Why Indian history barely makes sense to me

I can barely read stories about the British takeover of India and the struggle for Independence, because it’s all so awfully sad and triggering with all the mindless atrocities on my fellow countrymen.

But another reason I can’t really read those accounts is a lot of it seems disconnected and seems to make no sense. I never really understood how nonviolence brought us freedom, or how all the famous people knew or related to each other. There was no overarching structure or narrative. We go straight from the Mughals, to the war in 1757, and then the First War Of Independence in 1857. Then there’s a big blank until we get to around WW1 when Gandhi enters the picture. We have some talk of revolutionaries, but they are portrayed as ‘misguided youth’. And then there’s the Salt March, and the Quit India movement, after which we have WW2 followed by Independence, at which point Indian history promptly stops.

If you paid more attention in high school, or you studied history past school, it’s likely these gaps are better filled in your mind. But I didn’t, and it’s pretty likely you didn’t either.

India House And The Man Behind It

I’ve been following my curiosity on this topic, and as I shared in a previous email, I got fascinated by India House in London, which was an apartment building that was a hub for young Indian revolutionaries, many of whom went on to become instrumental in the Indian independence movement. It was run by this Indian lawyer and businessman called Shyamji Krishna Varma.

I dug into who he was, and came across this book called Shyamji Krishna Varma - An Unknown Patriot. It was written in 1992, by someone who did a PhD on the Independence movement, and was in the Ministry of Information. The book is available to read for free.

This book fills some of the gaps between 1857 and WW1/Gandhi, and gives us an idea of what the general feeling about Independence was back in the day. We also get an idea of how a lot of work towards independence happened outside India, which makes a lot of sense to me as an Indian in America.

The impression I got in history class was that there were isolated patriots who would occasionally fight back, but in general there was no organized move towards freedom. This book destroys that idea, because it turns out there were lots of organized movements that all had independence in mind, and the people involved all knew each other, and actively collaborated to further this aim.

The Historical Context (Or why the Star Wars Prequels are a bore)

India in 1857 was basically a post-apocalyptic society. I’ve tried reading the history of the natives in America, Hawaii, and the Pacific Islands, and the common thread is that by the time the colonial powers took over, they were post-apocalyptic societies. There’s usually economic ravages going on for at least a 100 years prior, institutions falling to ruin, populations losing morale and dwindling due to a combination of emigration, falling birth rates, and famine. There’s also wars, usually.

India had all of these things.

The Mughal emperor was deposed, not that he had much of a territory as he was finally only a vassal of the Marathas. The Marathas had been defeated in the Third Battle of Panipat, and the British East India Company had taken over Calcutta. There were also the Carnatic Wars, Anglo-Maratha Wars, the Doctrine of Lapse, and finally the First War of Independence in 1857, which cemented British rule over many Indian territories. It was at least a 100 years of continuous wars and weakening institutions. People were tired, hungry, and low on morale. As with any war-torn society, a lot of social ills also took hold - restriction on women’s rights, stronger taboos, more taboos, child marriage, you name it.

Times like these are also when a lot of people from the mother country visit the colonies and write about them, which is where you get the image of the tired, poor huddled masses living in filth and squalor. This is also a time of last stands and nothing-left-to-lose heroic fights, which make it to the history books, and subsequently, novels and movies. But the events that lead to this point are usually a bunch of boring dates and unfair treaties, which don’t exactly make for riveting reading.

Think about it, what’s more exciting, a rebel plot to take down the empire, or the political tale of how the empire came to power?

Shyamji Krishna Varma

In this backdrop, Mr. Varma was born. He was born in 1857, in the desert region of Kutch, not long after the British took over. There were still kings and princes around.

There were several reform movements for Hinduism happening. One of them was the Arya Samaj, headed by Swami Dayananda Saraswati. (Swami is a prefix to indicate holiness, and Saraswati is a qualification. I can’t find it now, but there are different criteria to be called an Acharya, or a Pandit, or a Saraswati, much like a Bachelor, Master, or a Doctor.)

Now Swami Dayananda believed in a return to the original Vedic texts, and didn’t believe in worshipping Gods in physical forms. He also believed that knowledge should be free, and his followers worked to sponsor bright young children of all socioeconomic classes to become highly educated with a grounding in the Vedas.

