Time Stays Awake

Four quarters, four statements about what Time does and to whom. The verse is carried in the Mahabharata and has never left the language. It is often read as consolation offered to the suffering, which is a small misreading beside the one that matters. The beings being cooked in this account, the creatures being gathered in, the sleepers being watched - these are not the occupied. They are the occupiers. Bharata is what endured. The Empire is what Time was working on the whole time, and it did not notice, because that is the nature of the process. Each of these four books takes one quarter and reads the British occupation of Bharata against it.

This book takes the third quarter, and it is the one that carries the weight.

Supteṣu is a locative plural: not while the others sleep, but among them, in their midst, in the same house. Jāgarti is to wake and to keep waking - the root of jāgaraṇa, the vigil kept through the whole of a night when everyone else has gone to bed. The line does not describe a distant power biding its time. It describes something awake in the room.

The sleepers in this book are British. Michael O'Dwyer, who had approved the firing by telegram, left India and prospered: a memoir defending his administration, a libel action won in an English court, the lecture circuit, seventy-five years of age reached in the settled confidence of a man whose account is closed. The Empire slept in the same way, having satisfied itself that Punjab was pacified and that a province struck hard enough stays struck.

Something was awake in the room the entire time, and in this book it is not an abstraction. It has names. Sarabha at nineteen. Bagha Jatin at the river. Alluri writing his own name in a police station register. Das at sixty-three days. Pritilata with the cyanide. Azad keeping his vow with the last round in the chamber. Bhagat Singh asking to be shot rather than hanged because the government had itself called it war. And a man out of an orphanage at Amritsar who kept the vigil for twenty-one years, across three continents, while the man he was watching wrote his memoirs and won his lawsuit and grew old.

Which is why the quarter must not be misread as patience. Sanatana thought nowhere counsels waiting. The Gita is spoken to a man who has laid his bow on the floor of the chariot, and its whole labour is to get him to lift it; Arjuna is shown Time in its terrible aspect, shown that the outcome is already accomplished, and told in the very next breath therefore stand up.

These men and women are not spectators of Time's vigil. They are its form.

In 1908 the Government of Bombay tried Bal Gangadhar Tilak for sedition over what he had printed in Kesari about the Muzaffarpur bomb, and sentenced him to six years' transportation. He was fifty-two. They sent him to Mandalay, in Burma, where the climate was bad and the isolation was the point, and where a man with diabetes and no library was expected to subside.

He asked for books. Some were allowed. And over the next few years, in a cell, in Marathi, with his health failing, he wrote the Gītā Rahasya.

It is a long book and its argument is a single blade. The great commentators had read the Bhagavadgītā as pointing finally away from the world — toward knowledge, or toward devotion, or toward renunciation. Tilak said they had read the ending and skipped the occasion. The Gītā is spoken to a man who has put his weapons down. Every word of it exists because he laid the bow on the floor of the chariot and said he would not fight. And the whole of it is directed at getting him to pick it up again.

The verse Tilak's readers already knew was the one where Kṛṣṇa reveals himself in his terrible aspect and says:

I am Time, grown mighty, the ruin of worlds.

What Tilak insisted on was the next verse. Having been shown that the outcome is already accomplished, that Time has done its work and the men on that field are dead whether or not he acts, Arjuna is not told to sit down. He is told: therefore stand up. Be the instrument. Win the glory that is there to be won.

Therefore. The vision of Time as destroyer is given as the ground for action, not as a substitute for it. The instrument still has to draw the bow. Time is not the excuse for the archer; Time is the reason the archer may not put the bow down.

The Government of India had convicted a man of sedition and thereby caused to be written the book which told India, out of India's own scripture, that waiting was not piety and that the doctrine of gradual and patient improvement — the doctrine the Raj taught, and the doctrine the moderates had absorbed — was a misreading of its own inheritance. The Empire paid for the cell in which its refutation was composed, and shipped the author home in 1914 in worse health and considerably more dangerous.

Everything in this book follows from that sentence. The men in it are not waiting for Time to deliver justice. They are what it looks like when Time stays awake.

The awake

There was, running underneath the constitutional history of India, a second history that the constitutional history does not much mention.

In September 1915, at a river landing in Balasore on the Odisha coast, Jatindranath Mukherjee — Bagha Jatin, who had the name because as a young man he had killed a tiger with a knife — fought a gun battle against an armed police force for over an hour with four companions and almost no ammunition, and died of his wounds the next day. He had been organising the landing of German arms on the Bengal coast, a plan that failed for the ordinary reasons plans fail, and he refused to surrender because surrender was not among the things he did.

That same November, seven of the Ghadar men were hanged at Lahore Central Jail after trial by a special tribunal constituted under the Defence of India Act, from which there was no appeal. Kartar Singh Sarabha was nineteen. The judges noted in their order that he was the most dangerous of the accused and had shown no contrition.

