The journey of the word Rebel: from revolution to headlines

Very Recently Loksabha MP Mahua Moitra called out the Ritabrata Banerjee led faction of Trinamool Congress a theatre of the absurd

and went on to say that people without knowledge claim anything. She has time and again outrightly repudiated claims of the faction being a rebel group, unlike the popular media discourse and has distinctly referred them as betrayers of Mamata Banerjee. This opens door for conversations beyond faction politics in our country, a conversation around the fluidity of discourse and how words travel with or without structural barriers.

A word that once meant throwing an open challenge to an entire regime, empire, exploitative systems, or questioning the sovereign authority and accepting imprisonment, exile, and even death at times (as the price to pay), now repeatedly appears in the very headlines during every single election. The word Rebel Candidate keeps moving here and there pretty often. The word used to describe one’s confrontation with Sovereign Will comes around to represent a difference of opinion within political institutions or parties. A semantic shift visible in fewer places than in the spectrum of contemporary Indian political journalism.

A rebel today could be a politician rising up after being denied a party ticket, a start-up founder disrupting an industry, cracking B2C sales, a celebrity cultivating a socially relatable image, or a clothing brand selling defiance stitched into denim. The word slips effortlessly through television debates, election coverage, advertising campaigns, and Instagram captions, carrying with it an independence that few pause to think about.

A century ago, however, rebel was a far more expensive word.

It belonged to those who challenged power, knowing the consequences could be imprisonment, exile, or even death. It was not a personality trait. It was a political statement.

Somewhere between anti-colonial struggles and algorithm-driven timelines, the word has travelled remarkably far, far beyond its origins, but the question is whether it has left anything behind?

The journey raises another question—not whether rebellion itself has disappeared, but whether the language used to describe it has gradually surrendered its meaning altogether?

The Roots

The word rebel derives from the Latin rebellis—one who wages war again. In medieval usage, it was used to denote someone rising against sovereign authority. However, as a noun, it is often used to define organized rebellion against established power.

Embedded within its etymology is conflict, not merely disagreement. Medieval English inherited much of the same understanding: someone who rejected the legitimacy of an established power structure. The word carried risk because the act it described carried heavy consequences. However the journey it has taken on is not just more domestic but also towards a softer path. A path that does not demand huge individual sacrifice for collective emancipation. A path that thrives on individual opinion and free will.

History is populated by such figures, although history rarely agreed on what to call them. Across different periods and political contexts, individuals who challenged authority were addressed in remarkably different terms. Depending less on what they did and more on who held the power to name them.

When Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1947) began organising the Indian community against British racism in South Africa and against discriminatory legislation, he was hardly viewed as a moral icon. To colonial administrators, satyagraha represented organised defiance against the law. Civil disobedience was interpreted not as moral courage but as a political disruption. Gandhi’s methods would later become synonymous with nonviolent resistance, but they first entered public life as acts of unacceptable dissent.

The transformation was not just within his politics, but in the language through which later generations understood them.

Standing far apart from his language of resistance was Bhagat Singh (1907-1931), occupying an altogether different political universe, but somehow encountering a similar struggle over naming what his act meant. Following the assassination of Assistant Superintendent J. P. Saunders and the bombing of the Central Legislative Assembly, colonial records described him as a revolutionary, extremist, conspirator, and terrorist. Independent India would remember him as Shaheed Bhagat Singh—a martyr whose writings revealed a sophisticated political imagination extending well beyond the spectacle of revolutionary violence. A man who did not let his revolution translate into terror, the only meaning it reflected was that of liberation, but the man remained unchanged. The vocabulary surrounding him certainly did not. The entire plan of assassinating John Saunders, The Police Superintendent of Lahore, further strengthened the comradeship of Bhagat Singh, also called Ranjit, with another such Rebel.

Chandrashekhar Azad (1906-1931) - whose story followed a similar trajectory. To the colonial state, he was an absconding criminal, leading an armed underground network.

Within India’s nationalist memory, he remains alive as a revolutionary who vowed never to be captured alive, a promise fulfilled in Alfred Park in Allahabad in 1931. The label outlaw gradually shifted to what we call a Freedom Fighter today. Once again, language followed the political discourse of victory.

However, perhaps no individual demonstrates the strange afterlife of rebellion more vividly than Ernesto Che Guevara (1928-1967) In the twentieth century, Guevara became the international face of an armed revolution. His campaigns in Cuba and later in Bolivia established him as both an icon of anti-imperialist struggle and, depending on one's ideological perspective, a dangerous insurgent at times. Today, his likeness appears on coffee mugs, luxury apparel, phone cases, and fashion pieces. The revolutionary has become a commodity. The image that survives has somewhere blurred the boundaries between the political programme that produced it and the one that's encashing it. A man whose politics was rooted in collective emancipation rather than individual ambition, has history playing a trick on him today.

