The Mouse-Trap Moment

THE DENOUEMENT:

He took off his coat, apparently with some effort, and he turned to put it on a chair, and then before they realised what had happened they were startled to see him stagger and fall heavily to the ground. While taking off his coat Chandra had managed to swallow the contents of a bottle that was still clasped in his hand. Ashenden put his nose to it. There was a very distinct odour of almonds.

For a little while they looked at the man who lay on the floor. Félix was apologetic.
‘Will they be very angry?’ he asked nervously.
‘I don’t see that it was your fault,’ said Ashenden. ‘Anyhow, he can do no more harm. For my part I am just as glad he killed himself. The notion of his being executed did not make me very comfortable.’

The epiphany:
‘Il est pris,’ she gasped.
‘Il est mort,’ said Ashenden.
‘Dead! He took the poison. He had the time for that. He’s escaped you after all.’
‘What do you mean? How did you know about the poison?’
‘He always carried it with him. He said that the English should never take him alive.’

The twisted tail:
‘What are they going to do with his things?’
‘I don’t know. Why?’
Then she said something that confounded Ashenden. It was the last thing he expected.

‘He had a wrist-watch I gave him last Christmas. It cost twelve pounds. Can I have it back?’

When W Somerset Maugham set out to write the Ashenden stories, published in 1927, based on and embellishing his expe­riences as an intelligence agent during World War I, he had not planned to redefine espionage fiction. But Ashenden did just that and Maugham had the good sense to not write another story cycle or novel in that genre (although rumour has always had it that none other than Winston Churchill had persuaded him to say no more). That left Ashenden its status intact—and inspired Graham Greene and Eric Ambler. What it also did was give the spy story verisimilitude, showing readers how boring and often thrill-less a spy’s life could actually be. But these stories, written in the Interwar Years, also introduced a more complicated moral­ity, more than a touch of grey, to paint over the black-and-white of an earlier era. Ashenden did not, after all, wish to see Chandra Lal executed, perhaps because he pitied the Indian who seemed to be genuinely in love with the woman being used to lure him to France. Chandra’s lover Giulia Lazzari, who gives the story its title, does not want him to cross Lake Geneva from Lausanne and come to his arrest or execution. She tries unsuccessfully to warn him off. But when he is indeed dead, she does not see the point in not retrieving the £12 watch she had given him.

But on another Indian Independence Day, we owe a qualita­tively different debt to Maugham. Not only is this an underdone chapter of our history, but its fictional treatment is rarer still. There are several reasons for this, of which four will suffice here:

◗ The mainstream, post-1919 narrative of the non-violent struggle had relegated the study of ‘revolutionary terrorism’ to the historian’s backburner. The revolutionaries did one day en­ter the standard history textbook, albeit still as an afterthought.

◗ When the story of revolutionary terrorism was told, promi­nence was given to domestic actors, with Indian revolution­aries abroad neglected for a second time. They became the outliers among outliers.

◗ Our erstwhile colonisers never had any reason to publicise the activities of Indian revolutionaries in Europe, certainly to keep them from assuming inspiring dimensions in India but, more immediately, to keep the international focus on Germany and its intrigues against the British Empire during World War I.

◗ Since Germany had played such a key role in the plots involving Indian revolutionaries, much of the details needed to write this history had remained hidden away in German archives, hardly accessed for most of the last century or since.

Thus, quite a lot came to be written about India House in Lon­don and the Ghadar Party in North America—at that time the most important centre of Indian revolutionary activity on foreign soil—and the pathways and plotlines that connected them to events and individuals in India. However, the travels and travails of Indian freedom fighters in continental Europe during World War I—some of whom were evacuees of India House and/or close­ly linked to Ghadar and/or Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar—are almost never talked about.

The irony could not be starker. It was on the continent of Europe that the fate of India’s revolutionary road to freedom was being decided in 1914-19, with Berlin as its thinking head and beating heart.

