Colonial Violence & World Wars

From Sétif to Moramanga: Identifying Insurgents and Ascribing Guilt in the French Colonial Post-War (Martin Thomas)

Between 1945 and 1948 localized insurgency in three regions of the French colonial empire triggered extreme counter-violence by state security forces. Banned since 1939, Algeria’s foremost nationalist movement, the Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA) orchestrated protests in early May 1945 to disrupt French celebrations of the end of war in Europe. In the colony’s North East these demonstrations were the prelude to an organized uprising. White settlers, targeted in the initial violence, turned to vigilantism, joining French gendarmerie and army units in suppressing this regional rebellion. Violence actors on both sides drew on the vernacular terminology, the symbolic accoutrements, and the paramilitary methods of resistance when organizing their activities and explaining them to local and transnational audiences. Three months later, in French Indochina, the Vietnamese Communist party seized power in Hanoi. Reconfigured as a clandestine resistance movement during the wartime years of Japanese occupation, Vietnam’s Stalinists chose a universalist language of citizens’ rights and legitimate self-defence against foreign oppression to explain their political choices and revolutionary violence. In April 1947 the leaders of Madagascar’s self-proclaimed ‘national movement’ also rebelled against French colonial rule. In this instance, the covert methods of resistance organization came blended with the idealism of African cultural renewal, or Négritude.

The prevalence of resistance tropes and resistance practices in all three cases presented unique dilemmas to the resurgent republican democracy in post-Liberation France. Prominent figures in government, colonial administration and the security forces owed their post-war primacy to personal or institutional connections with French resistance movements, whether at home or within the empire. How, then, would they respond to outbreaks of anti-colonial violence that appropriated the claims to legitimacy and the associational forms of popular resistance? Reflecting on this upsurge in anti-colonial insurgency, this paper explores critical transitions in colonial state violence in the French colonial postwar.

Some Bhang, a Rape and a Killing: Everyday Violence and Anti-Colonial Imaginings in the Ghadar Movement in Colonial India, January 1915 (Gajendra Singh)

In Lahore, on the 26th April 1915, a trial began of 81 individuals for their connection to the Ghadar Movement. It was one of the first of a long list of prosecutions that were to take place in India, Burma, Canada and the United States. The Ghadar Movement served, in the Anglo-American imagination, as the missing link between anti-imperial violences in India, Ireland and Egypt and the ideologies of Anarchism, Bolshevism and Pan-Islamism. The dangers Ghadar posed required extraordinary measures. The Lahore trial was the first in a series of 'Conspiracy Cases' in British India that suspended ordinary jurisprudence. Guilt was assumed; it was innocence which had to be proven.

The near certainty of successful prosecutions made the Lahore trial a process of constructing a narrative of events rather than proving guilt. And, in that narrative of events relatively inconsequential crimes could become treason as long as it was shown that the participants were one step removed from an identifiable Ghadari.

This paper will focus on one such event - the Sahnewal dacoity on 23rd January 1915. It involved several men who killed and robbed a village moneylender, assaulted his wife and collectively raped his daughter-in-law. The paper will analyse how this relatively minor event could be used to construct revolutionary criminality and revolutionary consciousness in India during the First World War. It will explore the bodily violences committed at Sahnewal as a way of reading into the alternative consciousnesses of the rebel, and not-so-rebel, Ghadari.