The 'arch priestess of anarchy' visits Lahore

Violence, Love, and the Worldliness of Revolutionary Texts

Bibliographic Data

ID4465331
AuthorsJ Daniel Elam (0000-0001-8342-288X, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume16
Issue2
Pages140-154
Publication date2013-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePostcolonial Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1368-8790 • E-ISSN: 1466-1888
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13688790.2013.823258
OpenAlexW2054581037
LanguageEN
Citations received9

In 1909, a Criminal Intelligence Department official in Delhi warned of Russian-born anarchist Emma Goldman's trip to India scheduled for the following year. The 'arch priestess of anarchy', as she was called in the file was planning to arrive from the US for a lecture series across India. Because she posed a definite threat to the British Raj, officials moved quickly to bar her entrance at either Bombay or Madras. This essay, nevertheless, reframes Goldman's stalled South Asian lecture tour to focus on the ways in which the anarchist still appeared in Delhi and Lahore over the next twenty years, especially in the writings of Bhagat Singh. Though Goldman and Singh never formally met – Singh never left India and Goldman, in spite of her plans, technically never arrived – the two share a common vocabulary. Attention to this adds not only greater texture to the two thinkers' sensitive and ambivalent view of revolutionary action, but also illuminates the broad network of thought in which the two writers located themselves. This paper moves examines, in turn, four central metaphors of Goldman and Singh's texts: the mass and violence; humanity and love. In my analysis here, I suggest that we see two metonymic pairs of concerns. In this sense, the mass is metonymic to humanity and, subsequently, mass violence is metonymic to a love for humanity. Metonymy, in contradistinction to metaphor, renders in starker relief the textual gymnastics of revolutionary thought. Consequently, 'humanity' stands not only as an extension of 'the masses', but moreover humanity retains its central proximity to the crowds which form it. Similarly, and written with equal vigour in the texts under analysis here, is that 'love' is both 'violence' extended to humanity, and 'love' is in intimate proximity to 'violence'. The sustained interest in the masses, violence, humanity, and love turns our attention, in the final instance, towards a commitment to cosmopolitanism as an aggressively affiliative textual stance. Notes 1 National Archives of India (New Delhi), Home Political B June 1909 (19–21). 2 I am indebted to Chris Moffat for this insight. 3 K C Yadav and Barbar Singh (eds), Fragrance of Freedom, Gurgaon: Hope Press, 2006, p 79; and Emma Goldman, Red Emma Speaks, New York: Random House, 1972, p 50. 4 British Library, India Office Library EPP 16/1. 5 See, among many others: P M S Grewal, Bhagat Singh: Liberation's Blazing Star, Delhi: Leftwords Press, 2007; S Irfan Habib, To Make the Deaf Hear: Ideology and Programme of Bhagat Singh and His Comrades, Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2007; Kuldip Nayar, The Martyr: Bhagat Singh—Experiments in Revolution, Delhi: Har Anand Publications, 2000. 6 Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983, p 19. 7 In order to identify these relationships, the job of the critic is to foreground the social and political realities of texts, their circulation, their reception (including the critic's own), and their possible afterlives (especially, for Said, within the academy). 8 Two terms emerging from a more decidedly Marxist tradition which, it could be easily argued, attempt to describe the same thing Said is attempting to describe. See Theodor Adorno, 'Commitment', New Left Review 87–88, September–December 1974, pp 75–89; and Raymond Williams on 'Commitment and Alignment', in Marxism and Literature, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978, pp 199–205. In response to an earlier version of this argument, Christopher Taylor also suggested 'affinity', which has considerably more anarchistic valences. 9 Pascale Casanova, World Republic of Letters, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Casanova's account is far too Eurocentric and republican, but that the HRSA emerged from a group named after the Irish Republican Army and influenced by Giuseppe Mazzini's republicanism (Young Italy becomes Naujavan Bharat Sabha) is worth noting. 