This paper, The Spectre of Communism: Print Surveillance in the Working-Class Movement of Late Colonial Calcutta (1920–1947), tries to address the ways in which the British Government tried to regulate activism and revolutionary work of trade union workers in the late colonial urban setting of Calcutta through employment of surveillance tactics. This work, by Dr Manaswini Sen focuses primarily on the meticulous control of the literature that was composed by trade unionists to spread awareness among the workers about their rightful prerogatives and by extension anticolonial agenda. A study in the structures of colonial surveillance of print in the public sphere leads to better understanding of surveillance and censorship laws in postcolonial and contemporary India establishing the relevance and temporality of colonial surveillance.

Abstract:

This paper examines how the empire’s hysteria against militant trade unionism and its anti-colonial essence lay at the root of the colonial state’s proliferation of surveillance apparatus in late colonial Bengal. It primarily focuses on how the state censored, proscribed, and surveilled the literary output of trade unionists and other working-class propaganda materials to establish that it was a systematic effort to curb indigenous anti-colonial epistemologies. The article explores the legal provisions implemented to constrain the import, production, and dissemination of these materials as an ideological onslaught against the growing threat from militant and leftist nationalism. Through a thorough review of newspapers, proscribed journals, pamphlets, banners, and slogans produced between 1920 and 1940 within the urban working-class movement of Calcutta, this paper highlights how surveillance transcended being a mere tool of colonial oppression and became an integral part of the empire’s political rhetoric in the subcontinent. The study further evaluates the varying scales of spatiality in imperial surveillance and its policies to comprehend the transforming nature of governance and ordering in the closing decades of British rule in India.

Explanation in layperson’s terms

This paper explains how the British colonial government feared militant trade unions and workers’ movements in Bengal. To control them, it closely watched, censored, and banned workers’ newspapers, pamphlets, and slogans. It shows that surveillance became a key way the empire tried to suppress anti-colonial ideas and stay in power.

Future Research Plan: 

She is currently working on a project titled, ‘Wounds’: Sculpting Loss and Despair – a Dialogue between Hore and Moore, funded by the Henry Moore Foundation, Leeds, UK, where she is exploring possible methodological interventions into the history of empire through the practice of sculpting of British sculptor, Henry Moore and the Bengali artist, Somnath Hore.

The Link to the Article: 

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/abs/10.3828/lhr.2025.13