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.