In February 1939, the Governor of Bengal, Lord Brabourne, toured the town of Midnapore in western Bengal. The highlight was a somber visit to the graves of three British District Magistrates, which lay “side by side” in a local cemetery. At the beginning of the decade, Bengali nationalist revolutionaries had assassinated the three men. James Peddie was shot from behind at close range while attending an exhibition at a local school on 7 April 1931. Just over one year later, Robert Douglas was shot dead while presiding over a meeting of the District Board. His successor, B. E. J. Burge, was murdered at a local football match on 2 September 1932. For a British intelligence officer, writing in the year of Burge’s shooting, the sequence of assassinations served as a “tragic” reminder “that the Government are a long way yet from having been able to suppress the terrorist movement in Bengal.”1
By the time of Brabourne’s visit, however, the revolutionary movement had been crushed by colonial security forces and the use of mass detention without trial against revolutionary suspects.2 The political situation in Bengal had been transformed by the establishment of Indian ministries under the 1935 Government of India Act, while the revolutionaries’ own political tactics had shifted from individual acts of violence to communist-inspired political organization of Indian peasants and workers.3 Nonetheless, colonial officials feared a return to revolutionary violence in what had been one of the centers of “Bengali terrorism.” “The streets were empty,” Brabourne reported to the Viceroy,
In the following month, intelligence indicated that some of the revolutionary groups were “definitely preparing to collect such old arms as they have.” Brabourne added that the “‘naming’ of the present District Magistrate of Midnapore, by one group, as a potential obstacle that might have to be removed is a matter that cannot be lightly ignored.”5and closely watched by the police and plain clothes men and the shutters of houses on the streets had been closed under police directions. The opinion of the local officers was that it would probably have been possible to carry out this informal visit without such precautions … but that, knowing the past history of Midnapore and what they consider to be the untrustworthy nature of the people, and knowing also the present attitude of mind of the group which has been responsible for much of the trouble in Midnapore in the past, no responsible officer would have been prepared to take the risk of waiving strict precautions.4
Brabourne’s account of the elaborate security precautions in Midnapore reflected colonial fears that had evolved over thirty years of revolutionary activism in Bengal. An anticolonial revolutionary movement, which came to be known to colonial authorities as “Bengali terrorism,” began prior to the 1905 Partition of Bengal and did not come to an end until more than three decades later.6 During that time, revolutionaries conspired to disrupt the administration of the Raj, assassinate British and Indian colonial officials and their agents and informers, and commit robberies to obtain funds for arms and ammunition in preparation for a mass uprising. In 1930, revolutionaries carried out an attack on the Writers’ Building, the seat of the Government of Bengal in Calcutta, and in the same year attempted to re-stage the 1916 Easter Rising, substituting the eastern Bengal port city of Chittagong for Dublin. After this act of intra-imperial emulation of Irish revolutionary tactics, known as the Chittagong Armoury Raid, a renewed offensive in eastern Bengal began to approximate a campaign of guerilla warfare in which the revolutionaries commanded widespread support from the local population. Women also began to join the revolutionary societies and committed some of the most high-profile assassinations and attempted assassinations in this period. In total, the Bengal Police Intelligence Branch (IB) estimated that the revolutionaries committed more than 500 “revolutionary crimes” between 1905 and 1935. In addition, the IB recorded another 200 cases of “revolutionary activity” from 1917 to 1935 alone, including cases of loss or recovery of arms, ammunition, and explosives.7 As Brabourne’s account demonstrates, a revival of “Bengali terrorism” remained a near-constant fear of colonial officials until 1947.
Lord Brabourne’s pilgrimage to the graves of British martyrs to Bengali terrorism also demonstrates how the growth of Indian revolutionary organizations in the first decades of the twentieth century brought about a parallel growth of imperial intelligence agencies. The Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6), which came into existence prior to the Great War and greatly expanded their operations during the conflict, were staffed by a considerable number of officers with colonial police and military experience.8 The small office of Indian Political Intelligence (IPI ), established in 1909, worked closely with MI5 (responsible for security intelligence within the United Kingdom and the British Empire) and SIS (responsible for intelligence beyond the empire’s borders) to coordinate intelligence efforts against Indian nationalists and revolutionaries around the globe.9 In the decade around the Great War, imperial authorities bolstered their networks of intelligence-gathering and surveillance of Indian revolutionaries in North America, Europe, and Asia.10 In the interwar era, intelligence agencies played a crucial role in establishing and maintaining British control over their newly expanded empire in the Middle East.11
Empire and intelligence thus developed in tandem and were closely intertwined.12 Calder Walton in his study of post-Second World War intelligence and empire observes that “from the earliest days of the British intelligence community, which was established in the early twentieth century, there was a close connection between intelligence-gathering and empire. It is not an exaggeration to say that in its early years British intelligence was British imperial intelligence.”13 In no part of the British Empire was the growth of colonial intelligence more striking than in Bengal. At a time when the personnel of both MI5 and MI6 dramatically contracted from their peak during the Great War, the intelligence structures of the Bengal Police continued to expand.14 Prior to 1907, the intelligence apparatus of the Bengal Police was practically non-existent. By 1936, however, the Central Intelligence Branch of the Bengal Police in Calcutta numbered close to 650 police officers, with more than 400 intelligence staff distributed throughout the province’s districts.15 Bengal thus became both the focus of British fears of Indian terrorism and of the most concerted police intelligence efforts that attempted to eradicate revolutionary activity in the empire prior to the Second World War. While recent historians have emphasized the important role of intelligence during the era of post-Second World War decolonization, the extensive intelligence apparatus directed against the Bengali revolutionaries suggests that the roots of imperial intelligence as a sustained practice lie in the interwar era.16
While the revolutionaries’ anticolonial campaign was largely based in a single Indian province, Bengal, and largely limited to a specific social and religious group within Indian society, the Bengali Hindu elite or bhadralok , who made up the ranks of these “gentlemanly terrorists,” its ramifications were global.17 In the imperial imaginary, to use Kris Manjapra’s formulation, South Asian “anticolonial movements were said to contain only limited and self-serving nationalisms,” limited, for example, to a particular religion, social group, or ideology.18 Yet Bengali revolutionaries, like many anticolonial activists, drew upon eclectic political and cultural inspirations from within and outside India and made repeated efforts to form alliances with other nationalist, anticolonial, and revolutionary groups.19 During the Great War, Bengali revolutionaries formed part of global efforts by the German imperial government and Indian radicals to deliver substantial quantities of arms and ammunition to India.20 These anticolonial alliances became further pronounced after the Russian Revolution. As Ali Raza, Franziska Roy, and Benjamin Zachariah have asserted, the interwar era comprised “a window of time in which an array of movements comprising mostly nonstate or supra-state actors were linking up with each other.”21 Any analysis which seeks to understand the colonial response to the Bengali revolutionary movement must thus adopt a similarly transnational perspective.
This book examines the development of intelligence and policing directed against the Bengal revolutionaries from the first decade of the twentieth century through the beginning of the Second World War. It explores the emergence of modern police intelligence in colonial India and how in turn the policing of revolutionaries in Bengal was connected to and influenced police and intelligence work within the wider British Empire. The analytic framework of this study thus encompasses local events in one province of British India and the global experiences of both revolutionaries and intelligence agents. The focus is not only on the British intelligence officers who orchestrated the campaign against the revolutionaries but also on their interactions with the Indian officers and informants who played a vital role in colonial intelligence work, as well as the perspectives of revolutio...