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Policing ‘Bengali Terrorism’ in India and the World pp 233–278Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Spies, Sailors, and Revolutionaries: Bengal Revolutionaries, Indian Political Intelligence, and International Arms Smuggling

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the issue of arms smuggling, a primary objective of the Bengal revolutionaries and a continual source of anxiety to the Government of Bengal throughout the history of the revolutionary movement. While revolutionaries’ attempts to import large-scale arms shipments repeatedly failed, they were able to accumulate an arsenal of imported firearms through numerous, small-scale instances of arms smuggling. Bengali revolutionaries relied primarily on networks of maritime workers, which included not only European sailors but also Indian seamen known as lascars. This chapter explores the motivations of lascars and their relationships with Indian revolutionary movements, and the efforts of imperial authorities in London, New Delhi, Calcutta, and elsewhere in the British Empire to prevent the flow of arms to Bengali revolutionaries. These efforts involved coordination and conflict between Indian Political Intelligence in London, the Intelligence Bureau in New Delhi, and intelligence officers in Bengal and other Indian provinces. Imperial authorities also attempted to utilize both colonial legislation designed to control Indian criminality and the efforts of the League of Nations to craft international treaties on terrorism.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “List of Outrages, 1931. Part A,” in TIB VI: 757–758.

  2. 2.

    As Durba Ghosh observes, carefully crafted statements by female Bengali revolutionaries emphasizing their “feminine nature” tended to obscure their radicalism and their commitment to the revolutionary societies. Durba Ghosh, “Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s,” Gender & History 25: 2 (2013), 356.

  3. 3.

    Jackson to Hoare, 11 February 1932, Templewood Collection, MSS Eur. E 240, APAC BL.

  4. 4.

    Minutes of IO arms conference, July 1932, L/P&J/12/91, APAC BL.

  5. 5.

    Extracts from Weekly Report of the Director, Intelligence Bureau, GOI, 14 April 1932, L/P&J/12/391, APAC BL.

  6. 6.

    Durba Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal: Political Violence in the Interwar Years,” in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, eds., Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006), 272.

  7. 7.

    Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 148.

  8. 8.

    Tony Ballantyne, “Rereading the Archive and Opening up the Nation-State: Colonial Knowledge in South Asia (and Beyond),” in Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 112–113.

  9. 9.

    This has recently been highlighted in scholarship on the relationship between Ireland and India within the British Empire, notably by Barry Crosbie, Irish Imperial Networks: Migration, Social Communication and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

  10. 10.

    Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Introduction: Circulation and Society under Colonial Rule,” in Markovits, Pouchepadass, and Subrahmanyam, eds., Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia 1750–1950 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), 3.

  11. 11.

    Gopalan Balachandran, “Circulation through Seafaring: Indian Seamen, 1890–1945,” in Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia 1750–1950 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), 94.

  12. 12.

    Simon J. Potter, “Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Empire,” Journal of British Studies 46: 3 (2007), 621–646 (quotation on 622).

  13. 13.

    Priya Satia, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2018), 374.

  14. 14.

    See Chap. 4.

  15. 15.

    One exception was the arms trade involving the trans-border Pathan tribes of the Northwest Frontier of India. In the first decade of the twentieth century, large quantities of arms reached the Indian-Afghanistan border from the Persian Gulf. See T. R. Moreman, “The Arms Trade and the North-West Frontier Pathan Tribes, 1890–1914,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22: 2 (1994), 187–216.

  16. 16.

    Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973), 484. Peter Heehs has aptly titled his history of the rise of the revolutionary terrorist movement The Bomb in Bengal.

  17. 17.

    The Bengal Police Intelligence Branch considered the discovery of a “bomb factory” at Dakhineswar in the 24 Parganas District near Calcutta, 10 November 1924, to be one of the major events in the resurgence of the revolutionary campaign in the 1920s. Nine revolutionaries were arrested (and convicted under proceedings under the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act), together with firearms, ammunition, “formulae and instructions for the preparation of explosives, notes of thermit welding, sulphuric acid, nitric acid and other ingredients for the manufacture of explosives, [and] a collection of test tubes and retorts.” The IB noted that the instructions for the preparations for explosives were little altered from those recovered from the Manicktolla headquarters of the revolutionaries in 1908. “Terrorist Conspiracy in Bengal from 1st April to 31st December 1925,” (1926) in TIB I: 459–460.

