The Secret Lives of Yadhu Nath and Friends: Violence, Revolution, and Underground Politics in 1942 British India

On August 8th, 1942 the delegates of the Indian National Congress (INC)—a constitutional party led by Gandhi—ratified the Quit India Resolution, demanding the immediate termination of British rule in South Asia. Caught between a devastating war in Europe, and an impending mass revolution in the empire, the British state responded by arresting key INC leaders under the emergency Defence of India Rules, and by unleashing a series of draconian measures to crush all dissent. And yet, in the months that followed, the bustling cities and towns of British India were rocked by massive, violent unrest. Historians of the British Empire have long wondered why a movement directed by a non-violent political group led to such extensive devastation. While some have attributed the violence to spontaneous sentiments simmering to the surface in the face of state repression, others have argued that the INC was actually “taken over” by outside forces. Challenging established understandings of decolonization, this paper turns to the fluid boundaries and surprising entanglements between seemingly contradictory anti-colonial philosophies, and in so doing, brings to life a remarkable world of circulation, movement and secrecy in interwar India. It draws upon a local, multilingual archive—from recently declassified intelligence reports, fragmentary judicial testimonies, district police records, oral histories, and memoirs left behind by young nationalists, traveling revolutionaries and political fugitives—and argues that the constitutive contradiction of 20th century non-violent, anti-colonialism was that violence inevitably crept in.