ABSTRACT
Parvati Krishnaswamy act of reaching out to Pramila, of counselling her and comforting her, what Pramila calls 'humanitarianism', might be thought of as feminist solidarity, if one was to use a vocabulary unknown to either Rai or communists of his time, including the women among them. Revolutionary Desires examines the lives and subjectivities of revolutionary and communist women of different classes in India from the late 1920s, shortly after the communist movement took root in India, to the 1960s, when it fractured. The lives of Indian communists, as Nalini Taneja has noted, 'have been ignored not only by the mainstream nationalist historians and the latter-day historians of the 'subaltern' and 'post-colonial' variety, but also studiedly avoided by the major Left historians themselves'. Both Ushabai and Parvatibai also narrate how they felt browbeaten, harassed, or marginalized by upper-class Party members.
