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In the north India of 1920s–30s, many first-generation anticolonial communists and Left intellectuals did not see any contradiction in reliance upon religion, ethical traditions and morality in a search for vocabularies of dignity, equality, just polity and social liberation. Through select writings in Hindi of Satyabhakta (1897–85), an almost forgotten figure in histories of communism in India, this article focuses on the entanglement between religion and communism as a way of thinking about the Left in India, and the problems and possibilities of such imaginings. Steeped in a north Indian Hindi literary print public sphere, such figures illuminated a distinctly Hindu and Indian path towards communism, making it more relatable to a Hindi–Hindu audience. The article draws attention to Satyabhakta’s layered engagements with utopian political desires, which, in envisaging an egalitarian future, wove Hindu faith-based ethical morality, apocalyptic predictions and notions of a romantic Ram Rajya, with decolonisation, anti-capitalism and aesthetic communist visions of equality. Even while precarious and problematic, such imaginations underline hidden plural histories of communism and, at the same time, trouble atheist, secular communists as well as the proponents of Hindutva.

Durba Mitra, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020, 290 pp.

This article places the Dalit male body at its centre, and in the process disturbs the idea of masculinity in colonial India. It argues that ways in which caste, Dalit identities and masculinity relate to each other have not been readily recognised, in spite of a growing body of work on Dalits in the colonial period. The article explores how the Dalit male body was socially constructed, or belied, by colonial authorities, by upper castes and by Dalits themselves in colonial Uttar Pradesh, both for purposes of social control and for the construction of identity. It approaches Dalit masculinity discursively, through its representations in the dominant culture, in which the imagery was related to larger structures of oppression, such as lack of education, a discriminatory labour market, criminal justice system and technologies of surveillance, which resulted in an institutional decimation of Dalit males. At the same time, the article attempts to understand assertions of Dalit masculinity by Dalits themselves, by rooting it in a wider historical narrative. It seeks a gendered interpretation of Dalit histories, and the crisis of Dalit manhood.