Shyamji Krishna Varma was a bright young child who outgrew his smalltown high school pretty quickly, and it became apparent he was destined for greater things. A local rich person brought him to the big city of Bombay, and enrolled him in the cheapest school there. He was also made to attend Sanskrit classes after school. In a feat that is beyond me (and somehow seems typical of kids these days), he managed to impress both sets of teachers, and also won a scholarship to go to the rich kids school for free.

After he graduated from that school, he fell back into working for the Arya Samaj, spreading their message, educating people and all that idealistic work that I have no patience for.

And then, his life changed for a second time.

Monier Williams, a professor of Sanskrit at Oxford visited India, and was thoroughly impressed by him. I can’t imagine what the Sanskrit skills would be of an Englishman in an era where it took 6-8 weeks to travel to India, but there he was, and he was impressed by this twenty year old who was a reputed speaker and scholar. He wanted to take him back to Oxford with him, so that this brown kid with possibly a better command over Sanskrit than he could hope to have would assist him in teaching that language to uninterested young men who were hoping to escape poverty by heading out to the colonies.

Understandably, some people objected. But Swami Dayananda blessed him, and he went.

Well, the twenty-two year old assistant, in a short span of five years

Helped establish the Indian institute

Mastered Latin and Greek and topped those classes. At Oxford. Despite not knowing those languages before.

Graduated from law school

Got called to the Bar

Became a lecturer of Sanskrit, Marathi and Gujarati at Oxford

Got famous in Indology circles, and became pals with Max Mueller

Met the Prime Minister of Britain and told him he was ‘kicking Indians in the stomach with this colonialism nonsense’.

Fuck.

Yeah.

He could have gotten rich off of this racket, but because he was perfect, he was also service-minded, and decided to return to India. He realized he understood the colonizers, and wanted to use that knowledge to help the princely states achieve independence.

The Princely States

Shyamji Krishna Varma’s time in London put him in contact with revolutionaries from Ireland, Italy, Germany and other countries. Italy and Germany had just gone through a bloody process of uniting their countries, and Ireland was fighting hard for independence.

This inspired him to think that empowering the kingdoms in India were the way to go to achieve Indian independence.

He came with high recommendations and strong connections, and quickly became the Diwan (Prime Minister) of the Kingdom of Ratlam in central India. The King paid him the crazy amount of ₹700 a month, and gave him even more to stay on for a decade, but he had to quit in 1888 because of ‘health issues’. I imagine this was a mental breakdown; it can’t have been easy being a prime minister under constant assault from the British representative. The king was still happy with him and gave him a fat little severance. Since we’ve established he is a sharp and industrious sort, he immediately used that money to open up a legal practice and open a few cotton mills.

And then he went back to become the Diwan of Mewar in Rajasthan. The young, new king hated the British. But he had never left his kingdom, didn’t know English, and was at a loss on how to handle the British Resident. Mr. Varma used his influence with the British Foreign Secretary to stop the interference of the Resident, and somehow even managed to get a different person appointed as the resident.

If he had stayed on here, his would still be a brilliant life well lived. But great people don’t make history by staying comfortable.

He switched to the Kingdom of Junagarh closer home. But it wasn’t quite a pleasant ride. It was a corrupt, nepotistic government, with a convicted fraudster (and his army of relatives) running important departments in the palace. He tried to stand his ground, but he made too many enemies, and they colluded with the British to oust him.

Once ousted, he tried to go back to Rajasthan to join the kingdom of Udaipur. But the British representative Curzon Wyllie (remember this name, he will come back to play an important role) blocked his return. He worked for the king privately anyway, but the Residents ganged up to block him from important meetings, and he couldn’t do his job.

The press was considerably pro-British and they denounced him.

But here, he made an ally in the nationalist press, among who was Bal Gangadhar Tilak (remember this name, he’ll come back too).

Now, this is our point of no return. Shyamji Krishna Varma makes a pivotal decision here.

He realized he wouldn’t achieve his dream of independence for India from within India. The kingdoms weren’t strong enough to fight the British, and this was by design.

