Against Archaeology

There is an old joke concerning the famous Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh that sets the stage nicely for the discussions to follow. ‘Every Indian wants Bhagat Singh to be reborn’, it goes, ‘but only in a neighbour’s house!’ Recited with a laugh, the observation is clearly self-deprecating. It concedes that, while the popular desire for an uncompromising politics of conviction might endure in India today, this path cannot be for everyone; few are willing to accept the sacrifice and suffering now synonymous with Bhagat Singh’s name. Indeed, the messianic tenor of the saying – that a dissident youth, hanged by the colonial state in 1931, should return to fight again – transmits a furtive disavowal of the individual responsibility the martyr is so celebrated for affirming: his willingness to confront injustice, to never stand idly by, to never compromise one’s ideals, even in the face of death.

But the saying also reveals a reluctance to confine these heroic tendencies to the revolutionary’s historical context: that is, to his specific location amid a swell in militant activity in colonial North India during the 1920s, following the collapse of M. K. Gandhi’s first ‘non-cooperation’ movement in 1922 and falling significantly under the world shadow cast by the new Soviet experiment in Russia after 1917.Footnote ¹ Born in 1907, Bhagat Singh’s name was made on India’s anti-colonial stage, and yet the quality of his example is seen to exceed this particular struggle. Narratives of national liberation have not exhausted his potential, nor is he confined easily to a single revolutionary horizon. He is invited instead to return, to be ‘reborn’, appealed to for guidance and inspiration to contest all manner of postcolonial predicaments: government corruption, religious chauvinism, neo-imperialist incursions, environmental degradation; the list goes on, and in this appeal the living are forced to account for themselves, for their own actions or lack thereof. It is this desire for the revenant – for the dead man who returns – that concerns the chapters to follow: the enduring political potential of a twenty-three-year-old hanged in Lahore in the early twentieth century, and the work of his spectre in modern Indian politics.

This book is concerned with the problem of afterlives – their meaning for a politics and the challenges they pose for the writing of history. Its story unfolds on the terrain of colonial and postcolonial South Asia, but it aims to carve a place for the unquiet dead in the history of political thought more generally – to interrogate what the demands of inheritance might mean for politics in a given present. ‘Inheritance’ is understood here not as a logic of succession but as an untimely interference – a sense of responsibility to that which is not present, whose corporeal existence has been extinguished. How do the living negotiate a debt to the dead? How does this experience condition their horizons of expectation? Rather than approaching ‘afterlives’ simply as the wilful conjuring of the dead by the living, to serve a politics in the present, this book takes seriously the force of the dead as entities to whom something is owed – who might themselves conjure politics, calling the living to account.

Attention to the force of inheritance provides a window into the power and promise of anti-colonial histories in a postcolonial world. Ann Laura Stoler’s recent caution concerning the prefix ‘post’ and its function in the term ‘postcolonial’ has facilitated a conversation about what she calls ‘imperial durabilities’ in the present – those pervasive ‘effects’ of empire that were not contained by formal independence or decolonization, but which continue to animate global hierarchies in the present, from the dumping of toxic waste in African countries to ongoing processes of dispossession and resource extraction in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere.Footnote ² But thinking about the specific complex of concepts and horizons that characterize an anti-colonial politics, the independence moment remains an important location of material and psychic investment. As a temporal benchmark, it provides a convenient reference point for the postcolonial lament regarding the collapse of anti-colonial utopias and the compromises or corruptions of post-independence states.Footnote ³ It spurs an injunction to recognize the ‘unfinished business’ of struggle, parsed evocatively in the Indian communist slogan yih azaadi jhooti hai, ‘this freedom is a lie’. Across the formerly colonized world, radical figures from the past – from James Connolly to Dedan Kimathi to Stephen BikoFootnote ⁴ – weigh upon the present as reminders of paths not taken, of potential unfulfilled, even as ‘official’ historians and state authorities labour to absorb these radical pasts into a consensus national pantheon. In the figure of the martyred revolutionary, the question of a responsibility to the dead is entangled with the urge to continue a struggle caught ‘halfway’, to achieve a freedom not yet won or still to be perfected.

