The Romance of Revolution in Emergency-Era Delhi
As many today struggle against an undeclared BJP-led Emergency in India, a reflection on the fight against Indira Gandhi’s Emergency — and the role of love.
A glimpse of the local committee office of the Communist Party of India in The Ikyabharatham, Large portraits of senior male leaders can be seen covering the rear wall of the office. Kerala. Source: New York Times
We had been talking for eight hours over tea and cutlets at a Delhi University canteen, and were getting up to walk over to a roadside mithai stall to continue our conversation over some rasgullas, when the Socialist Party-affiliated anti-Emergency movement leader in his mid-60s said to me that he didn’t understand why I cared about his involvement in that movement. Thinking back on my participation, he said, “is like reading a novel, it’s simply a romantic idea, but it has no lessons for the present. All the slogans we shouted are empty….They have no meaning today.” When I pushed a bit further to find the source of his discontent, he elaborated, “well, I have not done anything meaningful … I’m not married, so it was a meaningless life in that sense. I was born, and then I got into a movement which ended into nothing. … I used to write some articles that were published in daily newspapers… but what to write [now]? I’m not even convinced [about] what to write [now]”.
This comrade was not the only male Socialist (or Naxalite, for that matter) who told me that he never found lifelong love and blamed his involvement in the anti-Emergency movement for this. At the end of the oral histories I conducted while researching my book, Brewing Resistance: Indian Coffee House and the Emergency in Postcolonial India (CUP 2020), I asked about the enduring legacy of the anti-Emergency movement for the present. By design, it was an open-ended question, but I was anticipating movement leaders to reflect on contemporary politics. Instead, to my surprise, many leftist men responded with lamentations of how their leadership role in the movement meant that they never found lifelong love and, more significantly in their view, were left without grandchildren in their old age. This melancholy of never finding lifelong love or having grandchildren was compounded, in their view, by a shared impression that the average Indian barely has a historical memory of the Emergency and, therefore, little appreciation for the personal sacrifices of those who led the movement against it. This combination of feelings – disappointment that their actions during the Emergency made little political difference in the long run, and melancholy that the only lasting impact was a loneliness – left many to conclude that their lives, in retrospect, were meaningless. As one Socialist told me, “most of the guys, you will find, have remained unmarried.”
“As one Socialist told me, ‘most of the guys, you will find, have remained unmarried.’”
Another Socialist anti-Emergency movement leader told me that, among those who never found lifelong love, “most…were Naxalites or Socialists.” Though on opposite ends of the left political spectrum, these two groups were, however, organized in similar ways. Leadership of Delhi’s Socialist and Naxalite groups often consisted of a group of very close male friends who were distrustful of outsiders because of the group’s commitment to higher risk political activities. For example, the Socialist group that produced the underground pamphlet, Janvaani, consisted of five men in their mid-to late 20s who would meet at night in various locations across Delhi to drink whiskey and work on this publication until dawn. These small, insular groups, suspicious of outsiders, were critically important in facilitating more subversive and high-risk activities against the Emergency. However, this type of group, I was told, rarely included women.
In addition to organizing high-risk activities in small, all-male affinity groups, thereby excluding women from certain nodes of the movement, some Socialists I interviewed also held sexist views. In reflecting on the ideas that animated the movement during the Emergency, one unmarried Socialist told me, “that was idealism, pure idealism…Of course it was for the Socialist idea also, Socialist India, of equality, of an assertion of rights. Now that era has gone … rights of the workers, rights of the poor, rights of the deprived, rights of the villagers, rights of the landless. Now…[we are in] an era of competing rights. Women’s rights against men. [Narrator laughs]”
For the Naxalites, however, teleological and predetermined ideas about revolution inhibited their creativity in organizing against the Emergency, leaving them also closed off to the spontaneity that love sometimes demands. But this rigidity was also the result of burnout after years of violent conflict with the state in the years leading up to the Emergency. In a moment of auto-critique, one Naxalite told me, “Maoists have this tendency to collapse everything into everything, to say everything is the same as everything else, you know?” But he explained to me that this teleological thinking was rooted in past trauma which left movement leaders unable to find the mental space to grapple with what India’s authoritarian turn might mean and how to best organize against it. “We were getting shot in our beds, only a few years [before the Emergency], and now you’re bothered about democracy. So we just used it to buttress our line that this is the norm in any case ... we always said that this was an autocratic tyrannical regime and [the Emergency] was just one version of it.”
For the Naxalites, this simplistic thinking about authoritarianism, I was told, was a result of exhaustion. “We went through an upheaval in the late 60s and early 70s. Having gone through that upheaval— and really, it was serious…Thousands of people died...people got disillusioned, people got cynical, people committed suicide… – people were trying to stabilize themselves, calm down, pick up the pieces, many people got very bitter, and disillusioned. It’s precisely this period that you’re talking about.” It’s difficult to embrace spontaneity and possibility – be it in terms of revolutionary strategy or love – in a group that is bitter, disillusioned, and traumatized by years of state violence.
