India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh
by Chris Moffat
Cambridge University Press 2019, 292pp
Reviewed by Munir Ud din
There is a renewed interest in Bhagat Singh with the corresponding effort to appropriate his revolutionary past for divergent political projects and the revolutionary afterlife of Bhagat has responded to these different strands with equal force: as a symbol of Punjabi/Sikh nationalism thanks to his regional affinity, a revolutionary for Naxals, and an embodiment of indigenous nationalistic resistance against colonial oppression for revivalist/right-wing forces like BJP and RSS.
(Mis)appropriations such as these are hardly surprising: figures like Bhagat Singh and their ideals tend to transcend their historical contexts, and are instead shared and invoked by various, often contradictory, elements. The same is true of Faiz: his revolutionary poems, such as “Hum dekhenge,” to give one example among many, are chanted with equal force by groups across ideological divides and where the untimely death of the young revolutionary has made him susceptible to myriad appropriations, it has also left him as a contested figure on the left (partly due to his often contradictory and evolving political position) over whether to see him as an anarchist or a Marxist socialist.
This multiplicity, however, should not be mistaken for interpretive equivalence. The presence of contradications or incompleteness does not imply that all readings are equally grounded in the available evidence. Some positions emerge repeatedly across his writings and actions, while others rely on selective emphasis on theoretical projection. To collapse these distinctions in the name of openness risks abandoning the basic task of historical judgment.
Before the contestation over ownership of this young revolutionary’s legacy could be settled, there has come a postcolonial and poststructuralist turn in the study of Bhagat Singh in the form of Chris Moffet’s “Revolutionary Inheritance”, with its particular emphasis on and rejection of ‘absence of a single, fully discernible figure’ while jettisoning the debate around what the revolutionary stood for and the kind of politics he subscribed to. For Moffet, Bhagat Singh’s revolutionary acts, the killing of a colonial officer, the bombing of the assembly, and finally sacrificing his own life were prompted by the urgency of the “present” rather than promise of some distant future (future free from the constraints of existing shackles of colonialism, religion and caste), and more than ideology, it was a judgment rooted in the truth of the present that drove his actions.
This line of argument introduces instability and multiplicity into the meaning Bhagat stood for, and, in doing so, the author opens the revolutionary to various forms of interpretation and decenters his aims, so evidently clear from his writings (though in their formative stages). The problem here is not that Baghat Singh can be read in multiple ways. Interpretation is always contested, and no historical figure can be reduced to a single, perfectly coherent doctrine. The issue, however, is that certain readings sever him from the political horizon that made his action intelligible in the first place. Interpretive openness, when left unconstrained, does not merely expand understanding but at times blurs the distinction between grounded interpretation and retrospective appropriation. Moffet’s “nuanced position” lends itself to the same appropriation that he warns against. In fact, the weakening of interpretive constraints can actively enable appropriation, by making even strained or politically motivated readings appear equally plausible within a flattened field of meanings.
Moffet tries to decenter Bhagat from revolutionary tradition, and instead of his action being seen as emanating from a careful, planned, and well-thought-out method, it is reduced to Jacques Rancière’s “dissensus” wherein a political subject disrupts the police order momentarily with no promise to the “ongoing fidility to moment. This repetitive or rather cyclical disruption of police order sounds revolutionary, but without an organized struggle, such rupturous moments often succumb either to reactionary forces or die down without any significant contribution to a cause. This approach risks selectively emphasizing rupture over continuity. Baghat Singh’s politics did not consist solely of symbolic disruption and also involved sustained ideological development (both within HSRA and as deputy editor of Kriti), organizational effort, and a commitment to long-term transformation. To foreground dissensus without equal attention to these elements reshapes the figure Moffet seeks to interpret.
Also, Rancière’s conception of politics introduces a particular problem of temporality. By privileging moments of rupture that interrupt the existing order, it flattens political time into a series of disconuntionus events, where continuity, accumulation, and strategic duration recede into the background, which obscures the way Baghat Singh’s politics unfolded across time. His actions were not isolated eruptions but part of an evolving trajectory, one that cannot be adequately captured through a lens focused primarily on episodic disruption.
This also helps explain why such a framework struggles to account for the development within his own writings. Baghat Singh’s later writings cannot simply be treated as interchangeable fragments within a diffuse interpretive framework. They reflect a process of refinement and advancement. One would not judge Marx or Ginzburg solely by early formulations in the Communist Manifesto or The Cheese and the Worms while ignoring how their later works complicate, revise, and deepen those claims. In the same way, to read Baghat Singh without regard to the internal development of his thought is to miss the very temporality that made his political development possible.
Moffet also draws heavily on the work of the postcolonial thinker and historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, especially his notion of historicism and the multiplicity of modernities. Though he does not deploy Chakrabarty’s concept in its original sense, which foregrounds the coexistence of heterogeneous temporalities rooted in indigenous practices, his recasting nevertheless remains tethered to the same conceptual logic. By rendering Bhagat Singh as a spectral figure who intermittently disrupts the linear flow of time, Moffet effectively relocates him within a space analogous to Chakrabarty’s “History 2.” So what follows from this is an image of Bhagat standing tall, resisting the historicist and universalizing tendency of capital.
Even if this framework is intended to complicate universal histories of modernity, its application here risks displacing Baghat Singh from the very revolutionary modernist tradition he engaged with. The issue is less the internal coherence of Chakrabarty’s theory and more the way it repositions historical actors when put into practice and strips away Baghat Singh’s revolutionary inheritance and makes him instead a figure not just open to misappropriation by myriad factions but also someone who stood against Enlightenment and it’s ideals of truth, reason, and objectivity.
Bhagat Singh might not have been able to fit himself into neat, enclosed political categories; in his writings, he certainly indicated what he stood for, a revolutionary socialist politics. While the archive is necessarily incomplete, it is not arbitrary, and historical interpretation does not require a finished record; it rarely encounters one. Patterns across Baghat Singh’s writings, actions, and affiliations allow for reasonable historical conclusions, as his thought, though unfinished, was not directionless. To preserve that direction is not to reduce him to a rigid ideological template, but to resist dissolving him into an empty symbol available for any cause.