The man who denounced consumer capitalism now survives as one of its most marketable images. His portrait has travelled from revolutionary pamphlets across the mines of Chile, farms of Bolivia to luxury stores and merchandise collections appearing on everything designer and premium. Fashion houses such as Louis Vuitton, often accused of using exotic animal skins, lack of environmental transparency and exploitative subcontracting labour policies- have, at different moments, have drawn upon his iconography or revolutionary aesthetic, while countless commercial brands continue to market his face as a short-hand for edgy individualism. The Capitalism that could not defeat Che Guevara on the battlefield, went far beyond that, it learned to sell him. The free market declared a silent rebellion against his version of freedom and Liberation altogether.

A revolutionary who failed to overthrow the market had the market simply absorb him.

History, then, suggests a more uncomfortable truth. A rebel is rarely just someone who objects or stands apart. A rebel is someone whom power—or posterity—chooses to call one. But where exactly does one trace the rebels existing within power networks today?

The rebels in Parliament today

For a moment it becomes imperative to think how far the word rebel has travelled. The Evolution of the word has perhaps killed the Revolution within it. At a time when Parliamentary politicians in our country like Raghav Chadha might be a bit too occupied in developing a better thick-skin to public criticism ,as directed by the Court, than asking real questions. Or perhaps any questions to the party of goons, he supports now. When actor-politicians and MPs like Rachana Banerjee keep reminding us of her career trajectory across 150+ movies and her apartment at an upscale residential premise, rather than the trajectory of her constituency over the years, this argument speaks for itself.

Around May, 2026, Loksabha Member, Saayoni Ghosh found herself at the center of a political storm after her remarks that triggered outrage among BJP leaders. The controversy escalated to the point where a purported video of BJP Nagar Palika Leader in Bulandshehar district of Uttar Pradesh publicly announcing a cash reward for beheading her, began to circulate. This drew widespread condemnation and forcing a national conversation about political intimidation and the death threats being hurled upon a woman. In that moment, Ghosh embodied a familiar democratic image: the politician standing up against a hostile political opponent. An image that was very well maintained through the political language of All India Trinamool Congress. An image built around a high – profile political career from the President of Trinamool Youth Congress to Jadavpur Loksabha MP, and working as a close ally of Mamata Banerjee and Abhishek Banerjee.

Fast forward a month or two, the vocabulary shifts. Amid turmoil within the Trinamool Congress, Ghosh is now reported among those associated with a dissident camp engaging with senior BJP leaders like Bhupendra Yadav, at his residence. The camp itself is being headed by Ritabrata Banerjee, Arup Roy and Javed Khan, each of whom have been accused of sexual harassment, malpractices within the recruitment scams involving the TMC and procurement of illegal properties across Kolkata, respectively. The same people have now been found declaring rebellion again Mamata Banerjee’s dynastic politics. This faction is allegedly in talks with THE NCPI (Nationalist Citizens Party of India) in order to lend its support to the NDA. However this looks like less of a rebellion and more of a horse-trade, as Journalist Abhishek Baxi had pointed out earlier. He even went on to say that most politicians should simply be auctioned publicly like players in the IPL. He sarcastically suggested that the process could even be televised and turned into an annual event for people to see. The remarks became more relevant every single time when reports of MPs and MLAs changing sides sparked intense political debate.

The political circumstances now are different, the calculations are different and the context is different. But the contrast is difficult to ignore.

Not because politicians cannot change positions or alignments, in a democracy they obviously can. Alliances can also evolve in all their glory, but how far does it have to go to be called a Rebellion.

When Bhagat Singh challenged the British Raj, he did so knowing precisely where that road could end. The gallows were not an unforeseen consequence of his politics. They were built into his journey to establish his steadfast opposition.

Chandrashekhar Azad chose death over capture. Che Guevara abandoned power, crossed continents and died in Bolivia still pursuing the revolution he believed in. Gandhi walked repeatedly into prison rather than compromise on the principles of Satyagraha.

Their politics can be debated. Their methods can be criticized. But their relationship with conviction could hardly be ignored. The rebel, in the classical sense, was not someone who changed sides. The rebel was someone who refused to budge from a stance.

That is perhaps why the contemporary use of the word feels so peculiar. Today’s political rebel often appears less concerned with confronting power than with renegotiating proximity to it. The rebellion is no longer against the system, especially if it keeps benefitting them.

Somewhere between Bhagat Singh embracing death for an idea and modern politicians moving from one parliamentary faction to another, betraying not just their own ideologies but the faith of every voter investing hopes in them, betraying every single word they stood by, political vocabulary has travelled remarkably down the stream. The time is to discuss it, before it finds itself drowned amidst personal choice politics of India in today’s times.

