New Delhi: The Delhi launch of a new book on the Lahore Conspiracy Case offered historians and authors a chance to revisit revolutionaries and heroes. To move away from the trope of heroic narratives where the hero is always noble and good. In Revolutionaries on Trial: Sedition, Betrayal, and Martyrdom, historian Aparna Vaidik turns the gaze back at India’s freedom fighters.
“We see revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh, Batukeshwar Dutt, and Sukhdev with all their frailties, flaws, and complicities, as well as their unheroic acts,” said Neeladri Bhattacharya, visiting professor at Ashoka University, at the book launch held at the India International Centre on 8 November.
The book is the product of 15 years of research that straddles India and Pakistan, and revisits the events after the murder of British police officer John Saunders in 1928 and the bombing of the Central Legislative Assembly in New Delhi in 1929. Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, and Sukhdev were sentenced to death.
“Working with sources like court records and British archival files was difficult. It also required a neutral perspective, though at times I developed sympathy for renegades and had to put things in perspective,” said Vaidik, who is also an associate professor at Ashoka University.
This was not Vaidik’s first book. She has also written Waiting for Swaraj: Inner Lives of Indian Revolutionaries in 2021 and My Son’s Inheritance: A Secret History of Lynching and Blood Justice in India in 2020.
“When you’re working on revolutionaries, you find three kinds of writing. One is hagiographic, where you completely eulogise the revolutionaries as martyrs and sons of Mother India. Second is methodological nationalism where the historians are affirming the idea of the nation. Third is the burgeoning writing on revolutionaries – history of violence and torture. Fifteen years ago, we didn’t have many books on even the histories of police,” said Vaidik, as the audience listened to her with rapt attention.
An ‘anti-colonial desire’
Revolutionaries on Trial challenges the view that Bhagat Singh was the primary figure in the Lahore trial. He was the leader, but she places him within the larger collective of the jailed Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) revolutionaries including Batukeshwar Dutt, Jaidev Kapoor, Shiv Verma, Bejoy Kumar Sinha, Sukhdev, Rajguru, Jatin Das, Kishori Lal, and others.
IIT Delhi professor Simona Sawhney, who was part of the panel, was fascinated by the clash between socialist and nationalist ideals. For instance, HSRA member and prominent Hindi writer Yashpal may have professed an attachment to socialist ideals and economic justice, but the priority was freedom from British rule.
“Such statements show us that what moved these young men might have been nothing more than a version of an anti-colonial desire for sovereignty, an escape from humiliation. A question of who rules rather than what constitutes the rule,” said Sawhney, during a panel discussion with former history professor at Delhi University Amar Farooqui and Bhattacharya.
The discussion started with how to write about revolutionaries and then segued into the lesser-known heroes – those who didn’t achieve martyrdom but were a part of the revolution.
“The issue that came up to me was how do I narrate. I have the sources, I have the historiography and all the material. But how do I tell the story, especially when it is pulling in 10 different directions? What do these revolutionaries look like when seen from the eyes of the collective?” said Vaidik.
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Law and violence
The book opens with a pertinent question: Why did the colonial state go through the trouble of following elaborate legal procedure? After all, the British had acquired a vast repertoire of violence and coercive strategies for pacifying the colonised.
These questions were discussed at the book launch to understand how the trial, the legal system, should not be viewed as different from the state’s inventory of coercive strategies.
“The answer lies in examining the illicit relationship between law and violence. In taking recourse to law courts and tribunals, the colonial state was relying on the violence they had grafted into the legal system through the process of law making, its enforcement and adjudication,” Vaidik writes in the book.
The discussion then moved to the imprisonment of political activists. Sawhney, remembering GN Saibaba, compared it with the prolonged incarceration of revolutionaries in Vaidik’s book.
“We have gathered here in the aftermath of the death of poet, activist and professor GN Saibaba. The young, impassioned, charismatic figures like Umar Khalid whose ideals seem in some respects similar to those espoused by the young revolutionaries who are central to Arpana’s book,” said Sawhney.
“But whose fate in important ways may be very different.”
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)
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