Indian Indepentism: Networks Abroad

A fair assessment of the Indian independentist movement abroad, of its strengths and its shortcomings, of its short- and long-term consequences is difficult to reach to this day. Certainly, the international and transnational nature of the nationalist movement cannot be ignored. Foreign events and remote revolutions helped embolden the movement and give impetus to the cause, while inspiration had been found in the–sometimes revisited–history of the West and Asia. Early alliances with anti-British anticolonial parties helped forge from the onset the conscience that the fate of Indian independence was linked to that of oppressed people everywhere. Exposure to foreign ideas and conditions gave shape to a national Indian consciousness shared by Muslims and Hindus, Sikhs and Bengalis. The mobilization of the Indian diaspora of all classes, students and workers, bourgeois and farmers, and their enlistment behind a common ideal is certainly a notable feat, not least because it had preceded the politization of the masses in India proper. In Punjab especially, the Ghadr movement is certainly to credit for the widespread rejection of British rule among a population that had been considered a pillar of the empire since the Sepoy Mutiny. Naturally, Indian revolutionaries abroad did not obtain by themselves the independence of India. The latter is the consequence of a number of factors, which included Bengali terrorism, Gandhi's campaigns and generally speaking the gradual loss of support to British rule within India, as well as the rising cost of the colony to the British crown. Nevertheless, they participated mightily in the support and provision of this movement in India, as well as to the politization of the masses, either through Ghadarite returnees, former jihadists, or simply the publicity given by the British themselves to the numerous trials linked to the activities of political exiles.