feature of the British response to revolutionary terrorism” (pp. 129–30). A rich discussion of reprisals follows, along with simultaneous attempts to “reform” and prevent young Bengalis into becoming revolutionaries with the aid of the YMCA, the Boy Scouts, and boxing.
In part two, Silvestri explores Bengali revolutionaries who “lived transnational lives, often seeking refuge beyond the boundaries of the British Empire” while staying connected to revolutionaries at home (p. 189). He discusses how M. N. Roy and Subhas Chandra Bose forged alliances with Irish nationalists and communists abroad. Anyone familiar with Peter Hart's work on the Irish Republican Army will appreciate the connections made with it, as Bengali revolutionaries also relied on small-scale shipments of arms and on assassinations. Some European sailors sold arms to Indians, but Indian lascars were the “primary conduit for arms smuggling” (p. 244) and were as heavily monitored as high-profile revolutionaries.
Silvestri describes how the Bengal Police Intelligence Branch worked with the Indian Political Intelligence, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), the Security Service (MI5), and Scotland Yard to stop the arms trade, despite interagency rivalry. As the League of Nations took up the question of international terrorism, tensions arose because the Home Office was reluctant to ratify the League's antiterrorism treaty on constitutional grounds, against the wishes of the India Office, Government of India, and representatives of MI5. Strikingly, the Home and Foreign Offices “did not regard terrorism as a domestic problem for the United Kingdom” (p. 262). One wishes for further unpacking of this peculiarity.
Overall, Silvestri succeeds in his aim to write a global history: the anticolonial networks that Bengalis established with overseas revolutionaries and their frequent attempts to smuggle arms had global ramifications as British authorities attempted to monitor and crush them. In the process, these intelligence officers created and transmitted knowledge about counterterrorism across the empire. The book is so carefully researched, engagingly written, and well organized that only the most minor typo in the epilogue stands out (on p. 332, “non-marital” Bengali instead of “non-martial”). It should be required reading for anyone studying radical anticolonialism or counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. It is an excellent example of transnational history and will enrich how scholars think about the construction of ethnographies and about state violence and policing. It is sure to be useful to any student of Indian history, in particular, or the British Empire, more broadly.
