The 'arch priestess of anarchy' visits Lahore: Violence, love, and the worldliness of revolutionary texts

Abstract

In 1909, a Criminal Intelligence Department official in Delhi warned of Russian-born anarchist Emma Goldman's trip to India scheduled for the following year. The ‘arch priestess of anarchy’, as she was called in the file was planning to arrive from the US for a lecture series across India. Because she posed a definite threat to the British Raj, officials moved quickly to bar her entrance at either Bombay or Madras. This essay, nevertheless, reframes Goldman's stalled South Asian lecture tour to focus on the ways in which the anarchist still appeared in Delhi and Lahore over the next twenty years, especially in the writings of Bhagat Singh.

Though Goldman and Singh never formally met – Singh never left India and Goldman, in spite of her plans, technically never arrived – the two share a common vocabulary. Attention to this adds not only greater texture to the two thinkers’ sensitive and ambivalent view of revolutionary action, but also illuminates the broad network of thought in which the two writers located themselves.

This paper moves examines, in turn, four central metaphors of Goldman and Singh's texts: the mass and violence; humanity and love. In my analysis here, I suggest that we see two metonymic pairs of concerns. In this sense, the mass is metonymic to humanity and, subsequently, mass violence is metonymic to a love for humanity. Metonymy, in contradistinction to metaphor, renders in starker relief the textual gymnastics of revolutionary thought. Consequently, ‘humanity’ stands not only as an extension of ‘the masses’, but moreover humanity retains its central proximity to the crowds which form it. Similarly, and written with equal vigour in the texts under analysis here, is that ‘love’ is both ‘violence’ extended to humanity, and ‘love’ is in intimate proximity to ‘violence’. The sustained interest in the masses, violence, humanity, and love turns our attention, in the final instance, towards a commitment to cosmopolitanism as an aggressively affiliative textual stance.