“Tomar Santan Jano Thake Dudhe-Bhaate”: Exploring the Naxal movement through Bengali protest poetry

Abstract

The Naxalite Movement was a radical left wing extremist movement that started in 1969 in the Indian state of West Bengal. Inspired by the ideas of Mao Tse Tsung, the combatants engaged in guerrilla warfare aiming to capture state power through armed insurgency, “annihilation line” that included the assassination of the representatives of the state administration and mass mobilisation. In the early 1970s, Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal, witnessed large-scale student participation in the conflict. It was suppressed by the State through the Operation Steeplechase, brutal police repression including widespread human rights violations. No political movement in post-independent India spawned as much literature, ranging from poetry to autobiographical narratives, as the Naxal Movement. Through a qualitative study, this paper attempts a critical analysis of the representative artistic expression by the Naxalites during the first phase of the conflict between 1969 and 1975. Drawing upon the poetry of revolutionaries such as Dronacharya Ghosh, Saroj Dutta and Timir Baran Sen, all of whom were killed by the police, along with the works of Naxal sympathiser poets like Sankha Ghosh and Birendranath Chattopadhyay, this paper aims to fill the research gap that exists in academia in the sphere of literary representation by the Naxal combatants.