London; New York: Routledge, 2019. ix, 321 pp. (B&W photos.) US$46.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8153-8174-7.
Vimla Dang penned down her reminiscences in 1957. Born Vimla Bakaya to a relatively prosperous Kashmiri Pandit family from Lahore in 1926, Dang led a distinguished political career with the Communist Party in colonial and post-colonial India. She did not write her memoirs for publication. Instead, she wrote them as a “personal diary” (or so her brother wrote). But given their historical significance, her friends and family decided to publish Dang’s memoirs half a century later. In the meantime, hundreds of memoirs, autobiographical/biographical, literary, and scholarly accounts of revolutionary men, and some women, had been published in India. Some were also published in Pakistan. Most went with familiar titles, with phrases like “my life,” “my struggles,” “revolution/ary,” “sacrifice,” “chains to lose,” “my journey” and so on dotting their garishly, but lovingly, designed covers.
Vimla Dang’s account was unassumingly titled “Fragments of an Autobiography.” She also wrote it in the third person under the assumed name, Rashmi. As her brother wrote in the foreword, this was a technique used by “sensitive writers” to write about themselves in a way they couldn’t if they were writing in the first person. It was more honest, and less difficult, this way. And along with its title, tone, tenor, narrative voice, and argument, “Rashmi’s” account was a striking contrast to a spate of other biographies that uncritically celebrated heroic male communists and their services in the cause of revolution. In her account, the revolution that many dreamt of and yearned for appeared more fraught with contradictions, filled with both promise and peril. This was an account of revolution like no other.
The same can be said for Professor Ania Loomba’s landmark work, Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism, and Feminism in India (2018). Vimla Dang appears in her book, too, as do other women revolutionaries. Together, these women speak through memoirs, song, stories, art, interviews, newspapers, and much else besides. What emerges is a delicately woven tapestry of archival fragments that collectively bear witness to women’s lives within the revolutionary and communist movement in India.
“Fragments,” then, are a good metaphor for the book too. Rendered nearly invisible in the colonial archive and in the histories written in its shadows, communist and revolutionary women rarely speak in their own terms about the movement they built. This is true even for the official histories produced by the communist movement itself, which privileged the history of the Party over the life histories and experiences of its cadres. This absence can also be traced in histories of feminism that have been written in isolation from histories of Marxism and communism. The converse is true as well, perhaps even more so, since the issue of women’s oppression was frequently viewed as a “second-order problem that would automatically vanish after the advent of socialism” (2). Loomba seeks to redress that disconnect. And what emerges through an extraordinary range of sources is an illuminating glimpse into the lives and subjectivities of revolutionary and communist women from the inception of the communist movement in the 1920s to its split in the 1960s. In a departure from the regional and provincial focus of other scholarly accounts on communism, these women come from different classes and castes across India in what Loomba has called a “Pan Indian communist ethos” (10).
But this is not merely a task of recovery. Revolutionary Desires in that sense fits neither the mould of “contributory histories” nor “compensatory histories” that the pathbreaking book We Were Making History: Women in the Telangana Uprising (1989) identified. For the women’s collective who produced the book, these modes of history writing either sought to compensate for the absence of women in revolutionary histories through token representation (the “they were there too” mode of writing history) or they wrote about the involvement of women only to the extent of their contributions to a movement that was ultimately defined and led by men (the “they helped too” mode of writing history).
Revolutionary Desires couldn’t be more differently positioned from both of these two models of writing about women and revolution. This is a book that reflects on the communist movement on terms set by the women who built it. In doing so, it shows how the movement opened up unprecedented spaces for women’s political participation even as it foreclosed others. There are accounts here of militant activity and strikes, but also of love, friendships, and partnerships. The home and the world, as Loomba shows, was bound together through revolution. And often this relationship was constrained by the tribulations and sacrifices that were specifically borne by women in the moment.
An illustrative example here is of Parvatibai, a low caste, working class, communist organizer who relentlessly fought her husband and family for the right to carry on her political activities. Her battles, like those of many other women, were fought on two fronts. In a similar vein, other women sought new homes, families, and partnerships. But even here, the constraints of a patriarchal society intervened. Few women could afford to openly participate in politics without being linked to a man. To that end, the Party introduced the concept of farzi shadis (pretend marriages) which operated as a cover for men and women to cohabit and participate in political activities without risking social sanction. What is more, these tensions and contradictions extended to the communist, and specifically, revolutionary movements too, where women’s sexuality was considered a source of threat, dissension, and distraction by their male comrades.
Even so, these political experiments inaugurated new modes of politicking, sociality, being, and living. This is where Revolutionary Desires is at its best. Time and again, Loomba provides a salutary reminder of how the political is personal, just as the personal is political. In that respect, this is a refreshing departure from the inordinate focus on party histories, political histories, and intellectual histories of communism in India. All three modes foreground relatively elite, high caste, urban, well-travelled, well-educated, men. Life histories of women, ordinary cadres, workers, peasants and so on, have scarcely been the subject of scholarly accounts on communism in India. Revolutionary Desires then does not merely locate the revolution on the street, barricade, picket line or the colonial/postcolonial jail; it extends the revolution and revolutionary desires into social, cultural, and indeed, intimate and private realms. It thus opens up and extends the question of “revolution” and “revolutionary” itself. How did women revolutionaries and communists stretch and redefine the meaning of revolution? What did the revolution mean to them? How did they create new modes of politics? New modes of social organization? New cultural forms? What does their politics tell us about the promise and limitations of the Indian revolutionary movement? Indeed, what does this history tell us about what remains unfulfilled, unmet, and unrealized? The dream of revolution, then, still has a lot more to offer, especially as we contend with our disaffected and disenchanted present in South Asia. With Revolutionary Desires, Ania Loomba may well have rekindled the desire for revolution in her readers.
Ali Raza
Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore