Sinews of Panic and the Nerves of Empire: the Imagined State's Entanglement with Information Panic, India c.1880–1912

This is a narrative of events and panics in India in 1907: the fiftieth anniversary of 1857. After the East India Company's political ascendancy in 1757, the uprisings and insurrections of 1857 shook the very foundations of British rule in India. In the summer of 1907, several different strands of protest came together: the nearly all-India telegraph strike was barely over when a revolutionary terrorist network was unearthed, bringing the simmering political cauldron to the boil. The burgeoning swadeshi and boycott movement splintered, partly through the experience of Government repression, into political extremism within the Indian National Congress and revolutionary terrorism via secret societies. The growing radicalism within nationalist politics culminated in the split of the Congress at the meeting at Surat in 1907. Through this process the Indian National Congress changed from its constitutional and elite politics of reform into a more popular and mass-oriented organization. Though much has been written about this period of Indian politics, this paper delineates the larger international technological and informational entanglement through a case study of India, and in particular, Bengal.