  18. 18.

    Moreman, “The Arms Trade,” 188.

  19. 19.

    T. R. Moreman writes that “the possession of a rifle became a symbol of individual prestige,” as well as a practical means of pursuing blood feuds. One colonial official in the Punjab observed in 1900 that “a rifle to a hill Pathan is literally the breath of life.” Moreman, “The Arms Trade,” 189.

  20. 20.

    Michael Silvestri, “Bomb, Bhadralok, Bhagavad Gita and Dan Breen: Terrorism in Bengal and its Relation to the European Experience,” Terrorism and Political Violence 21: 1 (2009), 10.

  21. 21.

    Sedition Committee Report (1918; reprint New Delhi, 1973), 66. The Sedition Committee also noted that 31 of the pistols had been recovered by the Bengal Police. Although many of the pistols were ultimately ruined when they were hidden in Bengal’s damp climate, many were utilized by revolutionaries within and outside of Bengal. R. E. A. Ray, Notes on draft of To Guard My People, Ch. 22, p. 11, Indian Police Collection, MSS Eur. F 161/257, APAC BL.

  22. 22.

    A. N. Moberly, Officiating CS to GOB to Sec. to Home, GOI, 1 September 1924, L/P&J/12/78, APAC BL.

  23. 23.

    Extract from Bengal Legislative Council Debates, p. 92, 10 January 1934, L/P&J/7/619, APAC BL.

  24. 24.

    For the arms-smuggling attempts of the Ghadar Party, see Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2011) and Heather Streets-Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

  25. 25.

    Streets-Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia, 115.

  26. 26.

    C. Desmond Greaves, Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolution (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 205.

  27. 27.

    Michael Silvestri, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 24–36.

  28. 28.

    Note on Tarak Nath Das, 8 March 1923, L/P&J/12/166, APAC BL.

  29. 29.

    Malayan Bulletin of Political Intelligence, No. 1, 1 March 1922, L/P&J/12/103, APAC BL.

  30. 30.

    See Chap. 5.

  31. 31.

    Kate O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-Irish Radical Connections, 1919–1964 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008), 18; and P. Biggane, “Indian Revolutionaries,” p. 43. L/P&J/12/117, APAC BL.

  32. 32.

    “The Activities of the Revolutionists in Bengal Subsequent to the Amnesty Following the Royal Proclamation, December 1919,” p. 3, L/P&J/6/1878, APAC BL.

  33. 33.

    P. Biggane, “Indian Revolutionaries,” 42–43, L/P&J/12/117, APAC BL.

  34. 34.

    A notable example was the attempt to smuggle almost 500 Thompson submachine guns aboard the East Side from Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1921.

  35. 35.

    Peter Hart, “The Thompson Submachine Gun in Ireland Revisited,” in his The I.R.A. at War 1916–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 183–184 (quotation on 183).

  36. 36.

    Hart, “The Thompson Submachine Gun,” 192.

  37. 37.

    Wallinger to Hose, 14 October 1925, L/P&J/12/78, APAC BL. While 100 sporting rifles and 288 automatic pistols were seized by customs authorities in Colombo from a single ship (on 7 July 1924), the rest of the shipments were small ones.

  38. 38.

    Clipping from Straits Budget, 5 June 1930, CO 273/566/10, NA UK.

  39. 39.

    Governor, Straits Settlements, to Colonial Secretary, 19 September. 1930, CO 273/566/10, NA UK.

  40. 40.

    “Activities of the Revolutionaries in Bengal from 1st September 1924 to the 31st March 1925,” (1925) in TIB I: 381–382.

  41. 41.

    “Activities of the Revolutionaries in Bengal from 1st September 1924 to the 31st March 1925,” (1925) in TIB I: 381–382; and O. Cleary, Intelligence Bureau, to Wallinger, 30 April 1925, L/P&J/12/78, APAC BL. Cleary’s report to Wallinger stated that two of the Chinese men had been arrested, when the revolutionaries were unable to raise the funds to purchase the eight revolvers, and the Bengal Police arranged for a “bogus purchaser” in order to make the arrest.

  42. 42.

