Abstract
Reviewed by: Priyanka Tripathi, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India
Revolutionary Desires traverses the history of colonial India where women challenged the gender divide and found a new way of being women in Indian society, one that was not necessarily feminist but was socio-politically sensitive. According to Ania Loomba, ‘women would have to fight hard to bring that society into being; indeed, “all the oppressed people will have to fight, and women, being the most oppressed, should lead the fight”’ (p. 1). Within and beyond the intersections of nationalism and women, these women created a unique communist space by questioning the conceptual bifurcation between the personal and the political and its critical engagement with otherwise neglected public spaces. These communist women rerouted these divides differently from the mainstream nationalist women and ensured that they did not simply build upon a system of hierarchies. The book traces milestones which suggest a reshaping of norms and practices as well as those which show the enduring capacity of conventions to limit change. Loomba establishes that while there is no dearth of material available on the intersecting discourse of communism with nationalism, and feminism with nationalism, there is scant literature relating to the discourse of feminism and communism. This book seeks to rectify this, and is extremely rich in its resources; memoirs, autobiographies, novels, official, literary and oral histories, newspaper articles and archival data are used to demonstrate the role of Marxism in shaping an Indian feminist historiography.
In the first chapter, ‘The Romance of Revolution’, Loomba examines the political consciousness and participation of women revolutionaries in Bengal, drawing her illustrations from literature, especially from Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s Pather Dabi (1926) (The Right of Way) and Rabindranath Tagore’s Char Adhyay (1934) (Four Chapters) to establish the hardest challenge for activist women, the punitive ethos of sexual purity (p. 58). These communist women make no space for love stories within their revolutionary moments, for they believe that sexual desire ought to be ‘tamed, disciplined and sublimated in service of the nation’ (p. 65). Chapter 2, titled ‘Love in the Time of Revolution’, draws on the experiences of women as revolutionaries in the context of the HSRAA (Hindustan Republican Socialist Army), and quotes from a manifesto aimed at bringing ‘harmony in the world’ (p. 73). Loomba discusses how two fiercely independent women, Prakashvati Kapur and Rashid Jahan, whose actions and writing were essential in dismantling the conventional orthodox codes of female sexuality and subjectivity, later inspired several fictional narratives. Chapter 3, ‘Commune-ism’, discusses the alternative models in which communists inhabited their personal relationships without diluting their commitment towards nation. Chapter 4, ‘The Political is Personal’, notes the importance of two autobiographies, Ushabai Dange’s Pan Aikta Kaun (1970) (Who Listens to Me) and Parvatibai Bore’s Eka Rannaraginichi Hakikata (1977) (The Story of a Fighter), wherein personal choices contributed towards the making of political ideologies. Both of these women were considered political actors and campaigned for the right to education, work, widow remarriage, political participation, equal wages and, most pertinently, dissent. Chapter 5, ‘The Dance of Hunger’, deliberates on communist activism in which women played an active role in famine relief efforts, creating room for economically weaker women to participate in the women’s movement in India.
Chapter 6, ‘The Family Romance’, uses the powerful ideology of a communist family to accommodate larger nationalist conversations. Loomba exhaustively divulges complex details of the private and Party lives of four married communist women, Vimla Dang, Murtazai Shakeel, Kondapalli Koteswaramma and Usha Dutta, to elucidate ‘the relationship between the larger family and the couple, or between the single-minded revolutionary and her partner, or children’ (p. 242). The last chapter, ‘Becoming “Indian”’, transcends the national borders to explore the stage and state of nationalist sentiment in narratives that can neither be forgotten nor marginalised. In an account of the life of Shiela Didi, an Indian communist woman from Kenya who became an activist with Punjab Stri Sabha, Loomba acknowledges that despite her Kenyan upbringing, her trajectory can well be ‘situated within the internationalism that developed in the anti-colonial movements, and which structured the relationship between post-colonial nation-states and their citizens’ (p. 298). In addition to these chapters, the book also has two detailed appendices.
The book covers the diverse literary references, emotions, campaigns and events that resonate through the revolutionary voices of communism during the nationalist movement. In that sense, it is not just an outcome of Loomba’s scholarship but also owes to the communism which she inherited from both of her parents and which she acknowledges in her introduction. Revolutionary Desires is beautifully illustrated with photographs that invigorate thoughtful responses, simple yet layered, and filled with protofeminist fervour that finds the place of gender in the space of communism. Revolutionary Desires is not just another confrontation with a traditional patriarchal mindset but a mellifluous treat layered with analysis to transform the conventional reading of historical feminism with an expansive insight into humanist paradigm. Loomba’s attempt to recreate a radical alternative his/herstory only asserts that mainstream political and historical feminism in India ought to be interpreted and legitimised within and beyond the different intersections of an individual’s existence.