These were ambitions of a grand scale with a sense of correcting the social and economic ills of society. For those who gathered the fever of revolution, these shifts inaugurated feelings of a needed social transformation. The tragedy of partition was also the quintessential chance at a fresh start from the perspective of those who migrated to the newly demarcated lands of Pakistan. This is a much-needed study that makes sense of the way communist party and worker party politics of colonial India and Pakistan took shape after partition.

How would, for example, the downfall of capitalism and imperialism be advanced with the problems of creating a new state? What of the vision of an international and global camaraderie? How does solidarity work toward a radical internationalist world that spurns class oppression and gender domination alike? Such are the dilemmas that begin Kamran Asdar Ali's fine book Surkh Salam: Communist Politics and the Class Activism in Pakistan, 1947-1972.

For those committed to an internationalist vision of disrupting the capitalist model, the creation of a new nation-state represents itself as a particular challenge. Such was the case in post-partition India and the creation of the separate entity of Pakistan. In periods of formal decolonization the nation-state inevitably emerges as an issue of debate in which the direction and mandate of a country is set. Writing left history or radical history is always global. Junaid Rana, Associate professor of Asian American Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Echoes of Mutiny by Seema Sohi