| Abstract: | This paper highlights an understudied aspect of the history of anti-colonial resistance – the role of people who sat on the fence, displayed ambivalence, or at times played an active role in wrecking, damaging and sabotaging resistance against the state. Such people appear, if at all, in popular parlance as ‘traitors’ and in academia as ‘collaborators’, labels which carry a categorical moral bias. By examining nationalism through the lens of betrayal, this paper engages with a methodological question – is there a way of broadening the scope of the history of anti-colonial nationalism which incorporates acts of collaboration (e.g. spying, informing, perfidy, denunciation), without the implicit moral judgment embodied in each term? To tackle this question, this paper reconstructs the history of one renegade revolutionary, Hans Raj Vohra (1909–1985), a government witness who testified against his comrades, the revolutionaries of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army in the Lahore Conspiracy Case trial (1929–30). This paper contextualizes Hans Raj Vohra's decision to become an ‘approver’, or a government witness, demonstrating the difficulties in framing his perfidy as a form of collaboration. |