    Note by H. LeMesurier, 5 July 1908, GOB Home (Pol) Conf. No. 390/C of 1909, WBSA.

  43. 43.

    Bengal Police Annual Administration Report (1913), 35.

  44. 44.

    Statement of arms smuggling into India from October 1921 to September 1924, enclosure to Wallinger to Hose, 10 October 1924, L/P&J/12/78, APAC BL.

  45. 45.

    Extract from statement of S. K. Niyamath, enclosure to Intelligence Bureau, GOI, to J. A. Wallinger, 4 December 1924, L/P&J/12/78, APAC BL.

  46. 46.

    B. Vogt, Norwegian Legation, London, to Austen Chamberlain, Foreign Secretary, 26 April 1927, P&J No. 1057 of 1927, L/P&J/6/1939, APAC BL.

  47. 47.

    W. D. R. Prentice, CS to GOB, to IO, 5 July 1927; and “Copy of judgment in the case of Emperor versus E. Johnson and H. Drendahl under section 19 F Arms Act,” 25 March 1927, P&J No. 1057 of 1927, L/P&J/6/1939, APAC BL. Both Prentice’s letter and the court judgment were forwarded by the Foreign Office to the Norwegian Legation.

  48. 48.

    Telegram, Sec. of State to Viceroy, 28 February 1934; and Intelligence Bureau to IPI, 7 November 1934; L/P&J/12/85, APAC BL; and Straits Times, 3 May 1935.

  49. 49.

    Straits Times, 3 May 1935.

  50. 50.

    IPI similarly regarded Chinese arms smugglers as a threat. After consulting Home Office files in March 1925, Wallinger advised the Intelligence Bureau that “large consignments” of arms were being shipped primarily from Hamburg to Hong Kong through a Chinese intermediary named Choy Loy in London. He further advised Indian intelligence to be aware that “Indian extremists who visit Hamburg are surely aware of Choy’s activities and may use him as their agent in furtherance of their own arms traffic.” Wallinger to Petrie, 4 March 1925, L/P&J/12/79, APAC BL.

  51. 51.

    Report by B. N. Banarji, Deputy Commissioner of Police, Calcutta, 22 July 1933, L/P&J/12/84, APAC BL.

  52. 52.

    Jennifer Liang, “Migration Patterns and Occupational Specialisations of Kolkata Chinese: An Insider’s History,” China Report 43: 4 (2007), 397–410.

  53. 53.

    August Peter Hansen, Memoirs of an Adventurous Dane in India 1904–1947 (London: BASCA, 1999), 203.

  54. 54.

    Report by B. N. Banarji, Deputy Commissioner of Police, Calcutta, 22 July 1933, L/P&J/12/84, APAC BL.

  55. 55.

    The German Hansa line was the second-largest employer of lascars after the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company. Balachandran, “Circulation through Seafaring,” 94–98.

  56. 56.

    Laura Tabili, ‘We Ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994).

  57. 57.

    Tabili, ‘We Ask for British Justice,’ 42.

  58. 58.

    Jonathan Hyslop, “Steamship Empire: Asian, African and British Sailors in the Merchant Marine c.1880–1945,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 44: 49 (2009), 51; and Balachandran, “Circulation through Seafaring,” 92. Balachandran makes this comment in reference to the lives and experiences of lascars in Britain.

  59. 59.

    Ali Raza and Benjamin Zachariah, “To Take Arms Across a Sea of Trouble: The ‘Lascar System,’ Politics and Agency in the 1920s,” Itinerario 36: 3 (2012), 19–38.

  60. 60.

    Jonathon Hyslop, “Zulu Sailors in the Steamship Era: The African Modern in the World Voyage Narratives of Fulunge Mpofu and George Magodini, 1916–1924,” in Fiona Paisley and Kirsty Reid, eds., Critical Perspectives on Colonialism: Writing the Empire from Below (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 138.

  61. 61.

    Raza and Zachariah, “To Take Arms,” 23.

  62. 62.

    Charles Tegart, “The Indian Communist Party,” 9 October 1922, L/P&J/12/46, APAC BL.

  63. 63.

    Bald, Bengali Harlem, 148.

  64. 64.

    Suchetana Chattopadhyay, “The Bolshevik Menace: Colonial Surveillance and the Origins of Socialist Politics in Calcutta,” South Asia Research 26: 165 (2006), 165–179 (quotation on 175).

