Writing Histories of Revolutionaries

Speaker: Prof. Aparna Vaidik, Associate Professor of History, Ashoka University and author of the recently published Waiting for Swaraj: Inner Lives of Indian Revolutionaries (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

Discussant: Prof. Himanshu Prabha Ray, former Chairperson of the National Monuments Authority, Ministry of Culture, and former Professor, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Chair: Prof. Madhavan K. Palat, historian, scholar of modern world, and political commentator

The talk examines the issues that a historian encounters while researching and writing the history of revolutionaries in the Indian context. Revolution is an idea and revolutionaries as agents of political change seem almost natural when studying Russian or Latin American history. However, when it comes to Indian history the revolutionaries appear as anomalies – a rag-tag bunch of misfits who were misguided and out of step with the times they lived in. The questions that this talk explores are: How do we study the history of revolutionaries? Does studying their history have any significance? What relationship does revolutionaries’ history have with Indian nationalism?