10 Goldman's biographers have written about her time in Europe following her deportation in 1917, of course, but surprisingly little work has been done to explicate the multitude of her concerns, especially about colonialism and racism. 11 Har Dayal, 'India in America', Modern Review X(I), 1911, p 55. 12 To be clear, the non-state circulation of commodities is the foundation for global capitalism, an equally ungovernable mode of affiliation. One of Said's anxieties about affiliation is its potential to produce new forms of hierarchies, a requirement of global capitalism. Anarchism, revolutionary thought, and anticolonialism did not magically operate 'outside' of capitalism. Rather, they operated alongside it and among its fissures. See J K Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2006. 13 Quoted in Simona Sawhney, 'Bhagat Singh: A Politics of Death and Hope', in Anshu Malhotra and Farina Mir (eds), Punjab Reconsidered, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp 377–408. 14 I use 'ostensibly' here not to discredit Singh or Goldman, but rather to draw our attention to the fact that our only access to either of these speeches is through their self-published texts. Goldman and Singh were both master editors. As Kathryn Lucas and Stephen Palmer have shown (Kathryn Lucas and Stephen Palmer, 'On Trial: Conflicting Versions of Emma Goldman's Address to the Jury', Rhetoric and Public Affairs 11(1), 2008, pp 47–88), Goldman edited 'Address to the Jury' quite substantially between its May 1917 pamphlet publication and its August 1917 essay form in Mother Earth. 15 The impulse towards assemblage and multitudes in contemporary political philosophy still leans towards an impulse to erase the individual—'all the colours of the population fade to grey', write Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, New York: Penguin Press, 2004, p 100. 16 Goldman, Red Emma Speaks, pp 51–59. 17. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (1896 [French, 1895]); reprinted, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009. Concerning the morality of crowds, Le Bon suggests that 'personal interest' and 'crowd action' are irreconcilable. Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde both offer quite nuanced accounts of mass/mob/crowd action, though this nuance is not always reflected in subsequent work. For careful readings and considerations of their work, see William Mazzarella, 'The Myth of the Multitude', Critical Inquiry 36(4), 2010, pp 697–727; Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, New York: Verso, 2005; and Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984. 18 Le Bon, The Crowd, p 77. 19 Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, New York: Mother Earth Publishing, 1910. 20 Goldman, Red Emma Speaks, p 61. 21 Goldman, Red Emma Speaks, p 391. 22 Hindustan Republican Socialist Army (HRSA), 'The Philosophy of the Bomb', Indian Proscribed Tracts, South Asia Microform Project (SAMP), Reel 3, item 28 (unpaginated). 23 Indeed, many of the debates among competing visions of anticolonialism fundamentally rest on who more accurately represents the masses, who understood the masses best, or whom the masses understood best. 24 South Asians in North America Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California-Berkeley. 25 In his essay on 'Punjab: The Problem of Language and Script', Singh makes a similar point about the need for international languages. Yadav and Singh (eds), Fragrance of Freedom, Gurgaon: Hope India Publications, 2006, pp 215–226. 26 Alice Kaplan, Reproductions of Violence, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p 62. 27 HRSA, 'The Philosophy of the Bomb'. 28 See Ashoke Kumar Mukhopadhyay, 'Terrorism': A Colonial Construct, Delhi: Satya Samad, 2009; and H W Hale, Political Trouble in India, 1917–1937, Allahabad: Chugh Publications, 1974. 29 Goldman, Red Emma Speaks, p 49. 