Dr Shruti Kapila (History, Corpus Christi)
Terror and Territory: Twentieth Century's First Terrorist?
My new project is concerned with the political and intellectual role of
one of the most significant, but almost entirely ignored figures of the
twentieth century. The work examines, in the first instance, the
biography of Har Dayal, (1884-1938) a major intellectual who taught at
Stanford and whose interlocutors included H.G. Wells and Kroptkin, but
who was also an anti-colonial and trans-national radical. It was his
activities and writings that occasioned the twentieth century’s first
imperial legislation against ‘terror’ and ‘treason’. His life-traces
lie obscured at the edges and in the crevices of the normative
histories of Nation and Empire. Because modern history has been
effectively strait-jacketed, read and retailed through the narratives
of nation and empire, his life-story, while instructive of the
twentieth century, remains obscure.
Traversing and creating a counter-geography to the British Empire Har
Dayal founded the ‘Ghadar’ (Mutiny) Movement in 1912, with its
headquarters in California. Often remembered as the ‘first armed
revolution’ against the Empire, at conservative and official estimates
the Ghadar movement on the eve of the First World War had at least five
thousand full-time members. The Ghadar had a dizzying geography, moving
arms and ammunition, and political propaganda that networked discrete
locales such as Panama, Honduras, Marseilles, Hong Kong, Manila, Burma,
East and South Africa. If this sounds like the fringes of the British
Empire, then it is equally striking that the Ghadar’s main ally was the
Pan-Islamist movement that had established its own network in Egypt,
Iran, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia and Ottoman Turkey. This
counter-geography was propelled into the theatre of the First World
War. The movement, then, has defied a historical account precisely
because of its extra-territorial nature and its indeterminate
relationship with ideologies of both nationalism and Communism.
In reconstructing biography, intellectual currents, imperial
legislation and an armed movement, my new project will aim to centre
and explore the question of the radical potential of violence for
political transformation. The work will locate this problem strictly in
the context of the twentieth century itself, through the perspective of
the century’s own subjective character (Badiou, 2006). In recent
articles, I have explored the normative vocabulary of the political as
it emerged in the twentieth century revising our understanding of both
iconic figures such as Gandhi and also conservative-radicals such as
Tilak to challenge liberal and Marxist accounts of the rise of
anti-colonial nationalism. These articles explored theoretical
perspectives on the nature of the political subject, violence as
fratricide, and sacrifice as a form of political duty.
The project will further this line of enquiry by developing historical
and theoretical perspectives on the question of terror while relating
the foundational role of extra-territoriality as it collided with
territorial nationalism. Often viewed as a pathological form of
politics, I will argue instead that the targeted economy of violence
has been constitutive of the twentieth century world order. The work
will explore the nature of the subject (the ‘terrorist’) and the limits
of the Human that such an economy of violence is predicated upon. The
work will intervene and critiquediscussions on the nature of subjective
and objective violence. (Zizek, 2008).
