A torn performative dispensation: the affective politics of British Second World War propaganda in India and the problem of legitimation in an age of mass publics

Abstract

How does a government convince a mass of people who no longer accept its sovereignty to die for it? This was the seemingly insurmountable challenge facing the British colonial government in India by the time of the Second World War. Using primary archival materials, this article presents British Second World War propaganda strategies in India as symptoms of a ‘torn performative dispensation’ – a political crisis in which the twin projects of the incitement of mass affect and the articulation of a discourse of sovereignty can no longer be successfully reconciled. This article also explores the dynamic of ‘interdependent conflict’ that characterized the relation between British colonial and Indian nationalist publicity.

Keywords:

• propaganda
• legitimation
• affect
• Second World War
• ritual

This is an article about the greatest marketing challenge of all: how to convince a mass of people who no longer accept your sovereignty to lay down their lives for you. This was, in somewhat simplified form, the brief that was handed to the makers of British Second World War propaganda for India. The early 1940s, the period that grounds my analysis, were indeed desperate years for the British colonial authorities. The Axis Powers seemed unstoppable in Europe as well as in southeast Asia. The Indian National Congress was spearheading an independence movement that was pushing the Raj towards its endgame and which, by August 1942, would demand that the British unconditionally ‘Quit India’.

In the following pages I examine how the British propaganda apparatus grappled with the impasses generated by this challenge. My aim, however, is not to produce a premortem autopsy of colonial rule. In the blinding light of August 1947, the moment of Indian Independence, it can become difficult to avoid reading the problems faced by the British during the last years of the Raj as anything other than the pathetic symptoms of a terminal condition of historical irrelevance. But perhaps precisely the extremity of the government's crisis in the early 1940s also helps to disclose structural problems of longer standing: specifically, the pursuit of political legitimation vis-à-vis emergent mass publics and the dynamic relation of interdependent conflict that tied the colonial authorities and the nationalist movement together in their competing claims to the commitment of ‘the Indian masses’.

Of course, in a formal sense the Indian nationalists ‘won’ this conflict in 1947, when sovereign power was transferred. But I want to suggest that this moment of victory was, for the nationalist movement, also in a very important sense a moment of loss – a ‘loss of the loss’, as Slavoj ˙i˛ek might put it. Colonization is often interpreted as having imposed a kind of self-alienation on the colonized, a loss of integrated subjectivity. But one could also turn this around and argue that colonization enabled a fullness of nationalist subjectivity, a fullness that was only possible because the nationalist movement did not have to mediate itself through its own sovereign state. In this paradoxical sense, British colonial rule was for India the loss that made possible the affective plenitude of mass nationalism. It follows, too, that the overcoming of that loss, which formally took place at the moment of Indian Independence, was in a sense the decisive and traumatic moment of loss: ‘the loss of the loss’ that marked the birth of the postcolonial Indian state.

Why make this argument through an examination of the problems besetting British colonial propaganda in the early 1940s? ¹ If I am arguing that the sense of mass density that attached to the Indian nationalist movement during the late colonial period was in part a result of its relationship of interdependent conflict with the colonial government, then there is also another side to this relationship. What we see in colonial propaganda initiatives during this period is an administration desperately envious of the mass legitimacy enjoyed by the nationalists it routinely excoriated. The tragedy of the late Raj, if one may dignify it thus, was that in its covetous pursuit of the kind of spontaneous mass commitment that the nationalist movement enjoyed, the colonial state failed to recognize that it was precisely its own presence in India, as a conspicuously alien power, that made that impression of spontaneity possible.

Two scenes

I would like to begin by juxtaposing two scenes of propaganda, both of them from 1942. What interests me about these two scenes, aside from their particular qualities, is their historical simultaneity. What does it mean for two such apparently incommensurable strategies of legitimation to be happening in the same polity at the same time?

Scene 1: the emperor's missing clothes

Scene 1 involves a suggestion that was never realized. But the reasons for its non-realization, as well as the fact that it was suggested at all, are illuminating.

In the summer of 1942, the Government of India was acutely aware of the gathering storm of popular outrage that would culminate that August in the Quit India Movement. Repeatedly, it requested from the India Office in London some film footage or photographs of the King-Emperor, George VI, dressed in the uniform of one of the Indian regiments of which he was, ex officio, Colonel-in-Chief. ² The propaganda value of such images was clear enough: they would function as concrete, pictorial evidence of the substantial continuity between the body of the King and the bodies of the Indian troops who, by wearing imperial uniforms, literally incorporated themselves into the cosmic and political order for which the King operated as master signifier.

The visual precedent for such an image was the imperial darbar, the Mughal courtly ritual of exchange and incorporation that the British had (mal)adapted in the nineteenth century as an apparently indigenous technology of political legitimation. ³ In the darbar, vassals expressed their allegiance by offering gifts to the prince and, in exchange, accepting vestments bearing the insignia of his authority. Such vestments functioned at once as tokens of exchange and, insofar as they might ritually be worn by the vassal, as media of political incorporation. The darbar was, in its time, a flexible and powerful political technology.

In requesting pictures of King George wearing colonial regimental uniform, then, the Government of India was drawing on a well-established political form. But as the ruler was now to be shown in the same clothes as his subjects, the government was also partially inverting it. The implication was that in times of war ruler and ruled were, if not quite sitting in the same boat, then at least standing in the same shoes. By combining leadership with solidarity, the ruler could once again appear as the all-enfolding parental patron, maa-baap (mother and father), to his Indian subjects.

The only problem with this plan, as it turned out, was that no such images existed. Nor, as the Ministry of Information somewhat sheepishly had to tell the India Office, were any forthcoming. Discreet inquiries to Buckingham Palace revealed that there was no point in asking King George to sit for new portraits as he did not own any of the uniforms in question. Having thus drawn a blank, the Ministry proceeded to suggest to the India Office that it ‘might still be possible to make a composite photograph from the uniform and an existing portrait of the King’. ⁴

It is hard to imagine a more perfect illustration of the hollowness of the late colonial regime, driven to cut-and-paste sleight-of-hand, willing to resort to shoddy desktop illusionism to maintain the impression of continuity between ruler and ruled that had long since become implausible. Even if the image of King George in Indian uniform might have signalled a degree of identification with the predicament of his soldier subjects, the whole darbar-and-Imperial-Assemblage imaginary that underpinned the initiative had, by the early 1940s, already been an outmoded political form for a good 20 years.

The India Office had had ample opportunity to reflect on the shifting terrain of imperial legitimation in an increasingly democratic age since the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) undertook a politically fractious tour of India in 1921–1922. Writing to the British Prime Minister at the conclusion of the tour, a British civilian who had accompanied the royal party noted the awkwardness of a protocol that was neither plausibly ‘traditional’ nor adequately ‘modern’:

Mere ceremonial, such as durbars, is a little liable to defeat its own end. We do not run these durbars exactly on Indian lines, nor do we run them on our own lines. The compromise is often very unsuccessful. By way of illustration, I may take the case of an Indian aristocrat who complained to me about the arrangements at an important function. ‘I shall quite understand’, he said, ‘if you run ceremonies upon democratic lines as in England, and make no distinction between one man and another. But if you run them upon Indian lines, why do you not take pains to see that Indian ideas of ceremonial and etiquette are properly observed? Why, for example, do you make us stand in the sun, or wait for hours for our cars, in the full view of our own people, while your most junior politicals [sic] take precedence over us? You never make sufficiently careful arrangements for our convenience. And why do you not ask influential Committees of Indian noblemen to assist you in ceremonial details, where you invariably go wrong?’ To this I had no answer. ⁵

If, in 1922, a more ‘democratic’ protocol would have been acceptable even to some of the Indian notables whose vanity the theatrics of the darbar were supposed to flatter, then by the early 1940s the maa-baap formula was indisputably antiquated. In the blunt words of the author of a 1941 intelligence report from Bombay: ‘[p]eople here are not really interested in […] being treated paternally and maternally by Their Majesties’. ⁶

Scene 2: humming the same song

If Scene 1 portrayed an idea that could not be realized, then Scene 2 depicts a project that ran for several years. If the trick photo of King George suggested a kind of sympathetic magic through bricolage, then Scene 2 involves a rather different kind of magic: ventriloquism. If Scene 1 is all about a fantasy of legitimacy in which the full visibility of the King's body is supposed to suture cracks in the colonial regime, then Scene 2 presents us with the reverse spectacle of a situation in which legitimacy depends on the invisibility of the state.

In 1942, the Urdu poet Hafeez Jallandhari was the Director of Publicity for All-India Radio in New Delhi. ⁷ In between composing ghazals, he spearheaded an ambitious scheme called the Song Publicity Organization (SPO). ⁸ The aim of the SPO was to build mass support for the war as well as for British imperial authority more generally by, as it were, subliminal means. This was to be achieved by disguising war propaganda as popular culture.

