Love and Revolution in the Twentieth

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World Perspectives from South Asia
and Southern Africa 1st Edition G
Arunima Patricia Hayes Premesh Lalu
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Palgrave Studies in the History of Social
Movements

Series Editors
Stefan Berger
Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum,
Germany

Holger Nehring
Contemporary European History, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK

Around the world, social movements have become legitimate, yet

contested, actors in local, national and global politics and civil society,
yet we still know relatively little about their longer histories and the
trajectories of their development. This series seeks to promote
innovative historical research on the history of social movements in the
modern period since around 1750. We bring together conceptually-
informed studies that analyse labour movements, new social
movements and other forms of protest from early modernity to the
present. We conceive of ‘social movements’ in the broadest possible
sense, encompassing social formations that lie between formal
organisations and mere protest events. We also offer a home for studies
that systematically explore the political, social, economic and cultural
conditions in which social movements can emerge. We are especially
interested in transnational and global perspectives on the history of
social movements, and in studies that engage critically and creatively
with political, social and sociological theories in order to make
historically grounded arguments about social movements. This new
series seeks to offer innovative historical work on social movements,
while also helping to historicise the concept of ‘social movement’. It
hopes to revitalise the conversation between historians and historical
sociologists in analysing what Charles Tilly has called the ‘dynamics of
contention’.

Editorial Board:
John Chalcraft, London School of Economics, UK
Andreas Eckert, Humboldt-University, Germany
Susan Eckstein, Boston University, USA
Felicia Kornbluh, University of Vermont, USA
Jie-Hyun Lim, Research Institute for Comparative History, Hanyang
University Seoul, South Korea
Marcel van der Linden, International Institute of Social History, The
Netherlands
Rochona Majumdar, University of Chicago, USA
Sean Raymond Scalmer, University of Melbourne, Australia
Alexander Sedlmaier, Bangor University, UK
More information about this series at http://​www.​palgrave.​com/​
gp/​series/​14580
Editors
G. Arunima, Patricia Hayes and Premesh Lalu

Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-

Century Colonial and Postcolonial
World
Perspectives from South Asia and Southern Africa
1st ed. 2021
Editors
G. Arunima
Centre for Women’s Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi,
India

Patricia Hayes
Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, Cape
Town, South Africa

Premesh Lalu
Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, Cape
Town, South Africa

ISSN 2634-6559 e-ISSN 2634-6567

Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements
ISBN 978-3-030-79579-5 e-ISBN 978-3-030-79580-1
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79580-1

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive

license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively
licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is
concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in
any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or
dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks,

service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the
absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the
relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general
use.

The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the
advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate
at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the
editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Alain Guilleux / Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered

