Journey
The armed movement and the exiles
The other movement: small cells, bank and train robberies to fund themselves, assassinations, bomb manufacture in rented rooms, and a press run from Paris and Geneva beyond the reach of Indian censorship. It was defeated everywhere and it shaped the argument anyway, because its trials were the most widely read political texts of the period.
Stops (11)
- Bal Gangadhar Tilak · Bal Gangadhar Tilak — the extremist turn
The Poona editor who made the Ganesh and Shivaji festivals into public politics in the 1890s, was jailed twice for sedition — six years in Mandalay — and gave the movement its first popular slogan. The 1907 Surat split between his wing and Gokhale's broke the Congress for nine years.
- Sri Aurobindo · Aurobindo Ghose — from Alipore to Pondicherry
Tried in the Alipore bomb conspiracy case of 1908 and acquitted after a year in jail, he left British India in 1910 for French Pondicherry to escape a second prosecution and never returned to politics, turning instead to yoga and to writing on a scale that filled thirty volumes.
- Bhikaiji Cama · Bhikaiji Cama — the press in exile
A Parsi from Bombay who left in 1902 and never came back while the British ruled, running an Indian revolutionary circle in Paris, publishing Bande Mataram out of reach of the censor and smuggling it home in French colonial mail. At Stuttgart in 1907 she raised a flag for an independent India — the first time it was done abroad.
- Kākorī · Kakori, 1925 — the train
Members of the Hindustan Republican Association stopped the 8-Down at Kakori and took the government treasury chest, to fund an armed movement after Non-Cooperation was abandoned. Ram Prasad Bismil and Ashfaqulla Khan, who wrote Urdu verse together, were hanged for it in 1927 along with two others.
- Bhagat Singh · Bhagat Singh — the trial as a platform
He shot Saunders at Lahore in 1928, threw two low-explosive bombs and leaflets into the Legislative Assembly in 1929 to make the deaf hear, and let himself be arrested in order to be tried in public. He used the court and a 116-day hunger strike to argue, and wrote Why I Am an Atheist in jail. He was twenty-three.
- Hussainiwala · Hussainiwala — the river bank
Where the bodies of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were taken after the hanging at Lahore Central Jail in March 1931, part-burned in haste and thrown in the Sutlej to prevent a funeral procession. The site went to Pakistan in 1947 and was exchanged back for twelve villages in 1961 specifically so India could hold it.
- Chittagong armoury · Chittagong, 1930 — the armoury raid
Surya Sen's Indian Republican Army took the police and auxiliary armouries, cut the telegraph and the rail line and declared a provisional government, holding out four days before a battle on Jalalabad hill. Pritilata Waddedar and Kalpana Datta of the same group are the best known women in the Indian armed movement.
- Rani Gaidinliu · Rani Gaidinliu — the hill revolt
A Rongmei Naga who took over the Heraka movement at sixteen when the British hanged her cousin Jadonang in 1931, and led a revolt against colonial rule and taxation across the Zeliangrong hills until her capture. She spent fourteen years in jail and was released only in 1947.
- Birsa Munda · Birsa Munda — the Ulgulan, 1899
The Munda rising in the Chotanagpur plateau against the outsider landlords and moneylenders who had converted collective khuntkatti land into tenancy, and against the courts that had underwritten it. He died in Ranchi jail at twenty-five, and the Tenancy Act of 1908 that came out of the rising is still Jharkhand's basic land law.
- Cellular Jail, Andaman Islands · The Cellular Jail, Port Blair
A panopticon of seven wings built in 1906 to hold political prisoners a thousand miles from anyone who knew them, where Savarkar, Barin Ghose and hundreds of Bengali and Punjabi convicts served sentences of transportation. Four wings were demolished after independence; three stand, with the names cut into the walls.
- Tokyo · Tokyo and the Indian Independence League
Rash Behari Bose, who had thrown the bomb at the Viceroy Hardinge in 1912 and escaped to Japan, spent thirty years there building an Indian political organisation, and it was he who handed the INA to Subhas Chandra Bose at Singapore in 1943 — the point where the exile networks and the armed movement finally joined a real army.