Reading Revolutionaries: Texts, Acts, and Afterlives of Political Action in Late Colonial South Asia
2013; Routledge; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13688790.2013.823259
ISSN1466-1888
Autores Tópico(s)Indian History and Philosophy
ResumoAbstract This essay maps out the discursive and political trajectories of the 'revolutionary' in Indian historical and literary worlds. Focusing on the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army and related interwar Indian anticolonial agitators, this essay reflects on the lineages, breadth, and productivity of the term. By tracing the figure of the revolutionary, we show that its genealogy reflects a wide range of political allegiances, ethical concerns, and aesthetic protocols. 'Revolutionary' not only suggests Marxist roots, but also reveals anarchistic, nationalistic, reformist, and socialist beliefs. Moreover, in our analysis, 'revolutionary' often escapes the grasp of the merely political: its use in popular discourse also suggests debates about violence, modernism, propaganda, cosmopolitanism, and utopianism. Consequently, we argue for the importance of historical context for understanding revolutionary thought, which is sensitive to an active rejection of rigid political categories or spectra. Notes 1 Sanjay Seth, Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics: The Case of Colonial India, Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995. 2 Perhaps a partial list of names is called for: Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Giuseppe Mazzini, Arya Samaj Hindu reformers (including Lala Lajpat Rai), Leon Trotsky, Upton Sinclair, Auguste Vaillant, Herbert Spencer, Henry David Thoreau …. For a full list, a glance through Bhagat Singh's Jail Notebook is enlightening, as is Upton Sinclair's Cry for Justice (1915). 3 Leela Gandhi, 'Postcolonial Theory and the Crisis of European Man', Postcolonial Studies 10(1), 2007, pp 93–110. See also Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. 4 Claude Markovits, 'Indian Soldiers' Experiences in France during World War I: Seeing Europe from the Rear of the Front', in H. Liebau et al (eds), The World in World Wars: Experiences, Perceptions and Perspectives from Africa and Asia, Leiden: Brill, 2010, pp 29–53; Harald Fischer-Tiné, 'Indian Nationalism and the "World Forces": Transnational and Diasporic Dimensions of the Indian Freedom Movement on the Eve of the First World War', Journal of Global History 2, 2007, pp 325–344. For an especially beautiful collection of letters from Indian soldiers in World War I, see David Omissi (ed), Indian Voices of the Great War, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. 5 On this point, see Harald Fischer-Tiné, Sanskrit, Sociology, and Anti-Imperialism: The Life of Shyamaji Krishnavarma, forthcoming. 6 Kris Manjapra, M.N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism, New York: Routledge, 2010. See also his essay in this collection. 7 For a general sketch, see Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. For a detailed biography of Har Dayal, see Emily Brown, Har Dayal: Hindu Revolutionary and Rationalist, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975. 8 Where Roy would remain at a distance from the Indian nationalist movement, the HSRA was to a degree enmeshed in its machinations (see Kama Maclean's forthcoming A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text, London: Hurst & Co, 2013). JP, by contrast, chose to pressure the Indian National Congress to the left from within, forming the Congress Socialist Party in 1934, and remaining an important force on the Indian left through the 1970s. 9. Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh, 1920–1940, 2nd edn, London: Anthem Press, 2002, p 78; for more detail, see Maclean, A Revolutionary History, ch 5. 10 The relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism is the subject of long-standing academic conversations. For a representative sample, see David Hollinger, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006; Martha Nussbaum and Joshua Cohen (eds), For Love of Country? Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2006; Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, New York: W W Norton & Co, 2007. For a particularly smart and sustained critique of these texts, see Bruce Robbins, Perpetual War, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 11 Christopher Pinney, 'Photos of the Gods': The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India, London: Reaktion Books, 2004; Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 12 Kama Maclean, 'Imagining the Nationalist Movement: Revolutionary Metaphors in Imagery of the Freedom Struggle', Journal of Material Culture, forthcoming 2014. 