Though India’s struggle for independence was largely non-violent, it was constantly shadowed and vitalised by a relatively small but vocal and, at times, highly effective terrorist movement. The movement began in the 1870s as a reaction against the way in which the colonial government set about responding to the political trauma of 1857. As we saw elsewhere, most Indians thought that the government in London was sympathetic to their aspirations, but that its good intentions were systematically frustrated by its narrow-minded representatives in India. Queen Victoria’s proclamation seemed to them to indict previous Indian governments and to promise better times. The Raj’s subsequent failure to satisfy the legitimate expectations it had itself aroused led to bitter disappointment. Furthermore, the new style of government in India intensified the growing trend towards bureaucratic rule. The Indian administrative system was a closed corporation, proud of its professionalism, supremely convinced that it knew how to rule and civilise the country, and held together by a fierce sense of mutual loyalty. It was remote, arrogant, unbending, and in no doubt that it was devoted to the pursuit of the interests of its subjects. It fancied itself as their protector and guardian, and in close touch with their hopes and fears. As such, it was impatient of the criticisms of the Western-educated Indian leadership whom it contemptuously dismissed as “self-serving”, “unrepresentative” and “out of touch” with its countrymen. Its arrogant claim to know “real Indians” better than their own countrymen and its subtle attempt to drive a wedge between the two naturally aroused strong resentment. Indian leaders also bitterly attacked it for reducing the “art of ruling” to an “inhuman and impersonal science” and “mechanically” imposing a straitjacket of abstract rules on a highly diverse reality.The brutal British treatment of those involved in the rebellion of 1857 and even of innocent citizens aroused strong feelings of revulsion and gave a glimpse of the ruthlessness of the “civilised” Raj. Captured rebels were generally blown away by the cannon to which they had been securely strapped and entire villages near Kanpur were put to the torch. Bahadur Shah’s sons were murdered in cold blood by Captain Hodson who was determined to ensure the “total extinction of a dynasty”. Many ordinary British residents went mad and wantonly attacked innocent villagers and even their faithful domestic servants. The liberal Macaulay, now retired in London, expressed the widespread feeling in England:The cruelties of the sepoys have inflamed the nation to a degree unprecedented within my memory. Peace Societies, and Aborigines Protection Societies, and Societies for the Reformation of Criminals, are silenced. There is one terrible cry for revenge. The account of that dreadful military execution at Peshawur – forty men blown at once from the mouths of cannon – their heads, legs, arms flying in all directions – was read with delight by people who three weeks ago were against all capital punishment. Bright himself declares for the vigorous suppression of the mutiny. The almost universal feeling is that not a single sepoy within the walls of Delhi should be spared; and I own that it is a feeling with which I cannot help sympathising. … But it is painful to be so revengeful as I feel myself I, who cannot bear to see a beast or bird in pain, could look on without winking while Nana Sahib underwent all the tortures of Ravaillac. And these feelings are not mine alone. Is it possible that a year passed under the influence of such feelings should not have some effect on the national character?Thanks to the fear of Indians generated by the rebellion of 1857, and thanks also to the opening of the Suez Canal which brought British women to India in large numbers and generated a climate of sexual jealousy and emotional insecurity, the colonial rulers isolated themselves from their subjects and displayed morbid forms of personal and institutional racism. Educated Indians, who had staked much on becoming Westernised, were insulted, mocked, made to feel small and denied positions commensurate with their proven abilities. The phrase jāti-vairita or racial animosity, first used by Bhudev Mukhopadhyay in 1864, caught the dominant mood and became popular. The British insisted that they were separated from their subjects by an “unsurpassable” racial divide; the latter reciprocated by developing what Bankim called this “evil yet necessary sentiment” of racial animosity. As Pennel, a district and sessions judge, put it in his summing up of an important case:Assaults by Europeans upon natives are unfortunately not uncommon. They are not likely to cease until the disappearance of real or supposed racial superiorityThe agitation surrounding the Ilbert Bill was an important milestone. Exposed for the first time to the unrestrained expression of the most violent racist invectives, Indians were left in no doubt about what the Anglo-Indians really thought of them. They also saw that it was possible for a small but determined and well-organised group to