Waiting for Swaraj: Inner Lives of Indian Revolutionaries 9781108838085, 2021005366, 2021005367, 9781108937146

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~ Waiting for Swaraj ~ Set in British India of the 1920s, Waiting for Swaraj follows the cadence and tempo of the lives of the intrepid revolutionaries of the Hindustan Republican Association and the Hindustan Republican Socialist Association who challenged the British Raj. This book seeks to comprehend the revolutionaries’ self-conception: When does a person say, ‘I am a revolutionary’? How did a revolutionary live out the vision of revolution? What was their everyday like? Did life in revolution transform an individual? What was their truth and how was it different from that of others? What did they do when not thinking about the revolution? The secret nature of the revolutionaries’ organisation and operations meant it was the more spectacular and heroic moments of their lives when they threw a bomb, carried out an assassination or were caught by the police or put on a conspiracy trial that became the point of historical analysis. Their lives, however, were an interesting interplay of visibility and invisibility, a kaleidoscope of the performance of violence and underground subterfuge. Drawing on the revolutionaries’ memoirs, this book locates the essence of being a revolutionary in the everyday conversations, banter and anecdotes, and in the stray fragments of the life in underground. It demonstrates how the time spent ‘waiting for freedom’ was the crucible that forged a revolutionary. The waiting did not rob the young men of the romance of resistance but coddled, nurtured and emboldened it. Waiting for Swaraj is an exploration of the rich, variegated and intimate history of revolution as praxis. Aparna Vaidik is Associate Professor of History at Ashoka University, Sonepat, India. She previously taught at Georgetown University, Washington DC, and University of Delhi. Her first monograph, Imperial Andamans: Colonial Encounter and Island History (2010), was on the spatial and penal history of the Indian Ocean. She has also written a creative non-fiction, My Son’s Inheritance: A Secret History of Lynching and Blood Justice in India (2020), on the deep and invisible history of violence in the Indian subcontinent. Another research monograph, Revolutionaries on Trial: Sedition, Betrayal and Martyrdom, on the history of the infamous Lahore Conspiracy Case Trial (1929–1931) is forthcoming in 2022.

~ Waiting for Swaraj ~

Inner Lives of Indian Revolutionaries

Aparna Vaidik

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314 to 321, 3rd Floor, Plot No.3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108838085 © Aparna Vaidik 2021 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2021 Printed in India A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Vaidik, Aparna, 1975- author. Title: Waiting for Swaraj : the inner lives of Indian Revolutionaries / Aparna Vaidik. Other titles: Inner lives of Indian Revolutionaries Description: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021005366 (print) | LCCN 2021005367 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108838085 (hardback) | ISBN 9781108937146 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Hindustan Socialist Republican Association--History. | Hindustan Republican Association--History. | Revolutionaries--India--History--20th century. | India--Politics and government--1919-1947. Classification: LCC DS480.45 .V35 2021 (print) | LCC DS480.45 (ebook) | DDC 954.03/570922--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005366 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005367 ISBN 978-1-108-83808-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In the loving memory of my mother Dr Vedwati Vaidik

The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits. – Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

List of Abbreviations

xi

1. The Revolutionary-Who-Waits

1

2. Satyagrahi to Krantikari

28

3. Between Kranti and Inquilab

60

4. The Ascetic Kaalyoddha

95

Conclusion

127

Notes

137

Glossary

192

Bibliography

194

Index

224

Acknowledgements

T

his book has been long in making and I have consequently incurred a debt of gratitude to several folks. I am grateful to Professor Madhavan Palat for conversations about the Russian revolutionaries and to William R. Pinch, Nonica Datta and Tanika Sarkar for discussions on asceticism, martyrdom and histories of religious sects. My special thanks to Gwen Kelly for helping me make sense of anthropological works. I am grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of Johannesburg, Witwatersrand, for a grant from their Governing Intimacies Project that made possible the completion of this book. I remain indebted to my friends, colleagues and students at Ashoka University for their support. My thanks to the librarian and staff of the Nehru Memorial and Museum Library, New Delhi, India, and its Deputy Director, Ravikant Mishra, and the Dayal Singh Library in Lahore, Pakistan. My debt of gratitude to Uday Khatri, son of Sh. Ramkrishan Khatri, who gave me the Kakori commemorative volumes. I have presented chapters and sections of this book in various conferences in the USA, UK and India and am grateful for the comments and suggestions from the audience. My thanks to friends who read and commented on parts of the manuscript: Laura Goffman, Carole Sargent, Queeny Pradhan, Preeti Prasad, Bharat Solanky, Mandavi Mehta, Pratik Chakrabarti, Amit Ahuja, Vikas Pathak and Ravish Kumar of NDTV. I am deeply indebted to Daniel E. Elam, Sanjukta Potdar and Aienla Ozukum for their generous feedback on the final draft of the manuscript. My heartfelt thanks to Sohini Ghosh, Aniruddha De and Qudsiya Ahmad, the editors of Cambridge University

x

Acknowledgements

Press, for joining me on this adventure. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their really helpful comments. I owe these words to my fellow marauder, Vijay. This book came out of our arguments about ngrams and microbial histories. Thanks to my sons, Advait Vallabh and Uddhav Pratap, for giving me a reason to be. Despite his asking for co-authorship credits, I remain immensely grateful to my loving partner, Anil Sanweria, for being my cheerleader. I dedicate this book to the loving memory of my mother, Dr Vedwati Vaidik, who on her grandsons’ request agreed to keep her eyes open and smile down at them when she became a star in the galaxy.

Abbreviations

CID

Criminal Investigation Department

HRA

Hindustan Republican Army

CSAS HSRA INC IOR

NAI

NMML OHT PGA

Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge Hindustan Socialist Republican Association/Army Indian National Congress Indian Office Records

National Archives of India

Nehru Memorial and Museum Library Oral History Transcript

Punjab Government Archives, Lahore

1 ~ The Revolutionary-Who-Waits ~

T

his book takes you on a journey on an old steam train billowing smoke and chugging across northern India with revolutionaries as co-passengers. Set in British India of the 1920s, we follow the cadence and tempo of the lives of the intrepid revolutionaries of the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA) and the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) who challenged the British Raj. Through this book, we listen to the revolutionaries’ conversations and observe them bantering, quarrelling and horsing around as they travel across northern India. We get off the train and continue to walk with them as they plot and plan their next move in their dens spread across maths, akharas, universities, forests, villages and towns of northern India. We join their ranks as they prepare to conduct robberies, assassinate British officials, buy guns and ammunition, and feverishly make bombs. We read the newspapers and journals that have the revolutionaries crossing swords with other nationalists over ideology and strategy. Journeying with them we retrieve the details of their everyday life – the trivial, the ordinary, the random, the anomalous and the atypical – and the different scales of interpersonal relationships: between the leaders of the movement between the leaders and the members, and between the members of the movement.1 We will hear the revolutionaries at their raucous, unrestrained and voluble best in these pages. Given how intense their desire to be heard was, being able to speak up was crucial to these revolutionaries until the time they chose to be silent or were silenced by the state. ‘Listening’ to the revolutionaries therefore is a vital cognitive tool for understanding their lives lest we write with the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’. This book narrates the history of the revolutionaries’ lives and worlds as much as possible through their words.2

2

Waiting for Swaraj

Waiting for Swaraj seeks to comprehend the revolutionaries’ selfconception: When does a person say, ‘I am a revolutionary’? What makes a revolutionary? What did it mean to be a revolutionary? Is it when the nebulous conception of an armed revolution begins to fire their imagination, keeping them up at night, and turning their days into a furious haze, or when the revolutionary finds himself awaiting the revolution? How did the revolutionaries live out the vision of revolution, what was their everyday like, did life in revolution transform an individual, what was their truth and how was it different from that of the others? What did they do when not thinking about the revolution? The concern here is to understand not only what the revolutionaries agreed about but also what they disagreed about; and what made them hold together despite their disagreements, differences in backgrounds, and variance in sources of inspiration. What were the common set of shared perceptions, views and feelings unifying them all? This book abandons the skyscraper view that makes the ‘revolutionary movement’ appear like a moving behemoth of collectivities, homogenous and indistinguishable, where only the individual leaders stand out as beacons. Instead, we take a street-level view that allows access into the underground revolutionary lives.3 The book modulates between close-ups and long-shots as it enables us to imagine the historical actor as a social being while keeping in sight the wider historical picture. Listening to revolutionaries in dialogue with each other, Waiting for Swaraj examines the history of Indian revolutionism as a lived vision. It is an exploration of the rich, variegated and intimate history of revolution as praxis. It locates the essence of being a revolutionary not just in the spectacular moments of ‘doing the revolution’ when the revolutionaries threw a bomb or carried out a political assassination but in the everyday conversations, banter and anecdotes, and in the stray fragments of the life in underground as they ‘waited for the revolution’. The revolutionary ontology (that is, nature of self/being), it demonstrates, had a deep connection with time.

~ The Intrepid Bahurupiya ~

Harishankar lived in a small Hanuman temple in a village called Dhimarpura near the princely state of Orccha in the Central Provinces. He used to survive on madhukari – collecting food that was just enough

The Revolutionary-Who-Waits

3

for him to survive, from the grihasta, or householders. In those days it was a tradition to feed any sadhu or sanyasi who turned up at your doorstep. With time, Harishankar took to narrating the Ramayana in the village. He also started a small pathshala, a village school, for little kids outside the Hanuman temple. Everyone had a good word for Harishankar Brahmchari. Convinced of Harishankar’s repute as an ascetic, Thakur Malkhan Singh, a village local and a rich man who was also an employee in the Forest Department, made arrangement for Harishankar to run his pathshala and to do his Ramayana session on the chaupal, community place, in front of his house. Malkhan Singh made sure that the brahmchari got his daily meals in his kitchen. He used to enjoy Harishankar’s company and they would oftentimes talk into the night. Malkhan Singh grew to implicitly trust Harishankar, so much so that he would leave behind the key of the family coffer and the armoury with him when away on Forest Department work. Harishankar did not let the comforts of the Thakur’s household keep him from his daily physical regimen. He would wake up early morning and bathe in the Satar river and exercise in the temple’s akhara. In the daytime he would teach the kids and his evenings were devoted to reciting Tulsi Ramayana.4 Harishankar was also a surprisingly good marksman and would hunt with Malkhan Singh. These hunting expeditions brought him into the circle of local rajas and zamindars. The naresh, or king, of the principality of Orccha was particularly fond of Harishankar and sought his company for hunting. Once when they were out hunting, the Orccha naresh shot at an animal and missed. So did his retainers. Harishankar took out his pistol, took aim and shot at the animal. The bullet found its mark. This stunned the Orccha naresh, who began to suspect that Harishankar was not simply any old sanyasi.5 Incidents of dacoity and murder were not uncommon in the ravines of Bundelkhand bordering the states of Orccha and Jhansi. There were several small riyasats, principalities, in the area who were exempted from the British government’s Arms Act. The local zamindars and rajas kept arms and would sometimes sell them for money. These riyasats were preyed on by dacoits (armed robbers) and were also a refuge for absconding krantikaris (revolutionaries) active in the region.6 The Orccha naresh conjectured that Harishankar had to be one of the two. Harishankar indeed led a double life. As he began to feel secure in his sanyasi personation, he gradually began to meet his gang members. He

4

Waiting for Swaraj

used the ravines of Bundelkhand to give his friends from Jhansi practice in target shooting. He would make use of his unfettered access to Thakur Malkhan Singh’s armour.7 In the initial days his crew were careful to visit him occasionally. They would deliver the newspaper clippings that helped him keep abreast of a court case that he was deeply interested in unfolding in the city of Lucknow and also send him information about the police arrests and activities related to the case.8 His ragged crew consisted of about 10–12 people at the time. Once the court case in Lucknow got fully underway, police activities in the region began to cool off as most people associated with the case were assumed arrested. Harishankar took the opportunity to begin reorganising his gang. He gradually changed his brahmchari appearance. Instead of wrapping a blanket on his torso, he started wearing a kurta and his loincloth gave way to a dhoti. He also acquired a bicycle that he used for moving between Jhansi and Orccha. He also went to the cities of Kanpur and Banaras and met with old members who began to visit him in the village of Dhimarpura.9 An incident involving another sadhu living in the Hanuman temple who had murdered a local palki-bearer cut short Harishankar’s stay in Dhimarpura. By this time he decided to give up the life of an impostor sanyasi and quit the village lest he got caught up in police investigations.10 From Dhimarpura, Harishankar went straight to the city of Jhansi and took up apprenticeship in the Bundelkhand Motor Company to learn motor driving and repairing. Harishankar spent nearly three years living in this manner. He continued to evade detection and police arrest. In the guise of a motor mechanic or a wise astrologer or a thakur, Harishankar swiftly altered his garb, language and demeanour according to the context and the people he was with. However, a life of subterfuge where he was constantly on the run was filled with financial difficulties. He barely had enough money to eat. While living in Jhansi, Harishankar many a time ate only once a day and that too just raw grams. A good day was one when he got a chance to eat at the home of a friend or an acquaintance. Despite not having enough to eat, Harishankar was lucky enough not to develop any serious illness except for once when he had bloody dysentery.11 At the end of the case unfolding in Lucknow, five of the leaders were hanged and the rest were in jail.12 As one of the few surviving members

The Revolutionary-Who-Waits

5

who were not dead or in jail, Harishankar took it upon himself to build back the organisation. He used his time as a fugitive in Bundelkhand to collect arms from surrounding principalities, especially the Datiya and Khaniadhana riyasats, whose rajas he had befriended. The raja of Khaniadhana riyasat deeply respected him and knew of his real identity. The raja would encourage Harishankar to take part in the royal shooting competitions as he delighted in seeing him hit impossible targets. Hari would accept donations of arms and ammunition from the Khaniadhana raja who, smarting under the British government’s high-handedness, harboured nationalist sentiments. The raja also opened up his forests and surrounding ravines for hunting, target practising and bomb testing.13 The support of the riyasats in the Central Provinces (now Madhya Pradesh) was crucial in obtaining arms supplies. Hari and his men bought arms and ammunition from not just the ruling class and the sardars but the hangerson and servants as well. They also got weapons from the Russians and from the fakirs and kabaylis in the northern frontier areas, who were supposed to be sworn enemies of the British and operated illegal arms factories.14 French Chandernagore, where the Arms Act was not in force, was also a regional centre of arms traffic.15 Harishankar alias Panditji alias Mahashayji alias No. 2 alias Chandrashekhar Tiwari alias Chandrashekhar Azad was the only active member of the HRA who had managed to deceive the police and evade arrest.16 He was an intrepid bahurupiya, an audacious impersonator. He could don a janeyu, the scared thread, a dhoti and a topknot with a copy of the Bhagwat in his hand to become a kathavachak, the traditional bard; or wear a simple cap on a dhoti kurta and transform into a regular well-to-do baniya; or put on a dirty undershirt with a thick dhoti to masquerade as a domestic servant; or even better, dress in a khaki uniform to pass off as a police constable.17 He was, however, not the only one known for his ability to change guises. Bhagat Singh (1907–1931), the HSRA revolutionary, donned a felt hat and Englishman’s clothes to escape from Lahore after the political assassination of a British police officer. Surya Sen (1894– 1934), who led the Chittagong armoury raid in 1930, was also famous for appearing as an old gardener or as a sanyasi and some believed that he could vanish into thin air.18 They were all revolutionaries who plotted and planned as they waited for swaraj.

6

Waiting for Swaraj

~ Waiting as a Crucible ~

The lives in revolution present an interesting interplay of visibility and invisibility, a kaleidoscope of the performance of violence and underground subterfuge. The secret nature of the revolutionaries’ organisations and operations meant that they remained absent in the colonial archives or in the contemporary newspapers except when they threw a bomb, carried out an assassination, were caught by the police or were on a trial.19 The popular and historiographical characterisation of the revolutionaries is premised on the spectacular moments at which they came into full public view when they shot someone or dropped a bomb or undertook a heist or stood trial or when the newspapers reported their arrest and hanging. Or it is based on their political writings – essays, pamphlets and books they wrote outlining their political ideas. Although significant, the moments of visibility provided only a partial view of their lives and fuelled a general characterisation of the revolutionaries as ‘impatient’ men who were ‘in haste’ – unwilling to compromise and negotiate – of people who forced history forward before its due time.20 Jaichandra Vidyalankar, a teacher at the National College, Lahore, wrote about his pupils Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev (who were members of the revolutionary outfit HSRA): ‘Their short-lived lives and actions betray their great impatience…. These young men could not control their impatience and made efforts, right or wrong, to gain independence.’21 While Vidyalankar saw their haste as being in service of the nation, in the eyes of their detractors, the haste was a consequence of being ‘misguided’ or ‘adventurists’ or ‘politically immature and historically ignorant’.22 The revolutionaries’ impatience was thus either used to valorise and romanticise their heroism or to condemn their radical politics as illegitimate, unlawful and unacceptable. The Sedition Committee Report, for instance, presented the revolutionaries as a ‘small clique of fanatics’, lowly criminals, a ragtag bunch, misguided youth, enemies of society, volatile and unreasonable men, and people wishing to replace rule of law with ‘unrestrained will of the individual’.23 Either way, ‘being in haste’ became a neat explanatory model for their supposed historical ‘failure’.24 How else does one coagulate their bravery, courage and willingness to lay down their life with the apparent historical failure of their politics to liberate India? The simplistic characterisation of revolutionaries as ‘being in haste’ – where the

The Revolutionary-Who-Waits

7

revolutionary was in a tearing hurry to arrest the speeding wheels of history or recklessly straining the calm tandem of unfolding history – provided a satisfactory explanation for admirers and critics alike. The imagery of lack of self-control and restraint also thrived on their apparent youth and the image of a sexualised masculinity that it evoked. Interestingly, ‘being in haste’ was also the revolutionaries’ selfcharacterisation, what they saw as a definitive aspect of the revolutionary ontology. When asked to sit quietly, the young men would often recite the lines from the Bengali poet Nazrul Islam’s poem ‘Bidrohi’ (The Rebel) that captured their state of being: ‘Aami bidrohi chiro oshanto’ (I, the rebel with a restless heart).25 Bhagat Singh was believed to have said: ‘Our young hot blood cannot wait for that long.’ 26 Chandrashekhar Azad would often ask people around him not to do ‘luk luk’ (a word describing impatience, eagerness, nervous excitement) as it could cost them weapons, resources and lives. He once reprimanded Rajguru as they were lying in wait outside the police chowki in Lahore: ‘Luk luk na kiya kar, luk luk karna hai to ghar ja.’27 Rajguru was raring to go and wanted to go inside the police officer’s room to shoot him instead of waiting for him to come out. Another time Azad refused to continue with a planned action: ‘Yadi uttejana mein aa kar main wahan sahasa kucch kar daalta to idhar tum logon ki halat kharab ho jaati…. Yoon hi uttejana mein aa kar kucch nahi kiya jata’ (Had I done anything there out of excitement you would have all gotten into trouble…. One should never do anything on an impulse).28 The key word here was ‘uttejana’, excitement or impulsiveness. These anecdotes go to show that restlessness, excitement, impatience were indeed part of revolutionary selves. With time, this characterisation has also made its way into the historiography on the revolutionaries. For instance, Kama Maclean calls revolutionaries’ politics ‘a politics of impatience’ and Durba Ghosh also discusses how this temporal disjuncture was a significant element of revolutionary narratives.29 The image of the revolutionaries-in-haste, however, obscures the image of the revolutionary-who-waits, who lived out his life away from public gaze. The revolutionaries’ safety and power, all things considered, lay in their ability to remain concealed from the public gaze and that of the colonial police. Much of their active revolutionary life was spent underground and thus remained invisible. This life was spent waiting: waiting out the heat of arrests, holding their fire, being on the run,

8

Waiting for Swaraj

waiting for the action to take place, waiting for the court to pass judgment, waiting to finish their jail sentence, or waiting to be hanged. It is ‘waiting’ that these revolutionaries did for most of their days although, if asked, they would say they were just being revolutionaries. Life spent ‘waiting’ for swaraj, or self-rule, was far more immediate for the revolutionaries than the yet-to-be-actualised dream of political independence.30 As we saw earlier, the wait was when they planned, plotted, organised, worked, dreamed, debated and struggled with the deprivations that came with the underground life of a secret organisation. This is where ‘action’ was. This was their everyday life. This everyday that encompassed the revolutionaries’ days and nights was a space that the revolutionaries resided in. This everyday was not a circadian rhythm of triviality, banality and habit that separated one’s subjectivity from one’s identity. It was not about the alienation that one experiences between the body and the mind as a result of insufferable repetitiveness. Instead, it was a space where bodily privations were interleaved with a mental cognition of those privations as being an element of one’s revolutionary existence. This everyday was one where an intimate awareness of one’s subjectivity was challenging, pushing and informing the revolutionaries’ consciousness and, in turn, constituting them as revolutionaries. At the heart of the revolutionaries’ everyday was the daily practice of ascetic renunciation and discipline. Practising to be a renunciate (a yogi, sanyasi or a brahmchari) – a person leading a life of principled denigration of materialism by observing voluntary adoption of poverty, fasting, chastity, performance of daily physical exercises, meditation (dand-dhyan), along with clothing and dietary injunctions – provided a conceptual and didactic framework for the revolutionaries’ everyday underground existence that came with its attendant material deprivations. It was not the lack of selfrestraint and control that defined the revolutionaries’ inner lives, but a deep desire for it and the struggle to attain and live by it. Their struggle to achieve self-control and restraint was their tapas or tap (penance or performance of austerities) that helped them soar nearer to self-rule (swarajya and swadhinta) as individuals and as nationalists. The transformation of the young men into revolutionaries, thus, occurred as they ‘waited’ every day. Waiting was the crucible that forged a revolutionary and it did so not by robbing the young men of the romance of resistance but by coddling, nurturing and emboldening it.

The Revolutionary-Who-Waits

~ Finding the Everyday ~

9

The political writings and the propaganda materials the revolutionaries produced while ‘waiting’ were meant to give their ideas public visibility, and to explain and to provide context for their ideas and ‘actions’. These materials remain invaluable for understanding their political inspirations, programme, vision and method. These included: the constitution of the HRA, 1924; the leader of HRA Sachindranath Sanyal’s pamphlet titled ‘The Revolutionary’ (1924) and his open letters to Mahatma Gandhi (1925); the political essays written by Bhagat Singh and Shiv Verma that were published in Chand, Kirti, Abhyudaya, Pratap, Prabha, Maharathi; the HSRA posters pasted on the walls of the city of Lahore following the assassination of John Saunders, a British officer, in December 1928; the leaflets that Bhagat Singh and Batukehswar Dutt, members of the HSRA, hurled in the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi after bombing it in April 1929; the court statements the HRA and HSRA revolutionaries gave during the Kakori Conspiracy Case (1926–1927), the Delhi Assembly Bomb Case (April–June 1929) and the Lahore Conspiracy Case (1929–1931); and the HSRA pamphlet ‘Philosophy of Bomb’ that followed the bombing of the Viceroy’s train in December 1930. These revolutionaries spoke for themselves, represented themselves and sought to define themselves. Being able to speak up was important to them, as evident from a statement used in the handbills they threw in the well of the Central Legislative Assembly: ‘It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear.’31 For these revolutionaries, being a revolutionary was an act of bold and defiant self-definition. This literature, however, gives little insight into their underground existence, neither do the plethora of popular visual and oral materials such as prints, posters, paintings, poems, songs and plays about the revolutionaries that were circulating since the late 1920s.32 So where does one go for the information about their everyday lives? My journey with this book did not start with a desire to find and write about the revolutionaries’ everyday while their everyday life was right there in each memoir they wrote and every interview they gave. They continued to write even after their organisations were decimated by the colonial police and the judiciary. The outcome was an array of memoirs, biographies, personal diaries, commemorative volumes, essays, journal articles, letters and interviews. The range of their writings goes to show how these revolutionaries were loquacious, eager to

10

Waiting for Swaraj

be heard and not forgotten by later generations. It is in this literature that one finds the details of the lives they lived away from public gaze. On most occasions I set the details of their everyday life aside as unimportant because the focus was to extract the information about the ideology (the intellectual as opposed to the mundane) and the revolutionary ‘actions’ (assassinations, bomb throwing, and so on). This disregard for the revolutionaries’ quotidian lives was also a consequence of subtle but deeply gendered presumptions regarding their inner lives – lives that were led in familial spaces and therefore presumed to be feminine, and thereby believed to be politically inconsequential.33 In contrast were their sensational revolutionary actions – heroic and awe-inspiring, that is, masculinised, and therefore believed to be ‘events’ worthy of scholarly attention. Scholarship on communist and labour movements also attests the exclusion of the personal or the private in political writings and, in turn, in the academic scholarship.34 When studying male revolutionaries, the scholarship tends to focus on ‘ideology’, that is, the search is for the intellectual, the extraordinary and the exceptional as opposed to the mundane and the everyday. The fact that active revolutionaries gave up their homes and families reinforced these binaries and led to the neglect of the study of their quotidian existence unless one studied female revolutionaries.35 As I read the memoirs I had a serendipitous realisation that altered my research journey. The revolutionaries were really ‘visible’ in their banter, ruminations and in everything else that appeared as having no bearing on their revolutionary self but, in effect, had everything to do with it. This illuminated the everyday life of the revolutionaries that had initially appeared as being irrelevant to writing their political history. The word ‘memoir’ here includes biographies, interviews, reminiscences and commemorative volumes. One can argue that they all belong to different genres. However, here they are all performing the function of a memoir. A memoir can be understood as a text that recounts a phase of life of the author or the narrator in which he or she played an important role or was involved in some measure. A memoir seeks to record one’s involvement in and experience of the public events or the movement or a relationship with a person or a group. It is self-referential and autobiographical but narrower in focus.36 A memoir also draws on recollection of others. As a first-hand account, a memoir reveals much about the writer’s or raconteur’s

The Revolutionary-Who-Waits

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‘experience’, subjectivities, emotional worlds, individual rationales and consciousness.37 While most of the revolutionary memoirs were written in postIndependence India, a few were written before 1947. These include Jatindranath Sanyal’s biography of Bhagat Singh that was published following his hanging in 1931, Yashpal’s journal Viplav (1939–1941) that he brought out after being released from jail, Bijoy Kumar Sinha’s In Andamans: The Indian Bastille (1939), a memoir of the time he spent exiled in the Andamans, and Manmathnath Gupta’s jail diary that he wrote while serving a sentence in Naini Central Prison in Allahabad in 1945. The ones written post-Independence include several biographical writings, commemorative volumes and collections brought out by the surviving revolutionaries and the families of the revolutionaries as part of golden jubilee celebrations of their deaths and hangings that carry reminiscences, documents and the letters of the revolutionaries written to their family members and to their associates.38 Another vital remnant that gives us access to their daily lives are the Hindi and English ‘archived oral history transcripts’ of the surviving revolutionaries and several of their associates. These are transcripts of interviews conducted by S. L. Manchanda and Hari Dev Sharma from the late 1960s and through the early 1980s as part of the Nehru Memorial and Museum Library’s (NMML) oral history project. All the NMML transcripts begin with the interviewer asking for the details of the interviewee’s childhood, family and the milieu they grew up in, followed by the sowing of the seed of political consciousness, their mobilisation and participation in the national movement. The transcripts open up a vast world of the inner lives of the revolutionaries with copious details of the interviewee’s interactions and conversations with their associates and their personal journeys.39 Similar to the NMML oral history interviews, the University of Cambridge’s Centre for South Asian Studies (CSAS) also conducted interviews of a plethora of British, Anglo-Indian and Indian folk who had lived in India during the days of the Raj. Some of the interviewees, such as Lala Feroz Chand, Bimal Prasad Jain and Nand Kishore Nigam, were associated with the HSRA revolutionaries. The sound recordings and transcripts of their interviews are available in English on the CSAS website.40

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Ploughing through the revolutionary memoirs, diaries, correspondence, interviews and reminiscences, what does one find about the revolutionaries and their everyday? As the reader shall see, these writings showcase the revolutionary-in-waiting. They dwell the longest and most fondly on the period the revolutionaries spent living together, that is, on their everyday togetherness. When staying collectively in their dens in different cities, the young men spent their time reconnoitring possible action spots, arranging arms, ammunition and chemicals for carrying out action, discussing strategies for escape if arrested, target practising, and learning to handle and maintain arms. They debated amongst themselves, had intense discussions about nationalist politics, socialist ideology, revolutionary methods, capitalism and colonialism, and together wrote propaganda materials. Or, like Rajguru (a member of the HSRA who was later hanged), who slept it off in different positions – on the cot, on the floor, in the den, at the railway station, in the open fields, splayed, curled up or even standing up – at all times of the day. Once running away from the police, he got very sleepy and spent the night sleeping in wet fields.41 The tedium of their days was at times broken when they had money to afford a few indulgences such as extra or nicer food or to watch a movie show if one got luckier. Bhagat is said to have never missed a show of Charlie Chaplin and loved the movie versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Three Musketeers.42 These men did not wait in stillness or in a state of stagnation, immobility, stasis or torpor – all the imageries associated with waiting.

~ Reading Memoir, Writing History ~

The revolutionaries’ memoirs go beyond simple recollections of life in revolution. They are self-conscious political acts of inscribing oneself into history. They recall the past in the present for the purpose of securing it for posterity, in the service of an imagined future. In this much, the act of writing memoirs was a manifestation of the revolutionaries’ deep relationship with time – the framing idea of this book. In many instances, the later editions of the memoirs published by newer publication houses do not carry the original publication date, imposing on these texts a historical immutability. Perhaps this strategy is a referent to the continued relevance of the texts, or their being suspended in time and their timelessness mimicking, as we shall see, the revolutionaries’ conception of their lives. This is also reflected

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in the manner in which the memoirs are titled either after a person in a leadership position or a person the author revers and was reminiscing about – Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqulla, Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad – or the titles have adjectives for the person or for revolutionism such as ‘Yug ke Devta’ (Gods of an Age), ‘Desh ke Nirmata’ (Builders of the Country), ‘Yugdrashta’ (Witness of an Age), ‘Agnipunj’ (Fire Collective), ‘Kranti ka Sakshya’ (Witness of Revolution) and ‘Amar Shaheed’ (Undead Martyrs). The repeated use of the terms ‘witnesses’ (sakshi), ‘an eon’ or ‘time’ (yug) and ‘being ever-living’/’timeless’ (amar) imagines the revolutionaries and their memorialists as ever-present witnesses of the times they lived in and of their experience of time – all gesturing to the profound connection the revolutionary ontology had with time.43 Durba Ghosh in her work on Bengali revolutionaries demonstrates how they took control of history and the pace of historical change by ‘writing’ their memoirs.44 Written right after the First World War, the memoirs of the first generation of bhadralok Bengali revolutionaries sought to revive the radical movement that was perceived to have been repressed by the colonial state during the War. In ideological contention with the growing might of non-violence as a political ideology, these memoirs wanted to inspire the youth to join the revolutionary secret societies. Even the officials of the Government of Bengal noted the ‘publication of articles relating to experiences of the old revolutionaries. Many of these have been written in the first person and purport to be personal reminiscences, others, with different degrees of frankness, express admiration of these heroes of the former days’.45 Notable amongst these, for our purpose, was the HRA founder Sachindranath Sanyal’s Bandi Jivan. Written in three parts, its first part was published in 1922. Bandi Jivan, written in Bengali and translated into Hindi and Punjabi, would became a bible for that generation of revolutionaries and the ones who came after. The second wave of Bengali revolutionary memoirs were written right after India’s independence. These memoirs carried several emotions – an urgency to record the revolutionaries’ lives for posterity; resentment at the marginalisation of the revolutionaries’ contribution to the anti-colonial resistance; perplexity with the novel independence and it not being what they had imagined; and a bewilderment at their location in the new milieu.46 A similar anxiety to preserve the past for posterity drove the penning of memoirs of the HRA and HSRA revolutionaries. Written or narrated

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retrospectively in the first person singular, the tenor of these memoirs was markedly different from their political and propaganda materials that was at times collectively authored.47 These memoirs consistently exhibit an urgency to record the story of their participation in, and their contribution to, the nationalist struggle. Most of the surviving revolutionaries and their associates felt that they were waging a losing battle against time. Following the hanging of HSRA members Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru in March 1931 and of Surya Sen and Tarakeswar Dastidar (the leaders of the Chittagong armoury raid) in January 1934, the mood and tenor of militant dissent shifted in the Indian subcontinent. While the revolutionaries continued to be active and carried out several actions, they were not able to regroup in the way they had during the 1920s. Most revolutionaries in northern India were either shot, hung or jailed or had gone into hiding. The revolutionaries’ memoirs were also responding to what they perceived as a shift in the attitude of the Congress leaders towards militant resistance from the 1930s onwards. Until the early 1930s, many Congress leaders had given open or covert support to the militant nationalists of all shades. Govind Vallabh Pant (1887–1961), who became the Chief Minister of the United Provinces in 1935 and served as the Home Minister in independent India, had represented the HRA revolutionaries when they were embroiled in the Kakori Conspiracy Case Trial. The editors of the newspaper Aaj, Babu Shivprasad Gupta and Baburao Prarkar, were inclined towards the Congress but had implicit faith in Sachindranath Sanyal and generously helped him with funds.48 Motilal Nehru until his death in February 1931 remained in communication with the HRA and HSRA revolutionaries, supported them with funds on occasion and also made arrangements for their defence in the Lahore Conspiracy Case Trial (1929–1931).49 Jawaharlal Nehru also openly supported militant radicalism and released political prisoners in Madras, Bombay, the United Provinces and Bihar following the formation of Congress ministries in 1935. The memoirs, however, note a growing ambivalence and reluctance in Jawaharlal Nehru’s attitude from the time he began campaigning for the 1935 Assembly elections.50 They insist that it took relentless pursuit and a hunger strike (by the political prisoners in Naini Jail) to make the Congress government release the political prisoners. It was not an outcome of Congress’ political largesse.51 Within a few years of the formation of the Congress ministries, even the Congress Working Committee had begun to

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display ambivalence and, in some quarters, active hostility to the cause of the imprisoned revolutionaries. They were censorious of the revolutionaries who, on their release, began to give ‘inflammatory’ speeches or went on hunger strikes while still in jail.52 This hostility towards the revolutionaries, according to the memoirs, continued into independent India. Many claimed to have received short shrift especially at the hands of Jawaharlal Nehru once he became the Prime Minister of India.53 They particularly took exception to Nehru’s representation of Azad as a fascist and a misguided leader in his autobiography Towards Freedom and to Nehru’s statement: ‘Terrorism is always a sign of political immaturity.’54 Many of the revolutionaries who embraced communism say that they received flak because the Communist Party of India did not support the Indian National Congress in its antiBritish struggle during the Second World War. Post-Independence they suffered because of Nehru’s ideological persecution of the communists and for their opposition to the Congress’ anti-people policies. Shiv Verma, for instance, went into hiding for several years after Independence and was jailed during the Indo-China war in 1962.55 From the violence that marked the coming of Independence, the state repression of Naxalism in the early 1970s, to the suspension of civil rights during the Emergency (1975), and the right- and left-wing appropriation of different shades of revolutionaries, the history of independent India as it unfolded further contributed to the setting aside of the revolutionaries’ legacy or it was reconfigured (and/or appropriated) to further contemporary political agendas.56 Many revolutionaries felt that between Gandhi’s non-violence and Nehru’s nationalist-Marxism, their contribution to India’s struggle for independence was written out of the post-Independence accounts of Indian history. Their memoirs were thus seeking to correct the balance of history and reclaim their past. Some memoirs were also seeking to correct the balance in other ways. The family members and friends of some of the revolutionaries such as Sukhdev (he was hanged at the end of the Lahore Conspiracy Trial along with Bhagat Singh and Rajguru) and Yashpal (he went on to become a famous Hindi novelist) believed that their revolutionary legacy had been overshadowed by that of Bhagat Singh – a reason being that their reputation in the revolutionary cohort carried the suspicious taint of having colluded with the British. On being arrested, Sukhdev had given the police the

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details of the revolutionary action and had accompanied them to their hideouts. While Sukhdev’s hanging seemed to have expiated him in the eyes of his fellow revolutionaries of the taint of betrayal, it nevertheless broke the organisation and kept the surviving revolutionaries from talking about him in laudatory terms.57 Sukhdev’s brother Mathura Das, while writing his biography, wished to cleanse his brother of any wrongdoing and to restore his legacy vis-à-vis Bhagat Singh.58 On the other hand, Yashpal was rumoured to have served as a police informer.59 It is said that Azad had been upset with Yashpal for getting married without his, the party leader’s, permission and had, therefore, ordered Durga Das Khanna to shoot Yashpal. While Azad and Yashpal were known to have reconciled later, Yashpal was believed to have nursed a grudge against Azad for having given the shooting order. Some memoirs allege that Yashpal played a role in the bomb blast that killed Bhagwati Charan Vohra and in passing on the information of Azad’s location to the police which ultimately led to his death in the encounter that followed. 60 Yashpal tried to extricate himself out of all these allegations in his journal Viplav and in the Hindi magazine Dharmayug and later went on to write a book, Simhavalokana, on his time as a revolutionary. His wife, Prakashvati Pal (neé Kapur), in her NMML oral history transcript claimed that a few of the revolutionaries disliked Yashpal and continued to malign his name.61 Notwithstanding Yashpal’s later fame as a foremost Hindi litterateur, it seems that his HSRA associates did not entirely absolve him. There was a general feeling that Yashpal overstated his role in the HSRA. He portrayed himself as being at the centre stage during the period when most of the HSRA revolutionaries were on trial (1929–1931) and he was in hiding with his associates Chandrashekhar Azad and Bhagwati Charan Vohra, both of whom soon died within a few months of each other.62 The fact that many of the HSRA revolutionaries gravitated towards the Communist Party of India in the years following India’s independence impacted their writings. For most of them, the time they spent in jail gave them an opportunity to read more deeply than they had done while living underground and this made them appreciate communism.63 Bhagwandas Mahour was one such associate of Azad to turn to communism during the time he spent in Sabarmati Central Jail, where he read extensively. After Independence, he briefly worked as a journalist and then devoted himself to completing his education and became a lecturer of Hindi in

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Bundelkhand College in Jhansi. He parted ways with the Communist Party over electoral politics in 1952 but remained committed to the ideology.64 Manmathnath Gupta, a member of the HRA, spent several years in jail following his sentencing in the Kakori train robbery case in 1925 and, after Independence, joined the Communist Party and made his mark in the Hindi literary world. Besides short stories, novellas and Hindi literary criticism, he also wrote several books on the history of the revolutionary movement.65 In his earliest work he presents a searing critique of Gandhian non-violence and ‘the universal conspiracy of silence’ in obliterating the role of the revolutionaries in India’s independence.66 His books held out the hope of ‘scientific socialism’ delivering India from its enslavement. Ajoy Ghosh, Dhanwantri and Shiv Verma also turned towards communism and joined the Communist Party of India. Verma’s writings presume that had Bhagat Singh survived, he would have embraced communism for sure.67 Satyabhakt, one of the founders of the Communist Party of India, in his biography of Bhagat Singh (written in 1981) uses the word samyavadi, or communist, instead of samajvadi, or socialist, to describe Bhagat’s political ideology.68 The inevitability that they presuppose in Bhagat’s metamorphosis was clearly a projection of their own ideological position but one also premised on Bhagat Singh’s last essay, written on 2 February 1931, ‘An Appeal to the Young Political Workers’, where he urged the young people to read Marx and Lenin and undertake mass propaganda, and elucidated the meaning of revolution as freedom from bondage of capitalism and imperial wars.69 Yashpal and his associate Sachchidananda Hirananda Vatsyayana, known as ‘Agyeya’, famous Hindi writers, also turned towards communism but they did not join left organisations or the Communist Party.70 Agyeya was a late entrant in the HSRA. He joined after the Lahore Conspiracy Case Trial had started and when Azad and others were hatching plans to rescue Bhagat Singh from jail.71 Agyeya’s and Yashpal’s disillusionment with the conditions of post-Independence India translated into a refusal to attach themselves to any socialist, progressive or new politico-cultural movements, and this eventually led them to put aside their pre-Independence revolutionary lives. The later generations knew them primarily for their contribution to Hindi poetry, novels and literary culture than for the time they spent in the revolutionary movement. Agyeya was the revolutionary who waited too long and whose romance of resistance soured into despair.

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The wait had turned into frustration, dejection and dystopia. This is reflected in his novel Shekhar: Ek Jivani (1941–1942) where Agyeya paints a picture of ‘incompleteness’, an unfinished process of becoming a revolutionary, and of a failed revolution.72 From this also stems Agyeya’s imagination of a yayavar, wanderer or gypsy, with no itinerary or end to his journey.73 Interestingly, despite the despondent tenor of their writings, the literary revolutionary characters in Yashpal’s Dada Kamrad and his short story ‘Saag’ fearlessly critiqued caste oppression, heterosexuality and patriarchy, and, in doing so, superseded the radicalism of real-life revolutionaries. Similar was the case of the literary revolutionaries of Jainendra Kumar’s Sunita, Kedarnath Pandey’s Jine ke Liye and Bhagwati Charan Varma’s Tedhe-Medhe Raste.74 Their authors’ radical selves now lived on through their literature. There were also those revolutionaries who never wrote and ones who chose to fade into oblivion. Kundan Lal was one such revolutionary. He also embraced communism during the time he spent in the Cellular Jail on the Andaman Islands. Like many others, the prison cell became a university where, for the first time, he immersed himself in reading and engaging with Marxist ideas.75 He took up journalism after his release and continued in the profession post-Independence. His life took an interesting turn when he moved to Nagpur where Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s elder brother Baba Rao Savarkar assisted Kundan Lal with his medical treatment and he eventually found employment with the right-wing journal Yugdharma, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s mouthpiece.76 Kundan Lal worked there all his life despite being a communist and with the full support of its editor, Satyapal Patait. The anti-British struggle bonded them despite their divergent political ideologies. He spent his life on a meagre salary, shunned public glare, refused government salary and lived in a garagelike tenement.77 Batukeshwar Dutt was also exiled to the Andamans and on his return joined the Navyuvak Sangh that worked to mobilise the communist cadres and the kisan sabhas. He organised a massive congregation of armed peasants and labourers and the old revolutionaries of the HSRA and the Ghadar Party in 1939. After Independence he moved to Patna and got married. Despite settling down into domestic life, Dutt remained ill at ease with the world around him. He stayed home while his wife worked as a school teacher and the couple faced endless financial struggles. Dutt refused to participate in parliamentary politics

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which would have secured him financially and given him political clout. The time spent in the Andamans had broken Dutt’s health and he finally succumbed to cancer. He was taken to Ferozepur for cremation where the dead bodies of his HSRA friends Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev had been burnt. In the last years of his life, Dutt had moved away from atheism and journeyed back to believing in the divine.78 Durga Das Khanna also talks about recovery of faith in the jail cell while under trial in the Lahore Conspiracy Case: I had such a vivid vision of the child Krishna with his flute…. I began my day with silent prayers. It was revealing that in spite of my Marxist studies earlier, God had not completely slipped out of my heart. At the first opportunity He came out in all his glory and splendour and possessed me so ardently. My cell became for me a sample of God verily.79

Similar was Sukhdev Raj’s turnaround, who became a Buddhist monk and then gave up the ochre robes to serve in a lepers’ village.80 Kundan Lal, Batukeshwar and Sukhdev Raj were not the only ones who died in poor health, poverty and unsung. So did Dr Gaya Prasad, Dhanwantri, Sadashiv Malkapurkar, Kishori Lal, Surendranath Pandey, Jaidev Kapur, Kashi Ram, Mukundi Lal and Sushila Mohan. It was to memorialise the lives of such friends-in-arms that many revolutionary comrades penned their memoirs. These memoirs carry the messiness that comes with memory.81 Written with the intent to put the ‘record straight’, the memoirs present themselves as repositories of remembrance; however, it is the dialectics of remembering and forgetting that informs the writing of these texts. They are not straightforward and faithful retrievals but reconfigurations. In places, the authors quibble over details that are otherwise small but acquire significance when one is seeking to preserve one’s family legacy. One instance of this is Sukhdev’s brother Mathura Das’ insistence that it was his mother and not Durga Devi Vohra (also known as Durga Bhabhi), wife of Bhagwati Charan Vohra, who accompanied Bhagat Singh when he was escaping Lahore after Saunders’ murder.82 According to Jaidev Kapur, however, Bhagat Singh was accompanied by Durga Bhabhi and Azad was accompanied by Sukhdev’s sister.83 Reading the memoirs together, the discrepancies and disagreements in narratives coming from the different vantage points of the raconteurs create the proverbial ‘Rashomon-effect’. However, the clarity and distortions of memory both reveal much that

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is useful to a historian in mining the interpersonal relationships of the revolutionaries. These memoirs are also fundamentally polyphonic. Although authored by individuals, they swivel between using ‘I’ and ‘We’ when talking about the life in revolution. The secret nature of the revolutionary organisations meant that no one person knew everything and neither could they record everything as they witnessed it.84 This slippage between I and We can be read as a reflection of their subjectivity – the moments when they were speaking for themselves, when they resonated the collective, when the ‘We’ became a subterfuge for not having to say what ‘I’ felt, or when ‘I’ as it was experienced in relation to the others. The spaces in between I and We provide a pathway into their motley and fissured inner world where the differences in socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, ideas and attitudes and what revolutionism and independence meant to them become visible. Insistent in their emotional intimacy, and refreshing in their lack of any pretence to neutrality, these materials provide a surprisingly candid view of lives in revolution, the unsanitised and messy backyard of revolutionary existence – young men still figuring out the world around themselves; assessing, disagreeing and arguing with each other; and struggling with the disjuncture between their burgeoning revolutionary consciousness and their lived reality. They unabashedly talk about the heterogeneous character of their organisations, internal debates and dissensions, their likes and dislikes, the revolutionaries’ struggle with old ways of being and thinking, variations in what they understood as revolution, how to bring about revolution, the nature and meaning of socialism, whether to remain a secret organisation or become a mass organisation, whether to be atheists or continue practising the religion of one’s forefathers, the inner workings of the organisation, and the intense emotional lives of the revolutionaries marked by deep friendships and betrayals. These memoirs and reminiscences sway between profound nostalgia, near-hagiographical appreciation of their associates and sharp critical analysis that comes with the benefit of hindsight. They are objective but not necessarily neutral.85

~ An Intimate ‘Anti-narrative’ ~

In recent years, the significant political role the revolutionaries played during the inter-war years has attracted scholarly attention and several

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recent works have opened up the field of the revolutionary history of this period in novel and original ways. Kama Maclean, Chris Moffat, Daniel J. Elam, Simona Sawhney, Neeti Nair, Kuldip Nayar, S. Irfan Habib and Ishwar Dayal Gaur use Bhagat Singh, his writings, his understanding of revolutionism, his legacy and popular narratives about him as points of entry into the history of revolutionism.86 While these writings are invaluable in their contribution to our knowledge of history of revolutionism, they have given rise to an understanding of revolutionary ontology that is premised on Bhagat Singh and elements of his persona and his life. In this framework, the acts of reading and writing coupled with a belief in socialism become essential elements of the revolutionary ontology, similar to the Bengali revolutionaries that Durba Ghosh studies.87 This historiographical frame with a singular focus on the ‘revolutionary-who-reads-and-writes’ imposes a unitary consciousness on the revolutionary as the subject of the study by constructing a binary – the individual who makes choices (and who writes) and thereby changes his life and that of others versus the individual whose life is determined by the structure (the socio-cultural context they find themselves in). In this schema, the former is the revolutionary – the individualistic and individualised rebel and, more often than not, a male. The co-relation between reading and becoming a revolutionary is an idea that even the revolutionaries subscribed to. This is borne out by the recruitment policy of most of the revolutionary organisations that required the new recruits to first read certain books before they were considered worthy or ready for action. Durga Devi Vohra, wife of Bhagwati Charan Vohra, says in one place: ‘First phase is an emotional one and after reading one becomes a revolutionary.’88 A fundamental binary between emotions and immaturity on one side and reading, rationality and maturity on the other is drawn in several instances in the revolutionary memoirs. For example, Bhagwandas Mahour confesses how he had to ‘overrule the emotions’ in order to commit dacoities and how ‘conflict between emotions and intellect would disbalance him’.89 This hydraulic view of emotions as elements of our being that need to be kept reined in lest they take over, and reading being the best mode of regulating them, is, however, contradicted in the next instant in these reminiscences when the narration slips into describing the revolutionaries such as Bhagat Singh as deewana, crazed, or utavala, impatient, and how they saw their being revolutionaries as an emotional commitment. These narrative slippages make classifying the

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revolutionaries as one or the other difficult. The questions for a historian then are: How do we analyse these textual slippages? What do they offer to our understanding of the revolutionaries as an affective community?90 Waiting for Swaraj challenges the above historiographical portraiture of the revolutionaries. The book dislodges the historical narratives that study the Indian revolutionary movement primarily through the lens of Bhagat Singh – his persona, actions and writings. It questions the presumed significance of socialism as a cementing philosophy or as a telos that revolutionary history was moving towards, and problematises the notion that ideology overrides, and is separate from, praxis. It does so by widening the canvas of the history of revolutionism by bringing in other leaders and members of the HRA and HSRA, many of whom had a sensibility sharply at variance with Bhagat Singh and yet saw themselves as revolutionaries. This book captures an alternative revolutionary ontology (and its inviolable connection with time) by focussing on the life experiences of the less visible members of the HRA and the HSRA. It contends that the fount of ontology and ideology lie in praxis, that is, the inner life, the quotidian existence, and in the practices of everyday life of the revolutionaries. The life story of Chandrashekhar Azad (1906–1931), a member of the HRA and the leader of the HSRA, serves as the narrative spindle that binds the different chapters of the book. Azad’s life journey drives us to imagine the ‘invisible’ revolutionary life beyond the prison or the courtroom (which are common frames for writing revolutionary histories) as he was an exception in having evaded police arrest and thereby never spending any time in jail or being put on a trial.91 Azad was one of the rare revolutionaries to have had an active political life of about a decade as a member of the HRA (1924–1927) and the HSRA (1928–1931) – two different revolutionary organisations in terms of their members, ideas, orientation and functioning. Azad was involved in running both the organisations on the ground: setting up dens, overseeing bomb-making, guarding hideouts, managing the finances, arranging and buying firearms, cleaning and maintaining them, and planning the actions – recceing the site, deciding the number of members required, choosing who will shoot, who will stand guard, which exit will they use, who will tackle the policeman, who will give cover, and so on. His life journey thus widens the canvas of historical inquiry by bringing together the lives, relationships

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and literature of the members of the HRA and the HSRA in the same frame and anchoring them in the longer history of revolutionism. In the chapters that follow, the literature on the HRA and the writings of revolutionaries associated with it (Sachindranath Sanyal, Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan, Ram Prasad Khatri, Manmathnath Gupta, Vishnu Sharan Dublish, Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee) appear in conversation with each other and with that of the HSRA (Bhagat Singh, Jaidev Kapur, Yashpal, Bijoy Kumar Sinha, Durga Devi Vohra). The HRA has received short shrift in Indian revolutionary history. Research on the HRA has been superseded by its more well-known successor, the HSRA, with the HRA receiving stray mentions in the latter’s history. Ram Prasad Bismil and Ashfaqulla, for instance, were prolific writers and poets and have left behind a body of work, especially in Urdu, that awaits academic attention.92 Ram Prasad’s adoption of the Urdu pen name ‘Bismil’ along with his deep devotion to Arya Samaj was a referent to a way of being that escapes analysis when using the present-day political binary of left and right wing. Examining the significant borrowings and departures between the two organisations helps locate the HSRA in a more longue dureé history of Indian revolutionism. The memoirs of revolutionaries hitherto ignored or considered marginal in studying the history of revolutionism, such as Bhagwandas Mahour, Sadashiv Malkapurkar, Ram Prasad Khatri and Vishwanath Vaishampayan, also acquire greater significance when one is trying to piece together the lives, roles and contribution of the rankand-file members.93 Bringing these diverse sets of writings into focus also recalibrates the significance of the revolutionary memoirs and the historical works singularly focussing on the political materials of the HSRA, Bhagat Singh and the works of his Lahore associates, such as Yashpal and Ajoy Ghosh.94 The challenges in using Azad’s life as the narrative mandrel were twofold. The first major challenge is that it unveiled shades of revolutionism that otherwise get subsumed in the dominant narratives. Here was a revolutionary who was neither like Bhagat Singh nor like the Bengali revolutionary leaders. Chandrashekhar Azad was a revolutionary whose radicalisation was neither a product of education nor a consequence of radical socio-familial background. He did not care for intellectual minutiae and neither did he ‘write’ himself into ‘history’ by penning essays, pamphlets and memoirs. Nor did Azad care to be memorialised in the manner he was

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after his death. Once he severely admonished Bhagat Singh for wanting to know the details of his family in order to assist them in the event of Azad’s death. He retorted angrily: ‘Dekho Ranjit (Bhagat Singh ka dal ka naam), is baar puccha, to puccha, ab phir kabhi mat pucchna. Na gharwalon ko tumhari sahayata se matlab hai aur na mujhe apna jeevan charitra hi likhna hai’ (See, Ranjit [Bhagat Singh’s party name], this time you asked so you asked, now never ask me again. Neither do my family members care for your assistance nor do I want to write my memoirs).95 It was Azad’s unshakeable belief in the might of arms in bringing about swaraj that kept him going. Given that his persona does not fit easily in the extant frames made me directly confront the question regarding how to configure the revolutionary ontology when it comes to people such as Azad. Evidently, in writing about Azad, and especially the inner lives of the revolutionaries, one was swimming against the tide of dominant historiographical frames without a conceptual buoy to hold it in place. The second challenge was regarding crafting the historical narrative. How not to write a romantic and celebratory history of revolutionary lives, given the near-hagiographical manner in which Azad’s associates, who respected and cherished him immensely, write about him; and how to compose a narrative out of diverse non-archival, oral and biographical sources that spoke in different and at times contradictory voices? In order to address these concerns and to deal with the complexities of crafting a narrative, I had to dive into a diverse range of historical and anthropological works relating to practice theory and cultural ‘thick description’; the importance of ‘everyday’, ‘experience’ and the ‘small voice of history’; the relevance of microhistorical scale and vantage point of historical writing; the ones theorising oral histories and using autobiographies as historical evidence; and, finally, the ones delving into the history of emotions – all of which went into parsing through the primary material and crafting the narrative.96 Moving forward, in the next chapter I dive into the social world of Azad to map the young man’s early journey as he gradually acquires a revolutionary consciousness and begins to identify as a revolutionary. I examine the antecedents of his radical imagination, the emotional and ideational resources available to a person like him and others, and the circumstances that propelled the young men onto the path of revolutionism in the 1920s. The chapter further undertakes a detailed discussion of

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the life of the HRA revolutionaries, their struggle with new ideas, their religious beliefs and their underground life. What comes to the fore is the production of revolutionaries through social practice in the world and, in turn, production of the world through social practice.97 That is, how structure (in this case colonialism) impacts, moulds and constitutes the subjectivities of ordinary people; the manner in which actions of people constitute their reality and the world around them; and how these actions, in turn, rupture, transform and contest the people’s earlier ways of being. In studying these elements this chapter disrupts the neat essentialisms in which the lives of the revolutionaries come wrapped, one of them being that revolutionism was an inevitable choice foretold in the early life of these young men. The reader is acquainted with the next stage of Azad’s life after the decimation of the HRA and his rise as the leader of the HSRA in Chapter 3. It focusses on the everyday conversations, debates and disagreements of the HSRA members, particularly regarding the importance of religion, the value and meaning of socialist ideas, how best to organise a revolutionary struggle and what revolution meant to them. Their memoirs show how their responses to different issues varied from indifference, bafflement, complete rejection and selective dismissal to theoretical cherry-picking to grudging agreement. Their disparate socio-cultural, class and educational backgrounds played into their conversations and responses to new ideas. The revolutionaries’ memoirs occasion a pause in our understanding regarding the ideological consensus that appears in the revolutionaries’ political tracts produced for propaganda purposes. The gaps between the two sets of writings make it hard to see the HSRA revolutionaries simply as socialists or internationalists and question the degree to which internationalism and socialism constituted their consciousness. The questions it bring up are: Did they see themselves as portents of a global phenomenon or is it the historians who have located them in this framework? Or were they simply nationalist revolutionaries? These questions are important because they unsettle a tidy complementarity hitherto presumed in several historical writings between Indian revolutionism and globally circulating anti-authoritarian thought in the aftermath of the First World War. They also challenge the presumed atheism of the HSRA revolutionaries and force us to re-examine the importance of religion and its place in the lives of these revolutionaries. And, finally, it pushes us to ask what held the

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revolutionaries together, given that they were such a disparate bunch – was it just revolutionary ideology or was there more? The final chapter weaves together the narrative of Azad’s initiation into the revolutionary movement on the Manikarnika Ghat in the city of Banaras and his assassination in a police encounter in Allahabad to explore the intimate inter-relationship between death, time and revolutionary ontology. For the revolutionaries, their death actually rendered them everliving or timeless (amar). It was the fulfilment of their destiny as a link in the long unbroken chain of warriors going way back in history and which would continue until the time India became independent. The chapter demonstrates how the revolutionaries had a dialectical relationship with time, which was reflected in their observance of political asceticism in their daily life (the invisible) and in their embrace of violence as a political tool (the visible). Focussing on their quotidian lives, the chapter examines how the twin ideals – asceticism and violence – allowed the revolutionaries ‘temporal mobility’, that is, they were able to transcend what they saw as an imperfect present and thereby shorten the time-distance to their political utopia – poorna swaraj (complete independence). Detaching themselves from the imperfections of their time – the rhythms of industrial time and giving up their lifestyles as upper-caste men or at least questioning their socio-cultural upbringing – was their attempt at experiencing swaraj (self-rule). Finally, what does focusing on intimate political lives – the interrelationships between different revolutionaries, their thoughts and conversations, and the inner workings of the revolutionary organisation – offer to our understanding of revolution? In asking this question, this book, much like Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, presents an ‘antinarrative’ of the popular understanding of revolution that is associated with the imagery of seismic convulsions, mobs baying for murder, army men with guns and bayonets stamping through streets, gunshots and cannonball explosions, utter chaos, and the world up in flames. Revolutions are generally studied as ‘events’ bound by space and time, with a beginning, middle and an end.98 Perhaps revolutions are not just world-transforming events but, as Daniel Elam persuasively argues, a process – a slow accretion of human actions and happenings.99 Seeing revolution as a process enables us to understand the histories of people who saw themselves as revolutionaries but were ones without a ‘classic’

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revolution and were thus written out of history as ‘failures’. Their presence indicates that there is more to the history of revolutions than ‘events’ that either failed or succeeded. Their presence also redefines the way we understand failure. These revolutionaries’ utopia was the attainment of swaraj, and many survived to see India attaining swaraj, but not the one they had dreamt of. In this much, the morning they wished to awaken to never came and it was not they who failed but, in their view, time (in this case represented as history) that had failed them.

