ABSTRACT
In both Indian political and historiographical discourse, the moniker ‘revolutionary’ is as slippery as it is indispensible. Who qualifies as a revolutionary? And who decides? For anyone familiar with historical and contemporary usages of the word in India, it is clear that there are several revolutionary registers simultaneously in use. This collection of essays aims to map out the discursive twists and travails of the ‘revolutionary’ in Indian historical and literary worlds. The papers herein take a loosely biographical approach to the question, testing the claims and counterclaims to revolutionary status as they are made in political, cultural and academic contexts. Each of the researchers represented in this volume has grappled with this question in their work, and has at some stage been challenged with the demurral that a revolutionary is something else, or something more, than the usage that we encounter in the archive, in texts, and in popular culture.
