Abstract
In recent years, there has been a marked upswing in fictional renderings of the 50-plus-year-old Maoist Naxalite movement among the authors of India and its sizable diaspora. This essay analyses how these attempts to give narrative-fictional form to the Naxalites, past or present, centrally entail taking a thematic position on the inegalitarian admixture of individualistic consumerism and profit-seeking, state and corporate power, and residual feudal agrarian landlordism defining contemporary neoliberal India, as well as on the extent to which the possibility of reforming this order posed by the Naxalites is desirable and able to be envisioned. Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others poses the Naxalite movement in essentially ambiguous terms — highlighting the frequent ugliness of its struggle but also the brutality, dehumanization, and desperation it is born of, as well as the unquenchable hope sustaining it that a world different from the structural violence and systematic exploitation of Indian capitalism is possible. Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, on the other hand, largely bypasses addressing these roots of the Naxalite movement in the gross inequalities of Indian society and this reformist vision driving it, instead offering a bourgeois humanist vision of revolt in terms of its familial impact, permutated into something completely insular and compatible with the abiding individualist ethos and retrenchment of the state that are central to neoliberalism. Nilima Sinha’s Red Blooms in the Forest considers the deep-seated injustices structuring contemporary Indian society that spurs the Naxalites’ idealistic reformist social vision, but ultimately opts for a vision of bourgeois social reformism and noblesse oblige, stepping away from the possibilities of revolution and economic justice to affirm the neoliberal status quo of individualistic entrepreneurial self-advancement and top-down social amelioration through charitable giving.
There is a spectre haunting Indian letters — the spectre of Naxalism.
Shades of the half-century-old Maoist Naxalite movement hover at the periphery of a vast array of works from contemporary Indian expressive culture. These range from renowned novels like Arundhati Roy’s (2017) The God of Small Things and Aravind Adiga’s (2008) The White Tiger, where the possibility of Naxalite attack strikes fear into the heart of the rural bourgeoisie, to the recent high-budget Netflix series Sacred Games (2018), based on Vikram Chandra’s (2006) novel, where being shipped off to the forests to fight the Naxalites is the ultimate career threat levied at a corrupt police inspector. The Naxalites figure centrally in such novels as Samaresh Majumdar’s Kalbela (1983), V. S. Naipaul’s Magic Seeds (2004), C. P. Surendran’s An Iron Harvest (2006), and Ashok Kumar Mukhopadhyay’s Atta-Natar Surjyo (2013) (Samanta, 2014: 110–111), as well as such films as Goutam Ghose’s adaptation of Kalbela (2009) and Debaditya Bandyopadhyay’s Naxal (2015). Since its emergence as part of the upsurge in global leftist revolutionary radicalism of the late 1960s, the Naxalite movement has captivated Indian cultural producers with its militant utopian reformism, its taking up of the cause of the country’s marginalized and exploited Adivasi tribal populations, and the challenge it poses to Indian parliamentary democracy — a fascination that has only grown sharper with India’s shift towards starkly inegalitarian neoliberal political economics over the past decades, which itself has provoked a resurgence in the movement.
The Naxalites draw their name from the town of Naxalbari in West Bengal, just east of the Nepal border. There it was in 1967 that a group of peasants, stirred and led into action by a cadre of communist activists and disaffected students, initiated an armed uprising that sought to redistribute land and stock, achieve debt cancellation, and eliminate “class enemy” oppressors (Singh, 2006: 3–15). While this uprising was quickly put down by Indian armed forces, it spread quickly through rural parts of the states of West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, and Andhra Pradesh, fuelled by a Maoist programme of peasant-led armed struggle with the eventual goal of surrounding and enveloping urban areas and thereby eventually toppling the government of India, as well as by the brutal feudal mistreatment and economic exploitation of the peasants in these areas. By 1972, the movement had been repressed in a particularly draconian manner through a series of armed skirmishes, extra-judicial killings, and the torturing of suspects. And by the time of Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a state of emergency in the mid-1970s, 27 Marxist-Leninist groups had been banned and an estimated 40,000 accused Naxalites were in prison (Mohanty, 2006: 3165). Then in 1980 a splinter from the movement, the People’s War Group of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), emerged in Andhra Pradesh, taking up the peasant cause with the same programme of land reform and debt cancellation while carrying out numerous killings and pitched battles with various branches of Indian law enforcement throughout the rest of the decade (Singh, 2006: 130–141). The 1990s and the new post-Cold War world order rolled around, with the “free market” capitalist Washington Consensus being pushed into implementation across the globe. This moved countries like India away from their early post-Independence ideals and at least nominal commitment to socialism, causing the Naxalite movement to gain steam — particularly following the 2004 merger between the People’s War Group and the Maoist Communist Centre, and as the Naxalites began fighting to aid peasant populations at risk of being pushed off their lands to accommodate the acquisitive goals of transnational mining corporations (Shah and Jain, 2017: 1166).
