Suchetana Chattopadhyay, "Voices of Komagata Maru: Imperial Surveillance and Workers from Punjab in Bengal"
English | 2019 | ISBN: 8193401581 | PDF | pages: 196 | 23.7 mb
Early twentieth-century Calcutta was not just a point of passage within the British Empire, but a key center of colonial power; a crucial laboratory of imperial repressive practices cultivated and applied elsewhere. Histories of the Komagata Maru or the Ghadar Movement offer rewarding perspectives on Punjabi Sikh migrants, but fail to adequately investigate why the ship was brought to Bengal; why overwhelming locally organized imperial vigilance was imposed on ships that arrived soon afterward; and the extent to which the operation of the repressive colonial state apparatus influenced the intersections of anticolonial strands in Calcutta and its surroundings during 1914-15.