Book review: Aparna Vaidik,Waiting for Swaraj: Inner Lives of Indian Revolutionaries

This short but nuanced exploration of the revolutionary anticolonial pasts of India engages with the (in)activities of revolutionaries associated with the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) and its predecessor, the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA), in British India of the 1920s. To this end, it reads memoirs by and about these revolutionaries, not so much to delineate what they did, but to relate what they did while ‘waiting’. Vaidik rightly identifies this waiting to constitute the time that the revolutionaries spent ‘away from public gaze’ (p. 7), underground, and invisible. The revolutionaries indeed waited through most of their days, ‘waiting out the heat of arrests, holding their fire, being on the run, waiting for the action to take place, waiting for the court to pass judgement, waiting to finish their jail sentence, or waiting to be hanged’ (pp. 7–8). This emphasis on waiting is justified because Vaidik’s aim in the book is to understand the revolutionaries’ self-imagination, an imagination that provides them the markers for who they are, an imagination that is as much public as private, active as passive, ‘masculine’ as ‘feminine’, and rational as emotional.

The attempt to relate the inner lives of India’s anticolonial revolutionaries makes the book deeply conscious of the historiographical intervention it makes regarding how the revolutionary pasts of modern India have conventionally been related. It rightly underlines the gendered assumption in most historiography, for instance, that revolutionaries’ quotidian existence, time spent with family members, partners or friends is politically insignificant (p. 10). Additionally, it highlights how memoirs by and of revolutionaries have been paid scant regard in comparison to collectively authored political and propaganda materials such as pamphlets, posters and manifestos.

In a gesture that Vaidik understands to be of terribly significant historical redressal, she questions the centrality of the figure of Bhagat Singh in writings about India’s revolutionary anticolonial heritage. She also casts doubt over historiographical narratives that present socialism as the glue that supposedly bound together India’s various anticolonial revolutionaries. Hence, in the opening chapter, ‘The Revolutionary-Who-Waits’ (pp. 1–27), she states that her attention is on ‘less visible members of the HRA and the HSRA’ (p. 22), members whose importance gets reflected both in the time they spent doing something as well the time they spent waiting.

Other chapters are reflective of the intervention Vaidik wishes to make in historiography about revolutionary anticolonial India. Centred around Chandrashekhar Azad, they take the readers away from revolutionary activities in the courtroom and prison, sites where most of the ‘action’ was, to invisible, everyday spaces, as Azad was able to evade arrest throughout his life. Additionally, as he worked in both HRA and HSRA for about a decade, focus on his activities in the book also subverts the dominant historiographical trend that privileges the latter organisation over the former (pp. 22–3). Hence, Chapter 2, ‘Satyagrahi to Krantikari’ (pp. 28–59) relates the sociopolitical and ideological context that makes Azad identify and express himself as a revolutionary in the 1920s. It provides a detailed analysis of the ideas, beliefs and underground lives of the HRA revolutionaries. The chapter argues that revolutionary consciousness and sociopolitical circumstances around an individual are mutually constitutive, and it is a fallacy to imagine that some people are somehow bound to be revolutionaries once they are born.

Chapter 3, ‘Between Kranti and Inquilab’ (pp. 60–94), describes the decline and virtual decimation of the HRA and Azad’s emergence as the HSRA leader. It focuses on the quotidian, everyday existence of revolutionaries, on their conversations and debates about the meaning of revolution, the appropriate means to achieve radical social transformation, the place of religion in revolution and the significance of socialism. The chapter demonstrates that unlike how the situation has been described in conventional historiography, there was hardly any consensus among the HSRA revolutionaries on most of these questions. Consequently, Vaidik asks if there was indeed something that brought the revolutionaries together despite the existence of such ideological divergence among them. Chapter 4, ‘The Ascetic Kaalyoddha’ (pp. 95–126), relates the intricate equation among revolutionary self-consciousness and imagination, time and death. It suggests that the revolutionaries perceived themselves as winning over time or becoming eternal once they moved past the dialectic between their ascetic, quotidian existence and violent, public being.

The conclusion (pp. 127–36) takes a sharp critical look at India’s revolutionary anticolonial inheritance. It argues that the radicalism of the revolutionary movement was ‘incomplete’, as the latter adopted a conservative stance on issues of gender, caste and religion. There was indeed an unmistakable male, upper-caste and Hindu tenor to the activities carried out by the revolutionaries as well as to the latter’s descriptions found in memoirs (pp. 130–1). Moreover, the fact that most of these accounts are in Hindi reveals a deep connection between revolutionism and the consolidation of the Hindi public sphere in colonial north India. Unfortunately, this concomitance resulted in the sociopolitical marginalisation of the Indo-Persian literary and aesthetic tradition as well as the Muslim community in discourses about and around India’s revolutionary anticolonial pasts (pp. 131–2).

The above discussion will rightly reveal that Vaidik’s book makes a bold and sharp intervention in the burgeoning field of history-writing about India’s revolutionary anticolonial heritage. Yet, it is not devoid of issues. Readers would register a rushed quality in Vaidik’s account, where she states some point, cites some scholar in relation to a statement, but does not develop the argument. Consider, for example, that most memoirs about revolutionary anticolonial India do not contain descriptions about ‘sex, sexuality or sexual lives of the revolutionaries’ (p. 135). Vaidik’s one-line explanation for the phenomenon, drawing from Ania Loomba (2018), suggests that revolutionary activity was imagined as having a political telos. Any conversation about the libidinal desire of revolutionaries needed to be avoided, as it would have supposedly derailed them from achieving the goal. Hence, readers of Waiting for Swaraj will appreciate the book for arguing what it does despite the brevity of its analysis. But they will look forward to Vaidik’s forthcoming Revolutionaries on Trial: Sedition, Betrayal and Martyrdom in the hope that this study will provide a more sustained and detailed analysis about the various facets of India’s revolutionary anticolonial pasts.