13 Among a steadily growing body of work: Robert J C Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, London: Blackwell, 2001; Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006; Anthony Parel, Gandhi's Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 14 For example, Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence, London: Hurst & Co, 2012; Richard Sorabji, Gandhi and the Stoics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012; Leela Gandhi, 'The Pauper's Gift', Public Culture 23(1), 2011, pp 27–38. 15 Just two examples of this include Harish Trivedi, 'Revolutionary Non-Violence: Gandhi in Postcolonial and Subaltern Discourse', Interventions 13(4), 2011, pp 521–549; and Victor Wolfenstein, The Revolutionary Personality: Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967. 16 Shruti Kapila, 'A History of Violence', Modern Intellectual History 7(2), 2010, pp 437–457; Kama Maclean, 'The History of a Legend: Accounting for Popular Histories of Revolutionary Nationalism', Modern Asian Studies 46(6), 2012, p 1566. 17 Statement before the Session Court, National Archives of India, Private Papers, Acc. No. 246, p 6. 18 See, for example, 'On the Slogan "Long Live Revolution"', originally published in the Tribune, 24 December 1929, reprinted in Chaman Lal (ed), The Jail Notebook and Other Writings, Delhi: LeftWord Press, 2007, pp 140–141. 19 A G Noorani, The Trial of Bhagat Singh: The Politics of Justice, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008 [1996]. 20 This was most explicitly addressed by Bhagat Singh in 'To the Young Political Workers', written in jail on 2 February 1931. The document is Bhagat Singh's assessment of the political landscape at the time of the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, which marked the end of (what turned out to be) the first round of civil disobedience, and the role of the revolutionaries in it. The document was widely circulated in multiple languages before being discovered by the CID in February 1932. British Library, India Office Records, L/PJ/12/391, pp 61–74. 21 Letter from Sukhdev, Young India, 23 April 1941, reproduced in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, vol XLVI, pp 397–399. 22 Similarly, Perry Anderson has recently noted the strategic failure of the newly Nehruvian state to absorb soldiers from Subash Chandra Bose's Indian National Army into the armed services, when the latter was a force that was 'composed of veterans of domestic oppression'. Perry Anderson, 'After Nehru', London Review of Books, 2 August 2012. 23 David M Laushey, 'The Bengal Terrorists and Their Conversion to Marxism: Aspects of Regional Nationalism in India, 1905–1942', PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 1969. 24 Durba Ghosh, 'Terrorism in Bengal: Political Violence in the Interwar Years', in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy (eds), Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World, Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006, p 273. 25 Bipan Chandra, 'The Ideological Development of Revolutionary Terrorists in Northern India in the 1920s', in Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India, Delhi: Orient Longman, 1979, p 223. See also Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India, 1900–1910, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. 26 Ramnath, Haj to Utopia, p 8; Maclean, 'History of a Legend'. 27 Ishwar Dayal Gaur, Martyr as a Bridegroom: A Folk Representation of Bhagat Singh, Delhi: Anthem Press, 2008; Gurdev Singh Sidhu (ed), The Hanging of Bhagat Singh, vol IV: The Banned Literature, Chandigarh, Unistar, 2007. 28. Bejoy Kumar Sinha, Memoirs of a Revolutionary: Andamans, the Indian Bastille, Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1987 [1939], p 22. 29 See also Simona Sawhney, 'Bhagat Singh: A Politics of Death and Hope', in Anshu Malhotra and Farina Mir (eds), Punjab Reconsidered, Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2012, pp 377–408. 30 See Chris Pinney's collection of calendars at http://www.christopherpinney.com/Bhagat_Singh.php# (last accessed 8 March 2013). 31 Avinash Kumar, 'Nationalism as Bestseller: The Case of Chand's "Phansi Ank"', in Abhijit Gupta and Swapan Chakraborty (eds), Moveable Type: Book History in India, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2008, p 178. 32 'Punjab Rally Vows to Fight Terrorism', Times of India, 25 May 1987. See also Anand Patwardhan's award-winning documentary, In Memory of Friends, 1990. 33 'NCERT Wants to Set History Books Right', Times of India, 15 April 2001. 34 'British Had Given Terrorist Tag to Bhagat Singh', Times of India, 1 November 2007. 35 'Bhagat Singh No Terrorist: Govt', Times of India, 21 December 2007. 36 Gandhi, Affective Communities.
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