Bhagat Singh has been a favourite topic for hagiographers, propagandists and polemicists in postcolonial India. Responding to the many myths and legends attached to his name, academic historians have set out to uncover who this famous rebel ‘really’ was, what he ‘really’ fought and died for.Footnote ⁵ This is perhaps unsurprising: the founding historicist presumption that the past is separate from the present promotes a principled distrust of the revenant and a preference for the corpse, immobile and amenable to excavation. The fact that Bhagat Singh is frequently invoked across contradictory ideological projects in contemporary South Asia – from the Hindu right to the Maoist left, Sikh separatists in Punjab to secular rationalists in Tamil Nadu, the army in India to pacifists in Pakistan – lends this call to reconstruct the ‘real’ figure an additional sense of urgency, especially among those eager to position themselves as ‘true’ inheritors of the revolutionary’s legacy. Historians in the twenty-first century must be careful, according to Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, the former chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research, to keep Bhagat Singh safe from ‘vulgar hands’.Footnote ⁶ The fact that the man is celebrated not simply for his courage in the face of death but also for his political actions – the shooting of a police officer in Lahore in 1928 and the bombing of the Legislative Assembly in New Delhi in 1929 – means that he is hardly an anodyne figure, available equally to romantic appraisals of anti-state violence as to solemn appeals for patriotic service.

The objective of this book is not to present another account of the ‘real’ Bhagat Singh nor to judge the validity of existing claims over others. It aims instead to open Bhagat Singh out into his afterlives, providing a language with which to comprehend his widespread popular appeal and continuing potential as interlocutor and instigator in modern Indian politics. An observation made by Gandhi, the most prominent nationalist leader at the time of the revolutionary’s execution in 1931, invites critical attention: ‘there has never been within the living memory so much romance round any life as had surrounded that of Bhagat Singh.’Footnote ⁷ Though the Mahatma would soon be lamenting the appearance of a ‘Bhagat Singh cult’ among young Indian nationalists,Footnote ⁸ his admission that the revolutionary’s potency had been constituted importantly by the nature of his reception remains instructive. This book begins by accepting the absence of a single, fully discernible figure and moves instead to trace the fleeting work of phantasmal forms – exploring the promise the revolutionary represents, rather than attempting to excavate the particularity of a political programme. By taking seriously rather than rejecting as ‘incorrect’ the myriad and often surprising appearances of the revenant revolutionary on the terrain of the present, the book draws a series of connections between the afterlives of violence, contemporary formations of dissent, and the public life of history in postcolonial South Asia. What is it about Bhagat Singh that compels such active fascination, across the political spectrum? How might his disruptive, spectral presence be integrated usefully into the study of Indian politics and political thought? What is to be made of India’s revolutionary inheritance?

Endings That Are Not Over

Rather than a Rankean concern to uncover the past ‘the way it really was’, this book’s sensitivity to the spectral betrays a Nietzschean prejudice, wherein ‘only something which has no history can be defined’.Footnote ⁹ Reading Nietzsche’s dictum, the philosopher Raymond Geuss reflects that, instead of definitions, one can only pursue ‘an “analysis” of the contingent synthesis of “meaning” [an object of inquiry] represents’.Footnote ¹⁰ But this work does not set out simply to map the contested, interpretive life of Bhagat Singh as a popular figure: this is not a history of reception or of the distortions of memory in any straightforward sense.Footnote ¹¹ Rather than contests over ‘meaning’, we are interested in a desire for ‘presence’ – and here I follow Eelco Runia’s provocative vision for a philosophy of history that is concerned less with problems of ‘representation’ than in the vertiginous urge for communion with the past and its effects in the present.Footnote ¹² The chapters to follow are animated by the possibility that the anti-colonial dead remain effective and indeed demanding interlocutors for the living. Such an agenda does not require the reader to accept that ghosts or revenants actually ‘exist’; rather, it builds on new sociologies of haunting and philosophical critiques of historicist time to consider how the emancipated present of modernity may not be as self-sufficient as it strives to be, and how living communities can experience this present through an active sense of responsibility to the dead.Footnote ¹³ Bhagat Singh appears not as an object to be ‘appropriated’ or ‘used’ by the living but as an entity to whom something is owed, even if the nature of this debt is interpreted variously: as the protection or reinforcement of the community he is thought to have died for, perhaps, or the perpetuation of a revolution that has yet to reach its end.