company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham,
Switzerland
Preface
Around the world, social movements have become legitimate, yet
contested, actors in local, national, and global politics and civil society,
yet we still know relatively little about their longer histories and the
trajectories of their development. Our series reacts to what can be
described as a recent boom in the history of social movements. We can
observe a development from the crisis of labour history in the 1980s to
the boom in research on social movements in the 2000s. The rise of
historical interests in the development of civil society and the role of
strong civil societies as well as non-governmental organisations in
stabilising democratically constituted polities has strengthened the
interest in social movements as a constituent element of civil societies.
In different parts of the world, social movements continue to have a
strong influence on contemporary politics. In Latin America, trade
unions, labour parties, and various left-of-centre civil society
organisations have succeeded in supporting left-of-centre governments.
In Europe, peace movements, ecological movements, and alliances
intent on campaigning against poverty and racial discrimination and
discrimination on the basis of gender and sexual orientation have been
able to set important political agendas for decades. In other parts of the
world, including Africa, India, and South East Asia, social movements
have played a significant role in various forms of community building
and community politics. The contemporary political relevance of social
movements has undoubtedly contributed to a growing historical
interest in the topic.
Contemporary historians are not only beginning to historicise these
relatively recent political developments; they are also trying to relate
them to a longer history of social movements, including traditional
labour organisations, such as working-class parties and trade unions. In
the longue durée, we recognise that social movements are by no means
a recent phenomenon and are not even an exclusively modern
phenomenon, although we realise that the onset of modernity
emanating from Europe and North America across the wider world
from the eighteenth century onwards marks an important departure
point for the development of civil societies and social movements.
 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the dominance of
national history over all other forms of history writing led to a
thorough nationalisation of the historical sciences. Hence social
movements have been examined traditionally within the framework of
the nation state. Only during the last two decades have historians
begun to question the validity of such methodological nationalism and
to explore the development of social movements in comparative,
connective, and transnational perspective taking into account processes
of transfer, reception, and adaptation. While our book series does not
preclude work that is still being carried out within national frameworks
(for, clearly, there is a place for such studies, given the historical
importance of the nation state in history), it hopes to encourage
comparative and transnational histories on social movements.
At the same time as historians have begun to research the history of
those movements, a range of social theorists, from Jü rgen Habermas to
Pierre Bourdieu and from Slavoj Ž ižek to Alain Badiou as well as
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to Miguel Abensour, to name but a
few, have attempted to provide philosophical-cum-theoretical
frameworks in which to place and contextualise the development of
social movements. History has arguably been the most empirical of all
the social and human sciences, but it will be necessary for historians to
explore further to what extent these social theories can be helpful in
guiding and framing the empirical work of the historian in making
sense of the historical development of social movements. Hence, the
current series is also hoping to make a contribution to the ongoing
dialogue between social theory and the history of social movements.
This series seeks to promote innovative historical research on the
history of social movements in the modern period since around 1750.
We bring together conceptually informed studies that analyse labour
movements, new social movements, and other forms of protest from
early modernity to the present. With this series, we seek to revive,
within the context of historiographical developments since the 1970s, a
conversation between historians on the one hand and sociologists,
anthropologists, and political scientists on the other.
Unlike most of the concepts and theories developed by social
scientists, we do not see social movements as directly linked, a priori, to
processes of social and cultural change and therefore do not adhere to a
view that distinguishes between old (labour) and new (middle-class)
social movements. Instead, we want to establish the concept of ‘social
movement’ as a heuristic device that allows historians of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries to investigate social and political protests in
novel settings. Our aim is to historicise notions of social and political
activism in order to highlight different notions of political and social
protest on both left and right.
Hence, we conceive of ‘social movements’ in the broadest possible
sense, encompassing social formations that lie between formal
organisations and mere protest events. But we also include processes of
social and cultural change more generally in our understanding of
social movements: this goes back to nineteenth-century
understandings of ‘social movement’ as processes of social and cultural
change more generally. We also offer a home for studies that
systematically explore the political, social, economic, and cultural
conditions in which social movements can emerge. We are especially
interested in transnational and global perspectives on the history of
social movements, and in studies that engage critically and creatively
with political, social, and sociological theories in order to make
historically grounded arguments about social movements. In short, this
series seeks to offer innovative historical work on social movements,
while also helping to historicise the concept of ‘social movement’. It also
hopes to revitalise the conversation between historians and historical
sociologists in analysing what Charles Tilly has called the ‘dynamics of
contention’.
The present collection of articles entitled Love and Revolution in the
Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World, edited by G.
Arunima, Patricia Hayes, and Premesh Lalu, unites two of the most
romantic concepts of the nineteenth century, ‘love’ and ‘revolution’.
While revolutions have been studied in a variety of different contexts,
the affective turn in historical writing has not reached this topic in a
major way as yet. The current volume takes a step towards this
incorporation of the history of revolutions into the history of emotions:
it focuses on the anti-colonial and anti-capitalist revolutions of the
twentieth century in many parts of the colonial and post-colonial
worlds, with special emphasis on India and Africa. Some of the
contributions here discuss this relationship between love and
revolution in specific texts while others look at political movements,
missionary activity, and legal or political discourses, but all are united
in their endeavour to disentangle the relationship between the work of
love and the work of revolution. Many of the contributions on the
subsequent pages also deal with the impact of the state and its legal
framework on repressing and accommodating revolutionary
sentiments. The language of the law in post-colonial India, for example,
did not only show remarkable continuities to colonial times, it also was
a means to protect the colonial and postcolonial state against forms of
‘dis-affection’.
As the editors point out, struggle, desire, and hope are all
phenomena and emotions connected to both love and revolution.
Revolution could be the object of love and love could spur actors on to
revolutions, while revolutions raised the question of what they did to
love. Most revolutions that are discussed in this volume have remained
incomplete, in the sense that their utopias have often turned into
nightmares. Liberation was at best partial and the ambitions for
transformation left many who questioned their realisation. The Dalit
movement in India, for example, speaks powerfully to the
disenchantment with the Gandhian and nationalist revolution that led
to an independent India.
Another important theme that runs through the following pages is
that of liberalism’s complicity with capitalism and colonialism in the
colonial and postcolonial spaces. This raises the question for whom its
universalism expressed ‘love’ in concrete situations. And what, the
volume proceeds to ask, about its challengers, nationalism on the one
hand and Marxism on the other? How did they position themselves vis-
à -vis the complex questions surrounding issue of love and revolution?
Several authors in this collection relate the lead theme to questions of
time that have been discussed so intensely in the theory of history of
late. In particular, the question of the loss of messianic time connected
to revolutions and its meaning for its affective sides is repeatedly
discussed here. There is, of course, no shortage of testimony, when it
comes to the love and passion felt by revolutionaries for their cause.
And there is no shortage of evidence also for the love and passion felt
by nationalists for the national cause, or, indeed, by Marxists for their
class cause. Liberals were perhaps most reluctant to invoke passions in
the pursuit of their cause pointing instead to an inherent rationality in
the ideas of the rule of law and of liberty and freedom. However, in
practice the struggle for those values as for the idea of human rights
has also been full of passions and love.
The contributions in this volume speak eloquently about poets
invoking love in their partisanship for revolutionary causes. They
render the story visible of the revolutionary who performs his own
sacrifice for the cause in being sentenced to death in such a way that it
creates lasting martyrdom that in turn becomes the object of more
revolutionary love. They also speak of nostalgia and melancholia,
feelings often related to love or better disappointed love and how these
sentiments can either render the revolutionary subject speechless or
give this subject a voice from which to recover a vision for a different
future. And they account for the role of love in the making of
revolutionaries – the emotional encounter with rituals or objects or
performances which lead to the decision to become a revolutionary.
The constructions of love and revolution were always highly gendered
and the volume’s essays also pay due attention to this gender
dimension in the relationship between love and revolution. Male
camaraderie and gendered familial traditions feature prominently in
some of the chapters in this book.
Making good use of a wide range of thinkers from Antonio Negri to
Giorgio Agamben, the contributors to this volume reveal how passion
and mobilisation have often gone hand in hand. They have produced
multiple scenarios of often contradictory and fuzzy interrelationships
that have unsettled traditional understandings of time and are crucial
for a deeper understanding of the fate of revolutions in the colonial and
post-colonial worlds of the twentieth century.
Stefan Berger
Holger Nehring
Bochum, Germany
Stirling, UK
Acknowledgements
This book arises from affinities, encounters, and the times we have
been through in the last decade. Love and Revolution initially emerged
in the site of post-apartheid under- and postgraduate teaching at the
University of the Western Cape (UWC). The potential of a conjoined
Love and Revolution thematic to speak to multiple concerns in parts of
the former colonial world prompted the organisation of a formal
workshop in Cape Town in 2010. This inaugural workshop drew on
existing networks across diverse collaborations, bringing together
colleagues from the Middle East, South Asia, and southern Africa, as
well as scholars located elsewhere and working on these regions. The
sense of certain commonalities and problematics around revolutionary
and liberation movements led to the organisation of further workshops
to explore these questions at different sites of historic debate. This
effectively relocated Love and Revolution into plural settings with their
own scholarly communities and critical concerns. After the first
conference in Cape Town in October 2010, the second took place at the
University of Minnesota in March–April 2011 on the theme of
‘Considering the Limits and Possibilities of Nationalist and Postcolonial
Thinking’. While the Cape Town meeting positioned politics and affect
in very productive ways especially for African scholars working on
nationalism and radicalism, the Minnesota meeting ventured out in
several theoretical directions, especially in terms of neoliberalism and
the revolutionary present in the Middle East. The Delhi workshop of
20–22 January 2012 had the rare felicity of clarifying a number of these
questions and posing new ones, demonstrating the advantages of a
cumulative process of workshopping a core set of issues over time and
bringing together scholars in different spaces. A fourth and final
workshop held in Cape Town from 11–13 October 2012 on ‘Affective
Revolutions’ concluded the series.
Only a fraction of the voices and conversations from the four
workshops are represented in this book, but every chapter bears the
imprint of many sustained critical and collective inputs. The Love and
Revolution workshops would have been impossible without the
unstinting help and support of many friends and institutions. We wish
to thank all those who came forward and helped with different
organisational aspects, managing logistics and contributing their lively
presence as workshop participants, chairpersons, and discussants. For
all this and more, we thank Ajay Skaria, Ashraf Jamal, Asli Ikizoglu,
Baidik Bhattacharya, Behrooz Ghamari, Bianca van Laun, Brian
Raftopoulos, Cesare Casarino, Charles Kabwete Mulinda, Christian
Williams, Dawn Rae Davis, Desiree Lewis, Dianna Shandy, Divya
Dwivedi, Drew Thompson, Fernando Arenas, Gary Minkley, Giacomo
Loperfido, Giovanna Trento, Hamit Bozarslan, Heidi Grunebaum,
Helena Pohlandt-McKormick, Iona Gilburt, Isabelle de Rezende, Isabel
Hofmeyr, Janaki Nair, Jean Allman, John Mowitt, Joya John, Karen
Brown, Kavita Panjabi, Lameez Lalkhen, Leslie Witz, Mahesh
Rangarajan, Malathi de Alwis, Maurits van Bever Donker, Martina
Rieker, Annachiara Forte, Michael Neocosmos, Mohinder Singh,
Ngonidzashe Marongwe, Nicky Rousseau, Noeleen Murray, Okechukwu
Nwafor, Phindi Mnyaka, Prathama Banerjee, Quynh Pham, Rajarshi
Dasgupta, Ross Truscott, Ruchi Chaturvedi, Sanil V, Sayres Rudy, Shaden
Tageldin, Shefali Chandra, Sian Butcher, Sipokazi Sambumbu, Steve
Akoth, Suren Pillay, Svea Josephy, Tanya Petrovic, Teresa Barnes,
Thembinkosi Goniwe, Udaya Kumar, Uma Duphelia-Mesthrie, Virgil
Slade, and Zen Marie.
A great deal of additional partnership, training, and collaborative
activities took place around the workshop series. Pre-conference
postgraduate workshops were held on the theme of ‘Show Us Your
Archive’ in Cape Town in 2010 and 2012, enabling senior international
scholars to respond to research-in-progress. Reading groups were
organised in preparation for workshops, and we thank Simona
Sawhney for leading the discussion on Jean-Luc Nancy, Gary Minkley on
Povinelli, and Maurits van Bever Donker on Spinoza. In 2012, Karen
Brown offered a grant-writing workshop, while Gary Weidemann of the
University of Minnesota Press held a publishing workshop in Cape
Town. Also part of the final workshop programme, the Handspring
Puppet Company performed ‘I Love You When You’re Breathing’ at the
South African National Gallery and Hamit Borzaslan delivered a public
lecture on the Arab Revolutions at the District Six Museum.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded the partnership between
the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at UWC, the University of
Fort Hare, and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global
Change (ICGC) at the University of Minnesota, all very active
participants in the workshop series. For logistical, organisational, and
funding support in Cape Town in 2010 and 2012, we thank the Centre
for Humanities Research (CHR) at UWC. The ICGC in Minneapolis kindly
hosted the second workshop. In New Delhi, the Director of the Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) Mahesh Rangarajan extended
the support and hospitality of the institution and attended to the
special visa needs of the international participants. This workshop was
held in collaboration with the Centre for Women’s Studies, Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi. Besides the Mellon Foundation, the
editors wish to acknowledge the conference support of the NMML in
New Delhi, supplementary partnership funding through the DST/NRF
SARChI Chair in Social Change (Unique Grant 70782) at the University
of Fort Hare, and the DST/NRF SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory
(Unique Grant 98911) at UWC for covering later research costs involved
in preparing this book. The editors also wish to thank all those
archivists who have assisted with materials and permissions,
photographers and artists who have allowed their work to be used, and
the editors and publishers at Palgrave for engaging with this book
project.
Contents
1 Love &​Revolution:​An Introduction
G. Arunima, Patricia Hayes and Premesh Lalu
Part I Intensities: Writing/Aesthetic/Cinematic
2 “Everything Built on Moonshine”:​Love and Revolution in Iqbal’s
Islamic Modernist Poetry and Faiz’s Socialist Verse
Javed Majeed
3 Sadness, as such…
Premesh Lalu
4 Mapiko:​Fragments of Revolutionary Time
Paolo Israel
Part II Depletions: Family/Party/Intimacy
5 Caste, Intimacy and Family:​The Experiences of the Slave Castes
in Kerala
Padikaparampil Sanal Mohan
6 Making and Challenging a Biographic Order:​National Longing,
Political Belonging and the Politics of Affect in a South African
Liberation Movement
Ciraj Rassool
7 The Family Romance of the South African Revolution
Jon Soske
8 The Romantic Manifesto:​Gender and “Outlaw” Emotions in the
Naxalbari Movement
Mallarika Sinha Roy
Part III Love/Sacrifice/Law
9 Bhagat Singh:​Sacrifice, Suffering, and the Tradition of the
Oppressed
Simona Sawhney
10 “Love is Stronger in Prison than Outside”:​The Intimate Politics
of Independence in the Congo
Pedro Monaville
11 Political Funerals in South Africa:​Photography, History, and the
Refusal of Light (1960s–80s)
Patricia Hayes
12 The Love Commandment:​Affect in the Time of Dissent and
Democracy
G. Arunima
Full List of Participants
Index
List of Figures
Fig.​1.​1 B.​R.​Ambedkar in 1950, Wikimedia.​commons.​

Fig.​1.​2 ‘Vive le 30 Juin Zaïre Indépendent.​’ Lumumba and King

Baudouin; Lumumba giving speech, Nationaal Museum
van Wereldculturen, Leiden.​Painting by Tshibumba Kanda Matulu,
1973

Fig. 3.1 George Milwa Mnyaluza Pemba, Funeral Procession, watercolour

on paper (1930)

Fig.​3.​2 George Milwa Mnyaluza Pemba, Professor D.​D.​T.​Jabavu, oil on

canvas, Collection of the Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Fort
Hare (1951)

Fig. 3.3 George Milwa Mnyaluza Pemba, Nongqawuse (The Girl Who
Killed To Save), oil on canvas board, 38.5 by 73 cm (1976)

Fig. 4.1 Samora Machel performs a nshakasha, Nampanya group at a

dance festival, Mwambula, Rui Assubuji, 2009

Fig. 4.2 Mapico moderno group at the First Festival of Popular Dance,
ARPAC, Maputo

Fig. 4.3 A sketch of mapiko by Jacques Depelchin, lead researcher of the

History Brigades in Mueda in 1981, from his field notes
Fig.​4.​4 Nantova’s skull mask, Massacre de Mueda group performing in
Cape Town, Rui Assubuji, 2011

Fig.​7.​1 In possession of the author

Fig. 7.2 Special Issue of the Lenasia Indicator, 8–15 February 1989

Fig.​7.​3 Sowetan, 31 January 1989

Fig.​10.​1 “Self-portrait,” © Photo Jean Depara/​Estate of Depara—

Courtesy Revue Noire

Fig.​10.​2 Female student activists on the day of their pardon by

President Mobutu (Alice Kuseke is the second student from the left),
photographer unknown, October 1969.​(Courtesy of the author)

Fig.​10.​3 Sapin Makengele, “Bolingo ya cachot, eleki bolingo ya libanda,”

painting, oil on canvas, 2010.​(Courtesy of the author)

Fig.​11.​1 Burials after Sharpeville shootings, 1960.​UWC-Robben Island

Museum-Mayibuye Archives

Fig.​11.​2 Funeral of Ida Mntwana, West Native township, 1960.​UWC-

Robben Island Museum-Mayibuye Archives, Eli Weinberg

Fig.​11.​3 Funeral of Steve Biko in King Williamstown, 1977.​UWC-

Robben Island Museum-Mayibuye Archives
Fig.​11.​4 Matthew Goniwe at the funeral of Tamasanque Steven,
Grahamstown, 1985.​UCT Libraries Special Collections, Julian Cobbing

