Solidarity, Suffering and ‘Divine Violence’: Fictions of the Naxalite Insurgency

Malreddy, Pavan Kumar

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-40354-4_12

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Malreddy also attributes the unpopularity of this canon to the "limited access to firsthand sources, lack of adequate ethnographic, or independent empirical studies." (Malreddy, 2016) This, we would say, stands true in the case of fiction based in a remotely accessible part of the country today, here writing becomes conjecture and imagination to fill the gaps of information.…”

Section: Observations On the Genrementioning

confidence: 94%

“…Pavan Kumar Malreddy's work forms a chapter in South‐Asian Fiction in English (2016) edited by Alex Tickell and published by Palgrave Macmillan. His contribution to the collection concerns the Naxalite–Maoist movement through an essay entitled “Solidarity, Suffering and ‘Divine Violence’: Fictions of the Naxalite Insurgency.” He uses three novels, The Lowland , Red Skies and Falling Stars , and Seeing through the Stones to posit that in moving from nonfiction to fiction, there is a radical “shift from enchanted to disenchanted solidarity” (Malreddy, 2016). In The Lowland and Red Skies , the protagonist displays a temperamental shift from enchanted solidarity for the movement to a disenchanted solidarity.…”

Section: Contemporary Debates: What Has Been Donementioning

confidence: 99%

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

Sarkar

Manna

2020

Literature Compass

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This article is a compilation of recent scholarly research produced on Anglophone fiction inspired by left-wing extremism (LWE) in India, known as the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency. With a brief historical glimpse distinguishing the three phases of the movement, the article begins with a contextualization of the canon. It perceives the immediate reason for the upshot of scholarship in this field. The array of literature is categorized and contextualized into subfields for a lucid examination of critical debates in fiction. It establishes how the novel has grown over the years to identify with distinct phases of LWE-Naxalism and Maoism. Some observations on the genre are chalked out, which include a biased scholarship to a lack of firsthand empirical knowledge in the writings. The whole repertoire is incorporated to analyze the significant trends in existing research, laced with deciding factors of global popularity, literariness, and readership. A thorough survey of the available research is ascertained to direct and formulate a direction for future scholarship.

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Section: Observations On the Genrementioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Contemporary Debates: What Has Been Donementioning

confidence: 99%

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

Sarkar

Manna

2020

Literature Compass

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“…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).…”

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confidence: 99%

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

Walonen

2019

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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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.

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Interrogating the Naxalbari Movement: Mahasweta Devi’s Quest Novels

Bhattacharya

2020

Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel

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Solidarity, Suffering and ‘Divine Violence’: Fictions of the Naxalite Insurgency

Cited by 6 publications

References 5 publications

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

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

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

Interrogating the Naxalbari Movement: Mahasweta Devi’s Quest Novels

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