Revolutionary Pamphlets, Propaganda and Political Culture in Colonial Bengal by Shukla Sanyal (review)

Which sentiments and values motivate a colonized society to take up arms against its European master? Shukla Sanyal’s research on revolutionary pamphlets in early twentieth-century Bengal unpacks the subversive power of the printed word. Sanyal, Professor and Department Head at Presidency University, Calcutta, offers a focused study of Bengali revolutionary pamphlets to examine national identity formation and political mobilization. Revolutionary Pamphlets, Propaganda and Political Culture in Colonial Bengal is a discourse analysis of cultural symbols, identities, and language embedded in a wide range of pamphlets and newspapers located primarily in the West Bengal State Archives. Drawing inspiration from critical scholars including Dipesh Chakrabarty, Jürgen Habermas, and Benedict Anderson, Sanyal argues that revolutionary pamphlets provide unique insight into the “ideas, value systems, hopes and aspirations” (p. 2) of an anti-colonial society straddling tradition and modernity. Consequently, Sanyal is adamant that hers is not a study of politics or revolutionary action. It is an interpretation of ephemeral print media sources as cultural artefacts, rebellious acts, educational tools, and barometers of public opinion (p. 12). The Bengali nation as social construct rests at the intersection of these themes.

The first two chapters outline the origins and themes of the nationalist revolutionary movement in the context of Bengali politics and society in the early 1900s. The dialectic between local resistance and colonial oppression is a dominant theme throughout the monograph. Frustrated by their lack of agency, Bengal’s western-educated, middle-class intellectuals—the bhadralok (gentlefolk)—turned toward revolutionary means to achieve political independence. Newspapers, including Jugantar, Sandhya, and Bande Mataram, were literary vehicles for challenging the British Raj’s legitimacy and creating a Bengal nation. Political pamphlets were the direct descendants of the nationalist newspaper press, in which anti-colonial messages reacted against repressive legislation and policing by British authorities. Public events, such as the Partition of Bengal (1905), the arrest of radical editor Bhupendranath Dutt (1907) and the Alipore Bomb Case (1908-1910), united moderates and extreme nationalists within a mass swadeshi (indigenous) movement and led to the production of propaganda that legitimated violence.

Police investigations of seditious plots and terror networks revealed the types of print media exchanged by nationalist groups. Nation-building literatures featured traditional Hindu images ranging from ritual sacrifice (Janga) to the “mother-goddess” (p. 61). Just as British officials characterized the South Asian ‘Other’ as uneducated, uncivilized and unprepared for political independence, Sanyal convincingly describes how pamphlets transformed colonial masters into the Bengali nation’s antithesis. Revolutionary discourse fused race, religion and nationality to create a Bengali identity that transcended “internal divisions of wealth, status and caste” (p. 67). Sanyal meticulously explains that propaganda targeted bhadralok men, while boys and young teenagers disseminated it. Otherwise, she provides little evidence to demonstrate that revolutionary pamphlets successfully bridged the wide social cleavages that divided Indian society for centuries.

Once Sanyal establishes the intellectual and political context of the revolutionary “nation,” she shifts focus onto how pamphlets legitimated violence, and what the British response to seditious materials was. The idea of revolutionary violence was a novel concept to Bengal nationalists; she argues that Jugantar spearheaded the discursive shift that encouraged violence against colonial rulers. Its editor was arrested and prosecuted in 1907 for attempting “to excite disaffection toward the government of India” (pp. 91-92). The emphasis on legitimate violence demonstrates that nationalists lost faith in British assurances of eventual self-government. Jugantar’s editors considered revolutionary violence a means to an end. To them, British rule was illegitimate and this legitimated the revolutionary’s use of violent means to secure its removal. In these pamphlets, revolutionaries harnessed martial and religious imagery drawn from the Gita, including the “all knowing and all powerful” Sri Krishna (p. 102). Sanyal argues that pamphleteers successfully justified violence by forging emotional bonds with readers through language. However, provocations to violence drew the natural suspicion of British officials who prosecuted radical presses and writers to the fullest extent of the law.

“The Battle...