The Residents controlled too much. They were the real rulers, while the kings were rulers in name only.

Any time a king attempted to delegate some powers to his people so they could have local self government, it was blocked by the residents/\. They wanted each king to have a mini dictatorship, because that gave them a lot of power to rule the country.

He had to leave India. UK would be where he would fight this from.

And then the Poona Plague happened, in 1897. The Plague Officer, Rand, in the name of disease control, inflicted atrocities on the people of Poona. More people died from military action than the plague.

Tilak, who wrote a firebrand newspaper, exposed these atrocities to the nation at large. When Rand was inevitably murdered, the British government imprisoned Tilak for 18 months.

Mr. Varma really needed to leave India.

Back in Blighty

This is the fun part. The part you came here to read.

At this point in Britain, Herbert Spencer was the leading philosopher of the day. He advocated ‘rationalism’, and pioneered the study of sociology and evolution, where he studied different people, and cultures. As one would conclude after studying people, he denounced all forms of oppression, and he advocated for ‘individualistic radicalism’.

Shyamji Krishna Varma was drawn into this line of thinking, and was struck that it might be a useful tool in galvanizing the Indian population into fighting for their independence. He met others influenced by Spencer’s philosophy, and they usually turned out to be radicals, fighting causes in Ireland, Egypt, South Africa, and elsewhere, against the British empire, and also just people protesting against unjust laws in Britain that got people jailed for writing books about sex.

When Spencer passed away in 1903, Mr. Varma instituted a lectureship in his name for anyone following his philosophy in their work. The gears in his brain began working and he realized this would be a great way to expose young Indians to the ways of the world.

A year later, he instituted five fellowships of ₹ 2000 each for Indian graduates to finish their education in England. Under one condition - No one who accepted the scholarship could go back to India and work in any capacity for the British Government. He felt strongly that the resistance to British power would only come from private power, not from within. At this point, he also felt that the British couldn’t hold on to India if all the Indians who worked in various positions for the British just stopped cooperating. He advocated for passive resistance.

And another year later, he instituted six more lectureships for authors, journalists and others to visit Europe, America and other parts of the world. Many, many people took these up - Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Lala Hardayal, Bipin Chandra Pal - you have probably heard of these guys. And remember Tilak? Well, he came out of jail and began giving great recommendation letters to students who he considered to have potential, and sent them in the direction of Mr. Varma’s scholarships.

Mr. Varma didn’t stop there. He instituted more and more scholarships, this time in the name of Egyptian and Irish patriots, in an attempt to solidify his solidarity with their causes.

Now all these Indian students and writers traveling to London felt pretty unsafe. They needed a safe space away from racism and police harassment.

And thus, in 1905, India House was born. This property in Highgate in London was transformed into a residence for 25 young men, with a library, a lecture hall, and tennis courts and a gym. That’s honestly a sweet fucking slice of space.

Being an overachiever as always, he decided this much work wasn’t enough, and he started a newsletter called The Indian Sociologist. It wasn’t an academic study of sociology as the name implies. Instead, it had a collection of pieces that were strongly against the British empire. He would talk about his scholarships, his disagreements with the growing ‘moderates’ in India, his glowing praise of Tilak’s work, and commentary on relevant world events.

This led him to have a lot of fans and followers, as people read more periodicals in those days and didn’t mind paying a penny to do so.

Some of those fans decided to meet up with him, and actually translate those words into action. So they all met up at his house, and formed an association called the Indian Home Rule Society. You might have heard of Annie Besant and Madame Bhikaji Cama; they were involved here. They were all very influenced by the Home Rule movement in Ireland, which asked for the British to let the Irish govern themselves, and that seemed like a reasonable demand back then.

But back in India, this was seen as a crazy, unreasonable deal. The Indian National Congress had become a leading voice of the Independence movement, and they were making demands and running for elections. While a lot of their members, especially the trio of Lal-Bal-Pal (Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak (remember him? He’s now into politics) and Bipin Chandra Pal (who took one of these scholarships!)) were aligned with Mr. Varma and the Indian Home Rule Society on their demands, the ruling faction, the Moderates would overrule them and say they were doing things that would anger the British (But that’s the fucking point!).