Hafeez's first and most important rule was that the voice of the state should remain ‘behind the scenes’, masked by the organic idioms of vernacular culture. These organic idioms would lend SPO propaganda its affective efficacy, but only if it appeared to be, in the words of a Government of Bombay Home Department official, ‘spontaneous and inspired by the Divine afflatus instead of by the rupees of a satanic government’. His second operating principle, fully consonant with imperial anthropology, was that Indians were exceptionally susceptible to the sensuous appeal of performance. Thus, the government's pragmatic need for disguise might find a felicitous fit with Indian dispositions. Hafeez noted in general terms that ‘it is in the guise of entertainment and recreation that propaganda becomes most effective. […] literature, song and music are the most vital formative factors in the shaping of human ideas’. Nowhere was this more true than in India: ‘In fact, so deeply is Indian life steeped in verse and song that in joy as well as in sorrow, everybody recites verses. Not to speak of marriage, we even mourn our dead by singing’.

By striking ‘the responsive chord of emotions’, the unwelcome face of the government might achieve a seductive makeover. Through such an embedded aesthetic politics, even the horrors of war could become beautiful: ‘The only method of bringing the sounds of war unobstructed to [the] hearing [of the people] is through mellifluous melodies’. Writing in terms that could well have been lifted directly from a marketing manual, Hafeez noted that the challenge was to make

the audience believe what is being said to be an echo of their own hearts. In other words, make your audience say what you yourself want to tell them. […] We only want just enough music to make the words of our music sound beautiful, so that their real spirit may permeate the consciousness of the audience and while affording them pleasure, compel them unconsciously to hum the same song.

The backbone of the SPO was to be a class of performers whose relative obscurity would at once ensure their closeness to the people and make them hungry for the kinds of performance venues to which the government might be able to provide access. Hafeez especially had his sights set on the qawwalis (Sufi devotional singers), whose performances stirred the masses at wedding feasts, pilgrimages and annual melas (fairs). But he was interested in deploying the talents of all those whose performative energy defined vernacular entertainment: bhajniks (Hindu devotional singers), ‘Punjabi actors’, ‘songstresses’, ‘dancing girls’ and itinerant singer-mendicants of various communities (bharais, suthras, mirasis, yogis, jugglers, acrobats, magicians, etc.). Particularly important for Hafeez was the fact that audiences would pay to see these performers, thus guaranteeing a level of engagement not available to freely given publicity.

By January 1943, Hafeez claimed already to have personally trained some 100 parties of qawwalis and bhajniks, peppering their repertoire with carefully scripted material that they would then showcase at the festivities and mournings at which they would typically perform. ⁹ Many writers and performers were wary of the government taint; others feared that the invitation to join up was in fact a desperately disguised press gang and that they would be shipped off to die on foreign shores. Still, by rewarding composers of ‘striking and original’ material with modest sums, ¹⁰ Hafeez had so far amassed some 500 songs and verses, ten plays of various lengths and one nautanki (North Indian folk drama). Extending the concept into the realm of mechanical reproduction, Hafeez had also overseen the production of gramophone recordings in Hindi, Urdu, Haryanvi and Punjabi for playing at ‘cinema houses, hotels, into microphones and on the radio, at places of entertainment, in village fairs and gatherings’ and so forth.

But it was the work of composition itself that presented the biggest challenge. Nothing less than a new hybrid genre was required. Since the days of the swadeshi movement during the first decade of the twentieth century, cultural luminaries like Rabindranath Tagore had promoted the harnessing of popular cultural forms to nationalist ends. And at around the same time that Hafeez was busy with the SPO, the colonial government was contending with both the vernacular agit-prop experiments of leftist groups like the Indian Peoples' Theatre Association and the rural cultural activism of Indian National Congress cadres. ¹¹ But the vestments of popular culture hung more awkwardly on the shoulders of the state. Hafeez wrote

Before this, our poets had never had the experience of versifying such themes. They either sang of Beauty and Love or, as of late, used their poetry as a means of instigating the masses against the Government. As regards the few third-rate poets who here and there supported the Government under pressure from local officials, their poetical talent was confined to the composition of panegyrics eulogizing the Tehsildar [district official], the Sub-Inspector of Police, the Police Superintendent, the Deputy Commissioner etc., and recounting, rather inelegantly, the blessings of the Government.

Was there not a way in which the Indian public's current ‘state of emotional excitement’ could be diverted away from its predominantly nationalist cathexis? If the government's ban on mass political meetings had, as Hafeez noted, forced political expression to adopt more ‘cultural’ forms – poetry recitals, the visual arts, dramatic performances – then could the colonial government not also be a subtle player on this pitch? At issue, in the most general sense, was an ambitious attempt at covert mass affect management. ¹² Hafeez noted that singers were capable of ‘sway[ing] large audiences’ with their songs, and even those who recited poems lightly or mockingly were susceptible to ‘catching the infection and passing it on to others’. In its spontaneous state such affective incitement was, from an administrative point of view, at best wasteful and at worst dangerous. Left to itself, such loose affect might either simply disperse unproductively or end up fuelling some seditious initiative. The challenge, as Hafeez saw it, was for the government to apply its ‘genius for organization’ in such a way as to ‘harness’ this vital ‘power of the poets […] saturated as it is with the old-world philosophy of life’.

Anachronism/simultaneity: a torn performative dispensation

What does it mean that these two scenes took place in the same year? Both involve strongly performative visions of legitimation: in one case, an overtly top-down spectacular orchestration of the singular sovereign body; on the other, a seemingly bottom-up distributed incitement of popular energies. And yet the strong sense of anachronism that clings to Scene 1 makes their juxtaposition uneasy. It is as if these two scenes involve fundamentally different ontologies of power and, as such, connote different historical epochs. The impossible photograph of King George, focusing as it does on the spectacularized body of the sovereign, seems to invoke an ideal-typical ‘feudal’ mode of authority, in which each component of the polity is nurtured and reproduced through cosmic incorporation. Conversely, Hafeez's work seems to belong to a distinctly ‘modern’ paradigm, where behind-the-scenes bureaucratic work powers a capillary process of subjectivation. If in Scene 1 authority radiates overtly from the singular body of the King, then in Scene 2 legitimacy is achieved through a covert mobilization of precisely that quotidian terrain that would seem to be ‘apolitical’.

To repeat, then how might we understand the political co-existence of these apparently incommensurable forms? It is certainly tempting to read it as a diagnosis of the desperate rudderlessness of the colonial regime in its twilight years. The analysis would go something like this: mortally wounded, the dying state lurches unsteadily between (as in Scene 1) a bombastic ritual idiom that has long since lost its efficacy and (as in Scene 2) the pathetic prefiguring of its own erasure in a situation where its voice has moved so close to becoming a kind of obscenity that it must at all costs be disguised. To be sure, propagandists worldwide by this time generally recognized the strategic advantages of anonymity. British broadcaster and author Richard Lambert made the point just before the war: ‘Indirect methods of propaganda are generally more successful than direct methods, because they cannot be so easily identified’ (1939[1938]: 45). But Milton Israel also notes that Edwin Montagu ¹³ – Secretary of State for India from 1917 to 1922 and a man whom Chandrika Kaul describes as progressive in his liberal understanding of imperial publicity ¹⁴ – viewed covert propaganda on behalf of the Government of India with distaste.

Certainly, the impression of a curious oscillation between stealth and bravado was characteristic of the Second World War propaganda in India. Even as Hafeez Jallandhari was insisting that official propaganda must at all costs ‘avoid the semblance of being officially inspired’, the Government of India was also advertising the war by sending out a dazzle-painted rail-show into the sections of India that could be traversed by broad gauge railway. Comprising ‘coaches containing exhibits from our Indian factories including armoured cars, guns and aeroplanes and also war trophies and cinematograph films of India's war effort and Indian troops on active service’, there was nothing subtle or covert about the Exhibition Train, whose imminent arrival in each locality would be announced by a fusillade of advance publicity through district officers, schoolteachers and air-dropped pamphlets. ¹⁵

What is particularly striking about these two scenes is not only their apparent incommensurability, but also that, taken together, they appear to comprise a decapitated body politic where both the head and the body have refused to die. ¹⁶ There is King George, the undead head. And then there is the spontaneous social body as imagined by Hafeez's SPO, vital but lacking the head that might coordinate an appropriate channelling of its energies into a coherent symbolic locus of authority and identification.

