Imagining the Indian nationalist movement: Revolutionary metaphors in imagery of the freedom struggle

Abstract

Recent interventions suggest that the history of India’s nationalist movement might be profitably reconstructed with reference to visual culture as a way of counteracting both dominant Congress teleologies and the colonial prejudices embedded in governmental records. This article furthers this hypothesis by undertaking a close examination of Desh Chintan, a rich nationalist image from the 1930s. Grounding Desh Chintan against a matrix of archival sources, banned literature, oral history interviews and other posters of the era presents a substantially different picture of the way in which the anti-colonial movement was conceived in the 1930s. This analysis suggests that there was a moment in the freedom struggle in which support for acts of retributive revolutionary violence were unproblematically maintained alongside genuine enthusiasm for the Gandhian program of non-violence.