India's Revolutionary Inheritance : Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh

"What do anti-colonial histories mean for politics in contemporary India? How can we understand a political terrain that appears crowded with the dead, heroic figures from past struggles who call the living to account and demand action? What role do these 'afterlives' play in the inauguration of new politics and the fashioning of possible futures? In this engaging and innovative analysis of anti-colonial afterlives in modern South Asia, Chris Moffat crafts a framework that takes the dead seriously - not as passive entities, ceremonially invoked, but as active interlocutors and instigators in the present. Focusing on the iconic revolutionary martyr Bhagat Singh (1907-1931), Moffat establishes the problem of inheritance as central to the forms and futures of democracy in this postcolonial polity. Tracing Bhagat Singh's revenant presence in India today, he demonstrates how living communities are animated by a sense of obligation, duty or debt to the dead. Chris Moffat is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of History, Queen Mary University of London"-- Provided by publisher Half-title Page 2 Title Page 4 Untitled 5 Contents 6 List of Figures 8 List of Abbreviations 10 Note on Style 12 Introduction : The Work of the Dead 14 Part I 34 1 Lahore and the Possibility of Politics 36 2 What Is to Be Done? 73 3 Infinite Inquilab 98 Part II 128 Prologue 129 4 Bhagat Singh’s Corpse 136 5 In League with the Dead 173 6 Life and Death in Monuments 214 Conclusion : A Politics of Inheritance 259 Acknowledgements 267 Bibliography 270 Index 291 This innovative account of revolutionary thought in South Asia explores the long-term legacies of militant violence and the politics of commemoration in a post-colonial context. Asking how anti-colonial martyrs have come to 'haunt' the independent state, Chris Moffat provides an exciting new window into contemporary Indian politics. Interrogates the explosive potential of revolutionary anti-colonial 'afterlives' in contemporary Indian politics and society.