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.

Table of Contents:
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.

About the Author :
Chris Moffat is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of History, Queen Mary University of London.

Review :
'In this tightly argued investigation of the figure of the revolutionary nationalist Bhagat Singh, Moffat explores the relationship between history as documentary facts, and history as political mythology. A timely intervention at a juncture where Indian history is more contested than ever before.' Thomas Blom Hansen, Stanford University, California 'A highly original study of India's revolutionary history, Chris Moffat's book is unique in exploring the surprising afterlife of this past. More than nostalgia for a losing argument in Indian politics, Moffat argues that the revolutionary past has come to possess a spectral agency. This is a nuanced and sophisticated study of historical consciousness in modern India.' Faisal Devji, University of Oxford 'In this imaginative reckoning with the spectacular and spectral afterlives of Bhagat Singh, Chris Moffat offers a brilliant account of history as hauntology. Based on sustained archival research and wide-ranging field work, India's Revolutionary Inheritance compels us to understand why and how some dead continue to have such a purchase in the world of the living. A historical and conceptual tour de force.' Sumathi Ramaswamy, Duke University, North Carolina 'This impressive book offers not only a deeply insightful account of Bhagat Singh's afterlives, but also a very timely and critical reflection on disciplinary history's rigid boundaries between past and present. Moffat makes an exceptionally important argument about how politics is often more about gesture and action than doctrine and belief.' Ajay Skaria, University of Minnesota 'Chris Moffat's Book India's Revolutionary Inheritance is a welcome addition to the list of works that seek to overcome the tropes of failure and defeat … Moffat's book is then not only a challenge to intellectual orthodoxiesn in History, but is also a political intervention in our possible futures.' Ammar Ali Jan, Radical Philosophy 'Moffat's work … with its blend of field and archive, provides an excellent example for how scholars might go about studying the tangled temporal orders of contemporary South Asian politics, one in which the divine, the dead and the living all play a part.' Rahul Rose, South Asia@LSE 'This book is the result of [Moffat's] rigorously academic, scholarly and yet social change-oriented research.' Chaman Lal, Countercurrents.org '… unquestionably the most arresting scholarly study thus far of Bhagat Singh …' Vinay Lal, Cultural Critique 'This is a work that creatively combines history, anthropology, and political theory. It has a methodological omnivorousness characteristic of a growing body of South Asian intellectual history that has challenged both traditional South Asian historiography and intellectual history more generally.' Anish Vanaik, American Historical Review