In their fight for peasant rights, the Naxalites garnered the acclaim of such prominent Indian intellectuals as Roy and Gautam Navlakha. They began to be seen as a rare front of resistance against neoliberalism, or what Roy terms an “economic totalitarianism” replete with “policies that allow a wholesale corporate takeover of people’s land and resources” (2011: 3, 87). In pursuing the neoliberal path of largely deregulated, market-driven capitalist expansion, India saw tremendous economic growth, but the fruits of this boom have been monopolized by the upper socio-economic echelons of Indian society. India’s billionaires are now second only to those of the United States in their total wealth (Bhaduri, 2014: 59). Meanwhile, 800 million Indians live on 50 cents a day, every half hour a farmer kills himself because he cannot pay his bills, and every 15 seconds a child under five dies for lack of access to food and/or healthcare (Das, 2017: 1093). To put it another way, neoliberalism in India has produced an expanded middle class and an emergent capitalist oligarch class, but it has left behind over 350 million people who are forced to live at food intake levels less than those of the citizens of the impoverished countries of sub-Saharan Africa (Gudavarthy, 2014: 9–10). Neoliberal India is an emergent global capitalist powerhouse, but it is also home to the largest populations of illiterate and chronically malnourished people in the world (Bhaduri, 2014: 59).
In light of these gross extremes of economic inequality, the cause of the Naxalites has taken on a particular kind of poignancy. Despite the continuing violent state repression of the movement, it continues to inspire with its vision of revolution aimed at achieving a just society for those ignored and marginalized in India (Shah and Jain, 2017: 1166). It has produced a sizable body of its own literature, including the work of comrade-poets such as Gaddar 1 (Singh, 2006: 138) and innumerable revolutionary songs written by the members of its cadres (Roy, 2011: 96). There is also a growing body of writing from onlookers from outside the movement appraising the efforts and legacies of the Naxalites (Martyris, 2014). Hence, one of its legacies can be seen as the inspiration of a distinct tradition of “Naxalite fiction” (Krishnamurthy, 2017: 139). This essay considers how the Naxalites figure into the thematic structure of recent novels from India and its sizable diaspora, focusing on Neel Mukherjee’s (2015/2014) The Lives of Others, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013), and Nilima Sinha’s Red Blooms in the Forest (2013) — works in which Naxalite characters command intensive narrative attention, as opposed to texts like The White Tiger in which the Naxalites hover as a kind of hazy socio-political force in the “background” of the work. In doing so, it explores how any attempt to give narrative-fictional form to the Naxalite movement will inescapably entail taking a thematic position on the admixture of individualistic consumerism and profit-seeking, state and corporate power, and residual feudal agrarian landlordism defining contemporary India, as well as on the extent to which the possibility of reforming this order posed by the Naxalites is desirable and envisionable. In approaching the Naxalites through the discursive form of historical fiction, these works of Naxalite fiction attempt variously to come to terms with the local-level, human face of the most militant challenge to both neoliberalism’s excesses and the continuance of older forms of socio-economic oppression in India; this article analyses the thematic positions that the novels take in doing so.
One of the most powerful works to engage in this task is Mukherjee’s Booker Prize–shortlisted novel The Lives of Others, the story of the Kolkata-based Ghosh family. 2 Mukherjee relates this family’s rise to affluence manufacturing paper in the years leading up to India’s independence and the early years of post-Independence import substitution economics, its subsequent economic reversals due to labour unrest and patriarch Prafullanath’s mishandling of the business, and the petty squabbles and family tragedies accompanying this rise and fall within the large home the various branches of the family co-inhabit. The family member receiving the greatest amount of narrative focus is Prafullanath’s eldest grandson Supratik, a sensitive young man whose awareness of the plight of India’s poor drives him further and further into the far-leftist politics of late-1960s Bengal. Supratik eventually joins the fledgling Naxalite movement, as a part of which he takes up a life of rural toil and hunger in a village near the border with Orissa, carries out a number of assassinations of exploitative local landlords and moneylenders in furtherance of Naxalite chief theorist Charu Majumdar’s programme of “class enemy” annihilations, and is ultimately tortured by the police after moving back to Kolkata to try to spread the Naxalite revolution there.