  65. 65.

    Raza and Zachariah have identified four different types of lascars: those who worked as seamen full-time, those who used the networks of lascars as “a front for their political activism,” those for whom being a lascar was only a form of temporary employment and lastly those who moved from work as a lascar to political activism. Raza and Zachariah, “To Take Arms,” 26.

  66. 66.

    Bald, Bengali Harlem, 150.

  67. 67.

    Bald, Bengali Harlem.

  68. 68.

    Hasan N. Gardezi, ed. Chains to Lose: Life and Struggles of a Revolutionary: Memoirs of Dada Amir Haider Khan, 2 vols. (Karachi: Pakistan Study Centre, University of Karachi, 2007), I: 169–171.

  69. 69.

    See Silvestri, Ireland and India, 13–45.

  70. 70.

    See, for example, Agnes Smedley, FOFI, to Frank P. Walsh, 21 August 1920, Frank P. Walsh Collection, Box 9, New York Public Library. Smedley wrote to alert Walsh, a supporter of both labor and anticolonial movements, to the low wages and poor working conditions of lascars, and to urge that “organized American seamen open their eyes to the necessity of organizing Indian seamen, that racial prejudice against them be eliminated.”

  71. 71.

    Gardezi, Chains to Lose, I: 234.

  72. 72.

    Gardezi, Chains to Lose, I: 236. Smedley played an important role in the Friends of Freedom for India after being introduced to radical Indian anticolonial politics through the Ghadar Party; see Ruth Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 34–87.

  73. 73.

    Gardezi, Chains to Lose, I: 233 and 243.

  74. 74.

    Gardezi, Chains to Lose, I: 245–247.

  75. 75.

    Gardezi, Chains to Lose, I: 251, 257–258, 261–262, and 264–274.

  76. 76.

    Cf. the analysis of Jonathan Hyslop, which stresses the agency of lascars, but also emphasizes their involvement in “the petty trade of smuggling” rather than their engagement with revolutionary or nationalist politics. Jonathan Hyslop, “Guns, Drugs and Revolutionary Propaganda: The Smuggling of Indian Sailors in the 1920s,” South African Historical Journal 61: 4 (2009), 838–846 (quotation on 840).

  77. 77.

    Unless otherwise noted, information about Obed in the following paragraphs is taken from his history sheet, 26 April 1934, L/P&J/12/477, APAC BL.

  78. 78.

    “List or Manifest of [Aliens] Employed on the Vessel as Crew” for the S.S. Sag Harbor, 19 October 1919, available at ancestryinstitution.com. Accessed 18 November 2014.

  79. 79.

    “Index to Alien Crewmen Who were Discharged or Who Deserted at New York, New York, May 1917–November 1957”; and “List or Manifest of Aliens Employed on the Vessel as Members of Crew” for the S.S. Spartan Prince, 19 October 1920. Both available at ancestryinstitution.com. Accessed 18 November 2014.

  80. 80.

    As “Henri Obed” he was the chief steward on a voyage of the Korean Prince from Santos, Brazil to New Orleans in the spring of 1921. Obed was engaged on the Korean Prince in New York on 4 November 1920. “List or Manifest of Aliens Employed on the Vessel as Members of Crew” for the Korean Prince, 8 May 1921, available at ancestryinstitution.com. Accessed 18 November 2014.

  81. 81.

    Sheikh Fela told the police that “we were afraid to purchase any revolver there as customs officers searched us in every port.” “Indian Communist Party,” 10 September 1923, L/P&J/12/52, APAC BL.

  82. 82.

    “Indian Communist Party,” 30 September 1922, L/P&J/12/46, APAC BL.

  83. 83.

    O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire, 17–18.

  84. 84.

    IPI to R. Peel, 30 July 1934, L/P&J/12/477, APAC BL.

  85. 85.

    Note by Clausen, IO, 27 April 1934, L/P&J/12/477, APAC BL.

  86. 86.

    Hyslop, “Steamship Empire,” 64.

  87. 87.

    IPI to Johnston, IO, 11 February 1936, L/P&J/12/477, APAC BL.

  88. 88.

    IPI memo, 20 July 1940, L/P&J/12/477, APAC BL.

