Uncovering Betrayal: About Anti-National Histories

About the Lecture

The historian, much like Perseus, is expected to go on a quest to the archive, a repository of truth waiting to be discovered. But sometimes the archive gives up stories nobody went looking for: stories of deception, of broken loyalty, of comrades who turned.

This talk recounts the history of Bhagat Singh's associates who reneged on the cause and betrayed their fellow revolutionaries. It then asks the uncomfortable questions: why bother with histories like these, and what does recounting them do for our present?

The session explores:

The little-told story of the revolutionaries who betrayed Bhagat Singh's circle
What historians do when the archive contradicts the heroic narrative
Why "anti-national" histories are worth recovering at all
What remembering betrayal does to how we understand the present
About the Speaker
Professor Aparna Vaidik teaches History at Ashoka University. Educated at St. Stephen's College, Cambridge University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, she has previously taught at Georgetown University, Washington DC, and the University of Delhi. She is the author of Imperial Andamans, Waiting for Swaraj and Revolutionaries on Trial, and of the creative non-fiction book My Son's Inheritance. She is actively involved in public pedagogy and is President Trustee of a charitable trust that runs a community library with more than 5,000 members.

Although she writes about revolutionaries and militant protest in the British period, she encounters it every morning at home: she is the parent of two sassy and surly teenaged un-schoolers, one a trigger-happy radical and the other a brainy anarchist. When she isn't teaching or researching, her favourite pastime is couch-potatoing.

About unLecture

unLecture brings experts out of classrooms and into cafés, bars and neighbourhood spaces across Delhi. Created by three friends from college who wanted learning to feel warm, social and alive — unLecture turns an otherwise ordinary evening into a conversation you may think about long after it ends.



Where it is
Address : Depot48, M9, Level, block market, 2, M, Block M, Greater Kailash II, Greater Kailash, New Delhi, Delhi 110048, India