Naxal Stories
Naxal Andoloner Golpo, edited by Bijhita Ghosh and brought out Punoshcho publishers of Kolkata, is available in Dhaka bookstores. The second edition was brought out in January 2008, a reprint of the original published in January 1999. The editor notes in his introduction that it was a matter of gratification for him that the first print run sold out quickly, and that the second edition has had twenty new stories added to it. The book's dedication reads "In memory of the Shaheeds of 1970s '…for the days that floated by on tears…'", a testament to the continuing hold of West Bengal's late 1960s-70s Naxalite movement on the Bengali bhadralok. Its iconic high priest was Charu Mazumdar, and the movement emerged out of the volatile left politics of Kolkata and West Bengal of the 1960s. The sixties, of course, was a time of national liberation movements and anti-colonial struggles, in which global revolution's two dominant salvation narratives were offered by Soviet Union and Red China. It was a brutally stark choice. Communist parties the world over subscribed to either of these two 'lines', which meant the 1962 Sino-Soviet split saw them fracturing them along the lines of the main fissure. In India it led to the break-up, in 1964, of the Communist Party of India, with the old-guard Establishment Left remaining within the CPI (with its roots in the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, its strategic choice of the parliamentary electoral route to power and affiliation with Nehru's Congress Party) versus the Maoists of Communist Party of India (Marxist), CPI (M), with their call for peasant revolts and a global fight against 'social imperialism'. Bengal, ever a step ahead of the rest of India (the 'what Bengal thinks today the rest of India thinks tomorrow' formulation), was seduced by the siren song of the Maoists, a seduction that in practice meant CPI (M) for a time was simultaneously a party of elections and legislative compromise as well as attempting to contain radical/extremist factions that disdained those very elections and the corridors of state power. The end result was a suicidal civil war between these two major factions, which spectacularly came to a head in the Naxal movement and its eventual repression by the West Bengal government, particularly in Kolkata. In 1967 a peasant rebellion was ignited by Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal in the Darjeeling District of Naxalbari that was supported by the hardline CPI (M) groups and which received the papal blessings of the Chinese Communist Party. The period 1969-1971 saw pitched battles between the fierce insurgency and the West Bengal state apparatus (an apparatus in which their former comrades were present in substantial governing coalition numbers). The Coordinating Committee faction led by Charu broke away to form the CPI (ML). The revolt moved into its Andhra 'Srikakulam' armed phase, and Charu issued a call for revolution. All hell broke loose. Thousands of West Bengal's best and brightest students, ranging from St Stephens College in Delhi to Presidency College in Kolkata, joined the Naxalites. For a brief period it seemed as if the revolution would sweep everything before it; parts of Siliguri, where in the 1964 party conference Charu Mazumdar had first officially given notice of the new mood, was even briefly declared independent. Heads of landlords were impaled on stakes; bombs exploded in Kolkata cinema houses. Indira Gandhi unleashed the Central Reserve Police on them, and some of the most horrific scenes of police-state brutalities were enacted in Kolkata. One of the worst occurred in the city's Kashipur and Baranagar areas, where the police dragged out Naxal suspects and killed them, among them Saroj Dutta and Sushital Raychoudhury, two fully paid-up members of the bhadralok intellectual left. Faction killed faction, party cadre slaughtered cadre, and the armed police boot-heeled on them all. Kanu Sanyal denounced Charu's 'line'; Charu himself died. By 1972 the Naxalbari movement was broken (by Jyoti Basu, then the home minister), and in 1975 was finished off by Indira Gandhi's Emergency. That period of political idealism and violence has given birth to a steady stream of writing: short stories, poems and novels. It is a stream that in West Bengal continues to flourish even today. The Naxals remain a fertile source for the West Bengal creative imagination, and the astonishing diversity and range of this literary effort can be seen in the hundred short stories of the volume under review. The editor writes that he chose stories that reflected the "dreams of the 1970s, hopes of liberation and the return home-absent from home of those up-and-down days of turmoil and rage," and to a very large extent he has succeeded, with writers such as Bimal Kaur, Surajit Dasgupta, Mahasweta Devi, Krishna Chakrabarty, Subimal Misra, Siddharta Saha, Amar Mitra, Samaresh Basu, Ashim Trivedi, Sandeep Bandhapadhaya and Manabendra Pal in the mix. In Bengali texts and printed words and fictional works, limned against a CPI (M) government afflicted by arthesclerosis and neo-liberalism after close to forty years in power, insurrectionary Maoism is still alive and kicking. It is more so in the field. "A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery;" Mao famously wrote in his 'The Question of "Going Too Far"', "it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. A rural revolution is a revolution by which the peasantry overthrows the power of the feudal landed class." Vast tracts of India remain under a restive semi-feudal order, underpinned by a twining of Brahmin caste codes and state power. It is therefore not surprising that organizations and party variants of the old Naxalbari movement--almost all of whom can trace themselves back to the splinter groups or breakaways factions of the CPI (M) in the fissiparous cycle known to academics as 'Left factionalism'--today hold sway over a vast stretch from Bihar to the borders of Karnataka, the so-called 'Red Belt', under the organizational umbrella of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). While China's Maoist mandarins have taken to pinstripe suits and Shanghai-style capitalism (whose schoolbooks famously mention Mao just once, in a chapter on etiquette!), Charu's May 1970 declaration ironically still rings true in parts of India: "Without class strugglethe battle of annihilationthe initiative of the poor peasant masses cannot be released, the political consciousness of the fighters cannot be raised, the new man cannot emerge, the people's army cannot be created." A huge, horrific, and underreported war is taking place, especially in Chattisgarh, between its Maoists and the state-sponsored terror of Salwa Judum. A literature like West Bengal's Naxalbari one is yet to spring out of these struggles, but as the editor of this volume says when discussing the morality of Naxal politics, "only time will tell."
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