What we see here, I would argue, are the two halves of a torn performative dispensation. By ‘performative dispensation’ I mean a set of performative conventions that make and remake a social order by coordinating the movement between the incitement of affect and its symbolic mediation or containment. I stress the performative here to highlight that social orders are made through their staged enactment. Every performative dispensation has its characteristic mises-en-scenes, its rituals of self-production through which aesthetic and political registers of legitimation are interlaced.

I find the term ‘dispensation’ useful partly because it suggests an ordering of things that appears to have been handed down from above – as in ‘a system of revealed commands and promises regulating human affairs’. ¹⁷ At the same time, ‘dispensation’ also includes the parallel sense of a sovereign authority with the power to decide, as Carl Schmitt put it, on the exception. ¹⁸ The phrase ‘performative dispensation’ thus at one level registers a universal paradox of ideology: that it is only through the vital artifice of performance that the sense of the naturally given can be secured. It underlines the extent to which ideological hegemony is never just a matter of discursive consent but also of embodied inhabitation. As such, thinking about an ideological formation as a performative dispensation allows us to track the dialectic of the corporeality of affect and its discursive inscriptions. But it also reminds us that world orders are often experienced at once as simply ‘the way things are’ in a diffuse sense and as only being possible by the more or less fickle, more or less ‘exceptional’ grace of a sovereign authority.

The performative dispensation of the late Raj was ‘torn’ insofar as it was capable of producing both affective incitement and symbolic narratives but unable to move them into a politically efficacious relation of mutual mediation. We have a possible diagnosis, then. But it remains abstract, potentially applicable to the crisis phases of any political order. How might we better locate this torn performative dispensation within the particularities of its historical context? For that we will have to start by considering the outlines of the political predicament of British rule in India in the early 1940s.

‘It could not be much worse’

Some two-and-a-half million Indian soldiers were deployed to defend the British Empire in Second World War. But the British also knew that the vast majority of Indians either were altogether indifferent to the war or felt that it was simply ‘not their quarrel’. ¹⁹ And this was despite the enormous effort that the British had put into selling the war in India. Since 1939, Indians had been deluged with pamphlets, newssheets, radio broadcasts, newsreels and documentary films.

India's entry into the war had been controversial from the beginning. As Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow proclaimed India's participation unilaterally, against the Congress' explicit stipulation that India would only fight if the British gave a clear statement of their intentions vis-à-vis Indian independence after the war. Following elections in 1937 (enabled by the 1935 Government of India Act), an unprecedented number of Indians occupied high administrative positions. But following Linlithgow's affront, the Congress resolved to resign these hard-won positions en masse in protest against what an intelligence report two years later aptly summarized as ‘the anomalous position of being forced into the war to safeguard democracy while India is still under foreign rule’. ²⁰ During the immediately following months and years, the sense of contradiction intensified. Indians were being exhorted to lay down their lives for the protection of a colonial authority that was at the same time responding to popular protest with exceptional violence, doling out punitive prison sentences to both nationalist leaders and to the rank and file. Petty officials provoked additional resentment by extorting donations to the Allied War Fund. How could a foreign regime that was otherwise only too happy to divide and conquer now expect its subjects to take seriously its calls to unite for the white man's war?

The British were facing the possibility that the case for Indian participation in the war was quite simply not compelling on any remotely rational grounds. A May 1941 Intelligence Digest from Calcutta summed up the situation:

I have found it very difficult to put over effective arguments for Indian support to the war effort – what are we fighting for, I am asked? If I say to give freedom to overrun countries the answer is – why not give us freedom[?] If I say for democracy – the answer is a democracy for white people only. If I say for the preservation of the British Empire, the answer is – we do not wish to see the British Empire preserved and even with the argument for self-preservation, the reply is it is only a change of masters. Though often exasperated, I am often in sympathy with Indian feelings and my own opinion, for what it is worth, is that we shall not get wholehearted support in the war effort until some unequivocal declaration is made of our war aims and our intentions towards India. In fact I doubt now if such a statement would be accepted at its face value without some immediate action as an [sic] evidence of good faith. ²¹

Sudipta Kaviraj notes that the idea of an eternal, immemorial India as celebrated in Indian nationalist discourse was an invented tradition of the nineteenth century. But the British administration in India had no plausible access to such immemorialist claims, invented or otherwise. The colonial government could hardly portray itself as having emerged organically out of ancient Indian lifeways. Thus, the great ideological advantages of utilitarianism as a discourse of colonial legitimation: as a ‘consequentialist’ doctrine, utilitarianism rested its case on the benefits that colonial rule would produce in the future: ‘a whole range of new civilized means of life, starting from the railways and scientific education to the most crucial gift of all – a stable political order’. ²²

The refutation of colonial utilitarianism had long been a central plank of Indian nationalist discourse. By the interwar period, as Mrinalini Sinha points out, the glaring empirical evidence of the structural underdevelopment of British India made it rather difficult to promote the Raj on the basis of its purported material blessings. ²³ Nevertheless, in a characteristic dialectical twist, the British Ministry of Information was, by the time of the Second World War, prepared to seize on precisely India's underdevelopment as an argument for a firm imperial presence. Katherine Mayo's highly controversial civilizational polemic Mother India was the model here; India's abjection would be blamed on Indians so as to make the white man's civilizing mission appear more pressing than ever.

In May 1940, Harry Hodson, an officer in the Ministry's Empire Division, wrote to Jack Beddington, a colleague in the Films Division, that nothing so gauche as a ‘direct defence’ of British rule should be attempted. Rather, the ‘British cause must be left to stand out for itself from an understanding of three factors: – the great complexity of the Indian problem, its difficulties arising from the backwardness, ignorance and superstition of great masses of people, and the progress that has been achieved under British rule, both economically and politically’. Stark juxtapositions of India's social degradation with carefully selected icons of colonial modernization might present the right kind of visual argument, and Hodson, for one, had a certain knack for pithy rubrics (Indian women – ‘From Suttee to Suffrage’). ²⁴ Still, the utilitarian approach was clearly going to be an uphill battle. In April 1941, a Bombay informant for the British Ministry of Information observed: ‘Among the thinking, there is a spirit of analysis on something like the following lines: It is said that if the British lose [the war] then India will be in a really bad plight. How could that be? After two centuries of their rule literacy is only about 10%. It would either require a millennium to reach 100% or at the worst stay at its present level. It could not be much worse’. ²⁵

The challenges of selling the material benefits of Empire were, during the War, further complicated by the need to make those (questionable) benefits appear threatened not only by the prospect of a Indian nationalist takeover but also by the threat of Nazi imperialism. Faced with a two-pronged attack on its legitimacy from the Congress and from Hitler's propaganda machine, London responded by trying to play them off each other. The Ministry of Information pushed the argument that Gandhian non-violence was disastrously naïve: ‘Passive resistance [is] a mirage in a world of power politics – cf. fate of Denmark or Roumania and cruelty to [German-]occupied countries – Unarmed India a prey to Japan, cf. China’. The Congress was not only (and despite all the evidence) distant from the hearts of India's masses, but also positively totalitarian – ‘more influenced by Communist and Nazi doctrines than the inherited philosophy of India’. Indeed, the Congress’ Working Committee's demand that all elected Congress officials resign their posts following India's unwilling entry into the war was figured as characteristic of leaders who ‘while professing democratic ideals act as dictatorially as Hitler himself’. Against the ‘freedom of religious observances’ that the British congratulated themselves on having given to India, a ‘Nazi victory would mean the end of all Indian aspirations, as the Nazi view on oriental peoples shows’. The Nazis would trample both the dignity of the Indian family and the ‘all-important religious aspect’ which, the Ministry of Information insisted in an internal memo, were ‘the centres of Indian life’. ²⁶

The harsh prison terms imposed on Congress leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru (who received a 4-year sentence in 1940, serving somewhat more than a year) had angered many Indians who otherwise might not have supported the nationalists. A sign of the power and range of the nationalist performative dispensation at this point was that a figure like Mahatma Gandhi was held in a kind of generalized popular esteem that could not be reduced to political preference. ²⁷ Sanjoy Bhattacharya notes that ‘reports about the nature of official vernacular publicity material produced within the provinces would routinely complain how a range of honorifics were used while referring to the members of the Congress Working Committee, especially Gandhi, in material intended to attack them’. ²⁸ Ostensibly, Hitler was easier for the British to mock than Gandhi, but even here there were problems. On the one hand, it turned out that Hitler actually enjoyed significant popularity in India – ironically enough, for reasons that also led many to admire Gandhi. On the other hand, the British critique of Nazi imperialism had a nasty habit of sounding rather like the Indian nationalist critique of British imperialism.

