The spy met with Indian communists and a Khilafatist newspaper editor to secure the interests of various parties, but at the heart of the meeting was an anti-imperialist agenda.
Communist International agent Charles Ashleigh. Photo: Tacoma Times, April 17, 1917.
A century ago, Bombay was abuzz with various types of anti-colonialists who sought to articulate their intellectual and political strategies, forge solidarities and exploit opportunities for active resistance. The British establishment was pushed into a state of high vigil by numerous threats on different fronts from Nationalists, Bolsheviks, Khilafatists and other agitators of different ideologies.
The colonial security establishment zealously tracked them and their activities and one particular incident was of special interest. It suggests an unusual meeting of interests in the complex matrix of anti-colonial and anti-imperial politics. Archival intelligence records of the Home Department (Political) of the Government of India from the period provide extensive details of this intriguing, unexplored incident and a highly secret meeting.
On the morning of September 19, 1922, a 30-year-old British man disembarked at Bombay port, having travelled by the SS Pilsna from Europe. Nothing of any particular concern was found in his baggage; the authorities did not search his person. The Bombay police had received cypher communications late on September 15 from the director of the Intelligence Bureau (DIB) to search his person “if a suitable pretext could be found”. On September 16, the DIB revealed that the man was carrying three letters for “three Bengali men.” Instructions specified, “…no other action other than placing him under secret surveillance is advisable.”
The very same day, further communications revealed that the Empire-wide endorsement of the man’s passport had been cancelled and the commissioner of police was to await instructions from the Bombay government. This cancellation was prompted by an urgent coded cable, dated September 13, from the Foreign Office to His Majesty’s Consul General in Marseilles requesting immediate action to track the man and prevent his landing in India. The interception did not take place.
The telegram from the Foreign Office on Charles Ashleigh’s visit to India. Photo: National Archives of India.
Hectic communications ensued between London, Simla and Bombay in the intervening period to ensure that the Bombay police also cancelled the Empire-wide endorsement on their end and removed him from the city.
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British Intelligence had it that Charles Ashleigh, aka John Ashworth, was a Communist International (Comintern) agent representing the Third International. He had left Berlin on August 25 following a meeting with M.N. Roy, the founder of the Communist Party of India (Tashkent) who was at the centre of the British establishment’s attention as part of its close watch of communists.
Ashleigh was travelling to India as a journalist carrying three letters of introduction: one for Muzaffar Ahmad of Calcutta, described as a “a new but prominent conspirator”, another for Khiran Chandra Roy, said to be an accountant in the AGs Office and a third for a P.N. Roy. (Another source reveals the third person to be Tejandranath (T.N.) Roy, the brother of barrister J.N. Roy and the second to be Kiranbehari Roy, the chief accountant of the Tata Assurance Company.)
The April 17, 1917 edition of the Takoma Times featuring an article on Charles Ashleigh.
Ashleigh had travelled from Trieste with a valid passport and was therefore allowed to land in Bombay. There was no provision to arrest him or search his person, as revealed by records of an internal enquiry into this incident the following year.
At the Bombay CID, Ashleigh claimed that he was travelling to India to write “some colour stuff…which sells readily in America”. Interestingly, he informed the police that Kipling’s Sea to Sea was the inspiration for his India tour and that he did not write political pieces, but “only what he saw.” As per the instructions given to the commissioner of Police, Ashleigh was allowed to stay in Bombay for a few days until he boarded the Kaiser-i-Hind on September 23.
Ashleigh checked into a hotel and surreptitiously conducted a few meetings, delivered the letters he was carrying and thereby became the first of several British Comintern emissaries to travel to India and establish direct contact with Indian communists. He did all this evading the watchful eyes of the Bombay police.
Indeed, a confidential report from the Bombay CID dated September 28 indicates that, “There was nothing suspicious about Ashleigh’s movements while in Bombay and so far as appeared on the surface he was what he alleged himself to be, a journalist who had come to write articles for the American press on India.”
Ashleigh had befriended a Major during his voyage, who had booked a room at the Majestic Hotel in Colaba where the “notorious communist” also stayed for the few days he stayed in Bombay. Ahmad, a founding member of the CPI who Ashleigh was supposed to have met on his trip, has written that en route, Ashleigh gave over the “letters, documents and surplus money” to the Major.
The money (800 pounds, which was revealed by the British spy Masood Ali Shah, Ahmad says) was for the travel of possible delegates for the upcoming Fourth Congress of the Comintern in Moscow. Ashleigh gave the police watchers the slip and attempted to meet Kiranbehari Roy who, as per Ahmad’s account, was scared and refused to meet him. Ashleigh then went to the offices of the controversial nationalist newspaper the Bombay Chronicle and met its editor Marmaduke Pickthall.
