Our cover features a 1967 chromolithograph portrayal of Bharat Mata (Mother India) made by artist V. A. Sapar, entitled “The Motherland.” Used courtesy of Sumathi Ramaswamy and reprinted by permission of the J. P. S. Uberoi and Patricia Uberoi Collection, New Delhi.
Read as companion pieces, our first two articles provide a comparative, cross-disciplinary, and cross-regional look at the way in which pamphlets provoke or legitimize political violence. Historian SuklaSanyal examines the circulation and rhetoric of anticolonial pamphlets issued by revolutionary terrorists in early twentieth-century Bengal. Sanyal identifies the unflinching, anticolonial Bengali newspaper Jugantar as the most influential precursor to the pamphlets. After British authorities shut down the newspaper in 1908 on sedition charges, revolutionary pamphlets—published anonymously and in fleetingly irregular fashion—did much to promote the vitality of the terrorist movement among Bengalis. The pamphleteers broadened their rhetoric with figures, themes, and motifs drawn from Hindu religion, mythology, and...
