Commonplace Anti-Colonialism: Bhagat Singh's Jail Notebook and the Politics of Reading

The Martyr, the Moviegoer: Bhagat Singh at the Cinema

“…By highlighting the “bibliomigrant” world of the early twentieth century (Levine & Mani, 2013; Mani, 2016) and therefore the proliferation of texts available to revolutionary thinkers, this article shifts the focus away from the postcolonial hagiographic concerns that Bhagat Singh read only “properly political” texts. 35 On the contrary, he read fiction (Elam, 2016; Yadav, 2007) and went to the movies with and without regard for their “convertability to politics.” The global circulation of texts and the proliferation of their interpretations and viewing experiences produced an altogether different canon of “revolutionary thought” available to cosmopolitan anticolonial thinkers.…”

“…To be clear, this is not to suggest that Bhagat Singh was a poor reader of texts or that he cribbed his revolutionary politics from US media. Scholars have endeavored extensively to show that this is not the case, and furthermore that Bhagat Singh’s reading practices reveal a significantly more egalitarian revolutionary politics than we might have previously accounted for (Elam, 2016). It is, rather, to highlight the astoundingly global scale of the circulation of texts and film in the 1920s, making the world of “world literature” a considerably more difficult place to account for than merely calculating the sum of national literatures and cinemas combined, which is what we have heretofore attempted to do.…”

“…Revolutionary anticolonial writing, on the contrary, urges us to privilege the role of aesthetic enjoyment in the present by foregrounding inconsequential and non-authorial reading. Such anticolonial revolutionary practices should alter our teleological understanding of “revolution” itself, whereby revolution might become, instead, the slow and perpetual accretion of knowledge rather than a teleological moment to be attained (Elam, 2016).…”