Death in three scenes of recitation

Sawhney, Simona

doi:10.1080/13688790.2013.823263

Cited by 23 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Unlike the Congress party, which was being led by M. K. Gandhi, and its official credo of non-violence to achieve political independence from the British, 2 Bhagat Singh was a member of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA), a revolutionary outfit which believed in the dictatorship of the proletariat and was not averse to using violence to achieve it. Recently, various scholars of the Indian anti-colonial revolutionary movement (Elam, 2013; Maclean, 2015; Maclean & Elam, 2013; Moffat, 2019; Sawhney, 2013) have contested the appropriation of these revolutionaries, especially Bhagat Singh, by the official Indian left and highlighted the problem inherent in naming them committed ‘Marxists’ or ‘Communists’. According to Maclean and Elam, ‘Bhagat Singh and the HSRA promiscuously combined many varied strains of political thought that a comprehensive list might read like a Borges short story’ (2013, p. 114).…”

Section: Bhagat Singh and His Heroic Stardommentioning

confidence: 99%

Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh (1954): A Curious Case of the First Biopic on the Indian Revolutionary Martyr

Singh

2024

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

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Immediately after India’s independence, the Indian revolutionary martyr Bhagat Singh became the focus of several competing biopic projects. A censorship controversy erupted around the making of the now-lost film Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh (1954), the first biopic on the martyr. It became a contentious site where the interests of the filmmakers, former revolutionary colleagues of Bhagat Singh and his family members, and various other stakeholders like public representatives, intersected with an almost disinterested state. Following Debashree Mukherjee’s (2019) methodological approach of considering film censorship ‘as a productive material site for the study of lost films’, this article enters into a microhistory of this controversy by utilising bureaucratic paperwork and filmic and nonfilmic paratextual material to compensate for the absent film element. By tracing the very first attempts which were made to mount a biopic on Bhagat Singh, I try to investigate personal and political motivations behind the race to make the first biopic on the revolutionary martyr. For this purpose, I employ Chris Moffat’s (2019) mobilisation of the metaphors of corpse, corpus and corps, which he productively uses to understand the politics behind the multifarious afterlives of Bhagat Singh and wrangle over his revolutionary inheritance in the post-colonial period, and make a case for the importance of the study of Bhagat Singh’s hitherto neglected biopics by arguing that the time of their making, their production contexts and attendant controversies afford us unique insights into what Moffat terms the politics of ‘India’s revolutionary inheritance’.

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Section: Bhagat Singh and His Heroic Stardommentioning

confidence: 99%

Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh (1954): A Curious Case of the First Biopic on the Indian Revolutionary Martyr

Singh

2024

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

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“…Briefly, these also include, from other scholars working closely with Maclean and Ghosh: 'love,' 'atheism,' 'youth,' and, of course, 'violence.' 3 'Revolutionary' is an especially difficult term, forged in a sometimes playful and sometimes hostile relationship with British surveillance, Indian moderates, and international supporters. It is an identification with French, Russian, and Irish histories, but its proud recuperation was made possible by the illicit circulation of Political Trouble in India and the Rowlatt Report.…”

Section: 'To Recognize "How It Really Was"'mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…62 Death was a reality that the revolutionaries of the HSRA imagined, anticipated and welcomed. 63 Although they refuted the consolations of religion, many of their admirers did not, and so religious tropes became a particularly compelling way to express, and more importantly to visualize, the revolutionaries' mortality and to lament their young deaths. A rich array of motifs drawn from religious traditions, from Hinduism (poems that imagine Bhagat Singh playing Holi with his own blood) to Christianity (in which Bhagat Singh is rendered as a crucified Christ) were brought to the task of commemorating revolutionary politics.…”

Section: Kama Macleanmentioning

confidence: 99%

New histories of political violence and revolutionary terrorism in modern South Asia

Amstutz

Elam²,

Choudhury³

et al. 2019

South Asian History and Culture

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This book round table discusses two recent monographs on political violence and revolutionary terrorism in late colonial India, Kama Maclean's A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (2015) and Durba Ghosh's Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919India, -1947India, (2017. Maclean's A Revolutionary History of Interwar India uncovers how revolutionaries in Punjab and northern India reshaped the goals and tactics of the Indian independence movement, especially the policy of nonviolence. Ghosh's Gentlemanly Terrorists explores the relationship of political violence in Bengal to the development of the modern nation-state in India. Both Ghosh and Maclean rethink the conventional narrative of the Indian freedom struggle and connect local developments in South Asia to global trends in anticolonial resistance and to larger conversations about the relationship between democracy and surveillance. In the five review essays, Daniel Elam, Rishad Choudhury, Mou Banerjee, Rohit De, and Michael Silvestri assess the impact of these two monographs on South Asian history, legal studies, histories of religion, studies of anticolonial movements, and British imperial historiography. In their responses, Maclean and Ghosh assess the challenges of writing histories of revolutionaries in the present in relation to the anticipated futures of the revolutionaries themselves.

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“…It is, therefore, impossible to reduce Bhagat Singh to the canonically revolutionary politics of Vladimir Lenin without taking into account his Stowe-esque demand to feel right . As Simona Sawhney has noted, to account for Bhagat Singh’s writings without accounting for his notion of “love” ( prem, ishq , pyaar ) is to diminish the power of his secular, humanist, critique (Sawhney, 2013). Indian anti-imperial critique did not simply recreate the hierarchies embedded in the narrow encircling of the political sphere, and we do it a grave disservice by insisting that it answer to those concerns in the present.…”

Section: Sentimentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Martyr, the Moviegoer: Bhagat Singh at the Cinema

Elam¹

2017

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

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This article attempts to rethink Indian anticolonial agitator Bhagat Singh within four alternative lineages, rooted in his often undiscussed love of early Hindi and American cinema. To date, Bhagat Singh has often been confined within the rubrics of a properly political form of revolution, whereby revolution is recognizable to the colonial state. To rethink revolution requires scholars to question the repetition of these colonial logics by moving away from the “recognizably political” to other forms of anti-authorial, anticolonial practices. This article focuses on Bhagat Singh’s viewing and response to the 1927 American iteration of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the 1927 Hindi film Wildcat of Bombay. The article considers the ways in which Bhagat Singh moved beyond “properly political” forms of agitation in favor of affective, aesthetic, and experiential models of movie-going in the early twentieth century. By doing so, it reorganizes the categories of “world literature” away from the nation-state in favor of worldwide circulation, distribution, and interpretation.

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Death in three scenes of recitation

Cited by 23 publications

References 0 publications

Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh (1954): A Curious Case of the First Biopic on the Indian Revolutionary Martyr

Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh (1954): A Curious Case of the First Biopic on the Indian Revolutionary Martyr

New histories of political violence and revolutionary terrorism in modern South Asia

The Martyr, the Moviegoer: Bhagat Singh at the Cinema

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