2 ~ Satyagrahi to Krantikari ~

T

he only childhood story one has of Chandrashekhar Azad is of an incident that occurred a few days before he left his home forever. It is of his mother admonishing him for not having gone to school. Seeing that he and his friends were playing with a box of matches, she shouted, ‘Why haven’t you gone to school? What are you doing?’ He replied playfully, ‘Experimenting, mother. A single match gives a good deal of light. I wanted to see how much light a boxful of matches will give.’ Standing with one hand on her hip, his mother used the other to pull his ear. ‘Haven’t I told you that fire is dangerous?’ Pat came the reply, ‘But it is also useful mother. It chases away darkness.’ A few days after the incident, in the dark of the night, Chandrashekhar quietly slipped out of his home onwards to his destiny.1 This vignette of Chandrashekhar playing with fire and leaving home in the dead of night was an allegorical interplay of darkness and light. Darkness standing for colonialism and ignorance, and also for subterfuge for a revolutionary to make his escape. Light and fire interchangeably refer to kranti, or armed revolution, and freedom.2 This story comes from the Amar Chitra Katha, which was an extremely popular illustrated storybook series for middle-class children that started in 1967. The one on Chandrashekhar was titled Chandrashekhar Azad: Freedom Was His Mission and was part of Amar Chitra Katha’s larger ‘Braveheart’ series that had biographical stories of ‘India’s bravest men and women from history’, which included warriors, legendary rulers of India, freedom fighters and Indian soldiers who had won gallantry awards.3 Azad’s life story was one of the most popular comic-books as there was little information available on him at the time.4 One finds a slightly different version of the story in Manmathnath Gupta’s history of the Indian revolutionary movement.5 Chandrashekhar

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and his friends were playing with matches and wanted to see how much fire and light several matches would make in one go. However, they were also hesitating lest they singed their fingers. Chandrashekhar came forward and lit all the matches while holding them in between his fingers. The matches burnt to the end and singed his fingers as he stood there smiling. His friends rushed to get him first aid only when they looked in the direction of his fingers.6 Such apocryphal childhood stories abound in biographies of most revolutionary leaders. Another oft-repeated story of a life in revolution foretold is of Bhagat Singh planting small twigs as saplings in the ground that he believed would sprout guns.7 Although the authenticity or historicity of these stories is not certain, they are ubiquitous. They circulate through the medium of popular narratives, comic books, cinema, documentaries and even school textbooks where a revolutionary’s childhood prefigures his adult life. These narratives primarily thrive on the youthful figure of the revolutionary. Their youth was made poignant by their ‘martyrdom’ and their early death kept them eternally young. Located within the celebratory story of anti-colonial nationalism, their readiness to embrace death (that is, the ability for self-sacrifice) became a signifier of their heroism, idealism and political maturity. The ‘youth’ of the revolutionaries also generated disparaging dismissal of their politics as immature and naïve, especially in comparison with the more ‘mature’ Gandhian politics. Caught in the binary of mature–immature/adulthood–infantilism, the story of the making of the revolutionaries was lost in their life narratives. Either it was presumed to have been superseded by the young men’s espousal of armed revolution and therefore blotted out, or only the vignettes that fed the story of armed revolution were narrativised (as in the case of Azad playing with burning matches or Bhagat sowing guns). There has been a consequent ‘cultural thinning’ of the lives of the young men, contributing to the ubiquity of mythic biographical narratives that embody the notion of the self as a preexisting entity beyond time.8 The commonsensical acceptance and circulation of these narratives raises rather self-evident questions regarding human action and individual agency. Were the lives of these young men simply being driven forward by an a priori and natural impulse or by a pre-determined schema? Did these young men not reconfigure their selves? What meaning does their ‘youth’ hold in their metamorphoses? Finally, what does learning about

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the transformation of these young men do for our understanding of the lives of the revolutionaries? In order to explore these questions, I examine Chandrashekhar Azad’s life journey from his early days, his life as a poor labourer in Bombay, a Sanskrit student in Banaras, his mobilisation into Gandhian satyagraha to his becoming a member of the Hindustan Republican Association (the HRA), and finally his rise as the leader of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (the HSRA). At each juncture, he encounters and engages with old habits, new ideas, ever-different cityscapes and several young men whose lives are interleaved with his, and thus occurs his metamorphosis into a revolutionary; and the refiguration of his revolutionary self – that is, the story told, and heard, of him as a revolutionary.9

~ Gandhivadi to Krantikari ~

Chandrashekhar Tiwari entered the nationalist fray as a devout Gandhian. Gandhi’s call for satyagraha, or non-cooperation, in 1921 had mobilised the urban youth from big and small towns in large numbers. Gandhi had launched his ‘non-cooperation’ movement with even greater fervour in the aftermath of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in April 1919 where the colonial police shot down several hundred peaceful protestors. The massacre, a tragedy with universal overtones, was a turning point in the nationalist politics as it brought together nationalists of all hues.10 At this time, Gandhi’s promise of swaraj, self-rule, within one year generated a massive popular groundswell. The biggest participants were the school and college-going students who quit government-run educational institutions to take part in a range of political activities. Several young men who later became Chandrashekhar’s associates also entered the nationalist politics at this time.11 Manmathnath Gupta while talking about Chandrashekhar’s early life says that it is doubtful whether he had heard of Jallianwala Bagh when he became a satyagrahi.12 He was the youngest of five children and grew up in an extremely poor household. His parents lived in the town of Bhavra or Bhabra which was in the riyasat of Alirajpur in the Central Provinces, a predominantly tribal area where conflict between tribal and settled agricultural communities alongside famine and hunger were endemic. His father, Sitaram Tiwari, held several small jobs and finally ended up as

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a guard in the government gardens of Alirajpur.13 Manmathnath paints a dismal picture of village society caught in a time warp and seeped in superstition. The town of Bhavra was like an island with no mode of communication or navigable roads and with only dacoits, sadhus and fakirs as visitors. Chandrashekhar’s family, in Manmathnath’s estimation, had no idea that there was a nationalist upsurge underway in the country.14 Impelled by the desire to escape his circumstances, one night Chandrashekhar sneaked out of his house, boarded a train to Bombay and found employment on one of its dockyards.15 Some kindly dockyard labourers helped him find work amongst the ship painters and gave him refuge in their living quarters.16 The labourers’ quarters were closed rooms with no windows or air passages. The air was laden with the smell of sweat and tobacco smoke. They slept on the floor dirtied by wanton spitting. Chandrashekhar slept on a mat, woke up every morning at 5 o’clock and left for work with everyone else. He would finish work and spend his time loitering on the roads or watching a film, returning to the room only when he could no longer ward off sleep. He had no friends or companions in the city to spend time with. The quarters where he lived had no provision for taking a bath and neither did Chandrashekhar have enough clothes to wash, dry and change every day. He would bathe once a week under a handpump and throw away the dirty clothes. He would buy a cheap set of used (but washed) clothes every Sunday from the stolen goods market and wear them after his bath.17 While living with the labourers, Azad would not eat food cooked by them for fear of despoiling his caste. Vaishampayan describes Chandrashekhar’s reaction to being invited by the labourers to eat with them: ‘Ye the kattar brahman pita ke putra. Unke saath khana kaise khaate, jinki na jaat ka pata tha na dharm ka’ (Here was a son of a staunch Brahmin. How could he eat with them, folks whose caste and religion were not known).18 Chandrashekhar had initially decided that he would live off dry snacks until he could buy his own provisions and vessels for cooking. The only problem with his plan was that he did not know how to cook. His attempts to learn cooking from a fellow labourer ended in miserable failure. Most times he could not get the fire started or would add too much water to the dough. Within a week he gave up his efforts to learn cooking and began eating in a hotel. However, there was also a social opprobrium

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against Brahmins eating in hotels, as one was not sure of the chef ’s caste. With no way out, he exculpated that he had already eaten the food cooked by an outcaste labourer and therefore eating in a hotel would not be any different. Recounting Chandrashekhar’s bogus excuses, Vaishampayan ends the narrative on a jocular note: ‘Is prakar hotel ki rotiyan sahaj hi bramanatva ko praapt ho gayee’ (This is how the hotel rotis [bread] simply got brahmanised).19 Chandrashekhar, however, could not sustain living in this manner. He reasoned if the objective was to find employment to stave off hunger then he could have found something to do back home itself. He decided to leave Bombay, as putting himself through the misery of a labourer’s life no longer made sense. He had heard from his father that people (that is, Brahmins) went to Banaras to study Sanskrit and where Brahmin boys were given free accommodation and clothing. This thought decided him about his destination. He got on the very next train to Banaras, went straight to the Banaras Sanskrit College and enrolled himself as a student.20 On settling into his life as a student in Banaras, Chandrashekhar finally wrote a letter informing his parents of his well-being.21 Although he did not quite enjoy the life of learning, yet at least he no longer had to worry about his meals and having a roof over his head. 22 Fortuitously for Chandrashekhar, the quiet of his days was soon disrupted as the anti-British struggle reached the banks of Banaras. It was the year 1921 and Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement was at its height. The Congress committees in Banaras were busy organising the boycott of foreign goods and picketing of shops that were selling liquor, opium and marijuana.23 Most of the prominent Congress leaders of the city, such as Acharya Kriplani and Kamlapati Tripathi, were soon jailed, leaving the teenage youth in charge of the movement.24 The students of the Banaras Sanskrit College were at the helm. Chandrashekhar Tiwari and his friends Gyanchandra Murabbawale and Vishwanath Sharma were nabbed by the police one day for picketing a liquor shop near the office of the Hindi journal Aaj. They were taken to the Banaras District Jail where Gyanchandra and Vishwanath received the sentence of hard labour for a month and Chandrashekhar was released because he was too young to be sent to jail.25 Chandrashekhar immediately re-joined the picketers who were preventing examinations from being held in the Government Sanskrit College. Again caught by the police, he was taken to the Banaras Jail,

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charged with disrupting order and produced in front of a magistrate. The judge asked the young boy his name and other family details. He replied that his name was ‘Azad’, his father’s name was ‘Swatantra’ and his home address was a jail cell. The magistrate was enraged with Chandrashekhar and decided to punish his recalcitrance by sentencing him to be caned. The young man braved the lashes. Soon after his release, he was publicly feted as the young nationalist who took the lashes instead of asking for pardon.26 From that day on, he dropped the Brahmin surname ‘Tiwari’ and came to be known as ‘Azad’, the liberated – the name he had identified himself with in front of the magistrate. The caning consecrated him as a satyagrahi and a nationalist; however, the habits and practices that went with the Tiwari surname were not that easily dropped. At this point Chandrashekhar joined the Kashi Vidyapeeth, an institution founded by the local leaders Dr Bhagwandass and Shivprasad Gupta along with the Theosophist Annie Besant in early 1921. They were operationalising Gandhi’s call to nationalise education and to boycott government institutions.27 Azad’s presence in the Vidyapeeth evoked surprise and curiosity because he was by now famous as a young satyagrahi and he was also older than the other students in his class.28 He began to spend his free time in the Carmichael Library reading newspapers and listening to political lectures. He also attended all the jan-sabhas, or public meetings, held by the two factions of the Congress Party, the Swarajists and the No-changers, to understand their political positions. At the time, Pranabesh Chatterjee and Manmathnath Gupta, young men from the revolutionary circles, were also students at the Vidyapeeth. Pranabesh began to tail Azad and gradually befriended him. He began giving Azad books to read. This was part of the general revolutionary strategy to give out books to students to gauge their inclination for revolutionary ideas before recruiting them. Although Pranabesh suspected Azad of returning the books unread, there was one by Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Anandmath, that his friends claim impacted Azad.29 At times these young men would congregate at a khadi shop and at Rajendranath Lahiri’s brother’s homeopathic medicine shop on the Dashashavmedh Ghat to discuss politics. Lahiri, a Bengali revolutionary, would take the conversation towards armed struggle to gauge their interest.30 However, Azad was not an easy person to convert to revolutionary ideas. It was only after several months that Azad finally began to show inclination towards militant ideas.

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Azad’s life, like those of several other young men, gradually began to turn towards the revolutionary highway after the infamous Chauri Chaura incident on 5 February 1922. Chauri Chaura was a small town near Gorakhpur in the United Provinces where a group of satyagrahis set the police chowki on fire, killing several policemen inside. The outbreak of violence upset Gandhi and he immediately withdrew his movement. The abrupt withdrawal created widespread frustration with Gandhi and a questioning of the political expediency of the philosophy of ahimsa, nonviolence. This is a refrain that comes up consistently in most oral interview transcripts of the revolutionaries.31 The young people grew disenchanted and began to veer towards militancy. They began to believe if a widespread mass movement such as Gandhi’s could not succeed in liberating India then armed revolution was the only way forward. Manmathnath recalls: ‘This is the line from where the new current started in the lives of people like Chandrashekhar Azad and myself, who later on from being staunch followers of Gandhi jumped to the other side, and were sucked in the vortex of revolutionary movement.’32 Azad, however, did not give up on Gandhi right away. Ramkrishan Khatri, another HRA associate, talks about how in the early days of their acquaintance they would often argue about the political sagacity of the withdrawal of the non-cooperation movement and ‘bahas mein vaha bahut zoron ke saath Gandhiji ka paksh lekar unki vakalat karte’ (in the argument he [Azad] would vociferously take Gandhi’s side and would defend his actions).33 Manmathnath also complained of Azad’s tenaciousness and how he had a ‘mysterious faith in the Congress. He cost me many days’.34 Finally, Manmathnath was able to recruit Azad as a member of the HRA, a revolutionary organisation with its nodes in different cities of the United Provinces. Sachindranath Sanyal (1893–1942) had come together with Ram Prasad Bismil (1897–1927) in 1924 to form the HRA (named after the Irish Republican Army and influenced by Mazzini’s republicanism).35 On becoming a member of the HRA, the first thing Azad did was to detach himself from his family in Bhavra. He visited them once while he was studying at the Vidyapeeth and then decided not to return. The uncertainty of the life of the revolutionaries meant that he could not afford to be tied down by a family. He also took up a regular exercise regimen that became a lifelong habit with him.36 Bismil and Sanyal had great affection for Azad; however, they saw him as a novice. Consequently,

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in the early days he was not entrusted with serious underground work.37 It was only with time that he was introduced to other revolutionaries in Banaras and assigned organisational work. In order to maintain secrecy and security, the members were introduced to each other only on a needto-know basis. To know everyone was to have a trusted status and with time Azad acquired that.38 Hereupon Azad undertook organisational work, assisted in recruitment and was also actively involved in political dacoities. Bismil named him ‘Quicksilver’ for his constant enthusiasm and ‘magnetic personality’.39

~ Banaras ~

Banaras, also known as Varanasi or Kashi, was an ancient site of Hindu pilgrimage on the banks of the river Ganges. The city had several temples, shrines, ashrams, ghats, cremation grounds, akharas and mohallas and drew pilgrims, sadhus and sanyasis in droves. It had burgeoned into one of the largest northern Indian cities of the early twentieth century with a robust agrarian, commercial and artisanal economy. The city was also a major attraction for merchant-bankers, moneylenders, military warlords and agricultural clans for the economic opportunities it offered.40 Famous for its handlooms, its weaving sector primarily comprised of Muslim weavers who along with the lower-caste service class formed the bulk of the city’s underclasses. By the 1920s, Banaras had, amongst other things, also become a revolutionary den.41 The odds that Azad would find himself in a revolutionary milieu in Banaras was not surprising. Sachindranath Sanyal had sown the seeds of revolution in Banaras as early as 1908 when he opened a cell of the Anushilan Samiti, the Bengali revolutionary organisation, in the city. The cell later morphed into ‘Young Men’s Association’ and, like all the other youth organisations across British India, it was guised as promoting the moral, intellectual and physical well-being of its members. The Bengalitola, the Bengali neighbourhood or muhalla/mohalla, was an important unit as a place of residence and collective associational activities. It provided subterfuge for their activities and hideouts for revolutionaries on the run.42 The organisation actively worked in schools and colleges and also made forays into nearby villages.43 In 1914, Rash Behari Bose (1886–1945) of the Jugantar Party in Bengal came to Banaras and briefly took over the running of the organisation.

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Around this time, three young men – Vishnu Ganesh Pingley, Kartar Singh Sarabha and Vinayak Rao Kaple – members of the California-based Indian revolutionary organisation called the Ghadar Party, returned from the United States of America (USA) and joined Sanyal in his efforts.44 The coming together of revolutionaries from Bengal and Punjab was part of the revolutionaries’ desire to create a united front.45 In 1915, Rash Behari Bose and Sachindranath Sanyal along with the Ghadarites in Punjab, the revolutionaries from Maharashtra and the cells in Bengal led by Jatindranath Mukhopadhyay (also known as Bagha Jatin) of the Jugantar planned a coup against the British. They had planned to take Fort William in Calcutta with the help of German arms that were to land in Calcutta alongside a series of coordinated mutinies in various garrisons across Punjab. Banaras was but one of the nodes in this plan, and India was but one theatre in the anti-British revolutionary resistance. Other sites of resistance included California, New York, Berlin, London, Tashkent, the Indo-Iranian border, Kabul, Singapore and Tokyo. The World War had mobilised anti-British revolutionaries who were being openly aided by the foreign office of Germany, Ireland and the pan-Islamists in Turkey.46 The global diasporic arc of the Indian revolutionary movement mimicked that of the British colonial state, which was a trans-national empire with its territories extending over sub-Saharan and north Africa, Afghanistan, India and Southeast Asia. The plan made by Sanyal and Bose for coordinated revolts and mutinies came to naught when a member of the Punjab group betrayed them to the police.47 Rash Behari Bose managed to escape and leave India before the police could get him and he spent rest of his life exiled in Japan.48 Sanyal was caught and tried under the Banaras Conspiracy Case and exiled to the penal colony of the Andaman Islands. Kartar Singh Sarabha and Vishnu Pingley met the worst fate. They were caught and tried under the first Lahore Conspiracy Case (1915) and were sentenced to be hanged.49 Despite having busted the revolutionaries in Banaras, in the view of the British administrators, the city had become ‘a point of peculiar peril’ because the revolutionary ideas had ‘spread gradually and secretly, through poisonous literature and teaching among uncritical and impressionable youths; that within these narrow limits it worked unchecked for years, and finally developed a conspiracy which almost achieved a horrible tragedy.’50 The British administrators were not entirely

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wrong because, notwithstanding the warnings of the Sedition Committee, the Banaras police was unsuccessful in preventing the city from turning into a revolutionary burrow. The ‘contagion’ of revolution had already firmly taken root.51 As we know, Azad’s reasons for going to Banaras had little to do with the national struggle. He was drawn to Banaras for the free lodging and boarding it offered to the Brahmin boys studying in the Sanskrit-learning centres. At the time, Banaras was indeed the foremost centre of Brahminic learning. There was a long tradition of patronage of Sanskrit and scriptural learning in the city, where Brahmins formed a sizable population. The British administration had joined the triumvirate of merchants, Brahmans and the Raja of Banaras to patronise traditional learning and had deliberately fostered the religious identity of the city.52 The establishment of the Banaras Sanskrit College in 1791 had been intended to serve as an exemplar of British commitment to Sanskrit and Vedic learning.53 However, about a century of British rule managed to hollow out the authority and prestige of the pandits as the interlocutors of law and religion and also supplanted the traditional systems of learning and authority. This happened despite the British administration’s purported commitment and the western Orientalists’ valorisation of Sanskrit and Vedic learning. By the 1920s, studying Sanskrit and ancient texts of rhetoric and grammar no longer held as much glamour as did nai vidya, the new knowledge or western education that included the English language, the sciences and mathematics. This was echoed in the choice of English as the medium of instruction in the Banaras Hindu University and the lukewarm response amongst its students to ‘Hindu’ Learning.54 Amongst the Indian languages, it was not Sanskrit but Hindi that had acquired a new public prominence as the language of anti-colonial and Hindu nationalist assertion. Little did Azad know that he had stepped into a world where different classical traditions were coalescing into a unitary tradition that was distinctly Hindu and upper caste and which saw the Muslim culture as extraneous.55 Other than Sanskrit grammar and rhetoric, Banaras also introduced Azad to the world of gosains, the armed Hindu ascetics, a dominant social group of the city who combined religiosity with trading and soldiering. The gosains formed the city’s militarised religio-commercial core. The word gosain primarily referred to the ascetics belonging to the Shaiva

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Dasnami (the worshippers of Lord Shiva) sect. However, by the early twentieth century the term had lost its sectarian connotations and had come to encompass both the Dasnamis and the Ramanandi bairagis (the worshippers of Lord Vishnu).56 The nineteenth century saw a sudden exponential increase in the population of gosains, who chose to settle down in Banaras following their demobilisation by the East India Company, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, the gosains had become one of the primary property-owners in the city.57 The akharas (confraternity, order or war-band) was the main organising unit of the gosains and the life inside the akharas was ordered as teacher–disciple (guru–chela) relationships. The akharas were popular for their openness and welcoming attitude towards people regardless of caste and religious background. They also offered young men from the lower classes a chance to be mentored and to acquire social mobility.58 The gosains acquired a great deal of socio-cultural capital amongst the populace through their participation in the patron–client networks of the city on the one hand, and in the religio-commercial life of the region on the other. The akharas created and controlled a wide trading network that connected the akhara members living in different cities on the pilgrimage routes. They maintained their hold over these networks by providing armed protection to the merchants using the pilgrim highways for goods shipment.59 Thus, living in Banaras, Azad developed ties with the gosains and the akharas, whose lives resonated with Azad’s potent imagination of the literary warrior ascetics of the Anandmath. Another aspect of Banaras that left its imprint on Azad was its robust cultural life centred around religious festivals, performing arts and sporting events. There were numerous cultural and sporting akharas (clubs, martial training centres and gymnasiums with wrestling pits other than the religious akharas of the gosains) that served as the organisational nuclei of the city’s social life. Nearly every mohalla of the city had its own akhara. The cultural akharas undertook organisation of sacred spectacles such as the Ramlila and the kathas (story-telling), to Parsi theatre and Hindi natak (drama), to street artists (svang), acrobats (nats), animal trainers and the solo disguise artists (the bahurupiyas).60 The sports akharas, on the other hand, conducted body-building, weightlifting matches, wrestling tournaments, and sword and stick performances. These sporting akharas had a distinct physical culture where all the disciples were expected to follow the guru or ustad and observe a daily regimen (niyam acharan) focussing on ahar (diet),

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sanyam (balance) and brahmcharya (celibacy).61 The slivers of this world would be visible in Azad’s later life as a revolutionary, especially in his garb as a bahurupiya and as a warrior-ascetic observing niyam-acharan.

~ The HRA ~

The first revolutionary bullet was fired at the end of the First World War in Bengal, the province that had been the epicentre of revolutionary resistance since 1905. Gopi Mohan Saha (1906–1924) attempted to assassinate Charles Tegart, the Chief of Police, on 12 January 1924. As fate would have it, Saha missed his target and ended up shooting a British merchant. Saha had been recruited as part of a vigorous revolutionary recruitment drive in the aftermath of the withdrawal of non-cooperation. During the period of the non-cooperation movement (1919–1921), the revolutionary organisations had decided to temporarily withhold their activities to support Gandhi. Many Bengal revolutionaries, however, notwithstanding the truce with Gandhi, had quietly continued to prepare the ground for revolutionary revival. Some kept printing anti-Congress literature, some infiltrated the Congress ranks, and some took up prominent positions in Bengal’s district-level Congress committees.62 Being part of the Congress later gave them access to a wider network of younger people whom they rushed in to recruit once Gandhi withdrew his movement. The students who had left their schools and colleges during the non-cooperation years were also a ready constituency.63 The revolutionary cadres swelled in no time and some of the cells began carrying out political dacoities to raise funds for the activities and for the upkeep of the new recruits.64 The revolutionaries described Saha’s shooting as a clarion call that ‘served as an announcement to the public, specially to the petty bourgeois idealist youth who had lost faith in Gandhi’s methods that the revolutionary party was there as an alternative to the Gandhian way’.65 Gandhi responded by attempting to pass a resolution at the Ahmedabad Congress of 1924 condemning Gopi Mohan Saha for shooting at Tegart. Sachindranath Sanyal countered Gandhi’s move by writing an anonymous ‘open letter’ in 1925 that questioned Gandhi’s ability as the leader of India’s liberation movement and affirmed peoples’ loss of faith in the non-violent method. He excoriated Gandhi for having failed to live up to his promise of attaining swaraj in a year. Sanyal wrote:

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The experiment with non-violent non-cooperation movement is now over.… To an ideal India, violence or non-violence has the same significance provided they ultimately do good to humanity…. Your sentiment of remaining within the British empire reminds one of the many Himalayan miscalculations that you have compromised a worthy ideal with the present needs of a false expediency.66

In Sanyal’s view, non-cooperation failed because of an absence of a ‘worthy ideal’.67 He went on to list the achievements of the revolutionary movement: annulment of the Bengal partition, the Minto–Morley and Montford reforms and, above all, the ‘moral advancement’ of India. Revolutionaries had made Indians realise the ‘grandeur and the beauty that lie in dying for a noble cause…. Death has a certain charm and is not always a dreadful thing’.68 He further congratulated the revolutionaries for having a better understanding of the masses’ temperament and not having mobilised them until they became sure of their strength. He condemned Gandhi for having dragged the Indian masses into a political struggle without understanding their psychology. He wondered why Indians could not equip themselves better than the British, given that they were also ‘saturated with high principles of spirituality’.69 Sanyal’s letter was unprecedented in openly defying Gandhi and his methods. Sanyal had already formed the HRA by the time he wrote the open letter to Gandhi. The coming together of the HRA was also an outcome of the post–First World War recruitment drive that Sanyal undertook in the cities of the United Provinces such as Agra, Kanpur, Allahabad, Aligarh, Meerut, Banaras and Fatehpur following his release from the Andamans as part of the post-War royal amnesty announced on 23 December 1919.70 The HRA’s formation was also part of a long-standing vision of a pan-Indian revolutionary party with a central command harboured by Sanyal, Rashbihari Bose and Bagha Jatin. This vision had eluded the revolutionaries for most of their history except when they came together with the Ghadarites during the days of the First World War and now with the HRA.71 Sanyal from his long experience in the revolutionary movement knew that creating a unified revolutionary organisation was quite difficult. The secret and cellular nature of revolutionary organisations was imperative for their safety. On the one hand, this militated against any unified organisational work and, on the other, prevented any unified

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action as the co-revolutionaries often remained unaware of each other’s existence. Many a time, the individual cell leaders’ desire for power and control over their cells also became a factor preventing the creation of a central command.72 Sanyal nevertheless persevered. He also travelled across northern India from Bengal to Punjab in order to connect the young men from these provinces. In Amritsar he even met the Akalis and other Sikh leaders associated with Ghadar. However, his efforts paid limited dividends as he was able to bring only the cells in different districts of the United Provinces under one umbrella.73 Sanyal’s most prominent HRA associate was Ram Prasad Bismil, a young man from Shahjahanpur, a small town in northern United Provinces. Bismil’s friends described him as ‘a singularly handsome person with an iron physique’ who had joined the revolutionary movement during the First World War.74 He was a member of a revolutionary organisation called the ‘Matravedi Society’ (or the ‘Society for those who are prepared to sacrifice their lives for the Motherland’) led by Gendalal Dixit, an Arya Samaji who was a school headmaster in one of the districts of the United Provinces.75 The society specialised in carrying out political dacoities (armed robberies) and in printing and distributing revolutionary materials. Several members of Matravedi, including Ram Prasad, participated in a dacoity that embroiled them in what came to be known as the Mainpuri Conspiracy Case (1918–1919). Ram Prasad managed to abscond and later came out of hiding when he was included in the royal amnesty at the end of the First World War that had also freed Sanyal.76 Ram Prasad along with his friend Ashfaqulla Khan joined hands with Sanyal when the latter sent him an emissary from Banaras to merge the cells under a bigger banner. Ram Prasad brought with him the experience of collecting arms and carrying out political dacoities.77 With assistance from Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee (1895–1969), another revolutionary leader from Bengal, they extended the organisation to nearly 23 districts of the United Provinces.78 The main HRA cells were in Banaras (Shachindranath Bakshi, Jogesh Chatterjee, Govindcharan Kar, Ravindramohan Kar and Rajendranath Lahiri), Kanpur (Suresh Babu, Batukeshwar Dutt, Ram Dulare Trivedi, Ajoy Ghosh, Shaligram, Ramesh Gupta, Bejoy Kumar Sinha, B. K. Dutt, Surendranath Pandey and Virendra Pande) and Shahjahanpur (Ram Prasad, Ashfaqulla Khan and Roshan Singh). Ram Prasad Bismil became the de facto head of the HRA after October 1924 when Sanyal went

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into hiding and Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee returned to Bengal. He was interned under the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, which was promulgated on 25 October 1924 and empowered the government to arrest and detain a suspect without trial.79 To knit the party together, Sachindranath Sanyal drew up a list of books that he wanted all the new recruits to read. In his view, it was the educated middle class that would provide leadership for attaining independence. They would discuss the prospective recruits’ families, political orientation, and their responses to the books threadbare before inducting them into their circle. Sanyal tried to create an atmosphere of discussion and engagement in their daily meetings. Manmathnath recounted their differences of opinion about books and heated discussions and debates on everything under the sun. Sometimes small arms were also displayed in the meetings and, if the opportunity afforded, they were taught to handle arms. However, they did little firing or target practice as they were always short of ammunition.80 Sanyal also penned several tracts to give the HRA a semblance of ideological coherence. He believed that the Indian nationalists had managed to discredit revolutionism as a creed since the revolutionaries had made no effort to publicise their views and therefore propaganda was a must.81 The result was his autobiography, Bandi Jivan, which had already become the revolutionaries’ bible. A government report called it the ‘best known gem of terrorist literature’ and that its ‘author has sent more young men to the gallows or to prison for terrorism than any man who has lived in India’.82 Sanyal also wrote the constitution of the HRA (also known as the Yellow Paper) that stated their desire to create a Federated Republic of the United States of India with three important elements: federalism (the regional Indian states would have full freedom in their internal matters), universal adult franchise, and freedom from exploitation.83 The constitution also laid out the party structure, which was to have five separate departments: propaganda, recruitment, fund-raising, arms collection and the last for developing foreign connections for military and scientific training. The key figure in the revolutionary organisation was to be the ‘district organiser’, who had to be well versed in local politics, build networks to recruit young men, and possess great leadership qualities. The Central Council of the party was to have representatives from every province of India. The party was to function secretly but also endeavour to mobilise the

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factory labour, railway workmen and the peasants, and to publish a weekly paper, booklets and pamphlets for public propaganda.84 Later Sanyal also wrote two leaflets, of which the first, titled ‘The Revolutionary’, was to be the ‘manifesto of the Revolutionary Party of India’. It was written under the pseudonym of Vijay Kumar in 1924.85 The HRA members distributed it all across India for propaganda purposes. The wide distribution was also aimed at giving a false impression to the police of it being a very large political organisation. The second was ‘Deshbashir Prati Nivedan’ (An Appeal to My Countrymen).86

~ Krantikari’s Dharma ~

In the early months of joining the HRA, Azad was asked to become a chela, the disciple of a wealthy mahant (chief priest) of a math (monastic institution) in Banaras. The mahant had taken ill and was believed to be on his last breath. The revolutionaries hoped to usurp his wealth once the mahant passed away. The hapless Azad was made to enter the math and live with the sadhus. He valiantly lived through the misery and boredom of the math’s life in the hope that the mahant would soon pass away.87 Unfortunately for the revolutionaries, the mahant’s health revived. Azad reported to his friends: ‘Yaha sala abhi nahi marne ka, dand pelta hai aur khoob doodh peeta hai. Gurmukhi padhte-padhte to meri aankhein phooti ja rahi hain. Mai to yahan nahi rahoonga’ (This bugger won’t die right away, he exercises, does push ups, and drinks a lot of milk. I am going blind reading Gurumukhi. I won’t live here anymore).88 With months of effort wasted, Azad made haste to quit the math. Thus ended the bahurupiya’s first guise as a sadhu. The second time Azad lived in the guise of a sadhu was when he was on the run after the arrests in the Kakori Conspiracy Case began. Azad did not see any essential conflict between his religious beliefs and being a revolutionary.89 He was a young Brahmin who belonged to a traditional sanatani family that practised idol-worship and was seeped in religiosity. Azad’s family, despite its poverty, strictly observed the Brahmanical caste and dietary taboos. His yagyopaveet (thread ceremony) that confirmed his dwija (twice-born) caste status was done in his early years and Azad continued to wear the ceremonial thread until his last.90 In his associate Mahour’s view, Azad’s association with the HRA tempered

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his Brahmanism but did not vanquish it in entirety.91 In this, Azad was not very different from the other HRA members who also held on to their religious beliefs. Ram Prasad Bismil, much like Azad, came from a poor Brahmin family and had been initiated into militant resistance as a result of his contact with Swami Somdev (Brajlal Chopra), who was from Lahore and was associated with the Ghadarites.92 Bismil was a ‘staunch’ Arya Samaji iconoclast who observed niyam acharan, the strict dietary and physical injunctions that the Arya Samaj prescribed. Before he joined the Matrivedi Society, Ram Prasad was actively involved in Shuddhi (the religious conversion of Muslims into Hindus) and lived in an Arya Samaj mandir.93 Even as an undertrial during the Kakori Conspiracy Case, he used to perform sandhya (Arya Samaji prayers) and havan (fire sacrifice) every day in the jail. He is believed to have recited the Vedic hymn Om vishwani deva savitar duritani parasuva at the scaffold.94 Similarly, Thakur Roshan Singh, another Arya Samaji, was believed to have carried the Gita in his hands and chanted ‘Vande Mataram’ and ‘Om’ as he walked towards the gallows. He was cremated according to Arya Samaji rituals. Ashfaq, they say, carried with him the Quran Sharif and walked to the gallows reciting the kalema.95 Vishnu Saran Dublish was also an Arya Samaji, while Sanchindranth Sanyal was a committed Vedantist and Manmathnath Gupta and Rajendranath Lahiri held ‘a middle ground’.96 Azad and several of his associates used to recite the Gita for inspiration and it was ‘Hindu darshan’, or Hindu philosophy, that initiated them into the revolutionary movement.97 Manmanthnath Gupta recalls how, at the time of their imprisonment during the non-cooperation movement, Swami Sampurnanand would take morning classes along with J. B. Kriplani on Hindu philosophy and on Mazzini’s Duties of Man.98 As teenagers they read writings of Vivekananda and Swami Ramtirth (also known as Ram Soami), Balgangadhar Tilak’s Gitarahasya, Sachindranath Sanyal’s Bandi Jivan, Upendranath Bandhopadhyaya’s Rajnitik Shadyantra and, above all, Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s (1838–1894) Anandmath. Mahour says: ‘Krantikari jeevan ki aarambhik dasha mein unhe … “Anandmath” ki bhawna ne bahut prabhavit kiya’ (In the early days of his revolutionary life he was much inspired by the feelings of Anandmath).99 By the 1920s, Anandmath had become an iconic text, a revolutionary ‘textbook’ that all new recruits were expected to read.100 Living and writing at a time when the Empire’s sun was still burning bright, Bankim’s novel narrated a

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compelling story of bondage and liberation – spiritual and temporal. The story of Anandmath was one without a firmly sealed ending, which invited the reader to imagine and constitute the end of the story.101 Anandmath also fused ‘the political and the religious in terms of predominantly “Hindu” ideation and symbolism’.102 The first instance of Bankim’s idea passing into political practice was when Aurobindo Ghosh (1872–1950) founded a revolutionary party in 1901 called the Anushilan Samiti and a newspaper called Karmayogin. Both words – anushilan (praxis) and karmayogin (detached performer of duties/actions) – were derived from Bakim’s writing. The Anushilan Samiti aimed at nationalist mobilisation through physical regeneration and the instruction of the Gita. Aurobindo Ghosh in his engagement and re-telling of the Anandmath took it a step further by lending it a Vedantic hue.103 It was in this form that the text was read and absorbed by the HRA and HSRA revolutionaries. Bankim’s invocation of the subcontinent’s sanyasi yoddha (warrior ascetic) tradition and the fact that the sanyasis were no ordinary ascetics but ascetic warriors made the ideal ever more alluring to the Indian revolutionaries. Reading Bankim helped them in ‘conjuring up spirits from the past’.104 In this much, Anandmath was a literary exemplar and an aidemémoire of this disappearing tradition. In upholding the warrior ascetic ideal, Bankim was also challenging the popular view of asceticism (sanyas) as peaceful world-renunciation and opening up the possibility of a sanyasi bearing arms.105 Other elements of Anandmath that held the most appeal for Azad and his associates were Bankim’s emphasis on tapas (spiritual power), anushilan and being a karmayogin. According to the text, one acquired tapas as a result of anushilan or abhyaas, that is, ‘training and practice’ of celibacy and renunciation.106 For an individual to transition from ordinary laity to a warrior patriot, he had to practise anushilan. It was anushilan that enabled shedding of identities and attachments acquired from birth, acquisition of inner spiritual knowledge and attainment of physical vigour.107 This idea found resonance amongst all the revolutionaries, be it sanatani or Vedanists or Arya Samaji. Bismil, for instance, in his instructions regarding observance of brahmcharya urged: ‘Humaare Jeevan ka pratyek karya … abhyaason ke adheen hai’ (Everything in our lives depends on practice).108 Being a warrior serendipitously flowed from the ideal of Krishna, the karmayogin (the one who is invested in performance of duty but not its fruits) as enunciated in the Gita, the text that had a deep influence

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on Bankim’s thought and that of the revolutionaries.109 Bankim was the first to produce a commentary on the Bhagwad-Gita and elevate Krishna as the ideal karmayogin.110 According to Sudipta Kaviraj, Bankim was ‘seeking a Krisna who is not an object of supplicatory form of bhakti, but a symbol of praxis … a figure of pre-eminent intellect’.111 The nationalist ideal worked with anasakti bhaav (without attachment/without motives for reward) and one devoted to ‘intense and ceaseless activity’.112 Since one renounced attachment to rewards, one was no longer bonded. This was freedom, unlimited and unbounded, to devote oneself to the path of continuous karma or purposeful action. The karmayogin, however, was not the perfect being but one who believed in the idea of perfectibility and strove towards perfection. His tapas (spiritual energy) defined him and the end goal of amassing tapas was the freeing of the motherland, that is, the ‘selfless political action in the service of one’s country’. The only Muslim in the HRA (including the HSRA) was Ram Prasad Bismil’s friend Ashfaqulla Khan Warsi ‘Hasrat’, a Pathan from Shahjahanabad. Ashfaq was born in a well-to-do Muslim family and learnt swimming, horse riding, cricket, hockey and shooting while growing up. His father, a sub-inspector of police, died early. Ashfaq in his autobiographical essays talks about how he was taught Urdu by a maulavi who infused anti-British sentiments in him.113 At the time of the Khilafat movement, Ashfaq fervently wished that Turkey or Afghanistan would invade British India and make it part of the Caliphate. He dreamt of the Christian rule of the British being replaced by that of the Muslims. His views subsequently changed and along with that the meaning of word ‘freedom’. 114 He says that by the time he joined the HRA, he could not think of India as having gained independence until the time the labourers and peasants of the country had equal rights. He firmly stated that he did not care if people thought of him as ‘ishtiraaqi’.115 Interestingly, the word ‘Communist’ is written in parenthesis next to the word ishtiraqi in the essay. It is unclear whether this was Ashfaq’s translation or a later interpolation because the word ishtiraqi can also be translated as socialism. The word generally used for communism was shu’ooiyat.116 In fact, Ashfaq in his writings rebuked the communists for their ‘gair-mulki tahdeeq’, the non-nationlist/internationalist imagination, and urged them: ‘Desh ke liye jio, desh ke liye maro’ (Live for your country and die for your country).117 Nevertheless, he goes on to say how all social rules that led to exploitation

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of the poor and the labouring classes were against belief in the divine (khudavandi ki khilaaf hain).118 His friendship with Bismil was rather unique. Bismil openly admitted that his friendship with Ashfaq always raised eyebrows: ‘Ek kattar Arya samaji aur musalman ka mail kaisa?’ (How was it that a strict Arya Samaji and a Muslim were friends?)119 and ‘Bahudha krantikari sadasyon ko bhi bada ashcharya hota ki maine kaise ek musalmaan ko krantikari dal ka pratishthit sadasya bana liya’ (Many a time the revolutionary co-members would be greatly amazed that I have made a Muslim a distinguished member of the organisation).120 Often cited as an example of Hindu–Muslim unity, the credit for their friendship, in Manmathnath’s view, went ‘more to Ashfaq than to Ram Prasad. Had he been an aggressive Muhammadan as Ram Prasad was an Arya Samajist, their friendship would have cracked at the first opportunity’.121 In his autobiography, Bismil acknowledged that it was Ashfaq’s devotion towards him and to the revolutionary cause that had won him over. He praised Ashfaq for having learnt Hindi and for his desire to educate Muslims to fight with Hindus for India’s liberation. He ends the essay he wrote on his friendship with Ashfaq by asking: What did this affection, love and friendship do in the end? ‘Mere Vicharon ke rang mein tum bhi rang gaye’ (You got dyed in the colours of my thoughts).122 He further says: ‘Maine Musalmanon mein se ek navyuvak nikal kar bharatwasiyon ko dikhla diya’ (I have shown to the Indians by taking out/ converting one young man out of the Muslims). Bismil claimed that this was the first experiment (in Hindu–Muslim unity) that was completely successful.123 In the section of the essay dedicated to Ashfaq, Bismil says: ‘Ek agyakari bhakt ke samaan meri agya paalan mein tatpar rahte the’ (You were eager to follow my orders like an obedient devotee).124 The language that Bismil uses is one of affection but not one that describes an equal relationship. Bismil’s acceptance of Ashfaq did not necessarily extend to an acceptance of his friend’s religion or his co-religionists. It was not for Ram Prasad to acquire knowledge of Islam or Muslims. He continued to view Muslims through the lens of an upper-caste Hindu urging them to join the Hindus’ (that is, Indians’) struggle against the British by holding up his friendship with Ashfaq as an example to emulate.125 Ashfaq appears as a Muslim friend who is patronisingly lauded for his appreciation of Hindu religion and mores by his Brahmin friend Ram Prasad. The burden of secularism rested on Ashfaq’s shoulders for

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he was the one expected to give up his ‘Muslimness’ and assimilate into ‘Indianness’. Ashfaqulla’s acquiescence also finds an appearance in one of the Amar Chitra Katha stories. In one of the scenes, a Muslim police superintendent asks Ashfaqulla: ‘Why should Muslims fight for Hindu India?’ Ashfaq replies, ‘Khan Saheb, I am quite sure Hindu India will be much better than British India.’126 This incident, aimed at lauding ‘national integration’, located Ashfaq within the nationalist pantheon as a loyal and a good Muslim.127 Ashfaq’s image was juxtaposed to the common trope of the ‘bad Muslim’, that is, the Muslim who failed to meet the ‘secular criterion’. Tagged as ‘separatists’ or as a ‘small clique of fanatics’, the Muslim revolutionaries tend to be studied separately and outside of what has come to be understood as the ‘mainstream’ revolutionary or even ‘nationalist’ history, and Indian historiography has thus inadvertently reproduced the majoritarianism of Indian revolutionism.128 The religious beliefs of the HRA members also kept them from completely accepting Bolshevism or communism despite the attraction of these ideas. Sachindranath Sanyal was an interesting case in point. He returned to Calcutta from his exile in the penal colony on the Andaman Islands in 1920 and the next year wrote his first article, ‘Lenin aur Samasamyik Russia’ (Lenin and Contemporary Russia), in Shankha, the mouthpiece of the Anushilan Samiti. Sanyal’s article drew heavily on British Labour Party leader George Lansbury’s What I Saw in Russia (1920) and American labour organiser A. R. Williams’ Through the Russian Revolution (1921) for his understanding of Lenin and life in Russia.129 Sanyal strongly believed, much in the way the Anushilanists did, that Lenin’s ideas and methods could be applied to fight Russian autocracy as well as colonialism in India. However, he unequivocally saw communism to be anti-God, anti-spiritual and also unscientific. In the preface to the fourth edition of Bandi Jivan (1938), Sanyal candidly speaks of his struggle to accept communist ideas. He confesses that despite reading a great deal of communist literature and engaging in deep philosophical conversations with his communist associates such as Satyabhakt (one of the founders of the Communist Party of India) and other radicals such as Jayachandra Vidyalankar (who taught at the National College in Lahore and later introduced Bhagat Singh to Sanyal) in between the years 1923 and 1925, he was still not able to embrace communism except for its economic programme.130 Sanyal was unable to give up his belief in God and saw

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his inner conflict in terms of the materialism–spiritualism binary. He believed that modern science validated ancient Indian philosophy and that materialism had no real scientific basis. Quoting Bertrand Russell, Sanyal argued that materialism was merely a view held by a minority of political leaders in Russia and some American scientists. He contended that it was modern science that was gravitating towards Vedantic philosophy and not the other way round. Sanyal cited John Wooddruff, a respected judge in the Calcutta High Court who also believed in Vedanta being superior to science, to buttress his view point.131 Sanyal’s pamphlet ‘The Revolutionary’ was a reflection of his ideological and semiotic medley. It claimed to draw inspiration from both the ancient Indian seers and Soviet Russia. It began with the anarchist axiom ‘chaos is necessary for birth of a new star’ but after a few lines abjured any desire to terrorise or spread anarchy.132 Manmathnath Gupta recounted a heated exchange they once had regarding the role of religion, especially Hinduism, in the lives of the revolutionaries. Sanyal was of the view that life would cease to have any meaning for him but for the lofty ideals of the Vedanta. I [Manmathnath Gupta] asked him what about the Muhammadans, would they accept his ideal. He replied that ‘the Vedanta thought fathered by the Hindus has nothing about it which could stamp it as Hindu ideology, it was universal, eternal and common to all.’ 133

When pushed further regarding which version of Hinduism should one to accept – Vedantist, Arya Samaji or that of others – Sanyal replied: ‘Dayanand’s assertions had been universally rejected by Vedic scholars.’134 This proved to be too much for Bismil who rushed to defend Dayanand and a passionate argument ensued.135 Their differences, Manmathnath insists, were primarily philosophical. The HRA leaders remained tolerant when it came to different religious beliefs, dietary habits and ways of dressing. They did not demand a particular pattern of behaviour from the rank and file.136 Religiosity, however, remained an integral part of the revolutionaries’ habitus. For the HRA men, the need or demand for separation between religion and politics was not as urgent and neither was being an atheist a precondition or a telos of being a revolutionary. Azad inhabited a world where the ideological lines as we understand today had not yet hardened. Much like the members of the HRA, there

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were many people in public life who straddled worlds that would, in time, become radically opposed. Motilal Nehru and Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi (the owner of Pratap Press and the founder of Mazdoor Sabha, a workers’ organisation in the city of Kanpur), for instance, were committed pacifists but nurtured and shielded the revolutionaries.137 Shiv Verma recalls how Vidyarthi was very much influenced by the October Revolution but never called himself a socialist or a communist or a Marxist. He made one point clear that unless the underdogs of the society – the oppressed and the suppressed section, the exploited people – were helped and brought up, there was no use of any movement or any freedom.138

Vidyarthi used to publish Bismil’s articles in Pratap and also published his autobiography that was purloined from the jail. He gave financial assistance to Ashfaq’s brother during the Kakori trial, arranged for his dead body to be photographed at the Lucknow station and got his burial done in Shahjahanpur. He also assisted with the marriage of Roshan Singh’s daughter.139 Later Vidyarthi would actively shelter and support Bhagat Singh and his HSRA cohort. Radha Mohan Gokul of Kanpur was another such figure whose pamphlets on socialism and Marxism had introduced Bhagat Singh, Bijoy Kumar Sinha, Jaidev Kapur and Shiv Verma to socialist ideas. It was at Gokul’s house that Azad first met Shiv Verma, Bijoy Kumar Sinha and Surendranath Pandey and through him connected with Bhagat and others before they came together to form the HSRA.140 In his early years, Gokul was a devout Arya Samaji and a close associate of Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya, another person who ‘straddled both spheres of knowledge’.141 At the time Radha Mohan Gokul edited an Arya Samaji magazine titled Satya Sanatan Dharma and attended Shuddhi ceremonies.142 Thereafter, he lived in Calcutta and Nagpur and was drawn into the revolutionary circle. He began assisting the cells in transporting weapons and supplied them funds. This association continued once he settled back in Kanpur, where he became one of the ‘early pioneers of the Communist ideas in the Hindi-speaking world’.143 He translated several socialist pamphlets into Hindi (‘Communism Kya Hai’, ‘Ishwar ka Bahishkaar’, ‘Dharm ka Atyachaar’, ‘Dharm aur Ishwar’ and ‘Prakritivad

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aur Ishwarvad’).144 His writings were responsible for converting a great number of youth in Kanpur and elsewhere to the cause of socialism. Although he is believed to have given up the idea of God and religion as years passed, yet he continued to acknowledge his debt to the teachings of Swami Dayanand.145 One finds a similar trend amongst the Muslim leaders of the anti-British pan-Islamist Khilafat movement such as Mohammad and Shaukat Ali, Zafar Ali Khan, Maulana Barkatullah and Maulana Hasrat Mohani. They were concerned with defending Islam but were also attracted to Bolshevism and socialism.146 The views of the communist leader Satyabhakt were also laced with spiritualism.147 Azad thus belonged to a milieu where religious folks were rethinking their relationship with religion; labour organisers were enamoured with socialist ideas but were uncertain of communist ideology; and devout Gandhians shielded and nurtured the revolutionary youth. Azad was still absorbing, learning, struggling with old conceptions of life and figuring out new ideas. His questioning of his relationship with religion would come much later when the HRA morphed into the HSRA.

