2 - ‘The Magical Lore of Bengal’

Summary

While earlier categories of extraordinary legal concern could be dismissed as ‘savage’ or ‘barbaric’ criminals operating at the fringes of society, a new vocabulary was required for colonial officials seeking to explain how educated members of India’s upper castes could be induced to carry out the kind of ‘outrages’ previously reserved for the Muslim ‘fanatic’ of the frontier. This chapter explores the phenomenon of ‘propaganda by bomb’ in colonial Bengal, viewing the phenomenon as analogous yet distinct from the ‘propaganda by deed’ carried out by European anarchists and Fenian revolutionaries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The use of the bomb in political assassinations by Bengali revolutionaries marked a new phase in colonial understandings of political violence and sparked a wave of emergency legislation that sought to police the interrelated propaganda tools of bombs and newspapers.