Defying the Raj ~I

In 1917, the British Indian government appointed the Sedition Committee headed by Justice Sidney Rowlatt, to investigate “criminal conspiracies connected with revolutionary movements” in India. The committee submitted its recommendations in 1918. These recommendations led to the Rowlatt Act of 1919. We look into this report at the outset, because even after independence, the narrative it sought to set was not rejected outright. Some of our historians, initially, called the revolutionaries terrorists. Later, facing fierce criticism, eminent scholars adopted the term “revolutionary terrorism” to retain the pejorative term ‘terrorist’ under the cover of ‘revolutionary’.

- BY NANDALAL CHAKRABARTI

It is the legacy of a colonial perspective borne by the nonviolence brigade. Let us now briefly examine the Sedition Committee’s report. The Report referred to the Chitpavan Brahmins’ rise to power in the Deccan as peshwas (the chief ministers) and the decline in their power after their government was overthrown by the British. The first revolutionary upsurge, the Report said, was witnessed among these Chitpavan Brahmins of Poona. This was stated to show that the revolutionary movement from the beginning was limited to the upper caste. The Report also said that revolutionaries of Maharashtra were anti-Muslim, as they were inspired by the Maratha fight against Muslim rule led by Shivaji.

It is true that Bal Gangadhar Tilak started public observance of Ganapati Utsav and Shivaji Utsav to mobilise Hindus against the British. But Tilak’s movements were not directed against the Muslims. Tilak sought HinduMuslim unity in the Lucknow Pact between Congress and the Muslim League in 1916. So much so, that he gave up his earlier objections to separate electorate for Muslims. The Committee emphasised that the movement was limited to certain pockets of certain areas only. This was factually wrong. At the end of the 19th century, a war was waged against the British by the crown prince of Manipur, Tikendrajit Singh, and an anti-British armed struggle was launched by Birsa Munda, a tribal leader, in the Chotanagpur region (present-day Jharkhand).