~ The HRA and Political Dacoities ~

The HRA’s revolutionary actions primarily consisted of routinely carrying out political dacoities. They were mainly aimed at meeting the chronic shortage of funds for their daily expenses, rations, weapons and materials. Other than dacoities they relied on personal contributions or donations from well-to-do sympathisers. As Manmathnath Gupta recollects: This revolution was to be attained by a conspiracy of revolutionaries, who will collect arms and funds, will propagate among the people the ideas of revolution by direct and indirect means – even through religious sermons (kathas) and magic lantern slides. Funds and arms were to be procured by contribution as well as forced contributions.148

‘Forced contribution’ and ‘subscriptions’ were jocular code words for dacoities, and the persons ‘who went to carry out the forced subscription issued receipt for the sum “received” repayable in “Free India”’.149 The dacoities were so central to the party’s activities that they even had a special vocabulary for them. The word action was used for dacoity. A member participating in the dacoity was called gyani (the one who had attained

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spiritual knowledge); the one who had not yet taken part in action was a bhakt (a devotee); the one who had complete knowledge of all aspects of carrying out a dacoity was an avdhoot (the supreme individual who in his devotion has forgotten his individual identity), the one who led a dacoity was a paramhansa (the man-god); finally, the absconder, the one who had escaped the police net, was known as jivanmukta (emancipated though alive).150 The use of the ‘sanyasi vocabulary’ reflected how they had embraced religion in these metaphysical ways to give a sanctified status to their own work and to their own identities. But more on this later. The memoirs of Ramkrishna Khatri, Manmathnath Gupta and Ram Prasad Bismil carry dense details of several dacoities that the HRA men carried out. They state how the HRA followed the rule of looting only the rich landlords, moneylenders and businessmen. They also carried out the dacoities primarily in villages so as to keep away from the government centres.151 Carrying out dacoities also became a mode of enlistment of youth of different kinds. In many instances the revolutionaries managed to gather a couple of hundred young men in a district who were willing ‘without five minutes notice, [to] be ready to leave their homes and kill and be killed’.152 The HRA men would employ various stratagems to conduct these dacoities, such as dressing up as policemen and enlisting professional dacoits to train and help them conduct dacoities.153 Thakur Roshan Singh, who was hanged in the Kakori Conspiracy Case trial (1926), was one such professional dacoit who was won over to the revolutionary cause.154 Having professionals in their midst was always a risk as they could loot wantonly and violate women. Keeping this in mind, Ram Prasad Bismil would give out strict instructions to be respectful to the village women and to ensure that there was no loss of life before setting out for an action.155 Bismil once returned the silver ornaments from the house they robbed in Bichpuri village in the United Provinces. A professional dacoit had been hired as their guide for this raid. As soon as Ram Prasad realised that the dacoit had led them to rob a home with limited means, he ordered the ornaments to be returned.156 The revolutionaries’ account of the dacoities (specifically the incidents of Bismil behaving in a respectful manner towards women and being honest about not robbing indiscriminately) were countered by the British administrator H. W. Hale in his book Political Trouble in India, which was first published in 1937.157 Hale mentions several unsavoury incidents involving the revolutionaries, such as the ‘cold-blooded’ murder of a villager

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in the Bamrauli dacoity; the ‘callous ransacking’ of a house in the Bichpuri dacoity; Azad accosting a child and laying a knife on his neck to get the mother to show where the valuables were hidden; the placing of burning rags between the legs of a woman to make her speak; professional dacoits regularly participating in dacoities; and the killing of several innocents in different actions. For Hale, these were the list of ‘crimes’ committed by the revolutionaries that he had recorded for posterity. Ironically, an Indian publisher republished Hale’s book in 1974 as part of a wider nationalist reclamation and celebration of the revolutionaries and their lives in the 1970s.158 Carrying out these political dacoities, however, was not without its ambivalences and conflicts and they often vitiated the internal atmosphere of the revolutionary organisations. There was a long-standing debate going back to the days of the Anushilan Samiti regarding the political efficacy of dacoities. Not all of the Anushilanists and the HRA members were convinced that the dacoities were a need-of-the-hour policy. They were never able to procure funds large enough to organise an armed uprising and whatever they did bring was lost in fighting the conspiracy cases in which many of the revolutionaries were regularly embroiled.159 The court cases would wipe out several cells in their nascent stage itself. So, for money, they committed dacoities, train hold-ups, and naturally when they did that, they were hauled up, because these were found out. So many times it happened that revolutionary movement got sort of embroiled in this dacoity stage; it could not go beyond that in many cases; and, again and again, it had to give in. 160

Another disturbing aspect of the dacoities was that they antagonised the public and made the revolutionaries appear as common criminals in rural areas. The aggrieved villagers took to openly denouncing the revolutionaries in court cases. Jaidev Kapur observed during the Kakori trial that several ‘young and old would come from villages and cities and catch hold of revolutionaries’ hand and identified them as participants in the dacoities not knowing what the revolutionaries stood for’. 161 Many a time some innocent villager would get shot in the crossfire and die. This happened in the Bichpuri dacoity, Dwarkapur dacoity and the Kakori train looting. In the Bichpuri dacoity, Ram Prasad Bismil was standing

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on the rooftop and firing in the air to prevent the villagers from coming near the place of dacoity. However, a stray bullet killed a villager who was working in the fields a long distance away. All the revolutionaries were deeply upset but little could be done at that point except to debate whether to conduct dacoities or not.162 Despite their ambivalence regarding them, the revolutionary cells distressed by lack of funds continued to carry out the dacoities. The disappointments and challenges of undertaking a dacoity were at times offset by the unprecedented support that the revolutionaries received from the very villagers they had robbed. Other than the need for finances, this was an important variable in keeping the revolutionaries going. There was one instance when the villagers of Dwarkapur, where the HRA had carried out dacoities, refused to testify against them despite two innocent villagers having been killed in the fray. Even the local policemen did not come to the court to testify in solidarity with the revolutionaries.163 In another instance, the owner of a jewellery shop, Gadodia Store, that the HSRA men had robbed sent a message of support when he found out that Azad had led the robbery. The owner wrote asking Azad to let him know whenever he needed money and not to endanger his life in carrying out robberies.164 Throughout the lives of the revolutionaries, there were several other such instances of people from different walks of life, from policemen to jailors and fellow prisoners, who came to their aid. Shiv Verma also narrates how one policeman offered to remove his handcuffs so that he could run away when he was first arrested in Saharanpur.165 Ram Prasad Bismil, Ramkrishan Khatri and Manmathnath Gupta similarly described their time in Lucknow Jail as one of great comfort, leisure and enjoyment, thanks to the friendly jailor. They talk about how they sang, composed poetry, played carrom and cards, staged plays, did gardening, learnt to ride a bicycle, and spent time laughing and bantering, and how all this was interspersed with resisting the same jail authorities (through hunger strikes).166 One dacoity that proved to be fateful was the looting of the train going from Saharanpur to Lucknow carrying government money bags. On 7 August 1925, Ram Prasad Bismil called a meeting of the Shahjahanpur cell which included Rajendranath Lahiri, Shachindranath Bakshi, Manmathnath Gupta, Mukundi Lal, Chandrashekhar Azad, Ashfaqulla Khan, Keshav Chakravarti, Murarilal Sharma and Banwari Lal. In the

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meeting, he presented his plans for robbing the train at a small station named Kakori that was a few kilometres before Lucknow Central.167 According to Manmathnath, Bismil had proposed the plan on the insistence of the younger members of the party such as himself and Chandrashekhar Azad. All the members were in favour of carrying out the dacoity given the pressing need for funds except Ashfaqulla, who vociferously opposed it.168 In Ashfaqulla’s view, the dacoity could harm the fortunes of their organisation as it would signify a direct assault on the state’s sovereignty. He believed that their organisation neither had the ability nor the capacity to withstand the government’s onslaught. Since Bismil had done all the spade work and had made a strong case for carrying out the dacoity, Ashfaqulla eventually gave in and agreed to participate in it.169 On 9 August 1925, the HRA looted the train at Kakori but things did not go as planned. Soon after, all the HRA members dispersed to different locations since the police and its informers were on their tracks. The revolutionaries mistakenly left behind a white bedsheet on the train. As part of their crime investigation, the police always ensured that they collected any piece of cloth or clothing that they found on the crime scene. Often the fabrics had the dhobi’s (washerman) markings that gave them a clue to the location where the cloth had been last washed. This helped the police trace the revolutionaries’ dens and hideouts. The forgotten bedsheet led the police to an HRA den and several of the revolutionaries were caught.170 One of them confessed and this set off a domino effect, with some others spilling the details of their plans, their names and the hideouts of their fellow revolutionaries. This drew everyone’s relationship with each other into a net of mistrust and suspicion.171 Within a few months, the police had nabbed the entire HRA leadership along with the rank-andfile members. The young men were booked for conspiracy against the King and put on a trial, which came to be known as the Kakori Conspiracy Case.

~ A Revolutionary Leader ~

In July 1927, at the end of the case, Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan, Roshan Singh and Rajendranath Lahiri were sentenced to be hanged. Sachindranath Sanyal and Sachindra Bakshi were exiled to the penal colony on the Andamans and several others such as Manmathnath Gupta, Ram Krishan Khatri, Vishnu Charan Dublish, Yogesh Chandra

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Chatterjee, Mukundi Lal, Govind Charan Kar, Suresh Bhattacharya, Bhupen Nath Sanyal, Prem Krishan Sharma and Keshub Chakravarty received jail sentences.172 Except Chandrashekhar Azad, the entire HRA leadership was either killed or jailed. He fortuitously had quit Banaras the moment he had begun to feel the heat.173 From Banaras he went to Jhansi and from there on to Dhimarpura to wait for the trial to end. The Kakori Case’s judgment disheartened Azad as he was waiting to regroup with his fellow revolutionaries after the trial. Realising that he had waited in vain, Azad at once began reviving the dormant HRA cells. He began to quietly tour different cities in the United Provinces ( Jhansi, Kanpur, Lucknow, Saharanpur and Agra) to gently tap out his old HRA contacts. Azad especially concentrated on Banaras and Kanpur as they were the traditional bastions of revolutionary activity in the United Provinces.174 He parlayed his considerable prowess as an organiser to string together a motley set of folks for the revolutionary cause. He was credited with bringing in several new recruits into the organisation even during his HRA days.175 The first four men to come on board were Bhagwandas Mahour, Sadashiv Malkapurkar, Master Rudra Narayan and Vishwanath Vaishampayan with help from Sachindranath Bakshi of Jhansi. Azad had developed deep bonds of friendship with them while living in Jhansi. He trusted them with his life and, in the years after Azad’s death, these friends looked after his parents like their own.176 Next he used his access into the varied sections of Banaras’ society to bring in a sadhu (who later went by the name Ramkrishna Khatri) into the revolutionary fold by plying him with reading materials such as the Sedition Committee Report and the life stories of Garibaldi, Mazzini and McSweeny, and finally Azad won him over by letting him handle a Mauser pistol.177 He also recruited a blacksmith who purportedly consorted with criminals but repaired the revolutionaries’ firearms at no charge.178 Many of the HRA cells had converged in Kanpur since the end of the Kakori trial where Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi served as their point of contact. Through the Pratap Press, the Kanpur cell contacted the Allahabad, Gorakhpur and Banaras cells and also managed to locate Azad.179 It was through these cells that Azad and Bhagat reconnected. Azad had first met Bhagat when the latter was working at the Pratap Press and was publishing materials on the revolutionaries. Bhagat at that time was not on the police radar and therefore served as an ‘arms depot’, the

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safekeeper of arms.180 Bhagat and Azad had also participated in a village dacoity before the Kakori train robbery.181 It was in Kanpur that Bhagat also met Shiv Verma, Jaidev Kapur, B. K. Dutt, Bejoy Kumar Sinha, Surendranath Pandey, Brahm Dutt Mishra and Ajoy Ghosh who would soon band together to form a new organisation. Azad and Bhagat jointly gathered the remaining revolutionaries scattered in Punjab and the United Provinces.182 Finally, the HSRA was formed on 9 September 1928 on the grounds of Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi.183 The HSRA was comprised of the young revolutionaries who had been working to promote the HRA in Punjab (Sukhdev, Bhagwati Charan Vohra, Dhanwantri, Sukhdev Raj, Professor Nigam, Mahavir Singh, Kamalnath Tiwari, Des Raj, Rajguru, Yashpal, Sushila Mohan and Durga Devi Vohra) and the United Provinces (Bijoy Kumar Sinha, Jaidev Kapur, Mahabir Singh, Batukeshwar Dutt, Dr Gaya Prasad, Surendranath Pandey, Shiv Verma, Sadashiv Malkapurkar, Bhagwandas Mahour, Vishwanath Vaishampayan, Master Rudra Narayan, Haldhar Vajpayee, Munishwar Awasthi, Ajoy Ghosh and Munindra Bannerji), along with Jatindranath Das, the bomb expert from Bengal, and Phonindranath Ghosh and his associate Manmohan from Bihar.184 The HSRA undertook two famous ‘actions’ – the murder of John Saunders, a British police officer, in Lahore in December 1928 and the bombing of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi in April 1929. Azad led the military wing of the HSRA. He was the one who strategised, planned and helped execute ‘actions’, gave the young men training in target practice, and helped organise arms and ammunition. Bhagat was the ideologue, organiser and the moving spirit of the organisation. With the formation of the HSRA, Azad finally transformed into a revolutionary leader.

~ Conclusion ~

Habitus, a term coined by Pierre Bourdieu, a French anthropologist, to talk about the site where the person-in-action gets constituted, is useful in analysing the journey of Chandrashekhar’s metamorphosis. Habitus refers to the past, cultural habits, social mores and ways of being that spontaneously survive in the present within a person or social groups (as a mindscape or subjectivity acquired through socialisation and internalisation) and outside

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a person (found in political systems, social institutions, media images and social memory). This habitus is embodied in everyday practices. In this much, the habitus generates a sense of reality and appears ‘natural’ to human agents. Internalised as ‘real’, the habitus plays an important constitutive role in one’s perceptions, actions and practices. However, habitus is not a closed and a static system. It is a vast playing field of possibilities which the human agent can constitute, re-shape, choose, reject or challenge.185 This concept of habitus (where structure/external environment is in dialectics with human action) helps us examine the extant social structures that defined, encouraged or constrained Chandrashekhar’s cognition and actions, and the manner in which he chose to deal with them and, in turn, transform his habitus. The Amar Chitra Katha story panels show Chandrashekhar dressed in a white shirt and a pair of white shorts while playing with burning matches. Chandrashekhar’s clothes set him apart from his friends – the shirtless Bhil tribals clad in a loin-cloth with bodies adorned with jewellery (a necklace, earrings and an armband). One of the tribal boys is shown wearing a blue cloth wrapped around his head in the manner of a coolie. In all the story-boxes, Azad is the one shown in action: talking, playing, burning the matchsticks and shooting an arrow. His friends either are silent onlookers or pale into the background or are depicted as line drawings without any faces. The Amar Chitra Katha sketches, in keeping with the comic series’ upper-caste and gendered values, depict Azad in a morally and physically superior position to his tribal peers despite their shared lives.186Azad, the protagonist of the story, was different because he was fated to become a revolutionary leader, and he was predestined as such because he was brave ‘by nature’. Azad’s ‘natural superiority’ was visually depicted through his clothing, his sacred thread and his well-built body – all markers of his social capital but ones presented as products of individual valour and bravery, that is, the innate nature of the individual. This individualised and natural rebel was thus above caste, class, religious and sectarian differences, and one who was also always male. Azad’s eventual martyrdom further lent credence and resilience to this representation. The elements of Azad’s habitus that undergird his story – caste, religion, class, gender and the educational background of the revolutionaries – are all congealed in the narrative of the young man being ‘naturally’ predisposed towards revolutionism.

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His habitus, that is, the socialisation that informed his way of being, becomes visible as the young man encountered new fields of activity and new modes of thought as he travelled out of Bhavra to Bombay and thence to Banaras. The contradictions, slippages, affinities and the struggles that made up this encounter revealed the socialised mindscapes and, at the same time, generated new ones. There was little in Chandrashekhar’s early life that prophesised his later choice of revolutionism. Chandrashekhar’s and many of his contemporaries’ political initiation happened with Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. The choice of revolution as the political path in the 1920s was neither instinctive nor the most obvious one. Amongst other factors, an important variable in Azad’s choice of revolutionism was a rebellion against the gerontocratic authority of the Indian National Congress and Gandhi. His life further transformed as he planned and executed political dacoities and assassinations, lived through the agony of numerous failed or botched revolutionary actions, grieved after departed associates, and through the time he spent on the run taking on different guises. In the process, some of the elements of his habitus were either discarded, transcended, tempered, or strengthened and deepened. Mining Azad’s habitus also reveals the cross-class but primarily Hindu and upper-caste character of the HRA and the near absence of Muslims in the revolutionary history except for the lone figure of Ashfaqulla. One way of understanding the revolutionaries’ youth would be to see it not simply as a signifier of biological age, status or behaviour but as a liminal stage of evolving consciousness – a referent to a self that was still seeking, searching, dreaming and coming to terms with the lived reality – where the individuals were gradually separating from their familial realm and being initiated into a new corporal identity.187

3 ~ Between Kranti and Inquilab ~

T

he magistrate had sentenced 15-year-old Chandrashekhar, a student in Banaras’ Sanskrit College and a satyagrahi, to be caned. His hands were tied to a flogging post and a wet cloth was spread out on his naked backside. Each time the whip fell and bloodied Chandrashekhar’s back he shouted ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki Jai’, ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ and ‘Vande Mataram’. The story of Azad’s caning was immortalised in all the biographical memoirs written by his associates.1 It also appears in the Amar Chitra Katha, where Azad is shown shouting ‘Inquilab Zindabad’, Long Live the Revolution.2 The slogan ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ came into popular usage following the bombing of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi in April 1929. The HSRA revolutionaries Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt shouted ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ as they threw crude bombs into the Assembly’s well. The coining of the slogan is generally attributed to Maulana Hasrat Mohani, a pan-Islamist scholar who was part of the Khilafat movement and one of the founders of the Communist Party of India. He used the slogan for the first time at the Indian Communist Conference held in Kanpur in 1920.3 Hasrat Mohani and Bhagat Singh were in contact during the latter’s sojourn in Kanpur in year 1924 and perhaps it was from there that Bhagat got the idea to use the slogan.4 If Azad’s caning incident was from 1921 and the slogan ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ did not come into popular usage until 1929, why did the Amar Chitra Katha insert the slogan ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ alongside ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’? The Amar Chitra Katha life-narrative of Azad provides us with an interesting entry point into understanding the postcolonial ‘scripting’ of the revolutionaries. Primarily a consequence of a particular reading of their political and propaganda literature and their appropriation by different

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political groups,5 the histories of radical and armed colonial resistance had by the late 1960s become part of the celebratory story of Indian nationalism and a footnote in the ignoble history of the colonial state’s excesses. Nearhagiographical portraits of the revolutionaries had seamlessly made their way into school textbooks, comics and cinematic adaptations alongside those of Gandhi, Nehru and a bevy of other nationalist leaders facilitating their co-option in the postcolonial state-building project. In these narratives, the revolutionaries’ violence was not depicted as violence in and of itself but as ‘a product of externalized forces’, a ‘response to exploitation’ and as an individual rebellion.6 The killing or hanging of the revolutionaries was presented as an evidence of the miscarriage of justice and disproportionate punishment that the British inflicted on Indians. The celebration of life stories of individual revolutionaries helped the postcolonial state contain revolutionary impulses emerging in various parts of the country in the late 1960s and the 1970s.7 The appropriation of the revolutionaries became a tool for justifying the state’s excesses against the marginalised communities. Resistance by different social groups (the Chipko movement, Naxalism, the formation of Dalit Panthers, and the Railway strike of 1974) was presented as self-serving and illegitimate and as being against the grain of the nation’s history of sacrifice. As part of a larger narrative of ‘a just rebellion’, the revolutionaries’ bravery, martyrdom and service to the nation made their espousal of violence and their opposition to Gandhian ideology invisible. This helped preserve the grand narrative of Gandhian non-violence as embodying India’s civilisational essence. The co-option of the revolutionaries accordingly helped the Indian state avoid ‘any celebration of organized violence as anti-colonial struggle’ and evade conversation on the historical possibility of a collective armed rebellion.8 Thus was rewritten the history of radical and armed anti-colonial resistance in warm and fuzzy hues where it spoke the language of socialism and not of violence. Chandrashekhar Azad’s Amar Chitra Katha lifenarrative, besides being replete with innate acts of bravery, forefronted the image of him as a socialist. There was a projection backwards of the espousal of socialism on to his early life. This followed in the footsteps of the addition of the word ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ to the Preamble of the Constitution of India by the 42nd amendment in 1976 and the unearthing and collation of Bhagat Singh’s writings by left-oriented (or nationalist–

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Marxist) scholars in the same decade. 9 The discovery and publication of Bhagat Singh’s essay ‘Why I Am an Atheist’ cemented the notion that these revolutionaries were atheists, that they had a deep appreciation of socialist thought, and that they were internationalists.10 It was no coincidence when the Uttar Pradesh government sanctioned the ‘ritual cremation’ (vidhivat dah sanskar) of Azad by Bhagat Singh’s younger brother Kultar Singh and Azad’s revolutionary associates in 1976. Some of Azad’s ashes were obtained from the family of a distant relative, Shiv Vinayak Misra, who had cremated Azad’s last remains in 1931. The kalash, the urn bearing the ashes, was taken through various cities of Uttar Pradesh. Thousands of people joined the procession and finally the kalash was brought to Lucknow and given to the State Museum for safe keeping.11 Hereafter several events commemorating the birth, death or hanging of the revolutionaries took place from time to time.12 Soon after in 1977, the Golden Jubilee celebration of the hanging of the Kakori revolutionaries was held in Lucknow and the President of India, Sanjeeva Reddy, launched the memorial catalogue at the President’s House.13 The event was attended by several parliamentarians and ministers. The first meeting effort of the event’s coordination committee was synchronised with the anniversary of the Revolt of 1857 and was held in Meerut on 9–10 May.14 The celebration of the revolutionaries, however, tells us little about the significance socialism and inquilab held for them, especially for someone like Azad, who saw himself as a krantikari, a revolutionary, much before the concept of inquilab with its socialist overtones became popular. This chapter examines the meaning these words held for Azad and the other members of the HSRA. Did the two words meld into each other or remain separate for them? What was it about socialism that appealed to them? Did they see themselves as internationalists? Was there ideological consensus amongst them? What held the HSRA together? In order to tackle these questions, this chapter goes beyond the script that the revolutionaries, their lives and their histories come packaged in. It does so by reading through the revolutionaries’ conversations, internal dissensions, disagreements, ambivalence and doubts that appear in their memoirs. This chapter demonstrates how praxis or ‘waiting’ was a significant site for the growth of their political consciousness and crucial for understanding their intellectual history.

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~ The S of HSRA ~

On Bhagat Singh’s insistence, the word ‘socialist’ was inserted in the party’s name when they grouped together in September 1928 on the grounds of Ferozshah Kotla in Delhi. At the meeting they discussed the importance of reaching out to the masses and mobilising them in favour of revolutionism. Shiv Verma recalls having raised the issue of the general perception about the revolutionaries amongst the masses: ‘All right, the revolutionaries are great people working for the country. But they did not feel their connection with us.’15 There was a consensus that it was not clear to the people what the revolutionaries really stood for. The revolutionaries appeared like people who killed police and in retaliation the police killed them: So we decided to explain our objective – What do we mean by freedom? What type of society we want? What do we mean when we say we want classless society, abolition of exploitation of man by man? What do we mean when we say we do not want exploitation of one nation by another nation – so that people may understand where we stood politically.16

As the first step towards endearing the revolutionaries to the masses, all of them agreed to stop the dacoities and the assassination of moles given their destructive potential.17 They were to raise funds primarily through donations and the goodwill of their supporters and associates. In the days to come, they got librarians to give them free books, journals and newspapers, obtained milk from the milkman, food from hotel owners, and so on. The revolutionaries who kept their jobs and families such as Bhagwati Charan Vohra, Bhagat Singh’s close associate from Lahore, diverted as much funds as he could towards the party’s activities. Many family friends helped hide the revolutionaries or served as depots for arms and their letters. Bhagat Singh, like other young men of his generation, yearned to endear the Indian revolutionary struggle to the ‘masses’. He felt without the support and participation of the masses the revolutionary vision would remain unfulfilled because ‘the real revolutionary armies are in the villages and in factories, the peasantry and the labourers’.18 Be it a national or a socialist revolution, neither could be accomplished without the participation of the masses.19 He also anticipated that the revolutionary party would play a significant role before and after the revolution. Jaidev Kapur recollects Bhagat as saying:

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Brother I understand one thing that if we go against such a big force we will surely break, die or rot in jail, we cannot be saved; however, if we can give our small life to spreading this belief in the country that it needs inquilab and that inquilab needs the country’s masses and its youth. Without a mass revolution our independence is impossible. Therefore, if we can create this feeling or wave then we would have got the value of our lives and we will be completely satisfied when we die.20

Bhagat confessed that he could die fulfilled if he knew that the slogan of ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ was doing the rounds in their country’s cities, streets, roads, schools, colleges, factories and farms.21 Besides Gandhi, the young HSRA revolutionaries also disparaged the methods of the earlier generation of revolutionaries, who, in their opinion, had alienated the masses and had failed to make revolutionism meaningful to a predominantly agrarian society. Even before the formation of the HSRA, Bhagat Singh and Jaidev Kapur had unsuccessfully tried to engage two leaders of the Pasi community (a prominent Dalit community of landless labourers in the United Provinces who had rebelled against the zamindars and the British in 1926), Madari Pasi and Deo Pasi, for the revolutionary cause.22 For Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Jaidev Kapur, Shiv Verma and Yashpal, who had studied at Lala Lajpat Rai’s National College in Lahore or were college-going youth from the United Provinces, the acceptance of the word ‘socialism’ was a reflection of their exposure to socialist literature and the significant impact it had on their consciousness. In 1923 S. A. Dange, the founding member of the Communist Party of India and a trade union leader, started publishing The Socialist series from Bombay that carried books written by German radical socialists, social democrats, anarchists and Marxists.23 Shapurji Saklatvala, a Parsee Member of Parliament in London, used to regularly send leaflets and pamphlets such as ‘Tasks of the Youth’ and ‘What the Indian Youths Are to Do’ to Naujawan Bharat Sabha, the youth wing of the HRA that Bhagat founded along with Bhagwati Charan Vohra, Cchabil Das and Comrade Ram Chandra in 1924.24 The repeal of the Defence of India Act and the Indian Press Act following the First World War brought these presses back to life. The revolutionary realm that had remained dormant during the period of non-cooperation now began to rumble. At this time, the Marxist literature began to flow in from England and the USA. Several revolutionaries associated with the

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Anushilan Samiti began to critically engage with it. They began writing articles portraying Bolshevism, Lenin’s ideas and the Russian Revolution in a positive light. Their articles encouraged the readers to apply the Bolshevik revolutionary tenets to the struggle for swaraj. Prominent amongst them were the writings of Sachindranath Sanyal, Amulya Adhikary and Upendra Nath Banerjee, who were writing for Bengali revolutionary journals such as Shankha and Atma Shakti. 25 Several nationalist leaders and teachers in Punjab were also writing biographies of European revolutionaries and commentaries critiquing British rule of India. These books were written for lay readers and were available in Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi. These books included Lala Lajpat Rai’s Hindi and Urdu pamphlets on the lives of Mazzini and Garibaldi and on Indian historical heroes such as Rana Pratap and Shivaji, Principal Cchabil Das’ political tracts (Hum Swarajya Kyon Chahte Hain?, Naujawan se Do Baatein, Rashtron ki Daulat, Duniya ka Sabse Bada Paap, Duniya ka Sabse Bada Insaan, Bechaare Firangi),26 Lala Hardayal’s Hindustani Kisaan, Sachindranath Sanyal’s Bandi Jivan, Soham Swami’s Commonsense, Bharatendu Harishchandra’s Bharat Durdasha, Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar’s Desher Katha and Jayachandra Vidyalankar’s Bhartiya Vangmay ke Amar Ratna. Bhagat Singh and his associates were also reading novels and plays, European and Russian revolutionaries’ memoirs and biographies and lefttheorists whose writings radicalised them. These included literary works such as Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), Oscar Wilde’s Vera; or, the Nihilists (1880), Sergius Stepniak’s The Career of Nihilist (1889) and Maxim Gorky’s Mother (1906); anthologies such as Jaakoff Prelooker’s Heroes and Heroines of Russia: Builders of a New Commonwealth (1908), Upton Sinclair’s  Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest (1915) and A. J. Sack’s The Birth of the Russian Democracy (1918); memoirs of Dan Breen, My Fight for Irish Freedom (1924), and Vera Figner’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist; biographies such as George Woodcock’s The Anarchist Prince and Bolton King’s The Life of Mazzini; and theoretical works such as Bakunin’s God and State (1882), Peter Kropotkin’s The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution and An Appeal to the Young (1880), Marx’s Das Capital and the writings of Emma Goldman and Lenin. Shiv Verma and Jaidev Kapur mention reading these books and pamphlets in their reminiscences and memoirs when discussing the literature that was circulating as part of

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the HSRA’s propaganda work. References to these books also appear in Bhagat’s political writings and in his jail diary.27 One finds an unmistakable resonance of the post-1876 wave of Russian populist revolutionaries known as the Narodniks in Bhagat’s political orientation and the actions the HSRA carried out. The Narodniks were extensively involved in bomb-making and a number of terrorist actions that had evoked considerable public sympathy. These included the shooting of the infamous Czarist official General Trepov in 1878, the shooting of the Czar in 1879, the bombing of the Czar’s carriage in 1880 and, finally, the assassination of the Czar in 1881.28 The Narodniks believed in egalitarianism, were areligious and did not subscribe to any definite doctrinaire ideology. The main political strategy of the Narodniks was to infiltrate society at all levels – official, professional and in the rural society. Instead of outright revolution (or a political coup), they wished to work towards transforming consciousness, attitudes, beliefs and aspirations. Many of them quit big cities and went to live in the countryside. They wrote extensively about rural poverty and suffering and the hardships they faced while living amongst the peasants.29 Interestingly, it was not just Bhagat who exhibited a consciousness that was in dialogue with the world beyond the spatial confines of British India; even the Anushilanists and the Ghadarites were equally inspired by the Russian revolutionaries and the European anarchists.30 A former Anushilanist, Satyendra Narayan Mazumdar, in his analysis of the propaganda literature of the Anushilan Samiti and the Ghadar Party shows that, although they saw the educated classes as the vanguard, an urgent need to mobilise the masses (variously understood as the city youth and the peasantry) drove the revolutionary rhetoric. It was at the heart of their imagination of an armed revolution.31 The Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar learnt the organisational structure, their methods (use of bombs, assassinations and dacoities) and expertise related to bombmaking from the books that came from Russia.32 Barin Ghose and his associates were the first to attempt the derailment of the train carrying Sir Andrew Fraser on 6 December 1907.33 Lala Hardayal (1884–1939), the founder and leader of the Ghadar Party, had openly advocated adopting the Russian methods as the ‘only methods’ that could bring the English to their senses.34 Hardayal possessed a sophisticated understanding of the European writers and anarchist philosophies that informed his

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commitment to international social revolution.35 He founded the Bakunin Institute in Oakland, USA, as a hermitage for wandering lecturers.36 One can discern similar influences, especially of Herbert Spencer’s ideas, on the London-based Indian radical Shyamji Krishnaverma (1857–1930).37 There were other maverick nationalists such as Dhan Gopal Mukerji (1890–1936) and M. P. T. Acharya (1887–1951) who were also moving transnationally, participating in international anti-imperialist movements and who espoused an eclectic mix of anarchist and socialist ideas.38 Thus, in the early years of the twentieth century, India remained part of the ‘thinking of internationally minded Western anarchists’ and it was with the formation of the Communist Party of India that Indians came to be seen as a part of the international workers’ movement.39 Bhagat’s desire to mobilise the masses was thus reflected in the long-standing commitment of the Indian revolutionary leaders towards them.

~ The HSRA’s World ~

The HSRA’s political consciousness was unfolding in a historical context where the question of mobilisation of the masses had acquired even greater urgency.40 The ‘toiling masses’ had become a political force to reckon with and the consciousness that swaraj was impossible to achieve without their participation had gained political currency. The anti-colonial politics had spilled out of the confines of legislative assemblies, executive councils and Congress meetings and was now being transacted on the streets, in factories and in rural hinterlands. Anti-colonial resistance in British India was taking new forms: public meetings, processions, demonstrations, prabhat feris, picketing, hartals, peasant satyagrahas and factory strikes.41 New organisations were coming into being, such as kisan sabhas (peasant organisations), home rule leagues, trade unions, the Communist Party of India at Kanpur (1925) and the formation of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party. These years were also marked by the worst ever communal riots, polarisation of nationalist politics on religious lines, and the formation of Hindu and Muslim right-wing organisations. Several revolutionary organisations were embroiled in a range of conspiracy cases and got decimated but ever-newer cells and outfits kept sprouting up on the lines of the old ones. The First World War had ushered in a new globalised world connected with new modes of communication and travel, mass migrations, intimate

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and parasitical transnational economic networks and, above all, a new vision of connectedness as evidenced in American President Woodrow Wilson’s attempts to bring together Asian nationalisms. There was a new alignment amongst Irish and Asian nationalism, the formation of the League Against Imperialism in 1926–1927 in Belgium, Jawaharlal Nehru’s visit to Brussels as the delegate of the Congress to the League and then to the Soviet Union in 1927, and a burgeoning Chinese communist movement. Together they fed the increasing fascination with socialism, making it the new catchword amongst the Indian youth and the working classes.42 This was a world with a greater knowledge of itself as a more connected entity. It was also a world where nationalism was demonstrably becoming a weapon in global conflict.43An awareness of one’s struggles in the global geography of colonial domination instinctively created ideological and imagined affinities with other colonised countries. At the time the HSRA was grouping together, an alliance and collaboration between the revolutionaries and the Communist Party of India would have been an obvious political choice given the similarities between them and the communists, such as their denunciation of imperialism, opposition to legislative assemblies, espousal of militant resistance and a commitment to creating a socialist society. Ajoy Ghosh recalls that the HSRA had initially hoped to join forces with the communists and work as their armed wing.44 Shaukat Usmani, an Indian communist leader, reminiscences how ‘they were boiling (with rage). Chandrashekhar and these people told (me) that they wanted to change their line [from individual action to mass action]’. 45 This change was coming as they were gaining understanding of socialism and Marxism. ‘They were attracted to the point that Bhagat Singh and Bijoy Kumar Sinha wanted to go to Moscow to understand more.’46 However, after some conversations with communist leaders, the HSRA realised that the communists were not in agreement with the idea of an armed rebellion and thereafter the HSRA could not think of the communists as revolutionaries.47 Jaidev Kapur says that unlike the communists, who wished to focus on the industrial proletariat, the HSRA focussed on ‘mobilising the educated youth whom they wished to use as a vehicle of spreading awareness’ and using brave and demonstrative ‘actions’ to bring about a revolution in thinking in India.48 Another reason that played into the HSRA revolutionaries maintaining a distance from the Indian communists was their mistrust

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of the British communists who were active in India. Shaukat Usmani confirms this in his reminiscences: ‘They were against British communists coming to India and guiding the Indian movement for two reasons. First, they would get publicity. Secondly, if there was a revolutionary action (they thought not I) the British people could not be depended on.’49 Elaborating on the HSRA’s view, Mahour states that the vital difference was that the HSRA ‘saw themselves despite the espousal of Marxism as being in the long line of Indian revolutionary tradition. However, this is not the way the Communist Party saw itself.’50 Mahour also complains that the communists tended to infantilise the HSRA: ‘Vaha log humko baccha samajhte the’ (They thought of us as kids).51 So while the HSRA revolutionaries were willing to learn from the communist organisers, devour the literature coming out of Soviet Union, tap the communist arms networks and valorise the Russian Revolution, their admiration never translated into joint political work or combining forces with the Communist Party of India or the internationalists. However, they were not averse to working with communism-inspired peasants’ and workers’ organisations. For instance, they were assisted by Kedarmani Shukla, a local peasant organiser (and associate of Maithili poet Nagarjun) who was involved in the communist kisan andolan (peasant movement) in the area when they went to Champaran, Bihar, to gather arms and funds for their party.52 The HSRA remained steadfastly focused on the objective of poorna swaraj and India as the site for their resistance. Shaukat Usmani, for instance, made an offer to Shiv Verma (in 1927–1928) to help send Bijoy Kumar Sinha and Bhagat Singh to study at a university in the Soviet Union. However, Shiv Verma recalls that they had their own conception of what they wanted to do and refused the offer.53 Durga Das Khanna, a member of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, also recalls Bhagat expressing similar sentiments: ‘Let us first try to do whatever we can in our own country and then we shall think of other countries of the world.’54 Even the fear of being imprisoned, shot or hanged was not enough to make these revolutionaries strategically leave India or go into exile. Sampuran Singh Tandon reminisced his last conversation with Azad when he urged the leader to leave India. Tandon feared that Azad would be hanged or shot. He outlined the escape plan to Azad. Their associates in the northwestern tribal area who smuggled weapons for them would escort Azad to

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Rawalpindi or Peshawar and from there on to Afghanistan. However, Azad adamantly refused to leave. With ‘fire in his eyes’, Azad retorted: ‘Mein is dharti ke bina kya hoon, mein kahan jaoon. Mera ant to yahin hai’ (What am I without this land, where would I go? My end will come here itself ).55 Tandon piteously reflected that Azad ‘preferred death to passing his life in some other country’.56 Tandon also stood to face a prison term if he did not leave. But both stayed. M. C. Davar, a young man who was part of the revolutionary circle in Lahore and later became a member of the Congress, summed up the revolutionary creed as: ‘Our ism was the liberty of the land. Our creed was courage. Our ideology was self-sacrifice in the cause of the freedom of the motherland.’57 The reason Comrade Ram Chandra, the co-founder of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, gave for the HSRA distancing itself from the communists are slightly different: ‘With time communist ideology came to be associated with state excesses perpetrated under Stalin. The communists did not appreciate the idea of India’s independence. Therefore, Naujawan Bharat Sabha was associated with socialism and not communism.’58 Ram Chandra’s statement, however, seems like a post-facto justification as the Stalinist excesses did not come to light until the 1950s and the Communist Party of India’s role in India’s partition politics was yet to play out. While some HSRA men did gravitate towards communism in later years, during the time the HSRA was politically active their affinity with the communists never really went beyond publicly cheering each other’s actions.59 The HSRA revolutionaries determinedly retained an identity separate from the Indian communists. However, by 1938 the HSRA members had begun to consider merging the party with the Communist Party of India. Mahour recounts that during their incarceration in the Andamans’ Cellular Jail, they had had an opportunity to study Marxism and had begun to see themselves as Marxists. In 1938, at the annual conference of the Provincial Youth Organisation in Faizabad, Manmathnath Gupta proposed that the HSRA no longer held any meaning and they should dissolve and merge with the Communist Party of India. Mahour also supported him because he felt that they had risen above terrorist activities and should go towards organising the masses. However, several people who were present opposed the proposal; especially Jharkhande Rai, a prominent communist leader, jettisoned the idea. The merger never took place.60

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For most part of the twentieth century, Asian nationalisms and radical anti-colonial resistance movements matured and operated independently of each other. There were only a few ephemeral moments when they displayed cognisance of and acknowledged each other.61 Since the HSRA’s struggle was articulating itself against a trans-local entity, it ideologically linked itself with similar resistance movements in other parts of the globe or imagined itself as an inheritor and bearer of similar historical struggles. Their ‘internationalism’ was more of an empathetic response, an affiliative solidarity, to the conditions of oppression than a simple belief in the ideas of the First International. To be an internationalist was to appeal to an idealistic universalism that surpassed the supposed insularity and inwardness of nationalism. Not state but mythos – solidarity against oppression – was internationalism’s imagined objective. This was the sense in which the HSRA’s political statements and propaganda materials captured the worldly political imagination in the cause of national liberation. The HSRA revolutionaries’ espousal of socialism and armed revolution as twin ideologies and the fact that they drew inspiration for their political actions from the Russian Narodniks, the Irish Sinn Fein, Italian leaders Garibaldi and Mazzini and the French anarchists has been an important factor in their being seen as internationalists.62 To be an internationalist meant that one possessed a ‘global’ consciousness, that is, a political sensibility that operated in a transnational geographic space. The characterisation of the HSRA as ‘internationalist’ thus carried with it an ideological connectedness that went beyond the narrow confines of a national space. However, the HSRA was linked to the international networks only in the form of socialist and communist literature flowing in from the USA, Europe and Russia and arms that were coming in from Germany and Afghanistan. The actual site of the HSRA’s resistance remained national, local and immediate, and the desire to mobilise the peasants and workers an unfulfilled ‘pious wish’.63 There were no international leagues or networks that the HSRA revolutionaries were feeding, neither were they plotting a revolution across Asia or Europe. The only time they made an attempt to reach beyond the Hindu Kush was when a party member, Jai Gopal, was sent to live in Kohat to surreptitiously cross over to Afghanistan and connect with revolutionary groups there but was called away without having made much headway.64 No efforts were made to express solidarity with the contemporary anarchists active

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outside western Europe in the Caribbean, Peru, Argentina, South Africa, Egypt, Korea, China, Japan and Ukraine. Bhagat and his friends remained unaware of the concurrently unfolding history of anarchism and Marxism in the non-European world and in the European colonies.65 The diasporic Indian revolutionaries such as the Ghadarites, the London-based India House revolutionary groups or the ones in various parts of Europe and Asia, notwithstanding the transnational character of their activities, were no different in imagining the site of resistance as national or local. It was swaraj, or India’s liberation, that all of them were working towards.

~The Language of Revolution ~

As it regrouped, the HSRA inserted the letter ‘S’ in its title as a nod to socialism but adopted the the HRA’s constitution in its entirety and chose not to re-write it. Manmathnath Gupta recounts in his Jail Diary: ‘Long afterwards, I think it was in 1938, Shachindra Babu [Sachindranath Sanyal] showed it [the constitution] to me that although the party fathered by him has become H.S.R.A. from H.R.A. at the hand of Bhagat Singh, not a single letter was changed in the constitution.’66 The new vocabulary of socialism found no reflection in the constitution while the HSRA’s political essays, posters and pamphlets frequently used the globally circulating socialist terminology. It is telling that Bhagat Singh, Shiv Verma, Bhagwati Charan Vohra and Yashpal, who had been at the forefront of producing the political and propaganda material for their organisation, did not think of altering the constitution which was saturated with the language of Vedantism. The basic premise of the constitution was that the ‘concrete objective’ of the revolutionary movement was to attain ‘a state of affairs as envisaged by the seers of yore and as now prevalent in Soviet Russia’. There was ‘no class-struggle, no talk of dictatorship of the proletariat or any such terms or phrase that became very common with the advent of socialist literature on a large scale in India’.67 They did not even bother rectifying the contradiction between simultaneously drawing inspiration from the great ancient sages of India and the Russian Revolution. Manmathnath Gupta commented at the irony: ‘The egalitarian outlook of the ancient seers of yore remained confined in the spiritual sphere. As soon as the seers descended on realities, they proved themselves to be hirelings of the ruling class.’68 How do we understand the seeming contradiction between the

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adoption of Vedantism-laden HRA’s constitution and the HSRA being a socialist organisation (and some of the HSRA revolutionaries proclaiming to be atheists)? The answer to this question lies buried in the way the Indian revolutionary history has been written more than in the political choices of the HSRA men. The HSRA’s political literature came dressed in a language that the nationalist–Marxist historiography easily recognised as ‘revolutionary’ with its use of terms such as ‘revolution’, ‘capitalism’, ‘proletariat’, ‘oppression’, ‘communism’, and so on.69 The non-religious character of the language or the disavowal of religion in these writings further lent credence to its revolutionary character and gave it political ‘legitimacy’. In contrast, the use of religious imagery and expressions by Aurobindo Ghosh and Bipanchandra Pal, the leaders of the Anushilan and Jugantar, was upheld as the reason for their failure and for their inability to mobilise the Bengali Muslims. The religiosity of these leaders and ‘infusion of religious language into political discourse’ delegitimised their politics.70 The nationalist–Marxist historiography, emerging in the post-partition era and imbued with the spirit of secular harmony, retained a lingering discomfort with religion, religiosity and with language laden with religious symbolism.71 The consequence was the ‘lexical-inadmissibility’ of anyone as a legitimate revolutionary if he or she did not speak the language of socialism and atheism.72 Historian Peter Heehs in his work on the Anushilan Samiti has demonstrated that there was little historical evidence to corroborate the nationalist–Marxist assertion that being religious in and of itself weakened the revolutionary movement.73 He argues that Aurobindo and Bipanchandra used religious imagery and concepts in their writing primarily to ‘stress on India’s distinctiveness’ because of the threat of it being absorbed into a universalised Europe but at the same time ‘they were also internationalists who knew and respected Europe and worked for intercultural understanding’.74 Much of what they had to say about India’s cultural distinctiveness was later hijacked and tethered to the Hindutva bogey leading to misrepresentation of their intellectual and political positions. Heehs argues that Aurobindo Ghosh and Bipanchandra Pal were nationalist orientalists in a vein similar to Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore who sought to challenge the myth of British cultural superiority by constituting the myth of Indian cultural and

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spiritual superiority.75 The ‘failure’ of the Bengal revolutionaries, in Heehs’ view, had little to do with their religiosity but was primarily a consequence of the inexperience and carelessness of the senior revolutionary organisers and the lack of discipline amongst the revolutionary cadres. Ironically, in case of the California-based Ghadar Party, it was the absence of a political language laden with religious symbolism that is believed to have thwarted its attempts to make inroads into Punjab’s peasantry, and that its ‘ideological syncretism rooted in anarchist thinking’ contributed to its ‘failure’ in the long term.76 However, much like the Bengal revolutionaries, the demise of the Ghadar Party in Punjab was actually a consequence of the strain of the war years, the legal repression it faced in the USA and British India, and the disagreements amongst the core party members regarding their alliance with the Germans. The HSRA revolutionaries, especially Bhagat, acquired the socialist vocabulary to encode their revolutionary ideas over a period of time.77 Bhagat in his early days drew on Vedantic imagery and concepts to filter his ideas. For instance, in 1918 Bhagat wrote a postcard to his grandfather in Urdu and inscribed Arya Samaji–style ‘Om’ (with the Hindi numeral ‘3’ in the middle of letters ‘O’ and ‘M’) on top of it. It was a common practice in the epistolary culture to begin one’s letter by inscribing a religious symbol on top of the folio.78 Looking back on these years, Bhagat later admitted that his journey towards atheism was yet to start.79 Then again in 1922–1923 he wrote an essay on the Punjabi language for an essay contest organised by the Punjab Hindi Sahitya Sammelan in which he asserted: ‘Musalmano mein bhartiyata ka sarvatha abhaav hai, isliye wo samasta bhartiyata ka mahatva na samajhkar Arbi lipi tatha Farsi bhasha ka prachar karna chahte hain’ (Muslims everywhere lack in feeling of Indianness; instead of understanding the importance of Indian heritage they wish to popularise Arabic script and Persian language).80 He insisted that the use of Persianised Urdu in the pan-Islamist journals Zamindar and Siyasat did disservice to the cause of Indian unity. He also critiqued the use of Gurmukhi script for the Punjabi language and made a case for Devanagari (which he calls Hindi) as the preferred script and Hindi as the national language.81 One is not sure whether Bhagat’s views on the language question changed in the time to come but he was certainly echoing the Arya Samaji position on the Hindi language that excluded Muslims from the imagined body politic.82

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In November 1924, Bhagat wrote an essay on vasudhaiv kutumbakam, or universal brotherhood, for Kirti.83 The essay was a rhetorical one exhorting the leaders and the people of Punjab not to be weak and cowardly and to stand up against the British excesses if they wished to achieve the ideal of world peace and brotherhood. The Sanskrit term vasudhaiv kutumbakam, world is one family, captured his vision of global solidarity and peace. The term comes from the Sanskrit tales of the Hitopadesh [1.3.71] and the Mahaupanishad [Ch. 6, v. 72], a text from the shastric pantheon.84 In these texts the phrase vasudhaiv kutumbakam appears in the context of didactic stories describing magnanimous people for whom the entire world is a family: udaracharitanam tu vasudhaiv kutumbakam. The text contrasts people with narrow-minded outlook with more high-minded ones whose generosity makes the world their oyster. For Bhagat the phrase was not just about generosity but more about friendship: vishwabandhuta – universal brotherhood. Bhagat’s use of the ancient idiom as a frame to grasp and express ideas is in interesting contrast to his later writings where he begins to rely on the socialist vocabulary. Over a period of time Bhagat wrote several letters to family and friends and essays for Kirti, Pratap and Chand. Other than these, Bhagat kept a jail notebook and co-authored the HSRA propaganda materials. Bhagat’s use of the ‘socialist’ language in his later writings has created the assumption of him being a theoretically sophisticated author. Daniel Elam in his analysis of Bhagat’s jail notebook, however, observes that there has been ‘a politically sympathetic attempt to place Bhagat Singh in line with other radical writers, especially Antonio Gramsci’.85 While Bhagat was believed to be a singular anti-colonial ‘author’ figure of his jail notebook, the text was actually an assemblage of quotations, fragments and notes. He is also believed to have authored all the HSRA propaganda materials (pamphlets, posters, court statements and essays) that were in fact a product of brainstorming and collective authorial contribution of Shiv Verma, Bhagwati Charan Vohra, Yashpal and others. There was no one authoritative ‘author’ producing the HSRA literature.86 The HSRA propaganda materials, while drawing on socialist vocabulary, was really a mix of diverse ideas drawn from a wide cross section of authors, theorists and literary traditions. It sought to give form to different imageries of the American, the Russian and the French Revolutions along with the Revolt of 1857 and the Sanyasi Rebellion into a single manifesto of anti-colonial call to arms.87

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The vocabulary of the HSRA youth echoed their ongoing metamorphosis into non-practising believers, agnosts or atheists but one that had not entirely scraped out the religious habitus. Perhaps this explains why they did not feel the need to rewrite the HRA’s constitution.88 Sukhdev, Bhagat Singh, Jaidev Kapur, Shiv Verma and Prem Dutt came from Arya Samaji families. Jaidev Gupta, a childhood friend of Bhagat, recounts how ‘Bhagat Singh’s grandfather came in contact with Swami Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj and became his staunch follower. He preached the Arya Samaj gospel and suffered much on that account.’89 Jaidev’s father was also an Arya Samaj organiser and lost his job because of constantly being called away to address Arya Samaji gatherings. Jaidev emphatically asserts that Bhagat’s ‘family was Arya Samajist. So Bhagat Singh was an Arya Samajist by birth’.90 Bhagat’s younger brother Kultar Singh and niece Virendra Sindhu also attest to the family being immersed in the teachings of Dayanand Sarawati and the Arya Samaj’s iconoclasm being the springboard of the family’s revolutionism.91 Sindhu writes: ‘Ghar ka vatavaran ugra Aryasamaji tha aur in dino Arya Samaj ka arth tha swadeshbhiman’ (The home atmosphere was militantly Arya Samaji and in those days being Arya Samaji meant having national pride).92 In their view, Bhagat’s grandfather Sardar Arjun Singh’s conversion to Arya Samaj was ‘revolutionary’ because he was not just another Hindu converting to Arya Samaj but a Jat Sikh making the journey from a gurdwara to Arya Samaj.93Arjun Singh made sure that the yagopaveet ceremony (the thread ceremony that marks the coming of age and affirms the dwija status) for Bhagat Singh was done but did not have his hair tonsured on the insistence of his wife, who was a devout Sikh. The household retained cultural practices associated with the Arya Samaj and Sikhism. It was with the non-cooperation movement, Sindhu recalls, that Arjun Singh put down the Arya Samaj’s red flag with Om on it and took up the tricolour with the charkha on it.94 The tradition continued with Bhagat Singh’s father, Kishan Singh, and his uncle Ajit Singh, who wrote several pamphlets and tracts for the Arya Samaj and in 1906 established the Bharat Mata Society that worked to mobilise the peasantry.95 Bhagat in his autobiographical essay also writes about his Arya Samaji upbringing and how he would recite the gayatri mantra for hours.96 He joined the Gurudwara movement in 1922 and his friend Yashpal reports that he grew his hair and started sporting a black turban with a kirpan,

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a dagger, tucked in it. Yashpal insists that Bhagat did this less out of devotion for Sikhism than because it marked an opposition to the British who had outlawed the possession of the kirpan. When Bhagat moved to the National College, he became less fastidious about wearing the black turban and the kirpan and gradually moved away from the Gurudwara movement, finding it too focussed on sectarian issues. He finally cut his hair in Ferozepur once he became a full-time revolutionary.97 Most other revolutionaries who came from Punjab were either from Arya Samaji families or had studied in Arya Samaji schools. Sukhdev, Bhagat’s friend from the National College and the chief organiser in Punjab province, was raised by his uncle Chintram Thapar, who was also described as a ‘staunch Arya Samaji’.98 Jaidev Kapur also came from what he described as a middle-class Arya Samaji family and used to attend the akhara of Guru Cchote Maharaj where he learnt to use the lathi. In 1923, Shiv Verma and Jaidev rejoined the school that they had quit on Gandhi’s call and became active workers of the Arya Kumar Sabha, which was a youth wing of the Arya Samaj, in order to get cadres for the revolutionary organisation.99 Verma recalls how ‘we went to the length of arranging Shuddhi for Muslims and converted them as Arya Samajists. We did that also. Thus, in the Arya Kumar Sabha I came in contact with Kashi Ram, Jaidev Kapur – who was, of course, my classmate and also my co-worker in the Arya Kumar Sabha’.100 Kundan Lal, another HSRA member who was exiled to the Andamans after the Lahore Conspiracy Case, also talks about his Arya Samaji upbringing. He says: ‘Arya Samaj mein rehne ke karan mujhe rashtriya andolan ke prati aakarshan hua’ (I was attracted to the nationalist struggle because of my association with Arya Samaj).101 Notwithstanding their later disavowal, the Arya Samaj was elemental to their upbringing. It made them part of a radical milieu, stimulated their iconoclasm, and infused them with scepticism regarding traditional religiosity, setting them on a path of critical inquiry. As Shiv Verma notes: I may tell you that the Arya Samaj also at a certain stage – though today it has become conservative – played a progressive role. At that time and even before that, though the Arya Samaj, the Brahmo Samaj, the Prarthana Samaj and the Theosophical Society were all religious bodies, they supplied the largest number of cadres to the freedom struggle. Sir Michael O’Dwyer had written a book India as I knew it 1885–1925,

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where he also mentioned that the Arya Samaj was the biggest supplier of leaders for the Congress and leaders for the revolutionary movement.102

In most instances, a critical relationship with one’s religion began with the questioning of the performance of everyday rituals. Thereafter, either they became less observant or dropped the rituals altogether. However, the personal transformation did not necessarily entail a lexical and social makeover. Even after joining the revolutionary movement, the HSRA’s social and political matrix continued to be dominated by family members, teachers at the National College (Bhai Parmanand, Jaichandra Vidyalankar, Guru Dutt) and associates ( Jai Gopal, Jaidev Gupta, Ram Chandra, Rajaram Shastri, Lala Feroz Chand, Kumari Lajjawati, Sushila Mohan, Seth Cchajju Ram, Durga Das Khanna, Dhanwantri, Master Agya Ram, Dr Gaya Prasad, Pran Nath Mehta), all of whom were Arya Samjis. The young men relied on them for a number of ancillary activities such as hiding weapons, receiving letters and messages, running errands or serving as gobetweens.103 The HSRA also used hostels of DAV Colleges (in Lahore and Kanpur) and Arya Samaj mandirs in different cities as dens, for short stay or as hideouts.104 Furthermore, the deeply ingrained religio-moral elements – brahmcharya, celibacy, frugality and fortitude – all derivatives of their families’ embodied religious practices, remained meaningful in the lives of the young men.105 As we shall see later, these elements got reconfigured and melded into their underground revolutionary life. In actuality, there did not exist a contradiction in the minds of the HSRA revolutionaries regarding adopting the HRA constitution in its entirety and being socialist. This contradiction appeared as such only in the views of Sanyal and Manmathnath Gupta and in the nationalist–Marxist historiography.

