“Richard Parker, President of the Delegates in the late Mutiny in his Majesty's Fleet at the Nore For which he sufferd Death on board the Sandwich the 30th of June 1797.”
Parker was court-martialled and hanged on his ship, the ‘Sandwich’, on 30 June, ‘for having been the Principal in a most daring Mutiny on board several of his Majesty’s Ships at the Nore, & which created a dreadful alarm through the whole Nation’. The political message of this print is underscored by the fact that Parker is shown twice, heroically posed in dress reminiscent of French Revolutionary style in the foreground, but pointing with his sword to a hanged body (presumably his own) on the yardarm behind, as a warning to other possible lower-deck subversives. The print can therefore be regarded a visual equivalent of the, often repentant, gallows speeches rushed out in popular editions at this time after the public executions of notorious criminals.
“One of the moat daring of sea adventures since the days of Captain Kidd got underway when mutineers seized the Dutch battleship De Zeven Provincien shown above in Olehle harbor, Sumatra, and steamed into the Indian ocean with nine of their officers shackled in the ship's brig. The officers are Dutch but the crew is composed of natives of the Dutch East Indies. Two modern cruisers of the Dutch squadron started in pursuit, but finally a squad of bombing planes captured the battleship.”
- from the Kingston Whig-Standard. February 13, 1933. Page 12.
The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution
Julius S. Scott
Verso, $24.95 (paper)
Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War
Vincent Brown
Belknap Press, 2020, $35 (cloth)
The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age of Atlantic Revolution
Niklas Frykman
University of California Press, $32.95 (cloth)
The Age of Revolution (1770–1850), bookended by the American and French Revolutions on the one side and the Revolutions of 1848 on the other, is widely viewed as the progenitor of the modern Euro-Atlantic world. Its intellectual energy fused the liberal and republican ideas of John Locke with the ideals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment; its political energy fed off the struggles between the bourgeois and their aristocratic enemies. Although visionary hopes could meet crushing defeats—as they did during the popular risings of 1848—by the end, there were new parliamentary regimes, emerging nation-states, declarations of rights, and the eruption of an industrial age.
And yet, this classic narrative leaves out the most radical of the revolutions that exploded neither in continental Europe nor in North or South America, but in the Caribbean, on the island the French called Saint-Domingue and the victorious rebels would call Haiti (Ayiti), after its indigenous name.
Until recently, the Haitian Revolution and other Caribbean slave rebellions have been treated as sidebars to the Age of Revolution. In part this is because of a Eurocentrism that has long diminished the role of Black people in shaping history. But equally important, enslaved people didn’t fit an accepted image of political actors, and thus it was difficult for historians to see them standing alongside the signers of the Declaration of Independence in America, the Jacobins in France, the Bolivareans in Gran Colombia, the Mazzinians in Italy, or the Chartists in England: envisioning, allying, struggling, surmounting. This, despite such works as C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution and W.E.B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, which left little doubt about the political capacities of enslaved Blacks.
Nowadays, Eurocentrism is called out for its parochialism as well as its veiled racism. Historians are much more attentive to questions of empire and colonialism, so they place the events of the Age of Revolution in a much broader context. Circum-Atlantic and transnational histories abound and have exerted enormous influence on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century studies. The Haitian Revolution has itself been the subject of a rapidly growing scholarship, whether looking from the Caribbean out or from the Euro-Atlantic in. And there has been renewed interest in slave systems, the maritime world, and their relation to the development of capitalism.
Still, it is not entirely clear how the pieces of this newly expansive story come together: how we may reimagine and reconceptualize what the Age of Revolution would look like if viewed comprehensively from below and from above, if portrayed with a much larger array of political actors and a much greater sense of the scope and ambitions of international as well as local politics. And if understood as coinciding with—indeed, deeply interconnected to—an age of emancipation in which the most powerful slave regimes in the world were overthrown despite hesitation among Euro-American revolutionaries themselves. The three outstanding volumes under review here offer the materials for just such a reconsideration.
The Common Wind (its title taken from William Wordsworth’s ode to Toussaint Louverture) is a pioneering contribution to our understanding of the place of Haiti in the Age of Revolutions. A revised version of Julius Scott’s 1986 doctoral dissertation (its publication delayed by unexpected circumstances and a determination to get the story right), the book is less about the Haitian Revolution per se than about the circulation of ideas and experiences that both lit the fuse and then sent the explosive results across an immense space. Indeed, Scott’s is a multinational history that suggests how the revolutionary years from 1780 to 1815 might appear if Saint-Domingue and then Haiti were recognized as a hub around which the politics of the period radiated.