Unlike most other works of cultural production dealing with the Naxalites, The Lives of Others rhetorically frames its narrative in terms that allow grievances driving the movement to be comprehended and felt in a visceral manner. The novel opens with a prologue set a year prior to the commencement of the central narrative timeline in which a tenant farmer, driven by desperation watching his family slowly starve to death while no longer even able to successfully beg for food, kills his wife and three children with a sickle before poisoning himself with chemical fertilizer. Leading with this graphic depiction of the frequent sort of peasant suicide still plaguing Indian society allows for the reception of Supratik and his confreres not as misguided, disaffected youth, but as individuals driven to their acts of violence by the gross forms of deprivation, exploitation, and structural violence endemic to their society. In the same spirit, the epilogue flashes forward to 2012 and the resurgent Naxalite struggle of the neoliberal era, opening a space for the novel to offer brief passages of exposition outlining the traumatic pasts that have driven the present-day Naxalite combatants being represented to the act of terrorism they are carrying out. This trauma includes the murders and gang rapes of family members they have witnessed as the rural bourgeoisie pushed them off their land, and the forced displacements from ancestral holdings for the sake of mining company profits. Taken together, such experiences have given the oppressed the choice “to be snuffed out overnight by the world or take on the world and wrest something from it; not very much, just a little, just to survive and live like a human, not an animal” (Mukherjee, 2015/2014: 501, 502). 3 These moving illustrations of the combined impact of the exploitative financial practices of the rural economic elite and the human cost of corporate-driven capitalist development — “the collective might and muscle of Steel Authority of India, Tata Steel and Hindustan Cable” (62) — on their dispossessed and brutalized victims render the Naxalite revolt, bloody as it itself is shown to be in the novel’s scenes depicting the killing of “class enemies”, both human and comprehensible.
But, at the same time, the novel is in essence an exposé of the social–psychological dynamics of Bengali family life. As such, it explores the internal as well as the external causes of Supratik’s adoption of the Naxalite revolutionary cause. Repeatedly, in the novel, Supratik is accused of being idealistically committed to the cause of India’s poor, socially distant from him as they are, in a way that blinds him to the suffering of those who stand in more intimate relation to him.
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Madan, the Ghoshes’ chief servant who has become like a member of the family after decades of service, chides him that the world does not change, you destroy yourself trying to change it, but it remains as it is. The world is very big, and we are very small. Why cause people who love you to go through such misery because of it? […] Being kinder to near and dear ones — isn’t that a bigger thing than doing good for the unknown mass of people? (426)
Likewise, Supratik’s mother laments, “If you are so full of kindness and sympathy for the powerless, why don’t you look closer to home, instead of running away and playing at dangerous politics with farmers and beggars?” (454). And later in the narrative, referencing Supratik’s framing of Madan for the theft of his aunt’s jewellery, which Supratik used to help fund Naxalite operations in Kolkata, the interrogating police inspector repeats this same sentiment: “If you feel so much for the poor and needy, why did you let your cook, Madan, take the blame when it was you who had stolen your aunt’s jewelry?” (476). But Supratik cannot fully confront this fact that his moral crusade to help form a more egalitarian society has caused so much familial suffering — he experiences a brief sinking sense of guilt before carrying on with his revolutionary planning as before. And in the case of Madan’s initial accusation, he pulls social class rank to diffuse the critique, despite his professed commitment to the cause of the poor. 5 Having experienced “a surge of cold fury that he is being given a lesson in political morality by the family’s cook”, he accuses Madan of having behaved selfishly himself in supporting the Ghosh family over his labour-organizer son during a factory strike. Moreover, he rhetorically asserts his position as one of the masters of the house, knowing that Madan’s position as a servant will restrain his ability to pursue the points of his argument and that “Madan-da will not answer back because his station in life has taught him not to” (426, 427).
A second, subsidiary, driver of Supratik’s taking up the path of revolution in the novel is his equation of armed revolt with masculinity. He continually sees his efforts on behalf of the Naxalites as exercises in toughness and self-mastery, from callousing his “shamefully middle-class hands” while harvesting rice stalks to striving to be less of a “middle-class cream-doll” by exposing himself to hunger, back-breaking labour, and dysentery (145, 241). This part of Supratik’s story is told through a series of never-sent letters to a young widowed aunt with whom he is in love. Within these letters, Supratik presents these efforts to achieve a greater masculinity in distinctly classed terms. The masculine ideal here with which he wishes to impress his love-object is the long-suffering body of the male peasant, as opposed to the soft, pampered masculinity he sees the men of his family and wider class as embodying. Therefore, when he is depicted carrying out assassinations of predatory capitalists — using a spear to enact a phallic act of penetration and power projection — this can be read equally as the elimination of a predatory, parasitic class enemy, and a projection of the desired killing of the “soft” bourgeois male type within himself. This effort also requires suppressing what he sees as the feminineness of his affective side: “Emotion is a luxury, he knows; like all revolutionaries he cannot draw the correct line between emotion and sentimentality” (419). However, in the end this would-be masculinist mastery of his body and his emotions breaks down in the face of the inescapability of his corporal vulnerability. Under police torture, he loses his ability to control his body at all, urinating in his pants and crying so uncontrollably that mucus streams from his nose (484). He has been infantilized, stripped of the fragile edifice of tough peasant masculinity he has sought to build up through his revolutionary efforts. Indeed, just before dying, he asks himself whether the police have “robbed him of any kind of self-control, of masculinity?” (490).