  89. 89.

    See O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire, 140–144.

  90. 90.

    “Note on persons employed on steamers who are known or suspected to be concerned in Arms’ smuggling,” [1927], L/P&J/12/82, APAC BL.

  91. 91.

    Extract from information supplied by Sheikh Karim [nd], enclosure to Intelligence Bureau, GOI, to Wallinger, 23 July 1925, L/P&J/12/78, APAC BL.

  92. 92.

    IPI to Peel, 29 August 1928, L/P&J/12/83, APAC BL.

  93. 93.

    “Note on persons employed on steamers who are known or suspected to be concerned in Arms’ smuggling” [1927]; and Extract from New Scotland Yard Report dated 7th September 1927, L/P&J/12/82, APAC BL.

  94. 94.

    IPI to Hose, IO, 19 January and 28 February 1925, L/P&J/12/79, APAC BL.

  95. 95.

    Wallinger to Hose, IO, 10 October 1924, L/P&J/12/78, APAC BL.

  96. 96.

    See the Statements of Arms and Ammunition Seized by Customs Officials in India and Ceylon in L/P&J/12/83, APAC BL.

  97. 97.

    Intelligence Bureau, Home, GOI, to IPI, 3 May 1932, L/P&J/12/91, APAC BL.

  98. 98.

    Extract from Report of Director, Intelligence Bureau, GOI, 22 April 1926, L/P&J/12/163, APAC BL. Noting both Sachindra Sanyal’s connections to Bose and the HRA, the Bengal Police IB concluded that Sanyal was “deeply connected in a conspiracy to smuggle arms and ammunition into India from the Far East.” “Statement of Persons Arrested and Detained under (1) Regulation III of 1818, (2) Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, 1924, (3) Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1925.”—“Irreconcilables.” Lytton Collection, MSS Eur. F 160/37, APAC BL.

  99. 99.

    Intelligence Bureau, GOI, to IPI, 3 March 1931, L/P&J/12/83, APAC BL.

  100. 100.

    Intelligence Bureau, GOI, to IPI, 3 March 1931; and IPI to Peel, IO, 31 March 1931; L/P&J/12/83, APAC BL.

  101. 101.

    Daniel Brückenhaus, Policing Transnational Protest: Liberal Imperialism and the Surveillance of Anticolonialists in Europe, 1905–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

  102. 102.

    “When analyzing the chances for success of … government efforts to work across national borders, it is important to distinguish systematically between official, open cooperation and hidden cooperation behind the scenes.” Brückenhaus, Policing Transnational Protest, 108.

  103. 103.

    IPI to Clausen, IO, 26 April 1934, L/P&J/12/477, APAC BL.

  104. 104.

    R. J. Peel to Under Sec. of State, Foreign Office, 19 July 1932; and Granville Leveson-Gower to Paul Hymans, Minister for Foreign Affairs, 28 July 1932. L/P&J/12/91, APAC BL.

  105. 105.

    Copy of statement of Mahomed Mofizuddin, 26 August 1927, L/P&J/12/82, APAC BL.

  106. 106.

    O. Cleary, Intelligence Bureau, GOI, to Wallinger, 17 December 1924, L/P&J/12/79, APAC BL.

  107. 107.

    Notes of a Meeting Held at Scotland House, 19 June 1925, L/P&J/12/91, APAC BL.

  108. 108.

    IPI note, “Indian Communist Party,” 3 September 1924, L/P&J/12/78, APAC BL.

  109. 109.

    John Fisher, “The Interdepartmental Committee on Eastern Unrest and British Responses to Bolshevik and Other Intrigues against the Empire during the 1920s,” Journal of Asian Studies 34: 1 (2000), 1–34.

  110. 110.

    Cited in Fisher, “British Responses,” 14. As John Fisher observes, the ICEU’s focus was in reality much wider than arms smuggling. Although its meetings grew less frequent after 1922, its purview actually widened as the committee “correlated secret information about anti-British activities in Asia and northern and central Africa,” and distributed it to relevant government departments. In spite of the widespread approval for its formation, SIS and Foreign Office became particularly opposed to the committee, believing that it was inefficient and its membership too large for the consideration of secret information. The committee ceased to exist in 1927.

  111. 111.

