This book takes you on a journey on an old steam train billowing smoke and chugging across northern India with revolutionaries as co-passengers. Set in British India of the 1920s, we follow the cadence and tempo of the lives of the intrepid revolutionaries of the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA) and the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) who challenged the British Raj. Through this book, we listen to the revolutionaries’ conversations and observe them bantering, quarrelling and horsing around as they travel across northern India. We get off the train and continue to walk with them as they plot and plan their next move in their dens spread across maths, akharas, universities, forests, villages and towns of northern India. We join their ranks as they prepare to conduct robberies, assassinate British officials, buy guns and ammunition, and feverishly make bombs. We read the newspapers and journals that have the revolutionaries crossing swords with other nationalists over ideology and strategy. Journeying with them we retrieve the details of their everyday life – the trivial, the ordinary, the random, the anomalous and the atypical – and the different scales of interpersonal relationships: between the leaders of the movement between the leaders and the members, and between the members of the movement. We will hear the revolutionaries at their raucous, unrestrained and voluble best in these pages. Given how intense their desire to be heard was, being able to speak up was crucial to these revolutionaries until the time they chose to be silent or were silenced by the state. ‘Listening’ to the revolutionaries therefore is a vital cognitive tool for understanding their lives lest we write with the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’. This book narrates the history of the revolutionaries’ lives and worlds as much as possible through their words.

Waiting for Swaraj seeks to comprehend the revolutionaries’ self-conception: When does a person say, ‘I am a revolutionary’? What makes a revolutionary? What did it mean to be a revolutionary? Is it when the nebulous conception of an armed revolution begins to fire their imagination, keeping them up at night, and turning their days into a furious haze, or when the revolutionary finds himself awaiting the revolution?