London; New York: Routledge, 2015. x, 125 pp. US$150.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-13-879497-9.
The chapters in this book were originally published in Postcolonial Studies (16, no. 2 [June 2013]). The main objective of this edited volume, outlined by the editors in the first chapter, is to interrogate the moniker “revolutionary” within the specific academic, political, and cultural contexts of South Asia’s past and present. The editors outline the book’s loosely biographical approach to this question, hoping to reiterate the humanness of revolutionary politics. The time frame for this exercise is the overlapping global interwar and late colonial periods. Three chapters of the book are devoted to three Indian activists and their effects within and beyond the British Empire. These three are M.N. Roy, V.D. Savarkar and J.P. Narayan. The remaining four chapters of the book focus on the members of the Hindustan Socialist Revolutionary Army (HSRA). One glaring omission from this list is M.K. Gandhi. The reason for this omission, the editors point out, is the recent proliferation of works on him. Gandhi however does not disappear from this volume totally as as “he continually hovers in the imagination of many of the figures under analyses” (5).
A key issue related to interrogating the term “revolutionary” is the relationship of this term to violent action. As the editors perceptively point out, there has been much recent academic discussion around forms of violence and legitimate resistance. They are right to point out that the historiography of Indian nationalism continues to be wedded to the binary between “violence” and “nonviolence” with little systematic and rigorous scrutiny of the disarray of such terms in anticolonial texts. Such a binary, in effect, reproduces British colonial representations of revolutionary activity, “where ‘revolutionary’ and ‘terrorist’ were frequently interchangeable descriptions of anticolonial agitations” (6). The truth, as is usually the case, is more complex and the various chapters chart this complexity in relation to both specific individuals as well as to the HSRA.
The legacy and symbolism of Bhagat Singh has been aggressively appropriated in contemporary India and Pakistan across the political spectrum for various ends. Chris Moffat’s chapter on Bhagat Singh and the HSRA aims to move beyond a debate about what Bhagat Singh symbolises in the contemporary period and instead looks at Bhagat Singh in the context of his present, to understand better the politics of action and the contexts of action. A central point of this chapter is the need to understand Bhagat Singh as a key member of the HSRA, especially in the context of the HSRA’s slogan, Inqilab Zindabad (“Long Live Revolution”). Tracing the various influences on Bhagat Singh, from Lenin to the French anarchist Auguste Vaillant to the Ghadar Party and Kartar Singh Sarabha, this chapter points to understanding Bhagat Singh’s notion of the immediacy of his present as a key driver of his politics of action. Moffat’s chapter is a key contribution to the literature on both Bhagat Singh and the HSRA as it subverts the cliché associated with him—what he would have been if he had not been hanged at the gallows. Moffat’s chapter is definitely required reading for anyone interested in the intricacies of the anticolonial movement in India.
The other interesting chapter in this book is by Aparna Vaidik on Hans Raj Vohra, a member of the HSRA who testified against Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev in the Lahore Conspiracy Case trial, 1929–1930. The author poses a key question: “is it possible to write a non-celebratory history of nationalism, which is sensitive to the instances when nationalist solidarity is fractured and betrayed?” (105). This is definitely a refreshing starting point especially in relation to understanding the specific contexts and motivations of revolutionaries who became informants against their revolutionary comrades. The key point Vaidik makes is that Hans Raj Vohra decided to testify against the HSRA trio not because of some pecuniary benefit to himself, nor due to torture or threat thereof from colonial authorities (both of which are usually cited as reasons for revolutionaries to become “approvers” against their previous comrades). Instead, Vohra decided to testify because he believed that Sukhdev, to whom he was related and through whom he came to be associated with the HSRA, had confessed to vital information about the HSRA’s activities once the latter was arrested by the colonial authorities. Despite its interesting starting point, however, the reader is left wondering if this explanation and Vohra’s documented guilt until his death in the 1980s could possibly be the self-serving justification of a young Vohra who wanted to escape the fate of rigorous colonial imprisonment or even the gallows. Vohra’s pardon from charges related to his involvement with the activities of the HSRA in return for his testimony could possibly be cited as proof of this motivation.
Overall, this is an important work for anyone interested in the history of the anticolonial movement in South Asia. It is also an important contribution to present-day discussions of “terrorism” and what constitutes contemporary legitimate resistance against various structures of imperialism and colonialism in our collective present.
Sinderpal Singh
National University of Singapore, Singapore
pp. 183-185