Rather than some stable icon or usable metaphor, the martyr appears exceptional in modern Indian politics precisely because the ‘actual’ conditions of his life are so immersed in and enveloped by a sense of possibility.Footnote ¹⁴ His potential is invested in the brave pursuit of a future-to-come, rather than in any concrete measure of worldly success. While other anti-colonial figures are certainly appropriated and ceremoniously invoked, few appear so ideologically unbound; while many are revered and saluted, it is Bhagat Singh who is invited to return. The martyred revolutionary is not, in this sense, honoured as a founding father – he cannot be equated to a Gandhi, a Nehru or even a B. R. Ambedkar, figures who also have vivid afterlives in contemporary India but whose prominence is connected to (or at least coloured by) their participation in projects of foundation, in the establishment of institutions. The celebrated nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose is often compared to Bhagat Singh due to his militancy and heroic death (in an aeroplane crash, in Japanese-ruled Formosa in 1945), but he too carries the weight of a long career on the public stage – a connection to the structures and compromises of mainstream nationalist projects. This is a burden the Lahore martyr does not have to bear, due in part to his youth but also the clandestine nature of his life and struggle.Footnote ¹⁵ In contrast to founding fathers, Bhagat Singh’s vitality is construed horizontally: as a ghostly comrade in a fight that continues, cajoling the living to recognize the lingering ‘something-to-be-done’ in the present. Thus his ambivalent relationship to normative institutions and his amenability to a politics of critique – the exhilaration of a departure, rather than the certainty of a destination.

Foregrounding the interruptive potential of the anti-colonial dead within a democratic postcolonial polity, this book positions the question of inheritance as crucial for understanding the nature of the political argument in modern Indian history. It responds to debates concerning the shape of and agenda for an emergent ‘Indian intellectual history’,Footnote ¹⁶ and yet, as will be clear by now, a genealogy of ideas or concepts is not this work’s primary concern. I am interested instead in the resonant significance of a certain ‘way of being’ in politics, and the manner in which one’s experience of a political present can be inflected by instances of repetition, recurrence and return. In this sense, my argument affirms Dipesh Chakrabarty’s insistence that any discussion of the political subject in modern India must coincide with a radical critique of the nature of historical time.Footnote ¹⁷ But whereas Chakrabarty’s interest in the untimely is primarily via the persistence of non-historicist orders of temporality – the enchanted worlds of gods and spirit – my concern is with what is clearly a malady of historicism, something that is supposed to be ‘past’ but continues to make itself known: ‘endings that are not over’, in Avery Gordon’s provocative phrase.Footnote ¹⁸ If Bhagat Singh continues to place a demand on the present – if the living affirm a sense of responsibility to his life, death and legacy – what does this mean for a politics? What modes of action might the revolutionary legitimate in the present? What possible futures does he aid in imagining?

To grasp the form and effects of this spectral weight upon the living, fieldwork for this book combined research in official and informal archives with visits to memorial sites – of which there are hundreds to Bhagat Singh in India – as well as participation in commemoration rituals, dissident political protests and new pedagogical experiments, primarily in Delhi, across Indian Punjab and in Lahore, Pakistan. Between 2011 and 2013, and across several subsequent short trips, I met with an array of activists, politicians, student organizations, artists, scholars and street performers – all as a means to understand the multiple ways Bhagat Singh is invited to ‘speak’ in the present, helping to constitute or challenge contemporary political vocabularies.Footnote ¹⁹

As a result of this work I have been interested to link methods in the history of political thought with recent calls for an anthropology of history, and more particularly for ‘ethnographies of historicity’ – close studies of the variant ways individuals and communities imagine their lives in relation to pasts, presents and futures.Footnote ²⁰ The South Asian context has long been a catalyst for research at the intersection of anthropology and history, with Bernard Cohn’s work in particular credited with inaugurating a ‘historical turn’ in the field of anthropology more generally.Footnote ²¹ Cohn’s intention was to shift the discipline’s concern from synchronic study to the diachronic effects of power relationships and processes of knowledge production, in India and elsewhere. But as Charles Stewart and Stephan Palmié have suggested, anthropology took this historical turn without interrogating the category of ‘history’ itself. The two scholars draw directly on Chakrabarty’s diagnosis of historicism’s limits – the imaginaries its emphasis on linear temporality and empirical verification can and cannot capture – to justify a call for new ethnographies of ‘past-making’ in all its variant forms.Footnote ²² This book stitches Stewart and Palmié’s methodological prescriptions for thinking about time and the place of the past directly to questions of politics and political thought in modern India. In this sense it departs again from Cohn’s influential work, which sought in the study of ‘culture’ the grounds for a historical anthropology, allowing a rethinking of the classical categories of ethnography in India – caste, region, village and so on.Footnote ²³ My focus is on the scene of a political dispute, the form of an argument, allowing me to approach directly the conditions of postcolonial democracy and new visions of revolutionary possibility as they relate to South Asian pasts. Before explicating my specific approach to the study of political thought in the later section on ‘Anarchy and Politics’, the following section situates this agenda in relation to recent writing on Indian revolutionary politics.