Fig.​11.​5 Congress of South African Students (COSAS) banner in Regina

Mundi Church, Soweto.​South African History Archive, Gille de Vlieg

Fig.​11.​6 Muslim leader Moulana Faried Essack tries to stop police

removing ANC flag from the coffin of Ashley Kriel, Bonteheuwel, Cape
Town, July 1987.​UCT Libraries Special Collections, Roger Meintjes

Fig.​11.​7 Reburial of Norman Pieterson a.​k.​a.​“Billy Holiday” through the

offices of the Missing Persons Task Team, Paarl, August 2016.​Paul
Grendon

Fig.​11.​8 Port Elizabeth.​Funeral of police victims, Uitenhage, 1985.​

UWC-Robben Island Museum-Mayibuye Archives

Fig.​11.​9 Police teargas at Crossroads funeral, Cape Town, 1986.​UCT

Libraries Special Collections, Guy Tillim

Fig.​11.​10 Funeral.​Santu Mofokeng (1956–2020).​©Santu Mofokeng

Foundation.​Image courtesy Lunetta Bartz, MAKER, Johannesburg

Fig.​11.​11 Michael Miranda, Trojan Horse killings, Cape Town, 1985.​

UCT Libraries Special Collections, Paul Grendon
Notes on Contributors
G. Arunima
is Professor at the Centre for Women’s Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, India, and is presently on deputation as the Director of the
Kerala Council for Historical Research, Trivandrum. She has researched
and published on both historical and modern contexts in India, focusing
particularly on cultural, visual, and material texts, and rethinking the
politics of the contemporary. She is the author of There Comes Papa:
Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Kerala,
Malabar, ca 1850–1940 (Orient Longman, 2003), and has recently
translated Rosy Thomas’s biography of her husband, the iconic
playwright CJ Thomas, from Malayalam to English (He, My Beloved CJ,
Women Unlimited, 2018).

Patricia Hayes
is the National Research Foundation (NRF) SARChI Chair in Visual
History and Theory at the Centre for Humanities Research, University
of the Western Cape. She has published on southern African history and
its colonial and documentary photographic archives. She is co-editor of
Ambivalent: Photography and Visibility in African History (2019) with
Gary Minkley, and co-author of Bush of Ghosts: Life & War in
Namibia (2010) with photographer John Liebenberg. She teaches in
African history, gender, and visual theory.

Paolo Israel
is Associate Professor and Chairperson of the Department of History at
the University of the Western Cape. Trained in philosophy, Israel’s
doctorate at EHESS (Paris) addressed the anthropology of art and
performance. His book, In Step with the Times: Mapiko Masquerades of
Mozambique, was published by Ohio University Press in 2014.
Premesh Lalu
is Convenor of the Communicating the Humanities Project with funding
from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, at the Centre for Humanities
Research at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. As
founding Director, Prof Lalu has built the Centre for Humanities
Research through extensive fund-raising and programme development,
lifting the profile of the Humanities both in the university and
nationally. He is an Advisory Board member of the Consortium of
Humanities Centres and Institutes. His publications address colonial
archives, violence, and, more recently, aesthetics and the technical
becoming of the human. His forthcoming book is entitled Sensing Post-
apartheid Freedom.

Javed Majeed
is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at King’s College
London. His book publications include Ungoverned Imaginings. James
Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (1992);
Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity. Gandhi, Nehru and
Iqbal (2007); Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism
(2009); Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India
(2019); Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of
India (2019); with Christopher Shackle, a translation and critical
edition of Hali’s Musaddas: The Flow and Ebb of Islam (1997); and with
Isabel Hofmeyr, the edited collection India and South Africa (2016).

Padikaparampil Sanal Mohan

has been Director of the Kerala Council for Historical Research, India.
He has been Professor (Retired) in the School of Social Sciences at
Mahatma Gandhi University in Kerala and also held numerous visiting
fellowships across the world. His research focus is on lower caste
histories in Kerala, India.
Pedro Monaville
is Assistant Professor of history at New York University Abu Dhabi. His
research interests include the history of decolonization, political
imagination, youth movements, higher education, and state violence, as
well as the study of memory work and postcolonial history writing. His
current book project focuses on the role of student activism in the
Democratic Republic of Congo.

Ciraj Rassool
is Senior Professor of History at the University of the Western Cape. He
has published widely on political biography, museums, histories of race
in South Africa, cultural restitution, and the postcolonial transfer of
human remains in the decolonising museum nexus. His teaching
includes African history, biography and liberation movements, museum
studies, curatorship, and urban studies.

Mallarika Sinha Roy

is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Women’s Studies in Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research monograph is titled Gender
and Radical Politics in India: Magic Moments of Naxalbari (1967–1975)
(London: Routledge, 2011) and she has co-edited Displacement and
Citizenship: Histories and Memories of Exclusion (Delhi: Tulika Books,
2020). Her research interests include social movement studies,
ethnography and oral history, gender and political violence, gender and
theatre, and history and politics of South Asia.

Simona Sawhney
teaches at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the
Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and is a senior co-editor of the
journal Cultural Critique. Her book The Modernity of Sanskrit appeared
in 2009 (University of Minnesota Press and Permanent Black). Her
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
G. Arunima et al. (eds.), Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and
Postcolonial World, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79580-1_1

1. Love & Revolution: An Introduction

G. Arunima1, Patricia Hayes2 and Premesh Lalu2
(1) Centre for Women’s Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New
Delhi, India
(2) Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape,
Cape Town, South Africa

Patricia Hayes
Email: phayes@uwc.ac.za

Keywords Ambedkar – Mandela – Liberalism – M.N. Roy – C.L.R. James

– Patriarchy

Overture
What has love to do with revolution, or for that matter, revolution with
love? Is love, as in romantic love, always in relation to the second
person, or can it be for the third person, as in love for the people? If so,
what elided imaginaries lie behind histories of liberation?
These are some of the questions that have arisen in relation to the
productive but fractious pairing of the terms love and revolution.1 This
book is a continuation of the working out of many questions raised
during four meetings in South Africa, India and the USA between 2010
and 2012. Many of us in the ‘global south’ or the ‘postcolony’ together
recognise our concerns: colonial pasts, shared radical libraries and
dramatic postcolonial political convulsions with acute specificities and
rich cultural texts that mark us out as distinct from each other and from
the major Euro-American narratives. When our Love and Revolution
workshops commenced, the ‘Arab spring’—of which perhaps the
Egyptian revolution was the most emblematic and caught the
imagination of a world audience—had not yet begun. When we ended it
was almost over. We found ourselves with the beginnings of a script
that was radically overtaken until we are now in the residues of lapsed
passions, reinforced repressions and new crises that have rippled
across our different geographies. As the ‘Love and Revolution’ series
travelled and grew, we carried with us a core of scholars who were
constantly engaged in this discussion, and others who came in as
interlocutors for part of the journey.2 This volume brings together
conversations, discussions and debates that are rich with possibilities,
and constitutes an unusual journey of mutually intersecting intellectual
and political concerns. As we bring together the political and the
affective, it has enabled us to think about both love and revolution not
only as conceptual categories or sites of thought, but as a means of
engaging the formidable problems that have been critical to our own
particular locations both at the time and as we prepared this book.
The coupling of ‘Love and Revolution’ that we invoke here has
appeared in many forums, guises and publications in recent years.3 This
is remarkably serendipitous. In our case, as a motivation behind the
organisation of the first workshop, it emerged from very specific
circumstances. Love and revolution was a formulation that surfaced in
exchanges with undergraduates studying anti-colonial struggles in
African history in a South African university after apartheid. The
experience was marked by the need to address a growing set of severe
disconnections. First, despite considerable scholarly engagement
‘Africa’ itself was virtually absent in the South African school
curriculum until the end of apartheid, and there was a perceived need
to impart the new national historiographies and postcolonial crises of
expectation. When music, literature and poetry were introduced into
the space of the history lecture, one listened anew to the regional
chimurenga music with a young generation who were usually hearing it
for the first time. It then dawned overwhelmingly, even damningly, that
what had seemed to be unproblematically connected in this era may
not have been, namely, the narratives of national liberation and the
popular aesthetics of the time. At the most obvious level, many sang of
love while nationalist leaders lectured on revolution. If nationalist
historiographies were doing one thing and burgeoning popular culture
was doing another, they were both producing new subjectivities and in
some kind of relation. But what exactly was this relation?
The question becomes more urgent in the postcolony and post-
apartheid as new nations failed to carry the more profound sensibilities
that had marked the movements that had ushered in change. While it
may be too much to say that revolution becomes separated from the
senses, the emphasis is certainly on state formation and the new
nation.4 The problematic posed by the aesthetic was and is happening
all around those caught up in these politics, literally bombarding them.
But with the technocratic direction of developmentalism, nationalism
and also socialism, something drops out and is attenuated. Why is it
necessary to put love back into the equation? This is because it has
effects and affects for the history of revolution. Certainly the coupling of
love and revolution is around globally—but we did not embark on this
series of dialogues in order to simply follow a new turn to affect theory,
or to make an aesthetic turn tout court. We made this turn because
these are literally some of the last remaining resources when
nationalism turns ugly. Thus this ‘Love and Revolution’ came literally
from the ground upon which we stand.
From the very first gathering in Cape Town however it struck us
forcibly that this task would be far less intuitive, and hence more
challenging and productive than anything we had imagined. The
themes chosen by presenters did not speak directly to what may be
thought of as predictable ways of addressing either love or revolution,
yet each managed—through a skilful unpacking of the dense material
they were engaging—to open up ways of continually interrogating the
concepts themselves. This was even as we thought about the pairing,
and the “and” in love and revolution. As the papers navigated their own
particular cultural and historical contexts, the questions posed helped
to not only refine the conceptual categories that we had started with
but also to rethink where we wished to take this conversation.
For instance, were we speaking of love in purely personal contexts
of intimacy, or was there a larger spectrum of affective states and
modes that enabled us to think of politics? What meaning did
revolution have in histories that were dominated by narratives or
‘allegories’ of national liberation? Where could we plot the story of the
individual when revolutionary politics demanded a certain kind of
collective consciousness, let alone action? What kinds of cartographies
of love, or affect, would reveal revolutionary political subjectivities?
Was there a place for fatigue, sadness or despair within these
imaginations of love? What was the place of the atypical in thinking of
projects that aspired to have a more universalist dimension? This is a
tiny spectrum of the issues that became increasingly apparent as we
grappled with this rich and difficult ground.
This book, therefore, is preoccupied with such tensions. Love and
revolution is revealed as conceptually productive when the anti-
colonial and anti-capitalist struggles of the twentieth century in Asia
and Africa are perceived as threaded through with their slippery
couplings. In his chapter in this volume, Pedro Monaville calls this the
‘diverging and converging paths of love and liberation’. The main
tension may be succinctly expressed as follows: the more we attempt to
understand the twentieth century as a relationship in which the affect
of love was related to the conduct of revolution as mutually reinforcing
and constitutive terms, the more their sequence brushes up against the
problem of a refusal of a neat dialectic. The thematic arrangement of
the essays in this volume speak to the ways in which the effects
produced by this difficult pairing are worked out in such diverse sites
as cultural texts, political movements, legal dicta, political treatises or
missionary records. The terms love and revolution here are served by a
copular because each refuses any easy process of cross-referencing and
resists the efforts to compel their mutuality. Yet by placing these terms
in relation to each other, the book seeks to explore the ways in which
the twentieth century was stitched, unstitched and at times re-stitched
to produce the very limits and possibilities of a postcolonial world. We
now turn to a number of identifiable sites of these ‘stitchings’.

