Post-Magic: The Female Naxalite at 50 in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom

Abstract

In Gender and Radical Politics in India: Magic Moments of Naxalbari (2010. New Jersey: Routledge), Mallarika Sinha Roy takes her title from an interview with a former Naxalite woman in which the interviewee declares, “[t]hose were the best days of my life … in those years I lived as a human being … seta chillo ekta ashchorjyo somoy (Those were magic moments)” (x). The import of this metaphor, Roy explains, is its ability to “convey [the] duality” of “[p]ersecution, pain and tribulation” along with “wonder, surprise and hope” (xi). The early stage of the Naxalite Movement from roughly 1967 to 1975, is often represented as embodying this powerful duality that encapsulates a response to the brutal violence unleashed by the state against the Movement, but also the tangible hope inhering in the late sixties that a revolution was possible.This paper considers how such representations of, and metaphors for, the experiences of the female Naxalite have changed over time, noting emerging scholarship focused on the gender politics of the movement as well as an increase in literary representations of contemporary female Maoist guerilla fighters. 2017 saw the 50th anniversary of Naxalbari, along with the publication of Arundhati Roy’s much-anticipated The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017. New York: Knopf) and Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom (2017. London: Chatto & Windus), both of which include the narratives of female guerilla fighters. I argue that the contemporary iteration of this figure is “post-magic,” and suggests that despite the authors’ sympathies for the current guerilla movement, particularly its female participants, “wonder, surprise and hope” are evacuated from their depiction in the novels. Through a consideration of both literary form and contemporary history, I engage with the reasons for this shift and their consequences when it comes to the potential and imaginary of violent resistance.