This chapter explores the development of shahr āshob and marṡiyah poetry from the Kanpur mosque incident of 1913. It argues that poets built on grief and lament to reclaim power and agency, reinterpreting grief and martyrdom in a Sufi perspective as positive symbols of love and faith, which nourished anti-colonial mobilisations in the 1910s and during the Khilafat movement (1919–1924). Iqbal’s poetry was emblematic in proposing a new positive and hopeful interpretation of grief as he turned ruins into new beginnings.

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.