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H. Fischer-Tiné: Shyamji Krishnavarma 2018-1-049

Fischer-Tiné, Harald: Shyamji Krishnavarma spent decades in the shadows of Indian pol- (Pathfinders). : Routledge 2014. itics but which today dominates the main ISBN: 978-0415445542. stage of the world’s largest democracy. was owned, operated and Rezensiert von: Chris Moffat, School of Histo- overseen by the accomplished scholar ry, Arts Two, Queen Mary University of Lon- and public figure Shyamji Krishnavarma don (1857–1930), originally from in present-day but who lived in Eng- Visitors to ’s Highgate Hill are often land as a student in the 1880s and then again drawn, magnetically, off the main road and as a dissident exile from 1897. His influence across Waterlow Park towards the plentiful on and funding for the house is not noted by pilgrimage sites offered by Highgate Ceme- the plaque (he resided nearby at 60 Muswell tery – the burial plots of Karl Marx, George Hill Road), and indeed it is only in the last Eliot, Yusuf Dadoo and many others. But ten to fifteen years that his role as a „freedom if one were to turn right instead of left at fighter“ has come to be commemorated in The Old Crown Pub coming up Highgate India. In a new critical biography, Harald Hill (ignoring for now the call of its „Karl Fischer-Tiné asks why it is that Krishnavarma Marx Tea Rooms“), the leafy residential street disrupts conventional histories of Indian of Cromwell Avenue would reveal another anti-colonialism, arguing that the man’s pilgrimage site in the area’s radical history. career requires us to rethink some of our basic For the first decade of the twentieth century, presumptions about how to tell this history number 65 Cromwell Avenue was known and map the geography on which it unfolded. as „India House“, and provided a residence Fischer-Tiné’s approaches Krishnavarma’s for young Indians studying in the imperial „individual life history as a window onto metropolis. It soon became notorious to in- a number of important aspects of Indian telligence officers as a „sink of sedition“, a modernity“ (p. 83). He focuses on three top- hub for all manner of activists and intellectu- ical foci: „knowledge“, „cosmopolitanism“ als openly questioning British rule in the prize and „political violence“. These themes are ex- colony of India. The House was shut down in plored through three different stages of Kr- 1909 after one of its residents, the Amritsar- ishnavarma’s biography: his early career as born engineering student , an intellectual intermediary between Euro- assassinated colonial official Sir William Cur- pean and Indian traditions of thought, his ex- zon Wyllie at a reception in Kensington. periences navigating dissident diasporic net- Three-quarters of a century later, in 1985, works, and finally his efforts to theorise an the Greater London Council authorised the „ethics of dynamite“ in service of the eman- placing of a blue plaque – the customary pub- cipation of India. Each of these studies, or- lic history marker for noting famous residents ganised across three chronological chapters, in the city – on 65 Cromwell Avenue. The stands alone for distinct interventions into plaque announces to visitors that „Vinayak discrete historiographical and conceptual de- Damodar Savarkar, 1883–1966, Indian Patriot bates. But together they cohere around one and Philosopher, lived here“.1 It is true that overriding methodological concern: a cau- Savarkar, now recognised as a major figure in tion against the fetish for „mobility“ Fischer- modern Indian history, lived at the site from Tiné sees as characterising much new work 1906–09 whilst studying law at Gray’s Inn. in global or transnational history – an en- But the fact that he and only he is marked on thusiasm for „entanglements, flows and con- the blue plaque reveals more about those who nections“ which in the study of anti-colonial campaigned for the plaque than the crowded thought has come to accord a „quasi-magical history of the House itself, which hosted fig- transformative power“ to cosmopolitan „in- ures as diverse as Lajpat Rai, , Asaf Ali and MK Gandhi himself. Savarkar is 1 English Heritage - SAVARKAR, Vinayak Damodar renowned as the father of „Hindutva“, the (1883–1966), http://www.english-heritage.org.uk /visit/blue-plaques/savarkar-vinayak-damodar-1883- right-wing Hindu nationalist ideology that 1966 / (18.01.2018).