Arguing that the commodity-producing slaveocracies of the Caribbean were major sites of trade and migration, Scott draws our attention to the ports rather than the plantations, to the seas rather than the land, and to the “masterless”—sailors, free people of color, runaways, maroons—as much as to the enslaved. They are the keys to understanding how news, rumors, information, and ideas flowed across the Atlantic and around the Caribbean: the ever-thickening veins of commerce that linked Nantes and Bordeaux to Cap-Français (now Cap-Haïtien), Port-au-Prince, Havana, and Kingston. These trade routes brought thousands of vessels and maritime laborers into the harbors of all of these cities; they also brought fugitives and veterans of battle. Two of eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue’s rebel leaders (Makandal and Boukman) fled there from Jamaica. Henri-Christophe, another leader, was born in St. Kitts. He, Andres Rigaud, and Martial Besse, free men of color who became military leaders, served with the French forces at Savannah during the American Revolution.
As a result, the enslaved and the free people of color in any one place learned of history’s unfolding elsewhere and transformed the languages of revolution that they heard—and, in some cases, read—into their own political vernacular. The radicalism of the Age of Revolution, as Scott so brilliantly shows, was invigorated as it moved from France to Saint-Domingue and then to Jamaica, Cuba, and back. The visions of the Jacobin Republic in France and of the slave rebellion turning revolution in Saint-Domingue were both mutually constitutive and ever expanding.
Like a stone that falls into the water, the rebellion in Saint-Domingue, as Scott demonstrates, had ripple effects going in multiple directions: to other Caribbean islands, to the South American mainland, and, perhaps with greatest effect, to the United States. Beginning in 1793, thousands of slaveholding emigres, their slaves often in tow, headed out of Saint-Domingue to whatever port might offer a measure of safety. Well over 10,000 landed along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of North America, settling in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, Pensacola, Mobile, and especially New Orleans. With them came vital news of rebellion in Saint-Domingue that sent fear through the minds of American slaveholders and hope through the minds of their slaves, who quickly learned that the wealthiest and most powerful slave regime in the world had fallen before the might of their enslaved counterparts.
The consequences would be enormous for the social and political history of the Western Hemisphere and Euro-Atlantic and particularly for what was about to become the new center of the slaveholders’ world: the U.S. South. The rumblings from below were already apparent in the 1790s with slave conspiracies in Louisiana, and then, in the early nineteenth century, with the aborted Gabriel’s Uprising of 1800, the St. John the Baptist Parish revolt of 1811 in Louisiana, and the Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822 in Charleston, all of which showed either the direct influence of the emigres or secondhand knowledge of what had transpired in Saint-Domingue. As the cotton economy spread across the Deep South, the enslaved laborers who were driven along with it could now know that slave systems were not cast in stone and timeless, that they were vulnerable and could be destroyed by people like them. As we have come to realize, owing to Scott’s groundbreaking work, there is no way of understanding the history of the United States during the first six decades of the nineteenth century, and especially the emancipation process during the Civil War, without acknowledging the political shadow cast by the Haitian Revolution and the political roles played by previously unrecognized actors: the masterless of the Atlantic and the enslaved workers their enslavers thought they had mastered.
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During the Haitian Revolution, the rebel armies under the command of Toussaint Louverture not only toppled the slaveholding class of Saint-Domingue; they also defeated the armies of Britain, Spain, and France to secure their victory, freedom, and eventual independence as the Republic of Haiti. Slave rebellions, together with the quotidian struggles in which enslaved people engaged, were nothing less than warfare. And although this might seem apparent on considered reflection, few scholars have taken to the idea and its meaning for the study of slave regimes. Vincent Brown is a notable exception. Slave warfare is one of the central conceptual points in Brown’s extraordinary book on Tacky’s revolt, the massive Jamaican slave rebellion of 1760–61. Indeed, Brown sees the rebellion as more than an episode of Jamaican history and internal warfare; he sees it as part of a multilayered set of wars that encompassed both sides of the Atlantic and involved empires in Africa and Europe. Combining meticulous research in a multitude of national archives and the use of new technologies for visualization, Brown has produced one of the best treatments of slavery ever written.
