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

Abstract

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.