This led to a growing schism, and Mr Varma decided he’d hit another dead end.

Escape to Paris

He decided to go another route.

The goal was to galvanize the people of India, right? What if he created a group of Political Missionaries?

He funded this organization called the Deshbhakta Samaj (Society of Patriots). They would circulate pamphlets advocating for total non-cooperation.

Their structure is interesting - a central committee, missionaries, workers to assist them, and sympathizers. I’m pretty impressed by this structure with circles with different levels of involvement; this seems like how most political parties organize their membership.

The word began to spread about this movement, and there began whispers of him and Tilak advocating a violent struggle. He always maintained that he was only advocating non-cooperation.

And then in 1908, revolutionaries tried assassinating a British judge in India, by throwing a bomb at a carriage they thought he was in. But it was the wrong one, and two British women died in the attack.

Tilak wrote a column saying it was a justified attack, and called for independence of India. He was charged with sedition and was sentenced to six years in Mandalay in Burma.

At this, Paris newspapers began talking about groups of Hindus in Paris attempting to overthrow the British government. That turned up the heat on Mr. Varma, and he was forced to clarify his stances in a column in The Indian Sociologist. He said he was still only advocating for non-cooperation, but justified the violence.

He realized he couldn’t take this anymore, and escaped to France, which was friendlier to Indian revolutionaries.

Boom! And Moar Escape!

Vinayak Savarkar was one of the most influential residents of India House. I haven’t yet read his book, so I’ll not project too much. But we do know his protege was the young student, Madan Lal Dhingra.

Remember Curzon Wyllie who blocked Mr Varma becoming Diwan of Udaipur? Here’s where he comes back.

He became the head of the organization that is in charge of managing the rising tide of Indian dissent in Britain. Yep, back to being a pain in the ass for Mr. Varma. Well, Madan Lal Dhingra didn’t take kindly to it, and in 1909, he shot Curzon Wyllie with a pistol.

Dhingra got death. Savarkar was arrested for conspiracy, and was deported to India. Savarkar jumped out of a porthole when the ship docked in France, and he was supposed to meet Bhikaji Cama and others who would guide him back to safety; he didn’t know French or France. But they were late, and he ended up lost and captured by French police, who then handed him back to the British. He got sentenced to two years in the Andamans, an island prison so horrific, it makes ‘waterboarding in Guatanamo Bay’ sound like a tropical holiday.

All this again turned the heat up on Shyamji Krishna Varma. Was he also involved in this conspiracy? British papers demanded he be deported from France.

He ended up denouncing the assassination, and eschewing all personal connection to the people involved. He said he could empathize with the assassins, but that he disagreed with their methods.

This made even the revolutionaries be disappointed in him, and they didn’t want anything more to do with their fallen hero either.

He instituted more scholarships in Dhingra’s name. As was his brand.

He felt he was safe in France, and continued publishing The Indian Sociologist, having given up all pretense of moderate demands.

But then, England and France began getting closer. When the British ambassador came to meet the King of France, he took the hint.

And left.

Again.

The Retired Revolutionary

He moved to Geneva, in Switzerland, the Neutral Country. The government had extracted from him a promise of no political activity. So even though he kept himself informed, he had to keep quiet. It was World War 1 and Switzerland really wanted to be neutral. No more Indian Sociologist.

After the war, he began speaking up again, but the impression I get is that he was so tired of the garbage emanating from the Indian National Congress, that he gave up on it. Though, Gandhi did take up the idea of non-cooperation, and made it into a mass movement.

Plus, in 1920, his friend Tilak passed away. He wrote his last issue of The Indian Sociologist in 1922, and retired from active politics. He mentored others like CR Pillai who tried organizing propaganda efforts from Berlin, but he was, for all purposes, retired, and remained so until his death in 1930.

Why Do Indians Become Revolutionaries Outside of India?

Several years ago, speaking at an Indian diaspora meet, the Indian Prime Minister said ‘Gandhi, too, was one of you’. That blew my mind.

Our image of NRIs is that of people who left for greener pastures, and then come back home and complain about how dirty everything is.

Not Gandhi.

Gandhi very clearly left India for London, and then South Africa, for purely economic/career reasons. But then he became a community organizer in South Africa, and then parlayed that into the Indian freedom struggle.

