YASHPAL'S SOCIO-POLITICAL NOVELS: REVOLUTIONARY REALISM, GENDER, AND THE POLITICS OF FREEDOM

Abstract

This article reassesses Yashpal's socio-political novels as a sustained literary inquiry into the meanings and limits of freedom in twentieth-century India. Rather than treating the novels primarily as documentary records of anti-colonial politics, it argues that Yashpal expands the Hindi political novel by connecting national liberation to class relations, labor, caste hierarchy, gender, sexuality, communalism, and the contradictions of postcolonial nationhood. The study uses a comparative textual-historical approach to Dada Comrade, Deshdrohi, Geeta (originally Party Comrade), Divya, Manushya Ke Roop, Amita, Jhutha Sach, and Meri Teri Uski Baat, while engaging major biographical and critical scholarship on Yashpal and the Hindi public sphere. Three movements become visible across this corpus: an early concern with revolutionary organization and political ethics; the use of historical imagination to interrogate caste, patriarchy, and violence; and a later, broader critique of Partition, communalism, and the incomplete social realization of independence. Particular attention is given to women's agency and to the role of dialogue in staging ideological conflict. The article concludes that Yashpal's realism is best understood not as simple political advocacy but as a developing method for testing public ideals against intimate, social, and historical experience.