Ramachandra Guha's 'Rebels Against the Raj' chronicles westerners who fought to free India

Nonica Datta

On November 16, 1893, an Irish woman arrived in the southern port town of Tuticorin. She stayed on in India for 40 years and devoted her life to her adopted country. This bright, independent woman had left her husband and did not go back to her comfortable life in the West. She became the first woman president of the Indian National Congress, founder of the Banaras Hindu University, a promoter of the Theosophist cause and a strident campaigner for Home Rule in India. This bold woman was none other than Mrs Annie Besant, one of the key characters in Ramachandra Guha’s eminently readable and dazzling new book.

Yet, Mrs Besant wasn’t alone in crafting the extraordinary prose of resistance to the Raj. There were other white women and men too, some well-known, others less known. They were not just wonder-struck by exotic India, but were robust actors who fervently stood for a modern and plural idea of the country. As Guha shows, it was their passion that drove their lifelong quest and endeavours to liberate their beloved new home from colonial oppression and enslavement. Drawing on extensive private and public archives, Guha, in his inimitable style and with exemplary rigour, retrieves the lives of seven foreigners who deeply loved India. One such life is that of the British-born Mira Behn, formerly known as Madeleine Slade. Incarcerated in Bombay’s Arthur jail with Sarojini Naidu and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, the gifted Mira, Gandhi’s adopted daughter, wrote about the horrendous treatment of women in the jails of British India and later travelled to the West to promote the message of the Indian freedom struggle. We also enter the intimate side of Mira’s life, an aspect often ignored in the histories of nationalism and political resistance against imperialism. As a woman close to 50, her unrequited love for the revolutionary Prithvi Singh is candidly expressed in her letters. While building an ashram, dedicating her life to its cause, the yearning didn’t die. It intensified. Guha juxtaposes Mira’s life with that of the London-born Catherine Mary Heilemann, who came from a different class. Later known as Sarala, Guha reveals in astonishing detail how she committed herself to girls’ education and set up the Lakshmi Ashram in Kausani, modelled after Gandhi’s ashram in Sevagram. Her deep ecological consciousness and involvement in forest movements in the Himalayas inspired the Chipko activists.

‘Rebels Against the Raj’ points out that the uniqueness of these foreigners lay in the fact that they made India their home whilst transcending their privileged western worlds. It was an eclectic mix of individuals, reflecting diverse shades of opinion. But the connecting thread was that they resisted the Raj and deftly combined writing with activism. My favourite, BG Horniman, the editor of Bombay Chronicle, who was a vocal opponent of the infamous Rowlatt Bills and wrote against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, finds a special place in Guha’s flowing narrative. Horniman’s ‘Amritsar and Our Duty to India’ narrated the Indian people’s enormous contribution to Britain’s victory in World War I. He was astonished to see the celebration of General Dyer and his heinous crime back in England. A loner, a genius, a homosexual, Horniman was vilified for his radical political views and fearless adherence to the ideals of social justice. Unrelenting, never compromising, he was committed to freedom of expression. He was deported to England for his virulent anti-British stance. Guha’s story doesn’t end with Horniman’s active political journalism. It delves deeply into his aesthetic sensitivities and follows his fractured life journey until he breathed his last in Bombay.

While the story of dissident Britons living in Britain is well known, we rarely hear of these foreign voices in India. One wonders if the loud clamour of the mighty nationalists has drowned them out. Or is it our historiography that restricts the space for them? A major achievement of this book is that Guha moves beyond the confines of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in analysing the political resistance to the British. The contributions of such individuals are not confined to a predictable framework. As Guha puts it succinctly, ‘If imperialism was immoral and unjust, then ending it was in the interest of the coloniser as well as the colonised.’ These extraordinary men and women contributed to the robust public debate within India, and by so doing, they carved out a unique space within the changing Indian political environment and society. The book strongly asserts the value of the encounter between these foreign minds and their Indian counterparts. However, this is not without tensions and contradictions. Guha highlights the differences of these individuals with Congress nationalists. American-born Samuel Stokes made a trenchant critique of the British Empire, distinguished between British imperialism and German imperialism, wrote on the oppression of peasants and forced labour and was a firm Congress supporter, which led to his incarceration. Yet, disagreement with Gandhi’s mandatory commitment to spinning compelled him to secede from Congress. Above all, his mystical and pluralist spiritual outlook underscored the ‘deep underlying truth in all great religions’.

Thus, Guha makes us understand that India offered fertile ground for the germination of the innovative ideas of foreign rebels. This was an age of cosmopolitanism. The project of these individuals was wedded to ideals of freedom, equality and gender justice. It is also evident that they were committed to racial equality. They were not consumed by colonial guilt. In remarkable ways, they were makers of modern India, which they foresaw as possessing tremendous scientific, cultural, spiritual and intellectual potential. Unravelling their liberating as well as competing visions, Guha shows that for them, a free India embodied economic development, equal access to education, and environmental sustainability, goals we still strive for 75 years after Independence. Many of their concerns overlapped, and they all connected through the domineering presence of the Mahatma. Thus, from the author’s insightful analysis, we learn about the passionate concerns of Sarala Behn, which resonate with the American missionary and environmental campaigner Dick Keithahn’s vision. Both stood for village self-sufficiency and ecological renewal in Independent India. These journeys unfold against the canvas of the dynamic, messy historical context which Guha crafts skilfully.

The renegade lives that Guha paints demonstrate the multifaceted dimensions of these personalities and their emotional bonding. For example, Cambridge-educated Phillip Spratt, a communist, travelled to Punjab to meet left-wing activists in Lahore in 1927 and was later arrested in the Meerut Conspiracy Case along with communists like SA Dange and Muzaffar Ahmad. His correspondence with his fiancée Seetha during his imprisonment exhibits his deep love for an Indian woman, culminating in inter-racial marriage in those turbulent times. Spratt’s meaningful conversation with MN Roy further enriches the narrative. And his prescient warnings about Mrs Gandhi’s rise and centralisation of power in 1971 ring true after his death. Sadly, Pratt, who fought for India’s freedom, died in poverty in his adopted homeland.

These are no simple biographical portraits, but a meticulous and creative intertwining of the characters with other prominent figures and the events of colonial and post-colonial India spanning two world wars, Independence, Partition and the crucial decades following 1947. The book is rich in political conversations, personal friendships and antipathies, making it a compelling read. ‘Rebels Against the Raj’, like much of Guha’s earlier works on historical biography, signals an innovative direction in historiography, where biography crosses many boundaries and elegantly meets social and political history over a century. Painstakingly researched, this is history writing at its best. It is indeed a masterly study of hitherto neglected western figures of modern India and opens a new way of engaging with the complex fault-lines between nationalism and imperialism, between India and the West. For the intractable times that we live in, Ramachandra Guha’s outstanding work, which he considers as a moral tale, couldn’t be more relevant. Every Indian should read this book.

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