Hues of Red: The Facades of Leftist Insurgency and Crisis in India in Select Fiction

Abstract

Literature on the leftist insurgency is a field where sociopolitical turmoil meets revolution. For the last fifty years, leftist insurgency entails a problematic premise in India. From the example of countries like the Soviet Union and China, India incorporated the idea of Communism in the 1970s. Communism in India found manifestation through two movements namely Naxalism and Maoism, with their basis in Marxist–Leninist ideology but with a subtle variance. This subtlety breaks open a crisis that has been understated often when the movements have been referred to as synonymous terms in media jargon and popular discourse. The policy of the “annihilation line” forms an ideological crisis in India; which is expansively reflected in select fiction from the country. Therefore, this article attempts at dissecting two pieces of fiction chosen from the whole repertoire of literature written on Naxalism and Maoism to elucidate this crisis. Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others (2014) is placed against Nilima Sinha's Red Blooms in the Forest (2013) in order to establish how parallel discourses from two different time periods of the movement facilitate a study of the trajectory of the Naxalite–Maoist insurgency.

Left‐wing extremism in India: Red terror through the novel

“…However, it is only after the death of Charu Mazumdar in the 1970s that this term was used to refer to the movement. "The principal ideological variance between Naxalism and Maoism is that in Naxalism, the compulsory use of arms and ammunition was not propagated" (Sarkar & Manna, 2018). According to Kanu Sanyal, the movements were inherently different.…”

“…Sanyal implies that post Mazumdar's death in 1972, Naxalism abandoned the annihilation program and worked toward mass organizations and even participated in elections to amend the ideological error that the party had committed. Revolution would not be possible without arms; however, according to Sanyal, Naxalism never propagated the extensive use of arms necessarily (Sarkar & Manna, 2018). It was also about keeping intact the original spirit of Naxalbari-channelizing the masses.…”

“…Despite the Maoists arguably championing the cause of the farmers, the real peasantry in India is still detached from them. (Paul, 2014) SARKAR AND MANNA With the rising Maoist insurgency in the last 2 decades, Sanyal, once a staunch Naxalite, categorically said that Naxalism did not propagate terrorism or fanaticism, but Maoism did (Sarkar & Manna, 2018). Therefore, classifying the first phase of the movement as Naxal and the third phase as Maoist would not be an ideological miscalculation.…”

Histories of resistance, political violence, and revolutionary possibility in the neoliberal-era Naxalite novel

“…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.).…”