Many Indians were impressed by Hitler's leadership of a military machine of apparently unstoppable efficiency and of a nation which ‘might do a lot for [India] while doing something for themselves’. ²⁹ Hitler's image elicited everything from a ‘sneaking regard’ to raucous cheering from student newsreel audiences and many were prepared to attribute supernatural origins to the Führer’s efficacy. As a June 1941 report from the Indian Northwest remarked ‘India, as you know, is the land of mystics and people here especially the masses have a great faith in mysticism. Certain sections of the mystics, perhaps impressed by the Nazi successes in Europe, have come to believe that Hitler has been endowed with some supernatural powers and that is why he has been successfully challenging the invincible might of the British Empire’. ³⁰ Others credited him with the kind of exceptional personal discipline prized in many indigenous Indian models of exemplary leadership: ‘The ascetic vegetarian, champion of a people held under by British capitalists, etc., has a natural appeal to many Indians’. ³¹ And while the British, as we have seen, routinely tried to discredit the Congress by associating it with fascism, the following comment was overheard in February 1941 by a Ministry informant in Madras: ‘Hitler is a good man; he does not drink or smoke and is a vegetarian; only in the matter of violence does he differ from Gandhi’. ³²

Unsurprisingly, many Indians greeted news of German advances and the prospect of England getting a taste of what it was like to be ‘beaten and ruled’ with a certain Schadenfreude. When the British tried to conjure images of a future Nazi-ruled India as a sickeningly violent dystopia, the response was that ‘it could not be worse than [the infamously brutal 1919 massacre at] Jallianwala Bagh’. If the British pointed to Nazi racism, they were countered with pragmatic counterarguments like ‘The British rule on a class superiority and race superiority basis; so would, presumably, the Nazis. Nobody is going to accept the Indians as equal, not while they are being governed’.

In desperation, the British tried to use the extremity of Nazi atrocities as a yardstick against which British rule might appear reasonable or even attractive. Nazism became the Bad Imperial Object that would absorb everything the British could not avow in their own Indian adventure. Nevertheless, almost every accusation they threw at the Germans found an echo in Congress critiques of the Raj. Hitler would turn India into a ‘slave-state labouring to provide the primary products for a higher German standard of living’. Further, the Ministry of Information invoked

The Nazi contempt of the coloured races, transportation of labour, uprooting of people from the land, prostitution of non-German women, regimentation of youth and spying of children on their parents, trampling of religion and things of the spirit, and the economic exploitation of subject peoples, should be reiterated with graphic examples of their application to India. National tradition, culture and customs would be suppressed – compare Poland. ³³

But as a Ministry informant wrote from Bombay in February 1941, ‘Everybody feels that the day the war is over, the white-skinned Italian or German will be welcomed with open arms by the Britisher in this country because after all they are “Europeans” whereas the Indian is a “native” and should be kept in his place’. ³⁴ What was the point, then, of risking one's life to fight the Germans on behalf of the British? ‘The maxim of “it is better to have the devil we do know than the devil that we do not know” is not the prevalent feeling. Rather it is that let us get rid of this devil and we will take our chance on the next’.

Who speaks for the masses?

In Indian nationalism and German fascism, different as they otherwise were, the British were confronted with two exceptionally powerful, mass-based performative dispensations. By contrast, the political setting in which the maa-baap idiom of imperial incorporation had made sense no longer existed. It was by no means accidental that the dilution of the darbar as the key ritual of the imperial performative dispensation should have been noted in the early 1920s, at the time of the Prince of Wales' tour. For these were the years when the nationalist movement under the charismatic, exemplary leadership of Mahatma Gandhi for the first time achieved a genuinely popular, trans-Indian mass base. ³⁵ The nationalist movement did not invent the Indian masses, but it was the first articulation of a plausible framework through which the masses could experience themselves as masses on a national scale and, as such, understand themselves as historical actors in the Hegelian sense. An important effect of its success was the impression that Indian nationalism – a necessarily partial, historically contingent ideology – actually articulated the universality of which the masses were supposed to be the latent and spontaneous bearers. This sense of political plenitude and trans-ideological commitment was in turn dependent on the invocation of the overarching ‘loss’ that India had suffered as a result of colonization.

This national-popular moment of Indian nationalism would not have been possible without the regional popular revitalization movements around festivals and community identities led by vernacular cultural activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aided by the mass distribution of printed texts and images, these new, sometimes, militant public cultures often seemed to activate seditious potentials in practices and representations that the British had until then been able to consign to the supposedly apolitical domain of Indian ‘custom’. ³⁶ In their dramatic enactment and processional traversal of city streets, these revitalization movements hovered ambiguously between the invocation of ‘traditional’ principles of communal authority and, at the same time, an assertive claim to the ‘modern’ public space of the abstract citizen.

The British were, of course, horrified at what they saw as the increasingly blurry line between religious rituals and political rallies. Sandria Freitag notes that although the British had in the 1890s started treating religious unrest as a security issue, by the 1920s they viewed religious protest and nationalist agitation as all but inseparable. ³⁷ Indeed, one of the great strategic advantages enjoyed by Indian nationalism was its ability (for the most part and provisionally) to close the gap between these two ways of imagining politics. In this way, multiple regional and vernacular practices of cultural activism that drew on locally resonant performative practices could be sutured, through the anti-colonial nationalist relay, to an over-arching sense of world-historical destiny.

Before the Gandhian transformation of the nationalist movement, as Cohn usefully reminds us, ³⁸ its predominant ritual technology was still a second-order adaptation of the British adaptation of the darbar. Both the Congress and the colonial authorities claimed to speak for the common people. But in this phase, neither yet understood their political work to depend on an actual harnessing of mass energy. The gradual mobilization of the publics that would eventually be recognized as ‘the Indian masses’ took form in part, then, through regional movements, but also in part through the coordinating address of emergent mass media – print, of course, but also the cinema, which, during the First World War, became an important tool of official propaganda.

Since the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885, the British had routinely derided its leadership as a group of out-of-touch, overeducated troublemakers with no organic connection to the Indian masses. The British generally understood these Indian masses as practical and apolitical, quietly rooted in the rhythms of local lifeworlds. This inert mass of Indians, the denizens of the innumerable villages that comprised the ‘real’ India, was figured as the true and loyal bedrock of the Raj. In the face of the rising tide of nationalism and the gradual enfranchisement of Indians, particularly after the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms of 1919, British colonial discourse continued to reiterate its timeworn ‘preference for the simple people’. ³⁹ The fantasy of the apolitical common man allowed the British to continue claiming that the nationalist movement was an artificial abstraction imposed by a few urban hotheads on the vast rural majority whose real loyalties were solidly grounded in local community. Thus, even as late as 1941, at a time when the Raj was facing mass protest on an unprecedented scale, the British Ministry of Information felt able to argue that

The Indian masses are practical people, more interested in their day to day prosperity than in political theorizing, and their attachment is to their district and, at most, to their province and caste, rather than to India as a unit. Individually, they have little hatred of the British, and if they could they would vote against the [Congress] Working Committee and in favour of good Local Government and support of the war effort. ⁴⁰

There was a grain of truth in this argument: namely, the recognition that – pace the immemorialist claims of nationalism – a nationalist consciousness was something that had to be invented, laboriously realized out of a million local acts of ideological mediation. On the contrary, the colonial argument overstated the givenness of Indian identities and loyalties. And its criticism of the ‘artificial’ interference of the nationalists also helped to hide the fact that at the very time when the Ministry of Information was defending the quietist dignity of the Indian masses so stoutly, its own officers were reaching a point of exasperation with these same common folks' unwillingness to recognize themselves in colonial propaganda.

According to colonial ideology, any effervescence provoked in the Indian masses by nationalist appeals was by definition fake; the masses were in fact masking their native sensibilities so as not to get in trouble with the ‘fascist’ Congress cadres. But when the Indian masses failed to greet colonial mobilization with sufficient enthusiasm, popular reluctance became a symptom of inertial backwardness. A 1941 report from Orissa suggested that the inhabitants of Angul Subdivision were so uninterested in the wider world that they would not be unduly disturbed if neighbouring Cuttack went up in flames, whereas in Patna ‘the people of the province of all classes are almost completely apathetic’. Seconding the sentiment, a source in Belgaum Presidency remarked only that ‘The whole outlook can be summed up in the word “apathy”’. An informant in the Delhi region bemoaned the political inertia of the small merchants, shopkeepers, villagers and cultivators, whose interests could only be aroused by events and entities that ‘directly and immediately affect their daily earnings. This is entirely due to their inability, through ignorance, to understand anything outside their immediate neighbourhood’. In the princely states matters looked, if anything, even worse than in British India. Having passed through several kingdoms in Eastern Rajasthan, a correspondent wrote that ‘I would go so far as to say that it is only vaguely realized that there is a War, though this vague idea takes the form that “the Sircar [sarkar, the government] is at War, but no doubt it will win as it is the most powerful”. Thereafter, the matter is mentally dismissed’. ⁴¹

Here we can see the impasse that marks the transition between the two scenes of propaganda that I juxtaposed earlier: in Scene 1, the Emperor as steadfast maa-baap and in Scene 2, popular culture as a medium of subliminal mobilization. The clearest sign of the political shift that had taken place in the decades leading up to the Second World War was the fact that the very masses that could earlier passively be enfolded and incorporated into the body of a nurturing sovereign now had to be activated.

