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

Interrogates the explosive potential of revolutionary anti-colonial 'afterlives' in contemporary Indian politics and society.

Chris Moffat (Author)

9781108739016, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 9 July 2020

294 pages, 33 b/w illus.
15 x 23 x 1.5 cm, 0.45 kg

'… unquestionably the most arresting scholarly study thus far of Bhagat Singh …' Vinay Lal, Cultural Critique

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.

Introduction: the work of the dead
Part I: 1. Lahore and the possibility of politics
2. What is to be done?
3. Infinite Inquilab
Part II: Prologue
4. Bhagat Singh's corpse
5. In league with the dead
6. Life and death in monuments
Conclusion: a politics of inheritance.

Subject Areas: National liberation & independence, post-colonialism [HBTR], Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Asian history [HBJF]