~ What Is Socialism? ~

Several of the revolutionaries’ memoirs inform us how Bhagat’s proposal of adding the word ‘socialist’ to the organisation’s title had taken several members by surprise. Amongst those who were present, Phonindranath Ghosh and Manmohan Banerjee from Bihar were in favour of continuing the older party name. They feared that adding the word ‘socialist’ might alienate the educated classes and the revolutionary cause could not afford

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to lose their support. Some also expressed the opinion that stalwarts such as Sachindranath Sanyal and Ram Prasad Bismil had named the organisation and therefore they should not change it. A heated debate ensued.106 As one of the HSRA members, Kundan Lal, who was present in the meeting, recounted, ‘Yadyapi Bhagat Singh ko cchod kar hum mein se kisi ke bhi vichaar samaajvaad ke vishay mein us samay tak spasht nahi hue the tathaapi Bhagat Singh ke vichaar hume uchit janche’ (Except Bhagat Singh none of us had any mental clarity regarding socialism at that time but we felt that Bhagat Singh’s ideas were right).107 Bhagat was able to persuade his associates to accept the word ‘socialist’ as it conveyed freedom for the masses but Kundan Lal’s quote captures the HSRA members’ feeling of inadequacy when it came to understanding socialism in any depth. Azad, who was not present at the Ferozshah Kotla meeting because there was an arrest warrant on him, was also surprised to learn about the change in the party’s name.108 He felt that the word ‘republican’ already ensured that the party espoused the idea of equal rights for all. After much discussion, he realised that Indian bureaucrats and capitalists could dominate a republic and thereby exploit the Indian masses. Therefore, it was important that they assured the masses that they were fighting for them and adding the word ‘socialist’ to the title would ensure that.109 It was really Azad’s faith in Bhagat that made him accept the changed title. In fact, he stayed away from the dacoities only until the time Bhagat was around and resumed them once the Lahore Conspiracy Case got underway.110 Mahour also reiterates the point about having deep faith in Bhagat: ‘Yaha aadmi aisa kaha raha hai to isme kucch hoga zaroor’ (If this person is saying it there must be something in it).111 Socialism as an idea appealed to the different HSRA revolutionaries for their own reasons. Much like Bismil, who also grew up extremely poor, Azad’s intimate experience of poverty and oppression during the years that he spent roaming from Bhavra to Bombay to Banaras as a labourer and then as a student had sensitised him to the plight of the underclasses.112 Azad would often sing these lines: Jehi din hoiye surajwa/Arhar ka daliya, dhaan ka bhatua/Khoob kachar ke khabaina (The day sun will shine/we will eat pulses and wheat/we will eat with great gusto).113 This was his dream of an independent India where everyone would have enough staples to eat. Having received education in Sanskrit, Azad especially saw himself as different from his associates from Lahore and Kanpur, who, unlike him,

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had been initiated into revolutionism through their education.114 Azad had spent several years thinking of himself as a krantikari, a revolutionary, and participating in the revolutionary actions without ever feeling the need to theorise it because he did not see himself as an intellectual or an ideologue.115 He used to refer to the young men who were always engaged in deep intellectual conversations as ‘badhbadiya’, that is, people who sounded like a motorcycle without a sound muffler. Azad primarily relied on his physical agility, prowess as a marksman, and on being a prodigious revolutionary strategist. He would always say, ‘Let these people do discussion, my job is to do action. You people decide and I will execute.’116 Azad was not the only one in the HSRA for whom the appeal of socialism came from their life experiences. Rajguru was also born in an extremely poor family in Pune, left home at 15 and came to Banaras to receive Sanskrit education. Shiv Verma on his first meeting with Rajguru found him unsmiling, serious and a tad mature for a young man of 20. Verma attributed Rajguru’s stiff behaviour to having encountered hardships at an early age.117 In a conversation a few days before he was to be hanged, Rajguru narrated his experiences of poverty before becoming part of the revolutionary circle: ‘Meri zindagi ka har kshan bojh tha us bojh bhare apmaanit jeevan mein yaha duniya mere liye nark se bhi badtar thi’ (Every moment of my life was a burden and this oppressive and insulting life made my world worse than hell) and ‘Garibi abhishaap hai aur pyaar ka abhaav nark hai’ (Poverty is a curse and absence of love is hell).118 He insisted that he did not mind the hunger, bad food, poor living conditions, tattered and dirty clothes that came with being part of a secret revolutionary party as his earlier life was no better. Like Azad, his life in poverty, full of insults and bitterness, made him intuitively appreciate socialist ideas.119 All the socialist talk of ending oppression and living in a classless society had an emotive appeal for Rajguru that precluded any deep intellectual engagement with Marxism or socialist ideology.120 In Rajguru’s understanding, a capitalist society was one where a few people stole the hardworking labourers’ earnings and in a socialist society there would be no division between the rich and the poor. However, he would not have been able to answer if asked what socialism was, how socialism was to be achieved or what was to be the form of the socialist society. As Shiv Verma notes: ‘Bhaawi samaj ki roop-rekha kya hogi aadi prashno par krantikariyon mein kaafi aspashta thi’ (The revolutionaries

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were quite unclear about what the shape of future society would be).121 No one would be exploited and no country would be able to enslave another was the sum total of his understanding of socialism. As far as he was concerned, socialism was a good thing as it talked about equality for all but that was where it ended for him. Bhagwandas Mahour and Vaishampayan also came from poor families and had known a life of deprivation and therefore appreciated socialism. They connected whatever they understood of socialism with the primary objective of swaraj or freedom.122 Manmathnath in his jail diary reflects back on his time in the HSRA and admits that they had no real understanding of socialism or class struggle. He says: At least this much I can say that we missed class-struggle completely and conceived of Socialism as a fight between the poor and the rich. While reading the history of the Russian revolution we did not distinguish between the activities of Bolsheviks and Narodniks. The attempt on the life of the Tsar, the strikes of the proletariat and the activities of Lenin and Trotsky appeared to us to be knit into one single whole.123

Neither were they able to differentiate between a European military leader and a revolutionary nor could they appreciate the fine philosophical distinctions between different theorists. We did not distinguish between Lenin on the one hand and De Valera, Dan Breen, Garibaldi, Mazzini, Kemal Pasha, Sun Yat Sen on the other. To us they were all heroes and patriots. Lenin was to us a patriot like any other patriot. At that time we understood nothing about the classes, hence how could we distinguish between Lenin and De Valera.124

In fact, Marx appeared to them like a kind old gentleman. We had also heard of Marx in a vague and distant manner, but for a long time I was not able to understand why he should be classed as a hero. He seemed to us at that time a kind-hearted old gentleman, who was philanthropically inclined towards the suffering proletariat class. His beard and his eyes inspired us with great respect, but this respect was in no way different from that we felt towards say Rabindranath Tagore.125

Jaidev Kapur also concurred:

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At that time nor did we see ourselves as ideologically or intellectually mature and neither were we. There was no disputing this. However, we were in search for a revolutionary ideology, a strong party to implement that ideology, and for an open and a secret platform within the party, which was to prepare the masses for the revolution.126

An internally consistent and coherent ideology was still in the making. Interestingly, Azad was also not as sanguine regarding Bhagat’s belief that the work of freedom will remain incomplete until they had awakened the masses. For Azad, working amongst the masses and being members of a secret organisation did not quite add up and he was in favour of keeping the revolutionary movement away from the mass movement. Azad’s concerns were premised on the material reality of the revolutionary cells. The secret workings of the organisation, the crushing lack of resources and the fact that many cells did not last for more than two years impeded their ability to consistently work to create a mass contact programme. Remaining loosely connected was important for a secret outfit to ensure the safety and security of the organisation. In the event of a head of a smaller group becoming an approver, he would only damage his cell and not take the entire party down.127 In a more centralised party there was always the risk of the entire organisation getting decimated or of violence turning inwards in the form of internal purges.128 Consequently, not only the HSRA but nearly all the revolutionary groups in British India remained splintered in regional cells without ever turning into a huge pan-subcontinental wave despite repeated efforts to create a unified central command. Thus, for Azad the question of the survival and safety of the revolutionaries outweighed the question of mass awakening. He was of the view that other nationalists such as Mahatma Gandhi were already mobilising the masses and that made the revolutionaries’ intervention redundant. In Azad’s view, the revolutionaries ought to continue doing what they were doing, that is, run secret organisations, carry out political assassinations and if ever a situation such as the one in 1857 or 1914 came up, they should be in a position to give a call for revolution, and that they should have leaders with social prestige whom the people were willing to trust.129 He harboured a dream of initiating guerrilla warfare aimed at setting up ‘liberated areas’ in the countryside. Mahour informs how they

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would discuss graduating from individual actions to carrying out guerrilla warfare. When asked what guerrilla warfare meant to them, Mahour responded: Not to keep doing actions individually but to fight the government as a group. This would take their aims further. Chandrashekhar Azad used to like the area of Jhansi for this. He used to feel that they could successfully carry out guerrilla warfare in that area and raise an organization of 50–60 people. They felt that laying siege on police thana, looting an armoury, looting a bank or government treasury would be more effective than shooting an official or throwing a bomb in the Assembly.130

That is, the ‘actions’ would be more effective in creating the momentum towards a mass armed revolt if they helped the revolutionaries build their cache of arms and ammunition or yielded enough money that could go towards buying weaponry. Most others also imagined bringing about a national revolution on the lines of the 1911 revolution in China and the revolt of 1857 in India.131 The majority of the HSRA members felt that their organisation should be equipped with weapons and have enough mass support to harness the spontaneity of a popular rebellion for the purpose of bringing about a revolution if an opportunity appeared. As Mahour recalled: Our view was that armed conflict/battles will take place, army will fight, they will take over different provinces. In case the army in Bengal does not rebel then we would organize the forces in Punjab to attack the ones in Bengal and so on. The way it happened in 1857.132

Here they were echoing Sanyal’s position regarding the role that an organisation such as the HRA/HSRA was to play in providing leadership to an armed revolution. Sanyal firmly believed that the revolution could not be converted into a democracy if the rebel leaders came from peasant or proletarian background. It was from the educated middle ranks that future leaders should rise although there were not enough of them around at the time.133 For the revolutionaries ever since the formation of the first revolutionary cell (the Maniktala Secret Society of Calcutta) in 1906, the aim was the achievement of poorna swaraj, and kranti, or revolution, was

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a means to that end. The dream of swaraj had served as a glue for the rank-and-file revolutionaries.134 Even the HRA’s ‘immediate objective was the attainment of Indian independence by an armed and organised revolution.’135 The HRA’s four-page pamphlet ‘The Revolutionary’ stated: ‘The way a mother had to bear the pain of child-birth, the revolutionaries had to bear all sorts of pains to bring about a revolution. The infant to be born was swaraj.’136 Sanyal was convinced that the nationalist leadership neither imagined swaraj as a possibility nor was it equipped to take India towards swaraj because they saw it as a cause espoused by some ‘misguided’ individuals, that is, the revolutionaries.137 Attaining swaraj required them to work towards an armed revolution and in order to bring about a strong armed revolution, Sanyal believed, primacy should be given to organising and training the rank-and-file members and arranging arms, not to mobilising peasants and labourers. In his view, a pan-Indian labour movement could be part of the wider armed rebellion but no way could it lead India to liberation.138 For the HSRA also, the dazzling vision of swaraj (as opposed to dominion status) was at the heart of their political utopia.139 They believed that it was their desire for swaraj that set them apart from Gandhian nationalism and not the dichotomy of violence and non-violence. Manmathnath in one place says how Gandhi never defined what he ‘meant by the vague word “swaraj”’. He says that senior leaders ‘again and again nagged Gandhi to define “swaraj”. But Gandhi never defined it’. In Manmathnath’s view, Gandhi did not want to alienate the ‘rich people’ by defining it since his swaraj ‘was not going to be a republic in which the workers will rule’.140 Notwithstanding the single-minded focus on attaining swaraj, it was not accompanied by any discussion on what free India would look like. Mahour recollected that they never had any detailed discussions on the future programme because at that time their understanding was that this discussion about future programme was meaningless till the time they do not attain Swaraj. Their broad understanding was: there was talk of equality, yes, there should be equality; no human should be exploited by another human; capitalism was exploitation of one human by another. So there was general conversation about socialism but no real discussion on future programme. 141

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Sukhdev, for instance, would get impatient with conversation on postindependence society: ‘Bhavishya mein kaisi sarkar hogi, kaunsi shaktiyan sarkar ko chalaengi, humaare sangharsh ka kya swaroop hoga iski abhi se kya chinta abhi to ek cheez hai angrezon ko bhagao. Desh ko azad karna hi pehla mukhya kaam hai’ (Why do we need to worry now about the nature of future government, which powers will run the government, what will be the nature of our struggle. At the moment the only aim is to chase out the British. Liberating the country was the main and sole aim at the moment).142 Jaidev Kapur recollects a conversation he had with Bhagat where the latter surmised: What is to be and how it is to be done was something for the future generations to decide because they would get wiped in the present struggle. If they would be able to do this, their life would have succeeded. It was not our task to take the movement to fruition. The people who would survive would take the task forward.143

~ A Diverse Collective ~

Living together required the HSRA members to negotiate differences in their views, orientation, education and social tastes on a daily basis which manifested in their attitudes towards food, clothing and money. The lack of nuance regarding class struggle, however, did not mean that the HSRA members were unaware of social differences within.144 Bhagwandas Mahour says in one of his reminiscences that the moment he set his eyes on Bhagat, he knew that ‘wo acche khaase khaate-peete sukhi parivaar se aaye the’ (he came from a well-to-do family).145 He recounted: ‘Jis swabhavikta se mere jaise log jo gareeb parivaron se hi aaye the gande kapde pahne raha sakte the aur rukha-sukha kha le sakte the us swabhikta se Bhagatsingh waisa na kar pate the’ (The ease with which some of us who came from poor families would wear dirty clothes and live off scraps, Bhagat Singh was not able to do with similar spontaneity).146 It was not that Bhagat was unwilling to make do with what was available but he would find it difficult to go on for days without changing clothes and to swallow bad food. Mahour recounts an incident of how one day Bhagat had had enough of going hungry and eating badly. They all sat down for their ‘feast’ of burnt rotis and tasteless daal. Bhagat smiled and announced that he would give

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a demonstration of the dining etiquettes of the nawabs of Lucknow. He enacted breaking the roti daintily with his hands so as not to hurt the bread or his fingers. In the time Bhagat took to break the roti, Mahour had eaten three–four bites. Bhagat then barely touched the piece of roti to the daal before putting it in his mouth and chewed it with exaggerated expressions of delight. He got up, drank some water and said: ‘Allah! Kya lazeez khana hai, subhanallah!’ (Allah! What a tasty meal, subhanallah!). Bhagat soon after disappeared and returned with money from somewhere to buy food and cooking vessels.147 Shiv Verma and Sukhdev Raj in their memoirs also talk about how Bhagat was fond of all things that came with running a dairy and being a part-time milkman – good food, milk, kheer and rasgullas.148 As Batukeshwar Dutt fondly recounted Bhagat’s love of milk: ‘Vaha doodh peene ke vilaas se nahi chookta tha. Jahan roti ka lukma bhi nishchit na ho wahan dugdhpaan vilaas ki hi shreni mein ayega na?’ (He never stepped back from the luxury of drinking milk. Where we weren’t assured of even bread, his milk-drinking habit would be counted as luxury or not?).149 Vaishampayan validates Mahour’s observation about Bhagat and other men from Lahore. He narrates an exchange that he once had with Bhagwati Charan Vohra. One day Vohra gave him money to go out and get something done. On his return, Vaishampayan gave back the balance to him along with a list of expenses. Bhagwati Charan kept staring at him without taking the money back. Another friend from Punjab who was standing with them asked Vaishampayan: ‘Yaha hisaab ka lena dena kaisa?’ (What is this exchange of accounts?).150 The ‘Punjab group’ never bothered with accounting expenses. Vaishampayan was extremely surprised to hear the question because he always kept an expense account. Azad had asked all of them to keep one five-rupee note in their pockets to be used only in dire emergency when they had to escape from one city to another. At another time, Bhagat inveigled Mahour into buying him cinema tickets from their food allowance. Mahour under Azad’s strict discipline stuck to his guns until he realised that Bhagat would wrestle him on the street for the money. Mahour, kept worrying about going hungry as they bought the ticket and settled down to see the movie. During the movie, Bhagat kept teasing Mahour, who was enjoying the movie and did not want to leave: ‘Chalein, uthth chalein? Bade discipline wale ke dum bane hain’ (Shall we go, let’s get up and go? What a lapdog/

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follower of that disciplinarian [referring here to Azad]). Bhagat winked and smiled at Mahour when on returning to the den he managed to sweet-talk Azad into giving them money for food.151 Vaishampayan says that he later realised that the ones from Punjab found it easier to get material assistance than they did and when they had no money they had access to Durga Bhabhi’s kitchen and therefore did not have to worry about food and never went hungry.152 There were also divergences on the question of belief in God. While Bhagat had strong views on atheism and never failed to defend them, Azad’s position on the question of belief remained unstated. Shiv Verma recollects that Azad neither countered Bhagat’s opinions nor did he ever advocate belief in God. However, there were others who took strong exception to Bhagat’s views. Amongst the most vociferous believers of Vedantism was Phonindranath Ghosh. He and Bhagat would often get into verbal duels on the matter. In Ghosh’s view, India’s colonial subjection was the result of having deviated from God’s path and nothing would change until the time God forgave Indians for their past sins. Such assertions would enrage Bhagat, who would retort that such talk was simply a justification for one’s akarmanyata, non-action.153 Another instance of conversation of atheism turning into a heated debate was between Master Agya Ram and Rajguru. While Agya Ram was fine with the socialist idea of equality, he was not in agreement with atheism and materialism. The argument boiled over into Agya Ram calling out Rajguru’s shallow understanding of socialism and telling him: ‘Pehle ghade aur ghode ki tameez karna seekh lo phir bahas karna’ (First learn to distinguish between a horse and a donkey before you start arguing).154 Mahour also humorously recounts how he and Rajguru were the butt of Bhagat Singh’s jokes for their lack of attentiveness to theoretical discussions and for their belief in God. Once Bhagat gave Mahour Marx’s Das Capital to read but he could not follow most of the book and, much to Bhagat’s disappointment, returned it half read. Mahour could not fathom Bakunin’s claims in God and the State: ‘If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish it.’ The more Bhagat tried to initiate him into a dialogue on socialism and atheism the more Mahour stuck to his guns until Bhagat gave up his efforts. Mahour says: ‘Virodh mein unko bharitya darshan ya vedant ki duhaai dekar Sanskrit ke shlok sunaane lagta tha’ (In opposition I used to start reciting Sanskrit shlokas as examples of

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Indian philosophy or Vedant). In return, Bhagat would laugh and recite ‘Jai Hanuman gyan gunsagar’ (the Hanuman Chalisa) to tease the ‘monkeyface’ Mahour.155 Mahour came from a ‘pakka sanatandharmi’ (traditional caste Hindu) Brahmin household where ‘Aryasamajipana’ and ‘Christianpana’, the nonconformist ways of the Arya Samajis and Christians, were frowned upon.156 For Mahour, being a revolutionary did not mean being an atheist and it was enough to know that they were fighting for India’s freedom from the British. He failed to see why something so simple and straight required extensive theorisation.157 However, Mahour was not unaware of Bhagat’s frustration: ‘Bhagat Singh aadi ki drishti mein main sada hi ek aisa ujjad “pehelwan” hi raha jise buddhi aur siddhant vyavstha se koi sarokar nahi’ (For Bhagat Singh and others I remained a boorish wrestler and someone who had little to do with intellect or theorisation).158 Once on hearing the news that Mahour had topped his class in the philosophy exam, Bhagat kept staring at him and asked with disbelief: ‘Have you received the prize for philosophy or for doing push-ups?’159 Another time Mahour won a prize for acting in a play and Bhagat Singh said that now all that they awaited was the news of monkey-face Mahour winning a beauty contest! While the young men who came from modest backgrounds were sharply conscious of the differences amongst them being a consequence of their class background, the college-educated youths such as Bhagat and Jaidev pegged it to the ‘lack’ of intellectual atmosphere amongst the erstwhile HRA members. This view was expressed by Jaidev Kapur at different times. In one memoir he recalled how Bhagat played a crucial role in creating a ‘serious political thinking’ in Azad and others. Wherever Bhagat would sit, there would be a few books and he would always initiate serious discussion. He felt that it was only with the formation of the HSRA did it become absolutely essential for the ‘organisers’ charged with recruiting young men to use books for recruiting and training the rank-and-file revolutionaries. The young people were urged to attend study circles, listen to lectures and read leaflets, books, pamphlets and periodicals.160 In Jaidev’s view, this set them apart from the earlier generation of Bengali revolutionaries who either started gymnasiums (akharas) for physical exercises to draw recruits or set up a weekly revolutionary newspaper, Jugantar, to enable them to go beyond ‘word-of-mouth promotion’.161 Here Jaidev overstated the uniqueness of the HSRA in terms of its intellectual culture. Perhaps he was

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unaware that the HRA’s recruitment strategy was not any different from that of the HSRA and that the HRA had a similar culture of reading and discussion. In fact, even the Anushilan and the Jugantar revolutionaries had a long reading list and would hold regular classes for the young men to impart political education.162 Notwithstanding the HRA and HSRA’s recruitment policy of making all potential and new recruits read revolutionary literature, not all revolutionaries actually cared to read or accessed the world of ideas through reading. As Mahour once said to B. K. Sinha, Bhagat Singh and Shiv Verma, who were engaged in a discussion: ‘Maine to seedhe se kaha ki itihaas padhne-na-padhne se goli to koi jor se chalengi nahi’ (I stated it straight that reading or not reading history had nothing to do with shooting the bullet with force).163 Even if they did read, it did not ensure that all of them grasped a text in the same manner. As most people are wont to do, the revolutionaries read the different books in their own context, cherry-picked ideas, and adapted them to their situation. As literary theorist Michael Bakhtin reminds us: ‘The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes one’s “own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intent.’164 Further, the circulation of socialist literature and the fact that many were reading did not necessarily imply that all of them were reading; nor did not reading preclude intellectual engagement. As was the case with Azad, Rajguru, Mahour and Vaishampayan, learning also came from listening and participating in conversations. Azad was fluent in Hindi but his English was indifferent and that held him back from accessing some of the socialist reading material; however, that did not keep him from being intellectually engaged. Azad would often ask others to read the books for him.165 Contrary to Jaidev Kapur’s reminiscences, Shiv Verma recalls that it was Azad who would urge them the most to read and write. Verma says that he read the entire ‘communist manifesto’ for the first time when he read it out aloud to Azad. In recalling Azad’s interest in debates and being read to, Verma was seeking to dispel the misperception of proficiency in English language being the measure of intellectual ability: ‘Gyan aur buddhi ka theka angrezi jaananewalon ko hi mila ho aisi baat to nahi’ (It wasn’t so that knowledge and intelligence were the preserve of the people who knew English).166 Azad used to make one of

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them read aloud the English newspaper every morning and would make an effort to re-read the important news items by himself.167 If Azad heard that a book was related to their movement or could educate them about political issues, he would have it bought and get someone to read and translate it for him. He actively engaged in intellectual debates and discussions about their ultimate objective of revolutionism, what they meant by the country’s freedom, what the future society would look like, the meaning of a classless society, the role of revolutionaries in modern class struggle, the nature of Congress party, and the birth of God and religion.168 He also attentively listened in on conversations and arrived at his own conclusions about what would serve the revolutionary movement well.169 With time there was also a greater questioning of Azad’s observance of religious and caste taboos. Bhagat’s gentle and humorous nudging also contributed to the process. Mahour recounts how he was once astonished to see Azad, a strict vegetarian, swallowing a raw egg. He asked him: ‘Panditji yaha kya?’ (What is this, Panditji?). Azad replied: ‘Ande mein koi harz nahi hai. Vaigyanikon ne ise fal jaisa bataya hai’ (There is no problem with eating eggs. Scientists have likened it to a fruit). Mahour knew that ‘egg is like a fruit’ was Bhagat’s argument. Mahour reparteed that if an egg was a fruit then a hen could be nothing less than a tree. Bhagat Singh, who was present at the time, burst out laughing and commended Mahour on his wit. Azad, embarrassed at being caught in the act, interjected with annoyance: ‘Chal be, ek to anda khila raha hai, aur upar se baatein bana raha hai’ (Get lost, one, you are feeding me eggs, and other, you are talking smart).170 However, Azad never entirely gave up his religious beliefs or practices despite his growing consciousness towards socialist ideas and new-found fondness for eggs. He continued to perform sandhya every evening, wore his sacred thread and observed brahmcharya. If Bhagat was able to challenge Azad’s caste prohibitions, it was Azad on whom Bhagat depended for his experience with organising actions that saved the lives of their fellow revolutionaries on several occasions. Vaishampayan, a member of the HSRA and Azad’s close associate, recalls how Azad had once called off the rescue mission for Jogeshchandra Chatterjee, a member of the HRA who was convicted in the Kakori Conspiracy Case, from the Agra Jail in 1929. Jogesh was going to be transferred to a jail in Lucknow via Kanpur and the revolutionaries were going to use this opportunity to rescue him. They all gathered on the

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railway station in Kanpur where Jogesh was to arrive. They waited for Azad to give the signal. However, Azad instead of giving the orders to rescue Jogesh ordered everyone to board the train back to Agra. Everyone silently complied. On reaching Agra, Bhagat broke down with grief and remorse at the mission having miscarried. Azad let Bhagat cry himself quiet before explaining that he had scoured the railway station and found that there was a heavy police guard that could have easily taken down all of them. Azad did not want to risk the lives of all the gang members for a slim chance of rescuing Jogesh. Bhagat asked for forgiveness on hearing Azad’s reasons for abandoning the rescue plan. This was just one instance of many when Azad displayed tactical acumen and foresight.171 On most occasions, Azad took care not to impose his wishes on the central committee of the party unless it was a question of observing safety rules.172 For instance, Azad was opposed to Bhagat surrendering himself after bombing the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi. He understood the significance of courting arrest and giving a statement but he was loathe to lose Bhagat or, for that matter, any member of the group.173 However, Bhagat coaxed Azad into agreeing to his plans to bomb the Assembly and to court arrest. Finally, as always, Azad’s affection for Bhagat made him give in. Notwithstanding its diverse character, the HSRA was relatively free of internal squabbles and factionalism, which was the bane of most revolutionary organisations. The safety of any secret revolutionary outfit depended on mutual trust amongst the members. Many knew each other only by their party name. For instance, Mahour despite having spent a great deal of time with Bhagat only knew him as Ranjit. It was only after Bhagat threw the bomb in the Delhi Assembly that Mahour found out his real name.174 Secrecy was a double-edged sword as it also bred a great deal of suspicion, mistrust and fear, making factionalism and internal strife a common feature of most revolutionary organisations. The secret societies of Bengal, the Ghadar Party and the HRA had all been faction-ridden or marked by intense rivalries amongst the leaders.175 These revolutionary organisations were hurt the most by associates who broke under interrogation and gave away hideouts, plans and the locations of different persons.176 Eventually the HSRA also fell prey to betrayal but, until the time that happened, it was the bonds of friendship between Bhagat and Azad that held the organisation together. They valued each other despite being

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two very dissimilar individuals in terms of their personalities, beliefs, the social milieu they came from, and the manner in which they arrived at militant radicalism. Jaidev Kapur described them thus: ‘Humaari party mein do “dynamo” the; inme se jo oorja udbhaasit hoti thi us se doosre chirag timtimaate the. Hum log to timtimaate hue chirag the’ (Our party had two ‘dynamos’; the energy these dynamos gave out made the maps shine. We were the shining lamps).177According to Manmathnath Gupta, Bhagat and Azad both loved each other and complimented each other. Till the time Bhagat Singh stayed with Azad, there wasn’t a single instance when the link between the two broke, or they did not find their togetherness exciting and attractive. Their minds were so connected that they did not require much conversation. Whatever relationship they had, it had great depth and belief in the tradition.178

Other notable friendships that repeatedly find mention in the memoirs were of Bhagat and Sukhdev; Azad, Mahour, Vaishampayan and Malkapurkar; Shiv Verma and Jaidev Kapur; and Rajguru’s bonding with and adoration of Bhagat. Besides the friendships amongst different individuals, another reason that the memoirs give for the collegial atmosphere of the HSRA was the lack of oppressive hierarchies within. The leaders neither strong-armed (dadagiri) the members nor used them as cannon fodder. Mahour and Ajoy Ghosh both confirm that Azad and Bhagat always participated in all the everyday chores, shared food, washed each other’s clothes, made bombs and tested them, and collectively carried out the actions. They were also at the forefront when deciding who would carry out the assassinations, bombings or dacoities.179 Mahour credited Bhagat with bridging the differences and hierarchies with his sense of humour, his gentle pestering, and by doing his share of everyday chores. It was never the case that Bhagat ‘sat around with a pillow and we mopped the floor’.180 It was the intense bonds of friendships, loyalty and mutual respect amongst members of the HSRA that gave it cohesion. The revolutionary party in this case was also an affective community – a diverse set of individuals otherwise who felt that they belonged together.181 Between April and July 1929, several HSRA members were rounded up by the colonial police and put on trial. The trial was held in the city

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of Lahore and came to be known as the Lahore Conspiracy Case. While several of the HSRA revolutionaries were on trial, many were absconding. The latter included Chandrashekhar Azad, Bhagwati Charan Vohra, Yashpal, Sukhdev Raj, Jagdish, Bhagwandas Mahour, Vaishampayan and their female associates Prakasho (wife of Yashpal), Durga Devi Vohra (wife of Bhagwati Charan Vohra and the head of the Hindi Department in a women’s college in Lahore) and Sushila Mohan. Azad with the help of Yashpal and Bhagwati Charan Vohra tried to rebuild the ranks. They carried out several unsuccessful actions: blowing up the Viceroy’s train in December 1929, looting the Punjab National Bank, assassination attempts, and the attempt to rescue Bhagat Singh from the Lahore Jail. Gradually the ranks further depleted. In May 1930, Bhagwati Charan Vohra died while testing out a bomb and Vaishampayan and Mahour were caught by the police and embroiled in a conspiracy case. About five of them, Jai Gopal, Phonindranath Ghosh, Hans Raj Vohra, Lalit Mohan Banerjee and Manmohan, had turned King’s witness and took the stand against their fellow revolutionaries.182 In October 1930, Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were sentenced to be hanged in the Lahore Conspiracy Case Trial. They were finally hanged on 23 March 1931. Shiv Verma, Jaidev Kapur, Bijoy Kumar Sinha, Kamal Nath Tiwari, Gaya Prasad, Kundan Lal, Prem Das, Kishori Lal and Batukeshwar Dutt were sentenced to transportation or given jail sentences. Ajoy Ghosh, Des Raj and Surendranath Pandey were freed. The initial fervour of banding together for the cause of armed liberation did not have the opportunity to dissipate into internal squabbles and factionalism perhaps because of the short life span of the HSRA.183 Had the organisation lasted longer or grown bigger, the individual differences might have become untenable. However, we can only speculate about the possible turn the organisation could have taken.

~ Conclusion ~

The revolutionaries’ memoirs reveal the revolutionaries-in-making, a set of young people who were exploring, discovering, seeking and at times failing in their search for an ideology. Living together in secret dens meant navigating differences in class and caste status, educational backgrounds and the socio-religious milieu that the different party members came from. The differences circumscribed their everyday exchanges and were reflected

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in their relationship with clothing, money and food. The revolutionaries’ political consciousness and the conviction for armed struggle, however, grew as they got drawn into the revolutionary circle and spent time living together underground, reading, observing, participating, learning and conversing about other revolutions and revolutionaries, or when they found themselves for weeks on end alone in a jail cell. It is in their everyday conversations, debates and ruminations that one actually sees them for who they were. Coming into consciousness was an ongoing process continuing even as the young revolutionaries waited to ascend the gallows. The challenge for the HSRA leadership was to knit the diverse set of individuals into an ideologically cohesive collective. Some of them were provincial youth from petty bourgeois backgrounds, some belonged to the provincial elite, a few came from farming families, most were university students and some had no formal education. They were in their teens or early twenties and most were newly initiated into politics, still soaking in new ideas. The dominant historiography presumes the revolutionaries’ actions to be driven by ideology as if all the ideas had been absorbed into their consciousness. It also reduces the plurality of their subject positions to a single and homogenous one. Far from it, some were reading radical literature but had no exposure to actual revolutionary work; some were acquainted with revolutionary organisational work but had little or no access to the world of books; others were recruited for the skills they brought to the revolutionary organisation and they radicalised only after their induction. On a given day, the HSRA men would be hard pressed to give identical answers if asked how they envisioned the armed struggle, if they believed in God or what they meant by socialism. Like in any other revolutionary organisation, the degree of party members’ ideological immersion was variable in the HSRA as well. The revolutionaries went about armed with a programme rather than with a coherent ideology.

4 ~ The Ascetic Kaalyoddha ~

A

zad had started his revolutionary journey on the famous stone steps of Banaras’ river bank, the Manikarnika Ghat, amidst the raging flames and the smoke emanating from the funeral pyres.1 Banaras’ Manikarnika Ghat had a deep association with death, transcendence and time. In Hindu mythology, it was on the Manikarnika Ghat that Lord Vishnu sat at the beginning of time to create the universe and it was here that all corpses were to burn until the end of the time. It was believed that dying in Banaras ensured permanent residence in the heavens, symbolising freedom from the cycle of birth and rebirth, that is, the attainment of moksha. Consequently, people in droves would come to Banaras to live out their last years or were brought on their death-beds (or as corpses) to be cremated in Banaras or their ashes were brought for immersion in the Ganges.2 The unending performance of funerary rites of cremation was a sacrifice and an act of creation that continually regenerated the cosmos. The name Manikarnika meant a jewelled earring that supposedly fell from the ear of Shiva, the Ascetic and the Destroyer, in the face of Vishnu’s penance. This symbolised Shiva’s loss of potency and the ascendance of Shaivism.3 Banaras was thus home to several Shiva followers, known as the aghoris, with whom, as we shall see, the revolutionaries identified on some days. The aghoris’ initiation into ascetic life required them to perform their own funerary rites and it was believed that in doing so they folded back the irreversibility of death into the ideal of regeneration.4 Azad, standing at the Manikarnika Ghat, in a manner similar to the aghoris, consigned his mortal existence (visarjan) into the fires of India’s liberation. His death in Allahabad’s Alfred Park was simply a physical annihilation that reinforced his status as ‘Azad’. By the time someone

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known to Azad arrived to identify his dead body, the police had already consigned it to flames.5 Later the police contacted Sirajuddin, a motor mechanic from Jhansi under whom Azad had worked, and asked him to come to Allahabad to identify Azad from the photo of his dead body. The real identity of Azad, who was a bahurupiya, the man who wore several guises, remained unknown to most even in death. He would often say: ‘Dushman ki goliyon ka saamna hum karenge, azad hi rahe hain, azad hi rahenge’ (I will confront the enemy’s bullets, I have always been free [azad] and will always remain free [azad]).6 Azad had always imagined himself as a sovereign who lived and died free. He believed that his name and his person embodied the ideal of poorna swaraj where the self was completely free from any bondage. Azad’s belief in his sovereignty and his transcendence, physical and imagined, reflected the deep and intimate connection revolutionary ontology had with time. How did this relationship between revolutionary ontology and time manifest? What form did it take? What connection did it have with revolutionism? To answer these questions we would have to wade through the revolutionaries’ quotidian existence. The revolutionaries’ dialectical relationship with time impacted and at the same time determined their everyday life in the underground. It was evident in their practice of asceticism in their daily life (the invisible) and in their espousal of violence as a political weapon (the visible). One does not generally associate the revolutionaries with asceticism because the term ‘asceticism’ evokes an imagery of a monastic, devotional, otherworldly and non-violent life. Asceticism was not always thought of in this manner. This devotional and monastic idea of asceticism began to acquire prominence in the late eighteenth century with the growth of the rasik Ramanandis (the devotional and monastic sect of Vaishnavite ascetics who were devotees of Lord Rama) and the waning of the other two Ramanandi sects, the tyagis and the naga ascetics, who were either associated with violent yoga practices or the akhara life where they trained in martial activities. Concurrent political developments such as the quelling of the Sanyasi Rebellion from the 1770s onwards, the waning of the political prominence of the gosain warrior ascetics, and the criminalisation of peripatetic groups such as banjaras and fakirs, ‘the armed vagrants’, by the British Governor General of India, Warren Hastings (1773–1785), brought the devotional and monastic ascetic orders into public prominence. 7 This, in turn, hastened the tying together of

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the idea of asceticism with world-renunciation in popular imagination. In the twentieth century, Gandhi’s emergence on the political scene as the mahatma infused this mystique of the suffering renunciate with the imagery of ahimsa, non-violence. He was a living example of a man whom the public saw as a renunciate whose yogic non-violence bestowed on him magical and superhuman powers. Hereafter, it became difficult to conceive of the revolutionaries as practising asceticism although it formed the core of their everyday life.8 In some ways it was a consequence of the scarcity of resources and the harsh existential reality of underground life; the revolutionaries’ asceticism, however, went beyond a lifestyle choice forced upon them by circumstances.9 The practice of asceticism enabled them to constitute their quotidian world – a world in which they lived by their laws, free from the excesses of colonial law and structural violence. It was a mode of disengaging from and transcending the colonial temporality, that is, their imperfect present. This world, in turn, was a microcosm of the society they envisioned, a declaration of swaraj over self and the land they inhabited (renunciative and political freedom). The revolutionaries’ practice of asceticism was also firmly tied to their embrace of violence. It validated and redeemed their violence because of its connection with the capacity for sacrifice and the renunciation of material comforts. Aspiring to and observing ascetic strictures fuelled their imagination of being patriotic yogis or ‘ascetic warriors’ devoted to the cause of India’s liberation. Like the gosain warrior ascetics of yore, the Sikh khalsa, and the Arya Samaj, their adoption of ascetic ideals did not ‘preclude the possibility of arms’ and thus serendipitously melded into the life of a revolutionary.10 The revolutionaries imagined themselves as patriot ‘ascetic warriors’ styled after Bankim’s literary ascetic Satyanand in Anandmath or as the Karmyogin of Aurobindo Ghosh’s Bhawani Mandir or as Rakhmatov, the hero of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? or as Bazarov, the protagonist of Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.11 Although divergent in their historical context, the life histories of Bankim’s warriors and the Narodniks were uncannily similar in many ways. These literary heroes nourished and nurtured the revolutionaries’ imagination and enriched their dream of the revolution; they informed, shaped, moulded and radicalised their impressionable selves; and from them the revolutionaries learnt how to live their utopia.

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~ Mrityunjaya ~

Covenant with Death

Death and the manner in which it will come was a regular joke amongst the HSRA men. They mercilessly teased Rajguru for being a sleepyhead and, true to form, pictured him being caught by police slumbering in some corner. They joked that on waking up in the lock-up, Rajguru would ask the guard whether he was truly in the lock-up or only dreaming. Batukeshwar Dutt, a dreamer, would be caught observing the moon. On being caught, he would point out the moon to the policeman and urge him to appreciate its beauty. It was surmised that Bhagat Singh and Bijoy Kumar Sinha, given their love for movies, would be caught in a cinema hall. They would have no problem with being arrested but would protest at not being allowed to finish the movie. Azad would be caught hunting in the hills of Bundelkhand. They chorused to add that a treacherous friend would give him away. The police would find him in an unconscious state, take him to a hospital and Azad would realise that he had been arrested once he woke up. He would then be hanged.12 When it came to hangings, given how tall Bhagat was, the jail officials would have to dig a deep hole under his feet or else they would not be able to swing him from the noose. They would have to tie sandbags on Bijoy Sinha and Shiv Verma, the thin ones, to weigh them down to be properly hanged.13 Bhagat would taunt Mahour, given his love for singing, whether Mahour would sing as he waited to be hanged. Mahour would retort: ‘Of course! If a Jamvant like you reminds me to.’14 Here Mahour was referring to the bear king in the Ramayana who reminds Hanuman, the monkey god, of his powers. This was his way of getting back at Bhagat for calling him a monkey-face. Bhagat would further jest that police would find it difficult to hang Azad because there would not be a noose big enough to fit his thick neck and big girth. The police might need two nooses, one to go round his neck and the other to go round his belly. On hearing this, Azad would grab his revolver and reply that no one could ever arrest him, he had no interest in being hanged and that the noose was not for the likes of him: ‘Dekh, fansi jaane ka mujhe shauk nahi hai. Waha tumhe mubarak ho, rassa-fassa tumhaare gale ke liye hai.’ Till the time he had ‘Bamtul Bukhara’, his pistol, none would be able to arrest him alive.15 Irrespective of how they were going to die, they had all made a pact with death to free India from British rule. Everyone knew of Rajguru that

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he did not care if he was hanged or shot. However, Rajguru did care about being the first one to die. He always competed with Bhagat and wanted to die before him. Their friends would say: ‘Shahadat ke is ishq mein Rajguru apna raqueeb samajhte the Bhagat Singh ko’ (For Rajguru, Bhagat Singh was his opponent in their mutual love for martyrdom).16 Vishwanath Vaishampayan recounts an oft-told anecdote about Rajguru, of what he would do at the time of his and Bhagat’s hanging. Hanging by the noose, if Rajguru had the opportunity to open his eyes one last time before his heart stopped beating, he would check out Bhagat’s state to make sure that Bhagat had not beaten him in their race to death’s door. Bhagat, breathing his last, would have stolen a glance at Rajguru and smiled his sweetest last smile and said: ‘Shauq-i-shahadat to hum sabki hi rahi hai bhai! Par tu to sarapa shauq-e-shahadat hai, haar gaye tujhse!’ (All of us have an excessive fondness for martyrdom! But you are an incarnation of this fondness, you win!).17 The fact that entering the revolutionary movement meant having a covenant with death was made clear to them the day they joined the revolutionary party. The HRA and the HSRA had no oath or ceremony for joining the organisation. Forewarning the new recruits about what lay ahead in one’s life as a revolutionary was the only formality that was observed. As Azad told Ramkrishna Khatri before recruiting him into the HRA: Main aapko yaha salah doonga aur prarthna karoonga ki kranti dal mein aane ki bajai seedhe-seedhe congress party mein raha kar Gandhiji ke bataye hue satya aur ahimsa ke marg ko apnaiye. Usme agar satyagrah karte hue jail bhi hogi to zyada-se-zyada cchah mahine ki hogi. Kintu krantikari party mein yadi pakde jaoge to phansi tak ke liye tayyar rahana hoga. [I am giving you this advice and beseeching you that instead of entering a revolutionary group remain with the Congress Party and embrace the path of truth and non-violence as shown by Gandhiji. Even if you were jailed doing Satyagrah, you would spend at the most six months behind bars. However, in the revolutionary party, if you are nabbed, you have to be ready to be hanged.]18

In another memoir Manmathnath reminds his readers that great revolutionary organisations were not made by the numerical strength of its members but by the numbers who could ‘dash to death at 5 minutes’ notice’.19

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The life cycle of an active revolutionary was very short. At most two years is what one had on average.20 A good number of revolutionaries were hanged, sent to the Andamans or went dormant after a major action. Azad was one of the rare exceptions to have had an active political life of about a decade. Most others who lived for that long either spent most of their life in jail (such as Shiv Verma, Manmathnath Gupta and Bijoy Kumar Sinha) or went into exile (like Rashbehari Bose and Shyamji Krishnaverma) or endured more as ideologues than as active revolutionaries (such as Aurobindo Ghosh, Sachindranath Sanyal and Vinayak D. Savarkar).21 The resilience of the martyrdom imagery around the hanged or killed revolutionaries made covenant with physical annihilation a definitive, indeed indispensable, characteristic of their particular brand of anti-colonialism. This pattern of holding up a single individual, a willing sufferer for a cause, has heavily framed the biographical narratives of the martyrs, particularly of iconic figures such as Lala Hardayal, Khudiram Bose, Bagha Jatin, Ram Prasad Bismil and Bhagat Singh, to name a few.22 This imagery was not simply a popular or a literary construct but an idea that the revolutionaries also embraced and lived by. Their covenant with death in service of their country’s freedom was one aspect of their existence that held together all shades of revolutionaries. Azad would often recite a popular couplet: ‘Shaheedon ki chitaaon par padenge khaak ke dhele, watan par marnewalon ka yahi namon nisha hoga’ (Stones shall be thrown at the tomb of the martyrs, Thus shall be remembered the men who die for their country). 23 Their love for martyrdom was also immortalised in the Bismil’s song ‘Sarfaroshi ki Tamanna’ that became the revolutionary anthem and was popularised through postcolonial cinematic renditions: Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab humaare dil mein hai Dekhna hai zor kitna baajuye qatil mein hai…. Hum to ghar se hi the nikale baandh kar sar par kafan, Jaan hatheli par liye lo bad chalein hain kadam, Zindagi to apni mehmaan maut ki mehfil mein hai, Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab humaare dil mein hai. [The desire for rebellion is now in our hearts, Let’s observe the strength in the arms of the killer.…. We had left home tying the shroud on our heads, Carrying our lives in our palms our feet march forward,

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Life is our guest in the congregation of death, The desire for rebellion is now in our hearts.]

The revolutionaries were also not unaware of the fact that their death would help in endearing their cause to the masses and therefore the ones who were caught and jailed were known to actively seek and welcome the death sentence. As Ashfaqulla, on receiving the death sentence, said to his lawyer: ‘Yaha to meri khushkismati hai ki mujhe hubbewatani ka alatraeen inaam mila hai’ (It is my good fortune that I have received the best possible reward for my patriotism). Anything less would have disappointed him.24 Similar was Roshan Singh’s response, who saw his hanging as a mighty reward.25 Bijoy Kumar Sinha narrates the last conversation he had with Bhagat Singh in jail after his death sentence had been pronounced. They were discussing Pandit Motilal Nehru’s request to file an appeal against the death sentence in order to gain some time to secure general amnesty for all political prisoners. Bijoy recounts: I remember to this day every word that Bhagat Singh uttered to sum up his own feelings. He said ‘Bhai, Aisa na ho ki Phansi ruk jai’ (Brother, it may not happen that the hanging is stayed). He had no illusions about any amnesty being granted, but he feared that as the prosecution evidence was weak and the trial had been conducted exparte in the absences of the accused in Court, the death sentences might be commuted on appeal and he would be then deprived of the opportunity of furthering the cause of the revolution by dying for it. He pointed out to me that he could serve the cause best by his death at that juncture. I agreed with him and we decided that we should therefore give out consent to a general appeal to be filled only on the technical ground that the Lahore Conspiracy case ordinance under which we were tried was ultra-vires. He knew that such an appeal was bound to be rejected and desired that the interval gained should be fully utilised for revolutionary propaganda throughout the country.26

Manmathnath Gupta in his Jail Diary observed how martyrdom also served as a regenerative force for the revolutionary ranks: ‘Under such circumstances popular sympathy becomes the chief factor, and a sin qua non. Without this how can the decimated ranks be constantly filled.’27 He further says: ‘If a revolutionary martyr is not hailed as a deliverer and hero among the people for a particular type of work, there is no scope for revolutionary movement.’28 For the general public, the revolutionaries’

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willingness to lay down their lives for the nation’s liberation made the revolutionary worldly and yet not of the society. This attracted the awe and respect of the society at large. In the shastric tradition, even the gods feared martyrs and renouncers, and with Gandhi, political asceticism had already acquired magical overtones in the public mind.29 For the revolutionaries, their present was an inheritance from their revolutionary forbears where they were part of a long unbroken chain of warriors going back to historical and literary revolutionary exemplars such as Shivaji, Bankim’s sanyasis, the rebels of 1857 and the inhabitants of Bhawani Mandir. This was a chain that would extend to the future generation of revolutionaries until the time India achieved independence. As inheritors of this long history of Indian revolutionaries, they had to persist forth and accomplish the unfinished historical task, and individuals like them would keeping dying to take birth again. Ram Prasad Bismil described his last days in the condemned cell with much relish: ‘Meri ichccha thi ki kisi sadhu ki gufa par kucch din nivas kar ke yogabhyaas kiya jata. Antim samay wo ichccha bhi poori ho gayee. Sadhu ki gufa na mili to kya, sadhna ki gufa to mil gayee … badi kathinta se ye shubh avsar prapt hua’ (I always wanted to live in an ascetic’s cave and practise yoga. In my last time that desire has been fulfilled. I did not get an ascetic’s cave but found a cave for meditation … found this happy occasion after much hard work).30 He was convinced that he will soon be reborn in India: ‘Yaha mera drid nishchaya hai mai uttam shareer dharan kar naveen shaktiyon sahit ati sheegrah hi punha bharatvarsh mein hi … janm grahan karoonga’ (This is my strong belief that very soon I shall take birth in India itself with the finest body equipped with new powers). Death was regeneration and renewal.31 He ends his autobiographical note with a couplet forecasting the birth and rebirth of the chain of revolutionaries: Marte ‘Bismil’ ‘Roshan’ ‘Lahiri’ ‘Ashfaq’ atyachaar se| Honge paida sankdon inke rudhir ki dhaar se || [Bismil Roshan Lahiri Ashfaq will die of oppression Several will be born from their bloodstream.]32

Rajendranath Lahiri also strongly believed that he would be continually reborn until India was free. Just before he was to be hanged, he bathed, read the Gita and exercised. The magistrate overseeing the hanging is said

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to have asked him why he cared to exercise in his last hour and Lahiri responded: ‘Mai marne nahi ja raha hoon balki apni matri-bhoomi ko videshiyon ke changul se azaad karane ka mere is jeevan ka uddeshya adhura raha gaya hai use poora karne ke liye punarjanm lene ja raha hoon’ (I am not simply dying but seeking to achieve my unfulfilled life objective of freeing my country from foreigners. I am dying so as to be reborn to fulfill it).33 Similar were Bhagat’s sentiments as he awaited his sentencing. He asked one of his female associates, Kumari Lajjawati, to bring him a book on world history. When she asked him what he was looking for in the book, pat came the reply: he was looking for where he would do a revolution in the next birth.34 The imagination that new revolutionaries would sprout from their bloodstream or they would be reborn yet again as revolutionaries demonstrates that death for the revolutionaries was not about union with the divine or the end of the karmic cycle of birth and rebirth. It was about conquering and defying the fear of death, where death was a signifier of time and space. Conquering the fear of death rendered them free from its vassalage and immune to its ravages. It bestowed on them the figurative ability to move across time and space, validating their peripatetic existence, and ensured the continuity of the revolutionary movement from generation to generation. What Sudipta Kaviraj says about the warrior ascetics of Bankim’s Anandmath holds true for the way revolutionaries imagined their self: Even if the soldiers fail, they are already enacting the paradigm of martyrdom … so that even failure is a success of a kind … they look upon the present battle as an incident in a long and essentially unfinished process in which today’s fighters may well loose, but someone else someday must win the war for them.35

Irrespective of whether they achieved their goal of political independence or not, the revolutionaries were destined for triumph – the victory over death, a conquest over time and space. The performance of this sacrifice of life (that is, martyrdom), moreover, was supposed to be a ‘good death’ as it negated the irreversibility of death. It handed forward the vitality of life for it to be regenerated and, in doing so, revitalised the revolutionary cosmos.36

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This revolutionary cosmos was populated by historical and literary forebears, amongst which were Vera Zasulich (1849–1919) and Vera Figner (1852–1942). The Saunders murder had a curious resemblance to Zasulich’s shooting of the Governor of St. Petersburg, General Fedor Trepov, in January 1878. 37 Her trial, which was one of ‘the most important judicial event[s] in the history of Imperial Russia’, also inspired the HSRA.38 The HSRA revolutionaries knew about Zasulich from reading Jaakoff Prelooker’s Heroes and Heroines of Russia: Builders of a New Commonwealth (1908) and A. J. Sack’s The Birth of the Russian Democracy (1918) that carry short biographies of Zasulich.39 Jaidev Kapur mentions these books as being a popular read in the revolutionary circle.40 The Ghadar Party’s press had also published a profile of Vera Zasulich in a collection of essay on ‘early anti-czarists and Russian socialists’, presumably positioning Zasulich on the Indian revolutionaries’ radar.41 Having worked at Kirti, it is quite likely that Bhagat was familiar with this publication as well. He mentions Zasulich in his essay ‘Russian Nihilists’ published in Kirti in August 1928 and in the same essay he states reading Oscar Wilde’s play Vera; or, the Nihilst (1882) based on the life of Vera Zasulich.42 Her ideas regarding what it was to be a revolutionary were inspired by Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (1863). This was a text several generations of Russian university students had read and styled themselves after.43 The character of Rakhmatov, a dedicated professional revolutionary, in What Is to Be Done? was the most enduring literary ascetic figure that had a huge impress on the revolutionary ontology. Maxim Gorky’s protagonist Pavel in his novel Mother closely resembled Rakhamtov. This was a novel that Bhagat had read and he cites it in his writings as well. What Is to Be Done? alerted the readers not just to the general aspects of their conduct but also to the obligations of an anti-aristocratic quotidian existence: living arrangements (derision of marriage and family), diet, clothing (simple, unkempt and untidy clothes) and even hairstyles (short hair for women and shoulder length for men).44 Another Russian revolutionary whom the HSRA revolutionaries admired was Vera Figner. She was Vera Zasulich’s contemporary and a member of the People’s Will Party. She was sentenced for life for her involvement in the assassination of Czar Alexander II. She references What Is to Be Done? in her famous memoir, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, several times. In one place she says: ‘I had to lie down on this Rakhmatov

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bed.’45 Rakhmatov’s life narrative closely resembled the life of a thirteenthcentury Russian monk and a priest, Avraamii Smolenskii, who was regarded as a miracle worker.46 Although separated by centuries and belonging to different ideological realms, both Rakhmatov and Smolenskii were ascetic literary heroes and their characterisation as such influenced the narrative structure of both texts. In Russian literature, the ascetic literary hero was different from the canonical heroes primarily because of his ‘acceptance of extreme solutions to the problems of daily life’ and ‘non-return’ (Rakhmatov leaves Russia on a secret mission never to return). Similarly Pavel, Gorky’s hero, had the option of escaping from prison. However, he sends someone else in his place and decides to stay back and live out the sentence of exile in Siberia.47 Bhagat had also refused to be rescued from jail and chose to be hanged. The lives of the HSRA revolutionaries mimicked, intentionally and inadvertently, the existential structure of the literary ‘ascetic heroes’. Marcia A. Morris, a historian of Russian literature, argues that the triadic life cycle of separation–initiation–non-return was a common narrative strategy employed for an ascetic literary hero in western literature. The first phase of ‘separation’ occurred when the ascetic hero disconnected himself from his family, spurned the life of comfort and adopted ascetic practices – living frugally as a celibate. This phase marked the hero’s rupture from his past, the society and his earlier self. This was also a moment of transcendence where the ascetic hero rejected the imperfect present and declined the possibility of participation in it. The second stage of ‘initiation’ came with integration into the new higher life and acquisition of a new corporal identity. This phase was an acknowledgment of the possibility of human perfectibility, the union of the individual with their higher self. The ‘nonreturn’ occurred when the ascetic rejected re-integration and continued in the state of ‘separation’. The non-return made the ascetic hero transcend the bounds of time and thereby immortalised him. Interestingly, this was a familiar frame even for medieval veer-rasa riti poetry, oral narratives of Rajput warriors and medieval saints, and in Bankim’s Anandmath. The journey of a santaan began with giving up one’s family: ‘Whoever takes this vow must abandon wife and child…. You’re forbidden to see them till your vow is fulfilled.’48 In another place, Satyanand, the chief abbot of Anandmath, says: ‘Only he who has given up everything is fit for this task. If your mind remains tied by the rope of

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worldly concerns, then like the kite bound by its string, you will never be able to soar into the heavens.’49 The kite-like spirit had to thus cut loose from its worldly string (the family and sensory indulgence) in order to free itself. The initiation took the form of acquiring a new corporal identity where the novitiate devoted himself to acquiring tapas through anushilan. In the final stage of non-return, the hero was supposed to merge with the divine and come back, if at all, lying dead on his shield.50 Unlike the ‘epic heroes’ such as Lord Rama, Arjuna and Gilgamesh, all of whom ‘returned’ (either home or to past values) after being in exile, the ‘ascetic heroes’ such as the santaans of the Anandmath never returned because they were ‘nonreturning’ heroes. The ascetic hero’s return journey was rendered impossible either because of the weight of his transformation, or by a complete annihilation of the earlier self, or due to a desire to preserve and remain in the state of divine communion. The non-return could mean hibernation in a mountain cave or exile. In the case of the revolutionaries, their physical annihilation (that is, death) became the purveyor of their ‘non-return’, that is, their martyrdom, where they went on living forever.51 No doubt the slogan ‘Inquilab Zindabad’, Long live the Revolution, where revolution was to continue forever, held such deep meaning for the young men who followed in the footsteps of their revolutionary forebears.52

~ Ajeya ~

Practising Forbearance and Sexual Abstinence

Most young revolutionaries after quitting their homes lived a peripatetic life congregating at temporary hideouts with the intent to abandon them after the completion of an ‘action’. Stifling shortage of funds and resources forced the cell members to keep their expenses in check. They lived in small cramped dens, wore tatters, with no money for food or medicines. Funds were needed for the travel of emissaries, purchase of food, books and reading material, arms and ammunition, and for setting up the dens. They also needed more resources, as many had left their homes, jobs and schools to be full-time revolutionaries. Sanyal in Bandi Jivan talks about how he tried to find solutions for the challenges of the revolutionary underground in Tolstoy’s and Bakunin’s writings and realised that the life of the European and Russian revolutionaries was no better than theirs.53 Even Bismil, a fiery revolutionary, was less sanguine about life in

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revolution as he reflected back while waiting to be hanged. He felt many had been lured into a life in revolution with grand promises of freedom, display of guns and a chance to make something of oneself. However, the actual reality of a revolutionary’s underground life was soul-destroying.54 The lack of resources and the life of penury broke many of them. Many a time they had to abandon cells in some areas because they could not afford to keep them running.55 Some of them were forced to take up part-time jobs to feed themselves, like Jogesh Chatterjee, who worked as a tutor, and Azad, who served as an accountant of a pickle-seller in Banaras and later as a motor mechanic’s assistant in Jhansi.56 Congregating in dens, everyone was expected to share food, clothes, mattresses, soap and all the daily essentials. The winter months were the most difficult, when three people would huddle together on a mattress to keep themselves warm. Being a strict brahmchari, Azad never liked to share his mattress and therefore would sleep in a corner on a newspaper.57 The life in the revolutionary dens also entailed a strict regulation of daily expenditure and no one was allowed to spend more than four annas a day. Befriending the local milkman for a free supply of milk and curd was a standard stratagem.58 Mahour narrates how they stopped spending money on buying cooked pooris and instead began to buy flour and make rotis on an angithi, a coal stove. They improvised a cooking vessel for making daal, or lentils. The top of an earthen pot was broken off and the daal was cooked in its bottom. For all their culinary expertise, they used only salt and chillies in the daal, not knowing that it also required haldi, or turmeric, to give it the yellow colour. Once cooked, they would all sit around the daal pot with their rotis in their hands for the meal. One of them described the mealtime as: ‘Aghoriyon ki ghinoni sadhnao ki baat suni thi parantu hum krantikariyon ka yaha “bhakshan-chakra” bhi koi sadharan baat nahi na thi’ (We had heard about the disgusting rituals of the Aghori saints but the ‘eating-cycle’ of the revolutionaries was no less).59 Aghoris were Hindu sanyasis who smeared their bodies with cremation ashes and used human skulls as bowls and were said to indulge in necrophagy.60 The invocation of the aghori imagery to describe the revolutionaries’ eating ritual gestured towards the ‘uncouth carefreeness’ and the ‘truculent intransigence’ of the aghoris and their violation of all the caste taboos associated with dietics. However, unlike the aghoris, whose life and eating habits were a daily affirmation of their negation of all caste barriers, the violation of caste

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taboos by the revolutionaries did not necessarily imply the complete dissolution of caste as a habitus.61 When food was short, the person who was going out would be fed first. The rest had to make do with whatever remained. Bhagat was known to forego meals to have others eat his share. Azad generally would take only one bite, get up and drink water to quell the hunger pangs but would force others to eat.62 There was always a shortage of clothes as well. They would wash, dry and wear the one shirt that they had. Whoever had to go out would wear it first. Bhagat exchanged his suit with Jaidev’s before he threw the bomb in the Assembly in Delhi. He felt that once he was caught, the jail authorities would take away his suit. But if Jaidev wore it, he could use it longer, especially since his was newer.63 Sharing of food and clothes summoned a range of emotions and was fundamentally tied to the revolutionaries’ socio-moral and political context.64 Giving up physical comfort or one’s share of meagre food was not simply about self-starvation and painful renunciation, it evoked an imagery of a man who had reined in sensual pleasures, one who did not let lack of material comforts distract him from the chosen path, and one capable of ‘heroic and saintly generosity’.65 This imagery was a staple in most hagiographic accounts of revolutionary leaders who are presented as self-styled ascetics. The act of sharing food, giving up one’s portion or going hungry to feed another also bound the leaders and the young men in a relationship of mutual intimacy and solidarity while maintaining the difference in their rank and status. Exemplifying and enforcing an ascetic lifestyle thus positioned the leaders as nourishers and protectors and the others as disciples, devotees and followers. Here spiritual transcendence was not the objective but socio-emotional bonding of all involved in the gastro-activity. As sharing food, clothes and the little one had was an essential aspect of life in the underground, so was restrained consumption. The young men were supposed to practise abstinence and it started with avoiding consumption of any kind of intoxicants. Once, Bhagwandas Mahour heard that this medicine called John Exshaw no. 1 could make his body healthy and strong if he drank some every day. He ran up to get money from Azad, who kept all the funds. Despite severe rationing and budgeting, on hearing that Mahour needed the medicine, Azad quickly spared four rupees. From then on, Mahour started consuming the medicine every day.