Bhagat Singh as a Problem in the History of Indian Nationalism

The last decade has seen a surge in new academic studies of Bhagat Singh, both in India and abroad. This growing concern to update or replace old hagiographies may be thought of in relation to two events: the first calendrical – the 2007 birth centenary of the revolutionary, widely celebrated across India, and the second cinematic – the release of a number of popular films about the martyr in quick succession, from 2002’s Legend of Bhagat Singh to the 2006 blockbuster Rang de Basanti, with two more in between.Footnote ²⁴

There is much to be said about this timing, and especially Bollywood’s exaltation of Bhagat Singh as a muscular, confident patriot at the height of India’s early twenty-first-century economic boom; such issues will be addressed directly in Part II of this book. It was not, however, the contextual specificity of popular recall which prompted the attention of scholars at these moments, but the dissonance such events laid bare: the gap between Bhagat Singh’s tremendous popularity as a figure – both in his own time and today – and his near-complete absence from official and authoritative histories of India’s anti-colonial struggle. In 2007, the anthropologist and art historian Christopher Pinney observed that Bhagat Singh’s ‘huge popularity’ remains ‘one of the puzzles of twentieth-century Indian history that academics don’t seem to have engaged with’.Footnote ²⁵

Conventional histories of the freedom movement tend to cohere around a party-centric narrative, privileging the work of the Indian National Congress as the central arbiter of India’s march toward sovereign nationhood.Footnote ²⁶ This path to independence, guided by Gandhi under the banner of non-violence, leaves little room for alternative paths, let alone the so-called votaries of violence: those bomb-throwers and political assassins periodically distracting public attention since 1897, at least, when the Maharashtrian Chapekar brothers shot dead the colonial administrator W. C. Rand in Poona.Footnote ²⁷ The designation of Bhagat Singh as a ‘terrorist’ – by colonial authorities but also by sections of the nationalist pressFootnote ²⁸ – has facilitated the martyr’s relegation to a footnote in most general histories: a representative of Gandhi’s encounter with the ‘cult of the bomb’, a patriot perhaps, but ultimately misguided.Footnote ²⁹ As Kama Maclean notes, the distinction between ‘violent revolutionaries’ and a ‘non-violent’ Congress was sharpened after Bhagat Singh’s execution in 1931 – a result of Gandhi’s attempts to instil discipline within the nationalist party – to the extent that historians have often missed the ‘porous politics’ that existed between these two anti-colonial constituencies.Footnote ³⁰

In some polemical biographies released around Bhagat Singh’s birth centenary, the figure’s relegation from the dominant narrative of India’s anti-colonial struggle was construed in conspiratorial terms: as a purposeful degradation, a concerted attempt to silence a people’s hero whose revolutionary ideas still pose a threat to the ruling classes of an independent state.Footnote ³¹ For others, it appeared less controversially as an inevitable – if lamentable – response to the failure of the revolutionary project in India: an understandable outcome of this impassioned but ultimately ill-fated movement.Footnote ³² But some of the more interesting responses have taken this dissonance between official text and popular appreciations to demonstrate the limits of conventional history-writing in South Asia: primarily, its inability to capture the diverse set of imaginaries constituting ‘the national’ in India, its prioritization of certain types of sources over others, and its ambition to provide narrative closure despite relying on a limited and unreliable colonial archive. The historian Ishwar Dayal Gaur argues, for instance, that Bhagat Singh’s popularity can only be understood if read alongside the celebration of non-conformist heroes in Punjabi folk and cultural traditions, noting his resonance with certain religious tropes of sacrifice and commitment.Footnote ³³ Literary figurations of ‘the revolutionary’ in twentieth-century Indian writing have, similarly, begun to attract attention as canvases upon which issues around violence and dissident moralities could be negotiated with nuance, and not least because two of Bhagat Singh’s close associates in the revolutionary movement – Yasphal and Agyeya – would later become major figures in the world of Hindi literature.Footnote ³⁴

In his wide-ranging intervention, Christopher Pinney cites the dissonance between official and popular narratives of the independence movement as part of his call for a ‘new historiographic practice’: an approach grounded in the study of visual representations and so better equipped to grasp the ‘affective intensities of the popular’ in modern India.Footnote ³⁵ From this vantage the widespread circulation of Bhagat Singh’s image on posters and calendar art in India appears crucial. For Pinney,

One of the features this emphasis on visual sources allows Pinney to demonstrate is, indeed, ‘the prominence of revolutionary terrorism in the popular imagination’ – Bhagat Singh is posited as one emblem of the ‘popular messianism that drove much of the nationalist struggle’ in India.Footnote ³⁷ A similar sensitivity to Bhagat Singh’s recurrent presence in nationalist poster art leads the cultural historian Sumathi Ramaswamy to conclude that it is with the revolutionary’s hanging in 1931 that ‘martyrdom for the nation becomes a sustained (and sustainable) visual subject.’Footnote ³⁸ The revolutionary becomes bound to ideas of the national as part of a popular ‘visual pedagogy’, exhorting the youthful Indian male to take pleasure in sacrificing for the nation, and, particularly in seizing the chance to give his head to the anthropomorphized national deity, Bharat Mata [‘Mother India’]. For Ramaswamy as for Pinney, representations of Bhagat Singh are useful primarily for underlining the complexity of nationalist imaginaries in India: they reveal the widespread celebration of heroic and emancipatory violence that undergirds the creation of a non-violent polity by an educated party of lawyers and constitutionalists.

