Abstract
In 1931, Chandrashekhar Azad ordered that Yashpal, his comrade in Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, be put to death for his relationship with seventeen-year old Prakashvati Kapur. Prakashvati’s story remains virtually unexamined in contemporary scholarship. In this talk I trace its reverberations in literature as well as the political sphere, including in Yashpal’s pathbreaking novel, Dada Kamred which explores why the revolution needs to extend beyond the sphere of economic change into the arena of gender and familial relations, sexuality, intimacy, and ultimately personal freedom.
Bio
Ania Loomba is Catherine Bryson Chair in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, and currently Fellow at Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study. Her writings include Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama; Colonialism/ Postcolonialism and Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Her edited collections include Post-colonial Shakespeares ; Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion, South Asian Feminisms and Rethinking Feminism: Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Early Modern World. Her current project is a full length study of left-wing women in India.