Enslavement, Brown reminds us, did not simply begin in West Africa and get redeployed in the Western Hemisphere. As a system it was in constant motion, embracing people and states on several continents, trade and commercial relations crisscrossing the Atlantic, and—notably in the eighteenth century—almost continuous warfare as well as brutal regimes of exploitation. Owing to Brown’s success at identifying many of the enslaved participants in the events he recounts, we are able to see how the rebellion in Jamaica was very much an extension of wars erupting in the West African interior, propelled in many cases by the demands of European trade, and involving Africans who went into battle in both places.
Jamaica was Britain’s most lucrative colony and its most formidable military base, a virtual “garrison government” devoted to keeping enslaved laborers in subjection, fierce maroons (fugitive slave communities) in check, and rival empires at bay. The sugar plantations, where half of the enslaved Africans toiled, often took on the appearance—in their architecture and placement—of fortifications, and the work regimens on them showed military-like cadences. Between a half and three-quarters of Jamaica’s slaves in the mid-eighteenth century were African born, often veterans of West African wars, and thus quite aware of the broad context in which their enslavement occurred. Many of them had been forced aboard slave ships along the Gold Coast and became known as Coromantees (perhaps from the English post at Cormantyn), though they had generally been taken captive much farther inland and belonged to a number of different ethnic and linguistic groups. The Coromantees had reputations for their strength, skills, discipline, and rebelliousness: they were simultaneously prized and feared by their enslavers.
With attentiveness to the multiple sources and contending narratives, Brown demonstrates that what the British would call “Tacky’s revolt” was only part—a small and abbreviated part—of a larger “Coromantee war” that engulfed Jamaica for months. Although it is difficult to uncover the scope, timing, and objectives of the plot, Tacky and fellow slaves from the Gold Coast rose in St. Mary’s Parish in early April 1760 and seemed most intent on wresting control of the nearby riverine commercial zones and Fort Haldane from which weapons could be taken (the book’s wonderfully detailed maps help us visualize the revolt’s course). Early success came undone in the face of the British militia and of the maroons who had signed a treaty with the British long before and were ready to fulfill their end of the bargain: secure slavery in return for their independence and autonomy. There were, that is, political fissures of great consequence within the African-descended population. Tacky, it appears, was killed by one of the maroon’s bullets, and his revolt collapsed in short order.
But this was by no means the end. There is some indication that Tacky and his followers—nearly half of whom may have been women—rose too early; that they were to have awaited the arrival of the Whitsun holidays some weeks later to coordinate island-wide. British colonial officials and the slaveholders took no chances; they stretched the trials and executions of the captured rebels out over several weeks to gain more information and set terrifying examples of punishments. It didn’t work. In late May another rising occurred in Westmoreland Parish, the heart of the sugar plantocracy, led in this case by Wager (his African name, Apongo), whose trans-Atlantic story Brown reveals in all its complexity and with imaginative guesswork. The Westmoreland rising did not collapse in short order, even when the British navy became involved (thus linking the Jamaican rising with the Seven Years War) or when Wager was captured and gruesomely executed that summer. Rebel bands continued their struggle into the following year, relying on tactics of guerilla warfare, before some semblance of order was restored. Altogether, the Coromantee war would rank as the largest slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere before the Haitian Revolution. It formed a great peak in what Brown terms an “archipelago” of warfare that stretched from the Gold Coast of West Africa through the plantation zones of Jamaica, “at once an extension of the African conflicts that fed the slave trade, a race war among black slaves and white slaveholders, an imperial conquest, and an internal struggle between black people for control of territory and the establishment of a political legacy.”
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The tsunamis of revolt and revolution in the second half of the eighteenth century were just that, because the seas were integral to the making and meaning of these convulsive events. The rebels in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue had made many journeys across the Atlantic and around the Caribbean. Their perspectives as to what was possible and how to struggle were informed by their fellow seafarers as well as by the masterless souls who manned the vessels of commerce and warfare and brought news—often embellished with their own interpretations—of political developments in London and Paris, along the Gold Coast and Bight of Benin, and in the ports of Barbados, St. Croix, Cuba, Demerara, and Berbice. And, as Niklas Frykman demonstrates in The Bloody Flag, the crews of the warships of Britain, France, and the Netherlands not only carried stories of multiple rebellions; they engaged in rebellion themselves and thereby expanded the dimensions of a revolutionary age.