Site 1: Love and Revolution—The ‘Problem Space’

Is revolution an answer, a strategy, a political task, a promise or a
longing? The word brings images to mind—of struggle, desires, hopes.
How may one address this word-image that seems to elide meaning
even as it eludes definition? In keeping with David Scott’s discussion of
the anti- and postcolonial conditions, would it be more productive to
think of it as a ‘problem space’? For Scott, the
postcolonial/postapartheid nations’ contemporary is a tragic present.
As he says, ‘…consequently, almost everywhere, the anti-colonial
utopias have gradually withered into postcolonial nightmares’.5 As part
of this exercise, he reads C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins in order to get at
the conditions of its writing, and to unravel the political and intellectual
stakes involved in asking certain kinds of questions of history. He
suggests that it is the difference between the questions that animate
different temporalities or ‘presents’ that is relevant and not the
answers that may have been proposed. He conceptualises this as a
‘problem space’—‘…an ensemble of questions and answers around
which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as
ideological-political stakes) hangs’.6 The ‘problem space’ is bound to
particular temporalities as each political present produces its own sets
of questions, which are intimately bound up with new stakes.
What therefore are the stakes involved in asking questions of
histories of revolution, anti-colonial struggles and their desires in the
post-socialist world? What is it about the political present that
challenges readings of these pasts in ways that do not permit easy
resolutions? For the most part, the present speaks of revolutions that
did not make one free, struggles that provided only incomplete
citizenship, and domains of life, and selfhood, that are still marked by
inequality and injustice in the domain of the social, despite the dreams
stemming from the desire for transformatory revolutionary subjectivity.
The political present is the ‘post’ of revolutions that often did not
deliver promises; both Scott and Hamit Borzaslan speak to this
eloquently.7 Scott argues against what he sees as the teleology of the
narrative of ‘revolutionary romance’, where anti-colonial struggle’s
structure as a story of emancipation is narrated as a triumphal
overcoming of its history of domination, via a variety of trials and
tribulations, ending in an epiphanic finale of freedom. This he reads as
always already present within the structure of the narrative, where the
realisation of a revolutionary future is predicated within a particular
representation of the past. It is the dissatisfaction with such a narrative
romance that provokes Scott’s ‘problem space’.
How might such a problematic be productive for thinking of the
coupling of love and revolution? In thinking along with Scott, it could be
argued that the locus of the questions that animate this volume is
located in the ‘post’—be it socialist, colonial or apartheid—of struggles
and revolutions. Yet that alone does not address what the stakes in
these explorations might be, diverse as they are, that touch on the
impossibility of love, social life or emancipatory futures for so many.
In keeping with Njabulo Ndebele’s efforts to link love and politics,8
how may one speak of the pasts of caste violence in India for instance,
and the revolution that never happened? Ambedkar’s trenchant
critique of the Gandhian inspired national movement in India was not
simply about what he saw to be its flawed political strategies, but that
the politics of anti-colonialism did not address the domain of the social,
which is always the site of discrimination and exclusion. What kind of
love—in its most capacious sense—of being human could the slave
have, having been condemned to bare life? This is the question that
Sanal Mohan asks in his powerful discussion on the desires of a slave
caste, the Pulaya, in nineteenth-century Kerala, in southwestern India.
For those denied the right to dignity or any form of social existence, the
desire is to overcome the impossibility, which may hold the hope of
becoming human, of becoming the subject of one’s own history. In more
recent times, many Dalit activists and theorists in India have made a
polemical argument for the value of colonialism for ‘untouchable’
pasts,9 as at least the Christian missionaries, unlike upper caste Hindu
society, made conditions available to them that held the potential for
acquiring some sense of equality.
The domain of the social complicates the ways in which one may ask
questions of revolutions. If the task that revolutions set themselves is
the transformation of human consciousness, enabling liberation and
freedom, and the making of a new modern political subject, namely, the
citizen (of which we shall say more below), then one may find,
repeatedly, that these fall short of achieving this in its fullest sense.
What then is the domain of freedom, or justice, that are embedded
within histories of discrimination and exclusion that lie beyond the
imagination of the political? Or if we pose the question in another way,
what’s love got to do with it?
In different ways, both Roland Barthes and Alain Badiou address the
many meanings of love, including what may be called its eventness, its
invocation, its experience and the idioms that make available to us the
grammar of such intimacy—or the discourse of love.10 For Barthes, in
Fragments, the language and experience of love is semiotic—made
available to us through signs—which alert us to the existence of love,
though it is not love in itself. ‘A truly revolutionary moment is like love;
it is a crack in the world, in the usual running of things, in the dust that
is layered all over in order to prevent anything New.’11 The suggestion is
that both love, and revolution, are premised on, and made possible by,
dynamism and the desire to reinvent. When this stops and the
revolution no longer challenges its own ‘presuppositions’, then one
ends up in ‘regression’.12 So the question here is whether a sign of love,
in revolution, is indeed love. Badiou, like Arendt, warns us against
collapsing love and political passions. For Badiou, love is about a
universal truth, it ‘suggests a new experience of truth about what it is to
be two and not one’.13 It is declarative, in that it is intrinsic to the
‘structure of the event’ that is love. And in that declaration lies the
paradox of how something that is based on chance, the encounter, can
become, as he says, the ‘fulcrum for the construction of truth’.14 So the
question that he asks is whether politics is like love, in that it is founded
on ‘events, declarations and fidelities’?15 Badiou’s reservation about
reading politics as displaying structural similarities with love is that it
‘confronts…the control of hatred, not of love’. In other words, it is about
overcoming the enemy, and destroying the ‘consequences of hatred’.16
With this in mind, and returning to the problem of love and
revolution, we are reminded of the structural differences between the
two which an affective gloss may sometimes obscure. In fact, the
intersection, the conjunctive ‘and’ that provides an entry into
reconceptualising love and revolution as a ‘problem space’, is one that
leaves room for the non-revolutionary and the unloved.

Site 2: Law and the State

The ‘post’ or our differing political presents constantly bring us up
against the workings of the modern state, with revolutionary or anti-
colonial pasts being reconfigured for purposes of legitimation within
the logic of the new state apparatus. In other instances, efforts are
made to contain ongoing struggles and insurrectionary moments by an
exercise of state authority, which more often than not takes the form of
legal repression. Politics and law are deeply enmeshed and come
together in complex ways. As an instrument of governance, laws frame
the ways in which society must conduct itself, and the ways in which
the relationship between citizens and the state is defined. Law, in that
sense, is also a ‘means by which government organizes itself’,17 and is,
thereby, constitutive of politics. Colonial and postcolonial histories bear
testimony to the ways in which states claim powers in the name of the
‘rule of law’, even as people’s movements, of different kinds, push back,
invoking the democratic rights of citizens (or subjects) to justice. Many
like Gandhi and Mandela began their political education through an
introduction to legal studies. In a world where democracy is
understood to be the political default for modern nations, and is
invested by governments and citizens, variously, with different
properties and meanings, law becomes a site that is marked by
different inscriptions. In other words, the ‘rule of law’ that states invoke
to justify their claims to law-making is precisely that which is critiqued
by people’s movements as depriving citizens of their rights and liberty.
In his profound meditation on violence, Walter Benjamin reads the
relationship between law and justice as one that is deeply implicated in
its relationship to violence. Here he makes two moves. First, he reads
violence as a means for law-making, through which it is perpetuated.
Second, domination (the violence of power) signifies the end of law.
‘Law-making is power-making, assumption of power, and to that extent
an immediate manifestation of violence.’18 The struggle over ‘law-
making’ then is always already embedded in the relationship between
the state and its subjects/citizens, where the boundaries of rights,
liberties and freedoms are constantly being crafted, and renegotiated. It
is unsurprising then that in many postcolonial/postapartheid contexts,
like in India or South Africa, the constitution acquires the status of that
which enshrines people’s aspirations, while ensuring them their
fundamental rights, through well-defined political principles.
Despite this, postcolonial contexts reveal great excesses by states,
where the language of protection of citizens and their rights is often
turned on its head to defend the powers of the state. In her argument
about the manner in which an antiquated colonial law of sedition is
reinserted into the postcolonial Indian Penal Code (the infamous
section 124 A), G. Arunima argues that this retention is part of a
spectrum of laws created by the postcolonial Indian state to ‘protect’
itself ‘against the successful rebel’.19 The genealogy of such ‘protective’
laws for the state can be traced back to the colonial period when a
distinction was made between ordinary and political crimes, and thus
by extension, the need to institute ‘extraordinary’ laws for these was
given legitimacy. At the heart of this was the intent to crush political
dissent, as these were seen as crimes against the state, which the
colonial government explicitly, and the postcolonial implicitly,
considered to be ‘heinous and formidable’.20 Laws like the Unlawful
Activities (Prevention) Action (1967, amended in 2004) and the Armed
Forces Special Powers Act (in place since 1958, though amended over
the years so that more territories that were declared ‘disturbed’ could
be brought within its ambit) have been used successfully in curbing
resistance movements, any number of other activities conveniently
brought under the umbrella category of ‘terrorism’, and permitted
preventive detention.
It is in this context that the language of law becomes significant. The
Indian law against sedition (124 A IPC) that mandates life
imprisonment for words or acts that can ‘excite disaffection’ against the
state is a telling example of not only the ways in which laws define the
political, but also the ways in which it could limit the rights (in this
instance, of speech) that were guaranteed to citizens. Moreover the
language of the laws against ‘disaffection’ is also a command by the
state to its citizens to love the nation.
Yet, many resistance movements, especially those engaged in
struggles for civil liberties and democratic rights (often clubbed
together under the broad umbrella category of human rights activism)
have formulated political alternatives by actively engaging, challenging
and attempting to reformulate laws. Here, Indian legal theorist Upendra
Baxi’s important distinction between the politics for human rights
versus the politics of human rights is extremely relevant. He makes a
powerful argument for the ways in which the civil society organisations
use ‘transformative’/‘redemptive’ imagery in ways that reflect the
‘power of utterance of the political truths of the suffering peoples and
communities in resistance’.21 In other words, such resistance ruptures
not only the attempts by the state’s hegemonic claims but also its
‘totalizing narrative of official authorial voice’. This is what he argues
makes politics for human rights the ‘best narrative sense for the
uncertain promise of human rights futures’.22
Ambedkar’s was one of the earliest and most inventive ways of
using claims to social justice as the grounds from which to rethink law,
and by extension, political subjectivity, in India. Working within a
liberal democratic framework he produced new ways of thinking of
‘untouchables’ as a political minority.23 He argued that Dalit castes
would find no justice through political means, given the structural
violence of caste Hindu society. ‘Ambedkar’s signal transformation of
the political consists, then, in investing the state with the protection of
its minorities by using law to reveal state complicity in the extension of
caste power.’24 Though his earliest intervention, that of demanding
separate seats for the ‘Depressed Classes’. was renounced in the Poona
Pact of 24 September 1932 signed by Gandhi and Ambedkar,25 the
Indian Constitution, of whose Drafting Committee Ambedkar was the
Chairman and perhaps the moving force, ensured several safeguards for
Dalits and other social minorities (Fig. 1.1).
Fig. 1.1 B. R. Ambedkar in 1950, Wikimedia.commons.
It is Ambedkar’s extraordinary legal intervention that anticipates
Baxi’s distinction between the politics for and of human rights. The
availability of laws, however inadequately implemented, has provided
grounds on which ideas of justice have been imagined afresh in many
ongoing people’s resistance movements in India.26 Read from the point
of view of justice claims, law ceases to be simply part of a repressive
state apparatus, but has the potential for enabling emancipatory ideas,
and new notions of political subjectivity. Demands for a just world from
the historically marginalised and oppressed exceeded the limits of
liberal reason and a narrow ‘rights discourse’. It was not simply about
existing structures of power, but also a call to revolutionaries, and those
fighting for national liberation, to reimagine afresh their own ideas of
freedom and emancipation.