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One day in the Agra camp someone found his bottle and inquired what it was for and if others could have some. As they were consuming it, another fellow party member, Bijoy Kumar Sinha, suddenly entered the house. He flew into a rage the moment he saw the bottle of John Exshaw. It was a bottle of cognac. Bijoy, failing to persuade them that this was alcohol, reported them to Bhagat and Azad with spiced-up details. His snitching had the desired effect. Azad was livid and came down like a ton of bricks on Mahour and threatened to expel him from the party. Once tempers cooled, Bhagat explained to Mahour the ‘gravity’ of his misdemeanour, unwitting or otherwise. He made it clear that they should be very careful in their personal conduct because it could bring personal infamy, dishonour the revolutionaries, and bring disgrace to the revolutionary effort.66 He ended his sermon by impressing upon Mahour the importance of keeping his personal conduct unquestionable. A revolutionary had to uphold a rigorous code of conduct not only while carrying out actions but also in his everyday life. Bhagat was echoing the widespread middle-class sensibility and the nationalist discourse regarding liquor consumption and sexual conduct. Picketing liquor shops, banning the brewing of country liquor and strictures against its consumption were important aspects of Gandhian social reconstruction and nationalist mobilisation that critiqued the new trend in middle-class consumption patterns involving beer-drinking, watching cinema and theatre, going to restaurants and dressing well.67 ‘Semen anxiety’ was another reason dietics generated commentary. It was a commonly held cultural belief, and one that the revolutionaries also subscribed to, that loss or energising of semen resulted in enervation or strengthening of the male body.68 Bismil described how he quit adding salt, chilli and sour spices to his food and ate boiled saag and daal once a day for nearly five years to prevent nightfall.69 Reining in bodily hunger and urges was an aspect of invincibility that a revolutionary was expected to cultivate. Semen was seen as a ‘distillate’ of body fluids and substances such as blood, marrow and bone and therefore containing ‘the essence of the whole body within itself ’.70 In Hindu myth and ritual, certain dietary items such as liquor were seen as a sensual indulgence and leading to the dissipation of the semen. The consumption of milk and ghee (clarified butter), on the other hand, were deemed good because they helped conserve the virile energy and built the ‘store of energized semen’ for a strong, healthy physique.71 Semen and milk were both linked to blood.

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In several traditional cultural contexts, semen was measured in number of drops of blood.72 As a distillate of milk, ghee was superior to milk, as it represented ‘the essence of semen’ and a symbol of ‘asexual, non-erotic virility’.73 Bhagat was especially fond of milk. He took care of his father’s dairy where several of his friends would congregate and he made sure that everyone got into the habit of drinking milk.74 Bhagat had convinced Batukeshwar that drinking hot milk with pieces of malai (fat) floating in it was the best way to increase blood in the body: ‘Shareer mein khoon badhane ka uska yahi upayukt nuskha tha’). This was his best home remedy for increasing blood in the body.75 Mahour recounts that they used to get one chawanni (about four annas) per day. They would spend two annas on roti–daal–subzi, two paisa on peanuts and pinenuts and six paisa on ghee that they ‘drank’.76 Ramkrishna Khatri of the HRA also narrates long anecdotes around the consumption of ghee. Once in 1925 around the festival of Holi, Azad, Manmathnath, Ashfaqulla, Ram Prasad Bismil, Banarsidass, Mukundi Lal, Mahaveer Singh and Ramkrishna Khatri had congregated in Shahjahanpur in the United Provinces for carrying out a dacoity. Khatri was asked to purchase ghee for the khichadi, a mix of daal and rice. To save money, he bought the cheaper and poor quality ghee. He was asked to go back and exchange it for the more expensive one. Manmathnath Gupta instructed him: ‘Action par ja rahe hain, maloom nahi wahan se zinda laute ya nahi, so acche ghee se bhi vanchit rahein’ (We are going for action and not sure if we will return alive, why should we be deprived of good ghee).77 They did not want to be cheated of the opportunity to eat good ghee, especially when they were going for an action that could cost them their lives. Another time Azad got upset with Mahour for not polishing off the ghee from the lamps of a temple in a house they had gone to rob: ‘Abe deepak ko bujha kar ghee pee jata, tune use yun hi mitti mein gira diya, hain na moorkha? (You should have dowsed the lamp and drunk its ghee, you threw it away, what an idiot!).78 The consumption of semen-fostering milk and ghee was undergirded by the party’s disciplinary concerns regarding the young men’s sexual life (reinforced in some measure by the Arya Samaji upbringing of many of them).79 The revolutionary was expected to be virile and celibate at the same time. It was a matter of belief that ‘the heat of the ascetic is preserved by his celibacy’.80 Ram Prasad Bismil in his autobiography describes

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in great detail the importance of brahmcharya for young men and his reasons for taking the vow. He argued that ‘vidya, bal evam buddhi sab brahmcharya ke pratap se hi prapt hote hain’ (knowledge, physical strength and wisdom all are begotten as fruits of brahmcharya).81 He even gave detailed instructions on ‘brahmcharya vrat ka palan’ (how to observe the vow of brahmcharya).82 Some of them were as follows: Premalaap tatha upanyason mein samay nasht na kare … ashleel (ishq bhari) gazalein, sheron tatha gaano ko na padhe aur na sune. Striyon ke darshan se bachte rahein. Mata tatha bahin se bhi ekaant mein na mile. Sundar sahapathiyon ya anya vidyarthiyon se sparsh aur alingan ki bhi aadat na daale. [Do not waste your time reading love poetry or novels … don’t read or listen to obscene (love-laced) gazals, couplets or songs. Save yourself from looking at women. Do not meet even mother or sister alone. Do not get into a habit of touching or embracing beautiful fellow students or others.]83

There were some revolutionaries such as Bhagwati Charan Vohra who were married before they came into the revolutionary fold and there were others who continued to live with their families. However, there was a subset of ‘active’ revolutionaries, single young men who had left their homes and lived in different camps in the cities of north India. These young men were not supposed to get married without the party head’s approval. With the exception of a few, such as Yashpal and Phonindranath Ghosh, most of these young men abided by these strictures. Azad on his part claimed that he was married to his ‘Bamtul Bukhara’, the Mauser pistol. He would describe it as his ‘chir sangini’, or eternal companion.84 Once in a while he would say that a man committed to the work of revolution should only marry a woman equally committed to the cause. He would muse about his prospective wife: ‘We would be roaming in the ravines, with one rifle on her shoulder and one on mine. With a sack of cartridges. When surrounded by enemies, she would keep loading the rifle and I would keep shooting.’85 Azad’s imagination of a probable spouse was reminiscent of the female warrior Shanti in Anandmath who fights in the disguise of a male warrior. Shanti divests herself of all signs of womanliness, that is, desexualises herself, to enable her husband to keep his vow of chastity and yet remain married to her. She was the perfect Hindu wife – the onus was on her to set aside her desire and not to tempt her husband away from his pursuit of

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his ideal.86 Lurking behind the desexualised female imagery was the fear and abhorrence of the sexualised femininity reflected in the majority of the HSRA’s response to Yashpal and Prakashvati’s relationship.87 Unlike Durga Devi Vohra, Prakashvati was not married to Yashpal and this evoked everyone’s ire. As Ania Looma argues, ‘What disturbed them was that the relationship was sexual but not marital, nor romantic and celibate.’88 As Mahour says of Azad: ‘Pati-patni dono krantikari kaam mein lagein, is se abheeshth baat unke liye nahi thi’ ([If ] both husband and wife were involved in revolutionary work, it was ideal in Azad’s perspective).89 The fact that Prakashvati was unmarried made her appear as not only ‘available’ but culpable. Azad’s censorious attitude towards Prakashvati was part of a strict code that everyone was expected to tacitly obey, which was regarding not indulging in any kind of promiscuous behaviour or having romantic associations. Once, Rajguru hung a calendar with an image of a beautiful girl on the wall of a revolutionary den. The poster infuriated Azad. He shouted at Rajguru to leave his revolver and go home if he was going to busy himself with girls. With this he grabbed the poster, tore it and threw it in the trash. Rajguru was mighty upset on finding his poster torn. He asked Azad the reason for tearing the poster. Azad replied that he tore it because it was beautiful. Rajguru peevishly asked if Azad would destroy everything that was beautiful. Azad replied in the affirmative. In that case, Rajguru retorted, Azad should also destroy the Taj Mahal and muttered under his breath: ‘Khoobsurat duniya basaane chale hain khoobsurat cheezon ko tod kar, unhe mita kar, yaha nahi ho sakta’ (You are on way to instituting a beautiful world by destroying beautiful things, by annihilating them, this is not possible).90 This crushed Azad’s anger who immediately got up to pacify Rajguru. Azad explained that he feared adoration of feminine beauty could become a weakness and one day lead Rajguru astray. All he wanted of them was to remain devoted to their cause and not be entranced and waylaid by anything. Evidently, something as innocuous as a calendar with the image of a girl was also seen as an indulgence.91 Azad would also keep admonishing Mahour who was fond of singing and would often sing love ballads on Bhagat’s coaxing.92 He once warned Mahour: ‘Haan, kabhi koi kamzori aayee, to iska karan aurat-faurat ka chakkar hi ho sakta hai…. Dekh tu kavita-favita, gaane-vaane ke chakkar mein bahut rahata hai, tu hoshiyaar rehna’ (Yes, if there is ever a weakness,

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the reason for it will be entanglement with women…. See you are always caught up in poetry and singing, you better watch out).93 He once told him: ‘Kahan milega is zindagi mein prem-frame ka avsar? Kal kahin sadak ke kinaare police ki goli kha kar ludhakte nazar ayenge … kya sala “hridya lagi” “prem ki baat” manmathshar pinpinata rahta hai? Hriday mein lagegi three-nought-three ki goli, manmathshar famatshar nahi’ (Where will you get a chance for romance and all that in this life? One day you will be found dead by the roadside with your body riddled with police bullet … why you idiot keep singing about things like ‘touch my heart’ ‘love talk’ and ‘cupid’s arrow’? Your heart will be struck by a bullet from a three-nought-three [gun] and not by a cupid’s arrow).94 However, for all of Azad’s disapproval of singing, he would often sing himself and enjoyed music as well. Shiv Verma recounts an incident in Kanpur of walking down a street with Azad when they heard a beautiful strain of thumri coming from a balcony somewhere. Azad, after going ahead for a bit, pressed Verma’s hand and said, ‘Yaar bahut accha ga rahi hai’ (Buddy, she is singing beautifully), and then stood for a while in the dead of the night absorbed in the music.95 Despite their aversion to the idea of marriage, Azad and Bhagat would often jest about marriage.96 While planning the murder of J. P. Saunders, the Chief Commissioner of Police of Lahore, Azad and Bhagat would recce the streets near the police chowki in the morning hours when several school and college girls were also hurrying through them. On seeing the girls, Azad would slyly ask Bhagat, ‘Is there a fair lady who would marry our Ranjit [Bhagat’s alias in the party]?’ and would burst out laughing. Bhagat would respond with a sparkle: ‘Mahashaya ji it will be you who will get me married.’97 Marriage was an allegorical reference to phansi, or hanging. The only mehbooba/mashooka, or beloved, that revolutionaries allowed themselves to dream of and desired to behold was the hanging or the hangman’s noose – the phansi or the phansi ka fanda, also termed jaimaal, the bridal garland.98 The gallows was imagined as a shaadi ka mandap, marriage pavilion; death as a beautiful bride that one embraced (mrityu ka alingan, haseen maut); and the prison shackles as gahane, jewellery that adorned their bodies.99 Time and again their banter would circle back to discussing phansi as the beloved whom they longed to kiss and embrace. Even Ashfaqulla is believed to have kissed the noose before his hanging and remarked that his mother and brother kept pressuring him to get married but he had found his favourite bride only now.100

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It is interesting that although the young men claimed to be brahmcharis, the celibates were still talking about women. Vaishampayan narrates several encounters that Azad had with women who tried to seduce him or with whom friends wanted him to marry, how Azad successfully evaded them, along with instances of him having rescued women from their abusive husbands or having stood up for their honour, and women who respected Azad and were devoted to him.101 Despite being physically absent, women were nevertheless present in their reminiscences and conversations in different garbs: as a beautiful form, as feared objects of desire, as a frivolity, as worthless distraction or as the much-loved phansi. Here liberation or swaraj was being conceived of in masculine terms where women were understood as a nemesis (in the form of the noose) or a troubling presence that would entice men away from the goal of swaraj. This masculine construction of politics actually pushed women out of the ‘political’ but did not entirely erase them.102 It assigned them different roles as seductresses or as rescuers of family and the nation or as warriors/co-partners in the struggle. The actual women (as opposed to the imagined ones) associated with the HSRA, such as Sushila Mohan and Durga Devi Vohra, served as go-betweens, carriers of secret information and accomplices in escape plans, sheltered absconders and did safekeeping of arms but were not allowed to live in the revolutionary dens. They were expected to live in their homes or with their families.103 Despite Azad having taught them to use guns and engaging in target practice with them in his last days, the status of the women associated with the HSRA was in stark contrast to the vast participation of women in radical trade union politics and underground revolutionary movements beginning from the time of the Bombay Mill strike in 1928 and the Chittagong armoury raid in 1930.104 The revolutionaries upheld the traditional view of the ascetic life that pivoted on the dialectical separation between the sanyasi and the grihastha.105 The revolutionary could not be a grihastha while his country was enslaved. He could not earn a living, raise a family and fulfil the demands and responsibilities of a householder (which included sexual activity) while being engaged in the task of revolution. Life in revolution demanded complete devotion, steadfast loyalty and singular concentration on achieving the goal. The logic was that only when one gave up family life and abstained from any bodily indulgences did one became a

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revolutionary.106 All the revolutionaries were expected to quit their homes and in many cases had severed all contact with the natal families. As Manmathnath once said: The life of an Indian revolutionary was the life of a holy man. He was to take nothing for himself and to covet nothing. Youths came to the revolutionary party in our days in the spirit in which, beginning with Buddha and Mahavira, people went to monasteries in olden times.107

This is reminiscent of the passage in Bankim’s Anandmath when ascetic patriot Bhabananda, explaining the meaning of the song ‘Bande Mataram’, says to novitiate Mahendra: ‘But we say that our birthland is our mother. We’ve no mothers, fathers, brothers, friends, no wives, children, houses or homes.’108 All their worldly needs (clothing, food and shelter) and spiritual and ethical guidance were to come from the party. The revolutionary party was to serve as their family and was often described as ‘parivar’.109 As Shiv Verma says about Azad: Azad humaare senapati hi nahi the. Ve humaare parivaar ke agraj bhi the jinhe har saathi ki cchoti se cchoti avashyakta ka dhyan rahta tha. Mohan [B. K. Dutt] ki dawai nahi aayi, Harish [ Jaidev] ko kameez ki avashyakta hai, Raghunath [Rajguru] ke pass joota nahi raha, Bacchu [Vijay] ka swasthya theek nahi hai aadi unki roz ki chintayein thi. [Azad was not simply our General. He was our family elder who paid attention to the smallest needs of every member. Mohan’s (B. K. Dutt) medicine has not come, Harish ( Jaidev) needs a shirt, Raghunath (Rajguru) does not have a shoe, Bacchu’s (Vijay) health is not good, etc., were his everyday worries.]110

Azad especially gave instructions to Shiv Verma to attend to all of Bhagat’s and Batukeshwar’s needs before they went to bomb the Assembly. He told Shiv that soon the duo would ‘become country’s property. All that would remain with us is their memories. Until then treat them like guests and take care of their comforts’.111 Thus Azad as a leader saw himself and was perceived as a family elder. In time, this bred a new corporate identity that helped bind the young men together. Shiv Verma says this about Sukhdev as well, who used to invest a great deal of care and time in providing pastoral care for the party members.112

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When it came to their female associates and party workers, the revolutionary party was imagined as a ‘family’, one that was under threat from a hostile world outside and where everyone was vulnerable. The women appreciated and were devoted to the male leader who exercised pastoral power. The women in return received paternalism – respect, care, generosity and were shielded from worries and wants.113 This is reflected in all the women associates’ – Durga Devi, Lajjawati, Prakashvati Kapur (also known as Prakasho Devi or Sarla), Sushila Mohan, Master Rudranarayan’s wife – use of the honorific ‘Bhaiya’, or brother, for Azad. They all describe him as a person who was attentive to their needs despite not being a grihastha, householder.114 The appellation ‘Bhaiya’ was also meant to preclude any possibility of romance, incestuous or otherwise. Thus the HSRA’s was a benign masculinity that did not thrive on sexual exploitation or aggression towards women but on chivalry (although Prakashvati had reasons to think otherwise about some members),115 and the ‘feminine subordination’ was not about repression or subordination but appreciation of the ‘family elder’. This self-consciously protective (as opposed to dominative) masculinity helped establish bonds of male comradery and intimacy, one that was also seemingly heteronormative. Although the absence of mention in any of the revolutionary memoirs or reminiscences of homosexual love or homoeroticism does not preclude the probability of its existence. For, all that went in the name of love, these men had reserved for each other. Even the people whom they admired, idolised, revered, appreciated, respected, learnt from, were obedient to, and whom they relied on for protecting their lives, were all men. In this much, the heterosexual male culture was homoerotic, where the object of affection was always another man. Heterosexuality and homoeroticism were therefore congruent and perfectly compatible in the ‘fraternal’ revolutionary order.116 Practising and living by the ascetic code, however, was not easy for these young men. They were at times as conflicted as their literary forbears were but much more than the hagiographical accounts of their lives would have us believe. Bhagat admitted in a letter he wrote to his childhood friend Jaidev Gupta from Lahore Central Jail in which he had asked for shirts, shoes, soap, ink and almonds for himself and Batukeshwar: ‘Don’t you think that even in jail we have not been able to check our expensive mode of living. But these are, after all, necessaries and not luxuries.’117 Interestingly, Bankim also captured the warriors’ struggle with the ascetic

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code. As Bhabananda says to Mahendra when he asked him if he had all the fine qualities: ‘But qualities don’t fall off trees; you’ve got to practise them.’118 Commendably, Bankim also presents his heroes as struggling with the santaan code of celibacy and renunciation. He narrates the straying of Bhabananda when he goes to meet Kalyani (Mahendra’s wife) whom he had saved as she lay dying on the riverbank. Driven by desire, he asks Kalyani to marry him. Bhabananda says to Kalyani: ‘If I knew that I would ever see such beauty, I would have never embraced the santaan code. This code is burnt to ashes in this fire.’119 Clearly it took a great deal of practice or anushilan to live an ascetic life. Moreover, membership of an order, especially one that imagines itself to be ascetic and exists outside the fold of society, was bound to reconfigure identities. Joseph Alter in his work on wrestlers and akharas argues that wrestling did ‘not directly challenge caste values’. What it did was to ‘restructure some of the codes to such an extent as to throw into question the logic, and thereby the power, of the dominant ideology’.120 Similarly, becoming a revolutionary did call into question the ‘dominant ideology’ associated with individual revolutionary’s habitus but did not undermine ‘the ideological edifice of hierarchical relations’.121

~Bal~

Physical Strength and Political Violence

The day after the shootout, the city of Lahore was flooded with posters declaring ‘Saunders is Dead!’ signed by one ‘Balraj’ claiming to have avenged the death of Lala Lajpat Rai. According to David M. Laushey, historian of the early revolutionary movement in Bengal, ‘Balraj’ was the pseudonym used by Sachindranath Sanyal in the pamphlets that he wrote in 1925.122 However, according to Jaidev Kapur, ‘Balraj’ was the title given by Bhagat Singh to Chandrashekhar Azad when he became the commander-inchief of the HSRA and therefore was used on all the HSRA posters.123 Shiv Verma and Kumari Lajjawati also confirmed that ‘Balraj’ referred to Azad.124 Donald Petrie, Director of Home Intelligence, on the other hand, believed that ‘Balraj’ was none other than Bhagat Singh. Lala Lajpat Rai’s associate Lala Feroz Chand was also of the view that the word was coined by Bhagat Singh to denote ‘force’.125 The word ‘Balraj’ was further used by Motilal Nehru in his speech titled ‘Gandhi vs. Balraj’ in the Legislative

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Assembly after Bhagat and Batukeshwar had bombed it in April 1929.126 Nehru used the term to refer to the revolutionaries, armed revolution and political violence – everything that stood in opposition to Gandhian principles. The noun ‘Balraj’, whether it was used for Sanyal, Azad or Bhagat Singh, was really a metaphor for a person who embodied the spirit of revolution and possessed bodily strength (syn. balwaan, balshaali and balishtha). To be a revolutionary therefore was to be a Balraj – possessor of corporal strength and one embodying the spirit of revolution. Azad’s body and its strength was the physical idol of the revolutionaries that evoked a great deal of respect. He was described as a man who was stout, not very tall but one with elephantine strength, thick neck, generous girth, twirling moustache and the agility of wrestlers. Azad never missed his daily physical regimen even while he was living in Dhimarpura.127 Mahour says the first time he met Azad was in Jhansi with Sachindranath Bakshi and he could not help but be impressed with Azad’s ample physique, especially in comparison to Bakshi, who was thin and weak. Azad instilled the ideal of physical strength in his associates: ‘Balshaali bano, ek balshaali sau vidwaano ko kanpa deta hai’ (Be physically strong. A strong person can send tremors through a hundred scholars).128 Bhagat was also idolised for his physical strength. He had broken his ribs as a child and would therefore exercise his upper body and used chest expanders as he wished to be broadchested.129 His friend Sukhdev was also commended for his ‘gora-chitta rang, nihayat khoobsurat gungharale baal, badi badi tairati aankhein, … mulayam chehra’ (fair complexion, very beautiful curly hair, big deep eyes … soft visage).130 While some would receive appreciation for their physique, there were others whose appearance evoked mirth and disappointment. Shiv Verma narrates his disappointment with Rajguru when he met him for the first time at the akhara where the latter taught. Verma mistook him for a house servant or a guard on duty. Since he had heard Rajguru was a drill master and a wrestler, he conjured up an image of a tall muscular army man (‘lambe chaude fauji jawan ka naksha bana dala’). He had not expected to meet a man of medium height, dark complexion, unattractive visage and sunken cheeks with raised cheekbones (‘sadharan deel daul, sanwla rang, aakarshan rahit lamba chehra, pichke gaal, aur un par ubhari hui haddiyan’).131 Mahour was another person who often received ribbing for his facial features and was humorously likened to an ape. On seeing

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Mahour the first time, Bhagat had remarked: ‘Yes, Darwin seems to be correct. He [Mahour] may be the missing link.’132 The men’s physique was an important variable in their being selected for particular kind of revolutionary action. Bhagat’s general good health and his ability to skilfully articulate the revolutionary cause in the courtroom and Batukeshwar Dutt’s lack of good health were the reasons for which they volunteered to bomb the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi. Dutt was suffering from bloody piles and he thought it was better to die having done something instead of the disease.133 In another account Shiv Verma talks about how he was disappointed when Bhagat chose their friend Jaidev, who was more muscular and strong, to participate in Bismil’s rescue plan. Verma was left feeling deeply annoyed and frustrated with his thin body.134 A peculiar aspect of these portrayals and conversations was that they primarily focussed on the face, the upper body and the waist of a person but no references were ever made to the girth or strength of their thighs or their lower body. In Hindu mythology men’s thighs were associated with sexual and marital prowess and the high-caste men were expected to cover them. Wearing shorter loin cloth that revealed the thighs and talking about them were associated with lower-caste, tribal or labouring class men, reminiscent of the Amar Chitra Katha depiction of Azad’s Bhil friends who laboured either in fields or fought on battle fields in a loincloth. 135 Quite a few of the revolutionaries had either trained in akharas or were wrestlers. Rajguru was a wrestler and physical trainer. He was working as a drill master in a municipal school in Banaras and in his free time taught lathi and gadka (the staff and club) in an akhara.136 Batukeshwar Dutt, along with Ajoy Ghosh and Surendranath Pandey, had started the Kanpur Gymnastic Club for the Bengali youth in the city.137 Jaidev Kapur used to attend the akhara of Guru Cchote Maharaj and learnt to use the lathi before joining the revolutionary circle.138 Sukhdev Raj also trained at an akhara located near a shop where Bhagat used to sell milk. Bhagat on seeing him covered in oil would offer him milk without any charge and thus began a life-long friendship. They would sometimes wrestle on the floor of Bhagat’s father’s office which was near Sukhdev Raj’s home.139 Wrestling, besides being a professional occupation and a hobby for some revolutionaries, was a regular pastime in the revolutionary dens. Mahour recounts how one morning Bhagat and Azad were rubbing oil on each

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other’s backs as they were preparing to go for a bath. Slowly they started rubbing each other’s arms and then hands and gradually this rubbing escalated into a wrestling match. Mahour was stunned when Bhagat picked up Azad with both his hands and threw him on the floor grazing Azad’s knees. Mahour was in complete denial that someone could have overpowered Azad, who was idolised for his physical strength and agility. In Mahour’s view, Azad was unbeatable. Although forced to acknowledge Bhagat’s physical prowess, Mahour continued to believe that Bhagat’s win was beginner’s luck or Azad had not used his full strength. Thereafter Mahour and Sadashiv Malkapurkar would not rest until they had had defeated Bhagat in arm wrestling matches.140 The akhara culture – wrestling, military sports and associated exercises – which was a regular feature of leisure life in rural areas since the eighteenth century, saw a revival in both rural and urban settings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in different parts of British India.141 The akharas and gymnasiums proliferated in Punjab, the United Provinces, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. The ones in the cities of Baroda and Pune, in many instances, were founded by uppercaste men and were for ‘Hindu youth only’. In Punjab wrestling was a popular sporting event and was intertwined with its martial and military culture.142 There was also an urban revival of the sport amongst the Bengal revolutionaries of Anushilan and Jugantar in response to Bankim’s and Swami Vivekananda’s exertions regarding effeteness being the cause of India’s enslavement.143 The wrestling culture was being nourished by various monastic traditions that were centred around a corporal ethos. The naga sadhus, for instance, saw celibacy, or virya nirodha (protection of semen), as the cardinal disciplinary mechanics of a wrestler’s body and therefore a prerequisite for their wrestling practice.144 Thus, having a muscular body and strength (bal), being an ascetic (yogi) and being a revolutionary (a krantikari) became part of the same physical continuum feeding off notions of brahmcharya.145 This combination worked best if a revolutionary also happened to be a wrestler. The revolutionaries’ notion of bal encompassed both corporal strength and its semantic twin, force or violence. For them, violence was neither just a physical act involving bombings and political assassinations nor simply an episodic phenomenon bound by space and time. Violence was a moral and temporal tool to destroy the imperfect present and bridge the time-

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distance to their utopia.146 Unlike the Mau Mau in Kenya or the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) in Algeria, these revolutionaries did not imagine their violence as ‘terror’. The leaflet that Bhagat and Dutt threw while bombing the Legislative Assembly said: ‘We are sorry to admit that we, who attach so great a sanctity to human life, we, who dream of a glorious future when man will be enjoying perfect peace and full liberty, have been forced to shed human blood.’147 They saw a moral compulsion in their use of violence as if their hand was being forced by history. It was a ‘sacrifice’ they had to make ‘at the altar of the great revolution that will bring freedom’.148 The memoirs poignantly recount how they would be filled with agony and remorse after the assassinations and the deaths of the innocent. For instance, Azad shot the Indian constable Chanan Singh, who had chased Bhagat and Rajguru as they escaped through the DAV College after shooting Saunders. Azad was standing guard a few metres away from Bhagat and Rajguru supervising the operation and, if needed, was supposed to give them cover. Azad called out to Chanan Singh to give up the chase before shooting but Chanan did not heed the warning and kept running. Azad lowered his gun and aimed at his legs and shot a preventive bullet. It got Chanan in the groin and he eventually bled to death. The well-being of Chanan Singh’s family kept nagging Azad, who would voice his worries time and again to his associates. Shiv Verma recounts: ‘Chanan Singh ko maarna kartavya tha aur unki bewa patni tatha unke baal-bacchon ke liye chinta karna manav hriday ki swabhvik komalta thi’ (Shooting Chanan Singh was his duty but worrying about his widowed wife and children was the natural tenderness of a human heart).149 Despite it being a vengeful act, even Rajguru and Bhagat Singh were deeply disturbed and filled with remorse after shooting Saunders. Rajguru opined: ‘Bhai bada sundar naujawan tha [Saunders!]. Uske gharwalon ko kaisa lag raha hoga?’ (Brother, he [Saunders] was a very handsome young man. How his family must be feeling?)150 Similar was Bhagat’s state. Mahour recounts that he met Bhagat after the Saunders murder and found him deeply shaken. ‘Kitna udvelit tha unka manas. Unke sayant kanth se unka uddveg ubhara pada tha. Baat karte karte ruk jaate the aur der tak chup raha kar phir baat ka sutra pakad kar muskaraane ke prayatn karte aage badte the’ (How shaken his mind was. Despite his measured tone his discomposure was visible. He would suddenly stop talking mid-sentence and then stay quiet for a while

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before making an effort to smile and move forward).151 Similarly Rajguru cried inconsolably and berated himself for having failed the party when he once mistakenly shot a wrong person in the dark of the night. Shiv Verma had to hold him and lull him to sleep that night.152 When asked what purpose Saunders’ assassination achieved, Mahour replied: ‘The utility was that taking revenge will authenticate our party in the hearts of the public, people will have greater respect for us, and this would be useful later in our revolution.’153 Mahour argued that their aim was not simply to terrorise because they knew ‘ek mar gaya to doosra aa jayega. Humare man mein aisi koi baat nahi thi ki agar hum ek collector ko maar denge to kal ko doosra collector nahi aayega’ (If one [a British officer] was killed another will come. We did not believe that if we killed one Collector, tomorrow the second one will not replace him).154 Jaidev Gupta also corroborates Mahour’s testimony: ‘The plan to kill Saunders was not aimed at wiping out an officer but to avenge the death of a respected leader and to gain publicity out of that and to warn the Government regarding the consequences of its actions.’ 155 They knew killing a few Englishmen did not amount to staging a revolution: ‘From the very beginning, his [Bhagat Singh’s] idea was that killing a few Englishmen was of no use, it was not a revolution.’156 Jaidev rationalised that ‘Saunders was a handsome young man and they had to kill because he was a cog in the wheel of British imperialism which was crushing the Indians. Therefore, they had to break this wheel, to prevent this exploitative machine from functioning’.157 Their rationalisations echoed Vera Zasulich’s court testimony that concluded with the words: ‘It is a terrible thing to raise one’s hand against a human being but I felt I had to do it.’158 She saw her shooting of Trepov less as a political action and more of a moral imperative.159 She also rejected terrorism as a means of fighting oppression because in her view it took away from the work of propaganda and agitation amongst the peasantry who she believed would lead the revolution.160 They continuously reiterated that killing Saunders was a ‘demonstrative action’ directed against systemic oppression (atyachaar) and not an individual.161 According to them, personal terrorism and personal vendetta were not their objective: ‘Hum vyavastha ke virodhi the, vyaktiyon ke nahi … vyaktigat khoon kharaba humara uddeshya nahi tha’ (We were opposed to the system, not to individuals … personalised bloodshed was not our objective).162 Jaidev Gupta further recalled how in 1926 Bhagat had met

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Babbar Akali leader Master Mota Singh who had proposed to kill as many Englishmen as possible to create a terror wave. However, Bhagat did not agree with Mota Singh over the issue of individual killings. For Bhagat it was more important to destroy the institutions (capitalism and imperialism) that were responsible for human misery.163 In the Assembly they threw the bomb on empty benches. Had they ‘wanted they could have killed the members of the Simon Commission or the Legislative Assembly’ but they did not. 164 As Bhagat wrote in one his essays: ‘All forms of government rest on violence.’165 The state, in the Marxist–anarchist conception, was the focal point of violence. That is, the state created and perpetuated conditions of violence. If elimination of structural violence was the aim then the state as a form of human governance had to be done away with. Bhagat Singh questioned the desirability of all forms of state sysems, democratic or otherwise: ‘They say: “Undermine the whole conception of the State and then only we will have liberty worth having.”’166 In Bhagat’s conception, anti-statism (or astatism) was almost indistinguishable from anarchism.167 The post-revolutionary society was to be one with absolute individual freedom: a society created, maintained and experienced collectively, and where military and bureaucracy were no longer needed.168 The statement the HSRA revolutionaries made to the Commissioner of the Special Tribunal, for instance, declared: ‘Revolutionaries by virtue of their altruistic principles are lovers of peace – a genuine and permanent peace based on justice and equity, not the illusory peace resulting from cowardice and maintained at the point of bayonets.’169 Here poorna swaraj transformed into an ‘astatist’ and ‘aviolent’ utopia for absolute political and human freedom even if the means of achieving this goal were violent or involved staging an armed revolution. Their use of violence was also for the purpose of awakening the masses and popularising the revolutionary creed. According to Bhagat Singh: ‘Individual actions are to win the moral support of the people. We sometimes designate them as the “propaganda through deed.”’170 Their propaganda took different forms: surrendering to the police after bombing the Assembly, issuing a statement at the end of the court proceedings, going on hunger strikes in jail along with political assassinations.171 The violent actions were meant to be only one amongst a gamut of propaganda deeds. As Bhagat opined: ‘These actions have their political significance in as much as they serve to create a mentality and an atmosphere which shall be very necessary to the final struggle. That is all.’172

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They saw themselves as warriors with the task of jolting people out of the slumber (‘to make the deaf hear’) of an imperfect present (‘the present order of things, which is based on manifest injustice’), arresting the onward march of the present towards an undesirable future (‘We have only hoisted the “danger-signal” to warn those who are speeding along without heeding the grave dangers ahead. We have only marked the end of an era of “Utopian non-violence”’),173 and redirecting the course of history towards a utopian future. In the view of the revolutionaries, they were the ones who had unpacked the imperfect present, understood its true nature, and had figured out how to remedy it (‘We humbly claim to be no more than serious students of the history and conditions of our country and her aspirations’).174 As a temporal sword, violence enabled the revolutionaries to destroy their imperfect present and to arrest the tide of history hurtling in the direction of bourgeois political forms and one where India would become a British dominion, and it enabled them to set history on the right future course, that is, towards complete independence or poorna swaraj – a state of aviolence, where all violence, structural or personal, had been done away with.

~ Swaraj ~

Being Sovereign

The revolutionaries’ practice of asceticism went beyond simple devotionalism, monasticism and worldly renouncement. Asceticism practised and experienced as power over one’s self and one’s existence was not about renunciation of the world and having no ties to the community, state or nation. It was also not about the practice of brahmcharya or about non-violent existence or about unification with the divine. Neither was the purpose of asceticism to discipline, defeat, attack or destroy the body in order to attain spiritual transcendence. The essence of asceticism lay in one’s ability to harness ‘the possibilities of its [the body’s] full sensual and affective range’ to ‘gain power and to give meaning’.175 The revolutionaries’ voluntary exercise of self-restraint and adherence to the ascetic norms, however, did not come easy. Exacerbated by the scarcities of underground life, their asceticism continued to be an aspiration that needed constant practice, or anushilan, and one that did not obliterate the caste and class differences within. As we have seen, the struggle was to acquire tapas

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(spiritual energy). In the shastric tradition, tapas enabled the conquest of fear of death, which was a signifier of bondage to time and space (mrityunjaya), and invincibility through the harnessing of senses (ajeya), and imparted physical force and power (bal). The revolutionaries took the idea of tapas a step further, directing it towards attaining sovereignty (swaraj) over the self, one’s existence and the national territory through the practice (anushilan) of mental and physical discipline. Anandmath’s ideal of anushilan-performing karmayogin provides us with a clue to understanding the revolutionaries’ notions of sovereignty, where the inner spiritual power was tied to the outer temporal world. The characters of Bankim’s Anandmath, Satyanand, Bhabananda, Jibananda and Shanti, the Vaishnavite ascetic warriors, challenged the historical essentialism of the ‘oriental’ as being a passive, non-participating, nonautonomous and non-sovereign other.176 They were active participants and sovereign as well. Their sovereignty was the transcendental and renunciative freedom. In striving to achieve this freedom, they were seeking freedom from oppressive political rulers. The path to political liberation was paved with renunciation and call to arms. In seeing themselves as being in line with the warrior ascetic tradition and challenging the orientalised stereotyping of Indians as effeminate and cowardly, Bankim had created a new idiom of anti-colonialism. The revolutionaries chose this over the ascetic tradition that Gandhi espoused. Bankim broke the traditional association of rajah (energy/power) with rajya (temporal power). His sanyasis were seeking rajah without rajya.177 That is, Bankim posited a circular and dialogic relationship between rajah and rajya: the anushilan or practise of rajah would make possible acquisition of rajya, but a sanyasi’s journey did not end with achieving the rajya but circled back to the self. The ultimate end of the journey was the consigning (visarjan) of the self into the supreme being, that is, liberation of self. This was poorna swaraj. In another place, Bankim draws out a similar relationship between sthula (gross/material/macro/outer) and sukshma (subtle/spiritual/ micro/inner), where the temporal world ruled by the British represents the sthula (the reality of colonial subjugation) and the inner spiritual world is the sukshma (being in command of one’s destiny and living by one’s own code). Satyanand’s guru says: ‘Unless one knows the gross, one cannot know the subtle.’178 The circuitous path to sovereignty over self was paved through anushilan (disinterested performance of social duties). The freeing

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(or renunciation) was more about an ‘introspective mode of awareness’, an inward knowledge hinting at the need for sovereignty over the self before seeking it outwardly in the material world.179 The anti-colonialism espoused by the revolutionaries thus did not have acquiring state power as its objective.180 They saw themselves as an ‘organisation’ and not a political party aiming to participate in an electoral process or seeking to acquire state power.181 Theirs was an ‘astatist’ vision and one premised on universalism or at least one that had the potential to be universalised (vasudhaiv kutumbakam, world is one family or universal brotherhood) and therefore more inclusive than the boundaries of the state.182 This variant of astatism was also about liberation from the structural violence of state, church and private property. This was a utopian space of ‘aviolence’ defined not simply by the absence of violence, as was the case with the idea of non-violence, but one that had done away with the causes that gave rise to and sustained violence. To be a revolutionary thus did not simply mean being someone engaged in the struggle for liberation but being a person who was an embodiment of liberation, that is, a sovereign. By the same measure, the revolutionary party was not just an instrument but also an embryonic model of that liberation. Their asceticism was an attempt at symmetry in an asymmetrical moral universe that strained at the leash in search of equilibrium. It was an attempt to transcend the imperfect present, to shorten the time-distance to their political utopia, and to help them create and strengthen a new corporal identity as revolutionaries. The revolutionaries were time-warriors, the kaalyoddha, where time was their weapon, their foe and their muse.

~ Conclusion ~

A

s I was revising the manuscript, India was in the throes of civil disobedience against a new citizenship law. ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ and slogans demanding ‘azadi’ were reverberating in different corners of the country. Different citizen groups were protesting a new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed on 12 December 2019. The Act promised citizenship to all those classified as ‘non-citizens’ or ‘illegal immigrants’ if they had made India their home before 2014. However, the law had a caveat. It was applicable only to people of Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Parsi, Jain and Christian communities who had come to India because of persecution in their countries of origin (that is, the neighbouring Muslim-majority countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh). The law excluded the Muslims coming from these countries. The CAA in effect introduced religion as one of the eligibility criteria for Indian citizenship in violation of the provisions of the Indian Constitution, which prohibited privileging or discrimination based on religion. The new amendment had followed in the footsteps of an earlier initiative to draw up a National Register of all Indian citizens (the NRC). The NRC required every citizen to produce a series of identity documents as evidence of residence and citizenship of India. The CAA was believed to have been passed to give relief to all those who would not be able to produce the identification papers required under the NRC (except the Muslims).1 Thus, the CAA and the NRC together set off nation-wide protests as the Muslim minority feared being disenfranchised through these provisions. On 14 December 2019, a group of Muslim women gathered around their men who were being beaten up by police for protesting against the CAA–NRC in a locality known as

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Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi. Hereafter the women blocked one of the major highways and began a sit-in that lasted over a 100 days. In the vicinity was the Jamia Millia Islamia university that faced brutal police repression for organising anti-CAA–NRC protests.2 Soon the protests spread across the country. The protests were varied in form, style and intensity. They included sit-ins on highways, roads, neighbourhood parks and crossroads as well as rallies, gatherings, candle-light vigils and long marches, either silent or accompanied by sloganeering, speeches and singing.3 Common to all the protests was the slogan ‘Azadi’ – freedom from the oppressive laws, freedom of religion, freedom from hunger and unemployment and freedom from Manuvaad (or Brahmanism). An iconic image on the protest sites was one of Bismil and Ashfaq as the blazing symbols of Hindu–Muslim unity. Several speeches invoked their friendship and their life stories. Bismil’s poetry, especially the song ‘Sarfaroshi ki Tamanna’, had once again become popular. The slogan ‘Ashfaq–Bismil ki yaari, viraasat hai humari’ (Asfaq–Bismil’s friendship is our inheritance) was painted as graffiti that adorned the roads of Shaheen Bagh and the walls of Jamia Millia. The romantic invocation of their friendship invisibilised its unevenness. It hid Bismil’s upper-caste gaze and his doubts regarding the Muslim community’s ‘loyalty’ to the nationalist cause. Hitherto, to be a ‘Good Muslim’ was to be loyal to the ‘Indian nation’; however, ironically in this instance the image of another good Muslim, Ashfaq, was being deployed to protest that very nation. The Bismil–Ashfaq imagery also became a cover for, as some commentators noted, the ‘secular’ Islamophobia.4 The liberal intellectuals asked the Muslims protesting on the roads to not use Islamic slogans or imageries lest they appear ‘too Muslim’ and the protests be framed as sectarian. They wanted the antiCAA–NRC protests to remain focussed on protesting the violation of the Indian Constitution and not to make it about the Muslims (although it was the Muslims whom the CAA was excluding).5 Once again the Muslims were being asked not to use religious language and to set aside markers of their religious identity in order for the struggle to remain ‘secular’, much in the way Ashfaq had done by adopting Hindi, dressing like a thakur, and being an obedient and loyal friend to Bismil, while the reverse was not asked of Bismil. Another image jostling for attention at the protest sites was of the shirtless Chandrashekhar Azad twirling his moustache alongside the

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Kakori and Lahore Conspiracy Case martyrs, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, Jotiba and Savitribai Phule, Fatima Sheikh, Birsa Munda and Gandhi. A young Dalit by the name of Chandrashekhar Azad ‘Ravan’ arose as one of the leaders of the resistance. The image of Chandrashekhar, a flamboyant young man, sporting a moustache, dressed in a blue turban and Ray Ban glasses, standing on the steps of the Jama Masjid, a historical congregational mosque in Old Delhi, on 20 December 2019 holding a copy of the Indian Constitution went viral. Hiding from the Delhi police, he had come to the Jama Masjid under disguise wearing a shawl and a skull cap, jumped across the terraces of the houses in the crowded by-lanes and suddenly revealed himself on the steps of the mosque. His ability to cut through the heavily guarded area was reminiscent of his namesake’s adeptness as a bahurupiya. His presence at the Jama Masjid was hailed as the ‘second coming’ of Azad. This prophetic return bears the echo of Bhagat Singh posters with the caption ‘dubara ana padega kya’ (will I have to return?) that have started appearing in the past few years as rear windshield stickers, posters on roadside billboards and paintings behind inter-state trucks. In the case of Chandrashekhar, the revolutionary had returned once again to protest against state oppression, and would continue returning until India had attained swaraj. Several prints of him twirling his moustache in likeness of his namesake flooded the protest sites and news portals, although his sartorial style, his flamboyance and his hipster beard were more reminiscent of Bhagat than Azad. A lawyer by training, Chandrashekhar had formed the Bhim Army in 2015. His father had given him the name Chandrashekhar Azad and his elder brother was named Bhagat Singh.6 The fact that the historical Azad was a Brahmin and the contemporary one a Dalit had been rendered irrelevant by the belief that a revolutionary is ‘naturally’ above caste, creed and religion. As the protests raged across the country, a member of the Rajya Sabha, the Upper House of the Indian Parliament, sought permission to move a resolution to remove the word ‘socialism’ from the Indian Constitution in late March 2020. This request followed on the lines of an earlier attempt by the ruling party in 2015 to drop the word ‘socialism’ from the Constitution’s Preamble. A government-issued Republic Day advertisement had carried an image of the original Preamble without the words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’. The government had doused the huge outcry in the Parliament at that time with a declaration that there was no plan underway to change

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the Preamble.7 The resurfacing of the issue in 2020 was premised on the argument that the word ‘socialism’ had lost its historical relevance and was ‘redundant’ in a country like India which was now firmly on the path of neoliberalism.8 Before the resolution could be moved, the work of the government stopped because of the global pandemic, leaving the issue in abeyance. Irrespective of the future of the word ‘socialism’, the debate around its removal from the Constitution’s Preamble clearly signified that the history of postcolonial India had arrived at a new juncture. Observing and participating in the protests drew my attention to the ‘incomplete radicalism’ of the revolutionary politics and its conservative stance on the issues of gender and caste that the revolutionaries’ memoirs harboured, in contrast to the ‘performance of radicalism’ visible in the revolutionary political writings and propaganda literature.9 According to the Sedition Committee Report, the early revolutionary movement until 1918 was primarily upper caste and led by the bhadralok in Bengal and the Chitpavan Brahmins in Maharashtra. The early revolutionaries were seen as not only anti-British but also anti-Muslim. The British saw in their militant opposition a desire to regain their traditional authority. Many Marxist Indian authors such as Gopal Haldar and Rajni Palme Dutt have also expressed the view that the Indian revolutionary movement, although not expressly anti-Muslim, failed to take along the Muslims who constituted the majority of the ‘masses’ in Bengal.10 While this was not entirely true of the revolutionary movement as it developed after the First World War, there was, however, a clear ‘masculinist gendering of “revolution”’.11 For the most part, all the revolutionary outfits, notwithstanding individual proclivities, retained their upper-caste/class male tenor. This was reflected in Sanyal’s and Bhagat’s belief that the revolutionary leadership should come from the ranks of the educated middle class and Jaidev Kapur’s hesitation in joining forces with the Madari and Deo Pasi because they ‘had no political education’ and were seen as lacking in the capacity to keep their cadres in line despite the Pasis having carried out a rebellion that had rattled the British administration.12 There are individual instances of the revolutionaries displaying a concern for the lower castes (such as Bismil having staged a play called Chamar while in jail; the story of Bhagat having befriended a Harijan boy named Amar Chand during his student days in Banga, Lyallpur; the Naujawan Bharat Sabha’s organisation of inter-caste dining events and serving of halal and jhatka meat) but these beliefs and

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actions stopped short of a radical critique of the caste system of the Phule– Satyashodhak kind.13 Furthermore, the fact that most of the HRA and HSRA memoirs and reminiscences were predominantly in Hindi (and a few were translated from Bengali into Hindi) and that several revolutionaries became Hindilanguage journalists and writers reflects a deep connection between the development of the Hindi public culture/literary sphere and revolutionism. The Hindi public sphere began to take shape from the middle of the nineteenth century. The reformist Arya Samaj, DAV schools and gurukuls, Nagari Pracharini Sabha, the Nawal Kishore Press and the Gita Press of Gorakhpur, and the writings of Bharatendu Harishchandra, the Hindi playwright from Banaras, were the primary vectors of Hindi in northern India at the time.14 The Kashi Vidyapeeth in Banaras also contributed several students who became famous Hindi journalists and national leaders such as Lal Bahadur Shastri, Kamlapati Tripathi and Dev Bharat Shastri.15 Between the years 1920 and 1940, Hindi transformed into a vehicle of nationalist assertion that envisioned itself in universal terms and deemed anything outside of it is as sectarian.16 Its literary sphere embodied the world of the north Indian upper-caste Hindus and one that excluded the Muslim community and the Indo-Persian tradition. The revolutionary movement as it developed in north India bore the imprint of the Hindi public sphere. By the time we come to the 1920s, many of the prominent figures in the Hindi literary sphere such as Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi, Purushottam Das Tandon, Bhai Sampurnanand, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Babu Shiv Prasad Gupta and Baburao Pararkar, who were national leaders, publishers and editors of several leading Hindi journals such as Chand, Pratap, Dainik Vartman, Dainik Pratap, Vartmaan, Aaj, Bharat and Abhyudaya, became the first ones to raise the question of the masses, to write about the significance of the Bolshevik Revolution, to get actively involved in the kisan sabhas and trade unions and to extend support to the members of the HRA and HSRA.17 The political orientation of these leaders and editors segued into their desire to establish Hindi as the language of the common people. However, there was also a clear tension between the cultural bearings of the Hindi politicians and their political allegiance towards the masses.18 This was also true of several HRA and HSRA revolutionaries who came from the Hindi public sphere of the 1920s. Many of them were

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inspired by Maithlisharan Gupt’s Hindi kavya (poetry) ‘Bharat Bharati’ and Bharatendu’s Bharat Durdasha.19 Bismil in his autobiography showered praise on Ashfaq for his knowledge of Hindi and noted how surprised his family members were with Ashfaq’s use of Hindi words. Bismil held this up as a great example of Ashfaq’s patriotism20 – an Indianness that was defined by how well immersed he was in the world of Hindi and thereby in the Hindu nation. National College, Lahore, where Bhagat and his associates studied had Hindi as the medium of education.21 The students and teachers of the National College sang ‘Vande Matram’ in the morning prayer.22 Bhai Parmanand once scolded Comrade Ram Chandra for not using the ‘quami bhasha’, that is, Hindi, on the political posters he was making.23 Bhagat was known to regularly stage Bharatendu Harishchandra’s play Bharat Durdasha that served as an inspiration for revolutionism. One of Bhagat Singh’s early essays also advocated the use of the Devanagari script for the north Indian languages.24 It therefore remains open to question whether there was room in their imagination, in their asceticism and in their everyday lives that included Muslim or Pasi imaginings of liberation? In some part the ‘incomplete radicalism’ of the revolutionaries’ memoirs was also more pronounced in the ones who later embraced communism. Their memoirs were unintentionally but subtly complicit in the construction of their earlier selves and the revolutionary politics as ‘immature’ and ‘impatient’. The ‘self ’ that wrote, reminisced and recollected did so from the subject position of ‘adulthood’ and one that was patient and ideologically mature. They had journeyed from utopia (that is, spontaneous, emotional and immature) to ‘scientific’ socialism (that is, maturity and adulthood). Their communist self and its politics was not only a point of arrival but had also become the vantage point.25 Thus was created a hierarchy of knowing that unwittingly disqualified their earlier selves. Their memoirs retain the shell of heroism of their earlier selves intact but empty it out of ideology. So what one is left with is a celebratory memory of revolutionism. Most histories and biographies of Indian revolutionaries depict their lives as inevitably moving towards the ideological telos of communism or the ultra-right. Several revolutionaries’ life narratives presume a unilinear flow from satyagraha to revolutionism to communism, which finds duplication even in the life histories of revolutionaries other than the ones we have examined. For instance, there is the life story of Shekhar Ganguly,

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a famous Bengali revolutionary, who began his life as a satyagrahi and then transformed into a revolutionary and finally gravitated towards Marxism.26 In contrast were people such as Lala Lajpat Rai, Bhai Parmanand and V. D. Savarkar who went from being revolutionaries to founding members of the Hindu Mahasabha. If one were to think of Sanyal and Bhagat as two polar ends of the spectrum, the HRA and the HSRA revolutionaries straddled impulses that led in several directions. They read Lenin and Bakunin alongside Bankim and Savarkar.27 They lived in a time when religious philosophies were serving as a guiding force for rural mobilisation and energising the kisan sabhas, as in the case of Swami Sahajanand and Baba Ramchandra, and at the same time empowering Tabligh and Shuddhi, the proselytising and religious conversion movements.28 There was no one way to predict the flow of a revolutionary’s afterlife or pre-determine the revolutionary telos. Who would have thought that Mahour, a devout sanatani, would turn to Marxism, that Batukeshwar Dutt’s atheism would dissolve into Durga worship, that Agyeya would want to join the British Army during the Second World War and that Durga Devi Vohra would rise as the President of the Delhi Congress Committee by 1937?29 The time of history, after all, is one of happenstance, coincidences, ruptures and discontinuities than facile predestinations.30 This book also draws attention to the setting aside of the Indian warrior ascetic tradition in favour of Gandhian non-violence in our historical imagination. With Gandhi’s emergence on the political scene as the mahatma, the image of an ascetic blended with ahimsa, or non-violence (and thereby severing and obscuring its links with the warrior ascetic tradition), and the figure of the sanyasi as a truth-speaker, a person disinterested in the material luxuries and devoted to the ethical service of society, came to be firmly entrenched in the public imagination.31 With Gandhi, political asceticism more importantly transformed into a weapon of political resistance. Hitherto there were examples of political leaders becoming sanyasis (such Aurobindo Ghosh and Jatindra Nath Bannerjee) but here onwards political asceticism became an inveterate political and personal choice for most leaders, including the young revolutionaries of the time. It was also the meteoric rise in Gandhi’s popularity that firmly tied the idea of Indian civilisation with the idea of nonviolence, making it hard to conceive of the revolutionaries as political ascetics. In British India, the new affective regime of ‘civilised emotions’ that the colonial state (the extension of state power through courts and the criminal

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justice system) and Gandhian nationalism (his personal asceticism and withdrawal of the non-cooperation movement) sought to impose on Indian political life required non-violent self-expression and people to feel ‘affection’ towards political authority. This legal–emotional regime was heavily gendered and sexual, and it rested on the criminalisation of the use of firearms and physical aggression, traditionally associated with menfolk (while continuing to affirm non-physical forms of aggression).32 The revolutionaries’ violation of this emotional code classified them as ‘seditious’, that is, persons spreading ‘disaffection’ made worse, in this case, by their belief in violence. The attempts of the revolutionaries to regulate their emotional lives through the practise of asceticism (that is, restraint, training and mastery of their bodies) were actually in an interesting contrast to their characterisation as impatient, impetuous, angry and immature – all the images signalling a lack of restraint, an excess of emotion and near absence of political rationality. The fact that the revolutionaries’ practise of asceticism remained unseen continued to feed their characterisation as unrestrained and politically irrational men. Their practise of asceticism was firmly tied to their notions of masculinity, honour, their inner self-worth and moral stature and thereby enabled them to transact the relationship between their inner and outer worlds. It also bound the revolutionaries into an emotional community that aspired to complete political and personal liberation.33 For some revolutionaries, attachment and loyalty to this affective community sustained their everyday life in the underground more so than the ideological or ‘textual community’.34 This emotional community was to later coalesce around memories of the departed leaders and fellow revolutionaries and their shared lives. It continued into the post-Independence era and made their way into the revolutionaries’ memoirs. The stories they told about each other and about themselves became the dossier of this emotive community, less so the intellectual and propaganda material they produced. This community was also tied together in the way it glorified and romanticised its covenant with death, ‘sarfaroshi ki tammana’. Death for the revolutionaries was not simply annihilation of self but its legitimate fulfilment. Their annihilation was necessary for the long chain of warriors they had descended from to continue, as they were but mere links in the succession chain. While the revolutionaries’ covenant with death was the bedrock of their underground lives, it also engendered deep silences. All emotional communities cherish and celebrate certain emotions and

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abhor and shun others. Fear in the face of imminent death was one such unsayable emotion.35 The expression or verbalisation of fear was met with disdain and derision, because to be a revolutionary was to possess and display courage. A revolutionary’s honour was premised on his willingness and ability to die. In this framework, the display of fear was associated with moral turpitude and cowardice, the preserve of renegades, turncoats and ‘traitors’.36 Fear remained an emotion conspicuous in its absence in the revolutionary memoirs. Also one finds no discussion on sex, sexuality or sexual lives of the revolutionaries, as if the practise of brahmcharya negated and cancelled out any need for conversations on these aspects of their lives. As Ania Loomba’s work shows, there was an outlawing of libidinal desires in the writings of militant nationalists because their political and sexual desires had to be aligned in order to achieve their telos. The display of sexual desire was seen as not just personal deviance but political as well. Finally, how does a focus on the inner lives enrich our understanding of the revolutionary ontology? The study of the revolutionaries’ inner lives speaks to an experience of time – the time of the revolutionaries’ present. It was experienced as fast-paced, quickly dissipating and one that was flawed and imperfect. However, this was also a ‘perfectible’ present that could be perfected (that is, arrested and slowed) in the way one lived it. Their everyday thus became the site where swaraj or self-rule was enacted over the self and as a proxy for political swaraj. For the revolutionaries, their utopia (swaraj) was a formless reverie that helped transcend the inescapable reality of their present by imagining other worlds and other lives. One thinks of utopia as something to be achieved – a promised land, a vision of human society or an ideal state of being – in the future. However, utopia was rarely about the future. Utopia was about here and now, it resided in one’s present, a present that was imperfect and oppressive. The revolutionaries’ imagination was potent, it provided them succor, a hope of deliverance and empowered them to negotiate the power hierarchies in which they otherwise found themselves at the bottom.37 They were indeed revolutionaries without a revolution but revolutionaries nevertheless because it was lives lived, moving towards, anticipating and dreaming of achieving swaraj through revolution that bestowed on these young men the moniker ‘revolutionary’. The waiting made their utopias ever more real. The inner lives of the revolutionaries, their quotidian existence, conversations, banter, quarrels and disagreements reflect a consciousness

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that was not entirely coherent or fixed. Their memoirs reveal their selfunderstanding as revolutionaries as they talk about the varied sociocultural milieu and the diverse subject positions that these young men came from. They reveal the reasons that propelled them forward in the direction of revolutionism and the factors that constrained them. Their metamorphosis occurred over a period of time as they lived together underground and continued to evolve thereafter as they participated in actions, lived through court trials, spent time in jail or lived in hiding. Their consciousness was continually altering and shifting, something akin to ‘structure of feelings’, a phrase used by Raymond Williams, a Welsh theorist and novelist, to describe a shared set of unformed ideas struggling to acquire form – ideas that are at times unable to articulate with clarity the stakes involved, but ideas and tacit understandings that are connected with the lived experience. Seeing the process of the revolutionaries’ self-making also belies the reductive view of politics that upholds the ideology–praxis binary.38 As Waiting for Swaraj demonstrates, the revolutionaries’ everyday praxis was the site for their ‘ideology’. In doing so, the book reformulates the way we study political history, which generally amounts to an analysis of ideas and ideology or an exploration of seminal events or biographies of leaders. Instead, it focuses on political lives, the everyday reality of being a revolutionary, and on praxis as a way of studying political history and the history of Indian nationalism.

