ABSTRACT
It can be difficult to untangle Bhagat Singh from his futures. The revolutionary’s uncommon passion, taken alongside the event of a young death, seems to demand speculation—‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys’—the now-familiar lament for potential unfulfilled, trajectories interrupted. A desire to reconstruct futures lost weaves neatly into a critique of the postcolonial present: nostalgia for radical alternatives once confidently imagined. But the archive is also mobilized to perform an exorcism of sorts: to contain Bhagat Singh’s promiscuous ghost, to challenge the pervasive appropriation of his name and image in contemporary India and Pakistan—across the political spectrum, across contradictory futures. The restless search for doctrinal consistency and ideological guidance in Bhagat Singh’s scattered writings enables the correction and direction of his spectre, intimating a condition of misrecognition on the part of those who invoke the revolutionary in ‘incorrect’ contexts, for ‘incorrect’ reasons. 1