The men who led the Socialist faction of the anti-Emergency movement and never found lifelong love made sense of their loneliness in different ways. One Socialist in his early 70s explained to me that, “life is an illusion, the world is an illusion. It’s a good concept, but it means that we don’t take anything seriously. Hindus believe in waiting for the next life, whereas Christians feel an urgency because they only have one life. For example, a Hindu might say, “Kristin is beautiful, I want to marry her, and if it doesn’t work out, that’s fine because maybe I’ll marry her in my next life.” He was resigned to never finding lifelong love in this life, but was hopeful that he would find it in the next. Others felt that forgoing love was part of a long tradition in India of leaders renouncing sex and love in service of the struggle. A Socialist in his early 80s told me, “Don’t you forget, it is not for nothing that Gandhi ji was respected here. He was not an orator, he was not a great scholar. His strong point was his renunciation. He had given up things. So in this country, to be accepted as a big leader, [the] impression must go that here is a man who has given up things.” Many of the Socialists I spoke with gave up lifelong love and having a family in order to lead the anti-Emergency movement and rationalized it after the fact through Hindu philosophy or Gandhian asceticism.
“Many of the Socialists I spoke with gave up lifelong love and having a family in order to lead the anti-Emergency movement and rationalized it after the fact through Hindu philosophy or Gandhian asceticism”
This affinity with Gandhian thought has been a longstanding contradiction within the Socialist movement in India from its origins. And while Indian Socialism’s affinity with sarvodaya, satyagraha, and a romanticized view of traditional village life is particularly pronounced, much of the Indian left, perhaps rooted in a deeply internalized Gandhian ethos, idealizes voluntarily giving up one’s desires. Even Bhagat Singh, in his prison notebooks, for example, wrote admiringly of Marx and Bakunin because, like Mohandas Gandhi and the Sikh Gurus, they too had renounced their worldly desires in the service of a greater cause.
In speaking with anti-Emergency activists on the right (both RSS and the Jamaat-e-Islami), I soon learned that life without enduring romantic love (or at least marriage) was a problem unique to the left. Many right-leaning anti-Emergency leaders entered into arranged marriages, but not leftist men. Some leftist men who tried to find an arranged marriage at some point quickly discovered that the time they spent in jail as political prisoners disqualified them as a viable option on the arranged marriage market. While the Hindu Right also went to jail, their student leaders tended to come from more affluent backgrounds and had found success in business through connections they made in the anti-Emergency movement. Said one unmarried Socialist about why his cell mate was able to marry, “He has made money also, good money, and in that sense, he is a successful citizen.” The Socialists and Naxalites who remained without lifelong love were unsuccessful on the arranged marriage market because they never attained the sort of wealth that could’ve excused their time as prisoners.
Since love gives meaning and intensity to our lives, it’s unfortunate that those who were the most committed to revolution during the Emergency found lifelong love so elusive. But this is also surprising, since love and revolutionary politics seemingly fit so well together. Risk and adventure is the essence of both. Love brings a happiness that is beyond time, but this transcendence of time is also ever present in one’s engagement in revolutionary politics.
Emergency Files: JNU student Prabir Purkayastha kidnapped, Ashok Lata Jain expelled. Source: Bodhi Commons
Love for Some: The Student and Queer Left
While many anti-Emergency leftist men felt their leadership in the movement led them to miss out on lifelong love, one notable exception to this was in the gendered dynamics of the Students Federation of India Jawaharlal Nehru University Unit (SFI JNU), the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). From its founding in 1969, the Jawaharlal Nehru University was a home for left intellectuals and unaffiliated, but left-leaning, creatives. The artists and left intellectuals who made up the faculty of JNU in the 1970s set the tone for a campus culture that was a bohemian reprieve from the rigid social mores of North India. SFI JNU, unlike the small exclusively male groups discussed above, had women in leadership roles and the permissive atmosphere on campus allowed for male and female comrades to be involved in student politics on close and equal terms, fostering friendship, sex and romance. By way of example, Prabir Purkayastha and Ashoka Lata Jain fell in love while both were involved in SFI JNU during the Emergency. Jain was a PhD student in CSI and chair of the JNU Students’ Union during the Emergency. In August 1975, she was expelled from JNU for her leadership role in student politics. In a twist of fate, Purkayastha told me, the judge who presided over his arrest as a political prisoner during the Emergency was the same judge who later presided over his marriage to Jain.