    Sub-committee of ICEU minutes, 10 November. 1924, L/P&J/12/91, APAC BL.

  112. 112.

    Sub-committee of ICEU minutes, 10 November 1924, L/P&J/12/91, APAC BL.

  113. 113.

    Telegram from Viceroy to Sec. of State, 5 January 1925; and Notes of a Meeting Held at Scotland House, 19 June 1925. L/P&J/12/91, APAC BL.

  114. 114.

    Wallinger to Hose, IO, 10 October 1924; and Malcolm Seton, IO, to J. Crerar, GOI, 16 October 1924, L/P&J/12/78, APAC BL.

  115. 115.

    Malcolm Seton, IO, to J. Crerar, GOI, 16 October 1924, L/P&J/12/78, APAC BL.

  116. 116.

    Crerar to Seton, 13 November 1924, L/P&J/12/78, APAC BL. In a subsequent letter in the file, Crerar added that regarding the cases of lack of cooperation cited by Wallinger, the information was either “too vague to be acted upon” or the Intelligence Bureau had not been informed. In one instance, a warning about the potential import of miniature Thompson submachine guns to India had turned out to be simply a copy of a newspaper advertisement. The Intelligence Bureau had in fact already been informed of this by the Burma Police. Crerar to Seton, 20 November 1924.

  117. 117.

    D. Petrie to Wallinger, 4 November 1924, L/P&J/12/78, APAC BL.

  118. 118.

    See, for example, the report on the weapon and cartridges seized on 31 October 1927 from Fazel Mohammed, fireman on board the SS Baron Haig, L/P&J/12/82; and Deputy Commissioner of Police, Special Branch, Calcutta, Report of “S-48, dated the 28th of November, 1927,” L/P&J/12/83, APAC BL.

  119. 119.

    Moreman, “The Arms Trade.”

  120. 120.

    Foreign and Political Dept., GOI, to Sir Edwin Montagu, Sec. of State, 21 December 1917, RECO 1/341, NA UK.

  121. 121.

    See the correspondence in L/P&J/12/90, APAC BL. It is not clear from the file whether the Intelligence Bureau was able to locate the “splitters” imported in 1926.

  122. 122.

    Intelligence Bureau, GOI, to IPI, 3 May 1932; and “Proceedings of the Conference held in the Honorable the Home Member’s room at 11 A.M. on Friday, the 27th May 1932,” L/P&J/12/91, APAC BL.

  123. 123.

    Minutes of Arms Conference, July 1932, L/P&J/12/91, APAC BL.

  124. 124.

    Minutes of Arms Conference, July 1932, L/P&J/12/91, APAC BL.

  125. 125.

    Sec., P&O, to Undersec. of State, IO, 31 January 1933, L/P&J/12/92, APAC BL.

  126. 126.

    Ondrej Ditrych, “‘International Terrorism’ as Conspiracy: Debating Terrorism in the League of Nations,” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 38: 1 (2013), 200–210 (quotation on 200).

  127. 127.

    Ditrych, “‘International Terrorism’ as Conspiracy,” 200.

  128. 128.

    See Martin David Dubin, “Great Britain and the Anti-Terrorist Conventions of 1937,” Terrorism and Political Violence 5: 1 (1993), 1–29; and the correspondence from the India Office and the Government of India in L/P&J/8/582 and L/P&J/8/583, APAC BL.

  129. 129.

    As Mary Barton has recently argued, these Home Office officials, who rarely referenced political violence in the Empire, viewed “English culture and law as protective of civil liberties and distinctly different from the authoritarian regimes engulfing Europe.” Mary Barton, “The British Empire and International Terrorism: India’s Separate Path at the League of Nations, 1934–1937,” Journal of British Studies 56 (April 2017), 351–373 (quotation on 363). Barton provides the most comprehensive and convincing analysis of the British and British Indian responses to the Convention.

  130. 130.

    IPI to Johnston, IO, 6 February 1935, L/P&J/8/582, APAC BL.

  131. 131.

    C. W. Gwynne, Home GOI, to Peel, IO, 16 January 1933, L/P&J/12/92, APAC BL. The Government of India had previously hoped to place the issue of arms smuggling before the League of Nations.

  132. 132.

