5 - Entangled Histories

Summary

The fifth chapter, ‘Entangled Histories’, starts from the question of erasure. I examine how the memorialization of revolutionary pasts in India and Pakistan has erased a history of entanglements between the Left and other political and intellectual strands. Specifically, I take the case of Darshan Singh Pheruman, remembered today as a martyr who gave his life for the Sikh Panth. Through his life, I examine how the Akali movement, a Sikh socio-religious political movement in the 1920s, blended in with the communist movement in the Punjab. These intersections provide a reminder of how ideas did not observe strict ideological boundaries, boundaries that only seem unbridgeable in nationalist and communitarian erasures of revolutionary pasts. This chapter offers a portrait of the relative fluidity between ‘communist’, ‘communitarian’, and ‘nationalist’ politics of the interwar era. In doing so, it sketches an era of political possibilities that later gave way to a bitterly contested and fractured landscape with hardened political and ideological boundaries.