In the hill tracts of the Godavari, in the Andhra agency country, the forest laws had made criminals of the people who lived in the forest — the Madras Forest Act closed off podu cultivation, the shifting agriculture the hill communities had always practised, and the administration additionally conscripted them for road-building. In August 1922 a young man named Alluri Sītārāma Rāju began raiding police stations. He announced himself: he would enter a station, take the rifles, and write in the station diary what he had taken and why, and sign it. For nearly two years he held the agency against police and then against the Assam Rifles, brought in at considerable expense because the local force could not manage him. In May 1924 he was taken, tied to a tree at Koyyuru, and shot. He was about twenty-seven. The hill people call him the manyam vīruḍu, the hero of the forest, and there are villages in that country where he is still spoken of in the present tense.

In April 1930 the armouries at Chittagong were raided by young men and women who cut the telegraph lines, took the town for a few days, and proclaimed a provisional government under Surya Sen, a schoolmaster. Two years later Pritilata Waddedar, aged twenty-one, led the attack on the Pahartali European Club — an establishment whose entry sign, as everyone in Chittagong knew, indicated that dogs and Indians were not admitted — and, wounded and unable to withdraw, swallowed cyanide rather than be taken. Kalpana Datta was tried and transported for life. Surya Sen was caught in 1933 and hanged in January 1934, and the accounts that reached the outside say his teeth were hammered out and his limbs broken before they took him to the rope, that he was unconscious when they hanged him, and that his body was put into the sea. Contested

And behind all of it stood the Andamans. The Cellular Jail at Port Blair was built with six hundred and ninety-three cells arranged so that no prisoner could see another, and its distinctive labour was the oil mill — men yoked to the beam in place of bullocks and required to produce thirty pounds of oil in a day, flogged when they did not. Barindra Ghosh went there. Savarkar went there. Ullaskar Dutt went there and lost his mind. And in 1933, during a hunger strike over conditions, Mahavir Singh — who had been convicted in the Lahore case alongside Bhagat Singh — died when the milk being forced into him through a tube went into his lungs, and his body was weighted and dropped into the sea.

Not one of these people is in the story the world was told about how India became free.

The chain

The Simon Commission was appointed in 1927 to examine India's constitutional future and contained not one Indian. The insult was so complete, and so gratuitous, that it did what a decade of organising had not: it put the moderates and the extremists on the same street.

On the thirtieth of October 1928 a silent protest met the Commission at Lahore railway station. Superintendent James Scott ordered a lathi charge, and Lala Lajpat Rai — sixty-three years old, one of the three names the country had learned to say together, a man who had already been deported once without trial — was beaten about the head and chest. He said afterward that every blow struck at him that day would be a nail in the coffin of British rule. He died on the seventeenth of November.

There was no inquiry, because there had been no crime. A police officer had dispersed an unlawful assembly.

A month later, on the seventeenth of December, three young men of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association waited outside the District Police Headquarters in Lahore for Scott to come out. The man who came out was John Saunders, an assistant superintendent, and they shot him instead, having mistaken him. Chandrashekhar Azad shot the head constable who pursued them.

Saunders was not the man they had come for, and they knew it within hours. They posted notices across Lahore that night saying as much, and saying that the killing of Lajpat Rai had been answered regardless. No inquiry had been held into that killing, and none was going to be.

Bhagat Singh got out of Lahore because Durgawatī Devī — Durgā Bhābhī, widow of a comrade — walked out of the station with him as his wife, carrying her infant son, with Rajguru following as their servant, past police who were looking for a Sikh man travelling alone.

Then, on the eighth of April 1929, Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt walked into the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi while it debated two bills designed to break the trade unions and extend the powers of arrest, and threw two bombs into an empty gangway. The bombs were built low, deliberately, to make noise and not casualties. They threw leaflets after them. They shouted, and stood still, and let themselves be arrested, because the entire purpose of the act was the trial that would follow it — a courtroom being the only platform in India from which an Indian could speak and have it printed.

The leaflet carried a line borrowed from a French anarchist on the scaffold: that it takes a loud noise to make the deaf hear.

Lahore

What followed established the pattern beyond argument.

In the jail, the accused went on hunger strike. Their demand was not release. It was that Indian political prisoners be given the treatment that European prisoners in Indian jails received as of right — the same diet, the same clothing, books, paper, the recognition that they were not ordinary criminals. That was the whole of it. Sixty years after the Crown had promised that race would be no bar, and forty-six after the European community had gone to the barricades to stop an Indian judge trying an Englishman, men were starving themselves to be fed like white men.

Jatindra Nath Das held out for sixty-three days. They tried to force-feed him and did it badly, and he died on the thirteenth of September 1929, aged twenty-four. Improvements to the treatment of political prisoners followed in due course, and are recorded as reform. They were issued after the death, once the death had been reported in every paper in the country, and they cost the government nothing it had not already lost. His body went by train from Lahore to Calcutta and the platforms were full the whole way, and Subhas Chandra Bose received it at the other end, and something in Bengal did not go back to sleep afterward.

The trial dragged, because the accused kept turning it into a hearing on the Government of India. So on the first of May 1930 the Viceroy, Irwin, promulgated an ordinance creating a special tribunal of three judges empowered to proceed in the absence of the accused, to dispense with the ordinary procedure, and from which there was no appeal to any High Court.

