Writing Revolution in South Asia : History, Practice, Politics

This comprehensive volume examines the relationship between revolutionary politics and the act of writing in modern South Asia. Its pages feature a diverse cast of characters: rebel poets and anxious legislators, party theoreticians and industrious archivists, nostalgic novelists, enterprising journalists and more. The authors interrogate the multiple forms and effects of revolutionary storytelling in politics and public life, questioning the easy distinction between ‘words’ and ‘deeds’ and considering the distinct consequences of writing itself. While acknowledging that the promise, fervour or threat of revolution is never reducible to the written word, this collection explores how manifestos, lyrics, legal documents, hagiographies and other constellations of words and sentences articulate, contest and enact revolutionary political practice in both colonial and post-colonial South Asia.

Emphasising the potential of writing to incite, contain or reorient the present, this volume promises to provoke new conversations at the intersection of historiography, politics and literature in South Asia, urging scholars and activists to interrogate their own storytelling practices and the relationship of the contemporary moment to violent and contested pasts.

This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.

Kama Maclean is an associate professor of South Asian and World History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia, and the editor of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. She is the author of A Revolutionary History of Interwar India (2015).

J. Daniel Elam teaches in the Department of English and Drama, University of Toronto, Canada. He specialises in theories of World Literature, with a specific focus on twentieth-century South Asian literature and political writing.

Chris Moffat is a lecturer in South Asian and Global History at Queen Mary University of London, UK.