This article analyses the meaning of urban neighbourhoods for the emergence of Maoist activism in 1970s Calcutta. Through ethnography the article highlights the way recruitment, strategies and the legacy of the movement were located in the experience and politics of the urban neighbourhood. As a social formation, the neighbourhood shaped the relationships that made Maoist subjectivities feasible and provided the space for coalitions and cooperation across a wider spectrum than the label of a student movement acknowledges. The neighbourhood appears here as an emergent site for Maoist epistemologies, which depended on this space and its everyday practices, intimate social relations as well as the experience of the local state in the locality.
Banerjee M. ( 1999) Mamata’s khomota. Seminar480: 30-5.
2.
Banerjee S. ( 1984) India’s Simmering Revolution. London: ZED.
3.
Basu P. ( 2000) Towards Naxalbari (1953-1967): An Account of Inner-Party Ideological Struggle. Calcutta: Progressive Publishers.
4.
Berman M. ( 1982) All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity . New York: Simon & Schuster .
5.
Chandavarkar RN ( 2004) From Neighbourhood to Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Left in Bombay’s Girangaon in the Twentieth Century. In: Menon M, Adarkar N (eds) One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices: The Mill Workers of Girangaon, an Oral History. Calcutta : Seagull Books , 7-80.
6.
Chatterjee N. ( 1992) Midnight’s unwanted children: east Bengali refugees and the politics of rehabilitation. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Brown University, Providence, RI.
7.
Chatterjee P. ( 2004) The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press.
8.
Chatterji J. ( 2007) The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947-1967 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
9.
Cooper F. ( 1997) The dialects of decolonization: nationalism and labour movements in postwar French Africa. In: Stoler A, Cooper F (eds) Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley : University of California Press, 406-35.
10.
Corbridge S., Harriss J. ( 2000) Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Democracry. Cambridge: Blackwell .
11.
Damas M. ( 1991) Approaching Naxalbari. Calcutta : Radical Impression.
12.
Das V. ( 1995) Critical Events: Anthropological Perspectives on Contemporary India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
13.
Dasgupta B. ( 1974) The Naxalite Movement. Bombay : Allied Publishers.
14.
Dasgupta S. ( 1996) Recalling Naxalite terror. Indian Express 29 June.
15.
De Neve G., Donner H. ( 2006) The Meaning of the Local: Politics of Place in Urban India . London: Routlegde .
16.
Donner H. ( 2006a) The politics of gender, class, and community in a central Calcutta neighbourhood. In: De Neve G , Donner H, The Meaning of the Local: Politics of Place in Urban India. London : Routledge, 141-58.
17.
Donner H.(2010) Radical masculinity: morality, sociality and relationships through recollections of Naxalite activists. Dialectical Anthropology33(3): 327-43.
18.
Dutta A. ( 2006) 70s’ nemesis, now comrade: ex-naxal leader Ashim Chatterjee on same side as Ray. The Telegraph ( Calcutta) 25 April.
19.
Fernandes L. ( 1997) Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class, and Culture in Calcutta Jute Mills. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
20.
Franda MF ( 1971) Radical politics in West Bengal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
21.
Ghosh SK (ed.) (1993) The Historic Turning Point: A Liberation Anthology, vol. 2. Calcutta: S.K.
22.
Hansen TB ( 2001) Governance and myths of state in Mumbai. In: Fuller C J, Benei, V, The Everyday State and Society in Modern India. Delhi: Social Science Press, 31-67.
23.
Jacob J. ( 1994) The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage.
24.
Kaviraj S. ( 1997) Filth and the public sphere: concepts and practices about space in Calcutta. Public Culture10(1): 12-32.
25.
Keck ME, Sikkink K. ( 1998) Activists beyond Borders. Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press.
26.
Khilnani S. ( 1997) The Idea of India. London: Hamish Hamilton.
27.
Marston SA, Jones III JP and Woodward K. ( 2005) Human geography without scale. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers30: 416-32.
28.
Mayer M. ( 2007) Contesting the neoliberalization of urban governance . In: Leitner H, Peck J, and Sheppard E (eds) Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers. New York: Guilford Press, 90-115.
29.
Mukherjee SN ( 1970) Class, caste and politics in Calcutta 1815-38. In: Leach E, Mukherjee SN (eds) Elites in South Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
30.
Nossiter TJ ( 1988) Marxist State Governments in India: Politics, Economics and Society. London: Pinter Publishers .
31.
Ong A. ( 2006) Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press.
32.
Ray M. ( 2002) Growing up refugee: on memory and locality. History Workshop Journal53: 149-79.
33.
Ray R. ( 1988) The Naxalites and their Ideology. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
34.
Roy A. ( 2002) City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
35.
Roy A. ( 2004) The gentleman’s city: urban informality in the Calcutta of new communism. In: Roy A and Nezar, A (eds) Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia , Langham : Lexington Books.
36.
Roy A, Nezar A (eds) (2004) Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia. Langham: Lexington Books.
37.
Ruud AE ( 2000) Talking dirty about politics: a view from a Bengali village . In: Fuller C, Beneı V (eds) The Everyday State and Society in India . New Delhi: Social Science Press , 115-36.
38.
Skopcol T. ( 1994) Social Revolutions in the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
39.
Sennett R. ( 1974) The Fall of Public Man. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
40.
Seth S. ( 2006) From Maoism to Postcolonialism? The Indian ‘Sixties’, and Beyond. Inter Asia-Cultural Studies7(4): 589-605.