The naval fleets of the eighteenth century may seem to pale in comparison to our own world of destroyers, aircraft carriers, and nuclear submarines, but the line-of-battle ships were easily the most powerful weapons of war during that time. They were also enormous sites of social hierarchy and labor exploitation. Building on the foundational studies of Marcus Rediker, Frykman reveals the many ways in which naval vessels were historical bridges between the plantation and the factory: in the hundreds of seamen (in some cases nearing a thousand) who labored in twenty-four-hour cycles; in the national, ethnic, and sometimes racial diversity to be found among them; in the brutal regimens and dangers of the work (a “barbaric industry”); in the surveillance to which the crews were subjected and the almost unlimited power of the ships’ officers; in the punishments that were meted out to those who defied the rules (chiefly flogging but also execution); in the form of resistance most common (running away); in the coercive practices (particularly impressment) that could be used to assemble an adequate crew; and in the demands for better and more equitable pay and treatment that could be raised. The term “strike” is of maritime origin. If nothing else, Frykman’s is a significant contribution to Atlantic labor history.
But much more is offered up. The distinction between a strike and a mutiny may be hazy and potentially shifting, as is true for all types of rebellion. Either form of protest could involve a few seamen or a great many, and could occur in a variety of circumstances and times. The 1790s, however, proved to be an especially turbulent era on the seas as it was on the land. There were, according to Frykman, more than 150 single-ship mutinies together with a half dozen fleet mutinies over the course of the decade; in 1797 alone, the British navy experienced mutinies on more than a hundred of the ships in its fleet involving an astonishing 40,000 men, likely the “largest, best organized, and most sustained working-class offensive in eighteenth century Britain.” Some, echoing the political aspirations of the age, proclaimed a “floating republic.”
Frykman’s is very much an account of class formation and political radicalization. And he recognizes them as closely interconnected and mutually reinforcing. On the one hand, he is attentive to the different national experiences to be found as to the makeup of the crews, the means of recruitment, the relationship between maritime and terrestrial (mostly urban) labor, and participation in the warfare of the 1790s. On the other hand, he demonstrates how a shared consciousness, international in its horizons and reflective of the revolutionary struggles in the Atlantic, developed and made itself felt: revolutionary maritime republicanism, Frykman suggests we term it.
By the early 1800s, the authoritarian paternalism that had long shaped relations between officers and seamen had given way to a new arena of struggle organized around class warfare, though one that never fully displaced the political allegiances of warfare between nations. It was “a deepening division of shipboard society into two sharply defined and opposing classes that found its most striking expression in the adoption of the red flag”—the bloody flag—“as a symbol of permanent struggle between them,” accelerated by global conflict and the intense solidarities fostered by maritime labor. Although the mutinous explosions of the 1790s would be quelled by iron fists of suppression, the fortitude of the crews and the coercive practices that they endured led to anti-impressment campaigns in the new United States, which played an important role in articulating the substance of American independence, as well as in Britain. Leaders of the British anti-impressment campaign, such as Granville Sharp, were already deeply involved in the abolition movement, suggesting how the seaborne struggles of the 1790s contributed both to the age of emancipation and the making of national and international working classes. Small wonder that class-conscious sailors would later rear their heads, to great effect, at Kronstadt, Sevastopol, and Kiel, influencing the course of the Russian Revolution and the collapse of the German Imperial state.
How may these works, distinctive in their own ways, together contribute to new perspectives on this revolutionary age? The Coromantee wars of 1760–61 fall outside the customary chronological markers, yet Vincent Brown suggests how we can rethink the placement of those markers as well as the political currents of the Age of Revolution itself. The wars, Brown writes, “represented a watershed in the course of Atlantic history. Regional political maps had been drawn by the wars that opened new territories for cultivation, stimulated the slave trade, and enhanced state power—but the slave rebellions etched another record of historical movement. They channeled people into new solidarities and gave meaning to categories of belonging, partitioned friends and foes from bystanders, and redirected the priorities of governing authorities.” Not only the eventual leaders of the Haitian Revolution but many of the enslaved outcasts of the Coromantee wars ended up in Saint-Domingue, while the wars became part of the political memory and “radical pedagogy” on Jamaican plantations. These undoubtedly fed subsequent conspiracies there as early as 1776, then the Second Maroon War of 1795–96, and ultimately the great Baptist War of 1831–32, involving as many as 60,000 slaves, which led to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Slave warfare, that is, particularly in its large-scale and organized form, may have constructed the Age of Revolution’s great political arc: beginning in the 1760s and ending in the 1860s, when the most powerful slaveholding class in the world was—as in Saint-Domingue—brought down during a massive war in which the enslaved proved to be fighters, liberators, and carriers of the historical sensibilities that –as Julius Scott demonstrates – grew out of the Haitian Revolution.