Site 3: Depleted Love and the Liberal Problem

In Tensions of Empire, Fred Cooper and Ann Stoler reflect on the ways in
which liberalism arrives in the colonial world with its self-justification
stretched to the limit.27 One explanation for this overworked rationality
relates to the co-incidental emergence of liberalism with the
institutions of slavery and capitalism and the efforts to transplant the
tenets of liberalism into the larger frame of colonial and imperial
domination.28
From the perspective of anti-colonial nationalism, the colonial
world received a form of liberalism depleted of the passion of love—
love for truth, love of ‘Man’, love of freedom—that was at the very core
of its self-proclaimed sense of entitlement to define moral codes and
name political subjectivity. Liberalism’s appeal to ‘Man’ as a universal
subject always and necessarily translated into a form of paternalism
and aggression, with which liberalism is indelibly marked in the
colonial and postcolonial world.29 What happened to the aura of love
when the discourse of liberalism arrives in the colonial world? What,
we might ask in particular, of the slave or the Dalit? Who loved them,
and whom or what could they love? It begs the question of whose
revolution or emancipation this is anyway, constituting an ongoing
aporia.
What the chapters gathered in this volume suggest is that the
semblance of love that formed the basis of liberal discourse was
usurped in early nationalist anti-colonialism in fraught and productive
ways to mediate its critique of Empire. In the process, early forms of
nationalism compel liberalism to confront the limits of the solutions it
proposed to the formulation of the ‘native question’. This question, as
formulated and exported to different colonies and at times
overdetermined by the rise of racial science, sought the transformation
of the colonised subject into industrial worker, political subject of
Empire and marker of civilisational difference. Liberalism encounters
its limit here in the ‘native question’, through which it sought to
produce a subject of law and capital, of modernity and custom. It was
through ‘custom’ in particular that a policy of Indirect Rule was devised
and rationalised for the administration of colonial populations in many
parts of the British Empire.30
Several chapters in this volume invite us to cross the threshold of
the limit posited by liberal reason, to ascertain what nationalism and
Marxism imagined on the other side of liberal paternalism. One
response points to the ruins of the promise of messianic time, which
the idea of revolution constituted in opposition to the homogenous
empty time of liberalism and capitalism. This is the time-space where
love and revolution co-convened in an effort to redeem a future
potentially shorn of the paternalistic rationality of liberalism. The
echoes of Benjamin’s Angel of History are particularly evident in the
ways in which ideas of revolution in the first part of the twentieth
century produced anticipations and anxieties about a rupture within its
specifically racialised predicament that would set the course of history
on an altogether different trajectory towards a possible future.
What forestalled such movement was perhaps an irresolution that
presented itself in a debate about nationalism and Marxism,
exemplified in the exchange between the Indian communist M.N. Roy
and V.I. Lenin in the 1920s. Roy cautioned against a wholesale
abdication of the programme of the communist movement to attend to
the anti-colonial struggle, which he believed would needlessly
surrender worker and peasant mobilisation in the colonial world to the
terms of elite nationalism. Roy had Gandhi in his sights as he argued
against Lenin’s view of the colonial question. Those in the South African
Communist Party had nationalists like John Langalibalele Dube, and his
enthusiasm for the apparent reformism of Booker T. Washington, in
view. For both, the national question appeared as a source of
controversy and irresolution. Thinking love and revolution together
enables us to trace the contours of this disagreement
The debate crystalised in the extensively recorded resolution of the
Sixth Comintern or Third Communist International Meeting proposed
under the heading of the Native Republic Thesis. There, in the context
of the Comintern, representatives of India, South Africa, and the USA
confronted the question of how to respond to the extreme forms of race
and caste subjection. The Native Republic Thesis programmatically
directed the Communist movements in these countries to support the
nationalist struggles for self-determination, as a stage towards
communism. Within this programmatic formulation, Marxists allied to
the Soviet Union generally tended to ignore nationalist disappointment
with liberalism, especially among an intelligentsia who were the first to
be interpellated by the latter’s ideological apparatus. The Communist
Party’s attitude was that nationalism was merely an alibi in a general
postponement of the ideal of communist revolution after the First
World War.31 The spirit of revolution had to be tempered against the
backdrop of a seemingly backward and lagging discourse of race and
caste. The Native Republic Thesis adopted at the Comintern in 1928
recast the spirit of revolution, driving it increasingly towards a notion
of scientific socialism with its plans and prognoses, calculations and
assessments of the levels of consciousness.
Rather than being a stage on the road to communism, nationalism’s
encounter with liberalism is marked by the fact that it speaks in the
name of the public and the everyday, making possible a closer
proximity to what Herbert Marcuse has called an aesthetic ethos, and
by which he means the making of a society as a work of art. If
nationalism did convene around a spiritual core, as Partha Chatterjee
suggests, it was one partly infused with an aesthetic ethos before all
other claims to sovereignty and territoriality.32 Nationalist intellectuals
too saw their struggle unfolding on the stage of world history.
The idea of love retreats into a space of corporeality in the West
only to reappear as an image of love of the world in the struggles for
decolonisation. Among the tropes of decolonisation, a significant and
telling motif is the restorative ambition of nationalism facing the world,
grasping it as text and touching it as globe. In his painting of Patrice
Lumumba’s famous anti-colonial speech at Congolese independence in
1960, the artist Tshibumba Kanda Matula offers us a glimpse of this
sensibility beyond the corporeality of love indicated in the West where
freedom is increasingly individualised. The image of the globe gives us a
way to think about the efforts to restore Africa into the story of world,
as integral and necessary to it (Fig. 1.2).
Fig. 1.2 ‘Vive le 30 Juin Zaïre Indépendent.’ Lumumba and King Baudouin; Lumumba
giving speech, Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, Leiden. Painting by
Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, 1973
If this particular distinction underscored the ambivalence of the
nationalist anti-colonial encounter with liberalism, how do we account
for the ways in which third-world nationalism, at the moments of
departure and manoeuvre, made itself available as an idea on the stage
of world history? What was the nationalist response to scientific
socialism or liberal political subjectivity?
Nationalism, in its spiritual dimension, sets to work on the grounds
of culture with which it fulfils the humanistic promises betrayed by the
old culture. The struggle over the terrain of culture was aimed at
liberalism’s monopoly over the question of morality with which
liberalism inaugurates ideas of political subjectivity. The exemplary
instance of this attitude to liberal morality is Gandhi’s Law of Love that
proposed a tactical rerouting of love to undercut liberalism’s attempt to
define universal subject of ‘Man’ in its own terms. Gandhi’s elaboration
of ahimsa countered liberalism’s monopoly on love by seeking to
revolutionise love itself. Ahimsa would ground Gandhi’s Passive
Revolution, which amounted to a revolution without a revolution. In
South Africa too, a similar concern with liberal morality in fulfilling the
promise of love in the constitution of political subjectivity is revealed.
S.M. Molema reserved a few choice words for those who claimed the
moral high ground of liberalism: ‘In these things, we shall look, and look
in vain, for the much vaunted “Western liberalism”. In vain shall we
search the actions for the so-called High Political Morality.’33
In our various forays over four workshops on the theme of love and
revolution, the intermediate space between the two grand traditions
that mark our modernity, liberalism and Marxism, made it clear that an
idea specific to the anti-colonial struggles was being forged in the midst
of the great ideological shifts from the nineteenth century onwards.
Several Marxists, among them M.N. Roy and later C.L.R. James, would
rework the script of Marxism to pivot the great impulse for revolution
in the colonial world and not in the Europe that emerged after the First
World War. Through several precise engagements, this seemed
insufficient to account for the difficulty of relating love to revolution.
The problematic of love and revolution must be read as more than an
effort to reconcile two rather discrepant terms born of complex and
divergent genealogies.
More centrally, the papers in the present volume call attention to
the specific and singular way in which notions of love of the world were
born in a precise moment of anti-colonial struggle, a love of the world
for which one would offer one’s life, and for which there had been no
precedent in the history of earlier revolutions. In contrast to Marxist
precursors, nationalism in the third world opens the problem-space of
liberalism, by recasting liberalism’s depleted love as a terrain on which
to constitute its critique of colonialism. If love enables nationalism, it
also proves the site of its most profound disappointment when the
nation acquires a life of its own.

