THE FOREIGN HAND OF FRIENDSHIP

In his new book, Rebels Against the Raj, historian Ramachandra Guha tells us stories of seven Indian freedom fighters who all came from the West

- Shreevatsa Nevatia

Benjamin Guy Horniman came to Calcutta in 1904. Unlike his colleagues at The Statesman—British journalists who went to the races in the afternoon and the Bengal Club after—Horniman preferred keeping his nose to the grindstone. He travelled widely. He wrote about rural suffering and Hindu-Muslim strife. Protesting the partition of Bengal, he walked barefoot on Calcutta’s streets, ‘dressed in a white dhoti, kurta and chadder like an Indian patriot’. In 1919, when he was editor of the Bombay Chronicle, he again stood out. As Mahatma Gandhi arrived at Chowpatty to protest the Rowlatt Bills, only ‘one Englishman’ was seen in the big, bustling crowd—Horniman.

Reading Ramachandra Guha’s Rebels Against the Raj, it becomes clear that Horniman was more catalyst than he was exception. Deported for ‘openly, explicitly, identifying with the nationalists against the Raj’, the campaign for his return to India finally came to be championed by the likes of H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. “But he was still kept out for seven years,” says Guha, speaking to us over Zoom. Horniman’s dissent, Guha feels, interrupts the colonial narrative of supremacy: “We must remember there were only 200,000 British people ruling this large, diverse and densely populated country. Because they were so few, they needed to be convinced they were innately superior to brown people—not just economically, technologically or politically but morally, ethically, and culturally, too.”