But in thus probing the social–psychological roots of the Naxalite movement, the novel does not discount its legitimacy or its legacy. Believing he has been released by the police who will actually soon shoot him in the back, Supratik has a vision of a near future, maybe fifty years, maybe seventy-five, a hundred, when the seeds that he and his kind have been busy sowing have grown, hidden from the human eye, or denied until unignorable, into forest cover for most of the country. It brings tears to his eyes and, for the first time in his life, he cries moved by the possibility of fulfillment; not tears of joy, but a kind of proleptic hopefulness. (489–490)
While the novel does not seek to represent this future India when the Naxalite anti-capitalist struggle has come to fruition, 6 in its final epilogue it presents the reverberations of the efforts of Supratik and the other first-generation Naxalites onto the current guerrilla struggles against neoliberal capitalism in India. Alluding to W. B. Yeats’ (2000/1916) oxymoronic evocation of the intermixed horror and utopianism of revolutionary struggle in the poem “Easter 1916”, the struggles of twenty-first century Naxalites to not be brutalized and cast aside by the capitalist development of rural India are described as “terribly beautiful” (503). These struggles involve continuing in the spirit and tactics of the bygone generation of Naxalites, including Supratik’s “gift to his future comrades”, the “bequest” of a technique for derailing trains (504). The novel ends with a train speeding towards one of these acts of infrastructural sabotage — “In three hours, well before dawn breaks, the Ajmer-Kolkata Express, carrying approximately 1,500 people, is going to hurtle down these tracks” (504) — symbolizing an Indian society rushing relentlessly towards a future cataclysm of bloody upheaval, one whose revolutionary strategies have been passed down, whose way has been paved, by the earlier generation of revolutionaries so brutally snuffed out by the repressive arm of the India state.
In an otherwise laudatory review, fellow Bengali novelist Amitav Ghosh castigates this posing of Supratik’s legacy in the novel, arguing that what Neel chooses to celebrate about Supratik’s life is not the transmission of a spirit of resistance — something that is more than ever necessary at a time when the environment and the poor are being subjected to devastating violence in the name of “growth” — but rather a particular means of resisting: in this instance a technique of mass murder. This is troubling, for it was precisely the means adopted by the student-Naxals of the 1970s that doomed their movement. (2014: n.p.)
This critique is born of the establishment conceit that killing can never be justified regardless of the cause or purpose it is yoked to, as well as the notion that the spirit and the means of revolution can be neatly divided from each other. The novel does in fact celebrate the Naxalite “spirit of resistance” in the passages quoted above, but it sees this as inescapably and messily intertwined with the practical strategies, passed down over time, for struggling against the social system that sows such “devastating violence in the name of growth”, bloody as they sometimes may be. The novel does not seek to offer a corrective to the litany of censures of Naxalite violence that have been voiced over the years, as Ankhi Mukherjee (2016) notes. Instead, The Lives of Others ambivalently presents itself for interpretation as a “symbol” 7 of the continuing unresolved tensions between exploitative feudal and capitalist social structures and the militant resistance against them (470). In doing so, the power of The Lives of Others is its giving narrative form to “the politics of hope” through Supratik, thereby illustrating “the disturbing possibility that perhaps, in situations of extreme oppression and desperation, only desperate acts allow people to enact the kind of agency required to regain their humanity”, as Judith Suissa argues (2017: 886). In other words, the novel captures the essential ambiguity of the Naxalite movement — the frequent ugliness of its struggle but also the brutality, dehumanization, and desperation it is born of; as well as the unquenchable hope sustaining it that a world different from the structural violence and systematic exploitation of Indian capitalism is possible.
