As hundreds of thousands of seamen criss-crossed the oceans in British ships in the Interwar period, instances of subaltern ‘smugglers’ aboard created a novel, radical problem especially as anti-colonial sentiments spread in the colonies. Shagnick Bhattacharya discusses two unexplored examples from South Asia to highlight a wider problem confronting the Imperial Government, and their response.
The rise of the ‘lascar system’ of political networks active during the interwar period, which Raza and Zacharia described as the movement of men, printed matter and arms across the world through South Asian seamen (known as ‘lascars’) employed in the merchant navies of several countries made them the ‘key players in the politics of the interwar world, and especially in a still-colonised India’. In this post, I intend to pick up two unexplored historical sources and incidents in the context of the movement of printed matter and arms — one from the archives, and the other based on a newspaper report — to show how lascars would have gotten away with indulging in any activities considered illegal by the imperial state owing to their position of subalternity, as well as to try to imagine the extent and intensity of such activities.
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On 10 February 1921, the police boarded the British steamship Kandahar in Singapore and arrested 17 lascars on board. Arriving from New York, a ‘trunk full of seditious literature and badges’ were discovered on board, allegedly belonging to the lascars who were arrested. While the case is one among many examples of lascars playing an active part in smuggling revolutionary literature in line with Hyslop’s research, what makes it more interesting is that in this case all 17 lascars were let go on a technical point, without any punishment. While the ship was on its way from Colombo and Penang, the Captain’s suspicions led him to discover the stash of revolutionary literature being carried by the lascars. The only sensible thing that he could do on a ship in international waters is to seize the contraband and wait till he reached authorities on land, and that is exactly what the Captain did. But, in legal terms, this implied that when the Kandahar reached the port, the literature was under the Captain’s possession and not the accused lascars, so they could not be prosecuted for trying to smuggle it. As the acting Attorney General in Singapore stated: ‘it is not an offence cognisable by the Courts of the Colony for persons to have seditious literature in their possession on the high seas. It is only an offence when a person imports them into or has them in his possession in the Colony.’
And yet, had the Captain allowed the lascars to retain the literature until the ship reached port, it is entirely possible that they would have disposed of the evidence by throwing it overboard or destroying it in some other way. Not only that, but owing to their position of subalternity and, more often than not — illiteracy, a lascar caught with seditious literature written in a European language could always just claim that he did not understand it, taking the guilt and responsibility of such a crime away from him in the eyes of law. Hence, the arrested lascars were not only acquitted despite members of the ship’s crew coming forward to give evidence but their extra-territoriality provided sufficient cover to smuggle revolutionary literature.
This case underscores the likelihood of the existence of a well-organised smuggling network for revolutionary literature from (in this case) the United States to India; it also highlights the strategic agency of lascars in evading colonial surveillance. This, in turn, reveals the broader geopolitical implications of lascar participation in global resistance movements, demonstrating the far-reaching impact of subaltern agency in challenging imperial control which suddenly found itself powerless to do anything about such situations.
In fact, following this incident, authorities in London came up with proposals like appointing Consuls in US ports that would notify port authorities in India if any suspicions were aroused about a lascar on a ship, and for ships to be examined at their port of arrival in India. ‘Impracticable’, was the Secretary (Mr S. P. O’Donnell, Home Department (Political) in Simla) to Government of India’s clear response; the suggestions would be too costly to implement. Moreover, as he pointed out, since the majority of the 17 men arrested from the Kandahar were unknown to the police, they would probably have passed an inspection at the port of arrival in India anyway. All that could be done, said the official, ‘is to rely on the co-operation of the Masters of vessels, and get them to exercise vigilance over their Indian crews’. The Board of Trade helplessly replied that they already ‘rely upon the masters of British ships reporting wherever they discover the possession of seditious literature’, and that there is nothing further that the Board can do.
This rare glimpse of subaltern agency challenging and undermining colonial authority illustrates the immense potential and significance for a globalised labour force to bring about political change ‘from below’, even if only in the context of the Indian subcontinent.
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We also find evidence of lascars carrying guns on their person and, inevitably, using them when the situation arose. On an October night in 1922, for instance, two lascars — Ali Khan and Melbis Gorie — were quarrelling over a woman in Liverpool when, as things got heated, both of them reportedly drew their revolvers on each other, and fired. Khan got shot in his wrist while Gorie was severely injured with a shot to his chest. Of course, this incident occurs just about four years after the end of the First World War in 1918, and it is indeed possible that the two men were veterans, but even so what are the odds of not just one but two random lascars possessing a gun at any given moment, and how and why would they have it? Based on Colt’s price list published in December 1919, a revolver would have cost anywhere from US$31.50 to US$52 (£1 = US$4.40 in 1922). Assuming a similar (if not higher) price for the same guns in Britain considering purchasing power parity (i.e., £1 in the UK would buy fewer goods and services than the equivalent amount in US$ in the US at the nominal exchange rate), for a lascar who ordinarily earned just £1 17s. 6d. per month, and given that even a serang would earn no more than £4 10s. a month, how feasible would it be for him to be able to own a gun? Clearly there is something far more important going on here and a larger phenomenon is at play than what little the newspaper report about this incident reveals.
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Indeed, by the late 1920s, as Hyslop suggests, it seems clear that lascars had been successful not only in setting up an international small-scale arms trade but also in creating global networks in which guns and drugs circulated reciprocally. It was in fact not uncommon for authorities to find and arrest lascars indulging in smuggling arms or drugs with there being cases like: in 1929 aboard the S.S. Mantua, being discovered with ‘no less than 40 automatic pistols, a revolver, over 4,000 rounds of ammunition and illegal drugs’ when they arrived in Bombay; in 1928 in Hong Kong with 46 automatic pistols and nearly 5,000 rounds of ammunition aboard S.S. Jeypore; and, ex-lascar Abid Hussain who lived in Calcutta in 1920s and was believed to have been a close associate of the Indian Communist leader M. N. Roy, as well as being responsible for smuggling an estimated 15,000 handguns into India.
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