Emphatic images, loose affect

This need for decisive mass activation was in fact precisely the message that the colonial authorities were getting from the advertising business and from British trade networks in India. In late 1942, the Indian office of the advertising agency network Lintas made a pitch to the Government of India. British propaganda, it argued, ‘suffers drastically in comparison with the quite different methods employed by the Axis Powers’. The Ministry of Information's Calcutta Committee similarly suggested a few months later that the existing propaganda was ‘too elaborate in design, its appeal being lost by over-detail’. ⁴² Here, too, the recommendation was to retain the services of professional advertising agencies that might produce material ‘as simple in conception as it is clear in purpose’.

If nationalism formed a competing relay between mass affect and a sense of collective political destiny, then Lintas' recommendation now was that the drama of wartime heroism and suffering might effectively serve to harness mass affect to the imperial project. In retrospect, we have come to think of the Second World War as manifesting the terminal crisis of British imperial legitimacy in India. But in 1942, Lintas was able to seize on the pragmatic possibility that the sensory intensification and uncertainty of wartime might actually help to re-canalize mass affect in the direction of the Emperor. Miracle and disaster both shake affect free from its habituated inscriptions; as such they are moments of opportunity for a faltering performative dispensation.

Axis radio propaganda, the argument went, was more ‘emphatic’, more successful at generating a sense of urgency by conveying spontaneous human responses to catastrophic events: ‘The present impersonal nature of [Allied] news bulletins should be changed. Recent news of the Japanese raids on Calcutta was confined to communiqués issued by the Defence Services. In the case of Calcutta raids, people from the streets should have been rushed to the microphone to tell their experience, to allay fear and to praise the defence organizations’. ⁴³ The Government of Bombay Presidency was already successfully using this kind of human interest device in the form of radio broadcasts featuring personal messages from Indian soldiers serving abroad. ⁴⁴

If the communicative goal was to incite an affective intensity that might then be harnessed to an imperial purpose, then the photographic image – whether still or moving – was thought to be the most potent medium. The 1938 report of a Visual Education Committee appointed by the Central Provinces Government placed the cinema at the pinnacle of a process of evolution in which the supposed immediacy of the visual image, and in particular the photograph, had gradually overcome the mediated articulation of writing ⁴⁵ :

The psychological effect of a pictorial representation is enormous when compared to that of the written word. But the psychological effect of a moving picture is so enormous that it is impossible to compare it even with that created by a pictorial representation. It is instantaneous, it is deep. […] With this aid at his command the educationist need no longer wait for [the] universal literacy of the masses.

And yet the seduction of the photograph, as political pharmakon, was inextricable from its danger. ⁴⁶ On the one hand, its power to incite mass affect seemed tied to its indexical relation to ‘reality’ and thus to the possibility of serving as an indubitable evidentiary support for ideological projects. On the other hand, as the British well realized, the affective potential of photographic images did not come with any guarantees of semiotic stability. For example, following the violent 1922 riot at Chauri Chaura that caused Gandhi to call off the non-cooperation movement, the British decided to prohibit the public circulation of photographs of the burned bodies of the policemen who had been killed. Although the pictures could well have been used as evidence of the savagery of purportedly non-violent Gandhian volunteers, the British worried that ‘unscrupulous’ American journals might pick them up and publish them as ‘photographs of Indians massacred by British troops’. ⁴⁷

In early 1941, Stanley Jepson, then the editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, mused on the challenges of photographic affect management in a memo to his sub-editorial colleagues. Jepson expressed precisely the worry about the trade-off that photographs seemed to require: more intensity at the price of less clarity. In a place as socially complex and varied as India, moreover, the emphatic ambiguity of photographs was particularly problematic.

Although it may easily be argued that the vivid emotions aroused by war pictures provide more forceful propaganda than in the case of reading matter, there is another side to the picture [sic!]. In reading matter more definite objectives can be attained, but the emotional reactions aroused by pictures vary according to the mentality of the reader. This variation is so marked in the case of different people, particularly in India, that it is worth while [sic] giving some thought to the subject. ⁴⁸

Jepson's practical advice to his sub-editors was to search for a level of communicative resolution that was high enough to be compelling but low enough to be uncontroversial across regional and cultural boundaries. On one level it was a matter of finding the ‘greatest common denominator’, those ‘certain things that everyone admires’. On another level this work would necessarily involve a careful calculus of close distance: ⁴⁹ an effort to represent the war from a vantage point that was neither so close as to be viscerally repulsive (‘There is very little glory of war at close quarters’) nor so distant as to become abstract.

What haunts these reflections is not only the likelihood of photographs conveying ‘the wrong message’, for example colonial police brutality rather than irresponsible nationalist violence. At a more fundamental level, the worry is about semiotically unharnessed intensity – in other words, the prospect of loose affect. A torn performative dispensation is unable to harness and contain the affective intensities it may still incite. As a medium of publicity, photographs were at once thought to be eminently suited to mass communication and worryingly liable to trigger loose affect. As Walter Benjamin famously remarked of the coming of the age of photography: ‘For the first time, captions become obligatory’. ⁵⁰ Although the colonial government certainly held newspapers, theatres and moving pictures accountable to a complex regime of censorship, it had always rejected the kind of centralized control over production – and thus, in a sense, over the politics of captioning – that characterized contemporary totalitarian regimes in Europe. ⁵¹

In a sense, Stanley Jepson's caution about semiotic volatility projected onto photographs what was actually at that time the systemic crisis of the colonial performative dispensation. Every call for heightened intensity in propaganda, and thus presumably for greater efficacy, was met with a corresponding caution about the on-the-ground dangers of loose affect. Alec Joyce at the India Office had received a copy of Jepson's memo and wrote to New Delhi: ‘While I agree with what Jepson says and appreciate that the selection of war photographs for India, and particularly of the captions, requires great care in the light of Indian susceptibilities, I think it is necessary for us to keep right in the forefront of our minds that what we wish to create among the masses of India is a burning hatred of Hitler and a loathing of Mussolini’. ⁵² Jossleyn Hennessy at the Government of India's Home Department replied:

I consider that unless one is selling patent medicines, the fear motive is a dangerous propaganda weapon in any country and especially in India. Fear is a disintegrating emotion and it is impossible to foresee what resulting actions may be induced in those frightened. […] It is dangerous to threaten the average man with the awful things that will befall him if he does not agree with you or side with you, because this tends to arouse far more resistance than acquiescence. ⁵³

‘Fear’ here is a name for loose affect: an affective provocation without an authoritative symbolic net. ⁵⁴ As such it has a ‘disintegrating’ effect – but Hennessy also immediately acknowledges that the disintegration is not so much of the frightened person but of whatever residual ideological framework might otherwise harness the provocation. The administrative anxiety here is, above all, about triggering unpredictable consequences.

Perhaps the crowd that Hennessy had in mind was one that had panicked only weeks before, in June 1941 at Kannauj near Kanpur, when the District Magistrate of Fatehgarh had tried to stir up martial feeling by explaining to locals that Allied forces were not in a position to repel the attack on India that Hitler was at that moment supposedly contemplating. ⁵⁵ If an infelicitously delivered speech could set off this kind of local turmoil, then how much greater was not the risk of loose affect when it came to photographic images traversing anonymous mass publics?

To be sure, the nationalist movement also worried about affect management when it came to mass mobilization. Gandhi, for example, reflected repeatedly on the dangers of ‘mobocracy’. ⁵⁶ For the nationalists, the challenge was to calibrate the practical incitement of mass affect through a well-tuned performative dispensation, so as to produce an effect of immediation, of an ideological mediation so smooth as to appear spontaneous and unmediated. ⁵⁷ Conversely, a symptom of the tear in the colonial government's performative dispensation was that the masses appeared to them only in extreme positions, resistant to all mediation: either running wild, pumped up with loose affect, or inert. As a sequitur to Alec Joyce's exchange with Jossleyn Hennessy, Joyce received a communication from F.H. Puckle, Director of the Central Board of Information in New Delhi. Puckle invited Joyce to consider Indian affective inertia vis-à-vis colonial propaganda in quasi-electrical terms: ‘This apathy though non-conductor of enthusiasm is also antidote against panic’. Thus far, Puckle's characterization of the masses as non-conductive was of a piece with the discourse of the stolid traditionalism of the ‘simple people’. And yet in the very next breath, the masses reappear in a terrifyingly overwhelming guise, as if an injudicious amplification of propaganda might flick a switch that suddenly abolished all limits: ‘there is risk in playing on fear complex of 400,000,000’.