Although the primary concern was the dissemination of nationalist literature among the Indian troops in Europe and the revolutionaries trying to turn them, soon the British and the French concluded that the soldiers’ morale was too low to be energised into nationalist activity

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One name intricately associated with the watch and hunt of Indian revolutionaries in Britain and Europe is John Arnold Wallinger, who headed the Indian Political Intelligence Office (IPIO) from 1909 to 1916 and worked closely with erstwhile Dha­ka police commissioner Robert Nathan in the IPIO’s early days. He was originally posted in the Bombay CID. Wallinger’s name has far less recall in India than that of William C Hopkinson, the Delhi-born police officer who spoke fluent Hindi but little Pun­jabi and yet had successfully infiltrated the Ghadar movement while working for Canadian immigration in British Columbia and was assassinated by Mewa Singh in a Vancouver court in 1914. According to Richard J Popplewell’s Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire, 1904- 1924 (1995), “the first book to appear on the British intelligence operations based both in India and London, which defended the Indian Empire against subversion during the first two decades of the twentieth century,” the Indian intelligence network set up by Wallinger “was not much smaller than the European intelligence operations of the Secret Service Bureau, let alone those of the War Office.” Moreover, Wallinger “already controlled agents operat­ing in Switzerland, which was to become an important centre of German intrigue, and was an obvious point of entry for Allied agents into Germany. There were few, if any, secret service officers in 1914 whose experience of the Continent could match that of Wallinger, or who, like he, had cultivated friendly relations with the Paris political police, the Sûreté.”

It was Wallinger who had recruited Maugham and became the inspiration for R, the spymaster who gives Ashenden his commis­sion. Once war broke out, Wallinger, of course, was no longer chas­ing only Indian revolutionaries. But he needed reinforcements of officers from India to work on the continent where several of the Indians who left Britain had relocated. And yet, “Wallinger had not prepared for a war with Germany, since he had not ex­pected any increase in the activities of Indian revolutionaries in Europe. In June 1914 the Department of Criminal Intelligence [DCI] reported on ‘The future of Indian nationalist agitation in Europe’. They concluded that terrorism had lost ground while constitutional nationalism had gained in strength.” That was premature. Although the primary concern was the dissemina­tion of nationalist literature among the Indian troops in Europe and the revolutionaries trying to turn them, soon the British and the French concluded that the soldiers’ morale was too low to be energised into nationalist activity. In any case, the Sûreté had warned off Madame Bikaji Cama in Paris and expelled SR Rana to Martinique. But despite terrorism losing ground in India, revolu­tionaries abroad were increasingly involved in complex conspira­cies with the Germans to both ship arms to their counterparts at home as well as to plot invasions of British India.

Wallinger was aware, for instance, of Chempakaraman Pillai’s contact with the German consul in Zurich in September 1914 and his departure for Berlin thereafter. But Wallinger “had not set up a network of agents inside Germany, where the Indian national­ist movement had barely existed before September 1914, when the Indians and the Germans established an Indian revolution­ary committee, attached to the German General Staff in Berlin. British intelligence only learned that this had happened in May 1915.” This was the so-called Berlin Committee, subsequently the Indian Independence Committee, that was to play the most central role in the ‘Hindu-German Conspiracy’ of attempting to trigger revolution across India during the war.

The Berlin committee’s leading members, apart from Pillai, were Virendranath Chattopadhyaya (aka Chatto, a survivor from Shyamji Krishna Varma’s India House), Jnanendra Das Gupta (a chemist then studying in Berlin), Abinash Bhattacharya (another chemist then studying at Halle-Wittenberg and with Anushilan Samiti antecedents), and Abdul Hafiz. They were joined by Lala Har Dayal and Tarak Nath Das, both prominent revolutionaries of pre-war vintage.

The German calculations ran deep although not always in sync with ground realities. The collapse of Ghadar in Punjab in 1915 had left the Germans handicapped. By April 1915, the Annie Larsen plot, the primary offence in the 1917 ‘Hindu-German Conspiracy Trial’ in San Francisco, to ship arms to India had also failed. But Franz von Papen, the German military attaché in the US and future and last chancellor of Weimar Germany, arranged for a second shipment. These arms too never reached India (and Bagha Jatin would die in September after being fatally shot while waiting for the German guns on the Balasore coast). The Germans and their Indian co-conspirators had been betrayed by Baltic- German double agents working for the Czar and his British allies. One such double agent, probably based in Batavia and code­named Oren—apart from a German planter named Vincent Kraft who would turn out to be the most important Batavian catch for the British—was instrumental in exposing the gun-running aspect of the ‘Hindu-German Conspiracy’. Oren, who was never identified, also passed on information about Bagha Jatin’s associate MN Roy’s meetings with Germans in the area.

