Remembering revolution: Gender, violence and subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement

Abstract

The book, as the title suggests, is about „remembering,‟ about „memory‟ of middle-class women (and men) who participated in the Naxalite movement in the wake of Naxalbari uprising in 1967 in West Bengal. The objective of the author is to present a feminist reading of the experiences of women revolutionaries, who participated in the radical left movement in Bengal, which was characterized above all by violence. The book deals with „memory‟ i.e., memory as a culturally and politically mediated concept; and thereby depends heavily on oral narrative methods to bring the readers „her story‟ of the Naxalite movement. The author employs multiple methods and uses a broad array of materials from cinema, literature, and memories to personal interviews (of 26 Women and 16 men on which the book is mainly based) to bring fore the subtle and intricate manner in which the questions of gender and violence were embedded in the early days of Naxalite movement. Remembering Revolution, as the author claims, is an attempt to fill the gap in gendered politics of left-wing cultures and practices of violence, a topic that has remained at the margins in the study of the radical left movement in India.