Description:
Revolutionary Desires examines the lives and subjectivities of militant-nationalist and communist women in India, from the late 1920s, shortly after the communist movement took root, to the 1960s, when it fractured. This book traces the experiences of these women, showing how they were constrained by, but also questioned, the gendered norms of Indian political culture, including those that governed revolutionary organizations. It examines how their lives and actions and expanded the possibilities available both to women and to revolutionaries in India.
Review Quotes:
'Revolutionary Desires looks at communists as people - involved in different struggles (not least, against their own lives and subjectivities)- in ever-shifting and complex political debates, in difficult and new orders of intimate relationships and social rebellions, and in highly creative cultural representations and self-representations. It is a marvelously rich account of the emergence of a new political subject - a fascinating and untold story that is told compellingly.'
Tanika Sarkar, Retired Professor, Modern History, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
'Ania Loomba's insistent refusal to compartmentalize the personal and the political in this study of revolutionary and communist women in India is a signal achievement: a model for a radical historiography.'
Mrinalini Sinha, Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of History, University of Michigan, USA
'Intimacy, longing, desire and revolution - the heady cocktail that Ania Loomba has produced is a feminist delight.'
Nivedita Menon, Professor, Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
'In this inimitable feminist history of Indian women rebels and revolutionaries, Ania Loomba turns her well-trained eye on a shamefully under-written history of radical political desire in all its gendered forms. These pages are literally bursting with stories of militant and communist women who were nothing but trouble in and for modern Indian history.'
Antoinette M. Burton, Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, University of Illinois, USA