Revolutionary Lives in South Asia : Acts and Afterlives of Anticolonial Political Action

Prompted by the prevalence of ‘the revolutionary’ in Indian political, historical and literary worlds, Revolutionary Lives explores the radical and cosmopolitan nature of anticolonialism in early twentieth century India through a biographical lens. The volume draws together ten eminent researchers from India, Europe, Australia and the US to analyse the lives of anticolonial activists, both unknown and infamous, to ask: how should we read claims to ‘the revolutionary’ in both contemporary and historical contexts?

This book was published as a special issue of Postcolonial Studies.

The term ‘revolutionary’ is used liberally in histories of Indian anticolonialism, but scarcely defined. Implicitly understood, it functions as a signpost or a badge, generously conferred in hagiographies, loosely invoked in historiography, and strategically deployed in contemporary political contests. It is timely, then, to ask the question: Who counts as a ‘revolutionary’ in South Asia? How can we read ‘the revolutionary’ in Indian political formations? And what does it really mean to be ‘revolutionary’ in turbulent late colonial times? This volume takes a biographical approach to the question, by examining the life stories of a series of activists, some well known, who all defined themselves in explicitly revolutionary terms in the early twentieth century: V. D. Savarkar, M. N. Roy, Bhagat Singh, J.P. Narayan and Hansraj Vohra. The authors interrogate the subversive lives of these figures, tracing their polyglot influences and transnational impacts, to map out the discursive travels of ‘the revolutionary’ in Indian historical and literary worlds from the early 1900s, and to indicate its reverberations in the politics of the present.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Postcolonial Studies.