Lahiri’s novel The Lowland offers a very different take on the Naxalites and their legacy than The Lives of Others. Lahiri’s is a bourgeois humanist appraisal that largely sidesteps the economic injustices and human rights abuses impelling the movement’s challenge to India’s inegalitarian capitalist status quo. The novelist instead focuses on the ripple effects of familial trauma inaugurated by the Naxalites’ tactics of political violence. In unfurling the story of the Kolkata-based Mitra family, The Lowland narrates the tale of brothers Udayan and Subhash. The former of these siblings gets involved with the Naxalites, marries, and is summarily executed in front of his family by the Kolkata police, while the latter moves to Rhode Island where he studies and then practices oceanography. Subhash marries Udayan’s widow Gauri to help her escape mistreatment and social ostracization at the hands of his parents and raises the child she has conceived with Udayan just before his death, even after Gauri abandons them to take up a philosophy professorship in southern California. The novel ends depicting Subhash having moved on and married another widow late in life, while also exploring the impact of Udayan’s death through Gauri upon their now-adult daughter Bela and through her onto Bela’s child Meghna.
The novel repeatedly poses Udayan’s efforts as a Naxalite as futile and misguided, simply stemming from a derivative, recurrent pattern of youthful radicalism rather than part of a good faith militant effort to address the gross inequalities defining Indian society. Facing his death in the analeptic scene that concludes the novel, Udayan reflects that his political efforts — including demonstrations, political graffiti, and participation in the assassination of a “class enemy” policeman — “had fixed nothing, helped no one. In this case there was to be no revolution. He knew this now” (Lahiri, 2013: 408). 8 Shortly after this, in the final paragraph of the novel, he attempts to peer through sunlight to get a final view of Gauri before being shot down in front of his home by the police, but “[i]t was a futile gesture. Only silence” (415). The symbolism here is not just that this attempt at a final glance at his wife, but his whole involvement trying to ameliorate Indian society has been nothing but a “futile gesture”. Likewise, prior to his death, Udayan’s injuring his hand while attempting to make a bomb can be read as symbolizing his carelessly tinkering with things he does not fully understand in the realm of politics. As a result of this, Subhash reflects, “Udayan had given his life to a movement that had been misguided, that had caused only damage, that had already been dismantled. The only thing he had altered was what their family had been” (137). That is, the only lasting impact of Udayan’s radicalism is posed here as a deleterious impact on his familial social dynamic, not any amelioration of Indian society.
The novel consistently represents the Naxalite movement in this basic spirit. When it first mentions the uprising in Naxalbari that gave the movement its name and much of its early impetus, it briefly notes the way the revolting peasantry was “preyed on by moneylenders” and payed sub-subsistence wages, and then observes, “It wasn’t the first instances of peasants in the Darjeeling District revolting. But this time their tactics were militant. Armed with primitive weapons, carrying red flags, shouting Long Live Mao Tse-tung” (23; emphasis in original). While acknowledging the long history of dissent in this region, the text here implies that this emergence of Naxalism was simply an aping of Chinese Maoist revolution. This is an impression that is reinforced later when Subhash finds a note written in Udayan’s hand setting down the notorious Naxalite slogan “China’s Chairman is our Chairman!” (34). This sense, common enough in the growing body of discourse about the movement, that Naxalite revolutionary politics were derivative and divorced from the particularities of Indian socio-historical realities, is also evoked when the “radical” students of Bengal are described as “Echoing Paris, Echoing Berkeley” (31) — an “echo” being of course a reflection or second-order approximation of some sound that really takes place elsewhere. When the Naxalite movement reappears decades later, as a political phenomenon that enters onto the screen of Gauri’s awareness, it is represented not in terms of the rhizomatic reemergence of resistance to unresolved social injustices, but as a quirk or idiosyncrasy of history. After reading online “[s]hort pieces about Maoist insurgents blowing up trucks and trains. Setting fire to police camps. Fighting corporations in India. Plotting to overthrow the government all over again” Gauri asks, “Was this new movement sweeping up young men like Udayan and his friends? Would it be as rudderless, as harrowing? Would Calcutta ever experience that terror again? Something tells her no” (335). This passage asserts that the Naxalite movement would not achieve the same currency among the urban educated youth of Bengal that it had before, which has largely proven true. But it also attributes a sort of aimless lack of control to Naxalite violence, which accords with the novel’s broader dismissive representation of the movement. And immediately after these brief reflections, Gauri moves abruptly on to consider the different lived realities of inhabiting the Internet age. Here she — and by extension the author — accords just as much importance to the changing nature of being updated about one’s flight status or a search for information about a bygone acquaintance, as to a movement attempting to combat the depredations visited upon India’s tribal peasants by large multinational corporations and to adopt the general cause of those 800 million Indians living on 50 cents a day. It would be easy to attribute this dismissive attitude towards the Naxalites to Gauri’s denial of her earlier fleeting involvement with the group through Udayan that resulted in the assassination of a police officer, as well as to her considerable detachment from worldly considerations as a professor of philosophy. But the novel does not offer any other perspective on the group, aside from the brief third-person omniscient historical asides mentioned above. Furthermore, Lahiri uses an encounter between Gauri and a former student turned political scientist, who is researching a book on the Naxalite movement, to reinforce these impressions about it. Approaching the Naxalites in comparison with the Students for a Democratic Society of the United States (despite the much more moderate aims and tactics of the latter), this political scientist “had studied the movement’s self-defeating tactics, its lack of coordination, its unrealistic ideology. He’d understood, without ever being a part of things, far better than Gauri, why it had surged and failed” (341). This passage toes a line between free indirect narration and omniscient narrative affirmation of this dismissal of the Naxalites. It does not go into what is “unrealistic” about the Naxalite ideology, nor does the text go into this elsewhere; it simply offers an unsubstantiated blanket negation in the spirit of Margaret Thatcher’s notorious “there is no alternative” affirmation of neoliberal capitalism (Flanders, 2013). Because the novel only glances in from afar at Naxalite activities from time to time, 9 rather than representing Naxalite characters engaged in the movement — other than a few fleeting images of Udayan at the beginning and tail-end of the novel — it also does not make clear what was “self-defeating” about its tactics. This is the case despite the fact that the novel could have adduced or represented things like the group’s turn towards political violence before mobilizing a very large popular base of supporters, or Charu Majumdar’s early insistence that combatants use traditional weapons like spears, sickles, and bows and arrows rather than firearms (Singh, 2006: 34).