Yet an arc of revolution constructed by the struggles of the enslaved also reveals the multiple political threads that composed it. “The Coromantee Wars,” Brown argues, “don’t fit neatly into the prevailing narrative of the rise and progress of liberal freedom”; as best as we know, “the Coromantees did not draw upon the Enlightenment ideas that animated British and French revolutionaries, nor did they create an internationally recognized state.” Although “they undoubtedly wanted liberation from the slaveholders,” it was “rarely as liberal subjects—that is, autonomous and self-determined individuals. Instead, they fought for the space to develop their own notions of belonging, status, and fairness beyond the masters’ reach.”
Indeed, in Jamaica as in revolutionary Saint-Domingue and on the mutinous high seas, we may glimpse a confluence of political dispositions, energized and transfigured, that have been inadequately recognized—ethnic-based identities and hierarchies, slave royalism, radical republicanism, peasant consciousness, early forms of pan-Africanism, and working-class internationalism—and that help us sketch new connections between the Age of Revolution’s first (1760–1804) and last phase (1848–67), and between the Age of Revolution and the socialist and communist revolutionary movements of the twentieth century. Much, of course, is left to be done. But the work of Scott, Brown, and Frykman shows some of the new possibilities and potential rewards of viewing the Age of Revolution from below as well as from above.
- Steven Hahn, “Slave Rebellions and Mutinies Shaped the Age of Revolution.” Boston Review. April 23, 2021.
Image is Nèg Mawon/Le Marron Inconnu statue in Port-au-Prince / Image: Amy Nelson
There is a huge missing part in our knowledge of Indian freedom movements and that is related to armed struggle led by thousands of selfless souls. Indian history books taught in schools conveniently omit them and fill multiple chapters over hundred pages with eulogy of Gandhi, Nehru and Congress. In this video I have brought story of a revolutionary of extra-ordinary stature named Jatindranath Mukherjee aka Bagha Jatin. Instead of narrating his biography, I have told his story in the light of Hindu-German Conspiracy where he was the most prominent leader of the movement. Viewers are encouraged to read more on his biography from the books listed as references below. While going through Bagha Jatin's story, I have brought many other revolutionaries related to him and this movement. You will come across names like M. N. Roy, Rashbehari Bose, Chatto, Taraknath Das among others. You will come to know about different international espionage networks that worked against Indian revolutionaries to foil the plan of India's rise against British Empire. I am sure you will feel proud of our history and find lot of new information that has been kept out of sight in popular media discourse.
For a holistic evaluation of India’s hard and long freedom struggle from British imperialism, the crucial role of our many forgotten heroes and of some exemplary expatriate Indians cannot be denied.
In this year when many Indians are busy passionately celebrating ‘Azadi Ki Amrit Mahotsav’, let me start this article by asking a simple question to the readers. How much do we know about our freedom struggle in India and also of freedom struggle of India in other corners of the world? How many of us know that we were on the verge of attaining independence more than three decades before we actually became an independent nation and the role of expatriates in it? Do we still see it through the monochromatic lens of non-violent movements that we have been taught in our schools or have we enriched our knowledge about several armed movements which immensely contributed towards our freedom from colonial rule? Thousands of freedom fighters were imprisoned in just one jail - the dreaded Andaman Cellular Jail by the British regime, many were hanged, many were killed in shootouts, 30,000+ INA (Indian National Army or Azad Hind Fauj) soldiers died fighting against the British Army, many hundreds died during Army and Navy revolt thereafter. How much do we know about them? I am sure many among you would not be knowing much about these lesser-known or often forgotten chapters of our freedom struggle for we are being fed that India won freedom by spinning yarns on the supreme guidance of a Mahatma.