~ Notes ~

1

Chapter 1

Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 2009), pp. 75–106. Darnton undertakes an examination of the trivial and the anomalous patterns to understand the history of pre-industrial Europe. 2 Taking a cue here from Edward P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (London: Vintage, 1963, 1980), p. 12. He makes a case for listening to what the working-class men had to say for themselves. 3 For shifting the vantage point, see Robert Darnton’s The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1995). He overturns the story of the ideological origins of the French Revolution by locating it in the literary underbelly of pre-revolutionary France that slandered and desacralised the monarchy, rather than in the writings of Voltaire and the Enlightenment philosophes. 4 Malwinderjit S. Waraich and Rajwanti Mann, Chandrashekhar Azad: Viveksheel Krantikari (New Delhi: Rajkamal Paperbacks, 2013), pp. 83–85. 5 Dharmendra Gaud and Satyanarayan Sharma, Chandrashekhar Azad aur Unke Do Gaddar Saathi (Delhi: Bhagat Singh Vichaar Manch, 2001), pp. 74–75. 6 Waraich and Mann, Chandra Shekhar Azad, p. 86. 7 Ibid., p. 85. 8 Ibid., p. 89. 9 Ibid., p. 91. 10 Ibid., p. 93. 11 Vishwanath Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, ed. Sudhir Vidyarthi (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2007), p. 120. 12 Kaushalya Devi Dublish, Revolutionaries and Their Activities in Northern India (Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1982), p. 40.

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13 Waraich and Mann, Chandra Shekhar Azad, pp. 108–110. 14 Sukhdev Raj, Jab Jyoti Jagi: Ek Krantikari ke Sansmaran, ed. Sudhir Vidyarthi (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2009), p. 113; see also File no. 21/ XXXIV/30, Home, Police, 1930, National Archives of India, Janpath, New Delhi (hereafter NAI) – the file has a cutting from a British newspaper, Yorkshire Post (24 May 1930), discussing the alleged smuggling of Soviet arms into India and their use by the Indian revolutionaries. 15 Peter Heehs, ‘Maniktala Secret Society: An Early Bengali Terrorist Group’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 29, no. 3 (1992), pp. 349–370, 361. 16 Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, p. 139. 17 Shiv Verma, Sansmritiyan: Krantikari Shaheedon ke Sansmaranantak Rekhachitra (Lucknow: Samajwadi Sahitya Sadan, 1969), p. 53. 18 Kalpana Dutt, Chittagong Armoury Raiders: Reminiscences (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1945), pp. 14–15. 19 Kama Maclean, ‘The History of a Legend: Accounting for Popular Histories of Revolutionary Nationalism in India, Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 6 (2012), pp. 1540–1571; Kama Maclean, ‘Revolution and Revelation, or, When Is History Too Soon?’ South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 39, no. 3 (2016), pp. 678–694, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2016.1191536. 20 Claudia Verhoeven, ‘Time of Terror, Terror of Time: On the Impatience of Russian Revolutionary Terrorism (Early 1860s–Early 1880s)’, in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Neue Folge, Bd. 58, H. 2, Themenschwerpunkt: Modern Times? Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia (2010), pp. 254–273. 21 Jaichandra Vidyalankar, ‘He had Power to Do Great Things’, Abhyudaya, 8 May 1931, republished in K. C. Yadav and Babar Singh, eds, Bhagat Singh: Making of a Revolutionary – Contemporaries’ Portrayals (Gurgaon: Hope India, 2006), p. 142. 22 Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi, in his ‘Ve Diwane’ lists the epithets used for the revolutionaries by their detractors: ‘unaccountable’, ‘in hurry’ and ‘impatient idealists’ (anurttardayi, jaldbaaz, adheer adharshvadi), cited in Bhagwandas Mahour, ed., Kakori Shaheed Smriti Lucknow: Kakori Shaheed Ardhshatabdi Samaroh Samiti, 1977), p. 216; Abdul Majid Khan, Oral History Transcript no. 348, Nehru Memorial and Museum Library (hereafter OHT, NMML) also says, ‘They were in great hurry’, p. 33. See also Leela Gandhi, ‘An Immature Politics’, in her Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought and Postcolonial Friendship (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2006), pp. 177–190. 23 S. A. T. Rowlatt, Sedition Committee Report (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1918).

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24 Bipan Chandra, ‘The Ideological Development of Revolutionary Terrorists in North India in the 1920s’, in his Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1979), pp. 223–251. His narrative uses the success– failure binary to understand and locate the revolutionaries in anti-colonial political matrix. Mulk Raj Anand’s short story ‘The Terrorist’ in Selected Short Stories (Delhi: Penguin, 2016) paints them as a failure. 25 Jaidev Kapur, ‘Sardar Baaji Maar Le Gaya’, in Sudhir Vidyarthi, ed., Shaheed Bhagat Singh: Kranti ka Sakshya (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2015), pp. 132–137, 133. 26 Sohan Singh Josh, ‘Full Blooded Revolutionary’, in My Meetings with S. Bhagat Singh (Delhi, 1975), cited in Yadav and Singh, Bhagat Singh, pp. 65– 89. 27 Bhagwandas Mahour, ‘Chandrashekhar Azad’, in Bhagwandas Mahour, Sadashiv Malkapurkar and Shiv Verma, Yash ki Dharohar (Lucknow: Rahul Foundation, 2006, 2010), pp. 44–82, 13, 73. 28 Ibid., p. 71. 29 Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Inter-War India: Violence, Image. Voice and Text (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2015), pp. 5–7; Kama Maclean, ‘The Embodiment of Quicksilver: Picturing Chandrashekhar Azad’, available at http://tasveergharindia.net/essay/quicksilver-chandra-azad.html, accessed 5 November 2019; Durba Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 22–23. 30 Poorna Swaraj, or complete independence of India from the British rule, was a long-standing demand of the revolutionaries as opposed to the ‘Dominion Status’ that the colonial state and the Indian nationalists were working towards. 31 Reproduced in K. C. Yadav and Babar Singh, eds, The Fragrance of Freedom: Writings of Bhagat Singh (Gurgaon: Hope India, 2006), p. 245. 32 Kama Maclean, ‘The Portrait’s Journey: The Image, Social Communication and Martyr-Making in India’, Journal of Asian Studies 70, no. 4 (2011), pp. 1051–1082; Maclean, ‘The History of a Legend’; Ishwar Dayal Gaur, Martyr as Bridegroom: A Folk Representation of Bhagat Singh (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2016). 33 A great deal of feminist scholarship on women’s lives is focused on mapping their everyday lives that are seen as embodying resistance. See, for example, Anandita Ghosh, Behind the Veil: Resistance Women and the Everyday in Colonial India (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

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34 Grateful to the anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this. See also Jo Stanley, ‘Including the Feelings: Personal Political Testimony and SelfDisclosure’, Oral History 24, no. 1 (Spring 1996), pp. 60–67. Ania Loomba, Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism, and Feminism in India (London: Routledge, 2019). Loomba, in fact, argues that the everyday, domestic or emotional lives of the communist women have not been paid attention and it is primarily their public achievements that have been written about and extolled. Tanika Sarkar, ‘Political Women: An Overview of Modern Indian Developments’, in Bharati Ray, ed., Women of India: Colonial and Post-Colonial Periods (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005), pp. 541–563. 35 Kama Maclean, ‘What Durga Bhabhi Did Next? Or, Was There a Gendered Agenda in Revolutionary Circles?’ South Asian History and Culture 4, no. 2 (2013), available at https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2013.768843, accessed 16 March 2013; Loomba, Revolutionary Desires. 36 William Zinsser, ‘Writing and Remembering’, in his edited volume Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), pp. 11–29. 37 Hans Kellner, ‘Language and Historical Representation’, in Keith Jenkins, ed., The Postmodern History Reader (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 127–138; Joan W. Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991), pp. 773–797. 38 The post-Independence memoirs include Mahour, Malkapurkar and Verma, Yash ki Dharohar; S. Verma, Sansmritiyan; Raj, Jab Jyoti Jagi; Manmathnath Gupta, Bharatiya Krantikari Andolan ka Itihaas (Delhi: Atmaram and Sons, 1939, 2011); Yashpal, Simhavalokana (Allahabad: Lokbharti Prakashan, 2007); Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad; Virendra Sindhu’s Yugdrashta Bhagat Singh aur Unke Mrityunjaya Purkhe (Delhi: Rajpal and Sons, 2009); Sudhir Vidyarthi, Kranti ki Ibaratein (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2012) and his collection of reminiscences of associates of HSRA revolutionaries (Agnipunj: Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad ki Krantikari Jeevan Katha [New Delhi: RajkamalPrakashan, 2007] and Shaheed Bhagat Singh: Kranti ka Sakshaya [New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2015]); Ramkrishna Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein (Nagpur: Vishwabharti Prakashan, n.d.); B. Mahour, Kakori Shaheed Smriti; Dublish, Revolutionaries and Their Activities in Northern India. 39 Maclean, ‘Revolution and Revelation’; April Gallwey, ‘The Rewards of Using Archived Oral Histories in Research: The Case of the Millennium Memory Bank’, Oral History 41, no. 1 (2013), pp. 37–50.

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40 Maclean, ‘Revolution and Revelation’, discusses the significance of difference in the sound recordings of the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge (CSAS), and the NMML transcripts. 41 S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, pp. 75–76. 42 In Jaidev Gupta, OHT 346, NMML, pp. 74, 78; Bhagwandas Mahour, ‘Ve Suratein Ilahi Kis Desh Mein Bastiyan Hain’, in Sudhir Vidyarthi, ed., Shaheed Bhagat Singh: Kranti ka Sakshya (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2015), pp. 32–50, 45–46. See also J. Daniel Elam, ‘The Martyr, the Moviegoer: Bhagat Singh at the Cinema’, Bioscope 8, no. 2 (2017), pp. 181–203; Sindhu, Yugdrashta Bhagat Singh aur Unke Mrityunjaya Purkhe, pp. 259–261. 43 Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s ‘Hum Dekhenge’ (We Shall See) and Amir Aziz’s ‘Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega’ (Everything Will Be Remembered/Nothing Will Be Forgotten) that became the protest songs of the anti-Citizenship Amemndment Act/National Register of Citizens protests across India in 2020 also hark back to this idea of ‘witnessing’ the time and also of being the witnesses. 44 D. Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, pp. 23–24, 60–91. 45 Bengal and Calcutta: Papers relating to Terrorism, Mss Eur F161/36: 1923– 1936, Oriental and India Office Collection (OIOC), British Library, London, UK, p. 143. 46 D. Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, pp. 23–24, 60–91. 47 As Daniel Elam and Chris Moffat show, except for Bhagat Singh’s political essays that he wrote for Kirti and other journals (in the years he worked at Pratap Press in Kanpur, 1924–1926), the rest of the HSRA political material were collectively authored before or after they carried out a political action. See J. Daniel Elam and Chris Moffat, ‘On the Form, Politics and Effects of Writing Revolution’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 39, no .3 (2016), pp. 513–524, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2016.1199293. 48 Manmathnath Gupta, They Lived Dangerously: Reminiscences of a Revolutionary (New Delhi: Peoples’ Publishing House, 1956), p. 107; Manmathnath Gupta, OHT 174, NMML, p. 34. 49 Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Inter-War India, pp. 119–124; Maclean, ‘Revolution and Revelation’; Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, pp. 85, 100; Kuldip Nayar, Sarfaroshi ki Tamanna: Bhagat Singh ka Jeevan aur Mukaddama (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2012 [translation of Without Fear]), p. 54; Bhikshu Chaman Lal, OHT, CSAS, passim; Kumari Lajjawati, OHT 471, NMML, p. 65. 50 Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, pp. 105–107. Khatri narrates incidents in Kanpur and Bagpat where Nehru got annoyed when the event organisers asked him to accept donation for the Political Prisoners’ Relief Fund. He

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53

54 55 56

57

58 59

Notes

instead wanted them to donate it for the Congress’ election fund. He complained that he was not a ‘post box’ of the Relief Fund. See also Bimal Prasad Jain, OHT, CSAS, p. 20. Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, pp. 283–284. Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, pp. 105–117. Taylor C. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 96–110; Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, pp. 100, 124; Tanika Sarkar, Bengal, 1928–1934: The Politics of Protest (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987); Tanika Sarkar, ‘Bengali MiddleClass Nationalism and Literature: A Study of Saratchandra’s Pather Dabi and Rabindranath’s Char Adhyay’, in D. N. Panigrahi, ed., Economy, Society and Politics in Modern India (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing, 1985), pp. 449– 460; IOR/L/PJ/7/1059: 29 Apr 1936–6 Dec 1941 carries an extract of an ‘inflammatory speech’ delivered by Bhai Parmanand on his release in 1936. Manmathnath Gupta, Jail Diary, Accession No. 1749, NMML, p. 664 (this is a handwritten manuscript, written in Naini Jail in 1945); Prithvisingh Azad, ‘Bhumika’, in Pandit Banarsidass Chaturvedi, ed., Amar Shaheed Ashfaqulla Khan (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2008), pp. 7–11; Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, pp. 114–118. Jawaharlal Nehru, Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru (New York: John Day Company, 1936), pp. 82, 312. Pramod Kumar, Shiv Verma: Sardar Bhagat Singh ke Sahayogi (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2013, 2015), pp. 120–121. Harleen Singh, ‘Graphics of Freedom: Colonial Terrorists and Postcolonial Revolutionaries in Indian Comics’, in Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji, eds, Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 142–156. For the history of revolutionaries’ appropriation, see Chris Moffat, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of the Dead (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). More on nationalist– Marxist historiography in Chapter 3. Aparna Vaidik, ‘History of a Renegade Revolutionary’, Postcolonial Studies 16, no. 2 (2013), pp. 216–229; Kuldip Nayar, Without Fear: The Life and Trial of Bhagat Singh (New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 2000); Verma, Sansmrityan, pp. 107–108. Mathura Das Thapar, OHT 308, NMML; M. D. Thapar Collection, Private Papers Section, National Archives, New Delhi, India. Mathura Das Thapar, OHT 308, NMML, Annexure 8, has a letter from E. Walsh, Central Intelligence Officer, UP, Ajmer and Herwara, Mall Avenue, Lukhnow, dated 10 March 1947, to F.R. Stockwell, Superintendent Special

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61

62 63

64

65 66 67

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Branch, providing case history of a Punjabi youth described as a ‘a loyal and faithful fellow’ whose life details are similar to those of Yashpal. Raj, Jab Jyoti Jagi, pp. 153–156; Gaud and Sharma, Krantiveer Chandrashekhar Azad aur Unke Do Gaddar Saathi; Durga Das Khanna, OHT 294, NMML, p. 84; Prakashwati Pal (or Prakasho, wife of Yashpal), OHT 528, NMML, p. 36; Kuldeep Nayar, The Martyr: Bhagat Singh – Experiments in Revolution New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 2000), pp. 108, 152; Sudhir Vidyarthi, ‘Agyeya Bhi Chale The Kranti Marg Par’, in his Kranti ki Ibaratein (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2012), pp. 183; Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, pp. 87, 310–333; Bhagwandas Seth, Jhansi ka Sher (Meerut: Tarun Prakashan, 1989), p. 134; Dharmendra Gaud, Krantikari Andolan ke Kucch Adhkhule Panne (Delhi: Bhagat Singh Vichar Manch, 2010), pp. 27, 31. Yashpal, Simhavalokana; Gautam Chaubey, ‘Viplav Bharat: A Journalist and his Discontents’, paper presented at ‘Yashpal: Gender, Nation and Revolution’, symposium held at IIT Delhi, 7–8 January 2019; Prakashvati Pal (or Prakasho, wife of Yashpal), OHT 528, NMML, p. 98; Prakashvati Pal, Lahore Se Lucknow Tak (Delhi: Lokbharti Prakashan, 2009 [first published by Viplav Karyalaya, 1994]); Yashpal, OHT 467, NMML, p. 13. Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, pp. 219–220. Bijoy Kumar Sinha, In Andamans: The Indian Bastille (Cawnpore: Prafulla C. Mitra, 1939); Yashpal, Simhavalokana; S. N. Mazumdar, In Search of a Revolutionary Ideology and a Revolutionary Programme: A Study in the Transition from National Revolutionary Terrorism to Communism (New Delhi: Peoples’ Publishing House, 1979), pp. 250–287. Ramsingh Baghele, ‘Krantiveer Doctor Bhagwandas Mahour ke Patra’, in Ramesh Sinha, ed., Smarika: Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad: Balidaan Ardhshatabdi (Allahabad: Shaheed Chandra Shekhar Azad Balidaan Ardhshatabdi Samaroh Samiti, Leader Press, 1951), pp. 45–48; Sudhir Vidyarthi, ‘Kucch to Lal Dhara Hogi Hi’, in his Kranti ki Ibaratein (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2012), pp. 113–142. Bhagwandas Mahour, ‘Amar Shaheed Bhagat Singh’, in Bhagwandas Mahour, Sadashiv Malkapurkar and Shiv Verma, Yash ki Dharohar (Lucknow: Rahul Foundation, 2006, 2010), pp. 25–43, 27. Gupta, They Lived Dangerously; Manmathanath Gupta, History of the Indian Revolutionary Movement, (Bombay: Somaiya Publications Pvt. Ltd, 1972). Gupta, They Lived Dangerously, p. v. Shiv Verma, ‘Bhagat Singh’s March towards Socialism’, in Shiv Verma, ed., Selected Writings of Bhagat Singh (Delhi: National Book Centre, 1986), cited in Yadav and Singh, Bhagat Singh, pp. 37–64, 57–59.

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68 Shiv Verma, OHT 502, NMML, p. 137; Shiv Verma, ‘Introduction: Ideological Development of the Revolutionary Movement’, in Shiv Verma, ed., Selected Writings of Shahid Bhagat Singh (New Delhi: National Book Centre, 1986), pp. 7–43; Satyabhakt, Matribhumi ke Samman ki Raksha Karnewale Krantiveer Bhagat Singh, reproduced in Chaman Lal, ed., Krantiveer Bhagat Singh: ‘Abhyudaya’ aur ‘Bhavishya’ (Allahabad: Lokbharti Paperbacks, 2012, 2017), pp. 25–46; S. Irfan Habib, To Make the Deaf Hear: Ideology and Programme of Bhagat Singh and His Comrades (Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2007); P. M. S. Grewal, Bhagat Singh: Liberation’s Blazing Star (New Delhi: LeftWord, 2007, 2009) also make a very strong case for the readers to accept Bhagat as a communist ideologue. The subtitle of S. N. Mazumdar’s book In Search of a Revolutionary Ideology and a Revolutionary Programme – A Study in the Transition from National Revolutionary Terrorism to Communism – written in 1979 also presumes Communism to be the telos of revolutionary ideology. Relying solely on Ajay Ghosh’s and H. W. Hale’s books as sources, Mazumdar overstates the case of the HSRA’s adherence to communist ideas. See Mazumdar, In Search of a Revolutionary Ideology, pp. 240–250; H. W. Hale, Terrorism in India, 1917–1937 (Allahabad: Chugh Publications, 1974). 69 S. Verma, ‘Bhagat Singh’s March towards Socialism’, in Shiv Verma, cited in Yadav and Singh, Bhagat Singh, pp. 37–64, 57–59. 70 They had a trajectory similar to that of Bina Das and Kamala Dasgupta, who were active in the Bengal revolutionary groups but did not join any political party after Independence. They also wrote their memoirs: Bina Das, Srinkhal Jhankar (Calcutta: Joyoshri Prokashan, 1956 [reprinted and translated as Bina Das: A Memoir, trans. Dhira Dhar, New Delhi: Zubaan, 1994]) and Kamala Dasgupta, Rakter Akshare (Calcutta: Sourendra Basu, 1954, 2014). See Durba Ghosh, ‘Gandhi and the Terrorists: Revolutionary Challenges from Bengal and Engagements with Non-Violent Political Protest’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 39, no. 3 (2016), pp. 560–576, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2016.1194251. 71 Vidyarthi, ‘Agyeya Bhi Chale The Kranti Marg Par’, pp. 180–192. 72 Snehal Shingavi, ‘Agyeya’s Unfinished Revolution: Sexual and Social Freedom in Shekhar: Ek Jivani’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 39, no. 3 (2016), pp. 577–591, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2016.1197421. 73 Sachchidananda Hirananda Vatsyayan Agyeya, Arre Yayavar Rahega Yaad (New Delhi: National Publishing House, 1951); Vidyaniwas Mishra, ed., Rahul Chayanik (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1993); Nandini Chandra, ‘The Pedagogic Imperative of Travel Writing in the Hindi World: Children’s Periodicals (1920–1950)’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, n.s., 30, no. 2 (August 2007), pp. 293–325, DOI: 10.1080/00856400701499250.

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74 Shingavi, ‘Agyeya’s Unfinished Revolution’, p. 591; Nikhil Govind makes a strong case for the importance of literature as the realm where ‘creative detailing’ of the political takes place; see his Nikhil Govind, Between Love and Freedom (Delhi: Routledge, 2014), p. 4. For an analysis of Yashpal’s Dada Kamrad, see Loomba, Revolutionary Desires, pp. 95–108. 75 B. K. Sinha, In Andamans, p. 13, ‘Prisons have been aptly called the university for the political’; Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, pp. 203–205, 274–279. 76 The right-wing organisation implicated in Gandhi’s murder and was banned by Nehru after the Independence. 77 Sudhir Vidyarthi, ‘Ek Diya Zaroor Jalega’, in his Kranti ki Ibaratein (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2012), pp. 24–39, 30. 78 Sudhir Vidyarthi, ‘Ek Tasveer Jisme Batukeshwar ka Chehra Hai’, in his Kranti ki Ibaratein (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2012), pp. 40–79; P. Kumar, Shiv Verma, passim; Manmathnath Gupta OHT, CSAS, p. 19. 79 Durga Das Khanna, OHT 294, NMML, pp. 51–52. 80 Sudhir Vidyarthi, ‘Siraj Tum Nikal Jao’, in his Kranti ki Ibaratein (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2012), pp. 143–168, 154. Although Sukhdev Raj did pen his memoir in 1971. Amongst other things, Sukhdev Raj was seeking to counter Yashpal’s narrative. See Raj, Jab Jyoti Jagi. 81 Toni Morrison, ‘The Site of Memory’, in Willian Zinsser, ed., Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir (Boston: Mariner Books, 1998), pp. 101–124; Nonica Datta, ‘A “Samvad” with Ramachandra Guha’, Economic and Political Weekly 43, no. 40 (2008), pp. 81–83; Nonica Datta, ‘Memory and History: A Daughter’s Testimony’, in Charu Gupta, ed., Gendering Colonial India: Reforms, Prints, Caste and Communalism (Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2012), pp. 287–316; Robert Darnton, ‘Peasant Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose’, in his The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 2009), pp. 9–73. 82 Mathura Das Thapar, OHT 308, NMML, pp. 24–26. 83 Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, pp. 90–91. 84 Mazumdar, In Search of a Revolutionary Ideology, p. x. 85 Thomas Haskell, ‘Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream’, History and Theory 29, no. 2 (1990), pp. 129– 157 . 86 Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Inter-War India; Maclean, ‘The Portrait’s Journey’; Kama Maclean and J. Daniel Elam, eds, Revolutionary Lives in South Asia: Acts and Afterlives of Anticolonial Political Action (London: Routledge, 2014). J. Daniel Elam, ‘Commonplace Anti-Colonialism: Bhagat Singh’s Jail Notebook and the Politics of Reading’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 39, no. 3 (2016), pp. 592–607; Elam says, ‘The revolutionary was always

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91

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reading. Reading was revolutionary’ (‘Commonplace Anti-Colonialism’, p. 593); Simona Sawhney, ‘Bhagat Singh: A Politics of Death and Hope’, in Anshu Malhotra and Farina Mir, eds, Punjab Reconsidered (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 377–408; Chris Moffat, ‘Bhagat Singh’s Corpse’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 39, no. 3 (2016), pp. 644–661, DOI:1 0.1080/00856401.2016.1184782; Neeti Nair, ‘Bhagat Singh as “Satyagrahi”: The Limits to Non-Violence in Late Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 3 (2009), pp. 649–681, 676; Habib, To Make the Deaf Hear; Nayar, The Martyr; Gaur, Martyr as Bridegroom. For new works on internationalism and Ghadar, see Ali Raza, Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah (eds), The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds and World Views, 1917–39 (Delhi: Sage, 2015); Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); J. Daniel Elam, ‘Echoes of Ghadr: Lala Har Dayal and the Time of Anticolonialism’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and Middle East 34, no. 1 (2014), pp. 9–23. Elam, ‘Commonplace Anti-Colonialism’. D. Ghosh’s Gentlemanly Terrorists, specifically focuses on the Bengali revolutionaries during the inter-war period. She examines how the colonial state used the ruse of constitutional reforms to pass increasingly repressive emergency legislation to contain the revolutionaries, attesting to the fact that the revolutionary movement was at the centre of the nationalist movement and not just a radical fringe. Durga Devi Vohra, OHT 369, NMML, p. 20 One instance is Bhagwandas Mahour, OHT 478, NMML, pp. 48–49. Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002), 821–845; Barbara H. Rosenwein, ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). David Arnold, ‘The Self and the Cell: Indian Prison Narratives as Life Histories’, in David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn, eds, Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004, pp. 29–53; Kevin Grant, ‘The Transcolonial World of Hunger Strikes and Political Fasts, c. 1909–1935’, in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy (eds), Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006), pp. 243–269; Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India; Nair, ‘Bhagat Singh as “Satyagrahi”’. Vidyarnav Sharma, Yug ke Devta: Bismil aur Ashfaq (Delhi: Praveen Prakashan, 2014). The book reproduces Ashfaq’s writings in English and Urdu.

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93 Pandit Banarsidass Chaturvedi, ed., Amar Shaheed Ashfaqulla Khan (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2008); Devesh Chandra, Jail mein Likhe Gaye Patra evam Anya Lekh (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1997, 2005); B. Mahour, Kakori Shaheed Smriti; Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein; Sachindranath Sanyal, Bandi Jivan (Delhi: Sakshi Prakashan, 1922, 2012); Ramesh Sinha, ed., Smarika: Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad: Balidaan Ardhshatabdi (Allahabad: Shaheed Chandra Shekhar Azad Balidaan Ardhshatabdi Samaroh Samiti, Leader Press, 1951); Vidyarthi, Agnipunj; Gaud and Sharma, Krantiveer Chandrashekhar Azad aur Unke Do Gaddar Saathi; Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad; Ramesh Sinha, ed., Smarika: Amar Shaheed Yatindranath Das (Lucknow: Shaheed Yatindranath Das Balidaan Ardhshtabdi Samaroh Samiti, New Janta Press, 1971); Raj, Jab Jyoti Jagi; Suresh Salil, ed., Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi aur Unka Yug (New Delhi: Anamika Publishers, 2014); Puroshottam Modi, ed., Amar Shaheed Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi (Varanasi: Anurag Prakashan, 2011); Dublish, Revolutionaries and Their Activities in Northern India; Gupta, History of the Indian Revolutionary Movement; Gupta, Bharatiya Krantikari Andolan ka Itihaas; Manmathnath Gupta, Bharat ke Krantikari (New Delhi: Hind Pocket Books, 2012); Gaud, Krantikari Andolan ke Kuchh Adhkhule Panne. 94 Yashpal, Simhavalokana; Jagmohan Singh and Chaman Lal, Bhagat Singh aur Uske Saathiyon ke Dastawez (New Delhi: Rajkamal Paperback, 1986, 2010); Anil Verma, Batukeshwar Dutt: Bhagat Singh ke Sahayogi (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2010, 2014); P. Kumar, Shiv Verma; Grewal, Bhagat Singh; Jitendranath Sanyal, Amar Shaheed Sardar Bhagat Singh (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1999, 2014); Vidyarthi, Shaheed Bhagat Singh; Bipan Chandra, ‘Introduction’ to Bhagat Singh’s Why I Am an Atheist (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2006, 2013); Sindhu, Yugdrashta Bhagat Singh aur Unke Mrityunjaya Purkhe; Virendra Sindhu, Sardar Bhagat Singh: Patra aur Dastavez (Delhi: Rajpal and Sons, 2010); Ajoy Ghosh, Bhagat Singh and His Comrades (New Delhi: Communist Party Publication, 1945); Manmathnath Gupta, Bhagat Singh and His Times (Delhi: Lipi Prakashan, 1977); Chatursen Shastri, ed., Chand: Phansi Ank (New Delhi: Radhakrishan Publications, 1928, 1988); Yadav and Singh, Bhagat Singh; Yadav and Singh, The Fragrance of Freedom; Malwinderjit Singh Waraich, Revolutionaries in Dialogue: Lala Ram Saran Dass and Shaheed Bhagat Singh (Chandigarh: Unistar, 2007); Comrade Ram Chandra, Ideology and Battle Cries of Indian Revolutionaries (Delhi: Self-published, 1989); Comrade Ram Chandra, History of Naujawan Bharat Sabha, ed. Malwinderjit Singh Waraich (Chandigarh: Unistar, 2007).

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Arnold, ‘The Self and the Cell’; Kevin Grant, ‘The Transcolonial World of Hunger Strikes and Political Fasts, c. 1909–1935’; Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India; Nair, ‘Bhagat Singh as “Satyagrahi’”, p. 676. 95 Sadashiv Malkapurkar, ‘Chandrashekhar “Azad” ke Saath’, in Bhagwandas Mahour, Sadashiv Malkapurkar and Shiv Verma, Yash ki Dharohar (Lucknow: Rahul Foundation, 2006, 2010), pp. 83–90, 84. 96 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate since the Year 1000 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988); Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class; Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Book, 984); Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (New York: Vintage, 1979); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a SixteenthCentury Miller (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1980); Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1984); Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984); Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths and Historical Method (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1989); John Brewer, ‘Microhistory and Histories of Everyday Life’, Cultural and Social History 7, no. 1 (2010), pp. 87–109; Ranajit Guha, ‘The Small Voice of History’, in his The Small Voice of History: Collected Essays, ed. Partha Chatterjee (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009), pp. 304–317; Sandra Stanley Holton, ‘Challenging Masculinism: Personal History and Microhistory in Feminist Studies of the Women’s Suffrage Movement’, Women History Review 20, no. 5 (2011), pp. 829–841; Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It’, Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (1993), pp. 10–35; Barbara Cooper, ‘Oral Sources and the Challenge of African History’, in John Edward Philips, ed., Writing African History (Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 191– 215; Nonica Datta, Violence, Martyrdom and Partition: A Daughter’s Testimony (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012); Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards’, American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (1985), pp. 813–836; William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Margrit Pernau, Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

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97 Sherry B. Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (Durhum: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 16; Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in his The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 3–30. 98 Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2019). 99 Elam, ‘Commonplace Anti-Colonialism’.

1.

Chapter 2

See https://www.amarchitrakatha.com/in/amar-chitra-katha/brave-heartstory-books, pp. 1–2, accessed 31 August 2020. 2 H. Singh, ‘Graphics of Freedom’. See also Frances Pritchett, ‘The World of Amar Chitra Katha’, in Lawrence A. Babb and Susan Wadley, eds, Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1977), pp. 76–106; Nandini Chandra, The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha, 1967–2007 (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2008); Karline McLain, ‘The Place of Comics in Modern Hindu Imagination’, Religion Compass 5, no. 10 (2011), pp. 598–608, DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2011.00304.x. 3 Ibid. 4 Karline McLain, India’s Immortal Comic Books: Gods, Kings and Other Heroes (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009), p. 13. 5 Gupta, Bharatiya Krantikari Andolan ka Itihaas, pp. 210–211. 6 Ibid. 7 S. Nirvansh Singh, ‘The Great Martyr: A Profile’, Abhudaya, 8 May 1931, republished in Yadav and Singh, Bhagat Singh, pp. 17–29, 21; Sindhu, Yugdrashta Bhagat Singh aur Unke Mrityunjaya Purkhe, p. 130, and her essay in the same book ‘Bhagatsingh: Janmjaat Krantikari’ (Bhagatsingh: A Born Revolutionary), pp. 255–257; Moffat, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance. 8 On cultural thinning, see Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory, pp. 50–53; Gandhi, ‘An Immature Politics’. 9 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vols I–III (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988). 10 Kamlesh Mohan, ‘The Jallianwala Bagh Tragedy: A Catalyst of Indian Consciousness’, in V. N. Datta and S. Settar, eds, Jallianwala Bagh Massacre (Delhi: Pragati Publications, Indian Council of Historical Research, 2000), pp. 52–79. 11 Manmathnath Gupta: ‘Chandrashekhar Azad asahayogi hone se pehle krantikaari nahi the’, in his ‘Gandhivadi se Krantikari’, in Sudhir Vidyarthi, ed., Agnipunj: Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad ki Krantikari Jeevan Katha (New

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

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Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2007), pp. 213–224, 220. L. F. Chand, OHT, CSAS, p. 8. Gupta, ‘Gandhivaadi se Krantikari’, pp. 213–224. Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, pp. 35–36. Gupta, ‘Gandhivaadi se Krantikari’, pp. 213–214. Shiv Verma, ‘Tinki Ab Kaan Kahani Suno Karein’, in SudhirVidyarthi, ed., Agnipunj: Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad ka Krantikari Jeevan Katha (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2007), pp. 50–70, 53; Gaud and Sharma, Krantiveer Chandrashekhar Azad aur Unke Do Gaddar Saathi, pp. 30–31. Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, pp. 43–56. Ibid. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid. Ibid., p. 49. Ibid.; Gupta, Bharat ke Krantikari, p. 159. Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, p. 49; Gupta, Bharat ke Krantikari, p. 159. Vishwanath Sharma, ‘Amar Shaheed Shri Chandrashekhar Azad – 1 and 2’, in his Desh ke Nirmata: Jeevani and Sansmaran (Delhi: Prakashan Sansthan, 2004, 2010), pp. 52–60, 52. I am grateful to Anand Kumar, retired professor of sociology, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the son of Vishwanath Sharma, for this reference. Interview with Vishwanath Sharma published in Aaj, 5 October 1972, reproduced in V. Sharma, ‘Amar Shaheed Shri Chandrashekhar Azad – 1 and 2’, pp. 161–165, 162. V. Sharma, ‘Amar Shaheed Shri Chandrashekhar Azad – 1 and 2’, pp. 52–60, 61–68, 64. Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, p. 52; Gupta, ‘Gandhivaadi se Krantikari’, pp. 218–220; Gupta, They Lived Dangerously, p. 97. Vishwanath Vaishampayan, ‘Mahatma Gandhi aur Kashi Vidyapeeth’, in his Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, ed. Sudhir Vidyarthi (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2007), pp. 14–24. Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, p. 56. Gupta, ‘Gandhiwadi se Krantikari’, p. 221. Vidyarthi, Kranti ki Ibaratein, pp. 25, 39. Kundan Lal, Azad’s associate, had narrated this to Vidyarthi. Vishnu Sharan Dublish, interviewed by Kaushalya Devi Dublish, 24 November 1974, in Dublish, Revolutionaries and Their Activities in Northern India, p. 162; Comrade Ram Chandra, interviewed by S. L. Manchanda, 20

Notes

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42

43 44

45 46

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January 1978, New Delhi, OHT 356, NMML, p. 3; Durga Das Khanna, interviewed by S. L. Manchanda, 19 May 1976, Chandigarh, OHT 294, NMML, p. 71; Durga Devi Vohra, interviewed by S. L. Manchanda, 16 February 1972, Lucknow (interview is in Hindi), OHT 369, NMML, p. 5; Shiv Verma, interviewed by Hari Dev Sharma and S. L. Manchanda, 1 December 1988, OHT 502, NMML, p. 1. Manmathnath Gupta, interviewed by Hari Dev Sharma, 22 November 1969, New Delhi, OHT 174, NMML, pp. 30–31. Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, p. 35. Gupta, They Lived Dangerously, p. 97. Gupta, Jail Diary, pp. 297–298. Gupta, Bharat ke Krantikari, p. 159. Bhagwandas Mahour, ‘Ve Senapati The aur Mere Mitra Bhi’, in Sudhir Vidyarthi, ed., Shaheed Bhagat Singh: Kranti ka Sakshya (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2015), p. 17. Ibid. Gupta, They Lived Dangerously, p. 97. Diana L. Eck, Banaras: The City of Light (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); Nita Kumar, Artisans of Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity, 1880– 1986 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harishchandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 1997, 2010). Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, pp. 56–57. Rowlatt, Sedition Committee Report, p. 132; Sanyal, Bandi Jivan, p. 108; Diane M. Coccari, ‘Protection and Identity: Banaras’s Bir Babas as Neighbourhood Guardian Deities’, and Nita Kumar, ‘Work and Leisure in the Formation of Identity: Muslim Weavers in a Hindu City’, in Sandria B. Freitag, ed., Culture and Power in Banaras: Community, Performance, and Environment, 1800–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 130–146 and 147–172 respectively. Rowlatt, Sedition Committee Report, p. 132; Sanyal, Bandi Jivan, p. 84. Rowlatt, Sedition Committee Report, pp. 133–134; Dublish, Revolutionaries and Their Activities in Northern India, pp. 13–15; Tan Tai-Yong, ‘An Imperial Home-Front: Punjab and the First World War’, The Journal of Military History 64, no. 2 (2000), pp. 371–410. Sanyal, Bandi Jivan, p. 77. G. L. Dmitriev, Indian Revolutionaries in Central Asia (Kolkata: Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, 2002); Tilak Raj Sareen, Indian Revolutionary Movement Abroad, 1905–1921 (Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1979); L. P. Mathur, Indian Revolutionary Movement in the

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United States of America (Delhi: S. Chand, 1970); Durba Ghosh, ‘Terrorism in Bengal: Political Violence in Inter-war Years’, in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, eds, Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006), pp. 270–292; Giles T. Brown, ‘The Hindu Conspiracy, 1914–1917’, Pacific Historical Review 17, no. 3 (1948), pp. 299–310; Don K. Dignan, ‘The Hindu Conspiracy in Anglo-American Relations during World War I’, Pacific Historical Review 40, no. 1 (1971), pp. 57–76; Harald Fischer-Tinē, ‘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, no. 3 (2007), pp. 325–344; Thomas G. Fraser, ‘Germany and Indian Revolution, 1914–18’, Journal of Contemporary History 12, no. 2 (1977), pp. 255–272; Karl Hoover, ‘The Hindu Conspiracy in California, 1913–1918’, German Studies Review 8, no. 2 (1985), pp. 245–261; Joan M. Jensen, ‘The “Hindu Conspiracy”: A Reassessment’, Pacific Historical Review 48, no. 1 (February 1979), pp. 65–83; Kris K. Manjapra, ‘The Illusions of Encounter: Muslim “Minds” and Hindu Revolutionaries in First World War Germany and After’, Journal of Global History 1, no. 3 (2006), pp. 363–382; Matthew E. Plowman, ‘Nationalism as a Weapon in Global Conflict: The Indo-Irish German Conspiracy of World War I and the Anglo American Response’, paper presented at the 19th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism: ‘Nationalism & Globalisation’, 31 March–2 April 2009, London Panel: ‘Nationalism and Global Political Conflict’, 1 April 2009; Saul Kelly, ‘“Crazy in the Extreme”? The Silk Letters Conspiracy’, Middle Eastern Studies 49, no. 2 (2013), pp. 162–178. Dublish, Revolutionaries and Their Activities in Northern India, pp. 13–15. Bhikshu Chamal Lal, OHT, CSAS, p. 30, says that Bose worked as a police infiltrator for two years and therefore was able to leave India before his cover got blown. Rowlatt, Sedition Committee Report, pp. 131–136. Ibid., p. 136. Ibid. C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770–1870 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983, 2004), pp. 177–183. Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions, pp. 50–63. Leah Reynolds, A Hindu Education: Early Years of the Banaras Hindu University (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions, pp. 94–106, 430–439.

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56 This shift in use of the meaning of the noun gosain was related to the rise in political fortunes and the religious influence of the Dasnamis and the Ramanandis from the eighteenth century onwards, when they took control of the holy city of Ayodhya. See William R. Pinch, ‘Hiding in Plain Sight: Gosains on the Ghats, 1809’, in Michael Dodson, ed., Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories (New Delhi: Routledge, 2012), pp. 77–109; Dirk Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 57 Ibid.; Dirk Kolff, ‘Sannyasi Trader–Soldiers’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 8, no. 2 (1971), pp. 213–218, DOI:10.1177/ 001946467100800205; Sandria B. Freitag, ‘Introduction: The History and Political Economy of Banaras’, in Sandria B. Freitag, ed., Culture and Power in Banaras: Community, Performance, and Environment, 1800–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 1–24. 58 William R. Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 6–17. 59 Sandria B. Freitag, ‘State and Community: Symbolic Popular Protest in Banaras’ Public Arenas’, in Sandia B. Freitag, ed., Culture and Power in Banaras: Community, Performance, and Environment, 1800–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 203–228; Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, pp. 142–143, 183–186. 60 Kathryn Hansen, ‘Birth of Hindi Drams in Banaras, 1868–1885’, Scott L. Marcus, ‘The Rise of a Folk Music Genre: Biraha’, and Philip Lutgendorf, ‘Ram’s Story in Shiva’s City: Public Arenas and Private Patronage’, in Sandria B. Freitag, ed., Culture and Power in Banaras: Community, Performance, and Environment, 1800–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 62–92, 93–116 and 34–61 respectively. 61 N. Kumar, ‘Work and Leisure in Formation of Identity: Muslim Weavers in Hindu City’, pp. 147–172. 62 Mazumdar, In Search of a Revolutionary Ideology, p. 109; D. Ghosh, ‘Gandhi and the Terrorists’. 63 Manmathnath Gupta, OHT 174, p. 31; David M. Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left: Aspects of Regional Nationalism in India, 1905–1942 (Calcutta: K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1975), p. 21; Dublish, Revolutionaries and Their Activities in Northern India, p. 20. 64 Surya Sen (1893–1934), the leader of Jugantar, the second prominent revolutionary party in Bengal after Anushilan Samiti, and also selected as the President of the Indian National Congress’ Chittagong branch in 1918, was the first to carry out a heist in 1923. Surya Sen was to later become famous for

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79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

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leading the Chittagong armoury raid in 1930. See Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left, p. 24. Gupta, Jail Diary, p. 406; D. Ghosh, ‘Gandhi and the Terrorists’, pp. 560–576. Sanyal’s letter to Gandhi published in Young India, Ahmedabad, 12 February 1925; Dublish, Revolutionaries and Their Activities in Northern India, pp. 168– 174; Gupta, They Lived Dangerously, pp. 69–90. Dublish, Revolutionaries and Their Activities in Northern India, p. 169. Ibid., p. 172. Ibid., p. 174. Sanyal, Bandi Jivan, pp. 244–267. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 76–77, 255. Ibid., pp. 244–267. Gupta, They Lived Dangerously, p. 99; Dublish, Revolutionaries and Their Activities in Northern India, p. 31. Gupta, Bharat ke Krantikari, pp. 79–89. Ram Prasad Bismil, Nij Jeevan ki Ek Cchata, in Dinesh Sharma and Asha Joshi, eds, Ram Prasad Bismil Rachnavali (Delhi: Swarn Jayanti, 1997), pp. 35–123, 66–70. Nij Jeevan is Bismil’s autobiography. Dublish, Revolutionaries and Their Activities in Northern India, pp. 16-17, 31. Terrorism in India: 1917–1936, compiled in the Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India Press, Simla, 1937, reprinted by Deep Publications, Delhi, 1974, p. 69; Mazumdar, In Search of a Revolutionary Ideology and a Revolutionary Programme, p. 192. Terrorism in India, p. 69. Gupta, They Lived Dangerously, pp. 94–95. Sanyal, Bandi Jivan, pp. 303–305. See Terrorism in India, p. 69. Dublish, Revolutionaries and Their Activities in Northern India, Appendix VII, ‘Constitution of Hindustan Republican Association’, pp. 178–182. Ibid. Kaushalya Devi Dublish, ‘The Revolutionary’, in her Revolutionaries and Their Activities in Northern India (Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1982), pp. 185–190. Dublish, Revolutionaries and Their Activities in Northern India, p. 29. Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, p. 63. Ibid., p. 64. B. Mahour, ‘Ve Suratein Ilahi Kis Desh Mein Bastiyan Hain’, p. 33. Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, p. 39; Manmathnath Gupta says about Azad’s family: ‘Jo pongapanmulak kusanskaron mein

Notes

91 92 93 94

95 96

97 98 99 100 101 102

155

aakanth dooba hua tha’ (They were immersed to their neck in superstitious traditions), in ‘Gandhivaadi se Krantikari’, p. 213. B. Mahour, ‘Ve Suratein Ilahi Kis Desh Mein Bastiyan Hain’, p. 33. Bismil, Nij Jeevan ki Ek Cchata, pp. 45–59. Ibid., p. 102. Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, pp. 77, 79; Ramkrishna Khatri, ‘Faansi ki Cchaya mein Krantikari Manovinod aur Dridta’, in Bhagwandas Mahour, ed., Kakori Shaheed Smriti (Lucknow: Kakori Shaheed Ardhshatabdi Samaroh Samiti, 1977), pp. 117–131, 129; Manmathnath Gupta OHT, CSAS, p. 13. Manmathnath Gupta, ‘Ashfaqulla’, in his Bharat ke Krantikari (New Delhi: Hind Pocket Books, 2012), pp. 120–131, 131. Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, pp. 77, 79. Interview of Vishnu Sharan Dublish, in Dublish, Revolutionaries and Their Activities in Northern India, pp. 161–167, 161; Gupta, They Lived Dangerously, p. 102; Ramsevak Rawat, ‘Amar Shaheed Roshan Singh’, in Bhagwandas Mahour, ed., Kakori Shaheed Smriti (Lucknow: Kakori Shaheed Ardhshatabdi Samaroh Samiti, Lucknow, 1977), pp. 54–55, 55. Bhagwandas Mahour, OHT 478, NMML, pp. 48–49 Manmathnath Gupta, OHT 174, NMML, p. 23. B. Mahour, ‘Chandrashekhar Azad’, p. 80; Gupta, ‘Gandhivaadi se Krantikari’, p. 221; Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, p. 27, mentions that Tilak’s Gitarahasya was quite popular amongst the revolutionaries. Yamuna Mahour, ‘Krantikari aur Sahitya’, in Bhagwandas Mahour, ed., Kakori Shaheed Smriti (Lucknow: Kakori Shaheed Ardhshatabdi Samaroh Samiti, 1977), pp. 140–145, 143; Jaidev Gupta, OHT 346, NMML. See Tanika Sarkar, ‘Birth of a Goddess: “Vande Mataram”, Anandmath, and Hindu Nationhood’, Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 37 (2006), pp. 3959–3969, 3962. Most postcolonial historians assign a direct link between Anandmath and the Sangh Parivar’s muscular nationalism and see it as the founding text for the Hindutva ideology. Julius Lipner, however, insists that Bankim was using ‘the literary device of … the Muslims as a screen on occasion to refer to the British’ and it was not the Hindu–Muslim relations that were the prime mover of the text but India’s subjugation. This is borne out, according to Lipner, by Bankim’s erasure of references to the British in several places in the fifth edition of Anandmath that in time became the standard edition of the text. Tanika Sarkar refutes Lipner’s contention and argues that Anandmath or Bankim did not really face as much persecution as Dinbandhu Mitra and his

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Neel Darpan did. A great deal of police persecution associated with Anandmath happened much later in 1905 once the song ‘Vande Mataram’ became the battle cry of the anti-partition Swadeshi upsurge. Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Anandmath or the Sacred Brotherhood, translated with an Introduction and Critical Aparatus by Julius J. Lipner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 78; T. Sarkar, ‘Birth of a Goddess’. See also Milind Wakankar, ‘Body, Crowd, Identity: Genealogy of a Hindu Nationalist Ascetics’, Social Text 45 (1995), pp. 45–73; Meenakshi Mukherjee, ‘Anandmath: A Political Myth’, Economic and Political Weekly 17, no. 22 (1982), pp. 903–905; Carl Olsen, ‘Sakti, Celibacy, and Colonial Politics: Interlocking Themes of Anandmath and Debi Chaudhurani of Bankimchandra’, International Journal of Hindu Studies 14, nos 2–3 (2010), pp. 281–298; A. K. Dasgupta, ‘Bankim and Anand Math’, Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 18 (May 2002), pp. 1694 + 1768; Tanika Sarkar, ‘Imagining a Hindu Nation: Hindu and Muslim in Bankimchandra’s Later Writings’, Economic and Political Weekly 29, no. 39 (1994), pp. 2553–2561. Julius J. Lipner, ‘Re-translating Bankim Chatterji’s Ananda Math’, India International Centre Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2003), pp. 59– 71, p. 68; Tanika Sarkar, ‘Birth of a Goddess: ‘Vande Mataram’, Anandmath, and Hindu Nationhood’, Economic and Political Weekly, 41, no. 37 (2006), pp. 3959–3969. 103 B. Chatterjee, Anandmath or the Sacred Brotherhood, trans. Lipner, pp. 76– 78; Alex Wolfers, ‘Born Like Krishna in a Prison-House: Revolutionary Asceticism in the Political Ashram of Aurobindo Ghose’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 13, no. 3 (2016), pp. 525–545, doi.org/10.1080/008564 01.2016.1199253. 104 Wakankar, ‘Body, Crowd, Identity’, p. 52; Jasodhara Bagchi, ‘Positivism and Nationalism: Womanhood and Crisis in Nationalist Fiction Bankimchandra’s Anandmath’, Economic and Political Weekly 20, no. 43 (1985), pp. WS58–WS62; Partha Chatterjee, ‘Transferring a Political Theory: Early Nationalist Thought in India’, Economic and Political Weekly 21, no. 3 (1986), pp. 120–128. 105 In doing so, he was also defying the orientalist construction of India as a philological twin of Europe, and the British view of Indians as effeminate, cowardly, oversexed and lethargic. See Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya and the Formation of the Nationalist Discourse in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), passim and p. 115; Wakankar, ‘Body, Crowd, Identity’, p. 6; Jasodhara Bagchi, ‘Representing Nationalism: Ideology or Motherhood in Colonial Bengal’, Economic and Political Weekly 25, nos 42–43 (1990), pp. WS65–WS71; P.

