Bhagat Singh, a young revolutionary, fighting to free his country from the clutches of colonial rule, was tried for sedition in 1930 and sentenced to death. The martyrdom of Bhagat Singh has since been celebrated in countless hagiographical accounts of his life. In Revolutionaries on Trial, Aparna Vaidik revisits this familiar episode in South Asian history to argue that far from being a “miscarriage” of justice, the Lahore Conspiracy Case, in fact, revealed the true, if hidden nature of law in the colony, where violence was a constitutive element in its operations, not an aberration. To readers acquainted with critical scholarship on law and colonialism, this will be a familiar argument. But there is a lot more to this book. Based on the solid foundations of her archival research, Vaidik turns almost all the key tropes around which the story of this trial is typically woven on their head and traces the complex and unpredictable ways in which the case of Crown vs Sukhdev and others morphed into “Bhagat Singh’s Trial”—how the militant politics of an underground group of young men, rooted in collective action and radical socialist ideologies, was transformed into the myth of individual martyrdom, at the intersections of law and public discourse.

Vaidik is part of a larger cohort of scholars who have studied the history of revolutionary politics in modern South Asia: its ideological underpinnings, the long genealogy of administrative discourse that framed it as a form of “terrorism,” and the formidable body of legislations, emergency ordinances, intelligence apparatuses, and detention facilities devised by the colonial state to squash political dissidence.Footnote ¹ Vaidik herself has previously written about the everyday life of young revolutionaries in early twentieth-century British India.Footnote ² Revolutionaries on Trial stands out in this historiography for its close focus on a set of connected trials leading up to the Lahore Conspiracy Case, showcasing how rewarding a microhistorical approach toward legal archives can be for the study of society, culture, and politics in South Asia.Footnote ³

The book begins in 1928, when members of the Hindustani Republican Socialist Association (HRSA), a largely underground radical political group based in the Punjab Province, were arrested for the assassination of two policemen in Lahore and a bombing attempt on the Parliament House in Delhi. It ends in 1931, when at the end of a series of trials, Sukhdev, Rajguru, and Bhagat Singh, three of its most prominent leaders, were executed. The eight chapters of the book examine the events that unfolded during these four heady years from the perspective of four distinct sets of actors, respectively: the colonial state, the HRSA members who were put on trial, a group of prisoners who turned witnesses for the state, and the popular press and the public. Vaidik shows how the strategies and approaches of all four sets of actors changed during this period in response to one another.

The colonial state deployed the full force of its legal and police apparatus to tackle the HRSA’s radical anti-establishment politics—reducing and depoliticizing their violent actions in protest of two anti-socialist and anti-union legislations (The Public Safety Bill and the Trade Disputes Bill, respectively) to acts of crime. At the trial, the young revolutionaries set out to subvert these efforts. While the lawyers defending some of them in court tried to “downplay the seriousness of the young men’s revolutionary intent,” (61) those who chose to conduct their own defense mocked the court when it appeared to transgress those very principles of due process and fair trial that purportedly underpinned its proceedings. Interrupting and stalling the procedure of the regular criminal courts and using the unprecedented public attention the trial received in the press, they turned the jails and courtrooms into “revolutionary theatres.” Using them as platforms for dissent, the accused sought to publicize their criticism of both the colonial state and bourgeois society and to educate the public about their rationale for using spectacular violence as a method of political dissent. The colonial authorities only succeeded in turning the tide against the HRSA members when they moved the trial to a Special Tribunal. Now under trial for sedition and conspiracy against the state, the exceptional procedural rules of the special tribunal robbed the accused of their right to legal counsel and their ability to defend themselves in open court. Meanwhile, isolated in prisons from one another, police interrogators played the incarcerated HRSA members against one another in ways that proved to be fatal to the group’s cohesion—the testimonies of some of these so-called renegades sealed the fate of their revolutionary comrades. Following some of their stories beyond the immediate temporal frame of the book, Vaidik shows how the decision to betray the revolutionary cause was often also a decision to betray intimate homo-social ties of friendship, the repercussions of which haunted the lives of these “turncoats” long after the trial was over.

A sharp shift in the tone of popular discourse toward the end of the trial, however, thwarted the colonial state’s ability to control its narrative about the young revolutionaries. When news of the prisoners going on hunger strike in jails—and the death of Jatin Das in custody from the prison authority’s attempt to feed him forcefully—became public, the young men, viewed initially by leading nationalist leaders and the public alike at the start of the trials as “irresponsible hotheads,” now began to be celebrated by the masses as “nationalist icons” (xxiv). “Inquilab zindabad,” the ubiquitous call for revolution, “was no longer a secret creed: it had finally unfurled as a new battle cry of anticolonialism” (267). By the time Sukhdev, Rajguru, and Bhagat Singh were executed, their death, sanctioned by a legal verdict as punishment for threatening the sovereignty of the colonial state, had taken on the aura of martyrdom in the public eye.

Although Vaidik sets out to present colonial law as a form of violence and a tool of colonial coercion, a more unstable and complex picture of the law can be discerned in her narrative. During the trial, it not only operated as a body of technical procedural rules, and an institutional apparatus, but was also mobilized by some of the actors as a discourse that (at least, in theory) hinged on principles of fairness and justice. Legal scholars will find it rewarding to keep track of how the book’s varied cast of actors, only some of whom were formally trained in law, engaged and negotiated with these distinct dimensions of the law at different points in the trial with varying degrees of success. The book also gestures toward the limits of the law’s ability to mediate the relationship between politics and public opinion. The revolutionary creed that ultimately found traction with the public was decidedly not how colonial law and legal authorities viewed the HRSA’s ideologies and activities. Neither was it the vision of revolution that active members of the HRSA presented during their trial. The figure of the revolutionary that the public rallied around was neither someone who had transgressed the law of the land nor someone who instrumentalized violence as a means not only to end colonial rule but also to break down and radically transform bourgeois society. Rather, the revolutionary that tugged at the hearts and passions of the masses was a “noble ascetic” who fit the mold of a “nationalist icon,” a martyr who was willing to sacrifice his own life for the sake of their country. Vaidik describes this final phase of the Lahore Conspiracy Case vividly but does not quite flesh out for her readers what this subversive reception of the trial’s verdict reveals about the nature of colonial law.

The standout feature of this book is undoubtedly Vaidik’s remarkable archival work. She deserves kudos not only for working through a complex and uneven archive but also for assembling its dispersed documentary trail, now scattered in government repositories and private collections across multiple cities in Pakistan and India. Historical narratives that are underpinned by such painstaking research deserve adequate editorial support. Its absence in how the book has been put together interrupts the reading experience, especially for readers who will want to keep track of the footnotes and references. But thankfully it does not take away from the significance of her insights on law, society, and politics in colonial South Asia.