A Long History of Armed Rebellion
No, I am not going to talk about details of all such events for that would take many more pages of this esteemed publication than I have been allotted to. Today I will focus our discussion primarily to the contribution of Indian expatriates in foreign land, during the turbulent political climate of World War-I, in the light of Ghadar Movement and Hindu-German Conspiracy. Long before Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose’s Great Escape during WW-II from his house arrest in Calcutta and reaching out to Nazi Germany for support towards India’s freedom, we had a long history of armed rebellion for freedom struggle. As a matter of fact, the army (Azad Hind Fauj) that Netaji led during WW-II against British Empire was founded by another great exiled nationalist Rash Behari Bose, in Japan. Rash Behari Bose had to flee to Japan in 1915 after British administration foiled his attempt of insurrection within British Indian Army. More of that later… During WW-II, Rash Behari Bose convinced Japan’s government to support India’s freedom movement, formed the foundation of Indian National Army and passed the resolution in the 2nd conference of Indian Independence League (IIL) to invite Netaji Subhash Bose to take charge of it. Let us go back to 1912. In that year, India’s one of the greatest revolutionaries, Jatindranath Mukherjee aka Bagha Jatin met German Crown Prince in Calcutta and got his promise to support Indian revolutionaries with money and arms if a war broke out between England and Germany. By that time, Bagha Jatin and his organization Jugantar sent multiple revolutionaries to foreign land especially in Europe, America and Canada, for higher studies and also with a hidden intent to learn military tactics, explosive manufacturing and build public opinion in favour of India’s freedom.
Expatriate Connection
Two of such notable leaders were Tarak Nath Das and Bhupendranath Datta (who was the younger brother of Swami Vivekananda). Datta finished his Masters from Brown University in Rhode Island, USA. He later worked closely with Ghadar leaders and went to Germany during WW-I to work in revolutionary activities. Tarak Nath Das went to University of California in Berkeley and later to Georgetown University in Washington DC, from where he earned his PhD. Das founded the South Asian magazine ‘Free Hindustan’ that eventually became a platform to voice against British imperial rule. He also worked very closely with Lala Har Dayal who was one of the founders and key members of the Ghadar Party. “Dr. Tarak Nath Das, assisted by Guran Ditt Kumar, Harnam Singh, Professor Suren Bose, and with six years of zealous endeavour, reunited some Indian migrants in North America, arousing their patriotic sensibility and informing them about their rights in the country they chose to live. This organised effort culminated with the formation of the Ghadar. Dr. Das, with his intellectual foresight, saw the necessity of a thinker like Har Dayal to create a revolutionary movement. That was the genesis of Ghadar,” explained Dr. Prithwindranath Mukherjee, a renowned historian and recipient of Padma Shri award. He also happens to be the grandson of Bagha Jatin. Anti-British sentiment among Indian expatriates was rising in the US and Canada during the second decade of the last century. Komagata Maru incident in 1914 charged the expatriate Indians even more. A group of people from British India endeavoured to immigrate to Canada in April 1914 and they went to Canada by boarding the Japanese steamship Komagata Maru. But most were denied entry to Canada and they were forced to return to Calcutta. Anti-Asian lobbies in Canada and USA were so much opposed to Chinese, Japanese and other South Asian immigration that Canada stopped immigration from India in 1908, which was followed by the US in 1910. Gross mistreatment of the passengers in Komagata Maru ship by Canadian administration and then by the British police upon their return to Calcutta caused further uproar among overseas Indian communities, especially among the Punjabis. Before I tell you the true story of how India came closer to independence during World War-I, I need to dedicate a paragraph to one more exemplary exiled nationalist, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya aka Chatto, the brother of Sarojini Naidu, whose role in this story cannot be denied. It is a shame that Mrs. Naidu disassociated herself from her brother due to Virendranath’s anti-colonial activities and wrote a letter of indignation to British authority, informing that her brother had become wayward. Virendranath or Chatto went to London to study law. He became actively involved in anti-imperialistic activities along with German, Italian and French involvements. Later Chatto built his network in Germany and made an agreement on a 15-point treaty – known as Plan Zimmermann - with the Imperial German Government. Arthur Zimmermann was the State Secretary for Foreign Affairs in German government then. That plan finally ensured arms and money supply that initially Crown Prince of Germany promised to Bagha Jatin. He eventually became one of the most hunted men by the Scotland Yard. German Kaiser himself sent a message via Indian revolutionaries to the then German Ambassador in Washington, Von Bernstorff, to sanction funds to help an insurrection in India. German consulates in New York, Chicago and San Francisco supplied money and facilities to Indian revolutionaries who were rushing to join Chatto in Berlin. In the meantime, Ghadarites in the United States, Canada and Germany made alliance with Jugantar leaders, under the leadership of Bagha Jatin. Thousands of Ghadarites started coming back to India to join the revolution.