Notes

106 107 108 109

110

111 112 113 114 115

116 117 118 119 120

157

Chatterjee, ‘Transferring a Political Theory: Early Nationalist Thought in India’. Julius J. Lipner, ‘Introduction’ to Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Anandmath or the Sacred Brotherhood, trans. Julius J. Lipner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 56–57; Olsen, ‘Sakti, Celibacy, and Colonial Politics’, p. 291. T. Sarkar, ‘Imagining a Hindu Nation’, p. 2556. Bismil, Nij Jeevan ki Ek Cchata, p. 58. The two other texts that rounded up the thought that Bankim had developed in Anandmath were his Dharmatattva (The Essence of Dharma, 1888) and Krisnacarita (The Life of Krishna, 1886). The first was an explication of ‘making of a perfect moral individual’ and the latter the story of a historical Krishna ‘the ideal exemplar’. Lipner, ‘Introduction’, pp. 24–25. The karmyogin ideal finds an expression in the writings of Keshub Chandra Sen, Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghosh, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Gandhi as well. While this ideal of karmayogin had ‘deep roots in the tradition’, it was expressed ‘in quite a new way’ in the nationalist period. The new karmayogin ideal was a product of the colonial encounter and part of the larger effort of the Indian elite to redefine their religion and come to terms with their subjugation. Ursula King, ‘Who Is the Ideal Karmayogin: The Meaning of Hindu Religious Symbol’, Religion 10, no. 1 (1980), pp. 41–59, 45, 49. Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness, p. 78. King, ‘Who Is the Ideal Karmayogin’, p. 46. Ashfaqulla Khan, ‘Mera Bachpan aur Talimo-Tarbiyat’ (My Childhood and Edcation-Training), in Pandit Banarsidass Chaturvedi, ed., Amar Shaheed Ashfaqulla Khan (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2008), pp. 65–68. Ashfaqulla Khan, ‘Jajbaate Ittihade Islaami’ (The Passion for Muslim Unity), in Pandit Banarsidass Chaturvedi, ed., Amar Shaheed Ashfaqulla Khan (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2008), pp. 71–74. In Ashfaqulla Khan, ‘Jaam-e-Shahadat Peene se Pehle Shaheed-i-quam Ashfaqulla Khan ka Paigam Bardaraan-e-watan ke Liye’ (Letter Written by Ashfaq from the Faizabad Jail on 16 December 1927), in Bhagwandas Mahour, ed., Kakori Shaheed Smriti (Lucknow: Kakori Shaheed Ardhshatabdi Samaroh Samiti, 1977), pp. 222–226, 224. S. Irfan Habib in his To Make the Deaf Hear, pp. 27–28, presents Ashfaqulla as a proto-communist/socialist. These translations are on authority of Ali Khan Mahmudabad, Assistant Professor, Ashoka University, Sonipat, whom I consulted. Khan, ‘Jajbaate Ittihade Islaami’. Ibid., p. 73. Bismil, Nij Jeevan ki Ek Cchata, p. 102. Ibid.

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121 122 123 124 125

Gupta, They Lived Dangerously, p. 100. Bismil, Nij Jeevan ki Ek Cchata, p. 103 Ibid. Ibid. See K. H. Ansari, ‘Pan-Islam and the Making of the Early Indian Muslim Socialists’, Modern Asian Studies 20, no. 3 (1986), pp. 509–537. See Pritchett, ‘The World of Amar Chitra Katha’, p. 93; Nandini Chandra also notes the anti-Muslim tenor of Amar Chitra Katha comics in her ‘Market Life of Amar Chitra Katha’, Seminar, May (453), 1997, pp. 25–30, 26. This anecdote also appears in Chaturvedi, Amar Shaheed Ashfaqulla Khan, p. 25, in an article titled ‘Shri Ashfaqulla Khan’ (pp. 24–29). This article has been reproduced from another volume titled Kakori ke Shaheed. The reference details of this volume are not mentioned. Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: Islam, the USA and the Global War Against Terror (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004, 2005). Rowlatt, Sedition Committee Report, pp. 173–179; Faridah Zaman, ‘Revolutionary History and the Post-Colonial Muslim: Re-Writing the “Silk Letters Conspiracy” of 1916’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 36, no. 3 (2016), pp. 626–643, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2016.1195325; Manjapra, ‘The Illusions of Encounter’; Aijaz Ahmed, ‘Azad’s Careers: Roads Taken and Not Taken’, in his Lineages of the Present: Political Essays (New Delhi: Tulika, 1996), pp. 133–190. Mazumdar, In Search of a Revolutionary Ideology and a Revolutionary Programme, pp. 124–126, 298–314. Sanyal, Bandi Jivan, pp. 286–287. Sanyal, preface of the 4th edition, Bandi Jeevan, p. 11. Dublish, ‘The Revolutionary’, p. 185; Shiv Verma also notes this about Sanyal in one of his essays, ‘Bhagat Singh’s March towards Socialism’, p. 41. See also Mazumdar, In Search of a Revolutionary Ideology and a Revolutionary Programme, pp. 177–178. Gupta, Jail Diary, p. 354. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 354–355. Ibid., p. 361. Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Inter-War India, pp. 119–124; Maclean, ‘Revolution and Revelation’; Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, pp. 85, 100. A Gandhian and a committed pacifist, Vidyarthi was an important and influential figure in the nationalist and literary circles of the region. Shiv Verma, OHT 502, NMML, pp. 23–25; Salil, Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi aur Unka Yug.

126

127 128

129 130 131 132

133 134 135 136 137

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138 Shiv Verma, OHT 502, NMML, p. 24. 139 Vimla Vidyarthi (daughter of Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi), interviewed by Suresh Salil (the interview was published on 5 April 1887 in Dainik Jansatta), reproduced in Salil, Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi, pp. 307–310. 140 S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, pp. 50–51; P. Kumar, Shiv Verma, pp. 20–23. 141 Kama Maclean, ‘Hybrid Nationalist or Hindu Nationalist? The Life of Madan Mohan Malaviya’, in Kate Brittlebank, ed., Tall Tales and True: India, Historiography and British Imperial Imaginings (Clayton: Monach University Press, 2008), pp. 107–124; Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, pp. 92–93, 99. Ramkrishna Khatri talks about how Malaviya was the first person he went to meet after being released from jail following his sentencing in the Kakori Conspiracy Case. Bismil also wrote a letter to Malaviya before his hanging appealing for assistance; cited in V. Sharma, Yug ke Devta, p. 58 142 Karmendu Sisir, ‘Ek The Radha Mohan Gokul’, in Karmendu Sisir, ed., Radhamohun Gokul Samagra (New Delhi: Anamika Publishers, 2009), Vol. 1, pp. 17–36, 21–22. 143 Shiv Verma, OHT 502, NMML, p. 27; S. Verma, ‘Bhagat Singh’s March towards Socialism’, p. 45; S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, p. 22. 144 Karmendu Sisir, ed., Radhamohun Gokul Samagra, Vols 1–2 (New Delhi: Anamika Publishers, 2009). 145 Karmendu Sisir, ‘Samaj ka Naitik Samvidhaan’, in Karmendu Sisir, ed., Radhamohun Gokul Samagra (New Delhi: Anamika Publishers, 2009), pp. 37–54. 146 Ansari, ‘Pan-Islam and the Making of the Early Indian Muslim Socialists’, pp. 509–537; Ahmed, ‘Azad’s Careers’; Ali Khan Mahmudabad, Poetry of Belonging: Muslim Imaginings of India, 1850–1950 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020). 147 P. Kumar, Shiv Verma, p. 28. 148 Gupta, Jail Diary, pp. 297–298. 149 Ibid., p. 260. 150 Gaud and Sharma, Krantiveer Chandrashekhar Azad aur Unke Do Gaddar Saathi, p. 47. 151 Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, pp. 46–52; Gupta, They Lived Dangerously, pp. 105–129; Bismil, Nij Jeevan ki Ek Cchata, passim; Manmanthnath Gupta, OHT, CSAS, pp. 6–7. 152 Manmathnath Gupta, OHT 174, NMML, pp. 50–51. 153 Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, p. 71. 154 His associate Manmathnath Gupta described him as ‘a reformed sinner, like Valmiki’. He came from a background where neither dacoity nor bigamy was seen as a sin. He openly indulged in both. Gupta, Jail Diary, p. 362.

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155 Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, pp. 46–52; Gupta, They Lived Dangerously, pp. 105–129; Bismil, Nij Jeevan ki Ek Cchata, passim; S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, pp. 58–59. 156 Dinesh Sharma and Asha Joshi, ‘Vishesh Parichay: Ram Prasad Bismil’, in Dinesh Sharma and Asha Joshi, eds, Ram Prasad ‘Bismil’ Rachnavali (Delhi: Swarn Jayanti, 1997), pp. 26–33, 29. 157 H. W. Hale, Political Trouble in India, 1917–1937 (Allahabad: Chugh Publications, 1974). 158 D. Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, pp. 249–250. 159 In an article titled ‘Biplab-tattwa’ in Jugantar, cited in Bharater Swadhinta Andolane Jugantarer Dan, p. 161, cited in Mazumdar, In Search of a Revolutionary Ideology and a Revolutionary Programme, pp. 84–85, 96, 97. 160 Manmathnath Gupta, OHT 174, NMML, pp. 50–51. 161 Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, p. 51. 162 Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, pp. 74, 81. 163 Ibid., p. 53. 164 Ramkrishan Khatri, ‘Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad’, and Bhawani Singh Rawat, ‘Krantiyug ki Kahani’, in Ramesh Sinha, ed., Smarika: Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad: Balidaan Ardhshtabadi (Allahabad: Shaheed Chandra Shekhar Azad Balidaan Ardhshatabdi Samaroh Samiti, Leader Press, 1951), pp. 9–14 (p. 14) and 75–76 respectively; Bimal Prasad Jain, OHT, CSAS, p. 8; Nand Kishore Nigam, OHT, CSAS, p. 5. 165 Shiv Verma, OHT 502, NMML, p. 110. 166 Bismil, Nij Jeevan ki Ek Cchata, p. 111; Khatri, ‘Faansi ki Cchaya mein Krantikari Manovinod aur Dridta’; Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, pp. 60–61, 77–80; Manmathnath Gupta, OHT, CSAS, pp. 10-11. 167 Bismil, Nij Jeevan ki Ek Cchata, pp. 85–86. 168 Gupta, They Lived Dangerously, p. 140. 169 Ibid., pp. 140–141. 170 Diary of R. A. Horton, Assistant to DIG, CID 15 August 1925, p. 3 in Part III – Case Diaries of Kakori Case, pp. 933–1462 of Kakori Train Dacoity Case, C.I.D., Uttar Pradesh, RR1, 1925 Box no. 3, List no. 78. 171 Ibid., Police statement of Indu Bhushan Mitra, 1 October 1925. 172 Judgment in Criminal Appeals, Ram Prasad and Others, delivered on 22 August 1927, Revolutionary Conspiracy Case, Volume III, in the List of Judgments in Kakori Conspiracy Case, Uttar Pradesh State Archives, Lucknow; Dublish, Revolutionaries and Their Activities in Northern India, pp. 43–47. 173 Gupta, ‘Gandhiwadi se Krantikari’, p. 226.

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174 Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, pp. 134–135. 175 Gupta, Bharat ke Krantikari, p. 157. 176 Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, p. 123; Waraich and Mann, Chandrashekhar Azad, pp. 98–101; Vishwanath Vaishampayan, ‘Azad ki Maa’, in Ramesh Sinha, ed., Smarika: Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad: Balidaan Ardhshtabadi (Allahabad: Shaheed Chandra Shekhar Azad Balidaan Ardhshatabdi Samaroh Samiti, Leader Press, 1951), pp. 41–44; Sadashiv Rao Malkapurkar, ‘Amar Shaeed Chandrashekhar Azad ka Agyatwaas’, in Ramesh Sinha, ed., Smarika: Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar: Azad Balidaan Ardhshtabadi (Allahabad: Shaheed Chandra Shekhar Azad Balidaan Ardhshatabdi Samaroh Samiti, Leader Press, 1951), pp. 64–65. 177 Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, pp. 37–38. 178 Gupta, Jail Diary, pp. 340–341. 179 Shiv Verma, OHT 502, NMML, p. 61. 180 Jaidev Kapur, OHT, NMML, pp. 1–12. 181 Bijoy Kumar Sinha, ‘Jaisa ki Maine Unhe Paya’, in Suresh Salil, ed., Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi aur Unka Yug (New Delhi: Anamika Publishers, 2014), pp. 167–174, 171–172; Gupta, ‘Gandhivaadi se Krantikari’, p. 226. 182 Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, p. 135; Shiv Verma, OHT 502, NMML, pp. 60–61. 183 Although Azad was not present at the meeting because of security reasons. Also, he and Bhagat had already consulted each other extensively and Bhagat was tasked with rounding up all the revolutionaries. 184 Gaud and Sharma, Krantiveer Chandrashekar Azad aur Unke Do Gaddar Saathi, p. 69. 185 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Karl Maton, ‘Habitus’, in Michael Grenfell, ed., Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), pp. 49–66. 186 See https://www.amarchitrakatha.com/in/amar-chitra-katha/brave-heart-storybooks, pp. 1–2, accessed 31 August 2020; Sandhya Rao, ‘Amar Chitra Katha Comics: A Quick-Fix Culture Course for Kids’, Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature 38, no. 4 (2000), pp. 33–35. 187 According to Insa Nolte, ‘youth’ are a social group and category that does not yet have the ability or the means ‘to establish themselves as providers of others’ or is defined in opposition to the group seen as adults or elders. See Insa Nolte, ‘Identity and Violence: the Politics of Youth in Ijebu-Remo’, Journal of Modern African Studies 42, no. 1 (2004), pp. 61–89, 62; Charles Gore and David Pratten, ‘The Politics of Plunder: The Rhetorics of Order and Disorder in Southern Nigeria’, African Affairs 102, no. 407 (2003), pp. 211–240.

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11 12 13 14

15 16

Notes

Chapter 3

Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, pp. 51–53. Gupta, ‘Gandhivaadi se Krantikari’, pp. 218–220; V. Sharma, ‘Amar Shaheed Shri Chandrashekhar Azad – 1 and 2’, p. 52; Gupta, They Lived Dangerously, p. 97. Inquilab is a Urdu word for revolution that was primarily used by left-oriented revolutionaries but also came into popular usage and became a slogan for nationalist resistance. C. M. Naim, ‘The Maulana Who Loved Krishna’, Economic and Political Weekly 48, no. 17 (2013), pp. 37–44. Sindhu, Yugdrashta Bhagat Singh aur Unke Mrityunjaya Purkhe, p. 147; S. Verma, ‘Bhagat Singh’s March towards Socialism’, pp. 37–64, 45; P. Kumar, Shiv Verma, p. 18; Jaidev Gupta, OHT 346, NMML, pp. 30–33. Moffat, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance. H. Singh, ‘Graphics of Freedom’. Ibid. Ibid. Moffat, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance, 2019. For a detailed analysis of the history of Bhagat Singh’s appropriation by the Left historians and the Akali Dal see Moffat, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance. See also B. Chandra, ‘The Ideological Development of Revolutionary Terrorists in Northern India in the 1920s’; B. Chandra, ‘Introduction’ to Bhagat Singh, Why I Am an Atheist; The Times of India, interview of Bipan Chandra, 22 September 2010; Bipan Chandra, ‘Bhagat Singh and Atheism’, in his Ideology and Politics in Modern India (New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 1994); Grewal, Bhagat Singh; Gurharpal Singh, Communism in Punjab: A Study of the Movement up to 1967 (Delhi: Ajanta, Delhi, 1994); People’s Democracy, ‘Carry Forward Bhagat Singh’s Secular, Anti-Imperialist and Marxist Outlook’, 31, no. 15 (15 April 2007); Habib, To Make the Deaf Hear. Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, pp. 170–178. Ibid., pp. 181–188. B. Mahour, Kakori Shaheed Smriti. Letter from Y. L. Sudra Rao, General Secretary, All India Freedom Fighters Association, to Mathura Das Thapar, 1 June 1978, reporting on the meetings of the coordination committee and activities of other freedom fighters’ associations across India, in Mathura Das Thapar Collection, Private Papers, National Archives of India, Delhi (hereafter NAI). Shiv Verma, OHT 502, NMML, p. 76. Ibid., p. 77.

Notes

17 18 19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26 27

163

Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, pp. 137–138. Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., pp. 52, 59. Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, p. 22. Ibid., NMML, pp. 27–28. Badri Narayan, Woman Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India: Culture, Identity and Politics (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006); Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, pp. 29–35. The Pasis were active in the towns of Hardoi, Unnao, Raibareilly and Barabanki and would continuously move around armed with bows and arrows, spears and lathis. Gandhi had stepped in and got Shaukat Ali, the leader of the Khilafat movement, to approach Madari Pasi to surrender in order to prevent a bloody carnage. The Pasi’s troubles did not go away with laying down arms. The white soldiers in collusion with the zamindars took away their farms, goats and sheep. Most of the leaders festered in jails and remained under police watch even after being let out. P. Kumar, Shiv Verma, pp. 14–15. Shiv Verma, OHT 502, NMML, p. 43; The name Naujawan Bharat Sabha (NBS) was the Hindustani equivalent of Young Italy, Young Turkey and Young Ireland, all the revolutionary groups that Bhagat and his friends had read about while studying at the National College. See Ram Saran Das, History of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha (Chandigarh: Unistar, 2007), pp. 14–15. Shiv Verma, OHT 502, NMML, p. 42. Mazumdar, In Search of a Revolutionary Ideology and a Revolutionary Programme, pp. 122–130. Cited in Raj, Jab Jyoti Jagi, pp. 41–46. Shiv Verma, OHT 502, NMML; Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML; Bhagat Singh, The Jail Notebook and Other Writings, compiled with an Introduction by Chaman Lal (Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2007). It is well known that the bombing of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi was inspired by a similar action by the French anarchist August Vaillant (1861–1894) who had hurled a bomb at the French Chamber of Deputies in December 1893. See Habib, To Make the Deaf Hear; Jaidev Gupta, OHT 346, NMML, p. 85. Bhagat Singh had read about Vaillant and his courtroom speech in Upton Sinclair’s anthology A Cry for Justice: An Anthology of Literature of Social Protest (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Company, 1915); Jaidev Kapur and Jaidev Gupta mention Bhagat Singh having read Sinclair’s anthology. See Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, pp. 103–104; Jaidev Gupta, OHT 346, NMML, p. 85. According to J. Daniel Elam, many of the quotes attributed to different authors in Bhagat’s jail diary are extrapolated from Sinclair’s anthology; see Elam, ‘Commonplace Anti-Colonialism’, p. 4.

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28 Bhagat mentions the bombing of the Czar’s train in his essay ‘Russian Nihilists’, in K. C. Yadav and Babar Singh, eds, The Fragrance of Freedom: Writings of Bhagat Singh (Gurgaon: Hope India, 2006), p. 100. Vera Figner was involved in bombing of Czar’s carriage. She talks about it in her Memoirs of a Revolutionist (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1991), pp. 78– 81. 29 Figner, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, pp. 50–51. 30 Even Bankim had read a great deal of contemporary social theory – Mill, Comte, Spencer, Hegel and French philosophers; see Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness. Mazumdar, In Search of a Revolutionary Ideology and a Revolutionary Programme, pp. 52–75. 31 Mazumdar, In Search of a Revolutionary Ideology and a Revolutionary Programme, pp. 54–75. The Anushilan Samiti mobilised the youth on a large scale and in the city of Dacca alone there were six hundred Anushilan committees. Despite 20–30 revolutionary cadres being wiped out by the police every year the movement continued apace; in Manmathnath Gupta, Private Papers, List no 174, NMML, p. 12. According to Peters Heehs, the urban intellectuals associated with Bengal’s Swadeshi movement of 1905 also ‘resembled the Russian Slavophiles’ in their idolisation of the peasantry and love for the romanticised stateless socialism based on village economy. See Peter Heehs, ‘Foreign Influences on Bengali Revolutionary Terrorism 1902– 1908’, Modern Asian Studies 28, no. 3 (1994), pp. 533–556, 550. 32 Arun C. Bose, Indian Revolutionaries Abroad, 1905–1922 (Patna: Bharti Bhavan, 1971); Heehs, ‘Maniktala Secret Society’. 33 Heehs, ‘Foreign Influences on Bengali Revolutionary Terrorism 1902–1908’. 34 Harjot Oberoi, ‘Ghadar Movement and Its Anarchist Genealogy’, Economic and Political Weekly 44, no. 50 (2009), pp. 40–46: Harish K. Puri, Ghadar Movement: Ideology, Organisation, and Strategy (Amritsar: Guru Nanak Dev University Press, 1983), pp. 54–67; Ramnath, Haj to Utopia; Maia Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle (Oakland and Washington DC: A K Press and the Institute for Anarchist Studies, 2011), p. 63. 35 Emily C. Brown, Har Dayal: Hindu Revolutionary and Rationalist (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975), pp. 107, 112. 36 Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism, p. 95; Elam, ‘Echoes of Ghadr’. 37 Shruti Kapila, ‘Self, Spencer and Swaraj: Nationalist Thought and Critiques of Liberalism, 1890–1920’, Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 1 (1920), pp. 109–127, DOI:10.1017/S1479244306001077. 38 Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism, pp. 110–145.

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39 Heehs, ‘Foreign Influences on Bengali Revolutionary Terrorism 1902–1908’, p. 554. 40 Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left, p. 66. 41 The Bombay Railway Strike involving 50,000 workers, the Girni Kamgar Union Strike in Bombay city and other centres for six months involving 25,000 workers, the G.I.P. Strike involving 50,000 workers in Nagpur and Bombay, the strike by 20,000 Railway men of Liluah, Howrah, Oudal and Hsansa, in Sibnath Bannerjee Collections, List no. 236, Section III: Speeches and Writings of Sibnath Banerjee, No. 32 Meerut Conspiracy Case, NMML; Meena Menon and Neera Adarkar, eds, One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices: The Millworkers of Girangaon – An Oral History (Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2004). 42 Shiv Verma, OHT 502, NMML, p. 39; Kate O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-Irish Radical Connections, 1919–64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); Michael Silvestri, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Kevin Kenny, Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 43 Plowman, ‘Nationalism as a Weapon in Global Conflict’; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Ramnath, Haj to Utopia; Kris Manjapara, M.N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (New York: Routledge, 2010); Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Inter-War India. 44 Ajoy Ghosh, ‘Waha Dhoomketu ki Tarah Aya aur Chala Gaya’, cited in Sudhir Vidyarthi, ‘Sushila Didi ko Pranam’, in his Kranti ki Ibaratein (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2012), pp. 225–238, 229. 45 Shaukat Usmani, OHT 307, NMML, p. 51. 46 Ibid., p. 52. 47 A. Ghosh, ‘Waha Dhoomketu ki Tarah Aya aur Chala Gaya’, p. 229. 48 Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, pp. 224–225. 49 Shaukat Usmani, OHT 307, NMML, p. 51; M. G. Desai, OHT 183, NMML, also talks about how some of them felt that the British communists wanted India to be free not for the sake of Indian but in the interest of the British people themselves. The Labour Party criticised imperialism not because they were against it but because they felt they could govern India in economically and more progressive ways (p. 21). 50 Bhagwandas Mahour, OHT 478, NMML, p. 33. 51 Ibid. 52 Taranand Viyogi, Yugon ka Yatri: Nagarajun ki Jeevani (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2019), pp. 90–91.

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53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61

62 63 64

65

66 67 68 69

Notes

Shiv Verma, OHT 502, NMML, p. 43. Durga Das Khanna, OHT 294, NMML, p. 69. Sampuran Singh Tandon, OHT 451, NMML, p. 69. Ibid. M. C. Davar, OHT 51, NMML, p. 48. Comrade Ram Chandra, New Delhi, OHT 356, NMML, p. 41. Shiv Verma, OHT 502, NMML; Bhagwandas Mahour, OHT 478, NMML, p. 35. Shaukat Usmani, New Delhi, OHT 307, NMML, p. 52. S. Irfan Habib explains the HSRA not joining the Communist Party of India as a tactical measure because the latter ‘did not function as an open political party’ at the time. See Habib, To Make the Deaf Hear, p. 126, fn. 460. Bhagwandas Mahour, OHT 478, NMML, p. 35. Rebecca Karl, ‘Creating Asia: China in the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century’, The American Historical Review 103, no. 4 (October 1998), pp. 1096–1118; Samuel Moyn, ‘On the Nonglobalization of Ideas’, in Global Intellectual History, ed. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 187–204. The word ‘International’ made its way into the popular lexicon in the midnineteenth century with the formation of the First International in 1864, the first transnational organisation of the workingmen founded by Karl Marx. S. Verma, ‘Bhagat Singh’s March towards Socialism’, p. 54. Jai Gopal’s testimony in the court, The Tribune, 30 October 1929 and 31 October 1929, also in The Lahore Conspiracy Case Records, File. no. 79, Part II, pp. 701–909, Punjab Government Archives, Lahore, Pakistan (hereafter PGA). Benedict Anderson, ‘Preface’, in Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt, eds, Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2014), p. xxiii. Gupta, Jail Diary. Ibid., pp. 299–300. Ibid., pp. 300–302. Ibid., p. 40; B. Chandra, ‘Introduction’ to Bhagat Singh’s Why I Am an Atheist?; Bipan Chandra, Communalism in Modern India (Delhi: Vikas Publishing, 1989), p. 175; Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–1908 (Calcutta: People’s Publishing House, 1973); M. N. Roy, Selected Works of M. N. Roy, ed. Sibnarayan Ray, Vol. I (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 332, Vol. II (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 165–168; Harbans Mukhia, ‘Communalism: A Study in Socio-Historical Perspective’, Social Scientist 1, no. 1 (1972), pp. 45–47; Amales Tripathi, ‘Sri Aurobindo: A Study

Notes

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71

72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79

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of Messianic Nationalism’, The Calcutta Historical Journal 4, no. 1 (1979), pp. 62–75; Barbara Southard, ‘The Political Strategy of Aurobindo Ghosh: The Utilization of Hindu Religious Symbolism and the Problem of Political Mobilization in Bengal’, Modern Asian Studies 14, no. 3 (1980), pp. 353–376. Heehs, ‘Maniktala Secret Society’, p. 368; Peter Heehs, ‘Bengali Religious Nationalism and Communalism’, The International Journal of Hindu Studies 1, no. 1 (1997), pp. 117–139; Peter Heehs, ‘Shades of Orientalism: Paradoxes and Problems in Indian Historiography’, History and Theory 42, no. 2 (2003), pp. 169–195; Silvio Ferrari, ‘Separation of Church and State in Contemporary European Society’, Journal of Church and State 30, no. 3 (1988), pp. 533–547. B. Chandra, Communalism in Modern India, p. 175; S. Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–1908; M. N. Roy, Selected Works of M.N. Roy, Vol. I, p. 332, Vol. II, pp. 165–168; Mukhia, ‘Communalism’. Rudrangshu Mukherjee in his essay analysing postcolonial narratives of the Revolt of 1857 also finds a similar discomfort amongst the contemporary scholars analysing the role religion played in the uprising. In his view, historians writing a decade after independence were influenced ‘by the prevailing spirit of secular-nationalism’ and therefore let religion slip out of their analysis; Rudrangshu Mukherjee, ‘Two Responses to 1857 in the Centenary Year’, Economic and Political Weekly 43, no. 24 (2008), pp. 51–55; Neeladri Bhattacharya, ‘Predicaments of Secular Histories’, Public Culture 20, no. 1 (2008), pp. 57–73. Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought and Postcolonial Friendship (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2006). Heehs, ‘Maniktala Secret Society’, p. 368; Heehs, ‘Bengali Religious Nationalism and Communalism’; Heehs, ‘Shades of Orientalism’. Heehs, ‘Shades of Orientalism’, p. 195. Ashis Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994). Oberoi, ‘Ghadar Movement and Its Anarchist Genealogy’, p. 45; Puri, Ghadar Movement; Maia Ramnath, ‘Two Revolutions: The Gadar Movement and India’s Radical Diaspora, 1913–1918’, Radical History Review 2005, no. 92 (2005), pp. 7–30. K. C. Yadav, ‘Editorial Note’, in K. C. Yadav and Babar Singh, eds, Bhagat Singh: Why I Am an Atheist – An Autobiographical Discourse (Gurgaon: Hope India, 2005), pp. 19–28. Postcard has the stamp of 22 July 1918 on it; in Sindhu, Yugdrashta Bhagat Singh aur Unke Mrityunjaya Purkhe, p. 134; Sindhu, Sardar Bhagat Singh, p. 9. K. C. Yadava and Babar Singh, eds, Bhagat Singh: Why I Am an Atheist – An Autobiographical Discourse (Gurgaon: Hope India, 2005), pp. 31–58, 36.

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80 It was published by Bhimsen Vidyalankar in Hindi Sandesh on 28 February 1933. See Sindhu, Sardar Bhagat Singh, pp. 10–17; Yashpal, ‘“Naujawan Bharat Sabha” se Shahadat Tak’, in Sudhir Vidyarthi, ed., Shaheed Bhagat Singh: Kranti ka Sakshya (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2015), pp. 111– 131, 116. 81 Sindhu, Sardar Bhagat Singh, p. 15. 82 Veena Dua, ‘Arya Samaj and Punjab Politics’, Economic and Political Weekly 5, nos 43/44 (1970), pp. 1787–1791; Krishna Kumar, ‘Quest for Self-Identity: Cultural Consciousness and Education in Hindi Region, 1880–1950’, Economic and Political Weekly 25, no. 23 (9 June 1990), pp. 1247–1249, 1251–1255; Francesca Orsini, ‘What Did They Mean by “Public”? Language, Literature and the Politics of Nationalism’, Economic and Political Weekly 34, no. 7 (1999), pp. 409–416. 83 Bhagat Singh, ‘Universal Brotherhood: Indian Perspective’, in K. C. Yadav and Babar Singh, eds, The Fragrance of Freedom: Writings of Bhagat Singh (Gurugram: Hope India, 2006), pp. 237–242. See Simona Sawhney, ‘Death in Three Scenes of Recitation’, Postcolonial Studies 16, no. 2 (2013), pp. 202–215, on the language available to the revolutionaries to encode their ideas. Ania Loomba in her Revolutionary Desires also raises the question of language (pp. 61–62). 84 Ramphal Singh, Vasudaiv Kutumbakam: Samajik Itihaas (Delhi: Rajesh Prakashan, 2016), p. 13. 85 Elam, ‘Commonplace Anti-Colonialism’, p. 7. The writers who have sought to portray Bhagat as a ‘fully developed’ radical thinker and philosopher include: Bipan Chandra, Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India; Kuldip Nayar, The Martyr; Chaman Lal, ‘Introduction’, in Bhagat Singh, The Jail Notebook and Other Writings, compiled by Chaman Lal (Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2007); Habib, To Make the Deaf Hear. 86 Elam, ‘Commonplace Anti-Colonialism’, p. 7; Isabel Hofmeyer, Gandhi’s Printing Press (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 87 Aparna Vaidik, ‘Was Bhagat Singh an Internationalist? Resistance and Identity in Global Age’, in Vivek Sachdeva, Queeny Pradhan and Anu Venugopalan, eds, Identities in South Asia: Conflicts and Assertions (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 175–197. 88 Shiv Verma, OHT 502, NMML, p. 40. 89 Jaidev Gupta, OHT 346, NMML, pp. 5–7; Sindhu, Yugdrashta Bhagat Singh aur Unke Mrityunjaya Purkhe, pp. 15–25. 90 Jaidev Gupta, OHT 346, NMML, p. 9. There is no mention of Bhagat’s family being Arya Samaji in the following biographies of Bhagat Singh: Chaman Lal, ‘Revolutionary Legacy of Bhagat Singh’, Economic and Political

Notes

91 92 93 94 95 96

97 98 99 100 101 102

103 104

105

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Weekly 42, no. 37 (2007), pp. 3712–3718; Grewal, Bhagat Singh, p. 26; Habib, To Make the Deaf Hear; Nayar, Sarfaroshi ki Tamanna. Kultar Singh, ‘Swami Dayanand aur Humara Parivaar’, in Vidyarnav Sharma, ed., Yug ke Devta: Bismil aur Ashfaq (Delhi: Praveen Prakashan), pp. 43–44; Sindhu, Yugdrashta Bhagat Singh aur Unke Mrityunjaya Purkhe. Sindhu, Yugdrashta Bhagat Singh aur Unke Mrityunjaya Purkhe, p. 69; Yashpal also talks about this in his reminiscences; cited in Yadav and Singh, Bhagat Singh, pp. 114–133. Sindhu, Yugdrashta Bhagat Singh aur Unke Mrityunjaya Purkhe, p. 17. Ibid., pp. 21–22. Ibid., pp. 68–88; Yashpal, ‘“Naujawan Bharat Sabha” se Shahadat Tak’, p. 112. He wrote it while undergoing trial in the Lahore Conspiracy Case (1929– 1930). It was published on 27 September 1931 in The People with the title ‘Why I Am an Atheist’ and lays out his journey with religion. Yadav and Singh, Bhagat Singh, pp. 31–58. Yashpal, ‘“Naujawan Bharat Sabha” se Shahadat Tak’, pp. 114, 124–125. Mathura Das Thapar, OHT 308, NMML, pp. 1–5. Shiv Verma, OHT 502, NMML, p. 57. Ibid. Vidyarthi, Kranti ki Ibaratein, p. 38. Shiv Verma, OHT 502, NMML, p. 57; K. C. Yadav and K. S. Arya, ‘Arya Samaj and the Revolutionary Movement’, in K. C. Yadav and K. S. Arya, eds, Arya Samaj and the Freedom Movement, Vol. 1, 1875–1918 (Delhi: Manohar, 1988), pp. 190–236; Comrade Ram Chandra, Ideology and Battle Cries of Indian Revolutionaries, pp. 3, 85–86. Ram Chandra also reiterates this aspect about the revolutionaries and militant nationalists from Punjab. L. F. Chand, OHT, CSAS, p. 3; Kumari Lajjawati, OHT 471, NMML, p. 1; Comrade Ram Chandra, OHT 356, NMML, p. 1. Hansraj Vohra stayed at the Arya Samaj Mandir in Rawalpindi (P.W. 167: Lala Munshi Ram, Inspector of Police, CID, Lahore), in The Lahore Conspiracy Case Records, File no. 11, PGA; Kanwal Nath Tiwari lived in the Arya Samaj Mandir in Calcutta for about two years (P.W. 397: Tulsi Ram, 19, jamadar at the Arya Samaj, Cornwallis Street, Calcutta), in Malwinderjit Singh Waraich, Rajwanti Mann and Harish Jain, eds, Hanging of Bhagat Singh, Vol. II (Chandigarh: Unistar, 2010), pp. 556–557; Sindhu, Yugdrashta Bhagat Singh aur Unke Mrityunjaya Purkhe, p. 160. Sukhdev Raj travelled to Rangoon and stayed at the local Arya Samaj Mandir; see his Jab Jyoti Jagi, p. 82; Vidyarthi, ‘Sushila Didi ko Pranam’, pp. 81–82. Nonica Datta, ‘The “Subalternity” of Education: Gurukuls in Rural Southeast Punjab’, in Mushirul Hasan, ed., Knowledge, Power and Politics: Educational

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109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

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Institutions in India (Delhi: Roli Books, 1998), pp. 27–65; John Rosselli, ‘The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal’, Past and Present 86, no. 1 (1980), pp. 121–148, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/86.1.121. Daniel Winchester, ‘Embodying the Faith: Religious Practice and the Making of a Muslim Moral Habitus’, Social Forces 86, no. 4 ( June 2008), pp. 1753–1780; Philip A. Mellor and Chris Shilling, ‘Re-conceptualising the Religious Habitus: Reflexivity and Embodied Subjectivity in Global Modernity’, Culture and Religion 15, no. 3 (2014), pp. 275–297. Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, p. 137; S. Verma, ‘Bhagat Singh’s March towards Socialism’, p. 48. Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, pp. 136–137. Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, p. 50; Karmendu Sisir in his collected works of Radha Mohan Gokul says the suggestion that they should add the word ‘socialist’ to the party’s title had come from Gokul in the presence of Chandrashekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh, Shiv Verma and others as they were attempting to regroup after the Kakori sentencing. See Sisir, ‘Ek The Radha Mohan Gokul’, pp. 30–31. Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, p. 137. Khatri, ‘Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad’, pp. 13–14; Raj, Jab Jyoti Jagi, pp. 147–149. Bhagwandas Mahour, OHT 478, NMML, p. 51. S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, p. 62. Vidyarthi, Kranti ki Ibaratein, p. 25. Kundan Lal, Azad’s associate, narrated these lines to Vidyarthi, p. 27. Gupta, ‘Gandhivaadi se Krantikari’, p. 222. Bhagwandas Mahour, OHT 478, NMML, p. 47. Ibid., pp. 13, 32–33. S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, pp. 73–74. Ibid., p. 90. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 62; Bhagwandas Mahour, OHT 478, NMML, p. 33; Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, pp. 136–137. S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, p. 26. Bhagwandas Mahour, OHT 478, NMML, p. 43. Gupta, Jail Diary, pp. 310–311. Ibid. Ibid. Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, pp. 28–29.

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127 Manmathnath Gupta, OHT 174, NMML, pp. 57–58; Shiv Verma in his later writings also admits that they were unable to see the contradiction between ‘reconciling counter-terrorism with the work of organising the workers and the peasants’ (S. Verma, ‘Bhagat Singh’s March towards Socialism’, p. 56). 128 This was true, for instance, of FLN (Front de Libération Nationale), the revolutionary party that inherited the Algerian state in 1962. FLN at the time of Algerian independence primarily enjoyed military legitimacy, not ideological and moral, because its apparent success was largely a creation of violence. Methodical internal purges to pre-empt acts of vengeance and reprisals against detractors or ‘collaborators’ had ensured the FLN leadership remained in control. The French had also inadvertently helped boost FLN’s popularity when it fell for its leader Ben M’Hidi’s ruse of bringing collective retribution and civilian terror. Compared to FLN, the HSRA did not lead India to independence; however, their political success lay in their apparent ‘failure’ to manoeuvre themselves into power and become spokesmen for the so-called Indian masses. The HSRA’s famous trial and hunger strikes (1929– 1931) enabled them to retain the moral high ground in the anti-colonial political arena and thus ensured their continued celebration in the nationalist hagiography and in the popular culture. See Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 (New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2006) and Aparna Vaidik, Revolutionaries on Trial: Sedition, Betrayal and Martyrdom (New Delhi: Aleph, forthcoming). 129 Gupta, Jail Diary, p. 32; Ajoy Ghosh, however, presents Azad’s views a little differently. According to Ghosh, Azad held the view that most revolutionaries should work towards mobilising peasants and workers, leaving a few of them to carry out armed actions and to train cadres in handling arms. See A. Ghosh, Bhagat Singh and His Comrades, p. 31. 130 Bhagwandas Mahour, OHT 478, NMML, pp. 40–41. 131 Ibid., p. 46. 132 Ibid., p. 45. 133 A. Ghosh, Bhagat Singh and His Comrades, p. 248; see also Mazumdar, In Search of a Revolutionary Ideology and a Revolutionary Programme, pp. 177– 178. 134 Heehs, ‘Maniktala Secret Society’; Wolfers, ‘Born Like Krishna in a PrisonHouse’. 135 Gupta, Jail Diary, pp. 297–298. 136 Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, p. 57. 137 Sanyal, Bandi Jivan, p. 248. 138 Ibid., p. 242; Mazumdar, In Search of a Revolutionary Ideology and a Revolutionary Programme, pp. 177–178.

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139 140 141 142 143 144

Gupta, Jail Diary, pp. 297–298. Manmathnath Gupta, OHT, CSAS, pp. 11–13. Bhagwandas Mahour, OHT 478, NMML, p. 43. Rajaram Shastri, OHT 434, NMML, p. 232. Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, pp. 31–32. Kavita Punjabi in her work on the women in Tebhaga movement also notes the difference in the content of the memoirs of the urban middle-class activists and the ones coming from rural backgrounds, which were more ‘non-linear’ and ‘episodic’, talked about personal lives and were candid about internal differences. See Kavita Punjabi, ‘Between Testimony and History: Interpreting Oral Narratives of Tebhaga Women’, in Supriya Chaudhuri and Sajni Mukherji, eds, Literature and Gender: Essays for Jasodhara Bagchi (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2002), pp. 241–270, 250. Ushabai, wife of S. A. Dange, also talks about being taken less seriously by her husband and other other upper-class progressives in the Communist Party because of her humble background; see Loomba, Revolutionary Desires, pp. 170–171. B. Mahour, ‘Ve Suratein Ilahi Kis Desh Mein Bastiyan Hain’, p. 37. Mahour met Bhagat for the first time after the HSRA had set up a den in Agra. Mahour had been called to Agra to execute the plan to rescue Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee from the Agra Jail. B. Mahour, ‘Amar Shaheed Bhagat Singh’, p. 30. Ibid., p. 38. Raj, Jab Jyoti Jagi, pp. 33–35; S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, p. 99. Batukeshwar Dutt, ‘Mai to Ek Gushte-Gubaar Hoon’, in Sudhir Vidyarthi, ed., Shaheed Bhagat Singh: Kranti ka Sakshya (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2015), pp. 19–31, 23. Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, p. 47. B. Mahour, ‘Amar Shaheed Bhagat Singh’, p. 39; Sindhu, Yugdrashta Bhagat Singh aur Unke Mrityunjaya Purkhe, pp. 260–261. Ibid. S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, pp. 37–40. Ibid., p. 89. Sindhu, Yugdrashta Bhagat Singh aur Unke Mrityunjaya Purkhe, pp. 268–269. B. Mahour, ‘Chandrashekhar Azad’, p. 54. B. Mahour, ‘Ve Suratein Ilahi Kis Desh Mein Bastiyan Hain’. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., p. 40. Bhagat Singh, ‘What Should a Revolutionary Party and Its Programme Be Like? An Address to the Young Political Workers’, in K. C. Yadav and Babar Singh, eds, The Fragrance of Freedom: Writings of Bhagat Singh (Gurgaon:

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146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160

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161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183

1 2

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Hope India, 2006), pp. 52–64, 61; Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, pp. 12–13. Heehs, ‘Maniktala Secret Society’. Mazumdar, In Search of a Revolutionary Ideology and a Revolutionary Programme, pp. 50–52. Bhagwandas Mahour, OHT 478, NMML, p. 11. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), p. 294. Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, pp. 57–58. S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, p. 61. Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, p. 58. S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, p. 61; S. Verma, ‘Tinki Ab Kaan Kahani Suno Karein’, p. 63. Yashpal, ‘“Hispras” aur Azad’, in Sudhir Vidyarthi, ed., Agnipunj: Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad ki Krantikari Jeevan Katha (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2007), pp. 228–253, 231. B. Mahour, ‘Ve Senapati The aur Mitra Bhi’, pp. 48–49; B. Mahour, ‘Chandrashekhar Azad’, p. 81. Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, pp. 150–151. S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, p. 64. Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, p. 168. B. Mahour, ‘Ve Suratein Ilahi Kis Desh Mein Bastiyan Hain’, p. 48. Heehs, ‘Maniktala Secret Society’; Ramnath, ‘Two Revolutions’; Gupta, Jail Diary; Bismil, Nij Jeevan ki Ek Cchata, pp. 93–94. Bismil and Sanyal fell out with each other towards the end; Raj, Jab Jyoti Jagi, pp. 56–57. Vaidik, ‘History of a Renegade Revolutionary’. Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, p. 53. Gupta, ‘Gandhivaadi se Krantikari’, p. 226. B. Mahour, ‘Amar Shaheed Bhagat Singh’, pp. 41–43; A. Ghosh, ‘Waha Dhoomketu ki Tarah Aya aur Chala Gaya’, , pp. 229–230. B. Mahour, ‘Ve Suratein Ilahi Kis Desh Mein Bastiyan Hain’, p. 48. Gandhi, Affective Communities. Vaidik, Revolutionaries on Trial. Vaidik, ‘History of a Renegade Revolutionary’.

Chapter 4

Gupta, ‘Gandhiwadi se Krantikari’, p. 221. Jonathan Parry, Death in Banaras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Jonathan Parry, ‘Ghosts, Greed and Sin: The Occupational Identity of

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the Banaras Funeral Priests’, Man, New Series, 15, no. 1 (March 1980), pp. 88–111; Jonathan Parry, ‘Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagus Ascetic’, in Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, eds, Death and the Regeneration of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 74–110. 3 See W. R. Pinch, ‘Hiding in Plain Sight’, p. 109. 4 Parry, ‘Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagus Ascetic’, pp. 74–110. 5 He was gunned down on the morning of 27 February 1931 in Allahabad’s Alfred Park in a police encounter. Gaud and Sharma, Krantiveer Chandrashekhar Azad aur Unke Do Gaddar Saathi, pp. 133–135; The Tribune, 6 March 1931, p. 2 and 8 March 1931, p. 12. For a detailed discussion of Azad’s death, its reportage and its visual representation, see Maclean, ‘The Embodiment of Quicksilver’. 6 Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, p. 83. 7 Peter van der Veer, ‘Taming the Ascetic: Devotionalism in a Hindu Monastic Order’, Man 22, no. 4 (December 1987), pp. 680–695; David N. Lorenzen, ‘Warrior Ascetics in Indian History’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 98, no. 1 ( January–March 1978), pp. 61–75, 72–75; W. R. Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires, pp. 196–197; Vijay Pinch, ‘Gosain Tawaif: Slaves, Sex, and Ascetics in Rasdhan, ca. 1800–1857’, Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 3 ( July 2004), pp. 559–597; Nitin Sinha, ‘Mobility, Control and Criminality in Early Colonial India, 1760s–1850s’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 45, no. 1 (2008), pp. 1–33. Thanks to William R. Pinch for the conversations that went into writing this chapter, especially the sections on asceticism and sovereignty. 8 Chandrima Chakraborty, Masculinity, Asceticism and Hinduism: Past and Present Imaginings of India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2011). 9 Even though they were radically different in terms of being mixed-sex spaces, the communist communes in India also embraced the ascetic ideal. See Rajarshi Dasgupta, ‘The Ascetic Modality: A Critique of Communist Self-Fashioning’, in Nivedita Menon, Aditya Nigam and Sanjay Palshikar, eds, Critical Studies in Politics: Exploring Sites, Selves, Power (Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2014), pp. 67–87. See also Ania Loomba’s Revolutionary Desires, pp. 112–155; Joseph S. Alter, ‘The “Sannyasi” and the Indian Wrestler: The Anatomy of a Relationship’, American Ethnologist 19, no. 2 (May 1992), pp. 317–336, 329. 10 Lorenzen, ‘Warrior Ascetics in Indian History’; W. R. Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires, pp. 16, 240–241; V. Pinch, ‘Gosain Tawaif ’, p. 566; Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy. 11 Vaidik, ‘Was Bhagat Singh an Internationalist?’ 12 S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, p. 67; B. Mahour, ‘Chandrashekhar Azad’, p. 74.

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13 Ibid. 14 Sadashiv Malkapurkar, ‘Kakori Dal ki Jhansi Shakha’, in Bhagwandas Mahour, ed., Kakori Shaheed Smriti (Lucknow: Kakori Shaheed Ardhshatabdi Samaroh Samiti, 1977), pp. 132–139, 137. 15 B. Mahour, ‘Ve Senapati The aur Mitra Bhi’, pp. 42–43; Shiv Verma, OHT 502, NMML, p. 22; Bimal Prasad Jain, OHT, CSAS, p. 35; Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, p. 167. 16 Bhagwandas Mahour, ‘Rajguru’, in Bhagwandas Mahour, Sadashiv Malkapurkar and Shiv Verma, Yash ki Dharohar (Lucknow: Rahul Foundation, 2006, 2010), pp. 11–24, 12. 17 Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, p. 69. 18 Ramkrishna Khatri, ‘Ve hi Mujhe Party Mein Laaye’, in Sudhir Vidyarthi, ed., Agnipunj: Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad ki Krantikari Jeevan Katha (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2007), pp. 71–87, 76; Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, p. 50. 19 Gupta, They Lived Dangerously, p. 149. 20 Manmathnath Gupta, ‘Chandrashekhar Azad’, in Ramesh Sinha, ed., Smarika: Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad: Balidaan Ardhshtabadi (Allahabad: Shaheed Chandra Shekhar Azad Balidaan Ardhshatabdi Samaroh Samiti, Leader Press, 1951), pp. 15–19, 19. 21 Manmathnath Gupta, OHT, CSAS, p. 23. 22 Ramnath, Haj to Utopia; Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Inter-War India; Maclean, ‘The History of a Legend’; Maclean, ‘The Portrait’s Journey’; A. G. Noorani, The Trial of Bhagat Singh: Politics of Justice (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); Nayar, The Martyr; Nayar, Without Fear; Habib, To Make the Deaf Hear; V. N. Datta, Gandhi and Bhagat Singh (New Delhi: Rupa, 2008); Malwinderjit Singh Waraich, Rajwanti Mann and Harish Jain, eds, Hanging of Bhagat Singh, Vols I, II and III (Chandigarh: Unistar, 2010); Gaur, Martyr as Bridegroom. 23 As quoted by Durga Devi Vohra in her article ‘Bhaiya Azad’ published in her Montessori Intermediate College annual magazine of 1979, cited in Comrade Ram Chandra, Ideology and Battle Cries of Indian Revolutionaries, p. 203. 24 Kripashankar Hajela, ‘Amar Shaheed Ashfaqulla Khan’, in Bhagwandas Mahour, ed., Kakori Shaheed Smriti (Lucknow: Kakori Shaheed Ardhshatabdi Samaroh Samiti, 1977), pp. 41–44, 43. 25 Rawat, ‘Amar Shaheed Roshan Singh’, p. 55. 26 Bijoy Kumar Sinha, ‘Sirdar Bhagat Singh: His Last Moments’, The Deccan Chronicle, 23 March 1966, pp. 4, 8, in Individual Collection of Bijoy Kumar Sinha, Acc. No. 1125, Manuscript Collections, NMML. 27 Gupta, Jail Diary, p. 256.

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28 Ibid., p. 254. 29 RomilaThapar, ‘Renunciation: Making of a Counter-Culture?’ in her Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 876–913, 903; Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–22’, in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Vol. III (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 288–342. 30 Bismil, Nij Jeevan ki Ek Cchata, p. 105. 31 Parry, Death in Banaras. 32 Bismil, Nij Jeevan ki Ek Cchata, p. 123. 33 Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, pp. 100, 149; Babulal Sharma, ‘Amar Shaheed Rajendranath Lahiri’, in Bhagwandas Mahour, ed., Kakori Shaheed Smriti, (Lucknow: Kakori Shaheed Ardhshatabdi Samaroh Samiti, 1977), pp. 35–36, 36. 34 Kumari Lajjawati, OHT 471, NMML, p. 123. 35 Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness, p. 105. Interestingly, in the Anandmath, Mahendra is the only santaan not to be given a name with ananda suffix. The reason I suppose was that he was destined to return to the domestic realm. He was not a non-returning hero. 36 Edmund R. Leach, ‘Two Essays Concerning the Symbolic Representation of Time’, in his Rethinking Anthropology (London: Athlone Press, 1961), pp. 124–136, 135. See also Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, ‘Introduction’, in Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, eds, Death and the Regeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 1–44, 17. Bhagat in one his last letters to Sukhdev condemns his desire to commit suicide, which was seen as ‘bad’ death, a moral capitulation in the face of oppression (letter reproduced in Yadav and Singh, The Fragrance of Freedom). 37 A. J. Sack, The Birth of Russian Democracy (New York: Russian Information Bureau, 1918), pp. 51–52; Lev Deich, ‘Iuzhnye buntari’, Golos Minuvshago 9, p. 54 (Lev Deich was Zasulich’s common law husband), cited in Barbara Alpern Engles and Clifford N. Rosenthal, eds and trans, Five Sisters: Women against the Czar (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press, 2013). 38 Richard Pipes, ‘The Trial of Vera Zasulich’, Russian History 37, no. 1 (2010), pp. v–82; Anna Siljack, Angel of Vengeance: The Girl Who Shot the Governor of St. Petersburg and Sparked the Age of Assassination (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008); Samuel Kuchrov, ‘The Case of Vera Zasulich’, The Russian Review 11, no. 2 (1952), pp. 86–96; Ezhov S. Tsederbaum, Zhenshchina v russkom revoliutsionnom dvizhenni (Leningrad, 1927), p. 69, cited in Barbara Alpern Engles and Clifford N. Rosenthal, eds and trans, Five Sisters: Women against the Czar (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press, 2013), p. 78. Vera was

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40 41 42

43 44 45

46 47 48

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personally astonished and disheartened by her acquittal. Vera explained: ‘Had I been convicted, I should have been prevented by main force from doing anything, and should have been tranquil, and the thought of having done all I was able to do for the cause would have been a consolation to me.’ Cited in Sergius Stepniak, Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883), pp. 110–111. Stepniak was a contemporary revolutionary and the editor of Zemlyia Y Volia, Land of Liberty. Jaakoff Prelooker, Heroes and Heroines of Russia: Builders of a New Commonwealth (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., Ltd, 1908), pp. 84–86, 120; Sack’s The Birth of Russian Democracy, pp. 52, 78, 106, 182, 217–218. Jaakoff Prelooker (1860–1935) was a Russian Jewish religious reformer who settled in Britain in 1891 where he worked as a lecturer, magazine editor (Anglo-Russian) and a publicist. See John Slatter, ‘Jaakoff Prelooker and the Anglo-Russian’, Immigrants and Minorities 2, no. 3 (November 1983), pp. 48–66. A. J. Sack was the Director of the Russian Information Bureau in the United States at the time he wrote the book. The purpose of the book was to educate the American public about the efforts of the Russian revolutionaries since the 1820s that eventually culminated in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, pp. 11, 104. Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism, p. 272, fn. 43. Yadav and Singh, The Fragrance of Freedom, pp. 99, 101. I also found a copy of Oscar Wilde’s play in the Dwarkadass Library (now housed in Chandigarh’s Lajpat Bhawan) from where the HSRA were issuing and reading books. (Although inspired by Zasulich, Wilde’s play had little to do with her life except that the protagonist was her namesake and the play was set in Russia.) Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 16. Ibid. Figner, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, p. 208; see also Lynne Hartnett, ‘The Making of a Revolutionary Icon: Vera Nikolaevna Figner and the People’s Will in the Wake of the Assassination of Tsar Aleksandr II’, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 43, nos 2–3 (2001), pp. 249– 270. See Marcia Morris, Saints and Revolutionaries: The Ascetic Hero in Russian Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 10 Ibid. B. Chatterjee, Anandmath or the Sacred Brotherhood, trans. Lipner, Part I, ch. 10, p. 148.