Site 4: Love and Revolution—The Relation

How then may we engage the encounter between affect and politics in
anti-colonial or revolutionary contexts? Such encounters are frequently
elaborated in text itself. In Javed Majeed’s reading of radical Urdu poets
Iqbal and Faiz in colonial India, for example (this volume), the
languages of love and intimacy were integral to revolutionary
aesthetics. He shows how Iqbal recasts ishq (love) in the language of
khudi (selfhood), and then makes a case for the need of cultivating love,
which he calls the ‘power of assimilative action’. Such a love then makes
a demand of selflessness, in assimilation, and a complex relation
between self and collective, where neither becomes the other, yet is tied
to each other through affective intensities. This also then is at the heart
of the troubled relationship between pan-Islamism in Iqbal and the
possibilities of thinking of a future ‘state’ for Muslims, of which he was
a significant proponent. The revolutionary poet and intellectual Faiz
engaged with postcolonial disillusionment and the continuing
oppression despite political independence, yet continued to dream and
desire a better future for Pakistan and humanity. Faiz’s aesthetic
devices drew upon the resources of Urdu poetry, where the motif of the
separated lover from the beloved then is woven back into ways of
articulating both political pain and the conditions of hope. Vivid and
sensuous, it invokes intensely embodied metaphors and images that
speak equally of the ‘anxiety of hope’ of the revolutionary and the
aesthetic dilemmas of the poet.
Through the category of sacrifice, Simona Sawhney’s meditative
chapter (this volume) opens up ways in which the death penalty can be
appropriated and transformed by the revolutionary subject as both
‘devotion and defiance’, thereby connecting the ethical and the political.
This arises from her reading of the life and writings of Indian
revolutionary Bhagat Singh, who was sentenced to death by the British
colonial state in 1931. Sawhney suggests that Singh’s staging of his
suffering and death as a sacrificial act enabled this to be seen in turn as
a legacy he left behind for his heirs. Though popularly referred to as
shaheed, a layered term associated with both religious and political
martyrdom, Bhagat Singh was also a self-proclaimed atheist, and his
text ‘Why I Am an Atheist’ written while in prison is among his best-
read works. This text which was more manifesto than autobiography
brought together the importance of self-reliance as a sign of political
maturity alongside the need for ‘atheist sacrifice’. By bringing within
the same frame the love for humanity, and the desire for freedom, the
revolutionary’s act of self-sacrifice, of going joyfully to the gallows,
becomes a way of transforming a death sentence into a defiant political
possibility, a way of speaking back to state power. The sombre
conclusion that Sawhney draws however is that while such anti-
colonial sacrifice is still applauded today, it is no longer the willingness
to suffer but the capacity to inflict suffering on others that is now
valorised in India.
How may one think about the residual sadness, sometimes even
close to melancholia, that often seems to saturate the languages of
political love? In her reading of Walter Benjamin’s distinction between
the productive possibilities of sadness and his critique of left
melancholia, Wendy Brown sees the crises of the left as one of
mourning for the loss of a movement, and a moment. She argues for a
rethinking of the foundations and radical transformation of ‘political
love’; she suggests that without such an affective commitment to the
cause or community, all one would be left with is unproductive
melancholy.34 Her arguments are speaking to a crisis born of anxieties
of critique—both political and theoretical—that was central to many of
the debates of the 1980s and 1990s in Europe and the USA, but they are
pertinent. Here it is productive to look at one kind of critique—that of
the feminist (in its different iterations)—in relation to rethinking the
social and the political. The model of excluding women and slaves from
political life, relegating them to ‘bare life’ and to social and economic
reproduction that was intrinsic to Greek antiquity was not an exclusive
cultural or historical phenomenon.35 As feminists have argued
repeatedly, in different contexts, the problem around women and
gender is not one of absence, but of non-recognition and of not naming.
One may then revisit the ‘problem space’ of love and revolution by
asking questions about the very making of revolutionaries, and their
gendering. Several contributors to this volume mark the encounter with
institutions or categories that are recognised and named but are
profoundly refigured in political times. This is especially so of the
family and generational ordering under acknowledged patriarchal
systems. In Paolo Israel’s study of Mapiko mask dance and performance
in northern Mozambique, for example (this volume), the liberation
movement Frelimo welcomed the scintillating new emphasis in the
mask performances towards anti-colonial ends. But the movement
firmly discouraged certain forms of older competitive song that related
to cross-village insult. Samora Machel’s revolutionary vision sought
ultimately to eradicate the generational puberty rites that underpinned
‘the tribe’ (and the mask), all in the pursuit of the making of the New
Man who would ‘veio da mata’, that is, emerge from the bush.36 This
was ‘the most crucial task of all revolutionary endeavours: the
construction of regenerated men and women, “delivered from the
corruption of previous history”’.37 In Pedro Monaville’s paper, it is also
the opportunity to loosen old familial bonds in the 1960s that helps to
drive Congolese male students towards such powerful instances of the
new: the new discourses of romantic love, the new form of the political
party, and the new music and enjoyments of Kinshasa’s night life.
Patriarchy however takes on new forms in the political party itself.
Ciraj Rassool offers an immensely suggestive reading of both the
making (and unmaking) of I.B. Tabata and the Unity Movement in South
Africa (this volume), and the ways his biography and the subsequent
dissent over its narration, point to a troubled relationship between
politics and affect. In this reading, institutions such as the family and
the school are both sites for nurturing values and attitudes, functioning
as metaphors for the ways in which parties work through inter-
generational relationships that can be variously described as
paternalism and patronage. In using the mode of life narrative, Tabata’s
biography then becomes a way of mapping political affinities in the
mode of social relationships. As pater familias of the party ‘family’,
Tabata’s own self-fashioning and his representation could be recast as
that of head of an affective organisation that would provide leadership
through a pedagogic model that could be emulated. The filiations,
fictive and real, provide the matrix within which political lives acquire
their identities; the familial model also allowed for greater
authoritarianism, accompanied by intolerance for dissent, especially
when articulated by younger members of the party. Critique in such an
instance could be seen as almost akin to patricide.
In addressing head-on the relationship between gender and
political activism, Mallarika Sinha Roy makes a powerful argument
about the postcolonial Indian Maoist movement Naxalbari (this
volume). While many erstwhile comrades of the movement, some
turned scholars, celebrate the revolutionary romanticism of the male
revolutionary and the ways in which political and romantic love co-
exist, they do not engage the ways in which these realms often overlap
or become elided. Sinha Roy complicates the argument by drawing
attention to the manner in which emotions themselves are gendered,
with the rational and political conventionally being considered
masculine, and the emotional and affective feminine. What then
happens to the ‘outlaw emotion’ , she asks, when a woman Maoist
revolutionary expresses her love for the movement? And how may we
read that alongside an equally and perhaps even transgressive choice of
marrying outside of prescribed caste norms? In challenging both the
violence of the postcolonial Indian state and its sustenance of deeply
unequal and unjust conditions of life, as well as the heteronormative
violence of Maoist patriarchy, the woman Naxalite becomes that which
cannot be contained, or indeed historicised, within formal narratives of
the Maoist movement.
Such heteronormative narratives also feature in Monaville’s study of
the Congolese student movement of 1969 that we have mentioned
already. Lovanium University in Leopoldville (Kinshasa) remained a
colonial and clerical institution in the capital after Independence,
offering scholarships and status. It nonetheless became a centre of left
activism with a ‘big red library’ and Marxist reading groups that
attracted students who started out on the Catholic left. Infused by
Panafrican, Lumumbist and Global ’68 influences, an emergent student
movement called for the decolonisation of the university and increased
social access. A series of events in 1968 precipitated the conflict
between President Mobuto and the students, leading to the June 1969
march, shooting and massacre, with attendant arrests and detentions. It
was in prison that specific forms of solidarity emerged with students
sharing food and cigarettes, and engaging in mutual learning and
ideological development. Again, it was the element of the new in such
male friendships that made political engagement possible and
enduring, with many lasting through exile and later political
differences. By contrast, male student relationships with women in
Kinshasa tended to materialise as a failed romance. Moreover, their
fellow women students and nuns who participated in the protests were
marginalised in activist accounts, even more so in memory. For many,
this romance of male friendship between African youth activists was
love, and certainly a dimension where love and revolution came
together. In Monaville’s view, it explains certain aspects of postcolonial
politics.38
Site 5: In the Pause/Interval—Subjective Grounds
of the Political
The ends of liberation struggles and the aftermaths of the Cold War
seem designed to run into the terms of the postcolonial, the
postapartheid and the post-socialist. Thoughts might turn to the so-
called Arab Spring, but here too is a cautionary tale. Plainly, love is not
the royal road to revolution. In the concatenations of love and
revolution, and beyond the ‘problem space’ of categories and effects, we
wish to open up other entry-points into the subjective grounds of the
political that we refer to here as the pause, or interval.
In his contribution to the recent project Uprisings, Antonio Negri
takes the reader through an arc of political and subjective processes
that encompass the minutiae of revolt and its historical residues. At one
point he notes:

When there is an uprising, before exploding, the collective

tension gathers up in a moment of pause, an interval that
betrays an undecided effort that precedes the decision to open
up to action. Altogether. When this happens, time becomes
joyful.39

