Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence, and Subjectivity in India's Naxalbari Movement

258 Pages·2012·3.745 MB·English

by  Srila Roy

Remembering Revolution
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Remembering Revolution
Gender, Violence, and Subjectivity
in India’s Naxalbari Movement
Srila Roy
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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
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Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in India by
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© Oxford University Press 2012
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First Edition published in 2012
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ISBN-13: 978-0-19-808172-2
ISBN-10: 0-19-808172-3
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Remembering Revolution: An Introduction 1
1. Mapping the Movement, Situating the Study 20
2. Gendering the Revolution: Official and Popular Imaginary 46
3. Everyday Life in the Underground 74
4. Bhalobasha, Biye, Biplab: On the Politics of Sexual Stories 98
5. Sexual Violence and the Politics of Naming 120
6. Political Violence, Trauma, and Healing 148
Conclusion: Mourning Revolution 171
Notes 194
Glossary 209
Bibliography 211
Index
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Acknowledgements
I owe the greatest debt to the women and men who participated in this
project—who welcomed me into their homes and lives, gave valuable
amounts of their time, hospitality, trust, and patience. This book has
collected other debts along the way, from its inception as a PhD thesis
at the University of Warwick under the astute and creative guidance of
Deborah Steinberg and Parita Mukta. They have both contributed to
the shaping of my intellectual life well beyond the bounds of this project.
Sudipta Kaviraj and Carol Wolkowitz have been wonderful mentors since
they examined the thesis. I am particularly grateful to Carol for taking the
time out to read and provide extensive comments to the Introduction and
Conclusion of this book.
At Warwick, the faculty of Sociology and the Center for the Study of
Women and Gender—especially Steve Fuller, Robert Fine, Joanna Liddle,
and Terry Lovell—provided a creative and nurturing environment for the
writing up of this project. An Overseas Research Student Award along
with a Warwick Postgraduate Research Fellowship from the University
of Warwick provided the main funding for the thesis. A Feminist Review
Trust PhD Writing-up Scholarship aided the final stages of writing.
The field research in Kolkata was facilitated by a number of people I
met, some of whom I am fortunate enough to count as friends today. Mithu
Roy helped locate and access crucial sources besides conducting archival
work and translating data. The many sessions of adda with Alakananda
Guha and Anirban Das have filtered into some of the ideas presented in
this book. I am particularly grateful to Anirban for acting as an informal
mentor. Gautam Bhadra was instrumental in identifying key sources and
references, most of which would have remained unknown to me without
his astute guidance. Numerous others provided sources, references, and
contacts, and I am particularly grateful to Pradip Basu, Arun Ghosh,
Rajashri Dasgupta, Saumen and Latika Guha, Kalpana Sen, and Gita
Das in this respect. Ratnabali Chatterji proved a continuous source of
support in the field, and I am especially indebted to her. My thanks to
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viii Acknowledgements
Sharmishta for her invaluable help with some of the translations from
Bengali. The staff at the National Library and the Centre for the Study of
Social Sciences in Kolkata was especially helpful.
Colleagues at Nottingham, especially of the Identity, Citizenship
and Migration Centre, provided a supportive and friendly environment
for this thesis to be written up as a book. I extend my thanks to Nick
Stevenson and Amal Treacher Kabesh for reading and commenting on
draft chapters, and to Christian Karnerfor for his warm interest. As the
only South Asianist in the Nottingham village, Stephen Legg has been a
model of collegiality besides being a true friend. Julia O’Connell Davidson
and Jacqueline Sanchez-Taylor have made Nottingham home for me in
ways that are not easily acknowledged.
The ideas and arguments presented in this book have benefitted from
discussions at various stages with Jashodhara Bagchi, Samita Sen, Partha
Chatterjee, Jayoti Gupta, Kavita Punjabi, Pradip Basu, Tanika and Sumit
Sarkar, Rabindra Ray, Sumanta Bannerjee, Bela Bhatia, David Hardiman,
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Alpa Shah, Molly Andrews, and Rajarshi
Dasgupta. I am particularly grateful to Rajarshi for using his unpublished
thesis and papers on the Bengali communists. In the run up to publishing
this book, I found encouragement from unexpected quarters; warm thanks
to Craig Jeffrey and Laura Sjoberg. Oxford University Press brought this