The day we stop looking at a question on samosa prices at the Rajya Sabha as bold and ignore the existence of zero questions on the Rising LPG prices in the country, we might find clearer answers to dilemmas today.

Once, rebellion was measured by what one was willing to sacrifice. Today, it is often measured by what one has done to gain better perks out of a political career.

The tragedy is not that politicians realign. Democracies have always accommodated shifting alliances. The tragedy is in the language. Popular culture continues to use the same word for both acts, as though standing before the gallows and standing before a press conference belong to the same moral universe.

Perhaps that is the final irony in the journey of the word rebel. The people who once carried it with strong spines could not only bear the weight of resistance but also all the pain of repressions. Today The people who inherit it are often accused of treating ideology as a product, as marketable as Capitalism finds the Guevara brand of revolution.

The First Casualty of Rebellion Is Its Name.

But what does that even mean?

This observation runs throughout the length and breadth work of historian Eric Hobsbawm and his views on rebels and rebellion.

In his work Bandits, Hobsbawm argued that many people branded as criminals by the state later acquired heroic status amongst ordinary people, becoming symbols of justice where institutions had already failed. The same person could be an outlaw in official records and a protector of rights in popular memory, within a common political spectrum, depending on who was telling the story.

The historian Judith Brown in her work on India’s freedom movement explains how colonial governance depended not merely on military control but also on linguistic control and material interests of many. The empire classified anti-colonial activities through categories such as sedition, extremism and rebellion. Independent India inherited many of the same individuals and assigned them a radically different vocabulary—patriot, revolutionary, martyr.

The political struggle is till date accompanied by a similar struggle over the use of the language itself. The politics of finding the right word.

By following the work of such historians we understand that history reshaped the reputations of rebels and contemporary politics has simplified the meaning of the word. The market space for instance drove the vehicle of change faster than anything else. From a political identity to literally anyone who appeared unconventional.

Advertising discovered long ago that rebellion sells and in order to buy the product was to reject convention. The narrative shifts. Fashion celebrated the rebel look, corporations encouraged employees to think like rebels; entrepreneurs became industry rebels; influencers today are building personal brands around well curated nonconformity. The market absorbed rebellion not by defeating it, but by marketing it to the world against a backdrop of politics. Not a journey too far.

History chased the rebel, media altered its meaning

If Eric Hobsbawm showed us that history often rewrites its outlaws into heroes, and Judith Brown reminded us that empires manufacture the language through which resistance is remembered, the present confronts us with a different question altogether: what happens when the word itself begins to outgrow its history?

If the same word can describe Bhagat Singh confronting colonial rule, Gandhi mobilising civil disobedience against a foreign regime, and a contemporary politician negotiating factional politics based on numbers within a party, then the term has expanded far beyond its original terrain.

The rebel himself has perhaps moved from challenging the state to challenging his own party or group. In that journey, the word itself has become noticeably lighter. The description is not necessarily incorrect. But it is revealing of something changing.

In these instances, rebellion often denotes dissent within an institution, deflecting from one’s ideas rather than resisting.

The stakes, motivations and consequences differ profoundly from those who once came to be remembered as rebels in the midst of anti-colonial struggles and revolutionary politics. Yet popular journalism increasingly employs the same word across all these vastly different contexts.

Language expands—naturally, politically and historically. Evolution is neither surprising nor undesirable. But expansion cannot mean distinctions disappearing completely.

When Bhagat Singh, Che Guevara, a luxury fashion campaign and a legislator crossing the aisle, a Saayoni Ghosh, a Rachana Banerjee, a Ritabrata Banerjee and a Raghav Chadha, are all described as rebels, the word becomes an umbrella large enough to accommodate almost anyone. In doing so, it begins to lose the specificity that once made it significant. It becomes a convenient shorthand for anyone departing from expectation.

Words matter, because words do far more than describe reality. They document it. Labels shape how readers understand legitimacy, resistance and political conflict. Precision, therefore, is not an exercise rooted in dogmatism, it is a social obligation.

Perhaps the word rebel has not died yet. It has migrated—from prison cells and revolutionary manifestos to newsroom headlines, campaign war rooms and Instagram reels. It now travels with extraordinary ease across contexts and situations.

From a word that once embodied defiance against systems of power, it has gradually come to describe anyone who breaks ranks, changes sides or simply refuses accountability.

That journey tells us something not only about language but about ourselves. Every age invents the rebels it deserves, and every age reshapes rebellion in its own image. Words do not necessarily die; they migrate—from barricades and manifestos to popular culture, electoral politics and the marketplace.

Perhaps the most remarkable rebellion the word has staged is against its own history.