Pickthall was an interesting character who had converted to Islam and had become a kind of authority on the subject.
Earlier in April, Pickthall had addressed a public gathering at the Bombay Parsi Hall and urged Indian Muslims to support Turkey. The way he saw it, the Treaty of Sèvres had served to humiliate Turkey, take away its control of the holy cities of the Arabian peninsula and undermine the temporal and spiritual authority of the Ottoman Caliphate, thereby causing further divisions in the Muslim world. (These details are explored in great depth in the edited volume Marmaduke Pickthall: Islam and the Modern World.)
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Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, 1920. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/ The Bombay Chronicle.
The prominent writer, journalist, activist and Muslim convert had moved to Bombay in September, 1920 to take over the editorship of the Bombay Chronicle due to his dire financial condition and increasingly difficult circumstances back home. Jamie Gilham, a historian who has written on British Muslim converts and has a forthcoming biography of Pickthall, revealed to this writer in a telephone interview that “surveillance reports state that Pickthall met a senior manager of the paper in London in July, 1920,” adding that the previous editor B.G. Horniman may have also recommended him for the post. Horniman had been deported from India for his support of Indian nationalism.
Pickthall and his colleagues at the Islamic Information Bureau (IIB) had been under constant surveillance by British authorities for years. Dubbed as the “Woking Mosque gang”, they were seen as dangerous conspirators and he in particular was regarded as a “security risk” and “an enemy to Christendom”. His articles were attacked as anti-British propaganda and he was increasingly vilified.
During this period, Afghanistan had become an important location for anti-colonial agitators, aided by the young Amir Amanullah Khan’s anti-British expeditions. The famous hijrat exodus of pro-Turkish Indian Muslims to Afghanistan over the summer of 1920 added to the volatile situation. Some of these mujaharin or émigrés, found themselves in Tashkent and founded a Communist Party of India under the leadership of M.N. Roy in October that year. Driven by pan-Islamist, Khilafatist, Indian nationalist, anti-British and revolutionary egalitarian ideals, the motley group exemplified the complicated, intersecting and often contradictory political strands that coexisted in fractious balance.
Pickthall was a Disraelian conservative who considered Russia the biggest threat to the Empire. While there was a general disregard for communism amongst Muslims, some pan-Islamists agreed with Bolshevik anti-imperialism, their rhetoric on oppressed people and their support for Afghanistan and Turkey, despite the fraught tensions these associations were plagued with. For Pickthall though, an Empire man despite being seen as a “loyal enemy”, the ‘Red peril’ could be averted through a strong Turkey, supported by Britain. As regards Muslims, he argued, “It is not the love of the Bolsheviks, but the hatred and distrust of England (fast becoming general) which constitutes the real danger.”
It is against all these complex, intersecting strands that the secret, undetected meeting between Ashleigh and Pickthall at the offices of the Bombay Chronicle becomes particularly intriguing. Why did Pickthall meet Ashleigh? Ahmad speculates that they may have known each other from before.
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The July 31, 1922 edition of the Bombay Chronicle carrying an article detailing a public meeting presided over by Pickthall.
Fascinatingly, Gilham points to Pickthall’s old friend, fellow Turcophile and conscientious objector Arthur Field, a labour activist and later, founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), from which he broke away years later. During this period though, he befriended the British communist Shapurji Saklatvala and worked with M.N. Roy. Was Pickthall acting on behalf of his dear old friend? Despite Pickthall’s dislike for Russia, he is said to have praised Lenin’s call for liberating India and was encouraged by Moscow’s alliance with the Turkish nationalists. Was Pickthall’s secret meeting a nuanced, considered act in the complex, anti-colonial, pan-Islamic game?
Ahmad adds that Pickthall summoned trade union activist and communist leader S.A. Dange to the office on Ashleigh’s request. The British Comintern agent then conveyed the documents, instructions and money he had carried from Berlin to Dange.
A British Intelligence source in Europe had provided information of Ashleigh’s impending travel but they learnt of the meeting between Ashleigh and Pickthall only much later. Ahmad claims the source was George Slocombe, the British journalist and member of the CPGB who had facilitated Ashleigh’s trip to India. While this remains contentious, British Intelligence had, at the time, penetrated revolutionary networks successfully.
An outcome of this incident was heightened vigilance in the security establishment, embarrassment for the Bombay police and government and much discussion on the powers of search and seizure and arrest. This fascinating little incident threw the British establishment into a deeper state of paranoia, as it began to witness the unravelling of the Raj.
Gautam Pemmaraju is a Bombay-based writer and filmmaker with a special interest in Indian anti-colonial activists of the early 20th century.
SOURCE ; THE WIRE
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