The Stirrings of the Rebellion
As per the instruction from Jatin, Rash Behari Bose began establishing contacts in various military cantonments of Northern India (Nainital, Lahore, Peshawar, etc.) and also in Fort William in Calcutta. VG Pingle and Sachindranath Sanyal also became active in achieving diefection in British Indian Army in Benares and other cantonments. Revolutionaries got allegiance from multiple units like 93rd Burma Regiment and 16th Rajput Rifles. Jatin involved his right-hand man Narendranath Bhattacharya aka MN Roy, who later founded Communist Party of India and Mexican Communist Party, in the mission. On 7th December 1914, Bernstorff acknowledged the purchase of 11,000 rifles, four million cartridges, 250 Mauser pistols, and 500 revolvers with ammunition, for India. Further on 9thJanuary 1915, Von Oppenheim of German Foreign Office confirmed that 30,000 rifles and 5000 automatic pistols were ready to be dispatched to India.
The Failed Attempt
Plan was already made in the Berlin Committee to send an army, which was formed using imprisoned Indian soldiers in Turkey and Middle-East. The plan was that the army would enter through Peshawar, and Ghadar leaders under Tarak Nath Das would storm through Thailand and Burma, reach Calcutta, seize Fort William, and join the invading army at Peshwar. Revolution was ready to be launched and India was a few inches away from a well-fought independence. Jatin, the Commander in Chief of that operation, scheduled 21st February 1915 as the date of the insurrection. It is also known as the February Plot. Unfortunately, the plan was sabotaged by multiple betrayals and two of those were vital. A police agent named Kirpal Singh passed the information to the British police about the army insurrection. He was recruited by the Punjab CID to infiltrate among the revolutionaries. Upon hearing the news, Rash Behari Bose tried to advance the insurrection on 19th February. But even that information was also leaked. Bose had to flee to Japan. Revolt by multiple army regiments like Baluchi Regiment, 26th Punjab, 7th Rajput, 130th Baluch, and 24th Jat Artillery were foiled. Two other expatriates, VG Pingle and Kartar Singh Sarabha, who returned from United States to lead segments of the holistic armed rebellion, put their last effort to start the mutiny in 12th Cavalry regiment in Meerut. Both of them were eventually captured and tried in Lahore Conspiracy Case. They were hanged on 16th November 1915. British regime brutally suppressed the movement by hanging 46 Ghadarites and sending hundreds of them for life-imprisonment. “Even when, under the joint direction of Jatin and Rash Behari, the All-India uprising of 21 February 1915 failed, a number of regiments, participated in the revolutionary project: the 12th and 23rd Cavalry, the 128th Pioneers, the 7th and 14th Rajputs inside India; the 5th Light Infantry and the Malaya States Guides in Singapore. The last two regiments maintained a one week state of siege, after having occupied the Singapore fort,” wrote Dr. Prithwindranath Mukherjee in his book ‘The Intellectual Roots of India’s Freedom Struggle (1893-1918)’.
Rising from Setback
Even after that major setback, Bagha Jatin didn’t waver from his conviction to free India by taking advantage of the World War-I situation. Germany already had plan to send over four thousand rifles and around one million cartridges to India, using two German vessels, Annie Larsen and SS Maverick. At that time United States did not join the war and was maintaining neutrality. Annie Larsen left San Diego port of the US in February 1915 in order to contact SS Maverick and offload the shipment to be dispatched to the Indian revolutionaries. But the British Secret Service had learned of the plot and the Royal Navy cruiser H.M.S. Newcastle shadowed Annie Larsen throughout. After almost five months of failed attempts when Annie Larsen returned to the port of the US west coast city Hoquiam, Washington, on 29th June 1915, the US Customs officials at Grays Harbor seized the ship, which was found to be carrying arms and ammunition in violation of neutrality laws. This made British Foreign Office even more vigilant and it expanded its network in American and Canadian soil. They started actively pursuing Indian students and other expatriates in the United States. British Foreign Office took help of Czech counter-espionage network run by EV Voska and planted a Czech refugee as spy in disguise of housekeeper in the apartment of some Indian nationalists in New York City. An Irish double agent and an Indian agent code named ‘C’ passed valuable information to the British authority. This quisling ‘C’ is believed to be a wayward Jugantar member Chandrakanta Chakrabarti. In the meantime, Jatin and members of Jugantar planned to receive another shipment of 9000 firearms, over four million ammunitions from German ships S Henry and SS Djember, using East-Asian route. They were planning for another insurrection on 25th December 1915, also known as The Christmas Day Plot.