Corruptio optimi pessima

Never mind that images of Winston Churchill elicited far louder cheers at Indian newsreel screenings than views of the King ⁵⁸ ; it was still the King's body that was ritually supposed, like the great Leviathan, to be able to contain the bodies of those Indian soldiers going into combat bearing his insignia.

Conscious that the Leviathonic model of incorporation conjured inexpedient absolutist associations, the British propaganda apparatus experimented with more democratic tonalities. Retaining the soldier's uniform as the would-be relay between popular affect and imperial authority, the government tried with propaganda films showing ordinary Indian soldiers on the frontlines. If the King Emperor was auratically distant, inviting submissive incorporation, then the figure of the soldier-as-Indian-everyman was designed to interpellate Indian viewers more intimately and more actively in a mood of populist identification.

Ostensibly, the guiding ideal was to make the messages as locally resonant as possible – that is to say, to minimize the distance between the subject and object of propaganda. As early as January 1940 the Government of India had asked the India Office to send ‘shorts covering subjects embracing Indian troops’ activity in France, India and elsewhere, India Red Cross units, courageous lascar [Indian sailor] survivors and other cognate subjects and features'. ⁵⁹ From Kanpur, the Ministry of Information was in 1941 advised that

Posters of Australians in Tin Hats or other such headgear is useless. We want good posters of Sepoys [Indian soldiers] wearing pugrees [pagris, turbans] and such printed matter as connects India with the war. On one railway station, Lucknow, there is a publicity kiosk which shows three pictures, identically the same, of a British submarine. This is useless. A Sikh or Pathan leading a camel would be of far more value.

Bhattacharya notes that the advance of the Axis Powers towards British India's eastern borders pushed the British propaganda apparatus towards trying to give its messages more vernacular and local resonance. ⁶⁰ But if the affective relay of Indian bodies on the screen and Indian voices on the airwaves was supposed to heighten popular identification with the Empire's war effort, then this relay was constantly disrupted either by the assumption that the Emperor was cosmically empowered, and therefore would stand or fall irrespective of human intervention, or by the underlying suspicion that the interests of the colonial Government of India were discontinuous with those of its subjects.

So, for example, an increase in images of Indian soldiers in combat met with the complaint that ‘[o]ur constant stressing of the part played in the war by Indian soldiers has also led some to believe that we are sparing our own troops at the expense of Indian troops’. Conversely, in 1942, the Ministry's attempts to mitigate the sense of Indians under mortal threat met with a different kind of distrust:

People ask why when our troops have gone abroad in fairly large numbers, and when it is admitted that they are doing so well, the public is not allowed to see them on the screen and why when on the rare occasions they are seen, they are shown cooking or eating chapattis, bathing or washing their clothes etc.? Why are they not shown in the same light in which troops of other countries are shown? ⁶¹

Although several agencies of the British Government (the British Council, the War Office, the Travel and Industrial Development Authority, etc.) produced their own official ‘prestige’ shorts, the Ministry of Information generally preferred to insinuate its propaganda directly into existing commercial newsreel programs, through one of the three newsreel companies (Gaumont-British, Paramount and British Movietone) then operating in India.

In part this was a pragmatic question of expense and distribution. The sheer cost of film production made collaboration with commercial interests attractive. But this reliance on private business also came at a price. Commercial distribution promised to give the government access to networks of communication and trade that in many cases were far more finely filigreed than the official administrative channels of the state. But it was not always clear whether the logic of profitability would ensure that the government's messages would reach more rural and provincial audiences, since distributors and exhibitors were likely to concentrate on those urban and semi-urban markets that were likely to yield reliable returns. ⁶²

The Ministry of Information's strategy of embedding propaganda in commercial newsreel packages was designed to lend its communications all the mimetic sensuousness of the cinema while allowing the tone and pace of the genre to inflect state propaganda with the pleasure of entertainment and embed it, as the Ministry put it in terms redolent of those used by the Song Publicity Organisation, ‘in the normal life and activities of India’. ⁶³ The putatively independent front of a news organization, whether in the cinema or in the press, masked the government's voice and enhanced the perceived value of its messages. So, for instance, the Ministry opposed the Foreign Office's desire to send relevant material to India under the banner British News because it seemed to smack too much of the kind of official communication that would be rejected out of hand. Despite the Government of India's frequent jurisdictional disputes with the Ministry of Information, the Home Department in New Delhi was at least clear on the point that ‘[t]he resistance to official propaganda is strong. […] India cannot be hustled’. ⁶⁴ In a memo to Alec Joyce at the India Office, Jossleyn Hennessy at the Home Department expressed his approval of the Ministry's preference for commercial drag: ‘You value what you spontaneously buy because it attracts your interest, but you look gift horses suspiciously in the mouth’.

All the same, the aims of official propaganda often sat uneasily alongside the spectacular imperatives of entertainment. Sensational footage of riots and police violence could be suppressed in India under the provisions of the Cinematograph Act of 1918. But in the United States, where the British were extremely sensitive to the expression of anti-imperial opinion, neither the British nor the Indian Governments could apply anything much more forceful than diplomatic pressure. ⁶⁵ The newsreel companies, hungry for hot news and lucrative markets, were keen to reassure the colonial administration that official and trade concerns were comfortably congruent. L.L. Landau of British Movietone wrote in March 1931 to the India Office that ‘It is our desire that such pictures, while for commercial purposes they must have a popular appeal, should be always helpful to India and should be such as will meet the approval of the Government of India’. ⁶⁶

Aside from the upsets that intemperate images could cause – on which more in a moment – many officers of the Raj remained uncomfortable with the huckstering habitus of the entrepreneurial media. For them, what might be gained in communicative efficacy would almost certainly be lost in imperial dignity. In November 1940, F.H. Puckle at the Central Board of Information in New Delhi warned Alec Joyce at the India Office that it would be a mistake to ‘assume that methods which will sell commercial commodities will also sell the war’. ⁶⁷ As in 1914, the onset of war brought all manner of media entrepreneurs out of the woodwork; the desks of the Raj, both central and provincial, were filled with unsolicited proposals for bringing private capital into alliance with official propaganda through the medium of advertising: Gramophone records, slide shows, radio broadcasts, newsletters – in each case, entrepreneurial petitioners promised self-financing schemes of magical persuasion. Representatives of the Bombay advertising world attempted to convince the Presidency Government to include consumer goods advertising in the propaganda slide shows that toured the countryside. The proposal eventually foundered on the advertising agencies' unwillingness to accept the government's counter-proposal that while the slides themselves might contain advertising images, the ‘lecturers’ who narrated the shows could not be expected actually to give voice to commercial messages. One Home Department official noted on the proposal: ‘I still think it objectionable that a Government servant should be required to read out a lot of rubbish boosting laxatives and cosmetics.’

Drawing on advertising techniques and media made a certain amount of sense; after all, in the United States and in Western Europe during the 1920s the apparatus of mass consumerism had begun to divert loose working-class affect away from revolutionary paths and towards a kind of quasi-democratic populism that compensated in sensuous gratification for what it sacrificed in formal political engagement. ⁶⁸ And in fact it was not as if imperial authority had not already been translated into commodified form. Thomas Richards (1990) describes the highly successful performative dispensation that in late nineteenth century Britain was able to revive the public profile of Queen Victoria in a completely new register of mass publicity through an artful blend of imperial romance and commodity spectacle (in which the phrase ‘by appointment to Her Majesty …’ might rub off some royalty onto even – why not? – laxatives and cosmetics). If commercial methods were not considered infra dig at home, then what made them embarrassing in India?

Although it is true that officials back in Britain would certainly also have balked at reading messages from commercial sponsors, the distaste of British civil servants in India was redolent of a desire to maintain a cordon sanitaire between government and the bazaar. Since the trauma of the great rebellion of 1857–1858 (known in colonial historiography as the Sepoy Mutiny), British prestige in India had increasingly been cultivated through the maintenance of physical distance, a distance underwritten by nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences of racial difference. Priya Jaikumar notes that it was only when the British Crown replaced the East India Company as the apex authority in India in 1858 that the British explicitly felt it necessary to separate ‘political’ from ‘business’ concerns. ⁶⁹ In the decades that followed, the mounting nationalist critique of colonial economic exploitation only heightened the desirability of separating the ‘high’ ideals of Empire from the ‘low’ world of truck and trade. Just how unacceptable ‘business’ considerations had become to the official legitimating discourse of the colonial state by the final years of the Raj can be seen from a series of scribbled notations on an advertising man's proposal to the Bombay Home Department: ‘Is 2 lakhs [Rs. 200,000] enough to corrupt us?’ ‘I think not’. ‘Corruptio optimi pessima’ [the corruption of the best is the worst of all].

