‘Revolutionaries on Trial’ by Aparna Vaidik: Insightful new look at revolutionary past

Harish Jain

At the beginning of Caroline Augusta Frazer’s novel ‘Atma’ (1891), a poignant scene unfolds with the disarmament of the Khalsa army, capturing both national anguish and the personal humiliation of Raee Singh. Before the British General’s tent, a pile of weapons glittered in the sun as the Sikhs, one by one, cast their swords onto the heap. When Raee Singh’s turn came, he held his sword until an officer touched his shoulder, prompting him to release the blade with a resounding clang. This sound reverberated through the nation, symbolising the fate of the Khalsa army — the last to be disbanded and disarmed.
The Indian Arms Act of 1878, passed by Lord Lytton after the 1857 revolt, epitomised the colonial enterprise, criminalising the natural right to bear arms for self-defence. Sardar Gulab Singh, a Legislative Assembly member from Punjab, humorously highlighted this in a Punjabi couplet during a debate on Lala Lajpat Rai’s death on February 15, 1929. The English rendering of the couplet reads:
“The king ordains that none should bear arms;
All should wear veils and not turbans;
Our State even fears iron much;
None should tie even a key with the waistband.”
Despite this law, defiant resistance persisted, kindling the fire of freedom in the hearts of the people.
Aparna Vaidik, a professor of history at Ashoka University, is among the few scholars genuinely and keenly interested in the stories of revolutionaries who, through their extraordinary deeds, captured the imagination of a disheartened nation but were subsequently marginalised. Over more than a decade of fieldwork, she has amassed a vast collection of material on the lives and actions of these revolutionaries. Organising and presenting such an extensive amount of information into a coherent narrative is no small feat, as she acknowledges.
Vaidik is perhaps the only Indian historian who has accessed the records of the Lahore Conspiracy Case at the Punjab Government State Archives in Lahore, visiting the city twice in her pursuit. She also spent considerable time in London researching the India Office Records at the British Library, drawing extensively from these to support her arguments. In her work, she foregrounds several key sedition trials, including the Assembly Bomb Case, the Lahore Conspiracy Case (both the magisterial and tribunal trials), and the Delhi Bomb Case trial.
She challenges the notion that these trials merely represent Britain’s failure to uphold the rule of law. Instead, she contends that they reveal a hidden history of colonial violence, typically unacknowledged, except in notable instances like the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. This event exposed the British colonial violence that lay beneath the ideology of the ‘rule of law’. She further argues that the “gap between the reason of state (power) and the rule of law (moral ideology)” is insufficient to fully understand the history of these trials.
According to Vaidik, sedition can be better understood by examining the “illicit relationship between law and violence”. She argues that the colonial state’s courts and tribunals relied on a form of violence deeply embedded in the legal system through the law-making process. In her quest for truth, Vaidik navigates a complex landscape of witnesses, approvers, betrayers, renegades, judicial records, colonial archives and contemporary news sources like The Tribune and Hindustan Times. Leveraging her extensive scholarship, she posits that conspiracy and sedition trials were ultimately pantomime shows designed to camouflage their true intent — the survival and perpetual rule of the colonial state. However, the revolutionaries were no political novices. They harnessed their energy and seized every opportunity to amplify their voices, resonating throughout the vast country. Bhagat Singh and his comrades soon became the heartbeat of the nation.
Vaidik further questions why the colonial state chose to put revolutionaries on trial despite having a repertoire of violence at its disposal, and how this choice aids our understanding of the colonial state’s conduct. She finds her answer in the sanitised due process of law, executed by the judiciary and prosecution lawyers, which nullifies the use of cannons and bayonets and renders the violence invisible. In her earnest attempt to view all events fairly, she narrows the gap between the betrayer and the betrayed, using the role of Hans Raj Vohra as a cue.
It is rare to encounter a work of such depth in this genre, based on primary sources and enriching the reader with a wealth of fresh and ungettable material. The book emphatically traces Bhagat Singh’s journey from one among equals to a leader and icon. There is not enough space to describe, much less discuss, this multi-dimensional book in the detail it highly deserves.
The work has minor blemishes. Some factual and usage errors have crept in, such as the repeated use of ‘sessions court’ for ‘magisterial trial’, ‘chowki’ for the District Police Headquarters where Scott and Saunders worked, and the non-existent term ‘Legislative Council Assembly’ instead of ‘Legislative Assembly’. While she cites her sources, it is incorrect to state that Bijoy Kumar Sinha and Lalit Kumar Mukerji were arrested during a raid in Agra, as the hideouts there were abandoned before the Assembly bombing. Mukerji was arrested on June 16, 1929, in Allahabad, and Sinha on August 10 in Bareilly. It is also incorrect to say that Hindustan Times was the first to publish their photos. Available record tells that these first appeared in Bande Mataram of Lahore on April 12, 1929, then Hindustan Times (April 18), followed by The Pioneer on April 20. All three publications escaped criminal prosecution for publishing the photographs by a whisker. It was not the Indian Explosive Substances Act of 1908 that criminalised the use of arms and ammunition but the Indian Arms Act of 1878. Also, Section 3 of the Indian Explosive Substances Act provides for imprisonment for life as a maximum sentence, not 10 years, as stated. However, these minor aberrations do not mar the narrative in any way.
In its scope, extent and analysis, ‘Revolutionaries on Trial’ offers a new perspective and reshapes our understanding of how we perceive and consume our revolutionary past. Vaidik’s work deserves a place on the shelves of readers, scholars and researchers alike, presenting a gripping account of events that shaped public consciousness and providing scholarly reference enriched with a wealth of fresh material.