India's Revolutionary Inheritance

Moffat, Chris

doi:10.1017/9781108655194

Cited by 29 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 128 publications

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“…At the same time, there is a structure of critique that also persists across time: we see connections made explicitly, for example, to the anti-colonial, secular revolutionary Bhagat Singh, who came "to colour us all with one colour, so that we can live beyond life" (Syed, 2015b: 13-15; for another example, see Syed, 2016a: 20-21; this is also evoked in the play Āne Bahāne, discussed below). In this we see yet another connection to radical thought in India, as Chris Moffat's (2019) important work on representations of Bhagat Singh has explored. This sense of possibility moves across time.…”

Section: Untitledmentioning

confidence: 83%

Remembering against sentimentality: Partition’s literary shadows in the work of Najm Hosain Syed

Murphy

2022

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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Although Punjabi is written in two different scripts in India and Pakistan, there are striking parallels between the literary work in Punjabi produced on both sides of the India and Pakistan border that divides Punjab. Modern Punjabi literary works on both sides of the border express a generally progressive ( pragatīvādī, taraqqi pasand) set of political and social commitments; this is in keeping with the broader history of modern vernacular literary production in South Asia (Gopal, 2005). This essay explores further dimensions of the parallel literary commitments on both sides of the border, read against the legacy of the Partition, though a close reading of the works of Najm Hosain Syed (b. 1936), a leading writer in the Punjabi language advocacy movement in Pakistan. This exploration seeks to analyze the ways the Partition is configured in Syed’s work, and how he works to bring the past into the present — and the present into the past — against a kind of sentimental nostalgia that disengages from the political present.

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Section: Untitledmentioning

confidence: 83%

Remembering against sentimentality: Partition’s literary shadows in the work of Najm Hosain Syed

Murphy

2022

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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“…Unlike the Congress party, which was being led by M. K. Gandhi, and its official credo of nonviolence 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%

“…Chris Moffat (2016Moffat ( , 2019 in his work on the politics of Bhagat Singh's revolutionary inheritance and the fortunes of his multifarious afterlives in the post-colonial period makes use of an insightful formulation to argue that it is the absence of Bhagat Singh's corpse (which was cremated clandestinely after hanging and was not handed over to his family), and always-in-the-making nature of his corpus (his material remains in the form of writings) that defies the attempts of the corps (a heteromorphous body of people invested in retrieving the corpus and wielding it to claim to be the true inheritors of the legacy of the martyr) to 'contest appropriation and "incorrect" invocation [of Bhagat Singh]' (2016, p. 644), and ensures the revenant possibilities, the spectral appearances, of the revolutionary martyr. In this article, I propose that in the case of the SABS controversy, the corps was formed by the martyr's fellow revolutionaries and casemates, especially with communist affiliations, as well as his family members who were marshalling their own bodies (as opposed to Bhagat Singh's lost corpse) and their first-hand experiences and memories of the martyr to recover and resurrect his corpus in the form of a biopic to claim and contest rights over their own representation as well as that of the revolutionary martyr on celluloid.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

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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“…We understand an action to be 'revolutionary' or 'terrorist' only when it has been predicted or determined to be so by the British Raj. 5 The revolutionaries themselves were doing plenty of things they deemed revolutionary but which were not among the Raj's predictions: reading, transforming the jail into an ashram, watching movies, and experimenting with studio portraiture. 6 This is why Ghosh's revolutionary terrorists are also gentleman; this is why Maclean's moderate Congress Party is also, covertly, revolutionary.…”

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

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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India's Revolutionary Inheritance

Cited by 29 publications

References 128 publications

Remembering against sentimentality: Partition’s literary shadows in the work of Najm Hosain Syed

Remembering against sentimentality: Partition’s literary shadows in the work of Najm Hosain Syed

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

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