But, to return to the question of the distanced representation of the Naxalites, Sugata Samanta observes that they are only represented through a third-person narrative voice rather than a more embedded form of dramatization and that The Lowland fails to describe the stark rural poverty that spurred the movement into existence (2014: 114, 115). While the novel does spend a total of four sentences mentioning desperation-driven rural suicides and “[p]eople who resorted to eating what they fed their animals. Children who ate one meal a day” (409), it does so only as a fleeting afterthought in its final pages to provide some semblance of motivation for Udayan in the concluding chapter that leads up to the moment of his death. The novel fails to place these front and centre in the manner of The Lives of Others. Thus, stripped of any driving rationale or justification, the Naxalite movement is thematically reduced to a notion of the folly of quixotic youthful radicalism. In eliding the suffering of “the peasants, tribals, and insurgents who rebelled”, Pavan Kumar Malreddy argues, “the novel invests heavily in the idiom of Udayan’s death as the ultimate [futile] outcome of Naxalism” (2016: 248). Prasun Maji (2015) reasons along similar lines in noting that Lahiri cobbles together a history of the Naxalites from multiple sources, but remains ultimately indifferent to it, thus offering a novel of familial strife rather than a text of resistance (105). In other words, The Lowland offers yet another politically stultifying narrative of the family moving through history while failing to engage with the gross material inequalities produced by the long waves of neoliberalism, perpetuating the trend in contemporary fiction of focusing on individuals and cultural identities to the exclusion of socioeconomics famously castigated by Walter Benn Michaels (2009) in his essay “Going Boom”.
Instead of considering at any length the challenge posed to India’s ruling order by leftist militancy and the possibilities thereby of addressing the severe forms of exploitation and material lack suffered by the hundreds of millions of the country’s poor, The Lowland offers a vision of contemporary revolt permutated into something completely insular and compatible with the abiding individualist ethos and retrenchment of the state that are central to neoliberalism. It does this through the character of Bela, the daughter of Maoist Udayan and apostate fellow-traveller Gauri, who has adopted a life of peripatetic agricultural work after college. Subhash notices this lifestyle of Bela’s merging with a certain ideology. He saw that there was a spirit of opposition to the things she did. She was spending time in cities, in blighted sections of Baltimore and Detroit. She helped to convert abandoned properties into community gardens. She taught low-income families to grow vegetables in their backyards, so that they wouldn’t have to depend entirely on food banks […] It was necessary, she said. (272)
Bela serves here to personify and affirm a generational move from the radicalism of the late 1960s, impelled as she is by the wound of maternal abandonment that is itself a product — though she is not aware of it at the time — of her biological father’s involvement with Naxalite political violence. Her “spirit of opposition” manifests itself in spreading individualistic self-reliance, but this tessellates neatly with neoliberalism’s denial of the state’s responsibility to provide for its citizenry’s basic needs and with its denial of solidarity-based social movements. Rather than address why such urban poverty exists in the contemporary United States side by side with historically unprecedented levels of affluence among the country’s elite, she accedes to the hegemony of the neoliberal capitalist United States and helps people grow spinach in the urban spaces capital has abandoned. So here, as throughout the text, there is no viable continuance of or lesson to be learnt from the Naxalite movement of collective opposition to glaring economic injustice, only personal revolt satisfying individual psychological needs born and productive of a strife that resonates within the micro-level social system of the family.
