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The Terrorist and his Jailor: The Conundrum of Friendship and Intimacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 April 2018

Durba Ghosh
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Abstract

Through the framework of “friendship” defined by Judith Butler, Leela Gandhi, and Vanessa Smith, this essay tracks the relationship between Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty, a Bengali revolutionary terrorist who spent three decades in British jails in colonial India and Francis Lowman, a police officer who was responsible for his imprisonment. Informed by Chakrabarty’s autobiography, the essay shows that terrorism and intimacy were closely linked. Even though the revolutionary terrorist and jailor opposed one another in violent ways, these relationships were grounded in mutual recognition and built on what (following Butler) is called the “fundamental sociality of colonialism.”

Keywords

BritainIndiaterrorismintimacyfriendship
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 42 , Special Issue 1: The Private Lives of Empire: Emotion, Intimacy, and Colonial Rule , April 2018 , pp. 102 - 119
Copyright
© 2018 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

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Footnotes

*

Durba Ghosh is a Professor in the History Department and the Director of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919-1947 (2017), Sex and the Family in Colonial India: the Making of Empire (2006) and with Dane Kennedy, the co-editor of Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (2006).

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