Righting the Subalterns? Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others and the Naxalite Movement

Carlotta Maria Beretta

doi:10.5565/rev/indialogs.130

Abstract

Neel Mukherjee’s second novel The Lives of Others deals with the story of a family during one of the most controversial chapters in the recent history of West Bengal, namely the Naxalite movement and its subsequent repression by the State. The novel examines the reasons why so many young middle-class students decided to join the movement, and the actual impact of their activism. In doing so, it questions Bengali society and the relationship between different social classes. Above all, The Lives of Others is a bourgeois novel which explores and criticizes the contradiction and conflicts within the Bengali middle class. Although the subalterns, especially the peasants, played a significant role in the Naxalite movement, they are at the margins of the novel and are rarely given a voice.This paper will read The Lives of Others as an allegory of Bengali society. Such a reading will primarily look at the dialectics of society in the novel, thus providing a context in which to discuss class conflicts and the paradox represented by a bourgeois novel about a subaltern revolution. The comparison with a well-known novel of the time, Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084, will also be fundamental for the discussion.

Highlights

The Lives of Others is the second novel by Neel Mukherjee, published in 2014
Unlike his first novel Past Continuous, which deals with Indian diaspora in the United Kingdom, The Lives of Others is set in Calcutta and in the countryside of West Bengal
The novel tells the story of a family during one of the most controversial chapters in the recent history of West Bengal, namely the Naxalite movement and its subsequent repression by the State (1967-1973)

Summary

Introduction

The Lives of Others is the second novel by Neel Mukherjee, published in 2014. Unlike his first novel Past Continuous, which deals with Indian diaspora in the United Kingdom, The Lives of Others is set in Calcutta and in the countryside of West Bengal. The novel gives an account of the Naxalite struggle through the eyes of the oldest grandchild of the family, Supratik, who has left Calcutta to join the movement in the rural areas of West Bengal. As in The Lives of Others, the novel points to the moral and physical decadence of the middle-class, and questions its role in society whilst praising those who tried to change the state of things and better the conditions of the poor. The destructiveness that Supratik brings upon himself and upon innocent people (the cook, the people on the train) does not seem to benefit the subalterns in any way This destructiveness is connected by historians with the shift of the movement towards nihilistic actions and to the failure of the inter-class connection between the urban middle-class students and the peasants

Conclusion

WORKS CITED