366 Resisting Publics
to the connections forged in Cama’s salon that “Young Egypt” and “Young
Ireland” were usually mentioned along with “Young India” in Lounget’s
L’Humanité, which saw all of them as allied with Socialism against the
common enemy, imperialism.
aris had become the center of anti-British nationalist activism for P
the Indians after the Curzon-Wylie assassination, since the headquarters of
the “extremists” among the Indian expatriate community, Krishnavarma’s
India House, had been closed by the authorities. Most of its denizens left
England altogether when it became clear during the investigation that not
only had Dhingra lived there while planning the assassination but that he
had received, at the very least, moral support for his plan in that setting.
This move had made the Indians even closer to the Egyptians, as many
more Egyptian students were studying in France than in Britain. It is ironic
that Madame Cama brought together various sorts of “radicals” against
European governments in the same type of salon that initially attracted
Habermas’s interest in the constructive aspects of public discursive space.^27
Spreading the word: Congresses and newspapers
More than one nationalist paper was the beneficiary of Cama’s orga-
nizational ability. The Watani Party paper in Egypt, al-Liwa’, and its
European-language versions, The Egyptian Standard and L’Étandard
Egyptienne, often carried articles from Cama’s own Bande Mataram and
Krishnavarma’s Indian Sociologist, both banned Indian nationalist jour-
nals.^28 It also carried notes from the British socialist paper Justice and the
New York-based Gaelic American. A second Cama-financed paper, Talvar
[Sword], was based in Berlin and edited by Virendranath Chattopadhya, a
personal friend of both Madanlal Dhingra and Muhammad Farid.^29 With
the exception of Justice, all of these papers had to be printed outside of
the reach of British authorities in Geneva or other European cities, and
all—including Justice—were proscribed in India. Nonetheless, copies were
regularly found being smuggled into the colonies and al-Liwa’ and her
sister publications could be counted on to quote from them regularly.
n these papers we see an excellent example of Benedict Anderson’s I
imagined communities through print, as these papers not only shared