“There’s a reason we call it the ‘ugly baby’—writing isn’t easy; it’s frustrating, and sometimes you want to abandon it,” remarked Professor Aparna Vaidik, History, Ashoka University, when she spoke for Ashoka University’s Undergraduate Writing Program (UWP) on 28th October, 2024. Her recent book, Revolutionaries on Trial: Sedition, Betrayal, and Martyrdom, weaves through the murky ethical terrain of historical storytelling. In tracing the lives of revolutionaries and the betrayals that marked them, Vaidik drew students and faculty into the raw, often painful process of reconstructing history from the scraps left in archives and letters.
Her research brought to light the intense public scrutiny these revolutionaries faced through daily media coverage of their trials, the tensions within their ranks, and the paths they chose under tremendous pressure. Vaidik’s storytelling evoked the multi-layered perspectives involved in reconstructing these lives—each angle shaped by incomplete records and subjective memories.
The discussion started as an effort by the UWP to instigate meaningful discourse. Krittika Bhattacharjee, Head of UWP, explained that since its inception, The UWP goes beyond the confines of pure academia, emphasizing that education should connect to real-world issues, such as the challenges of documenting marginalized voices, and the impact of narratives on social justice and collective memory.
In the spirit of fostering analytical rigor and critical dialogue, the UWP designed this talk to break the norms of a traditional book discussion. The event involved taking a deeper look into the complexities of writing itself, especially the unique challenges faced when piecing together history from fragments of the past. For those in the audience, it was an invitation to witness both the rewards and the demands of archival research and historical narrative-making.
The UWP’s role in fostering such conversations became especially clear as Vaidik delved into the philosophical dimensions of her work, challenging students to rethink the meaning of objectivity in historical writing. “All our narratives are subjective,” she said, noting that with the destabilization of truth in postmodern thought, objectivity is no longer a viable framework. Instead, she proposed the concepts of “emotional alignment”(Emotional alignment is the shared understanding between writers and their subjects, ensuring their emotional investment and ethical considerations align with the complexities they explore) and “vantage points” as more nuanced ways of approaching narrative.
Her own alignment with Hansraj Vohra was immediate, captivated by his wish to be forgotten by history while recording himself within it. “We write because we’re writing ourselves into history,” she explained. Vohra, with what she described as “a remarkable pathos,” seemed to desire the opposite. Over time, her anger at this perceived betrayal of his gave way to sympathy, as she began to see him less as a “traitor” and more as a “renegade”- a sentiment reflected in Revoluntaries.
In setting up the event, the UWP team showcased a broader academic journey—encouraging students to see writing as not just an assignment but a demanding and iterative process that requires patience, ethics, and above all, curiosity. For Vaidik, this journey began with a chance discovery of letters by Hansraj Vohra, a revolutionary-turned-informant, in the private collection of Mathura Das, a prominent collector and archivist.
Hansraj Vohra was a member of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), a revolutionary group fighting British rule in the 1920s. He later became infamous for betraying leaders like Bhagat Singh, resulting in his arrest and execution. It was a decision that made Vohra a controversial figure and a subject of debate about his motives and pressures from colonial authorities. Mathura Das was a collector whose archives preserved personal letters and documents from this period, including Vohra’s correspondence, through multiple interconnected histories. These rare primary sources allow researchers like Vaidik to examine the complex moral dilemmas faced by figures in the independence movement.
These letters were like “hooks,” Vaidik recalled, guiding her across archives in India and Lahore in search of a coherent narrative from countless disjointed records. Archive records from the trial of Bhagat Singh and his comrades were stored on delicate microfilm, requiring hours of sifting through seemingly unrelated details to get to the core of their stories. “You’ll go to look up a date and get ensnared by virility ads in 1920s newspapers,” she quipped, prompting laughter from the audience. But alongside the humor was a more sobering revelation: “The archive took thirteen years of my life,” she admitted, acknowledging the profound sacrifices scholars often make in their pursuit of knowledge.
As Vaidik gathered more material, she encountered the common writer’s crisis: too many details, too little structure. The first drafts of her book had “no narrative,” she confessed, describing the manuscript at that stage as an “ugly baby”—a phrase her writing group used to refer to work.“Writing is about stamina,” she emphasized. Though the manuscript felt directionless, she persevered, revisiting it repeatedly until it started to take shape. A 2019 workshop for academics working on writing, Vaidik shared, marked a major turning point, as she realized that the endless drafts could be split into two distinct projects: Waiting for Swaraj, focused on freedom fighter memoirs, and Revolutionaries on Trial, centered on the historical revolutionaries themselves.
Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Rashomon, a classic favorite at Ashoka, unexpectedly inspired Vaidik’s structure for Revolutionaries on Trial. Rashomon’s multiple, conflicting perspectives offered her a narrative solution to the contradictory testimonies she found herself encountering in the archives. In Rashomon, each character’s story seems equally plausible, yet the truth remains elusive—an apt metaphor for the differing accounts and shifting loyalties of Vaidik’s revolutionary subjects.
This, she suggested, was something students could also consider in their own writing, exploring cinematic techniques like “spirals” or “telescoping” to structure arguments in a way that expands rather than constrict, a reminder of unlikely, multimedia scholastic influence. Using these methods, Vaidik was able to create a narrative structure that honored the complexity of these revolutionaries, refusing the propensity to reduce them to simple heroes or villains.
The process of coming to terms with Sukhdev, another revolutionary whose collaboration with British authorities led to the arrest of fellow comrades, was more fraught. For Vaidik, a historian raised in a culture that reveres patriotism, confronting the ambivalence of Sukhdev’s actions required her to step outside ingrained nationalist narratives and grapple with the gray areas of human motivation. This struggle led her to pose a provocative question to the audience: “Do you want to be the bard or the jester?”
The bard, she explained, sings praises and comforts the status quo, while the jester unsettles, confronting society with uncomfortable truths. “Historians are classic party-poopers,” she observed wryly. By choosing to portray these revolutionaries as deeply flawed yet profoundly committed, she positioned herself firmly in the role of the jester, both within her work and among the broader scope of narratives.
Vaidik’s narrative was a reminder of what the UWP seeks to instill in its students: that writing is not merely about putting words on paper but about engaging with ideas rigorously, grappling with contradictions, and daring to speak the unsayable. In a campus where students are encouraged to rethink established narratives, Vaidik’s journey through archives serves as both a cautionary tale and an inspiring model for the transformative power of scholarship.
(Edited by Nikita Kalra, Devadeepa Das, Srijana Siri)
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