Maclean has responded to these provocations by suggesting that revolutionary politics in 1920s and 1930s India should be seen less as a suppressed alternative to mainstream nationalism but rather as a vital and unacknowledged presence within it. Her study of Bhagat Singh’s revolutionary organization – the short-lived Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), established in Delhi in 1928 – foregrounds again the limits of a purely textual archive while also establishing the group’s constitutive significance within the anti-colonial struggle at large. Rather than a brief and unsuccessful challenge to Gandhian non-violence, the HSRA is positioned as integral to the process by which the Congress was radicalized and the call for purna swaraj [‘complete independence’] accepted in 1930 as a mainstream nationalist objective.Footnote ³⁹ Maclean supports this argument by creatively expanding the traditional archive, taking into account newly declassified documents as well as an array of oral history testimonies and visual sources, using this plurality to sharpen understanding of ‘what really happened’ and so consistent with the use of historical tools in their identifying mode.

Though Maclean’s central argument is based on an agonistic relationship – the push and pull between young revolutionaries and their (often direct) interlocutors in the Congress – its concern with the form and development of a mainstream anti-colonial nationalist movement can be brought into conversation with other attempts by historians of India to posit Bhagat Singh and his comrades in the HSRA as ‘unifying’ figures in late 1920s Congress politics, based primarily on a reading of the famous hunger strike orchestrated by the revolutionaries while in prison in 1929.Footnote ⁴⁰ For scholars like Neeti Nair and Taylor Sherman, Bhagat Singh appears as a figure who enables consensus: his popularity is produced through the spectacle of his suffering body, beaten by colonial authorities in prison and force-fed to survive, such that he can be effectively ‘absorbed’ into a Gandhian vocabulary of sacrifice. This is a conclusion Maclean contests – noting that the HSRA revolutionary who died during the strike, Jatindranath Das, comes nowhere near to sharing Bhagat Singh’s status as hero-martyrFootnote ⁴¹ – and a vision which, as will be made clear below, contrasts with the present book’s emphasis on the revolutionary as a figure of dissensus.

These attempts to place Bhagat Singh in relation to the national through a rereading or expansion of sources are mirrored elsewhere in the revision of scalar registers: that is, in works which approach revolutionary politics in India through the lens of ‘transnational’ or ‘global’ rather than purely national histories. And so Maia Ramnath interrogates Bhagat Singh’s interest in European anarchist thinkers, or J. Daniel Elam positions the young revolutionary as part of a ‘global community of readers’, channelling into the subcontinent concepts from a network of international radical thought.Footnote ⁴² Bhagat Singh’s dissonance with regard to official national histories is here affirmed, but only because he is accepted as demonstrative of a different manifestation of anti-colonial thought: its cosmopolitan and worldly dimension, a way of thinking community that did not necessarily end in the creation of a (capitalist) nation-state.Footnote ⁴³ Elam’s work is particularly suggestive in its call to place Bhagat Singh within a global conversation on philosophical and political egalitarianism, arguing that his reading and writing practice are instructive for rethinking genealogies of radical democratic thought in the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴⁴ This is not to say that acknowledgement of Bhagat Singh’s worldliness is always counterposed to the national – the two clearly work in tandem in many hagiographic accounts, wherein the young revolutionary’s global sensibility and intellectual appetite is posited as proof of his exceptional quality, deployed as an argument for his acceptance as model national subject: a citizen able to transcend parochial sentiment, at home in the world.Footnote ⁴⁵

