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5 - In League with the Dead

from Part II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2018

Chris Moffat
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
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Summary

Chapter 5 discusses Bhagat Singh’s revenant presence in twenty-first-century Indian politics, exploring how the dead revolutionary is apprehended as holding a stake in ongoing political struggles. It is here that I interrogate directly a politics manifest ‘in league with the dead’, wherein the martyr is greeted as a worthy interlocutor and contemporary in three distinct predicaments. I consider the India Against Corruption movement and its association with the Hindu right, the form and direction of India’s student left and the ongoing reverberations of Sikh secessionist militancy in Punjab. In each of these contexts, Bhagat Singh appears in the present to participate in a struggle caught ‘halfway’ – to guide the living as they fight for a revolution left unfinished. The key contribution of this chapter is to demonstrate the forging of a political community that spans the living and the dead, bound by a dispute held in common outside sequential time. This is not, then, a story of how Bhagat Singh is conjured, wilfully, by political actors in the present; rather, it considers the possibility that the dead Bhagat Singh might himself conjure politics, inciting the living to action.
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India's Revolutionary Inheritance
Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh
, pp. 160 - 200
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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  • In League with the Dead
  • Chris Moffat, Queen Mary University of London
  • Book: India's Revolutionary Inheritance
  • Online publication: 21 December 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108655194.009
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  • In League with the Dead
  • Chris Moffat, Queen Mary University of London
  • Book: India's Revolutionary Inheritance
  • Online publication: 21 December 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108655194.009
Available formats
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • In League with the Dead
  • Chris Moffat, Queen Mary University of London
  • Book: India's Revolutionary Inheritance
  • Online publication: 21 December 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108655194.009
Available formats
×