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49 Ibid., Part II, ch. 4, p. 178. 50 See Marcia Morris, ‘Introduction: The Nonreturning Hero’ in her Saints and Revolutionaries: The Ascetic Hero in Russian Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 1–14; Tanuja Kothiyal, Nomadic Narratives: A History of Mobility and Identity in the Great Indian Desert (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Christian Lee Novetzke, Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 51 Morris, ‘Introduction: The Nonreturning Hero’. 52 J. Daniel Elam talks about Hardayal’s writing reorienting the moment of revolution ‘to a time both beyond and before the present’ in ‘Echoes of Ghadr’, p. 12. 53 Sanyal, Bandi Jivan, p. 234. 54 Ram Prasad Bismil, ‘Karyakartao ki Durdasha’, in his Nij Jeevan ki Ek Cchata, in Dinesh Sharma and Asha Joshi, eds, Ram Prasad Bismil Rachnavali (Delhi: Swarn Jayanti, 1997), pp. 35–123, pp. 82–83. 55 Bismil, Nij Jeevan ki Ek Cchata, pp. 82–83; Radheshyam Sharma, ‘Swargiya Krantiveer Jogeshchandra Chatterjee’, in Bhagwandas Mahour, ed., Kakori Shaheed Smriti (Lucknow: Kakori Shaheed Ardhshatabdi Samaroh Samiti, 1977), pp. 61–63. 56 Gupta, They Lived Dangerously, p. 106. 57 Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, pp. 96–98. 58 Ibid. 59 B. Mahour, ‘Ve Suratein Ilahi Kis Desh Mein Bastiyan Hain’, p. 38; Bloch and Parry, Death and the Regeneration of Life. 60 Parry, ‘Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagus Ascetic’. 61 Ibid., pp. 99–100. 62 Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, pp. 96–98. 63 Ibid., p. 114. 64 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia’, American Ethnologist 8, no. 3, Symbolism and Cognition (August 1981), pp. 494–511. Paul M. Toomey, ‘Krishna’s Consuming Passions: Food as Metaphor and Metonym for Emotion at Mount Govardhan’, in Own M. Lynch, ed, Divine Passions: The Social Construction of Emotion in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 157–181. 65 Caroline W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 2. 66 B. Mahour, ‘Ve Suratein Ilahi Kis Desh Mein Bastiyan Hain’, pp. 41–42. 67 Swaraj Basu, Dynamics of a Caste Movement: The Rajbansis of North Bengal, 1910–1947 (Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2003); Lucy Carroll, ‘Origins of the

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69 70

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Kayastha Temperance Movement’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 11, no. 4 (1974), pp. 432–447; Lucy Carroll, ‘The Temperance Movement in India: Politics and Social Reform’, Modern Asian Studies 10, no. 3 (1976), pp. 417–480; David M. Fahey and Padma Manian, ‘Poverty and Purification: The Politics of Gandhi’s Campaign for Prohibition’, Historian 67, no. 3 (2005), pp. 489–450; K. Palaniappan, ‘Temperance Movement and Excise Policy of the British in the Madras Presidency (up to 1920)’, Quarterly Journal of the Mythic Society 92, nos 3–4 (2001), pp. 133–161; Kaushik Bhaumik, ‘At Home in the World: Cinema and Cultures of the Young in Bombay in the 1920s’, in  Douglas E. Haynes, Abigail McGowan,  Tirthankar Roy and Haruka Yanagisawa, eds, Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 136–154; Douglas E. Haynes, ‘Selling Masculinity: Advertisements for Sex Tonics and the Making of Modern Conjugality in Western India, 1900–1945’, South Asia Journal of South Asian Studies 35, no. 4 (2012), pp. 787–831; Markus Daechsel, The Politics of SelfExpression: The Urdu Middle-class Milieu in Mid-twentieth Century India and Pakistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 2013); David Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). James W. Edwards, ‘Semen Anxiety in South Asian Cultures: Cultural and Transcultural Significance’, Medical Anthropology 7, no. 3 (1983), pp. 51–67; Peter van der Veer, ‘The Power of Detachment: Disciplines of Body and Mind in the Ramanandi Order’, American Ethnologist 16, no. 3 (August 1989), pp. 458–470, 462–463; Joseph S. Alter, ‘Ayurveda and Sexuality: Sex Therapy and the ‘‘Paradox of Virility’’’, in Dagmar Wujastyk and Frederick M. Smith, eds, Modern and Global Ayurveda: Pluralism and Paradigms (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008), pp. 177–200, 179. Bismil, Nij Jeevan ki Ek Cchata, p. 45. Joseph S. Alter, The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992 [http://ark.cdlib.org/ ark:/13030/ft6n39p104/]), ch. 5, ‘Brahmcharya’, and ch. 6, ‘Nag Panchami: Snakes, Sex and Semen’. Alter, ‘The “Sannyasi” and the Indian Wrestler’; Alter, The Wrestler’s Body, ch. 6, ‘Nag Panchami: Snakes, Sex and Semen’, section ‘Milk’. Edwards, ‘Semen Anxiety in South Asian Cultures’, pp. 5–6. Edwards discusses the blood count for semen in Chinese, Sri Lankan, Punjabi and Rajasthani folk beliefs and in Unani medicine. Alter, The Wrestler’s Body, ch. 6, ‘Nag Panchami: Snakes, Sex and Semen’, section ‘Ghee’.

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74 Virendra Sindhu, ‘Dairy aur Diary’, in his Yugdrashta Bhagat Singh aur Unke Mrityunjaya Purkhe (Delhi: Rajpal and Sons, 2009), pp. 158–161. 75 B. Dutt, ‘Mai to Ek Gushte-Gubaar Hoon’, p. 23. 76 B. Mahour, ‘Ve Suratein Ilahi Kis Desh Mein Bastiyan Hain’, p. 45. 77 Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, p. 69. 78 B. Mahour, ‘Chandrashekhar Azad’, p. 64. 79 For instance, there was emphasis on the avoidance of spices and oil, and on the consumption of milk and ghee (clarified butter) that were believed to conserve the semen. N. Datta, ‘The “Subalternity” of Education’, p. 10. Anshu Malhotra, ‘The Body as a Metaphor for the Nation: Caste, Masculinity and Femininity in the Satyarth Prakash of Dayananda Saraswati’, in Avril Powell and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, eds, Rhetoric and Reality: Gender and the Colonial Experience in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 121–153. See also Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression, pp. 106–113, and Guy Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb: Plural Healing in Late Colonial India (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007), pp. 244–262. 80 van der Veer, ‘The Power of Detachment’, p. 463. 81 Bismil, Nij Jeevan ki Ek Cchata, p. 57. 82 Ibid., pp. 45, 56–59. 83 Ibid., p. 58. 84 Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, p. 117. 85 Yashpal, ‘“Hispras” aur Azad’, p. 239. 86 Loomba, Revolutionary Desires, pp. 13, 38; Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). 87 Ania Loomba discuses it exhaustively in her book Revolutionary Desires, pp. 73–111. 88 Ibid., p. 87. 89 Ibid., p. 88. 90 S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, pp. 53–55. 91 Ibid. 92 Sindhu, Yugdrashta Bhagat Singh aur Unke Mrityunjaya Purkhe, pp. 265–266. 93 B. Mahour, ‘Chandrashekhar Azad’, p. 49. 94 Ibid., p. 75. 95 S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, p. 60. 96 Bhagat’s story of having run away from home when his father began to insist on his marriage is well known and has been highlighted in various retellings of his life. 97 Vaishampayan, Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, p. 116.

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98 Bismil, Nij Jeevan ki Ek Cchata, p. 103. See also Gaur, Martyr as Bridegroom, pp. 139–150, on marriage and martyrdom. 99 Durga Devi Vohra, as told to K. C. Yadav, in Yadav and Singh, Bhagat Singh, pp. 162–170, 163; S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, pp. 44, 91; Virendra Sindhu, ‘Swabhaav ke Aaine Mein’, in Sudhir Vidyarthi, ed., Shaheed Bhagat Singh: Kranti ka Sakshya (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2015), pp. 307–317, 314. 100 Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, p.152. 101 Vishwanath Vaishampayan, ‘Azad ke Charitra ki Agnipariksha’, in his Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad, ed. Sudhir Vidyarthi (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2007), pp. 110–114. 102 Sikata Banerjee, ‘Gender and Nationalism: The Masculinization of Hinduism and Female Political Participation in India’, Women’s Study International Forum 26, no. 2 (2003), pp. 167–189; Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana, ‘Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender’, in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakravarty, eds, Writings on South Asian History and Society, Subaltern Studies IX (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 232–260. 103 Durga Devi Vohra, OHT 369, NMML, passim; Sukhdev Raj, ‘Durga Bhabhi’, in Sudhir Vidyarthi, ed., Jab Jyoti Jagi: Ek Krantikari ke Sansmaran (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2009), pp. 108–112; Maclean, ‘What Durga Bhabhi Did Next?’ 104 Loomba, Revolutionary Desires, pp. 51–52. Manini Chatterjee, Do or Die: The Chittagong Uprising, 1930–34 (New Delhi: Penguin, 1999); Hale, Terrorism in India. Radha Kumar, ‘Family and Factory: Women in the Bombay Cotton Textile Industry, 1919–1939’, in Sheila Rowbotham and Swasti Mitter, eds, Dignity and Daily Bread: New Forms of Economic Organising among Poor Women in the Third World and the First (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 53–72. For participation of women in underground revolutionary movements, see Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Durba Ghosh, ‘Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to 1980s’, Gender and History 25, no. 2 (August 2013), pp. 355–375; Srila Roy, ed., Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012); Mallarika Sinha Roy, Gender and Radical Politics in India: Magis Moments of Naxalbari (1965–1975) (New York: Routledge, 2011); Kavita Punjabi, Unclaimed Harvest: An Oral History of the Tebhaga Women’s Movement (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2015). 105 Alter, ‘The “Sannyasi” and the Indian Wrestler’, p. 331; R. Thapar, ‘Renunciation’; Romila Thapar, ‘The Householder and the Renouncer in the Brahmanical and Buddhist Traditions’, in her Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early

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107 108 109 110 111 112 113

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Indian History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 876–913, 914–945. See Lyndall Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 157; Roper talks about the sixteen-century European belief that people became Calvinists when they gave up whoring, drinking and gambling. Gupta, They Lived Dangerously, p. 108. B. Chatterjee, Anandmath or the Sacred Brotherhood, trans. Lipner, Part I, ch. 10, p. 145. Maclean, ‘What Durga Bhabhi Did Next?’ Shiv Verma in Sansmritiyan talks about how Rajguru became an integral part of the family: ‘Waha humaare parivaar ka abhinn ang ban gaya’ (p. 82). S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, p. 62. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 97. Iris Marion Young, ‘The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29, no. 1 (2003), pp. 1–25; Michel Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self ’, in Luther Martin, Huck Guttman and Patricia Hutton, eds, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), pp. 19–49; Iris Marion Young, ‘Autonomy, Welfare Reform, and Meaningful Work’, in Eva Feder Kittay and Ellen K. Feder, eds, The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency (Lantham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield., 2003), pp. 40–60. Durga Bhabhi, ‘Bhaiya Azad’, in Sudhir Vidyarthi, ed., Agnipunj: Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad ki Krantikari Jeevan Katha (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2007), pp. 100–104 (this article is same as Durga Devi Vohra’s ‘Bhaiya Azad’ published in her Montessori Intermediate College annual magazine of 1979; Comrade Ram Chandra references it in his Ideology and Battle Cries of Indian Revolutionaries, p. 203); Durga Devi Vohra, OHT 369, NMML; Tara Agrawal, ‘Jab Bhaiya ki Yaad Aati Hai’, in Sudhir Vidyarthi, ed., Agnipunj: Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad ki Krantikari Jeevan Katha (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2007), pp. 149–153; Shridevi Mussadi, ‘Kucch Bikhari Smritiyan’, in Sudhir Vidyarthi, ed., Agnipunj: Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad ki Krantikari Jeevan Katha (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2007), pp. 172–174; Shridevi Mussadi, ‘Ek Yug Beet Gaya’ in Ramesh Sinha, ed., Smarika: Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad: Balidaan Ardhshtabadi (Allahabad: Shaheed Chandra Shekhar Azad Balidaan Ardhshatabdi Samaroh Samiti, Leader Press, 1951), pp. 66–68; Kumari Lajjawati, OHT 471, NMML; Pal, Lahore Se Lucknow Tak; B. Mahour,

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116 117 118 119 120

121 122 123 124 125 126

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128

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‘Chandrashekhar Azad’, p. 47; Tara Agrawal, ‘Chandrashekhar Azad ke Sansmaran’, in Ramesh Sinha, ed., Smarika: Amar Shaheed Chandrashekhar Azad Balidaan Ardhshtabadi (Allahabad: Shaheed Chandra Shekhar Azad Balidaan Ardhshatabdi Samaroh Samiti, Leader Press, 1951), pp. 25–26. Even some of the male associates called him Bhaiya; see Bimal Prasad Jain, OHT, CSAS, p. 31. Interestingly, Prakashvati in her memoir talks about how she had to put up with the ‘offensive attitude’ and ‘the vulture-like looks of the comrades’ in the few days that she spent in a small revolutionary den. Pal, Lahore Se Lucknow Tak, p. 20. Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1983), pp. 134–135. Letter from Bhagat to Jaidev Gupta, Lahore Central Jail, 3 June 1930, in Jaidev Gupta, OHT 346, NMML, Appendix no. 1. B. Chatterjee, Anandmath or the Sacred Brotherhood, trans. Lipner, Part I, ch. I, p. 148. Ibid., Part III, ch. 4, pp. 194–198. Alter, ‘The “Sannyasi” and the Indian Wrestler’, p. 331. Here Alter is discussing the Chamars of Lucknow whose espousal of the sanyasi ideal enabled questioning of caste-based social hierarchies; see also Alter, The Wrestler’s Body, ch. 1, ‘Body Discipline: The Mechanics of Reform’. Alter, ‘The “Sannyasi” and the Indian Wrestler’, p. 331. Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left, p. 35. Jaidev Kapur, OHT, no. 431, NMML, p. 56. Kumari Lajjawati, OHT 471, p. 63; Shiv Verma, ed., Bhagat Singh: On the Path of Liberation (Chennai: Bharathi Puthakalaya, 2007), p. 78n. Letter by D. Petrie, Director of Intelligence, 25 May 1929, Home Political 192/1929 KW I, NAI; L. F. Chand, OHT, CSAS, p. 44; Maclean. ‘The History of a Legend’, pp. 8–9. The Tribune, 11 April 1929, p. 2 and 18 April 1929, p. 8; Hindustan Times, ‘Choice between Gandhi & Balraj: Sir D. Lindsay’s Statement’, 17 April 1929, p. 2; Reginald H. Craddock, The Dilemma in India (London: Constable & Co., 1929), p. 324. The Tribune, 11 April 1929, p. 2, and 18 April 1929, ‘Gandhi and Balraj’, p. 8. For an exploration of the iconographic representations of Chandrashekhar Azad, see Maclean, ‘The Embodiment of Quicksilver’. Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), p. 177. B. Mahour, ‘Chandrashekhar Azad’, p. 45.

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129 Jaidev Gupta, OHT 346, NMML, p. 11; Maclean, ‘The Embodiment of Quicksilver’. 130 Shiv Verma, ‘Sukhdev’, in Bhagwandas Mahour, Sadashiv Malkapurkar and Shiv Verma, Yash ki Dharohar (Lucknow: Rahul Foundation, 2006, 2010), pp. 111–122, 111. 131 S. Verma, Sansmritiiyan, pp. 73–74. Chandrima Chakraborty, ‘The Hindu Ascetic as Fitness Instructor: Reviving Faith in Fitness Yoga’, in Subhas Ranjan Chakraborty, Shantanu Chakrabarti and Kingshuk Chatterjee, eds, The Politics of Sport in South Asia (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 24–38. 132 Sindhu, Yugdrashta Bhagat Singh aur Unke Mrityunjaya Purkhe, p. 262. 133 Jaidev Kapur OHT 431, NMML, p. 109; Maclean, ‘The Embodiment of Quicksilver’; Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Inter-War India, p. 36. Maclean asserts that everyone in the party accepted Dutt as the volunteer for the bombing because the party did not want to lose another healthy body. 134 S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, p. 16; Michiel Baas, ‘The New Indian Male: Muscles, Masculinity and Middle Classness’, in  Knut A. Jacobsen, ed., Routledge Handbook of Contemporary India (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 444–456; Deepa Sreenivas, Sculpting a Middle Class: History, Masculinity and the Amar Chitra Katha in India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010). 135 Philip Lutgendorf, ‘Evolving a Monkey: Hanuman, Poster Art and Postcolonial Anxiety’,  Contributions to Indian Sociology 36, nos 1–2 (2002), pp. 71–112, 97; Namrata Ganneri, ‘Pahalwan Portraits: Manly Consumers of Physical Culture in Western India’, 2019, available at http://www. tasveergharindia.net/essay/pahalwan-portraits.html, accessed 6 November 2019. 136 S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, p. 73. 137 A. Verma, Batukeshwar Dutt, pp. 11–12. 138 Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, p. 1. 139 Raj, Jab Jyoti Jagi, pp. 33–34. 140 B. Mahour, ‘Ve Suratein Ilahi Kis Desh Mein Bastiyan Hain’, pp. 36–37. 141 Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy. 142 Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Military Sports and the History of the Martial Body in India’, Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 50, no. 4 (2007), pp. 490–523; Roselli, ‘The Self-Image of Effeteness’, pp. 121–148, 517; P. Sainath, ‘Kushti: The Secular & the Syncretic’, 19 December 2014, available at https:// ruralindiaonline.org/articles/kushti-the-secular-the-syncretic/, accessed 6 November 2019; Ganneri, ‘Pahalwan Portraits’; Namrata R. Ganneri, ‘The Debate on “Revival” and the Physical Culture Movement in Western India’, in  Katrin Bromber, Birgit Kraweitz and Joseph Maguire, eds, Sport Across Asia: Politics, Cultures, and Identities (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 121–143.

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143 O’Hanlon, ‘Military Sports and the History of the Martial Body in India’, p. 132; Sumit Sarkar,  Modern India 1885–1947 (New Delhi: Macmillan, 1983), p. 120; Abhik Roy and Michele L. Hammers, ‘Swami Vivekananda’s Rhetoric of Spiritual Masculinity: Transforming Effeminate Bengalis into Virile Men’, Western Journal of Communication 78, no. 4 (2014), pp. 545–562, 553; Rini Bhattacharya Mehta, ‘The Missionary Sannyasi and the Burden of the Colonized’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 28, no. 2 (2008), pp. 10–25; Indira Chowdury, The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and The Politics of Culture in Colonial Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001); Gautam Kalra, ‘Politics of Posture and Sartorial Sagacity: The Construction of Ascetic Masculinity in Vivekananda’s Posters and Photographs’, available at http://www.tasveergharindia.net/essay/ politics-ascetic-vivekananda.html, accessed 6 November 2019; Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left, p. 3. 144 van der Veer, ‘The Power of Detachment’, p. 463. See also Alter, The Wrestler’s Body, ch. 5, ‘Brahmcharya’. 145 See Alter, ‘The “Sannyasi” and the Indian Wrestler’, passim. He draws out the relationship between a sannyasi and a wrestler in northern India. 146 Verhoeven, ‘Time of Terror, Terror of Time’. 147 HSRA pamphlet ‘“To Make the Deaf Hear”: A Notice by the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association’, translation in K. C. Yadav and Babar Singh, eds, Fragrance of Freedom: Writing of Bhagat Singh (Gurgaon: Hope India, 2006), p. 246. 148 Ibid. 149 S. Verma, ‘Tinki Ab Kaan Kahani Suno Karein’, p. 60. 150 B. Mahour, ‘Rajguru’, p. 22. 151 B. Mahour, ‘Amar Shaheed Bhagat Singh’, pp. 40–41. 152 S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, pp. 81–82. 153 Bhagwandas Mahour, OHT 478, NMML, pp. 44–45. 154 Ibid. 155 Jaidev Gupta, OHT 346, NMML, p. 52. 156 Ibid. 157 Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, p. 227. 158 Tsederbaum, Zhenshchina v russkom revoliutsionnom dvizhenni. 159 Pipes, ‘The Trial of Vera Zasulich’, p. 76. 160 Ibid., p. 25; Jay Bergman, ‘The Political Thought of Vera Zasulich’, Slavic Review 38, no. 2 ( June 1979), pp. 243–258. 161 Bhagwandas Mahour, OHT 478, NMML, pp. 44; Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, p. 80. 162 S. Verma, ‘Tinki Ab Kaan Kahani Suno Karein’, p. 62.

186

Notes

163 Jaidev Gupta, OHT 346, NMML, p. 53. 164 Ibid., p. 52. 165 Bhagat Singh, quoting Emma Goldman, in Yadav and Singh, The Fragrance of Freedom, p. 79. 166 Yadav and Singh, The Fragrance of Freedom, p. 84. 167 Bhagat Singh, ‘A Critique of the Indian Revolutionary Movement’, in K. C. Yadav and Babar Singh, eds, The Fragrance of Freedom: Writings of Bhagat Singh (Gurgaon: Hope India, 2006), p. 44. Bhagat Singh in his essay ‘Anarchism’ (in Kirti, May 1929) questioned the stereotype of the anarchists as ‘cruel’ and a ‘blood sucker’, a person with no ‘compassion in his heart’ and one ‘who relished destruction all around him’ (republished in Yadav and Singh, The Fragrance of Freedom; pp. 43–51). B. Singh, ‘Revolutionary Party and Its Programme’, pp. 58–59. 168 Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Edinburgh: A K Press, 2009), pp. 53–54; Bhagat Singh, ‘Anarchism II’, Kirti, June 1928 (republished in Yadav and Singh, The Fragrance of Freedom, pp. 83–87, 86). 169 HSRA Documents, Acc. No. 822, NMML, Statement made by J. N. Sanyal, Mahabir Singh, B.K. Dutt, Kundan Lal and Dr. G. P. Nigam in Lahore on 5 May 1930 to the Commissioner of the Special Tribunal, Lahore Conspiracy Case, Lahore. 170 Letter on Hari Kishan’s Case, published in The People, 14 July 1931, republished in Yadav and Singh, The Fragrance of Freedom, p. 69. 171 Shiv Verma, OHT 502, NMML, pp. 92–93; Communist leader Sibnath Banerjee talks about how communist and socialist propaganda was otherwise forbidden in British India but the Meerut Conspiracy Case gave these ideas wide publicity; see Sibnath Banerjee Collections, List no. 236, Section III: Speeches and Writings of Sibnath Banerjee, No. 32 Meerut Conspiracy Case, NMML, pp. 67–68. 172 Letter on Hari Kishan’s Case, published in The People, 14 July 1931, republished in Yadav and Singh, The Fragrance of Freedom, p. 69. 173 The Tribune, 8 June 1929, p. 2; The Hindustan Times, 8 June 1929, p. 5. 174 Ibid. 175 Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, pp. 295, 208. 176 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 177 B. Chatterjee, Anandmath or the Sacred Brotherhood, trans. Lipner, Part II, ch. 4, pp. 179–180. 178 Ibid., Part IV, ch. 8, p. 229. 179 Lipner, ‘Re-translating Bankim Chatterji’s Ananda Math’, p. 64.

Notes

187

180 The idea of state, or statism, was at the centre of all shades of anti-colonial resistance: with state as an opponent (colonial state) and state as an aspiration (nation-state). Most anti-colonial resistance movements, especially the nationalist variants, nestled a spatial imagination of a land or territory that the nation physically inhabited and was a sovereign of. This space had very clear boundaries – it was bounded, finite and closed. This was also the space that had been illegitimately usurped by the colonists. The effort of the nationalist resistance therefore was to awaken the nation and win back state control. See Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism, p. 20. 181 Such as the FLN in Algeria, the Socialist Revolutionary Party in Russia or the Hezbollah in Lebanon. 182 In this case, as Rebecca Karl rightly states, the ‘scope of nationalism exceeded the scope of statism’. See Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’ is the title of one of Bhagat’s essays (B. Singh, ‘Universal Brotherhood’); S. Verma, Sansmritiyan, p. 60.

1 2

3

Conclusion

Haimanti Roy, ‘Testing Citizenship in Bengal Borderlands’, Current History, April 2020, pp. 128–133. Shahid Tantray and Ahan Penkar, ‘There Is Fear, but I Will Not Lose Hope: Jamia Student Who Lost an Eye during an Attack by Delhi Police’, The Caravan, 20 December 2019, available at https://caravanmagazine.in/ politics/jamia-student-lost-eye-during-police-attack, accessed 10 January 2020; Amit Ahuja and Rajkamal Singh, ‘Why Electorally Secure Modi Govt Cracked Down on CAA Protesters So Brutally’, The Print, 8 January 2020, available at https://theprint.in/opinion/why-electorally-securemodi-govt-cracked-down-on-caa-protesters-so-brutally/345543/, accessed 10 January 2020. Tanweer Fazal ‘Good Protestor and Bad Protestor: The Uneven Police Response to Anti-CAA Demonstrations’, The Caravan, 8 January 2020, available at https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/good-bad-protestor-unevenpolice-response, accessed 10 January 2020; Thongam Bipin, ‘Reading India in the Time of Protest’, 30 December 2019, available at https://roundtableindia. co.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9783:readingindia-in-the-time-of-protest&catid=119:feature&Itemid=132, accessed 12 January 2020; Nizamuddin Siddique and Roshni Sengupta, ‘Assam: AntiCAA Protests and the Silence of Media’, available at https://thepolisproject. com/assam-anti-caa-protests-and-the-silence-of-the-media/, accessed 20

188

Notes

January 2020; Appu Ajith, ‘Standing Their Ground: Documenting the Daily Resistance at Shaheen Bagh’, The Caravan, Februrary 2020, pp. 70–83. 4 Mudasir Amin and Samreen Mushtaq, ‘To Invoke Allah or To Not: Secular Islamophobia and the Protesting Indian Muslim’, The Caravan, 31 December 2019, available at https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/to-invoke-allah-or-tonot-secular-islamophobia-and-the-protesting-indian-muslim, accessed 12 January 2020. 5 Shashi Tharoor’s tweet, available at https://twitter.com/ShashiTharoor/status /1211265562883579904?s=20, accessed 20 January 2020. 6 Manik Sharma, ‘The Rise and Rise of the Daring Dalit, Chandrashekhar Azad’, Arre.com, 22 December 2019, available at https://www.arre.co.in/politics/ the-rise-and-rise-of-the-daring-dalit-chandrashekhar-azad/, accessed 1 April 2020; Ananya Jahanara Kabir, ‘Chandrashekhar’s Azadi with a Swag: The Fabulous Mystique of the Bhim Army Chief ’, Scroll.in, 24 December 2019, available at https://scroll.in/article/947721/chandrashekhars-azadiwith-swag-the-fabulous-mystique-of-the-bhim-army-chief, accessed 1 April 2020; Uday Singh Rana, ‘My Son a Dalit Revolutionary, Says Bhim Army Chief ’s Mother’, News18.com, 19 June 2017, available at https://www. news18.com/news/india/my-son-a-dalit-revolutionary-says-bhim-armychiefs-mother-1437081.html, accessed 1 April 2020. 7 The Hindu Business Line, ‘Govt Not to Remove “Secular”, “Socialist” Words from Constitution’, 24 February 2015, available at https://www. thehindubusinessline.com/news/national/govt-not-to-remove-secularsocialist-words-from-constitution/article6929053.ece, accessed 1 April 2020. 8 The Wire, ‘Rakesh Sinha to Move Resolution Seeking Removal of “Socialist” from Preamble’, 20 March 2020, available at https://thewire.in/politics/ rakesh-sinha-socialist-preamble-resolution, accessed 1 April 2020; The Wire, ‘“Anti-Democratic”: Socialist Party on BJP MP’s Bid to Remove “Socialist” from Preamble’, 22 March 2020, available at https://thewire.in/politics/ socialist-party-preamble-bjp, accessed 1 April 2020. 9 Loomba, Revolutionary Desires, pp. 186–187; Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery, ‘The Stifling Air of Rigid Radicalism: Can Radical Politics Harbour a Deadening Conservatism?’ The New Inquiry, 2 March 2018, available at https://thenewinquiry.com/the-stifling-air-of-rigid-radicalism/, accessed 1 April 2020. 10 Gopal Haldar, cited in Mazumdar, In Search of a Revolutionary Ideology and a Revolutionary Programme, pp. 14–15. 11 Kris Manjapara, ‘The Impossible Intimacies of M.N. Roy’, Postcolonial Studies 16, no.2 (2013), pp. 169–184. 12 Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, pp. 34–36.

Notes

189

13 Jaidev Gupta, OHT 346, NMML, pp. 8, 35; Manmathnath Gupta, OHT, CSAS, p. 4. 14 Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions. 15 Manmathnath Gupta, OHT 174, NMML, p. 30. 16 Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009). 17 Ibid., p. 329; Khatri, Shaheedon ki Cchaya Mein, p. 99; Manmathnath Gupta, OHT 174, NMML, p. 34. 18 Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–1940, pp. 341–347; Laura R. Brueck, Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 19 Manmathnath Gupta, OHT 174, NMML, p. 34; see also Manmathnath Gupta, OHT, CSAS, p. 13. 20 Bismil, Nij Jeevan ki Ek Cchata, p. 102. 21 Guru Dutt, OHT 186, NMML, pp. 11–12. Dutt was a teacher at the National College and talks about the importance of all teaching being done in Hindi; Comrade Ram Chadra, OHT 356, NMML, p. 14. 22 Jaidev Gupta, OHT 346, NMML, p. 23. 23 Comrade Ram Chadra, OHT 356, NMML, p. 20. 24 Y. Mahour, ‘Krantikari aur Sahitya’, p. 143; Yashpal, ‘“Naujawan Bharat Sabha” se Shahadat Tak’, p. 116. 25 This is true of communist memoirs as well, who saw their earlier selves as immature. See S. V. Ghate, OHT 326, NMML. Ghate was one of the founders of the Communist Party of India, member of the Bombay Trade Union and one of the people arrested in the Meerut Conspiracy Case. Gandhi, ‘An Immature Politics’. 26 Shekhar Ganguly, A Satyagrahi, a Revolutionary, a Communist (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1995). 27 These revolutionaries saw Savarkar as a respected elder and his The Indian War of Independence was a popular read. The book was published outside of India and was not available locally but the Punjab unit got its hands on it. They would cyclostyle one chapter at a time and get it sent to the United Provinces unit. Sukhdev was the person who was making this literature available. Jaidev Kapur, OHT 431, NMML, p. 27; Yashpal, Simhavalokana. 28 Walter Hauser and Kailash Chandra Jha, My Life’s Struggle: A Translation of Swami Sahajanand Sarawati’s Mera Jivan Sangharsh (New Delhi, Manohar, 2016), p. 159; Walter Hauser, The Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha 1929–1942: A Study of an Indian Peasant Movement (New Delhi, Manohar, 2019); Lata Singh, ‘The Bihar Kisan Sabha Movement: 1933–1939’, Social Scientist 20, nos 5–6 (1992), pp. 21–33; S. K. Mittal and Kapil Kumar, ‘Baba Ram Chandra

190

29 30

31

32

33

34 35

Notes

and Peasant Upsurge in Oudh: 1920–21’, Social Scientist 6, no. 11 (1978), pp. 35–56. Bimal Prasad Jain, OHT, CSAS, p. 30; Vidyarthi, ‘Ek Tasveer Jisme Batukeshwar ka Chehra Hai’; Baghele, ‘Krantiveer Doctor Bhagwandas Mahour ke Patra’; Manmathnath Gupta, OHT, CSAS, p. 19. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, 1979); Elco Runia, Moved by the Past: History and the Question of the Discontinuity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London and New York: Routledge, 1969, 1972); Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory’, p. 24. Mithi Mukherjee, ‘Transcending Identity: Gandhi, Non-violence, and the Pursuit of a “Different” Freedom in Modern India’, The American Historical Review 115, no. 2 (2010), pp. 453–473; Partha Chatterjee, The Princely Imposter: The Kumar of Bhawal and the Secret History of Indian Nationalism (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004). Pieter Spierenberg, ‘Masculinity, Violence and Honour: An Introduction’, and Martin Wiener, ‘The Victorian Criminalization of Men’, in Pieter Spierenberg, ed., Men and Violence: Gender, Honor and Rituals in Modern Europe and America (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), pp. 1–28 and 197–202 respectively; Ute Fervert, Emotions in History: Lost and Found (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2011). According to Barbara H. Rosenwein, an emotional community is the idea of ‘social groups that adhere to the same valuation of emotions and how they should be expressed’ and ‘groups of people animated by common or similar interests, values and emotional styles and valuations’; quoted in Jan Plamper, William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein and Peter Stearns, ‘The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein and Peter Stearns’, History and Theory 49, no. 2 (May 2010), pp. 237–265, 253. See also Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages; Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions’, Passions in Context: International Journal for the History and Theory of Emotions 1 (2010), available at https://www.passionsincontext.de/index.php/?id=557, accessed 22 January 2020; and Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’. Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). Jan Plamper, ‘Fear: Soldiers and Emotion in Early Twentieth-Century Russian Military Psychology’, Slavic Review 68, no. 2 (2009), pp. 259–283; William M.Reddy, ‘Emotional Turn? Feelings in Russian History and Culture’, Slavic Review 68, no. 2 (2009), pp. 329–334, DOI:10.2307/27697961.

Notes

191

36 Vaidik, ‘History of a Renegade Revolutionary’. 37 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreamers: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 38 ‘The polemical content of nationalist ideology is its politics’, in P. Chatterjee, ‘Transferring a Political Theory’, p. 121.

~ Glossary ~

abhyaas aghori ahimsa ajeya akhara amar anushilan bahurupiya bal Bamtul Bukhara bhaiya Bombay brahmchari brahmcharya Calcutta Dacca dwija gadka ghat ghee gosain grihastha hartal Inquilab Zindabad janeyu kaalyoddha

practice ascetic Shaiva sadhus non-violence invincible gymnasium, club, confraternity immortal practice; praxis impersonator force the name of Azad’s mauser pistol brother Mumbai celibate celibacy Kolkata Dhaka the twice-born (Brahmin, Kshatriya and Vaishya castes) club stone step at the bank of a river clarified butter Hindu ascetics organised into martial bortherhoods householder strike Long Live the Revolution the sacred thread time warrior

Glossary

karmayogin katha krantikari lathi mohalla mrityunjaya niyam-acharan parivar phansi Poone riyasat samajvaad samyavaad sanatani santaan sanyaas sanyasi satyagraha Shuddhi swadhinta swaraj tapas vasudhaiv kutumbakam visarjan yug

193

The one who performs karma (action) without desire for rewards, used for Krishna story revolutionary stick/staff neighbourhood one who has conquered death daily rules and regulations family hanging Pune principality, kingdom socialism communism traditional Hindu observing the rituals the residents of Anandmath monastery retirement from worldly life the who has retired from worldly life request for truth, name of Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement the movement to ‘reconvert’ the Muslims back into the fold of Hinduism independence self-rule heat, fire, energy (spiritual) universal brotherhood consignment, end world, eon

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~ Index ~

Acharya, M. P. T., 67 Adhikary, Amulya, 65 aghoris, 95, 107 Agyeya, 17–18, 133 ahimsa, 34, 97, 133 Ahmedabad Congress, 39 ajeya, 106–117, 125 Akalis, 41 akharas, 1, 35, 38, 88, 117, 119–120 Alfred Park, 95, 174n5 Allahabad, 11, 26, 40, 56, 96 Alter, Joseph, 117 Amar Chitra Katha, 28, 48, 58, 60–61, 119 Ambedkar, Babasaheb, Dr., 129 Anandmath, 33, 38, 44–45, 97,103, 105–106, 111, 115, 125, 155n102 anarchism, 65, 72, 123, 186n167 anasakti bhaav, 46 Andamans, 11, 18–19, 40, 55, 70, 77, 100 anti-British pan-Islamist Khilafat movement, 51 anti-British sentiments, 46, 157n113 anti-British struggle, 15, 18, 32 anti-colonial resistance movements, 71

anti-colonialism, 29, 100, 125–126 Anushilan Samiti, 35, 48, 65, 66, 73 and dacoities, 53 and Gita, 45 Anushilanists, 48, 53, 66 Arms Act, British government, 3, 5 arms traffic, 5, 138n15 Arya Kumar Sabha, 77 Arya Samaj, 23, 41, 44–45, 49, 50, 76–78, 97, 131 and ‘Om’, 74 asceticism, 26, 45, 96–97, 102, 124, 126, 132–134 Ashfaq. See Khan, Ashfaqulla atheism, 19, 25, 73–74, 87, 133 Azad. See Chandrashekhar Azad ‘Azadi’, 127–128 Babbar Akali, 122 Babu, Shachindra. See Sanyal Sachindranath Babu, Suresh, 41, 56 ‘badhbadiya’, 80 bahurupiya, 2–5, 39, 96, 129 Bakhtin, Michael, 89 Bakshi, Shachindranath, 41, 56 Bakunin Institute in Oakland, 67

Index

Balraj, 117–118 Bamrauli dacoity, 53 Bamtul Bukhara, 98, 111 Banaras, 4, 26, 30, 32, 35–39,40–41, 43, 56, 59–60, 79, 80, 95, 107, 119, 131 Banaras Conspiracy Case, 36 Banaras District Jail, 32 Banaras Hindu University, 37 Banaras Sanskrit College, 32, 37, 60 Bande Mataram, 115 Bandhopadhyaya, Upendranath, 44 Bandi Jivan, 13, 42, 44, 48, 65, 106 Banerjee, Lalit Mohan, 93 Banerjee, Manmohan, 57, 78, 93 Banerjee, Upendra Nath, 65 Bankim. See Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra Barkatullah, Maulana, 51 Bengal Ordinance Act, 42 Bengal partition, 40 Bengali Muslims, 73 Bharat Durdasha (play), 65, 132 Bhattacharya, Suresh, 56 Bichpuri dacoity, 53 ‘Bidrohi’ (poem), 7 Bihar, 54, 57, 69, 78 Bismil, Ram Prasad, 13, 23, 34–35, 41, 44–47, 49–50, 52–55, 79, 100, 102, 106, 109–110, 119, 128, 130, 132 Bolshevism, 48, 51 65 Bombay, 14, 30–32, 59, 64, 79, 114 Bose, Khudiram, 100 Bose, Rash Behari, 35–36, 40 Boycott, foreign goods, 32 brahmcharya, 39, 45, 78, 90, 111, 120, 124, 135 Brahmins, 32, 37, 88 British imperialism, 122, 185n157

225

British Labour Party, 48, 165n49 British Raj, 1 Buddhist, 19, 75, 127 Bundelkhand, 3–5, 17, 98 Bundelkhand Motor Company, 4 Calcutta, 36, 48–50 capitalism, 2, 17, 73, 84, 123 Carmichael Library, 33 caste, 18, 90, 32, 35, 107–108, 117 socio-cultural upbringing, 26 Muslim culture, 37 prohibitions, 90 Hindu mythology, 119 inter-caste dining events, 130 Phule–Satyashodhak, 131 Cellular Jail, 18, 70 Central Legislative Assembly, 7, 9, 57, 60, 91, 119 Centre for South Asian Studies (CSAS), University of Cambridge, 11 Chakravarty, Keshub, 56 Chamar (play), 130 Champaran, 69 Chand, Lala Feroz, 11, 78, 117 Chandra, Ram, Comrade, 64, 70, 78, 132 Chandrashekhar Azad, 5, 7, 13, 15–16, 19, 22–24, 33, 37–38, 55–57, 60, 62, 69–70, 79–80, 91, 128, 129 Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra, 33, 43–46, 116–117, 125, 133, 155–156n102 Chatterjee, Jogesh Chandra, 23, 41–42, 90, 107 Chatterjee, Pranabesh, 33 Chatterjee, Yogesh Chandra, 55–56 Chauri Chaura incident, 34

226

Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 97, 104 Chinese communist movement, 68 Chipko movement, 61 Chitpavan Brahmins, 130 Chittagong armoury raid, 5, 14, 114 Christians, 88 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 127–128 Communist Party of India, 15–17, 48, 60, 64–70 Congress committees, 32, 39 Congress Party, 33, 90, 99 Congress Working Committee, 14 Czar’s carriage, bombing, 66 dacoities, 3, 21, 41, 51–53, 92,146n89 and Anushilan Samiti, 53 Bichpuri, 52–53 Dwarkapur, 53 Hindustan Republican Association (HRA), 51–55 Dalit, 64,129 Dalit Panthers, 61 Dange, S. A., 64 Das, Cchabil, 64–65 Das, Mathura, 16, 19 Dashashavmedh Ghat, 33 Dasnamis, 38 Dastidar, Tarakeswar, 14 Datiya, 5 DAV Colleges, 78, 121, 131 Davar, M. C., 70 death sentence, 101 Defence of India Act, 64 Delhi, 9, 57, 60, 63, 91, 108, 119, 128, 129 Delhi Assembly Bomb Case, 9 Deshbashir Prati Nivedan, 43 Devanagari, 74, 132 Dhanwantri, 17, 19, 57, 78

Index

‘district organiser’, 42 Dixit, Gendalal, 41 Dublish, Vishnu Charan, 23, 55 Dutt, Batukeshwar, 18–19, 41, 57, 60, 93, 98, 110, 115, 118–119, 133 Dutt, Prem, 76, 93 Dutt, Rajni Palme, 130 Dwarkapur dacoity, 53 East India Company, 38 egalitarianism, 66 Elam, Daniel J., 21, 26, 75 everyday, finding 9–12 Exshaw, John, 108–109 Federated Republic of the United States of India, 42 Feroz Shah Kotla, 57, 63, 79 Figner, Vera, 104 First World War, 13, 25, 40, 64, 67, 130 Forest Department, 3 Fort William, 36 Fraser, Andrew, 66 ‘Free India’, 51, 84, 98 French Chandernagore, 5 Gandhi, Mahatma, 9, 15, 29–30, 34, 39, 61, 64, 82, 97, 125, 134 Ganges, 35, 95, 187n2 Gaur, Ishwar Dayal, 21 Ghadar Party, 18, 36, 41, 66, 74, 91, 104 Ghadarites, 36, 40, 44, 66, 72 Ghose, Barin, 66 Ghosh, Ajoy, 17, 23, 41, 57, 68, 93, 119 Ghosh, Aurobindo, 44–45, 73, 97, 100, 133

Index

Ghosh, Durba, 7, 13, 21 Ghosh, Phonindranath, 57, 78, 87, 93, 111 Gita, 44, 46, 102, 131 and Anushilan Samiti, 45 Gokul, Radha Mohan, 50 Gopal, Jai, 71, 78, 93 gosains, 37–38, 96–97 Gramsci, Antonio, 75 Gupta, Babu Shivprasad, 14, 33 Gupta, Jaidev, 76, 78, 116, 122 Gupta, Manmathnath, 11, 17, 23, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 42, 44, 49, 51–52, 54–55, 70, 72, 78, 81, 84, 92, 99–101, 110, 115 Gupta, Ramesh, 41 Guru Cchote Maharaj, 77, 119 Gurudwara movement, 76–77 gyani, 51 Habib, S. Irfan, 21 habitus, 49, 57–59, 76, 108, 117 Haldar, Gopal, 130 Hale, H. W., 52 Hartman, Saidiya, 26 Hastings, Warren, 96 Heehs, Peter, 73 heterosexuality, 18, 116 Hindi, 11, 13, 16, 32, 37, 47, 50, 65, 74, 93, 128, 131 Hindu Kush, 71 Hindu–Muslim unity, 47, 128 ‘Hindu’ learning, 37, 152n54 Hindustan Republican Association (HRA), 1, 5, 9, 13–14, 17, 22–23, 25, 30, 34, 39–43, 45, 46, 48–49, 57, 59, 64, 78, 83, 88, 90-91, 99, 110, 131, 133 and Indian independence, 85 jail sentences, 56

227

Kakori Conspiracy Case, 55 political dacoities, 51–55 Vedantism, 73 Hindustan Republican Socialist Association (HSRA), 1, 5–6, 9, 14, 16–19, 22–23, 25, 30, 45–46, 50–51, 54, 57, 60, 62–64, 67–85, 88–94, 98–99, 104–105, 112, 114, 116–117, 123, 131, 133, 140n38, 141n47, 144n68, 166n59, 171n128, 172n145, 177n42 and Naujawan Bharat Sabha, 70 armed revolution, 71 ‘S’ of HSRA, 63–67 Indian independence, 84 Indian National Congress, 15, 59 Indian Press Act, 64 Indian revolutionary movement, 22, 28, 36, 130 149n5 Indian revolutionism, 2, 23, 25, 48 Indo-China war, 15 ‘Inquilab Zindabad’, 60, 64, 106, 127 internationalism, 25, 71 Irish Republican Army, 34 ishtiraqi, 46 jail sentences, 56, 93 160n172 Jain, Bimal Prasad, 11, 40 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, 30, 149n10 Jama Masjid, 129 Jamia Millia Islamia university, 128 jan-sabhas, 33 Jatin, Bagha, 36, 40, 100 Jhansi, 3-4, 17, 56, 83, 96, 107, 118 jivanmukta, 52 Jugantar Party, 35–36, 66, 73, 88–89, 120

228

Kakori Conspiracy Case, 9, 14, 17, 43–44, 50, 52–53, 55–57, 62, 90, 129 Hindustan Republican Association (HRA), 55 Kaple, Vinayak Rao, 36 Kapur, Jaidev, 19, 23, 50, 53, 57, 63–65, 68, 76–77, 81, 85, 88, 92–93, 104, 117, 119 Kapur, Prakashvati, 16, 112, 116 Kar, Govind Charan, 41, 56 Kar, Ravindramohan, 41 karmayogin, 45–46, 125, 157n108 Kashi Vidyapeeth, 33–34, 131 Kaviraj, Sudipta, 46, 103 Khan, Ashfaqulla (Ashfaqulla Khan Warsi ‘Hasrat’), 13, 23, 41, 44, 46–48, 50, 54–55, 59, 101– 102, 110, 113, 128, 132 Khaniadhana riyasat, 5 Khanna, Durga Das, 16, 19, 69 Khatri, Ram Krishan, 23, 34, 52, 55–56, 99, 110 Khilafat movement, 46, 51, 60 kirpan, 76–77 kisan andolan, 69 kisan sabhas, 18, 67, 131, 133 Kriplani, J. B. (Acharya Kriplani), 32, 44 Krishnaverma, Shyamji, 67, 100 Kumar, Jainendra, 18 labour movements, 10 Lahiri, Rajendranath, 33, 41, 44, 54–55, 102 Lahore, 5–7, 44, 48, 57, 63, 64, 70, 78, 86, 117, 132 Lahore Central Jail, 116 Lahore Conspiracy Case, 9, 14–15, 17, 19, 36, 77, 79, 93, 101, 129

Index

Lajjawati, Kumari, 78, 103, 116–117 Lal, Kishori, 19, 93 Lal, Kundan, 18–19, 77, 79, 93 Lal, Mukundi, 19, 54, 56, 110 Lala Hardayal, 65–66, 100, 178n52 Laushey, David M., 117 League Against Imperialism, 68 Legislative Assembly, 121, 123 Looma, Ania, 112 Lucknow, 4, 50, 54–56, 62, 86, 90 Lucknow Central, 55, 160n167 Maclean, Kama, 7, 21 Mahour, Bhagwandas, 16, 21, 23, 56–57, 81, 85, 88, 90, 92–93, 108, 110, 122 Mainpuri Conspiracy Case, 41 Malkapurkar, Sadashiv, 19, 23, 56–57, 120 Manchanda, S. L., 11 Manikarnika Ghat, 26, 95 martyrdom, 29, 58, 61, 99–101, 103, 106 Marxism, 15, 50, 68, 70, 72, 80, 133 Marxist–anarchist conception of state, 123 Marxists, 64, 70 masses, 40, 63–64, 66–67, 79, 82, 103, 123, 130 materialism, 8, 49, 87 Matrivedi Society, 41, 44 Mauser pistol, 56, 111, 161n177 Meerut, 40, 62 memoirs, 9, 10, 12–20, 23–25, 52, 60, 62, 65, 78, 86, 9–93, 104, 116, 131–132, 134–136 Minto–Morley reforms, 40 Misra, Shiv Vinayak, 62 Moffat, Chris, 21 mohalla, 35, 38

Index

Mohan, Sushila, 16, 19, 57, 78, 93, 114, 116 Mohani, Maulana Hasrat, 51, 60 Montford reforms, 40 Morris, Marcia A., 105 Mukerji, Dhan Gopal, 67 Mukhopadhyay, Jatindranath, 36 Murabbawale, Gyanchandra, 32 Muslims, 44, 46–48, 59, 73–74, 77, 127–128, 130 naga ascetics, 96 Naini Central Prison, 11 Nair, Neeti, 21 Narodniks, 66, 71, 81, 97 National College, 6, 48, 64, 77–78, 132 National Register of all Indian citizens (NRC), 127–128 nationalist-Marxism of Nehru, 15 Naujawan Bharat Sabha, 64, 69, 130, 163n23 and Hindustan Republican Socialist Association (HSRA), 70 Navyuvak Sangh, 18 Naxalism, 15, 61 Nayar, Kuldip, 21 Nehru Memorial and Museum Library’s (NMML), 11 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 14–15, 61, 68, 141n50, 145n76 Nehru, Motilal, Pandit, 14, 50, 101, 117–118 Nigam, Nand Kishore, 11 non-cooperation movement, 30, 32, 34, 39, 40, 44, 59, 76, 134,154n66. See also satyagraha non-violence movement, 13, 15, 34,

229

40, 61, 84, 99, 124, 126, 133 ‘Om’, 44, 74, 76 Pal, Bipanchandra, 73 Pal, Prakashvati, 16, 112, 116 Pande, Virendra, 41 Pandey, Kedarnath, 18 Pandey, Surendranath, 19, 41, 50, 57, 93, 119 Pant, Govind Vallabh, 14 paramhansa, 52 Pasi, Deo, 64, 130 Pasi, Madari, 64, 130 Patait, Satyapal, 18 Petrie, Donald, 117 Pingley, Vishnu Ganesh, 36 political violence, 117–126 poorna swaraj, 26, 69, 72, 83, 96, 123– 125, 139n30 prabhat feris, 67 Prarkar, Baburao, 14, 131 Prasad, Gaya, Dr, 19, 57, 78, 93, 103, 122 Prelooker, Jaakoff, 65, 104 Provincial Youth Organisation, 70 Phule–Satyashodhak, 131 Punjab Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, 74 Punjab National Bank, 93 Quran Sharif, 44 Rai, Jharkhande, 70 Rai, Lala Lajpat, 64, 65, 117, 133 Railway strike of 1974, 61 Raj, Des, 57, 93 Raj, Sukhdev, 5, 14–16, 19, 57, 64, 76–77, 85–86, 92–93, 115, 118–119 Rajguru, 7, 12, 14–15, 19, 57, 80, 87,

230

89, 93, 98–99, 112, 118, 119, 121, 122 Rajya Sabha, 129 Rakhmatov, 97, 104, 105 Ram, Agya, 78, 87 Ram, Kashi, 19, 33, 35 Ramanandi bairagis, 38 Rashomon-effect, 19 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, 18 recruitment policy, 21, 89, 146n88 Reddy, Sanjeeva, 62 republican, 79 Revolt of 1857, 62, 75, 83 revolution, language of, 72–78 revolutionary cell, 83 revolutionary cosmos, 103–104, 176n36 revolutionary leader, 41, 55–57, 58 revolutionary memoirs, 11-13, 21, 23, 116, 135 revolutionary movement, 2, 17, 22, 26, 34, 36, 40–41, 44, 53, 73, 78, 82, 90, 99, 101, 103 , 117, 130–131, 137n3 Revolutionary Party of India, 43 revolutionism, 2, 13, 20–25, 42, 48, 58–59, 63–64, 76, 80, 90, 96, 131–132, 136, 222 Russia, 48–49, 66, 71–72, 104–105 Russian Narodniks, 71 Russian Revolution, 48, 65, 69, 72, 81 Sabarmati Central Jail, 16 Saha, Gopi Mohan, 39 Saklatvala, Shapurji, 64 Sanskrit, 32, 37, 75, 79, 87 education, 80 Sanyal, Bhupen Nath, 56 Sanyal, Jatindranath, 11, 36, 57 Sanyal, Sachindranath, 9, 13, 14, 23,

Index

34–36, 39–40, 42, 44, 48, 55, 65, 79, 83–84, 117 sanyasi, 3–5, 8, 52, 75, 96, 114, 133 sanyasi yoddha, 45 Sarabha, Kartar Singh, 36 Saraswati, Dayanand, Swami, 76 Satyabhakt, 17, 48, 51 satyagraha, 30, 34, 132 satyagrahi, 30, 33–34, 60, 133 Saunders, John, 9, 57 Savarkar, Baba Rao, 18 Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar, 18, 100, 133, 191n27 Sawhney, Simona, 21 Second World War, 15, 133 self-rule. See swaraj semen anxiety, 109 Sen, Surya, 5, 14 sexual abstinence, 106–117 Shahjahanpur, 41, 50, 54, 110 Shaligram, 41 Sharma, Hari Dev, 11 Sharma, Prem Krishan, 56 Sharma, Vishwanath, 32 Shuddhi ceremonies, 50 Shukla, Kedarmani, 69 Sikh, 41, 76, 97, 127 Sikh khalsa, 97 Singh, Bhagat, 5–7, 9, 11–16, 19, 21–23, 29, 56–57, 60, 62, 68–69, 75, 88–89, 91, 99–100, 121, 123 Singh, Chanan, 121 Singh, Kultar, 62, 76 Singh, Malkhan, 3–4 Singh, Mota, 123 Singh, Roshan, Thakur, 41, 44, 52, 55, 101 Sinha, Bijoy Kumar, 11, 23, 41, 50, 57, 68–69, 93, 98, 100–101, 109 Sinn Fein, 71

Index

Smolenskii, Avraamii, 105 social practice, 25, 149n97 socialism, 17, 20–22, 25, 46, 50–51, 61–62, 64, 68, 71, 78–85, 87, 129 159n146 socialist, 1, 12, 17, 25, 30, 50–51, 61–64, 67–68, 71–75, 78–80, 87, 89–90, 129 socialist ideology. See Marxism socialist revolution, 63 Soviet Union, 68–69 Spencer, Herbert, 67 Swami Dayanand, 50–51, 76, 160n159 Swami Ramtirth, 44 Swami Somdev, 44 swaraj, 5, 26, 30, 72, 84, 114,124–126, 135. See also poorna swaraj Taj Mahal, 112 Tandon, Sampuran Singh, 69 tapas, 8, 45–46, 106, 125 Tegart, Charles, 39 Thapar, Chintram, 77 Tilak, Balgangadhar, 44 Tiwari, Sitaram, 30 trade union, 64, 114 Trepov, Fedor, 104 Tripathi, Kamlapati, 32, 131 Trivedi, Ram Dulare, 41 Tulsi Ramayana, 3, 98 Urdu, 23, 46, 65, 74 Usmani, Shaukat, 68–69

231

Vaishampayan, Vishwanath, 23, 31– 32, 56–57, 81, 86–87, 89–90, 92–93, 99, 114 Varma, Bhagwati Charan, 18 vasudhaiv kutumbakam, 75, 126 Vatsyayana, Sachchidananda Hirananda, 17 Vedanta, 49 Vedantism, 72, 87 Vedic learning, 37, 152n53 Verma, Shiv, 9, 15, 17, 54, 69, 75–77, 86, 89, 113, 116 Viceroy’s train, bombing, 9, 93 Vidyalankar, Jayachandra, 6, 48, 78 Vidyarthi, Ganesh Shankar, 50, 56, 131 Vivekananda, 44 Vohra, Bhagwati Charan, 16, 19, 21, 57, 63–64, 75, 86, 93, 111 Vohra, Durga Devi, 19, 21, 23, 57, 93, 112, 114, 116, 133 waiting, 2, 6–8 Williams, Raymond, 136 Wilson, Woodrow, 68 Workers’ and Peasants’ Party, 67 yagopaveet ceremony, 76 Yashpal, 15–18, 23, 57, 64, 72, 75–77, 93, 111–112 yogi, 8, 120 Young Men’s Association, 35 Zamindar (journal), 74 Zasulich, Vera, 104 court testimony, 122