2019/1/26 Frontier articles on Society & Politics

‘Naxalbari 50’

A Few Words About Naxalbari

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
It is hard to think that fifty years have passed since the first confrontation in Naxalbari. I was both too far and too
close. One of my cousins, with whom I had gone to school every day as a child, was deeply involved. And one of our
batchmates let loose unbelievable mass brutality upon young men lining a street, asking householders to close their
windows. Rumours, before cable television (we had a small black and white), before the internet, before satellite
telephone. I was tucked away at the University of Iowa, a young Assistant Professor quite set in with the anti-Vietnam
War struggle earlier, and with the diasporic support of the Bangladesh upheaval later, but about Naxalbari was caught
in helpless hearsay. Hadn't enough money to go home until 1972, only then to realise the depth and breadth of the
wounded polity. But, and I say this with some embarrassment, an old cynical woman now, some of us had
romanticised the fact that the first shot was an arrow. My best understanding of the entire movement still comes from
Sumanta Banerjee's In the Woke of Naxalbari. I have learnt some Chinese since then, enough to teach some Mao
Zedong with the help of graduate students in Chinese. It seems at this distance that, although Charu Mazumder's
general inspiration from Mao was certainly enormously effective and moving, it was the at least temporary
conscientisation of Left intellectuals that seemed most impressive to us. In 1968, when French university students
joined hands with the working class, the Naxalbari phenomenon seemed to us, from far away, a greater political
achievement.
It is no doubt a function of my base abroad that I cannot readily perceive continuity between the Naxalbari movement
and what is called Maoism now in India. It could also be a function of the horror of violence among my co-workers
from the landless SCST-s (this is the descriptive they commonly use) on the border of Birbhum and Jharkhand. It nay
also be because I have personally encountered ex-Naxals in Purulia, completely given over to hands-on work for
agricultural justice; I have inevitably thought of swords and ploughshares.
I am a literary critic and a translator. In 1981, I translated Mahasweta Devi's "Draupadi". That story rather than the
novel The Mother of 1084, set the seal on Naxalbari for me, as it will for generations to come.
Frontier
Autumn Number
Vol. 50, No.12-15, Sep 24 - Oct 21, 2017
 
 

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