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Abstract
This article examines the contrasting role of violence in the anticolonial struggles of India and Ireland. It turns to the early writing of Mohandas K. Gandhi to explicate how violence for Indian nationalists shaped by the writings of Gandhi, was configured as a European methodology and antithetical to Indian culture. In contrast, James Connolly anticipates the work of Frantz Fanon in advocating violence as a necessary means to purge the ideological influence of British Colonial Rule from the minds of colonised subjects. It concludes by looking at the legacy of the two approaches to suggest that, rather paradoxically, Gandhi’s utilisation of nonviolence as a strategy of resistance proved to be more disruptive to the workings of the British State.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my colleagues within the School of English at Newcastle University who introduced me to Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj as one of our set texts in our weekly Theory Reading Group. They are Neelam Srivastava and Sadek Kessouas, and Tom Langley who is now based at Kings College London.
Notes
1. Farage, cited in Zoe Williams “Nigel Farage’s Victory Speech was a Triumph of Poor Taste and Ugliness” (The Guardian Newspaper, June 24, 2016).
2. O’Connell, Portrait of a Radical, 27.
3. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 99.
4. Gandhi was famously thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg for refusing to move from the first-class compartment. For a more detailed study on the formative importance of South Africa on Gandhi’s political activism, see Eric Itzkin, Gandhi’s Johannesburg: Birthplace of Satyagraha.
5. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, 72.
6. Ibid., 77.
7. The weaponising of the fragile human form against the technological might of mechanised military weaponry continues to be seen in areas of the globe, such as in contemporary Palestine, where obvious discrepancies of power force individuals to use their bodies as weapons of resistance.
8. Ibid., 77.
9. Ibid., 90.
10. Ibid., 90.
11. Ibid., 93.
12. Ibid., 96.
13. Ibid., 95.
14. Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 475.
15. Žižek, Demanding the Impossible, 177.
16. Connolly, “Labour, Nationality and Religion,” 112.
17. Ibid., 112.
18. As always with Connolly, definitive biographical detail of his time in India is scant For a more detailed discussion of the mystery that continues to surround Connolly’s time in India, see Donal Niven, James Connolly: ‘A Full Life’, 18–9.
19. Connolly, “The Coming Revolt in India: Its Political and Social Causes,” James Connolly: Selected Political Writings, 231. From the very inception of the British intervention in India, cartography was deployed as a mechanism by which Britain could extricate the substantial natural resources of India. Detailed cartographic maps of India were ordered which would allow ruthless colonial speculators to swiftly locate, remove and then ship Indian resources. Contemporary cartographic representations testify to the European belief that India was a territorial site of immense natural wealth. In contrast, maps of the African interior were characterised by a lack of topographic definition and forensic rigour. A popular misconception gained traction in the imperial imagination of the nineteenth century, that Africa was devoid of the same sort of natural and mineral wealth that was to be found in Africa. Indeed, the Scottish evangelical explorer David Livingstone was a canny operator who included in his fundraising patter to wealthy benefactors lines that referenced the concealed natural riches hidden within the continental interiority of Africa. For more on the importance of imperial cartography on the nineteenth-century experiment to “open up” Africa, see Robbie McLaughlan. Re-imagining “The Dark Continent” in fin de siècle Literature.
20. Connolly, “The Coming Revolt in India: Its Political and Social Causes,” 231.
21. Ibid., 233.
22. Ibid., 233.
23. Ibid., 233.
24. Ibid., 235.
25. Ibid., 240.
26. Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 3.
27. Ibid., 3.
28. Ibid., 3.
29. Connolly, “The Coming Revolt in India: Its Political and Social Causes,” 235.
30. Silvestri, “‘The Sinn Fein of India’: Irish Nationalism and the Policing of Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal,” 455. In his book Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory, Silvestri comprehensively documents the shared lineage, and the deviations, between the two nationalist struggles.
31. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. XVIII, 56.
32. Dyer had instructed his forces to block the main exits of Jallianwala Bagh (a public garden in Amritsar in the Punjab) where an estimated 25,000 protestors and Baisakhi pilgrims, among them Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus, had congregated in the garden among with traders for the Baisakhi annual fair. Dyer issued the command for his troops to open fire on the densest parts of the gathered crowd in retaliation for what he perceived to be Indian disobedience. Although official numbers are disputed, it is estimated that approximately 1500 people lost their lives that day.
33. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. XVIII, 220.
34. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. XV, 18.
35. Žižek, Demanding the Impossible, 178.
36. Ibid., 178.
37. Ibid., 178.
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