At one level, then, one could say that the fear of corruption, of the demoralizing taint of the market, locked the Raj into a self-imposed loop of distance from its Indian subjects, a symbolic and physical externality to the Indian quotidian that could only have been surmounted at the risk of losing face. But by the early 1940s, as we have seen, although the Raj may have saved face, it could no longer find a language in which to show its face with any degree of credibility, because the terrain of political legitimation had shifted into the very streets and bazaars from which the British had alienated themselves.

Final captions

In 1941, the Ministry of Information received a suggestion from one of its operatives in the Punjab and Sindh region. The suggestion may perhaps be read as a fantasy of reconciliation in which the torn performative dispensation overcomes its internal rupture by absorbing the energy of its opponent. In Scene 1, we saw the Ministry's willingness to indulge in a spot of scissor-and-tape dissimulation to create a reality that did not exist. In this suggestion from a year earlier we encounter a similar sense of wish fulfillment through a more elaborate performative artifice. Responding to the widespread dissatisfaction with the propaganda films of Indian troops at the front, the Ministry's informant recommended ‘If possible the troops may be asked at the time of filming to raise Nationalist cries as [sic] HINDUSTAN ZINDABAD [long live India] or JAI HINDUSTAN [victory to India] or BHARAT MATA KI JAI [victory to Mother India] and the pictures in the papers be given with captions that appeal to the Nationalist sentiment’. ⁷⁰ Captions indeed. It would appear that the captions suggested in this last example of imagined propaganda bring Scene 1 and Scene 2 together: the only hope for imperial incorporation (the motif of Scene 1) by the early 1940s were captions that ventriloquated the language of the popular opposition (the motif of Scene 2).

Is the conclusion, then, that the colonial government was a historically spent polity that could only dream of thriving by ceasing to be itself, by impersonating the voice of its enemy and successor? Such a conclusion would flatten out the story too much. It relies on an excessively linear narrative of historical destiny in which the world-historical fullness of one polity emerges out of the ruins of its predecessor. The juxtaposition of Scene 1 and Scene 2 with which I began would at one level seem to support that interpretation: Scene 1 represents the exhausted technology of imperial incorporation, whereas Scene 2 points forwards to the dream of a liberated polity in which the voice of the state will not have to appear as an external imposition because it is always already continuous with the spontaneous will of the people.

Actually it seems to me that what the torn performative dispensation of the late colonial administration in India discloses is not a desperate attempt to combine incommensurable political technologies. Instead of modes of political legitimation belonging to different epochs, Scene 1 and Scene 2 represent two dialectically connected moments in the movement of any well-oiled performative dispensation: the moment of incitement (Scene 2) and the moment of containment (Scene 1). It is precisely the tear in the colonial performative dispensation that jams the mechanism and makes the two moments look incommensurable. For as long as a dispensation is working smoothly, the contingency of the mediation between the incitement of affective energies and their ideological inscription is, effectively, effaced, and the dispensation seems natural and given.

Recall how Hafeez Jallandhari recommended in Scene 2 that the colonial government itself attempt to play the game of what Christopher Pinney has called ‘fugitive politics’: ⁷¹ that is, a politics which takes cover in the officially apolitical register of ‘custom’ and ‘culture’ precisely because it has been banned in the formal spaces of political discourse. That a sovereign authority should, in effect, be forced to look for political efficacy in a sphere that its own ideology does not recognize as political is indicative of a polity whose very existence precludes it from achieving the kind of popular recognition it desires. This was the condition of the colonial state by the early 1940s: whichever way it looked, the action was going on behind its back.

The nationalist movement, conversely, was during those same years the very embodiment of the efficacious performative dispensation. It was the great beneficiary of the ‘loss’ imposed on it by colonization. By continually denying the nationalist resistance recognition as a mass movement (as opposed to as a respectful opposition in a parliamentary mode), the colonial government became unable to pursue its own legitimation in this same political terrain. The Raj looked more and more like ‘an external, in a sense suspended, state which was not the product, or the terrain, of social conflict (as bourgeois states are) in the society over which it ruled’. ⁷² By the same token, the conspicuous externality of the colonial state enhanced the nationalist movement's appearance of internality, of spontaneous unmediated continuity with the Indian masses, and this glow of immediacy then further aggravated the colonial state's sense of rupture.

In other words, while the late colonial government was unable to find a plausible language of legitimacy in an age of mass publics, the Indian nationalist movement's apparently organic connection with these mass same publics was in fact significantly enabled precisely by its structural opposition to a power that was unmistakably foreign. Once that power was gone, the independent Indian state's inevitable alienation from the very masses with which the nationalist movement had once seemed continuous was all the more traumatic. In fact, even during the transitional period between the end of the war in 1945 and Independence in 1947, the Indian civil servants taking over from their British predecessors encountered the painful business of making a sovereign state: separating off from civil society ‘in order to stand above it’. ⁷³

As early as 1946, for example, the work of Song Publicity had begun to exchange the covert pursuit of imperial legitimacy for the ‘modern’ work of ‘Post-war Development’, Grow More Food, Get Vaccinated, Kill Mosquitoes, Plant Trees, Consolidate Holdings and so on. ⁷⁴ The language of mobilization had changed: ‘Songs, dramas, ballets and so on are the best forms of exhortatory and emotional propaganda and the most powerful means of stirring the national pride and josh ⁷⁵ which must precede a national surge towards social and economic advancement’. But a familiar tear had already begun to appear at the edge of this new performative dispensation: the very masses who were supposed to be the natural subjects of this ‘national pride and josh’, and as such continuous with the independent state that was coming into being, were at the same time also already assuming the familiar guise of the sluggish objects of sovereign policy: ‘slow-thinking people’. As India was moving towards its ‘tryst with destiny’, it was also beginning to see like a state.

Acknowledgements

Warm appreciation to Shannon Dawdy and Danilyn Rutherford for their thoughtful and generous engagements with the earlier versions of this text. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for their insights.

Notes

1. The longer work of which this article is a part features much more detail on the institutional structure of colonial propaganda in India, including the frequently tense relations between London, New Delhi and the provincial publicity organizations.

2. These were the sixteenth Light Cavalry, the first Punjab Regiment and the thirteenth Frontier Force Rifles.

3. Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’.

4. India Office Library (IOL), L/I/1/685 (462/14).

5. IOL, L/P&J/6/1801/2152.

6. IOL, L/I/1/1015 (462/72).

7. After the partition of British India in 1947, Hafeez would go on to compose Pakistan's national anthem. Strictly speaking, Hafeez's anthem was adopted only after the death of Pakistan's first president, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, in 1948. The original short-lived Pakistani national anthem was, interestingly enough, commissioned by Jinnah from a Hindu litterateur, Jagannath Azad, who at the time of Partition was living and working in Lahore.

8. My material on the SPO, unless otherwise noted, comes from the Maharashtra State Archives (MSA), Home Dept, 4th Series, 7073/4-I.

9. By early 1946, the SPO, which had by then been folded into the Field Publicity Organization (since 1945 the central coordinating authority for rural propaganda), claimed to have secured the cooperation of as many as 40,000 ‘non-official workers (song-writers, singers, bards, artistes, poets, etc.) without remuneration’, (National Archives of India (NAI), Ministry of Information & Broadcasting/Administration General/2/8/1946).

10. Songs and verses earned between Rs. 5 and 25, plays between Rs. 25 and 90. The government consequently also assumed all copyrights.

11. Bhattacharya relates that ‘One official report mentioned, for instance, that “Congress propaganda is conducted in the country through the medium of young students who travel from village to village and who talk to the people, particularly on bazaar days, and assist in village work.’ ” Bhattacharya also refers to a report from Orissa, where officials of the Provincial and District War Committees appear to have been acting upon plans, which, if they were not actually those of Hafeez’ SPO, were remarkably similar. The officials had ‘employed “songsters in the rural areas to sing songs” and distributed leaflets containing these songs “through the watch and ward committees [and] village chowkidars in those villages where songsters are not available at present”. In addition, “50 war songs, 6 war pallas and 2 war dramas … [printed] in the form of pamphlets” were “supplied to the District Officers and Subdivisional Officers for distribution to Jatra parties, Pallawallas and Theatrical parties in their respective areas”, and “Liaison Assistants” were made responsible for touring the districts in search of suitable theatrical groups, who were then subsidized by the provincial government’. Bhattacharya, Propaganda and Information, 20, 79.

