Apr 02 2025 to Apr 02 2025 6:30 p.m.

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

Spies, Lies and Allies is a thrilling tale about two forgotten revolutionaries who led lives that defy belief. It takes the reader on a wild ride through Kolkata, Hyderabad, London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Mexico City and Moscow. One was Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, the brother of Sarojini Naidu. The other was M.N. Roy, the founder of Indian communism.

Chatto and Roy met spies, dictators, femme fatales, assassins, revolutionaries and bomb-makers. They encountered Lala Lajpat Rai, Veer Savarkar, Vladimir Lenin, Sun Yat-Sen, Chiang Kai-shek, Joseph Stalin, Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. They travelled in disguise and survived assassination attempts by the British secret service. They had tumultuous love affairs with suspected Communist spies. They flirted with anarchism, then became communists, and Roy would eventually end up founding his own philosophy: humanism. Chatto’s sister Sarojini would distance herself from his journey, and his friend Nehru would eventually follow the Gandhian path. Roy would be ignored in newly independent India. But if Chatto and Roy were failures, they were magnificent ones. They battled for their ideas, and their ideas lived on, even if the pair died mostly forgotten.

Author Kavitha Rao will be in conversation with Historian Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav. A Q&A with the audience will follow.

Speakers

Kavitha Rao
Author & Journalist
Kavitha Rao is a London-based author and journalist. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, South China Morning Post, Mint, The Hindu and various other publications. She is the bestselling author of Lady Doctors. Spies, Lies and Allies is her fourth book.

She is available on www.kavitharao.net and @kavitharao on X.

Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav
Intellectual Historian & Assistant Professor, Social Sciences (History), NLS, Bangalore
Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav is an intellectual historian of modern South Asia, specialising in nationalism and secularism, and religious and political thought. She holds a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford and is currently an Assistant Professor of Social Sciences (History) at the National Law School, Bangalore, India.

Before this, she was a post-doctoral research fellow at ICAS: M.P., New Delhi, India, and the “Multiple Secularities” Research Group, University of Leipzig, Germany. Vanya’s research has been published in leading peer-reviewed academic journals such as the Journal of Asian Studies, Global Intellectual History, Studies in Indian Politics and Religions. Passionate about making history accessible to the public, her first book, Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood was published with Penguin Random House, India, in February 2024. Her book has been long-listed for the Crossword Book Award 2024 (Non-Fiction) and the Godrej Literature Live! Book Award (Non-Fiction Best First Book) 2024. She has also written op-eds in The Indian Express, The Hindu, The Wire and The Times of India.

She tweets at @vanyavaidehi.