Among the multiple histories traversed in the love and revolution

debates, it is often these intervals of the ‘undecided effort’ where things
are so intense, but opaque at the same time. Something is gathering. For
mobilisation, this is where subjectivity becomes fundamental, it is ‘a
motor of lifting … to produce action’.40 Thus, one form of ‘love’ in love
and revolution might be a hardened commandment issued by a
nationalist government fighting ‘disaffection’ (Arunima); or it might be
the ‘love manifesto’ articulated by Maoist women militants in Bengal
(Sinha Roy); or the declaration that ‘love in jail surpasses love outside’
(bolinga ya cachot) on a Congolese prison wall (Monaville). But equally
it might be less conscious, in the more indeterminate zone of affect.
Thinking about affect is ‘an invitation to voyage’, suggests Brian
Massumi. Affect cannot be clearly named or determined, it is more of a
‘margin of manoeuvrability’,41 and only comes to be understood when
enacted.42 It is proto-political. Many contributors have attempted to
track these less conscious interplays.
Negri distinguishes between a ‘pause/interval in the gesture’
(before discharging a collective breath as it were and rising up) and an
‘interruption/rupture of the gesture’ (when movement is derailed or
defeated). In the latter case, the ‘materiality of the operation’ falls away.
Proponents may start to build a utopia and have recourse to
apocalyptic ideas. ‘Those who didn’t plan to revolt fool themselves a
magical hand will lift them up from impending catastrophe.’ Negri then
asks what remains of ‘the thought of uprising’ and its affects? ‘Memory ,
suffering, regret, repentance’ are listed. ‘And where has subjectivity
gone? Nostalgia takes away the desire to start again and deposits tired
residue of that ancient experience into the soul. The perception of the
crushing of desire replaces the uprising.’ Negri sees in this a ‘refusal of
the concrete’.
Certainly many derailed movements might go in this direction and
run into the sand. Wally Serote’s novel of Soweto in the 1970s, To Every
Birth Its Blood, implies however that these sensations might be felt
repeatedly, even within short bursts of time in an ongoing liberation
struggle.43 Movements continue, ‘even through defeats’. In Negri’s
geological metaphor, ‘The defeats are a stratum, a deposit, and a living
one. They are not inert, they are passions that keep producing
subjectivity, productions that cannot be stopped.’ Howard Caygill’s
distinction between the ongoing ‘capacity to resist’ and singular,
spectacular acts of protest or uprising is pertinent here.44 New
indignations become the spark of uprising, Negri suggests, ‘only when
the sad passion of the indignant comes across the ontological power
deposited by lives of struggle. … in that concrete historicity and in the
productive imagination, the relay is handed over.’ These ‘deposits’ feed
into teaching and cultural texts, are passed on through various media,
or mediated through institutions and relationships. Monaville’s work
on the student movement in Congo gestures to this, for the postcolonial
Mobutu dictatorship ‘did not put an end to political passions’, and
‘affects of liberation kept re-emerging’.
What is necessary for revolution to go into action? Negri insists that
firstly it must be grounded, but also ‘enervated by passions and
interests, radical will and desires for the future’. Secondly, it needs to
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 WHAT IS GOOD MORTAR?
To a casual observer mortar is mud, but to a builder who
understands the chemistry of mortar it is a compound of water, lime
and sand, and when properly prepared forms an indestructible
cement. Fresh slacked lime, when brought in contact with clean,
sharp sand, adheres strongly to the surface of each grain, and forms
the silicate of lime.
At the same time the drying mortar absorbs carbonic acid from the
atmosphere, forming with it lime-stone, which in time becomes a
rock in solidity. Now, all mortar is good or bad in proportion to the
purity of the ingredients and their relative affinity for each other. The
adhesive properties of mortar are nullified by loam or clay in sand, or
the stale condition of lime used.
Loam mortar adheres freely to the surface of walls or ceilings. So
does mud if thrown against an upright surface; but water dissolves it.
It dries quickly, but does not harden with age. The foundation of
many frame, and the entire walls of many brick houses are built with
poor mortar, when the materials for good could be had at the same
price.
Water, lime, sand and hair are the ingredients for plasterers’
mortar in about the following proportions: One bushel unslacked lime
and four bushels sharp sand; (to this add twenty-four pounds of dry
hair for every one hundred yards, when used for “scratch” or first
coat,) and water sufficient to make it of proper consistency. After
being properly mixed, the mortar should stand from three to ten days
before using. However, the time it should stand depends upon the
susceptibility of the lime to slack. Some lime requires a month, while
good lime slacks immediately. Age improves mortar, provided it is
kept wet, and makes it work easier under the workman’s trowel. As it
is the keys formed by pressing the mortar against the lathing on the
ceiling that holds it to its place, there should be a relative width of
lath and key space to insure strength sufficient to prevent its falling.
Ignorance of this, and poor mortar, is the cause of falling ceilings.
Lath one inch wide, 7/16 inches thick, placed 7/16 inches apart will
insure good strong work.
The second coat needs but a very small quantity of hair. Fifty
bushels sand, and twelve and one-half bushels unslacked lime, will
make mortar enough to cover one hundred square yards. If mortar
freezes before it is dry it loses its cementing properties and becomes
in common phase rotten, but if the sand used is clean, and it remains
frozen without thawing until it is dry, it is not injured. The best way to
treat a house in which the plastering is not dry, and cannot be kept
from freezing before it dries, is to throw the house open, and let it
freeze for eight or ten days, or until the plastering freezes dry.
Cisterns should be plastered inside with mortar made of equal
parts of hydraulic lime and clean sand. For brick work above
foundations use one part unslacked lime to four parts sand.

“THE INDEPENDENT,” 251 Broadway, New York,

October 28th, 1889.
Gentlemen:—The shingles from your respected concern
used on my new house look splendidly, and give entire
satisfaction. They are far better than any metal shingles I
have previously used on other buildings, which I have had
torn off and thrown away as worthless. At times we were
flooded by the water under their (want of) protection, and we
could not stop the leaks. Noah in the ark I am sure was,
fortunately, not troubled with leaks such as we endured for
years; if he had been all would have been drowned. Now,
under your protection, we are all right and still alive.
Faithfully,
HENRY C. BOWEN,
Chandler.
 TO ARCHITECTS AND BUILDERS.
There is no detail of house building more important than the roof.
Upon it depends to a great degree the durability and preservation of
the whole structure. The number of good houses with mottled
ceilings and cracked plastering, to be seen all over the country, are
reminders of the necessity of securing the best material and faultless
construction for this important part of your dwelling.
The advantages we claim for our Tin Shingle, over the ordinary
mode of applying sheet metal for roofing purposes, consists in its
Superior Strength, Freedom from Wrinkles and Cracking, (which
cannot at all times be prevented where sheet metal is put on in
continuous sheets); and in being the Most Ornamental and
Durable of all sheet metal roof coverings. Now, in answer to this last
assertion you may say, How can this be? Is not the same quality of
tin as durable when applied in one form as another? We answer, By
no means. The writer—and we presume the reader—has seen tin
roofs worked, and walked over in the necessary finishing up, to such
an extent as to seriously damage the roof. The Tin Roofers’ mallets,
seamers, tongs, and sliding over the roof, do more real damage to
the surface of tin plate than several years’ wear. We entirely
overcome this difficulty, as no part of the exposed surface of our Tin
Shingles are struck with a mallet or hammer in applying them. Again,
where metal plates are put together in continuous sheets, moisture,
which condenses underneath for want of ventilation, settles in the
cross-seams and causes decay, and the ordinary metal roof when
removed invariably shows this to be the case, while the other part of
the plate shows no perceptible wear. Our form of metal roofing has
no cross-seams, and has sufficient ventilation to prevent the
condensation of moisture underneath, making it by many years the
most durable form of metal roofing ever offered to the American
people.
 Our object is to furnish the building public with a better form of
roofing material, attractive in appearance, without the objections of
the heavy slate, the clumsy shingle, or the plain ribbed metal roof;
and at a price that claims the attention of Architects and Builders of
the whole country.
THE NATIONAL SHEET METAL ROOFING CO.,
510 to 520 East Twentieth St.,
New York City.
 CHIMNEYS.
We will not moralize on the evils of smoky chimneys,
but just tell you in plain language how to construct them
so they will not smoke. Make the throat of the fire-place
not more than half the size of the flue; carefully smooth
the inside of the flue, and have it of the same area all
the way to near the top of the chimney, when it should
be gradually tapered inward to about half the area of the
flue. At the extreme top, the cap stone should slant from
the opening in all directions downward at an angle of
about twenty degrees. This will insure a good draught
and prevent the smoke blowing downward. No two fire-places should enter
the same flue; neither should a stove-pipe enter a flue unless the fire-place is
closed. Each stove and fire-place should have its own flue. The size
necessary for a flue depends on the fuel to be used.
Soft or Bituminous coal requires a flue nearly double the size of one where
Anthracite is to be used; an open fire-place for wood, larger flues than either.
For instance, an 8 × 8 inch flue answers for Anthracite, because it makes but
little soot, while if Bituminous coal is used, 8 × 12 is none too large.
You will find in houses all over the country flues smaller than the above, and
a corresponding number of smoky chimneys, which it is impossible to remedy
without re-building from the bottom up.
The carelessness displayed in chimney construction is astonishing. As the
work is hid from view on completion, be watchful during the process of
construction from the ground up. All chimneys should, if possible, extend
above the apex or comb of roof, and should be built of good hard burnt brick,
and no woodwork should be allowed to enter within five inches of inside of
flue, and not within twelve inches anywhere near the fire-place.
 Design H.—Front Elevation.

EIGHT-ROOM, TWO-STORY HOUSE.

Estimated Cost, with Bath and Furnace, $3,500 to $4,000.
Roof covered with 10 × 14 No. 1 Standard Tin Shingles; gables with Queen
Anne; second story, sides, with 7 × 10 Standard Tin Shingles; and porches
with Broad Rib Tin Roofing; use No. 2 Five-foot Finial on tower.
 First Floor. Second Floor.

Design H.—(Elevation, page 18.)