President of the JNU Students’ Union and SFI JNU President, DP Tripathi, told me that the Indian Coffee House at Connaught Place was an important organizing space for SFI JNU in coordinating with other groups, such as the Socialist student groups in Delhi University or with the ABVP, among others. But for JNU leftists, the Indian Coffee House was not just a place for political meetings, but also one of the few places off-campus where JNU students could have the freedom to meet one on one and converse with their lovers or would-be lovers. So while many SFI JNU comrades fell in love while participating in left politics on campus, other JNU leftists fell in love at the Indian Coffee House.
Sitaram Yechury (Second from left) and Devi Prasad Tripathy (Fourth from left) during their time at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Yechury was deeply involved in organising student resistance against the Emergency, because of which he had to go in hiding for some time until he was arrested in 1975. Source: Bodhi Commons
One male comrade who was involved in SFI JNU during the Emergency told me that one issue with SFI JNU, however, was that, “a lot of social activists found that the Socialists and Communists…have taken up a whole lot of agenda but… the gay population do exist and this was not being addressed.” After the Emergency, “across the political parties and cadres” some former anti-Emergency movement participants joined queer groups, who held weekly meetings to do political organizing, provide community support, and as a way for Delhi’s queer left to meet each other. One of the founders of AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan, said that some “Old-type revolutionar[ies]” supported queer organizing out of a concern for civil rights. However, the queer Communists who met in the coffee house countered, “you have no idea what pleasure the tip of the index finger gives when it touches certain parts of human anatomy… to hell with your rights!” In sharp contrast to the Socialists who renounced sex and love out of a Gandhian asceticism, queer Communists asserted that pleasure was paramount.
“In drastic contrast to the Socialists who renounced sex and love out of a Gandhian asceticism, queer Communists asserted that pleasure was paramount.”
At the close of our conversations, many anti-Emergency comrades cautioned me not to make the same mistakes they did. They told me that love should not take a backseat to the revolution, and while they felt it might be too late for them, many advised me to value being in love, to get married – and make sure I invite them to the marriage! The comrade, who told me his life was meaningless because he never found lifelong love, did nonetheless have some perspective to offer today’s young revolutionaries. He blamed our need to be “doing things” and our prioritizing of the “here and now, matter of fact, … rather than romanticizing, idealizing, dreaming,” for the failures of the Indian left of the 1970s to joyfully embrace the possibilities that come with the experience of enduring romantic love. During the height of the anti-Emergency movement, the leftist men were primarily focused on how history might remember their heroic actions, but in this outcome-oriented thinking, many failed to seek meaning and joy in the process of revolutionary politics. This outcome-oriented thinking led to feelings that, in retrospect, perhaps the movement was meaningless. This comrade told me that he hoped that leaders of today’s student movements take time for the romance and dreaming that is so critically important, not just in finding meaning through romantic love, but also central to the creative process of crafting resonant ideologies to animate left movements.
A monkey walks between tables of customers on the terrace of the Indian Coffee House, New Delhi. The image is taken from the book The Palace of Memories: tales from the Indian Coffee House, Dewi Lewis, London 2015. ©Stuart Freedman/ Panos Pictures
Learning from Love
Admittedly, my view into love and left politics during the Emergency is primarily through the perspective of heterosexual male comrades and I hope that others can recover more queer and female-centered stories of love on the left during the Emergency. Because women were barred, implicitly or explicitly, from certain nodes of the left resistance to the Emergency, male and female comrades couldn’t meet – but certainly I don’t mean to conclude that women’s participation is necessary merely so that heterosexual male comrades can find love.
An activist holds a placard during Mumbai Pride 2020 against the Anti-Muslim legislation introduced by the current BJP government. The placard reads: “I am Bisexual, not a bystander. No NRC, No CAA” Source: Imgur
Rather, what I want to offer, by way of conclusion and prescription, is that when comrades of all genders and sexualities are involved in revolutionary politics on equal terms and are free to explore love and sexuality with each other, it creates a space outside of capitalist rationality in which meaningful, decommodified human connection is possible. As Silvia Federici puts it, sexuality is “the irruption of the ‘spontaneous,’ the irrational in the rationality of the capitalist discipline of our life… a possibility for intimate, genuine connections in a universe of social relations in which we are constantly forced to repress, defer, postpone, hide, even from ourselves, what we desire”. When love and sex are absent from left movements, what is lost is not just the meaning and depth that comes from experiencing non-commodified sex and romantic love, but also the assertion of human desire against capitalist rationality.
While today’s left student movements across South Asia have made gender equality and diversity a greater priority, one lesson from the experiences of the anti-Emergency left is that the student movement is at its best when there is space for spontaneity, romance, and dreaming. In its ability to disrupt, produce new truths, allow us to see the world through difference, and transform the impossible into the possible, love has many parallels to revolutionary politics. Spontaneity, romance, and dreaming are not only important in the creative process of ideology-making, but also in realizing one’s full humanity through left politics.
Kristin Plys is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto and the author of Brewing Resistance: Indian Coffee House and the Emergency in Postcolonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2020).