Despite this already mounting succession of failures, the Ger­mans estimated that British India was still ripe for revolution. There were three main reasons for this. One, Bengal at this time was in the grip of such violence unleashed by revolutionary ter­rorism that it was ungovernable; two, Ghadar had collapsed in Punjab but not yet in the US, Canada and the Far East; and three, the Germans were certain that if Ottoman Turkey were to enter the war on the side of the Central Powers, Indian Muslims would join any effort at subversion. This would also trigger a tribal uprising in the North-West Frontier and end Afghan neutrality in the war while simultaneous subversion could be carried out in the British satellites of Persia and Egypt.

On the eve of the war, the Auswärtiges Amt, then the imperial German foreign office and still the federal foreign ministry, set up the Intelligence Bureau for the East, or Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient, to be headed by Baron Max von Oppenheim, diplomat, archaeologist, orientalist and a member of the Jewish-German Oppenheim banking family. His most prominent successor would be Eugen Mittwoch, perhaps the most famous German Orientalist of his day and an Orthodox Jew who established mod­ern Islamic studies in Germany. But while Oppenheim worked closely with Egyptians, Persians (via Wilhelm Wassmuss, the notorious adventurer, romantic and egotist known as the ‘German Lawrence’ or ‘Wassmuss of Persia’), Ghadar, Jugantar, and especially the Berlin Committee, he laid down the protocol that there should be no direct contact between German officials and the Indians. This caution was thrown to the winds after Oppenheim’s departure in 1915, thereby helping the Allies impli­cate Germany directly in the Indian plots but also adding to the archival evidence of what had transpired.

The Nachrichtenstelle’s problem was the absence of Indians in Germany who could lead the revolutionary committee they had set up in Berlin. But soon, the “Germans did, however, procure the services of Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, who had been a prominent if ineffective figure in pre-war revolutionary circles in London and Paris. The situation improved in January 1915 when Har Dayal arrived in Berlin, along with the prominent Muslim member of the Ghadr Party, Maulvi Barakat Allah [Barkatullah].” (Intelligence and Imperial Defence)

AN ESSAY CANNOT EXPLORE THE ENTIRETY OF wartime Indo-German activity. So, it is time to look at the Indian who assumed a leading role at this point. Besides, his life and afterlife drive home the point about how neglected this chapter of Indian history is.

Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, aka Chatto, born in October 1880, was Sarojini Naidu’s younger brother. Sent to Oxford in 1902, he began spending sufficient time at India House to become closely acquainted with both Krishna Varma and VD Savarkar and at one time worked for Krishna Varma’s Indian Sociologist. In a fascinating but tragic and largely unsung life, he moved from London (after the smoking out of India House) to Paris, settled down in Germany and recruited Indian students for the Berlin Committee, fled to Stockholm with the committee’s work as the war ended, landed in Moscow and got a job later at Leningrad’s Academy of Science, and finally perished in Stalin’s purges.

Unlike India House in London or the Ghadar Party in North America—then the most important centre of Indian revolutionary activity on foreign soil— the activities of Indian freedom fighters in continental Europe during World War I are almost never talked about

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There was hardly any biographical account of this man that did justice to his years in continental Europe before Nirode K Barooah’s Chatto: The Life and Times of an Indian Anti-Impe­rialist in Europe (2004), a product of extensive research in German archives. What distinguished him from Gandhi, Nehru, the Lal- Bal-Pal trio, and even the post-World War I Har Dayal, according to Barooah, was that “Chatto… never made any compromises with imperialism, apart from using the German imperial power against British imperialism in India during WWI, declaring at the same time his own anti-imperialism.” While that was never a very original formulation, it also underscored the paradox of the Indian revolutionary in Europe. But the “effectiveness of his propaganda against the British in India in the foreign press, and his political activities in Europe before, during, and after WWI, remained a constant thorn in the side of the British government, and the British Secret Service made strenuous efforts until 1931, in Switzerland, Sweden, and Germany to capture or kill him.”