In their study of Naxalite fiction, Debjani Sarkar and Nirban Manna (2018) note a sharp representational divide between novelistic treatments of the movement in its early years of the late 1960s and the 1970s, such as The Lowland and The Lives of Others, and those like Sinha’s novel Red Blooms in the Forest that take place following India’s shift towards free market capitalism and the merging of the People’s War Group and Maoist Communist Centre of India factions in 2004 — a shift capturing the movement’s now exclusively rural character and the more sophisticated military techniques and weaponry of its combatants. Red Blooms in the Forest was Sinha’s first foray away from the children’s literature she had previously written; this plus its somewhat sentimentalized plot and simplistic characterization is perhaps what has led Shoba Ramaswamy (2015) to write about it as young adult fiction, despite the fact that it has not been marketed as such and its author has avowed that it was her “first book for adults” (ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival, 2014: n.p.). The novel narrates the story of protagonist Champa as she moves to the jungle in Jharkhand to join a Naxalite cadre after her father has been wrongfully imprisoned for purportedly associating with the group. There Champa learns to be a guerrilla fighter; falls in love with Vijay, an idealistic college student who has dropped out of school after becoming disillusioned with the possibilities of fighting India’s rampant corruption from within the system; aids with the kidnapping for ransom of the scion of a wealthy local family; and, eventually, having come to morally disagree with its tactics of political violence, parts company with the Naxalites after their camp has been broken up by a police raid.
Thematically central to Red Blooms in the Forest is the question of the Naxalites’ social impact on the rural peoples of “red corridor” zones of eastern and central India within which the group operates and, intertwiningly, the possibilities of social reform in a country posed as corrupt, inegalitarian, and largely indifferent to its poor. Champa finds among “the forest people” (as the Naxalites are dubbed in the novel by the rural peasants among whom they operate) a space outside of the suffocating dimensions of her family life. Within her stepmother-dominated family, she has been called upon to provide the bulk of the domestic labour, having been pulled out of school early to fulfil this function. She learns a trade when taught to be a nurse by the forest people’s second in command, Comrade Rekha, and finds a kind of female empowerment in her military training. “You are Durga!”, 10 her commander tells her and the other female recruits, “Just like the goddess you worship, you too have power in your hands. Take up the gun. Fight those who attempt to harm you. Learn to be tough, and never think you are weak or helpless” (Sinha, 2013: 69). 11 The novel flirts here with embracing the revolutionary social potential of the Naxalites, as it does in tracing the legitimate grievances of Vijay and Commander Bhaskar, which include their confrontations with insurmountable nexuses of crony capitalism, feudal landlordism, and a culture of bribery that have led them to take up arms with the group.
However, the text ultimately presents the Naxalites as too disconnected from the agrarian populations they purport to serve, too idealistically misguided in their methods, and too wedded to a violence the novel poses as immoral to successfully remedy the social ills afflicting Indian society. In the opening two chapters of the novel, first the Naxalites, then the repressive arm of the Indian state in the form of the local police, are represented as alien, threatening forces encroaching on the social fabric of Champa’s household and village. The leadership cohort of the forest people in the novel consists of four urban, formally educated individuals (Bhaskar, Rekha, Vijay, and Vijay’s close friend Sudhir). This is despite the fact that in its current incarnation the movement draws its membership mostly from rural subaltern populations, unlike its early days of disaffected Bengali youth like Supratik in The Lives of Others and Udayan in The Lowland. It is also despite the practical fact that, having no combat experience, Vijay and Sudhir would be unlikely to garner leadership positions in any military organization in the world. Nonetheless, the leaders of the Naxalite group Champa joins, the only members outside of her friend Munia that receive any concerted degree of characterization, are represented in these roles. And they are depicted as living among and spouting abstractions divorced from the rudimentary lived realities of the oppressed whose cause they champion: “[Bhaskar] spoke about matters that were too distant for her, far from her little world of [her family] and the village which she had left behind. She let the stream of words flow above her head, catching a few words here and there” (68). The novel employs the group’s kidnapping victim, the Harvard-educated engineer Manas, as a foil for them, one who espouses democratic reform and education as roads to social amelioration. Manas calls the Naxalites opportunistic, telling Champa: “Don’t you see, they are using you and other uneducated, backward youth like you? They want power, which they will get through believers such as you” (189). While Bhaskar and company are presented as idealistic but dogmatic, Manas is presented as lucid and rational, even in the face of a serious gunshot injury to the leg, and it is always the former who storms off in frustration after engaging in a political debate with him. He wins over Champa to his way of looking at things, and she releases him to prevent his execution before parting ways with the group during the novel’s climactic police attack. In fact, for all its conventional emplotment and central saccharine romance narrative focused