Politics and the Work of the Dead in Modern India

Abstract

This article provides a framework for understanding the continuing political potential of the anticolonial dead in twenty-first-century India. It demonstrates how scholars might move beyond histories of reception to interrogate the force of inheritance in contemporary political life. Rather than the willful conjuring of the dead by the living, for a politics in the present, it considers the more provocative possibility that the dead might themselves conjure politics—calling the living to account, inciting them to action. To explicate the prospects for such an approach, the article traces the contested afterlives of martyred Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh (1907–1931), comparing three divergent political projects in which this iconic anticolonial hero is greeted as interlocutor in a struggle caught “halfway.” It is this temporal experience of “unfinished business”—of a revolution left incomplete, a freedom not yet perfected—that conditions Bhagat Singh's appearance as a contemporary in the political disputes of the present, whether they are on the Hindu nationalist right, the Maoist student left, or amidst the smoldering remains of Khalistani separatism in twenty-first-century Punjab. Exploring these three variant instances in which living communities affirm Bhagat Singh's stake in the struggles of the present, the article provides insight into the long-term legacies of revolutionary violence in India and the relationship between politics and the public life of history in the postcolonial world more generally.

The Politics of Our Selves: Left self-fashioning and the production of representative claims in everyday Indian campus politics

“…Left self-fashioning thus nurtures close ties with leading sacrificial figures. As illustrated by Moffat (2018), the great martyrs ( shaheed-e-azam ) such as the communist freedom fighter Bhagat Singh—executed by the British Raj—act as ‘historical spectres’ for future generations of activists, haunting contemporary political selves to complete the revolution left unfinished at Indian Independence.…”

“…Distinct from other streams of political asceticism, the figure of the declassed left is correctly understood as a strong reaction to the pervasiveness of hierarchy in Indian society and not as an enactment of strictly religious ideas. Because the practice is firmly grounded in the sentiment of class awareness, it is undoubtedly Marxist in character, but also finds inspiration in the revolutionary repertoire of secular icons such as the freedom fighter Bhagat Singh (Jaffrelot 2011: 151–155, Moffat 2018), who is by far the most popular political personage in JNU political pamphlets—he is mentioned in 1,151 pamphlets among those I collected and digitized.…”