Mirch Masala’s invocation of M K Gandhi celebrates independence from an external colonial state while also manufacturing consent for the modernising initiatives undertaken by the postcolonial state.
Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age by Shruti Kapila, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2021; pp 328, $35 (Hardcover).
Satyabhakta’s engagements with communist politics, the Hindi print public sphere, and workers’ movements in the Gangetic heartland often intermeshed caste, gender, and nationalism, with an indigenous communism. Signifying a strand of the Hindi literary project, he represents some of the suppressed traditions of left dissent, and takes us back to debates between internationalism and nationalism, materialism and spiritualism, class and caste. Even if his ideas were, at times, amateur, they provide us with the everyday lived realities of communist lives, and utopian dreams of equality, which need to be taken into account and historicised seriously.
Learning to think without being hindered by fear or temptation will, among other things, help those who want to emulate M K Gandhi deal with the gravest challenge that they face. That challenge is posed by those who, behind their deviously articulated public lip-service to him, are tirelessly engaged in realising that vision of India which is diametrically opposed to Gandhi’s humane vision.