force the government to withdraw a measure behind which it had thrown all its weight. An anonymous letter in the Hindu Patriot drew the obvious lesson when it advised Hindus to “return hatred for hatred” and to “learn to help themselves”. The weekly Charuvarta put the point more strongly: “No one ventures to oppress where there is power. Endurance renders oppression easy; opposition produces power. The people of India should depend entirely on their own power.”The tragic consequences of the government’s economic policies, especially the free trade introduced in the 1830s, became evident in the 1860s and 1870s. Destruction of indigenous industries, the commercialisation of agriculture, the increasing loss of autonomy of the Indian economy, the increase in land rent and taxes to meet the expensive civil and military administration, among others, led to large-scale unemployment, acute poverty and long and chronic famines. The appearance of an extensive body of critical economic literature during the 1870s, Ranade’s “doctrine of the relativity of economic laws”, Naoroji’s highly popular “drain theory” and the spread of the Swadeshi movement were all reflections of the growing consciousness of economic exploitation. During the late 1870s, the themes of arrogant and remote bureaucracy, contemptuous rejection of the representative claims of the educated elite, racism and economic exploitation dominated the national agenda and became subjects of much heated discussion in the English language and vernacular literature. Lacking legitimate channels of protest and pressure, the frustrated Indians, especially the urban, middle-class, educated and largely unemployed youth, reared on the heroic stories of 1857 and the bitter memories of the Raj’s brutal response, began to think of violence as the only available mode of action. Terrorist groups and secret societies sprang up in Bengal and Maharashtra and, a few years later, in the Punjab and the United Provinces. Their literature was widely circulated and eagerly devoured even by those unsympathetic to their methods. Akharas and gymnasia were set up in several parts of the country to provide martial training. Landlords in Bengal allowed terrorists to use secluded parts of their lands to store their equipment and to organise training camps. Money was raised to send young Indians abroad, initially to France to make contacts with Russian revolutionaries, and later to the Soviet Union to learn “advanced methods” of terrorism. The terrorists were fascinated by the bomb and saw this “Russian method” as the only effective answer to British rule. As the presiding judge at Tilak’s trial observed several years later, the “advent of the bomb in India” was in the eyes of many a terrorist a “great historical event”. One of the interesting books to be produced by the terrorists was appropriately called the Philosophy of the Bomb.The terrorist movement enjoyed some measure of support among overseas Indians in Canada, the US, South-East Asia and especially Britain. Shyamji Krishna Varma, a Cambridge graduate, started the India Home Rule Society in London. Valentine Chirol of the Times described it as the “most dangerous organisation outside India”. It recruited young Indian activists, collected money and arms, and maintained close contacts with its counterparts in India. It published a weekly called the Indian Sociologist, a title chosen to convey its founders’ conviction that the “new scientific discipline of sociology” founded by Comte and popularised by Spencer should form the ideological basis of the Indian struggle for independence. Not surprisingly, it carried quotations from Spencer’s writings on its masthead. The authority of the two sociologists was invoked to justify a biologically orientated worldview with its emphases on struggle, violence, national solidarity and subordination of the individual to the needs of the “national organism”.By the end of the 19th century, the terrorist movement had become too important to be ignored. Though not powerful enough to threaten colonial rule, it was strong enough to be a source of some concern. It had resulted in the deaths or attacks on the lives of nearly forty government officials and several raids on ammunition factories and public buildings. The colonial government was worried and so were many national leaders. Allan Octavian Hume apprehended a “terrible revolution” and wrote in his memorandum to the government that the ranks of young terrorists were now joined by the “lowest classes” who chose to fight rather than “starve and die”. “They were going to do something and stand by each other, and that something meant violence.” He proposed a constitutional organisation as a “safety valve for the escape of great and growing forces generated by our action”. Along with a group of Anglo-Indian and Indian liberals, he helped set up the Indian National Congress in 1885, and even Lord Dufferin, the new Viceroy, hoped that it would emerge as “Her Majesty’s Opposition” in India.Excerpted with permission from Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political Discourse, Bhikhu Parekh, Speaking Tiger Books.