The point in outlining this recent work on Bhagat Singh is not to assess individual arguments but to demonstrate how approaches to the figure are organized around the apparent ‘problem’ of Bhagat Singh’s exclusion from dominant narratives of India’s anti-colonial movement. My own approach to the revolutionary has benefitted from these studies, especially in the way they open up the category of the national and emphasize its heterogeneous nature.Footnote ⁴⁶ But my primary interest in Bhagat Singh as a ‘problem’ is formulated in terms of the figure’s enduring intransigence – not simply for the national but for normative order in general – and thus the object is not to get the story straight but to negotiate its constitutive crookedness, to accommodate that which escapes historical knowability as much as that which confirms it.Footnote ⁴⁷ In this sense I take a cue from Pinney’s work and the challenge of addressing that ‘affectively and libidinally charged domain that escapes conventional signification’.Footnote ⁴⁸ But rather than focusing on the visual encounter, this book chases that spectral excess produced at the intersection of sacrifice and politics. My concern is not the texture of a life reconstructed but rather a death that remains, in an important sense, irreducible. Bhagat Singh is acclaimed not simply for dying, but for tempting that fate, for sacrificing himself, defying those who held power over his life and then marching courageously to the gallows, singing a song, kissing the hangman’s noose and shouting ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ [‘Long Live Revolution’] with his final breath. It is this event that removes Bhagat Singh from the corruptible world of things, transforming him spectacularly into amar shaheed [‘the immortal martyr’] and producing something unbound, something capable of return.

The centrality of death in the constitution of Bhagat Singh as a figure is also affirmed in the explorations of literary scholar Simona Sawhney – even if her object is to map the discursive ground enabling the man’s decision to die and so based on a reading of his writings, an interrogation of his life. But Sawhney is also careful to situate her interest in Bhagat Singh within a twenty-first-century context, that is, as part of a political conjuncture in which violence and martyrdom continue to play important roles, a world characterized by the competing sacrificial economies fuelling America’s so-called War on Terror. And so Sawhney opens her first reading of Bhagat Singh in the context of the May 2010 suicide bomb attacks on Ahmadiyya mosques in Lahore, Pakistan: not to prove equivalence between their perpetrators – the Pakistani Tehrik-i-Taliban – and Bhagat Singh’s HSRA, but to open this question of youth’s ‘smouldering, inarticulate fascination with death’ as it manifests in variant historical epochs.Footnote ⁴⁹

My own interest in Bhagat Singh lies less in how his world appears different from the world of today – which is Sawhney’s concern – than in how the dead revolutionary continues to inflect questions around militant struggle, political commitment and self-sacrifice in twenty-first-century India and, to some extent, Pakistan. This is not a question of divergence or disparate analogy but one of return, repetition, and relapse: a sense that the martyr still has a stake in the political present, that something remains unfinished. The affirmation of a responsibility to the struggle and sacrifice of an uncompromising revolutionary – who may inspire action but who also lays bare the inadequacies of the living – is addressed explicitly in Part II of this book. What I want to foreground here is a relationship to history not as ‘a sequence of events like the beads of a rosary’, to cite Walter Benjamin’s caricature, but as something which charges integrally the ‘time of the now’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Benjamin’s theses toward a philosophy of history appear significant for this project in the sense that they install historical practice at the heart of both intellectual inquiry and the pursuit of social change in the present.Footnote ⁵¹ The German critic’s interlocutors at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research would question similarly modernity’s desire to separate the present from the past: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno even proposed a ‘theory of ghosts’ in an appendix to their famous Dialectic of Enlightenment, arguing against the reduction of individuals to ‘a mere succession of instantaneous presents’ and commending instead a coming-to-terms with the long history of violence and destruction that binds the living and the dead.Footnote ⁵² But this exhortation to convene with ghosts is largely about learning to mourn properly and without stigma: recovering the dead from alienation and providing them a hospitable home.Footnote ⁵³ My interest is less in how the living may redeem the past than in how the past might interrupt the living: throwing the present out of joint, shaking a stasis rather than allowing for closure. If we accept Benjamin’s image of the past ‘flashing up’ at a moment of danger, it is the interruptive potential of this appearance that compels attention here, and more specifically its relationship to a movement of dissensus – the inauguration of a dispute.

Anarchy and Politics

In 1953, the Bombay-based People’s Publishing House printed one of the earliest historical accounts of Bhagat Singh’s life and ideas in the form of a pamphlet by Gopal Thakur.Footnote ⁵⁴ The work was introduced by one of the martyr’s former comrades, the HSRA veteran Shiv Varma, recently released after nearly twenty years in colonial prisons.Footnote ⁵⁵ Varma, in his preface, made one central plea: that Bhagat Singh ‘should primarily be studied as a political figure’.Footnote ⁵⁶ This is a call that the historicist endeavours I mentioned earlier would claim fidelity to: reconstructing, through a close analysis of contemporary writings and archival sources, Bhagat Singh’s ‘ideology and programme’.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is also an agenda I seek to honour, albeit with an amendment regarding what precisely is signalled by the name ‘politics’.