book to light quickly and efficiently, and for this I thank them. Sandip
Ray allowed the use of a still from Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi with little
hesitation for which I extend my heartfelt thanks.
For cheering me along the way, I thank Atreyee Sen, Rubina Jasani,
Niharika Dinkar, Shalini Grover, Rashmi Varma, Janaki Abraham, Luke
Robinson, and older friends, Maud Perrier, Rudra Chaudhuri, Amrita
Ibrahim, Konkona Sensharma, and Ankur Khanna. Friendships that
have deepened over time and shifting locations with Kaavya Asoka,
Susan George, and Elisabeth Simbuerger have sustained me through
the writing of this book. Elisabeth read the entirety of the project in its
earlier manifestation and has been its champion since. My biggest debt is
to Disha Mullick who read several chapters and offered detailed advice
unabashedly, often at a day or two’s notice, and with little patience for
academic jargon. This book is much stronger thanks to her generosity
and attention.
At the final stages of writing up, the arguments presented benefitted
enormously from the incisive comments of friends and colleagues given
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Acknowledgements ix
at very short notice: Stephen Legg, Deepti Misri, Jonathan Dean, Nicolas
Jaoul, Becky Walker, Swati Parashar, Henrike Donner, Alf Nilsen (who
offered references and encouragement), and Srimati Basu, this book’s
ardent advocate. Shraddha Chigateri and Pratiksha Baxihave have been
ideal interlocutors in addition to being inspirational friends, and this
book and I have gained much from our conversations over the years.
Pratiksha has been a virtual presence throughout the writing of this book
in ways that have deepened my understanding and restored my sanity.
My thanks to Ishan Tankha for being a mensch and letting me use his
haunting photograph.
My family has been critical to the execution and completion of this
project, from their hospitality to the sharing of memories and stories,
to their enduring love that makes me the person I am. My extended
family—Didu, Ninou mashi, Gina, and Bon—sustained me with good
cheer throughout fieldwork in Kolkata. A big thanks to Ninou mashi
and Shormi mashi for facilitating my use of one of the images for this
book. It is a pleasure to record my thanks to my elder sister, Mishta Roy,
for designing the book’s cover. Together with didi, my brother-in-law,
Anirudh, and my in-laws, Simone and Jean-Pierre, have created homes
for me wherever they are, and this book owes much to their generosity
and affection. I owe the greatest debt to my parents, Reeti and Debashis
for their ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ acts of kindness, support, and
encouragement right from the inception of this project. Without them,
this book and I would be a great deal more wanting. And finally, my
thanks to Rafael Winkler, who has read each word on every page, for his
love, his wise counsel, and his example.
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Remembering Revolution
An Introduction
One of the earliest memories I inherited from my mother was of the home,
the bari in which she had spent much of her childhood. Situated in south
Kolkata,1 this house was the fruit of my grandfather’s entrepreneurial
skills; a house he had built ‘with his own hands’. Yet, it was a house he
never spoke of. His silence was rooted in a certain event that had led to
the immediate abandonment of the house, a week before my mother was
married in 1971. A group of young boys—boys of the para who had
played cricket with the children of the household—had held the family
hostage and robbed my grandfather’s collection of guns and revolvers.
Their intentions were never very clear to me but I knew they were not
petty criminals. Before the event itself, my grandmother spoke of the men
trying to hide in the garage. My mother spoke of the army coming into
the house in search of them. I was also told of their violent deaths at the
hands of the police, which the family had heard of some months later.
The family itself never returned home after the incident with the guns.
The loss of our bari was one that I, along with the other children of the
family, inherited and mourned.
By the time I joined university, I could locate this familial memory
in a wider cultural narrative around a pro-poor revolution led by young
students in the late 1960s in Kolkata, a time when the world was rife with
anti-state, rebellious bursts of utopian energy. The ‘Naxalites’ were our
very own home-grown brand. For me, the story of the Naxalites was one
of youthful rebellion and romantic tragedy, rooted in the imaginary of the
city of Kolkata and its most representative voice, the middle class. The
class element became increasingly important as I graduated from school
to university, given a newfound disdain towards everything that was ‘petty
bourgeois’, including my own familial and class background. When I met
Anant, a fellow student whose mother, a Naxalite, had been imprisoned
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