    C. M. Trivedi, GOI, to Undersec. of State for India, 2 March 1935, L/P&J/8/582, APAC BL.

  133. 133.

    Findlater Stewart to Sir Russell Scott, HO, 16 April 1935, L/P&J/8/582, APAC BL.

  134. 134.

    R. Peel to Sir C. Kisch, Sir F. Stewart, 27 April 1935, L/P&J/8/582, APAC BL.

  135. 135.

    R. Peel to Sir Denys Bray, GOI, 27 October 1937; and Bray to Sec. of State for India, 16 November 1937. Article 13 of the convention stated that “Manufacturers of fire-arms, other than smooth-bore sporting guns, shall be required to mark each arm with a serial number or other distinctive mark permitting it to be identified; both manufacturers and retailers shall be obliged to keep a register of the names and addresses of purchasers.” League of Nations, Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism, Geneva, 16 November 1937, L/P&J/8/583, APAC BL.

  136. 136.

    The Bengal Smuggling of Arms Bill, 1933, “Statement of Objects and Reasons,” 22 December 1933, L/P&J/7/619, APAC BL.

  137. 137.

    The Bengal Smuggling of Arms Act, 1934, L/P&J/7/619, APAC BL.

  138. 138.

    The definition is from the 1923 Bengal (Goondas) Act.

  139. 139.

    Although official reports from the 1880s onwards expressed concern over increased crime in industrializing areas such as the Asansol-Raniganj coal-mining belt in Burdwan District, particularly among migrants from the United Provinces and Bihar, the patterns of criminal activity in these districts was neither clear nor consistent. While districts such as Howrah and Burdwan showed a marked increase in violent crime, property crimes actually decreased in Howrah and Hooghly districts. See Arun Mukherjee, Crime and Public Disorder in Colonial Bengal 1861–1912 (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1995), 45–50. For the heterogeneity of Calcutta’s “goondas,” see Suranjan Das and Jayanta K. Ray, The Goondas: Towards a Reconstruction of the Calcutta Underworld (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1996).

  140. 140.

    Indigenous elites as well as colonial authorities had a role in the construction of the concept of “goondaism” and specifically the “goonda problem” in the Barabazar area of northern Calcutta following the First World War. See Sugata Nandi, “Constructing the Criminal: Politics of the Social Imaginary of the ‘Goonda’,” Social Scientist 38: 3–4 (2010), 37–54.

  141. 141.

    Lord Ronaldshay to Sir Edwin Montagu, 24 November 1921, Montagu Papers, MSS Eur. C 523/32, APAC BL.

  142. 142.

    The Bengal (Goondas) Act, 1923, P&J No. 1611 of 1923, L/P&J/6/1845, APAC BL.

  143. 143.

    Debraj Bhattacharya, “Kolkata ‘Underworld’ in the Early Twentieth Century,” Economic and Political Weekly 39: 38 (September 18–24, 2004), 4279.

  144. 144.

    Sugata Nandi, “Inventing Extraordinary Criminality: A Study of the Calcutta Goondas Act,” in Shaunnagh Dorsett and John McLaren, eds., Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagements and Legacies (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 92–106 (quotation on 103). Nandi notes how the “Criminal Biography” in each externed goonda’s police file outlined a common three-part transformation into “a criminal whom ordinary law failed to subdue.” Nandi, “Inventing Extraordinary Criminality,” 97.

  145. 145.

    Taylor C. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 171.

  146. 146.

    See Chap. 2.

  147. 147.

    Extract from an Abstract of the Proceedings of the Meeting of the Bengal Legislative Council, 15 February 1934, L/P&J/7/619, APAC BL.

  148. 148.

    “Report under Section 6(4) of the Bengal Smuggling of Arms Act 1934, in connection with the case of Henry Obed,” 9 April 1935, L/P&J/12/477, APAC BL.

  149. 149.

    Tim Harper, “Singapore, 1915, and the Birth of the Asian Underground,” Modern Asian Studies 47: 6 (2013), 1782–1811 (quotation on 1797).

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    Michael Silvestri

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Silvestri, M. (2019). Spies, Sailors, and Revolutionaries: Bengal Revolutionaries, Indian Political Intelligence, and International Arms Smuggling. In: Policing ‘Bengali Terrorism’ in India and the World. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18042-3_6

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