2 - Travellers, Migrants, Rebels

Summary

The second chapter, ‘Travellers, Migrants, Rebels’, traces Indian networks that forged a radical anti-imperialist politics in the diaspora. These networks later fed into the development and evolution of the leftist movement in British India. Through the lives of key figures, I trace how networks of radicalism emerged and thrived in the global arena. Along with networks of labourers, migrants, and lascars, I focus primarily on the Ghadar and the Khilafat movements. Through these circuits and the figures involved in them, I sketch how an itinerant life provided a foray into revolutionary politics and was in turn intimately connected to a revolutionary ethic. In doing so, I also examine an oft-neglected question of how political radicalism was deeply wedded to distinct spaces and spatial imaginaries. In tracing how ideas and lived experiences – and thereby intellectual and social histories – were co-constitutive of each other, I chart the antecedents of the communist movement in British India.