A Speculative Memoir of Secrets, Spirits, and India’s Fight for Freedom
We need our revolutionary ancestors now more than ever. But what happens when a family forgets a freedom fighter?
Growing up mixed-race in California, Anjoli Roy did not know the story of her great-grandfather, Kali Nath Roy. A fiercely anti-British journalist and Indian freedom fighter championed by Gandhi, Kali Nath had been erased from her family’s memory.
Anjoli secures a research grant and embarks on a quest to India to reclaim this lost lineage. As she scours the subcontinent for the “seditious” 1919 editorials that landed her great-grandfather in prison, she discovers a profound somatic link: Kali Nath suffered from the same autoimmune illness as Anjoli while in rigorous imprisonment.
When the British colonial record hits devastating dead ends—entire issues of Kali Nath’s newspaper were erased by the empire following the Jallianwala Bagh massacre—Anjoli’s visceral connection with Kali Nath demands she take a new approach to understanding him. Using speculative nonfiction, Anjoli writes into the silences of the official archive. She conjures the agonizing reality of Kali Nath’s imprisonment and unearths the family’s darkest, most closely guarded secret: the tragic erasure of a third child, his daughter Tarulata.
A blend of historical excavation, diasporic travelogue, and formal innovation, Revolution in the Blood resurrects the past to heal the present. It serves as both a timely blueprint for the principled resistance we desperately need today, and a sobering cautionary tale about the private costs of a revolutionary public life.
The preparation for this book involved extensive archival and oral-history research in New Delhi, Chandigarh, and Kolkata, supported by a 2014 J. Watumull Scholarship for the Study of India. A 2025 Jack Hazard fellowship supported a revision of this manuscript.
This manuscript is complete at 75,624 words.
Recent interview about Revolution in the Blood:
Rajiv Mohabir, in Apogee Journal: “Wresting Back the ‘Revolution in the Blood’: An Interview with Anjoli Roy on Her Memoir-In-Progress“