30 Although Gandhi's 'Cult of the Bomb' (Young India, 2 January 1930) and HRSA's 'Philosophy of the Bomb' are ostensibly in conversation, the grounds of disagreement between the two are not clearly marked. Both texts were clearly Anglophone battles for the claim to represent the non-Anglophone mass's interests (both through claims of experience), but HRSA's authorial decision to deflect the conversation by redefining 'violence' against Gandhi alters the debate. Gandhi himself had considerably more complicated views about violence than is generally credited to him. See, among others, Faisal Devji, Impossible Indian, Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. 31 In his 'Statement Before Sessions Court' Singh clarifies this point: 'Force when aggressively applied is "violence" and is therefore morally unjustifiable; but when it is used in the furtherance of a legitimate cause it has its moral justification' (Yadav and Singh (eds), Fragrance of Freedom, pp 247–254). 32 Lucas and Palmer, 'On Trial', p 70. 33 In this spirit, what would have happened if Goldman had landed at Madras? 34 Goldman, Red Emma Speaks, p 394. 35 See, by way of a tangent, on potentiality: Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History, New York: Verso, 2007. 36 Yadav and Singh (eds), Fragrance of Freedom, p 248. 37 Lucas and Palmer, 'On Trial', p 79. 38 Yadav and Singh (eds), Fragrance of Freedom, p 253. 39 Goldman, Red Emma Speaks, p 392. 40 Purity and cleanliness were common concerns across the political spectrum before World War II. Giuseppe Mazzini's Duties of Man (1860 [English, 1907]) expressed a central interest in purity, renewal, and revival; his ideas were extraordinarily popular on the left and the right before they became associated with fascism, especially that of Mussolini and Hitler. 41 Yadav and Singh (eds), Fragrance of Freedom, pp 253–254. 42 Yadav and Singh (eds), Fragrance of Freedom, p 21. 43 Yadav and Singh (eds), Fragrance of Freedom, p 28. 44 Yadav and Singh (eds), Fragrance of Freedom, p 301. 45 Sawhney, 'Bhagat Singh: A Politics of Death and Hope', pp 377–408. 46 'Universal Brotherhood', in Yadav and Singh (eds), Fragrance of Freedom, p 238. 47 I am thinking here of ethical claims, stemming from Emmanuel Levinas, articulated most clearly and most recently by Judith Butler ('giving an account of oneself'), Kelly Oliver ('witnessing'), and Jacques Derrida ('democracy-to-come'). 48 Sawhney, 'Bhagat Singh: A Politics of Death and Hope', pp 377–408. 49 Claire Hemmings, 'In the Mood for Revolution: Emma Goldman's Passion', New Literary History 43, 2012, pp 527–545. 50 Emma Goldman, 'An Anarchist Looks at Life', http://ucblibrary3.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Writings/Speeches/foyles.html 51 Yadav and Singh (eds), Fragrance of Freedom, pp 52–64. 52 Fanon. See Leela Gandhi, 'Postcolonial Theory and the Crisis of the European Man', Postcolonial Studies 10(1), 2007, pp 93–110. 53 Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, 'Sacco and Vanzetti', The Road to Freedom 5, August 1929 (accessed at http://ucblibrary3.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Writings/Essays/sacco.html). 54 See, as a coincidentally appropriate representative, Upton Sinclair's Boston (1928). 55 Goldman, Red Emma Speaks, p 396. 56 Or perhaps I have it backwards here: could the masses be the logical extension of humanity? In this sense, the masses would be the extension of the potential of humanity. In either case, the metonymic relationship between the two, I think, illustrates the theoretical connection that is implicit in this network of thought. 57 See Hardt and Negri, Multitude; Hardt and Negri are considerably less onerous advocates for 'love' than Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love, New York: New Press, 2012. 58 Bruce Robbins, Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012, p 30. 59 I slightly disagree, then, with Simona Sawhney's (2012) assertion, that Bhagat Singh is responding to a world fundamentally different from our contemporary one. At the risk of producing daft comparisons, I would suggest that the contemporary moment and the global interwar/late-Raj period are tellingly parallel conjunctures. 60 Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags, New York: Verso, 2007. 61 Yadav and Singh (eds), Fragrance of Freedom, pp 77–93. 62 To crudely paraphrase Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, New York: Verso, 1981

Ambivalence · Art · Humanity · Literature · Metaphor · Metonymy · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Theology · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology

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