Shyamji Krishna Varma would too have been a force for good in India, teaching Sanskrit and eradicating social evils, but a few years in Britain cured him of all those notions.

What happens to us?

Being in India is like a warm blanket. No matter how terrible things are, the social structures give you a place to be, and expectations to live up to. There’s enough people around you going through the same struggles, and since you’re not special, you just live with it, because that’s just how life is.

But when you’re plucked out of that safe blanket, and made to reckon with the world, you start wondering about your place in it.

Even if you don’t see yourself as particularly Indian, the world looks at you as an Indian. And treats you like one.

You realize very quickly that you need to have a strong sense of self and belonging to hold your own among all these people with their own strong identities. You can’t anymore be wishy-washy about your origins. You are a representative of your country to most people you meet, and they judge your country based on you. You realize your origins are an important part of your identity, good or bad.

And then you just want to be part of a cooler country. Kind of like how Pakistanis abroad often say they are Indian. Or Bangladeshi restaurants call themselves Indian. Of course, you can’t do that when you’re Indian, really, so you just want a better India.

And that’s what you work towards.

For me personally, seeing how people of other countries see themselves, and comparing that with how me and my countrymen saw ourselves, I realized there was a big gap that needs bridging. We had been raised on all sorts of self-loathing and self-defeating notions.

As a small example, I didn’t care to watch Bahubali, because I thought it was one of those loud, dramatic movies. But when non-Indian people saw it as a great fantasy movie with rich worldbuilding, I realized I looked at things from the point of view of a made-up global citizen watching me. I wasn’t looking at things from my perspective. Or even from that of any global citizen. It was just this perspective of self-loathing that had been trained into me little by little. I mean, I didn’t have to like Bahubali, but it should be for my own reasons, not reasons I’m made to believe matter.

This would probably be even more real a hundred years ago, when there was no Google maps or global standards and you had to rely on the residents of wherever you went to get by, and you were forced to look at yourself the way they do. There were even less people who looked like you, and nothing was tailored to fit you. You had to learn to fit in real quick.

That was the feeling Shyamji Krishna Varma was trying to get other Indians to feel, with his scholarships. Live by yourself, away from your community. Figure out who you really are. Wonder about your place in the world. And about your origins. Look at where your country is perceived to be. Then about where you want it to be. Then bridge that gap.

Conclusion

They constructed a replica India House in Shyamji Krishna Varma’s native Mandvi, and made it a memorial to him. They renamed Kutch university after him, and have issued postage stamps with his image.

On his death, one of the tributes to him from an Indian newspaper said that with him was lost a connection between the old freedom struggle and the new. I agree. He had served as a Prime Minister in a princely state, and then went on to birth a whole new set of revolutionaries who extended his dream to non-cooperation among the armed forces, because that would be the way to break the back of the British Empire.

It’s relatively easier to write stories about the hero who pulled a shotgun, or the one who jumped out of a porthole, or heck, even the one who led protestors to the sea to make salt. It’s a bit harder to talk about someone who took great pains to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, so they could provide a stable structure for the heroes to thrive.

The author of this book takes the line that he stuck to advocating only non-cooperation, but I know better than that; the author was a history student in the 90s when we still assumed all the ‘good’ people of the independence movement were the ones who eschewed violence.

Shyamji Krishna Varma was most definitely someone who wanted independence by any means, even if it was violent. In his lifetime, he was criticized for influencing young kids to get into violent struggles and do things that ruined their life trajectories, while he hung back, comfortable. And that was probably true; I dislike people with those tendencies.

But even that goes on to highlight how difficult it must have been to keep doing what he did, especially since it wasn’t like there were any dearth of options in front of him.

He’s someone to learn a lot of lessons from, and take a lot of inspiration from. India as a nation-state was built on the backs of a lot of different kinds of sacrifice. The modern independence movement, as we know it from history books, didn’t exist in a vacuum. It was forged by the likes of Shyamji Krishna Varma who evolved through the whole history, right from the First War of Independence, to cannibalized Princely States, to the revolutionary movement and political activism, and it is important to recognize all shades of that, to really know where we come from.