12. Mazzarella, ‘Affect: What is it Good For?’

13. Israel, Communications and Power.

14. Kaul, Reporting the Raj.

15. This description of the Exhibition Train is from a memo by a Bombay Home Department Secretary (MSA, Home Dept, 4th Series, 4863/4-I). I might add that the government did, in fact, see fit to downplay the fact that the train also carried a recruitment officer.

16. This appears at first sight as a horrifying failure of the normative transition from feudal to democratic power, as described by Claude Lefort: ‘The democratic revolution, for so long subterranean, burst out when the body of the king was destroyed, when the body politic was decapitated and when, at the same time, the corporeality of the social was dissolved’. Warner, ‘Mass Public and the Mass Subject’, 387.

17. Merriam-Webster, On-Line Dictionary Entry for ‘Dispensation’.

18. Schmitt, Political Theology.

19. IOL, L/I/1/1015 (462/72).

20. The phrase is from a May 1941 intelligence report on pro-Congress sympathies in Bombay and Ahmedabad. Sanjoy Bhattacharya usefully points out that this collective ‘egress’ from office was not altogether a smooth process: ‘September 1939 also brought to prominence a group of politicians in Eastern India who seemed keen to continue partaking in the activities of provincial legislative assemblies, although they were often forced to indulge their craving for formal politics in a very round about way’. Bhattacharya, Propaganda and Information, 17. British intelligence suggested that some elected Congress officials had indeed resented being forced to resign en masse in 1939, not because of any loyalty to the British but because their recently acquired ‘appointments’ had proved quite ‘lucrative’ (IOL, L/I/1/1015 (462/72)).

21. IOL, L/I/1/1015 (462/72).

22. Kaviraj, ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’.

23. Sinha, Specters of Mother India.

24. IOL, L/I/1/684 (462/14). Important areas of the colonial project were, as it turned out, not immediately reducible to the sentimental drama of human liberation. ‘Industrial welfare’, for instance, turned out to be a more ‘difficult theme because it is hard to translate into terms of people rather than things’.

25. IOL, L/I/1/1015 (462/72).

26. IOL, L/I/1/1016 (462/73).

27. Cf. Amin, ‘Gandhi As Mahatma’.

28. Bhattacharya, Propaganda and Information, 167.

29. This formulation is from an April 1941 report from Bombay (IOL, L/I/1/1015 (462/72)).

30. IOL, L/I/1/1015 (462/72).

31. IOL, L/I/1/1016 (462/73).

32. IOL, L/I/1/1015 (462/72).

33. IOL, L/I/1/1016 (462/73).

34. IOL, L/I/1/1015 (462/72).

35. Dipesh Chakrabarty notes along these lines that the political process sometimes called ‘decolonization’ may perhaps be said to have started in the 1920s. Chakrabarty, ‘Introduction’, in From the Colonial to the Postcolonial, 3.

36. Freitag, Collective Action and Community; Hansen, Saffron Wave; Hansen, Wages of Violence; Kaur, Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism; and Christopher Pinney, ‘Photos of the Gods’.

37. Freitag, Collective Action and Community.

38. Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’.

39. Collingham, Imperial Bodies.

40. IOL, L/I/1/1016 (462/73).

41. IOL, L/I/1/1015 (462/72).

42. IOL, L/I/1/1016 (462/73).

43. Ibid. There is a certain irony in the fact that by Second World War it was British propaganda that was being described as dry and factual by comparison with Axis efforts since, according to Armand Mattelart, the situation was perceived in exactly the opposite way during First World War: ‘So when London put out news announcing atrocities committed by the enemy soldiery, photographs showing them engaging in pillage and the like, Berlin launched itself into long dissertations pointing out that only the United Kingdom's interest in liquidating its rival's industry had justified the war and explaining in great detail the historical and diplomatic reasons for Edward VII's policy of encircling Germany’. Mattelart, Mapping World Communication, 54.

44. MSA, Home Dept, 4th Series, 3967/4–III–A.

45. ‘[I]t was gradually discovered after experience that even after acquisition of literacy the process of education through the written word was slow and cumbrous. The written symbol had first to be converted into the sound symbol which then has to be correlatedto the object or ideas which it represents, whereas in visual education the object and ideas are directly presented to the mind, much of the needless mental effort is avoided, and the process of education becomes less tedious and frequently quite pleasant’ (IOL, L/I/1/121 (17/5)).

46. Pinney, Coming of Photography.

47. IOL, L/P&J/6/2010 (3846/30). See Amin for a comprehensive discussion of the politics of Chauri Chaura as a historical event. Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory.

48. IOL, L/I/1/907 (462/50B).

49. Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke.

50. Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’.

51. Philip Woods records how British newsreel maker Joseph Best, frustrated by his experiences in India in 1937, later suggested the setting up of a centralized film department, acknowledging the strides taken in this direction by ‘the European dictatorships’. Woods, ‘From Shaw to Shantaram’, 295. During the Indian Cinematograph Committee's interviews in 1927–1928, Bhagwat Prasad, a Lucknowi Judge, told the ICC: ‘Some films of educational value are exhibited in Italy at the order of Monsieur Massolini [sic], the Dictator of Italy, at each performance in Picture Houses. The example is very much needed to be copied in India at the present day’. Indian Cinematograph Committee, vol. IV (1928), 109. Incidentally, K.S. Hirlekar, prime mover on the Visual Education Committee, founder of the Motion Picture Society of India and tireless early advocate of Indian documentary production had received his own cinematic training in Germany.

52. IOL, L/I/1/907 (462/50B).

53. IOL, L/I/1/1016 (462/73).

54. Massumi, ‘Fear (The Spectrum Said)’.

55. IOL, L/I/1/1015 (462/72). Bartlett warns that ‘Fear must be allied with confidence in the power of some proposed combination to resist any threat that may be realized’. Bartlett, Political Propaganda, 114.

56. Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony.

57. Mazzarella, ‘Internet X-Ray’.

58. As a military man of action and clear beliefs, Churchill's personal efficacy appears to have won him the admiration of many ordinary Indians who, in this respect, were more likely to align him with the equally dynamic Hitler than with the King. An intelligence report from Bombay in early 1941 remarked: ‘It has been very noticeable in cinemas that during news reels, Mr. Winston Churchill invariably raises applause on his appearances, but that appearances of H M the King do not receive the same treatment’ (IOL, L/I/1/1015 (462/72)).

59. IOL, L/I/1/683 (462/14).

60. Even earlier, in the summer of 1940, Twentieth Century Fox in collaboration with the Government of Bombay had begun to dub its newsreels into Indian languages, a scheme that was soon extended to the rest of the country.

61. IOL, L/I/1/685 (462/14).

62. Woods, ‘From Shaw to Shantaram’.

63. IOL, L/I/1/1016 (462/73).

64. In this respect, India was regarded – as befitted the jewel in the imperial crown – as rather different from other territories. In Africa, for instance, the Ministry of Information exercised more or less unrestricted control over propaganda policy. Woods, ‘From Shaw to Shantaram’. Moreover, as J.M. Burns reports, the Ministry of Information was convinced that the products of the Colonial Film Unit, widely used in British Africa, would not work in India because ‘[a]s one official put it, “Indians have notoriously a keen nose for propaganda, which they reject as soon as they sniff it”, while “the native peoples of the colonies are more gullible”’. Burns, Flickering Shadows, 51.

65. Even in Britain the film censors, formally an unofficial advisory body, were extremely wary of appearing to be imposing anything that might look like state censorship. See the detailed materials on these matters in IOL, L/P&J/6/2010 (3846/30).

66. Landau was well aware that matters were delicate. British Movietone was sending a permanent camera crew to India in the wake of the official resentment caused by their screening of riot footage the previous year. At that time, their Indian crew, facing bureaucratic obstruction at every turn, had cabled London in indignant frustration: ‘We want assist with government propaganda but believe they overlook Movietone prestige assuming antiquated attitude that cinema undignified’. By 1931, when Landau was requesting that the Government of India second officers to facilitate the travels and work of his employees, he also saw fit to insist that these officials should be equipped with some ‘news sense’ (IOL, L/P&J/6/2010 (3846/30)).

67. IOL, L/I/1/1016 (462/73).

68. Ewen, Captains of Consciousness.

69. Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire.

70. IOL, L/I/1/1015 (462/72).

71. Pinney, ‘Iatrogenic Religion and Politics’.

72. Kaviraj, ‘On the Construction of Colonial Power’.

73. Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony, 64.

74. NAI, Home/Public/1946/224/46.

75. The use of the Hindustani word josh (animation, excitement) was glossed as follows: ‘This enthusiasm may be termed as Development Morale or better still, as the Indian word Josh, and the action it activates as Development Effort. To engender the Josh that activates the effort is our task and purpose’ (NAI, Home/Public/1946/224/46).