‘The roar of the bomb’: Violence as universal communication in Gadar Party writings

Abstract

This article examines the role of violence in Shabash and ‘History of the Freedom Movement in India: The Ghadar Movement, 1913–1918’, two key texts of the Gadar Party, a US-based political party of South Asians that campaigned for Indian independence in the early twentieth century. In these texts, violence operates both as universal communication and as a critique of the possibility of universal communication. Acts of violence allow oppressed societies to secure the status of civilized nations. Violence also operates as a historiographic principle that enables the writing of universal history, linking present with past and incorporating national histories into global narratives. On the other hand, violence fails to sustain communities beyond a narrow conception of political community. The body that suffers violence negates the very possibility of communication. I also argue that violence in these contradictory roles brokers a relationship between national identity and global belonging in Gadar thought.