Conspiracy Rises Again: Racial Sympathy and Radical Solidarity across Empires

When in 1925 members of the Jugantar, a secret revolutionary association in colonial India, began to conceive of what they believed to be a more effective strategy of anticolonial revolt than that of nonviolence promoted at the time by the mainstream Congress Party in Chittagong, they chose for themselves a new name: the Indian Republican Army (IRA). In so doing, they explicitly constructed a revolutionary genealogy from which their future actions were to draw inspiration, a direct link between the anticolonial revolt in East Bengal and the 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland.¹ The 1930 attack on the Chittagong Armory, the first in a series of revolutionary actions taken by the IRA, also marked the anniversary of the Irish rebellion. The very language of Irish revolt seeped into the practices of the Indian organization as they smuggled in illegal copies of the writings of Dan Breen and Éamon de Valera and began each meeting with a reading of the Proclamation of the Irish Provisional Government.

The ideological and textual kinship between these two anticolonial communities and another former holding of the British empire, the United States, illuminates transcolonial circuits that formed a curiously shared revolutionary project, at once deeply local and insistently global. Rather than simply offer a historical account of those interconnections, this essay presses on the language of resurrection offered by the Easter date of these two uprisings to consider revolutionary violence as perpetual, repetitive haunting. Locating these interconnections and their falter engages a form of reading that I will call here conspiratorial—a practice of reading for expansive sympathy in both latent and manifest forms, for the travel of shared breath across revolutionary imaginations: to argue for a historiographical live burial by which the violences of the past reappear in surprising, fleeting, and sometimes incongruous forms, disrupting the imperial promise of futurity and continuity; to argue for forms of radical sympathy that emerge, flourish, and stutter in an era of ethnonationalist constriction as the transportation and translation of British imperial conceptions of race become a critical node of imagining radical sympathies in America.

The Resurrection and the Crypt: A Time of Revolution

The date of the 1916 Rising on April 24, Easter Monday, was of course not picked at random. Originally set for the day before, on Easter Sunday itself, the decision to strike was postponed after a rash of conflicting orders. Beginning that morning, some twelve hundred Irish men and women took key infrastructural sites around Dublin by force: the General Post Office (GPO), the Four Courts, the South Dublin Union, Boland's Mill, Stephen's Green, and Jacobs' biscuit factory. They declared the Irish Republic independent of the United Kingdom and, against odds of supply and sheer number, held off the British Army for six days.

Though a Sunday attack might have more efficiently compressed symbolic and functional elements of the day, the mythos of Christ's resurrection essentially scaffolded in particular Padraic Pearse's vision of the insurrection. He writes in "The Coming Revolution" (1913), "I do not know if the Messiah has yet come, and I am not sure that there will be any visible and personal Messiah in this redemption: the people itself will perhaps be its own Messiah, the people laboring, scourged, crowned with thorns, agonizing and dying, to rise again immortal and impassible."² The body of an Irish people is cohered into the singularity and exemplarity of the Messiah—yoking together tropes of messianism from the Old and New Testaments. This is a call not to wait for salvation to come but to become the self-sacrificing savior, redemption by whom is allocated across an unbroken and unmarked futurity. By the same stroke, Ireland is purged of both sin and subjugation. Thus the choice of Easter as the moment of rebellion aligns the certainty of death with the promise of futurity, an iconography of moral certitude.

Fourteen years later the insurrection of that Easter Monday rose again, sutured to resurrection's promise of return. On April 18, 1930, Good Friday, sixty-five young men under the guidance of schoolteacher Surya...