MAUGHAM’S CHANDRA LAL IS BELIEVED TO be Chatto. And of the many attempts and planned attempts on his life, one stood out that inspired the plot of ‘Giulia Lazzari’. Exploiting Chatto’s relations with an interned English woman named Hilda Howsin, a British agent and assassin named Donald Gullick invited Chatto to Zurich with the intention of luring him to the French, or Italian, border to kill him. But having drawn the attention of the Swiss police—neutral Switzerland rather zealously arrested and expelled Allied operatives—Gullick was arrested along with Chatto in Zurich on November 18, 1915. Chatto was released in December and unlike Chandra Lal, still in possession of his life. Maugham was also tracking Chatto in Switzerland although his primary concern was the Khedive, the viceroy of Ottoman Egypt.

Chatto was instrumental in legitimising Mahendra Pratap—a landlord from the United Provinces who convinced the Germans in Switzerland that he was an important Indian royal by refusing to deal with any­one below the Kaisar—that landed the latter a place in the Niedermayer–Hentig Expedition (1915-16), aka the Kabul Mis­sion, to encourage the Emir to end his neu­trality by declaring, first, full independence and then, war on British India. It led to the establishment of the Provisional Govern­ment of India in Kabul. This project too was ultimately a failure but it was linked to another—subversion in southern Persia organised by Wassmuss. His mission inter­rupted by the British, Wassmuss would flee but only after leaving behind a tome of subversive literature in Indian languages and a code book that would help the British crack German diplomatic correspondence. “The combined threat from Afghanistan and Persia was particularly serious at this time because of the strain put on India by the war and because of the terrorist problems in Bengal,” writes Popplewell. The Brit­ish were evacuating from Gallipoli by the end of 1915 and a few months later would surrender with their colours to the Turks at Kut. But with the Kabul Mission having broken up a month before the Kut surrender, the empire was saved.

Wassmuss and Har Dayal, who had joined the former in Persia, reportedly did not get along and this contributed to the German failure. However, a more pertinent cause was the German miscalculation in backing the Deobandi project of an Islamic state in India, keeping in mind Muslim sympathy for the Caliph. While the Muslim socialists and largely Hindu revolu­tionaries could work together, non-Muslim Indian soldiers as well as most of the revolutionaries could not really be enthused by the idea of an Islamised India.

Betrayal, as always, sank the Indo-German projects, which in­cluded assassination plots on the continent. Mahendra Pratap’s secretary Harish Chandra, on his return from America, was arrested by the Special Branch in London. According to Basil Thompson, famous London policeman and in some ways Wallinger’s bête noire though they worked well together, the British got “very definite evidence… of the extent of the German-Indian conspiracy” as late as October 1915. Earlier, they had allowed Har Dayal’s associate Gobind Lal to reach Liverpool in March 1915 and then allowed him to return to America in April. Thompson and Nathan had learned only in end-1915 that Lal was in England in connection with an assassination plot against Lord Kitchener, the war secretary. The Germans had already established a small cell of Indian revolutionar­ies in Britain. But now, Harish Chandra gave Thompson and Nathan not only information about the Berlin Committee but also details of the Kabul Mission. “Were it not for Harish Chandra’s confession the British might not even have known its existence. Though a fail­ure, it was potentially the most dangerous of the German-Indian plots based in Europe. Harish Chandra gave further reliable information that at least two other missions had been sent off—one to Japan and one to Singapore— and also gave some information about the activities of the Ghadr Party in California,” writes Popplewell.

While these revolutionaries’ complete failure—thanks to incompetence, rivalries, betrayal, and often the impracticality of the Indo-German plots—was always an important factor for the neglect, the British, too, had no interest in publicising the danger they faced

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Harish Chandra kept working as an agent for Wallinger in Switzerland and even in mid-1916 was supplying the Brit­ish with reliable information although by this time the Afghan mission, the scheme for a mutiny in British-Indian Burma, as well as the supply of arms to Bengal had fallen through.

But Harish Chandra provided the evi­dence that the Germans were not done yet. “The Indian revolutionaries in Swit­zerland gave him two glass tubes which he was to carry into India. The first tube contained a letter from the Kaiser to the Indian Princes; and the second contained a summary of the Berlin Indian Committee’s aims. This document showed that the Germans were now con­centrating on a vain project of inciting the Indian Buddhists.” If the Afghan plot posed a real threat to the Indian empire and the Persian plan was far-fetched, this last was ludicrous. By the end of 1916, the British had concluded that “the best policy was to encourage the Germans to waste as much money as possible upon” such plots.