What usually goes by the name of ‘politics’ in Bhagat Singh’s case is, as noted, this question of ideology and programme: the form and structure of the HSRA, strategic approaches to organization and mobilization, the proposed ends against which individual action may be measured. This concern is symptomatic of a more general way of thinking about politics that is archic: from the Greek arkhé and concerned with the foundation or development of autonomous and sovereign ‘wholes’ – the party, the state, the individual and so on. Most of the studies discussed above exhibit an archic concern in their eagerness to relate Bhagat Singh to the constitution of an alternative whole: the creation of an independent India – a story of gains and losses, successes and failures, establishment and consolidation. Questions of state and sovereignty are, undeniably, crucial to modern South Asian history, and I do not mean to discount that here.Footnote ⁵⁸ But the lives and afterlives of Bhagat Singh encourage a different conversation, not simply due to conventional historicist obstacles – the scarcity of available writings, the brevity of the revolutionary’s political career – but because it is precisely the dynamic of a confrontation which constitutes Bhagat Singh as a political figure. It is the passion of a dispute which propels him to popularity and enables his apotheosis.

Accordingly, this book pursues an an-archic vision of politics, and I deploy ‘anarchy’ in its strict philosophical sense: as something which cannot be sovereign like arkhé, which does not presume autonomy or self-sufficiency but rather evokes a condition of proximity and exposure, a necessary relationality.Footnote ⁵⁹ It is through an anarchic potentiality – a way of being in relation to order, to tyranny, to injustice, to death – that the specificity of Bhagat Singh’s promise is apprehended. Anarchy, by its very definition, resists institutionalization, even if it is bound necessarily to the existing order of things, prompting a disturbance within it.Footnote ⁶⁰ And while I have already alluded to the incalculable aspects of a sacrificial politics – the excess of meaning produced in the act of martyrdom – a sense of perpetual recalcitrance is also central to the famous slogan of the HSRA, those words Bhagat Singh reportedly shouted from the gallows: ‘Inquilab Zindabad’, ‘Long Live Revolution’ – a life for revolution, a life of revolution.

Defending this slogan from critics in a 1929 letter to Calcutta’s Modern Review, Bhagat Singh described its premise precisely in relational terms:

‘Politics’ is approached accordingly in this book as an activity or occurrence, shaped not by its place or object but by its form: the introduction of a contentious claim into ‘old order’, the inauguration of a dispute. In this sense the work draws on recent attempts by thinkers on the left to challenge an epochal shift toward ‘consensus’ and interest-based compromise in liberal democracies after the Cold War.Footnote ⁶² Against a limited understanding of politics as those processes of legitimizing power and distributing roles and resources, the question of emancipation has been rephrased in terms of the ability to disrupt or depart, and hence the growing interest in processes of subjectification: ‘the production’ – to cite Jacques Rancière – ‘through a series of actions of a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience’.Footnote ⁶³ Against the order of consensus is posited the disruptive potential of dissensus – the invention of arguments – and it is in these terms that I want to address Bhagat Singh as a figure of politics: a revenant whose function is precisely to cajole, to stir from slumber, to demand action and critique rather than idle acceptance and compromise.

Rancière’s influential conception of politics is anarchic in the sense that it, too, foregrounds a relationship – that between the dissenting subject and the policed order of things which tries to shut that subject down, denying the possibility of dissent and affirming instead the necessity of inhabiting allocated roles.Footnote ⁶⁴ This book will draw from Rancière’s insights throughout, but it is important to note that it is not the smooth functioning of his vision of politics that attracts my attention but also its clear limitations. Critiques of Rancière’s emphasis on politics as departure and disruption mirror the ways I want to delimit Bhagat Singh’s revenant potentiality. These criticisms suggest that politics, in this anarchic form, can only be sporadic and responsive, and that Rancière has been largely indifferent to questions of organization and the problem of how to sustain opposition over time. Compare this with an interlocutor like Alain Badiou, a major French contemporary, who also privileges a notion of rupture but endorses ongoing fidelity to that moment, rather than what Rancière seems to venerate as an ongoing capacity for infidelity, a perpetual refusal of mastery.Footnote ⁶⁵ But while Badiou is more concerned with militant affirmation than continual improvisation, it is precisely this idea of infidelity that can help us to comprehend Bhagat Singh’s spectral wanderings. It is important that – in Nina Power’s words – politics for Rancière ‘literally has “no future”, or at least not one that is predictable’.Footnote ⁶⁶ It is a similar openness to ongoing change – a compulsion to be vigilant against every manifestation of order, ‘always and ever’ – that enables Bhagat Singh’s constant return, even if the price of this promise is frustration for those who wish to establish a singular claim to inheritance and determine a stable direction for the future.

