What desires do revolutionary women nurture? Are political actions and commitments of women political actors ‘driven by their romantic desires’? Did revolutionary women find a fulfillment of their ‘personal and political desires’ in the Communist Party of India (CPI)? Can their desires at all be separated from the political worlds that they inhabit or were they uniquely integrated? In the romanticized accounts of revolutionary women, what about the psychological and material price that the women pay? Was there an element of ‘rendering revolutionary passions monstrous but redeeming the women who espoused them’ (p. 68)? How does a conservative social identity reside with a radical political one, which defies any boxing of revolutionaries, including revolutionary women?
What have attitudes to domesticity, parenthood, motherhood, conjugality, friendship, marriage, renunciation, sexuality and the family, been in the Communist Party of India (CPI) or other Left-Wing groups or anti-colonial groups? Did the CPI advocate free love, or did it develop a systematic critique of dominant sexual mores, or did it integrate a critique within its programme? Do Communists reinforce the delineation of the personal and political worlds by ‘endorsing a bourgeois division of the individual and the collective when saying it is bourgeois to pay attention to the personal?’ These are but some of the questions that one gets to probe as one reads Revolutionary Desires.
Is it not a contradiction to be a Communist and a nationalist? But were not Indian Communists talking the language of nationalism? Why does some of it seem hardly different from the dominant Hindutva nationalist articulations today? Could it be because Communism ‘cements asceticism, discipline, chivalry, authoritarianism, and Aryanism’ as characteristics of the heroic revolutionary? Could it be because Communist praxis has been a mixture of radicalism and prudishness? Wasn’t there a kind of unwritten Party line about love and marriage for the sake of the Communist revolution (read nation) in the Indian context? Would it be correct to say that masculinity, the Indian nation and a Hindu lineage were interwoven in the formation of and political awakening of a revolutionary? If there is one abiding feature that one gathers from the book, it is that the Left Wing groups’ positioning is not static but dynamic.