With the unravelling of the Indo-German conspiracies and the ending of the war, Chatto’s life in Berlin had become difficult. Post-war, the Germans allowed him to stay only on condition of his desisting from political activities. He tried internationalising the Indian question from Stockholm and thereafter from his Bolshevik refuge. Yet, as Nehru wrote, “Chatto was not, I believe, a regular communist, but he was communistically inclined.” The Bolsheviks were never sure about him. Moreover, his connections with Trotsky and the fact that he had become a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) could not have endeared him to Stalinist Russia. After all, the dicta­tor purged almost the whole of the KPD in the Great Terror. Apart from the scholarly neglect of German sources and MN Roy “minimizing the importance of Chatto’s work in Berlin” in his memoirs, Barooah blames Indian communists most for the neglect of his memory in India: “[F]or many Indian Communists, the study and research of Chatto’s life and work has re­mained taboo. Although the Soviet Union, throughout its existence, kept on feeding the Indian government concocted stories about the circumstances of Chatto’s death, it has always been an open secret that he was liquidated in Stalin’s mass purges.”

There was dishonour even in death. On the night of July 16-17, 1937, Chatto was arrested and never seen again. In late July, Nehru promised ACN Nambier, journalist, national­ist, later diplomat and at that time Chatto’s brother-in-law, to find out what happened. In September 1956, more than a half-year after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, Chatto’s last partner Lidiya Karunovskaya, whom he had married in the Soviet Union, got a certificate declaring that the case against “Chatopadaya Virendranat Agornatovich” had been withdrawn and the verdict of September 2, 1937 lifted. In March 1958, she was given a death certificate stating Chatto had died on April 6, 1943. This too was a lie, 20-odd years after his disappearance. It was only after the fall of the Soviet Union and the revelations from the KGB archives via Leonid Mitrokhin that the truth was revealed: Chatto had been sentenced to death on September 2, 1937 and executed by firing squad on the same date.

STANDARD WORKS ON THE FIRST WORLD WAR do not refer to the Indian revolutionaries at all,” writes Popplewell. And we do not need him to tell us about their neglect in India itself as they lost out to both the Gandhian mainstream and the revolutionaries of World War II vintage like Subhas Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army. But he does also say, correctly, “Existing works on the Indian revolutionaries of the First World War have done little to restore their memory from oblivion”. While these revolutionaries’ com­plete failure—thanks to incompetence, rivalries, betrayal, and simply the impracticality of their plans—was always an impor­tant factor for the neglect, the British, too, “had no interest in pub­licizing the problems they had faced as a result of the Indian ter­rorism during the First World War. Thereafter, they deliberately underplayed its seriousness.” But the victory over revolutionary terrorism the Raj won did not come easy and the very fact that it needed an extensive worldwide intel­ligence network is proof enough. While they were active, they were a real threat given the thinned-out army in India with most of it in Europe. They had resourceful backers in the Germans. At the very least, the revolutionaries scared the British. Without them there would have been no Defence of India Act, 1915.

The dilemma of the founding logic of “My enemy’s enemy is my friend”, which drove Indian revolutionaries close to the Germans, was always the question of ‘Then what?’ Had the Central Powers won the war, would they have let India be? If the Indian revolutionaries had suc­ceeded but the Central Powers still lost the war as they did, would the British have let India be? A German defeat might still have spawned the Nazis and then what would be the moral legacy of the Indian revolution? The one good thing that a German victory in World War I might have done was precluding the Nazis and perhaps keeping the “Germany that was” alive—a Germany where both Oppenheim and Mittwoch were Jewish; a Germany which could produce Werner Otto von Hentig (the Hentig of the Niedermayer-Hentig Expedition), a soldier and diplomat who, at great personal risk, would help thousands of Jews escape to Palestine from the Third Reich. The Germany of World War I was still an untainted Germany. Maybe there was no shame in taking its help against another coloniser.

These Indians, so far from home, were patriots. That should be the last judgment on them. Everyone may have their reasons but whichever side of a war one’s on, there is one verdict for loyalty and another for treachery. The only Indian villains were the traitors. But then what do we know of what they too perhaps endured?

About The Author

Sudeep Paul

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