© Clio-online, and the author, all rights reserved. terstitial“ spaces in London, , and and the elite nature of his global career is so on (p. 185). Fischer-Tiné is diplomatic in worth underlining. Krishnavarma’s experi- his critique, offering no explicit examples of ence in European capitals was that of privi- the scholarship he has in mind, but his call leged salon sociality, not of underground as- for rigorous contextualisation that addresses semblies or working mens’ clubs, which ex- not simply the fact of a thinker’s mobility but plains perhaps his ability to spurn the open- rather the „substantive quality“ (p. 93) of ness required of other itinerant radicals in this their interactions is welcome indeed. era. Krishnavarma was a political dissident Fischer-Tiné’s intervention is informed by but also a „self-made multi-millionaire“, well his observation that, although Krishnavarma known on the stock exchanges of Paris and spent decades abroad in the company of , owning shares in countless compa- some of the age’s most radical thinkers – nies from Moroccan railways to Berlin power socialists, anarchists, suffragettes and early plants (p. 57). Krishnavarma the capitalist is feminist thinkers – his own thought re- not, alas, a role explored in depth by Fischer- mained relatively „untouched“ by these in- Tiné, though surely this too would provide in- teractions. Krishnavarma’s eclectic alliances, sights into another constitutive aspect of In- for Fischer-Tiné, appear at times superficial dian modernity. or overdetermined by strategic considerations Fischer-Tiné’s research is expansive, and (pp. 72–3), and the libertarian attitudes of his facility in European and South Asian his bohemian company would not disturb languages a great asset for mapping Krish- his „quasi-brahmanical habits“ (p. 86). Ev- navarma’s transcontinental wanderings. The idence for this is clear in practice (Krish- difficulties in taming the complexities of a navarma’s resilient social conservatism) but long life into a short biography become ap- also in his mode of political argument, which parent at points. One decision Fischer-Tiné for Fischer-Tiné was consolidated by the late has made to manage his archive and intro- 1890s and determined by his status as a „de- duce readers to an unfamiliar history is to voted acolyte“ (p. 88) to the radical liberal split the narrative historical component of a thinker – who, incidentally, chapter off from conceptual analysis or argu- has resided since 1903 in Highgate Cemetery. ment. But this has the effect, at times, of at- Krishnavarma’s fidelity to Spencer and his tributing Krishnavarma with a „dual person- brand of anti-statist critique – which attacked ality“, wherein for the first part of a chapter imperialism as both economically unsound we read about Shyamji the pragmatist, who and culturally retrogressive (p. 127) – en- navigates the vagaries of life and looks after courages Fischer-Tiné to position his sub- his interests, only to have him displaced in the ject as a „liberal revolutionary“, who sought second half by Shyamji the intellectual, ani- a „rational and universally valid ideologi- mated by the force and power of ideas. This is cal basis“ (p. 148) for militant resistance marked in Chapter Three, where we follow a to oppression. Fischer-Tiné deploys Krish- disgraced narcissist and marginalised exile in navarma’s endorsement of a Spencerian „vol- Paris and Geneva before meeting a pathbreak- untary outlawry“ (p. 152) to service a broader ing political thinker whose „rediscovery“ is historians’ offensive against outdated narra- „long overdue“ (p. 162). Is Krishnavarma tives of anti-colonial thought in India; in- propelled by individual humiliation, personal deed, this dismantling project is characteris- attacks or higher political ideals? Is he an op- tic of the Pathfinders series, edited by Dilip portunist, a facilitator, or an ideological in- Menon, of which this text forms part. For novator? These tensions remain unresolved Fischer-Tiné, Krishnavarma’s defence of vio- and perhaps cannot be. But some reflection lence constitutes a „third powerful language“ from Fischer-Tiné on the problems of biogra- (p. 164) besides culturalism and socialist- phy as genre – akin to the nuance with which internationalism, a radical perspective that he meditates on global history – would have can no longer be ignored. been interesting, especially around that fe- Fischer-Tiné reminds us that Shyamji was cund question of how we might think the con- no typical „moving revolutionary“ (p. 185), tingencies of life experience alongside the pol-

© Clio-online, and the author, all rights reserved. H. Fischer-Tiné: Shyamji Krishnavarma 2018-1-049 ished assertions of intellectual production. This is a minor tension in a book that offers much to lay readers of Indian history, special- ist students of South Asian revolutionary pol- itics, as well as those interested in the writ- ing of transnational histories more generally. Fischer-Tiné ends the biography with a nod to other aspects of Krishnavarma’s life and legacy which „still await serious scholarly treatment“ (p. 190), and certainly the ques- tion of „afterlives“ is prominent among these. For if Krishnavarma is not commemorated on Cromwell Avenue, one of the most tantalising aspects of the book’s conclusion is the reve- lation that in 2010 a replica of the Highgate house was constructed halfway across the world in Mandvi, the place of Krishnavarma’s birth in Gujarat, as part of a 52-acre memo- rial site devoted to the recently-resuscitated „freedom fighter“.2 Fischer-Tiné speculates on what this twenty-first century interest in Shyamji signifies: the right-wing project to claim anti-colonial figures outside Congress- dominated historical narratives, or indeed the regional appeal of a militant nationalist-cum- global capitalist in ’s „vibrant Gujarat“. Figures like Hemant Padhya (p. xxviii) – the UK-based Krishnavarma enthu- siast who campaigned for the return of his hero’s ashes from Geneva to Mandvi – of- fer compelling insight into the public lives of anti-colonial histories and their unconven- tional archives. Fischer-Tiné sets an invalu- able foundation for continued conversations, securing Krishnavarma as a vital case study for thinking about Indian political modernity and anti-colonial thought in a global context.

HistLit 2018-1-049 / Chris Moffat über Fischer-Tiné, Harald: Shyamji Krishnavarma (Pathfinders). New Delhi 2014, in: H-Soz-Kult 29.01.2018.

2 Shree Shyamji Krishna Varma Memorial - About Kranti Teerth, http://www.krantiteerth.org/about- the-memorial.html / (18.01.2018).

© Clio-online, and the author, all rights reserved.