Jaichandra Vidyalankar, a teacher at National College, Lahore, wrote about his pupils Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev: “Their shortlived lives and actions betray their great impatience...These young men could not control their impatience and made efforts, right or wrong, to gain independence.” Vidyalankar saw their haste as being in service of the nation.

In the eyes of their detractors, however, the haste was a consequence of being ‘misguided’. The revolutionaries’ impatience was thus either used to valorise them or to condemn their radical politics as unlawful and unacceptable. For these men were revolutionaries without a revolution. So why did they claim to be revolutionaries? Waiting for Swaraj, my most recent book, provides a novel reimagination of the revolutionaries’ self-conception.

The lives of these revolutionaries present an interesting interplay of visibility and invisibility. The secret nature of revolutionaries’ operations meant that they remained absent in the colonial archives or in contemporary newspapers except when they threw a bomb, carried out an assassination, or were caught by the police. These moments of ‘action’ therefore became the most visible ones. Waiting for Swaraj, however, locates the essence of being a revolutionary not just in the spectacular moments, but in everyday conversations, anecdotes, and in the stray fragments of life in underground. It demonstrates how ‘waiting’ was the crucible that forged a revolutionary. It did so not by robbing the young men of the romance of resistance but by nurturing and emboldening it. Waiting was where the action was.

The book contributes to a burgeoning field of scholarship on the history of revolutionaries in British India. It follows the cadence and tempo of the lives of the intrepid revolutionaries

– of the Hindustan Republican Association and the Hindustan Republican Socialist Association who challenged the British Raj. What we know about revolutionary lives is primarily through political propaganda materials and popular culture memorabilia of the times. This book, however, draws on the revolutionaries’ memoirs, to show that the revolutionaries are most ‘visible’ in their banter, ruminations, and in everything else, that appeared as having no bearing on their revolutionary self but, in effect, had everything to do with it.

Ploughing through the revolutionary memoirs, diaries, correspondence, interviews, and reminiscences, what does one find about the revolutionaries and their everyday? They showcase the revolutionary-in-waiting. They dwell the longest and most fondly on the time these men spent together – on their everyday togetherness. When staying collectively in their dens in different cities, the young men spent their time surveying possible action spots, arranging arms for carrying out action, discussing strategies for escape if arrested, target practising, and learning to handle and maintain arms. They debated amongst themselves, had intense discussions about politics, revolutionary methods, capitalism and colonialism, and together wrote propaganda material.

Some, like Rajguru, slept in different positions – on the cot, on the floor, in the den, at the railway station, in the open fields, splayed, curled up or even standing up – at all times of the day. The tedium of their days was at times broken when they had money to afford a few indulgences such as nicer food or a movie show. Bhagat is said to have never missed a show of Charlie Chaplin and loved the movie versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Three Musketeers. These men did not wait in stillness. Shifting the gaze to the inner lives of the revolutionaries as the source of their self-imagination refocuses our attention on praxis (lived reality) as a significant site for their ideology and the gradual growth of their political consciousness. In doing so, the book reformulates the way we study political history. It focuses on political lives, the everyday reality of being a revolutionary, and on praxis as a way of studying political history and the history of Indian nationalism.

Aparna Vaidik is Associate Professor of History. Her primary areas of research include colonialism and culture, nationalism, and the politics of violence. Her book, Waiting for Swaraj was published in 2021.