4th January 2022
In a crisp 200 pages, The Dream of Revolution — a biography begun by the late historian Bimal Prasad, a close associate of Jayaprakash Narayan’s, and completed by his daughter, art historian Sujata Prasad — narrates the singular, often surprising political life, which bridged the era of Bhagat Singh and civil disobedience with that of George Fernandes and the Janata Party.
I spent my childhood in a quiet part of outer Bangalore once called Sarakki Layout, but later renamed JP Nagar. My father liked to complain about losing the warm, vernacular ‘Sarakki’, and I was never curious what lay behind ‘JP’. A decade later, I could draw a hazy relation between those initials and a handful of parties across the country, relics of an older political force that went by the same initials. Today, the ruling party is working hard to turn legends of the anti-colonial Left, like Bhagat Singh and Subhas Bose, into heroes for the Hindu right. Still JP is out of the picture. Nobody in power seems to want him, and as I finally read his story, I could see why. Revolutionaries are either buried deep or hidden in plain sight, as JP was in the place where I grew up.
In a crisp 200 pages, The Dream of Revolution — a biography begun by the late historian Bimal Prasad, a close associate of Jayaprakash Narayan’s, and completed by his daughter, art historian Sujata Prasad — narrates the singular, often surprising political life, which bridged the era of Bhagat Singh and civil disobedience with that of George Fernandes and the Janata Party. For five decades, Narayan had a hand on the wheel of the national project, always pulling it left, from the grip of powerful classes. His aim was always a more complete revolution; even in the end, when his compass betrayed him.