The Final Battle
The plan was to take control of Fort William in Calcutta and execute simultaneous revolt by Ghadarites in Burma (Myanmar) and Siam (Thailand). The United Kingdom already dispatched majority of the British Indian forces outside India to fight World War-I. A smaller number of regiments were there to guard India. Jatin knew this was the right opportunity to defeat them. Jatin sent MN Roy to Batavia (part of current day Indonesia) to implement the plan of getting German ammunitions from SS Djember. As MN Roy later recounted the events, "The plan was to use German ships interned in a port at the northern tip of Sumatra to storm the Andaman Islands and free and arm the prisoners there, and land the army of liberation on the Orissa coast. The ships were armoured, as many big German vessels were, ready for wartime use". Orissa’s Balasore coast was selected for the final drop of the arms. But act of the Czech spy in the United States, and of the Baltic-German double-agent codenamed ‘Oren’ in Batavia foiled that plan as well. Berlin Committee had to abandon the shipment. Not knowing about that betrayal, Jatin with his followers already arrived at the Balasore coast, only to be countered by the Deputy Commissioner of Calcutta Police, Charles Tegart, on 9th September 1915. They fought a heroic battle of gun-fight that lasted for 75 minutes; some of the fellow revolutionaries died and Jatin was captured, mortally wounded. Finally, Jatin died the next day on 10th September in Balasore hospital. Before the battle, his followers told him to flee. He did not. He said in Bengali “Amra Morbo, Jagat Jagbe” which in English can be roughly translated as “We will die to awaken the nation.” Even after the demise of Baga Jatin, Ghadar maintained its momentum for some more time. Berlin Committee (or Indian Independence Committee) was successful to form a provisional government of India in exile, in Kabul, Afghanistan on 1st December 1915, with the support from the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria). Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh served as the President in that government. Later in November 1917, United States started the Hindu-German Conspiracy Trial in the District Court of San Francisco. It lasted for five months and many of the Ghadar leaders among other Indian revolutionaries were convicted on the charge of waging military action against Britain while taking advantage of American neutrality during the initial phase of World War-I.
Not Just a Failure
Apparently, it may seem that the rebellion failed to liberate India. But we should remember every revolutionary activity snowballs into another. The next generation of revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh was highly influenced by that struggle. When Jugantar organized Bagha Jatin’s 8th death anniversary from Calcutta to Lahore on 9th September 1923, young Bhagat Singh participated in it. And the feeling of patriotism and nationalism that the rebellion fostered by Bagha Jatin with passionate support from expatriate leaders brought within the British Indian Army during WW-I can be observed during WW-II with the formation of INA/Azad Hind Fauj. I think this feeling took culmination during the Naval Revolt of 1946. Even though the significance of the 1946 Naval Revolt is unfortunately not given its due recognition in our mainstream history, it was lot bigger than that. In fact, there were multiple revolts in the Royal Indian Navy between 1943 and 1945. During the 1946 revolt, multiple army barracks supported Navy revolters. In one instance, when British army officials ordered Gurkha regiment in Karachi to fire on the navy personnel, they refused and British empire realized that they lost control over the Indian armed forces and it was time to leave India. In a seminar in 1967, for the 20th anniversary of Independence, the then British High Commissioner, John Freeman, marked Naval Revolt as one of the key factors for Britain leaving India. He said, “the British were petrified of a repeat of the 1857 Mutiny, since this time they feared they would be slaughtered to the last man.”
Do We Remember?
Known as Hindu-German Conspiracy, the above described armed rebellion envisaged by Bagha Jatin was our one of the most significant wars against the imperial British Empire that brought us on the verge of freedom, three decades before we actually got it. An American publicist of Czech origin, Ross Hedvicek, later wrote, “Had EV Voska (the Czech spy who betrayed the plot) not interfered in this history, today nobody would have heard about Mahatma Gandhi and the father of the Indian Nation would have been Bagha Jatin.” Jatin’s adversary, the Commissioner of Police, Charles Tegart later said, "Bagha Jatin, the Bengali revolutionary, is one of the most selfless political workers in India. If an army could be raised or arms could reach an Indian port, the British would lose the war." It was a war of independence where expatriate Indians took a critical part. However, the immense sacrifice of Bagha Jatin and his group of committed revolutionaries, which included a few exemplary people from Indian diaspora, has been neglected by our mainstream history and consequently have been long forgotten from our popular culture. This is our collective shame as a nation.