A retired plumber thus gives a point for the gratuitous relief of householders:
“Just before retiring at night pour into the clogged pipe enough liquid soda lye
to fill the ‘trap’ or bent part of the pipe. Be sure that no water runs in it until the
next morning. During the night the lye will convert all the offal into soft soap,
and the first current of water in the morning will wash it away and clear the
pipe clean as new.”
 THE WALTER’S PATENT, AND WHAT
IT IS.
Previous to the granting of a patent to John Walter, in 1882, there
were no tin shingles manufactured for the trade in the United States,
with the exception of those which covered more than two-thirds of
their surface to get one-third exposed to the weather; the same is
commonly done with wood shingles. This made them too expensive
for general use. The Walter’s patent made it practical to expose five-
sixths of the surface and only conceal one-sixth of the shingle. This
great saving at once reduced the cost of metal shingles over one-
half, and enabled the National Sheet Metal Roofing Co., which
controls this patent, to put on the market the best metal roofing in the
world, at prices that compete with ordinary wood shingles. (See
“Comparative Cost,” pages 26 and 27.)
How this was done is best expressed in the claim granted the
patentee, copied from the United States Official Gazette:

“A metal roofing plate having a gutter formed by

corrugations at one side, and a perforated flange at the side
of the gutter, whereby it shall be nailed to the roof of a house;
a broad corrugation at the other side adapted to form a seam
with the adjoining edge of a corresponding plate, substantially
as shown and described.”

The advantage of this lock is that it makes a water-tight seam

without soldering or hammering down. The plates are joined as easy
as crossing two sticks, with ample provision for expansion and
contraction. This lock is the perfection of simplicity; there is no
exposed seam where water is liable to lodge and cause rust; no
cleats are used, and no tin springs are necessary to hold the side
edges of connecting plates to prevent water seeping through.
 PAINTING SHEET-METAL ROOFS.
The subject of painting sheet-metal roofs is one of great
importance, says the Builder, Decorator and Wood-Worker, not only
on account of the protection afforded, but because the material,
when properly colored, can be made pleasant to the eye when
placed in exposed positions. While many kinds of paint have been
discovered and patented, composed of a great variety of materials, it
is a question if there is a substance used that is an effective
substitute for linseed oil, regarding the effectiveness of which an
authority on the subject says: “By consulting experienced and
unbiased painters you will learn the fact that there is no vehicle
pigments at all approaching linseed oil in effectiveness and
durability, especially for exposure to the weather. A good paint must
be both hard and elastic. It requires hardness to prevent abrasion
and wear, and elasticity to prevent cracking from expansion and
contraction. Nothing but linseed oil will give these qualities, for,
strange as it may seem to many in these days of novelties, the
pigments really add but very little to the effectiveness of paints.
Mark, we say the best of pigments, for many pigments are the
reverse of protective, and are really destructive to both the vehicles
and the material which they are supposed to protect. For example,
coal tar and all its products, whether called dead oil, asphalt, rubber,
etc., are of the class just described, and their use at any price,
especially for covering sheet-metals, is a wanton waste of money.
Extended experiments have demonstrated that there is no better
pigment for metal than a good iron ore ground to an impalpable
powder. To be most thoroughly effective the pigment must be
intimately incorporated with the vehicle, which can best be done only
by grinding them together in a stone mill by steam power.” It is of the
greatest importance that sheet-metal roofs, especially those made of
iron, should be protected from the action of the elements, as when
so protected there is hardly any limit to the time they will last. In
order that the paint should be effective, it should be applied before
the iron has had an opportunity to rust, and the first coat should be of
the best quality and applied in the best manner; or if it is defective it
is plain that it will not only require repainting far sooner than it
should, but no matter how good the subsequent coatings of paint
are, they cannot be effective if founded on an original coating which
has commenced to crack or peel, as it certainly will if not prepared
with the best methods and materials. Another important point to be
observed in the painting of sheet-metal is that the paint should not
be too thick, as it is the linseed oil that is to be depended on to
furnish protection, and as the action of the air on the surface of the
exposed oil gives it a particularly hard surface, two thin coats of paint
are much more durable than one thick one.
Remember, it is the rust-preventing qualities of linseed oil,
combined with the oxide of iron, that makes steel or iron sheets
resist the corrosive action of oxygen, which is ever present in the
atmosphere. (See page 101.)
 THE CELLAR.
The cellar under a dwelling house has many advocates. It is a
convenient, cool place, and nineteen times out of twenty is a damp,
dark, musty, foul-smelling place. It cannot well be otherwise and be a
cellar. It is a store-room for all sorts of vegetables; odds and ends of
most everything are laid away in that dark retreat. It is the favorite
resort of spiders, toads and other creeping things; it is the
unrelenting enemy (?) of the family physician, the breeding-place of
malaria, which unceasingly sends its poisonous vapors into every
part of the dwelling above it. It would be suicide for one to make it
their sleeping room.
But if you insist upon having a cellar under your house, and will
not put it under the corn-crib or carriage-house, see that it is properly
constructed. This is more important than most of the other parts of
the house, for upon it in a great measure depends the health of your
entire family.
The floor of the cellar should be hard and dry, with no woodwork in
its construction. To obtain this result, cover the floor about three
inches deep with coarse gravel, or broken stone, well pounded to a
level surface. Fill this with a thin mortar, composed of one part
hydraulic cement and two parts sharp sand, smoothing it off with a
trowel or plasterer’s level. When we mention sharp sand, we mean
coarse, clean sand.
Build a flue, say 8 × 12 inches (with an opening next to the floor of
the cellar fully that size), from the bottom of cellar foundation
alongside of and extending to top of kitchen chimney, the heat of
which will create a constant, upward current of air from the cellar. On
the opposite side of cellar from this ventilating flue make an air inlet
near the ceiling for the purpose of supplying fresh air to the cellar.
This will keep the cellar dry and the atmosphere healthy. Put a wire
netting over the opening to prevent the entrance of rats and mice. If
from the nature of the location, or other causes, a cellar is damp, dig
a trench all around a little below and outside of the foundation wall;
this trench should be covered with flat stones and earth filled in a
little above the surface line, so that surface water will flow from, and
not settle next to, the foundation walls. When the cellar is completed
whitewash the walls and ceiling.
OUR “QUEEN ANNE” VALLEY,
FOR SLATE, TIN OR WOOD SHINGLES.

Patented October 30th, 1883.

This cut fairly illustrates our improvement. The
corrugations at the side keep the edges rigid, and
prevent the edges from dipping into any space that may
be between the roof boards where they are not laid
close. Besides this, they dispense with the necessity of
chalk lines, and hold the shingle or slate from lying
close upon the metal, preventing decay both of wood
and metal. A convenience and benefit to every builder.
To be used where the pitch of the roof is equal to that
necessary in using the ordinary shingle.
 Design G.—Front Elevation.

EIGHT-ROOM, TWO-STORY HOUSE.

Estimated Cost, with Bath and Furnace, $3,000 to $3,500.
Roof to be covered with 10 × 14 No. 1 Standard Tin Shingles; gables with 7
× 10, same quality; and porches with Broad-Rib Tin Plate Roofing.

Smithtown Branch, L. I., November 27th, 1886.

Dear Sirs:—During the recent very heavy storms—wind and rain—
the roof on my house, put on with Walter’s Patent Tin Shingles, stood
the test; not a single leak has ever been discovered, not even around
the chimneys, valleys, nor where the roof of the wing butts up against
the main building. The work was done in April last, and never leaked,
and I think never will, as long as the material lasts.
You will remember how reluctant I was to try the shingles, but I am
now glad that I did so, for I not only have a good first-class roof—fire-
proof—but I also have the handsomest roof in our town. I promised
you I would come in and see you, and tell you how I liked the shingles,
but not having done so, I write you this.
Yours very truly,
COE D. SMITH.
 First Floor. Second Floor.

Design G.—(Elevation, page 24.)

New Bedford, Mass., June 24th, 1887.

Gentlemen:—The Metallic Shingles, which were put on by you on
the roof of the New Bristol County Jail and House of Correction at this
place, are entirely satisfactory in every respect, the manner in which
the plates are rolled overcoming all objections to the expansion and
contraction of the metal. Those that were put on here were of hard
rolled copper, and have now turned a beautiful bronze color, and is
very much admired by all who have seen it. The roof cannot but be an
extremely desirable roof, and I do not see that it can need repairs of
any kind for years to come.
Yours very truly,
ROBERT H. SLACK, Architect.
 WOOD AND METAL SHINGLES.
COMPARATIVE COST.
We are often asked if our
metal shingles are as cheap as
wood shingles. While we cannot
consistently say they are not;
still, if we say they are, they
refer to our price list, which
necessitates an explanation
something like this:
We will suppose a dwelling is
to be built to cost, say $2,500.
Such a house will usually require about 20 squares of roof covering,
which, if done with wood shingles, fixes the cost of fire insurance
about one-quarter of one per cent. higher than a metal roof during its
existence. This extends not only to the house, but all contained in
such roofed houses. And this is the case, no matter how good the
wood shingles are.
In making this comparison, we will consider such shingles as are
generally used in the older settled portions of the country. We are
aware that shingles made from well-matured timber, straight-grained,
free from sap and wind-shakes, full length, hand drawn to five-
eighths of an inch at the butt, four inches wide, and carefully put on
make a good, durable roof. But shingles of that kind are only to be
had in the thinly settled portions of the country.
It is the broad, thin, split or sawed shingles, found in all markets,
which we contend are more expensive than our metal shingles.
These do not last, on an average, more than fifteen years, and after
ten years the repairs are a continual expense until removed and
replaced with new material, which is not often done until some of the
woodwork is badly damaged, and ceiling cracked and stained from
frequent leakages. On the other hand, tin shingles will last for any
length of time, if painted once in every five or six years, and show no
perceptible wear.

Cost of a TIN SHINGLE Roof for a period of

Fifteen Years.

Twenty squares of Tin Shingles, at $6.75 per square $135 00

Labor of putting on same 10 00
One coat of paint after roof is laid 8 00
Total cost of same $153 00
One coat of paint at expiration of five years 10 00
One coat of paint at expiration of ten years 10 00
One coat of paint at expiration of fifteen years 10 00
Insurance on $2,500 for fifteen years, at one-half of one
per cent. per annum 187 50
Total cost at expiration of fifteen years $370 50

Cost of a WOOD SHINGLE Roof for a Period of

Fifteen Years.

Twenty squares of Wood Shingles, at $3.75 per square $65 00

Putting on same 20 00
Expense of five years’ repairs, after expiration of ten
years; damage to roof and ceiling caused by leakage
not counted 15 00
Insurance on $2,500 for fifteen years, at three-quarters of
one percent. per annum 281 25
Expense of covering at expiration of fifteen years 85 00
Total $466 25
Making a difference in favor of Tin Shingles in a
period of fifteen years of $95.75