This focus on anarchy – a ‘non-foundational’ potentiality bound to the context of a dispute – allows me to centre what is portable and reiterable about Bhagat Singh: here, in the form of relational practices, ways of being in proximity to rule or order.Footnote ⁶⁷ This is the focus of the three chapters in Part I, which retell the story of the revolutionary’s political career not to identify particularity but to open the figure out into his afterlives: to examine the nature of a promise rather than the refinement of a principle or programme. In Chapter 1, I focus on the question of Bhagat Singh’s education, introducing the young revolutionary not as a product of familial fidelities and proclivities but as an individual propelled by his investment in critique and transgression. Chapter 2 explores the militant gestures announcing Bhagat Singh’s presence on the anti-colonial stage; it considers how these political actions respond to the contingent order manifest in the revolutionary’s present rather than the prescriptions of some distant, anticipated future. Chapter 3 situates Bhagat Singh’s politics in relation to the law, reading the revolutionary’s confrontation with colonial legal order not as part of some call for an alternative or reformed legality but as a theatrical event that raises the stakes of justice itself: a reckoning outside law, reformulated as an infinite ‘will’, and corresponding to the anarchic vertigo of the slogan Inquilab Zindabad.

Part II begins with Bhagat Singh’s hanging on 23 March 1931. In a brief prologue, I raise again the question of sacrifice and argue that what Bhagat Singh’s martyrdom elevates is not some stable idea of community to be defended but the struggle of politics itself. This death was not foundational but resonates as the heroic affirmation of a fight: a call to arms, an invitation to inquilab. The three chapters in Part II interrogate the various ways living communities have negotiated this demand proffered by Bhagat Singh’s self-sacrifice. Chapter 4 considers how a meaningful idea of inheritance is sought in the martyr’s material remains – his fragmented corpus, seized by the living with necromantic intent and wielded to provide guidance for the future. Chapter 5 discusses how the revenant is apprehended in the present as party to a struggle that remains unfinished, and it is here that I explore most directly a politics manifest ‘in league with the dead’, wherein the martyred revolutionary is affirmed as a worthy interlocutor and contemporary in three distinct twenty-first-century predicaments. I consider, specifically, anti-corruption and the Hindu right, the form and direction of India’s student left, and the ongoing reverberations of Sikh secessionist militancy in Punjab. Chapter 6, finally, considers the anxieties produced by Bhagat Singh’s promiscuous, posthumous wanderings in the Indian nation-state, exploring attempts made to ‘tame’ the ghost and consolidate the martyr as a figure of the national past and thus outside its present. It is with this in mind that I cast a sideways glance at state sponsorship of public memorials and commemorative events honouring the revolutionary, refusing to take these blithely as part of the perpetuation of Bhagat Singh’s memory and recognizing them instead as exorcisms of sorts, a means to entomb or contain the spectre. This final chapter also considers the place of Bhagat Singh in contemporary Lahore, juxtaposing ongoing calls for an official memorial with the rich tradition of dissident street theatre in Pakistan and its animation of the martyr in public space.

Each of the chapters in Part II traces the afterlives of Bhagat Singh as they intersect with key questions in the study of postcolonial politics: the pursuit of ‘authentic histories’ against the limitations of the archive, the integrity of the independence moment and the nature of ‘true’ azaadi [freedom], as well as the marking of history in public space, the territorialization of memory and indeed the partition of anti-colonial pasts in the decades after 1947. Throughout these discussions I return to this movement between the material and spectral, the normative and undisciplined. While I am interested in the desire to claim Bhagat Singh for specific political arguments and institutions, I am also concerned with how the revolutionary – through the anarchic potentiality characterizing his life and death – manages to elude full integration, how his spectre remains unbound. In this way the book goes beyond stating the truism that all history is shaped by ideology and politics in the present; it explores instead how the past throws the present out of joint, and how the dead might be conceived as actors in their own right.

This vision of a political community that draws together the living and the dead allows us to think differently about the force and effects of anti-colonial histories in a postcolonial present, in India and more generally. My aim is not to attribute a ghostly agency to the dead but rather to question the presumption that the living stand confidently in an emancipated present, able to draw selectively from the past but remaining in no way bound to it. To acknowledge the work of the dead is to accept that the living may face the future but can be distracted, deterred or roused by their sense of obligation, duty or debt to the heroes or victims of struggles past. The concept of inheritance offers a language for grappling with this untimely interference – for understanding how this spectral weight is experienced as a call to responsibility, an incitement to action, and through which the outcomes of new political struggles have consequences not just for the living but for the honour and dignity of the dead themselves.