The law was rewritten, in the middle of the case, to produce the verdict. It is the same instrument as the Indemnity Act, run the other way: in 1919 a statute was passed to place British acts beyond the reach of the courts, and in 1930 an ordinance was issued to place Indian defendants beyond the protection of them. One system, two settings.

The tribunal sentenced Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru to hang.

He was twenty-three years old, and in the death cell he read at a rate that his jailers found unnerving and filled a notebook with several hundred pages of extracts. That October he wrote the essay called Why I Am an Atheist, in which he examined his own position with the specific object of testing whether his refusal of God was courage or merely vanity — a young man in a condemned cell auditing himself for self-deception. He wrote to comrades that the important thing was not to die well but to be understood correctly afterward, which suggests he had a clear view of what was coming and of who would be writing it.

He filed no mercy petition. In March 1931 he wrote to the Punjab Government asking not for his life but for a change of method: that as men who had been convicted of waging war against the King, he and his comrades be shot by a firing squad rather than hanged, since the government had itself described their offence as war.

They did not reply.

Alfred Park

Chandrashekhar Azad had taken a vow that no policeman would ever take him alive. He had been carrying it since he was fifteen, when a magistrate sentenced him to fifteen lashes for non-cooperation and he called out the name Āzād — free — at each stroke.

On the twenty-seventh of February 1931 he was sitting in Alfred Park in Allahabad, discussing what could be done for Bhagat Singh, when the police arrived in numbers. Somebody had told them. He fought from behind a tree for a long time, covered the escape of the man he was with, took a bullet in the thigh, and when he had one round left in the Colt he used it on himself.

He was twenty-four. The police did not approach the body for some time, because they did not believe he was finished.

March 1931

On the fifth of March 1931, Mahatma Gandhi and Irwin signed the pact that ended the civil disobedience movement. It provided for the withdrawal of the ordinances and the release of political prisoners not convicted of violence.

Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were convicted of violence.

What Gandhi did or did not press for in those conversations turns on what was said in a room. Contested The sequence is not in dispute. The pact was signed on the fifth of March. The three men were hanged on the twenty-third of March, at Lahore Central Jail — eleven hours ahead of schedule, in the evening, without notice to their families, because the jail authorities feared what the city would do in the morning.

The bodies were not returned. They were taken out through a hole broken in the back wall of the jail, driven to the bank of the Sutlej at Hussainiwala, and burnt in a hurry; and when villagers began coming toward the fire, what had not burnt was put into the river.

The Indian National Congress met at Karachi three days later. It passed a resolution recording its admiration for the bravery and sacrifice of the three men, and in the same breath dissociating itself from and disapproving of political violence.

That formula — admiration and dissociation, the wreath and the disclaimer — is the exact shape of what happened to the revolutionary tradition in Indian memory. It is how you honour men while ensuring they establish no precedent, and it is how a movement that had been given the country's attention by the gallows of others arrived at the negotiating table with clean hands and the moral standing of both.

The men who could not be at the table had made the table necessary. Then they were thanked for it, and filed.

Twenty-one years

Michael O'Dwyer left India in 1919 and prospered. He published a memoir defending his administration of the Punjab. He sued a critic for libel and won. He was seventy-five in 1940 and belonged to the sort of London bodies where retired proconsuls address each other on the affairs of the East, and on the thirteenth of March he attended a joint meeting of the East India Association and the Royal Central Asian Society at Caxton Hall, Westminster.

In the audience was a man who had spent the intervening twenty-one years in Nairobi, in the United States, in eastern Europe, in England — labouring, drifting, changing names, once arrested in India with a revolver and Ghadar literature and given five years for it. He was an orphan out of the Central Khalsa Orphanage at Amritsar, and he had been in the Jallianwala Bagh on the afternoon of the thirteenth of April 1919, carrying water to the crowd. Contested

When the meeting ended he walked forward with a revolver concealed in a book he had cut out to hold it, and shot O'Dwyer twice, and killed him. He wounded three others, including the serving Secretary of State for India. He made no attempt to leave the hall.

Asked in court to give his name, he gave it as Ram Mohammad Singh Azad — Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, free — which was not his name and was not an evasion. It was the only political statement he was going to be permitted to make, and he made it into the record of an English court in three words.

He said at his trial that he had done it because the man had deserved it; that he had seen his people starved and crushed under British rule; that he did not fear death, and that it was an honour to die for his country. The Government prohibited the press from reporting the statement.

He was hanged at Pentonville on the thirty-first of July 1940 and buried inside the prison. Both Gandhi and Nehru condemned the killing publicly at the time; the word Gandhi used was insanity. The disowning had become automatic by then, a reflex requiring no deliberation.

His remains were not returned to India until 1974 — thirty-four years after his death, twenty-seven after independence.

There is one thing about him that the arithmetic makes plain and that nothing in the official histories on either side quite absorbs. O'Dwyer had retired, written his book, won his lawsuit, and reached an age at which a man assumes the account is closed. Everyone had moved on. The Empire had moved on, the Congress had moved on, the world had a larger war to attend to.

Somebody, for twenty-one years, had not.