on its heroine, the novel ends with Champa’s fate up in the air — eliding the fact that the outcome of her ethical choice to release Manas and strike out into the forest would likely either be capture and torture at the hands of the Indian police (this being the common treatment of Naxalite prisoners (Gudavarthy, 2014: 47)) or to return to the life of repetitive labour and bare subsistence living should she be lucky enough to make it back to her family. Rather than follow after Champa in its denouement, the narrative shifts focus in its final chapter to Manas’ homecoming, wherein he reflects on the “lost and misguided boys and girls fighting for a cause they believe in. They had taken up arms to protect themselves from a harsh, unjust, and uncaring world” (241). Manas then proclaims his dedication to setting up free educational institutions in his underdeveloped region and asks his family to foot the bill, to which “[t]hey had no answer to give” (242). In concluding in this manner, the novel has structurally shifted the burden for social reform in India from subaltern militancy and agency to bourgeois reformism and noblesse oblige, from revolution and economic justice to a vague programme of training for a select few to function economically within the existing system — leaving up in the air the question of whether altruism will even trump the individualistic self-interest of neoliberal society enough for the solution it hazards to even be funded by Manas’ family. It thereby sidesteps the fact that, in recent history, programmes enacted by the Indian government to aid the rural poor, like mild land reforms, have been carried out largely under pressure from the Naxalite threat. While the novel paternalistically acknowledges the idealism of the Naxalites, then, it ultimately affirms the neoliberal status quo of individualistic entrepreneurial self-advancement and top-down social amelioration through charity.
Despite the claim, noted in the text’s author biography section, that having lived and travelled extensively in Jharkhand with her MP husband, Sinha (2013) “is familiar with life at the grassroots level as [sic] also the impact of Naxalite activity on the local populace” (2013: cover), like Lahiri she presents a straw man caricature of the Naxalites so as to subvert and circumvent the challenge they present to the gross material inequalities of the contemporary neoliberal capitalist Indian social order. This raises the question, pertinent to all works of Naxalite fiction, as to whether fictional Naxalites are fated to be but screens on which India’s intellectual class projects its fears, aspirations, and desires for consumption by other bourgeois elites. Apropos of this, there is a distinct tendency within the corpus of Naxalite fiction, evinced in both The Lives of Others and The Lowland, to represent only the disaffected young Bengali intellectuals of the first generation of Naxalites. These are individuals who share elements of a common social background with these authors, rather than the contemporary combatants hailing predominantly from more socially marginalized groups. Certain other discursive genres may have had greater success narrating the stories of these latter-day Adivasi and lower-caste or lower-class Naxalites — journalistic works like Navlakha’s (2012) Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion and Roy’s (2011) Walking with the Comrades and documentary films like Red Ant Dreams (2013) come to mind here. But the large-scale fictional focus on apostate–bourgeois Bengali Naxalites inescapably raises the questions of subaltern voice and incommensurability famously posed by Gayatri Spivak (1981: 381; 1988) in her “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and her foreword to her translation of Mahasweta Devi’s Naxalite short story “Draupadi”, in the latter of which Spivak sees the antagonist army officer Senanayak as embodying an “approximation” of the situation of the lettered intellectual, confronted as he is by the imminence of the title character’s suffering and revolt but only able to approach it theoretically. In his The Political Unconscious, Neil Lazarus argues forcefully against this line of thought common in postcolonial studies discourse that holds that the subaltern can only be represented in a way that inflicts distorting conceptual violence to them. He shows that postcolonial literature has continually explored fiction’s capacity to convey the felt or “sensational” 12 aspect of social truth, its capacity to adequately represent and evoke without conveying absolute truth, rather than fatalistically asserting the impossibility of representing the marginalized outside of colonial traditions of representation and/or a colonialist impulse to dominate and speak for (Lazarus, 2011: 114–160). So it is not that the Adivasi and lower-caste stories of the more recent phases of the Naxalite struggle are beyond the means of fictional representation, just that they have yet to garner the same level of authorial interest as stories of the late 1960s and early 1970s rebellion against bourgeois Bengali moral complacency and complicity in the structural inequalities of Indian society.
Yet these sorts of narrative are sorely needed if today’s fiction is to do justice to the contemporary Maoist struggle to keep India’s rural poor from being ground under the wheels of neoliberal capitalism. Imagining the possibilities of resistance against and political–economic alternatives to the global system of neoliberal capitalism that is causing such spiralling incidence of economic inequality, ecological deterioration, and social discord in India as throughout the world is not easily accomplished, given the extent to which neoliberalism has been hegemonically naturalized in the post-Cold War era. But this is socially imperative cultural work to which the body of Naxalite fiction in its future evolutions can, and it is hoped will, significantly contribute.
