This article examines the crisis in Calcutta's Presidency College in 1916, when a white professor was assaulted and the college closed down. Focusing on conversations in the vernacular press, Anglo-Indian newspapers and the colonial government, it unpacks the meanings of ‘anarchy’, the word commonly used by all observers to describe the condition of young, middle-class Indian males. By locating this apparent anarchy in the context of nationalist agitation, the internal convulsions of middle-class Bengal, colonial race relations, wartime anxieties, and conflicting understandings of youth as a social phenomenon, it argues that the discourse of anarchy articulated a perception of incompatibility between colonialism and youthfulness that was broadly shared by whites and Indians of diverse political persuasions. At the same time this vision of deviant youth provided a platform on which blame could be assigned, and on which the competing factions of colonial Bengal could attack one another.
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