The violence of the oppressed is right. The violence of the oppressor is wrong. And to hell with ethics.
In Ramesh Sippy’s legendary movie Sholay (1975), the notorious bandicoot Gabbar Singh is presiding at the trial of his two henchmen for returning empty-handed, after having failed to collect tax from the nearby villagers. Gabbar paces up and down a pair of high boulders in the middle of his den, bouncing his bandoleer over the undulated rock surface to affect a cold metallic clink, before uttering the most famous words in Indian cinema: “Are oe Samba, kitna inam rakhhe hain Sarkar hum par [Oh Samba, what’s the prize money the government has put on my head]?” “Pure pachas hazaar, sarkar [Full fifty grand, chief],” utters a scrawny Samba from the top of a rock. “Full fifty grand, and you know why my head is worth so much? Because in the villages hundreds of miles away from here, when the babies cry at night, mothers tell them ‘sleep, child, sleep, else Gabbar Singh will come and get you.’”1 The most dreaded words for any Indian child, and the most enchanting lullaby for any Indian mother, are all but formulaic: Gabbar Singh could be replaced by no less a ferocious mortal than a Naxalite,2 and the mothers could still get their babies to sleep, or at least that is what happened in the Southern Telangana region in the early 1980s during my own childhood. The bone-chilling, electrifying, and resounding chant of the mothers: “sleep, child, sleep, or else the Naxalite will come and get you.” Not only the mothers, but the famished peasants and bonded laborers would pick up the refrain and add a chorus: “run, Lord, run from the village, else the Naxals will come and get you.” This immortal threat, often associated with the ferocity of bandits, thieves, goons, or masthans across India, became synonymous with Naxalism in the 1970–1980s. Rumors and urban legends ruled the streets. In the countryside of Southern Telangana, many a peasant believed that the Naxalites are those who walked around at night with “lights,” rounding up stray buffalos. Others read the “lights” part of the Naxalite somewhat euphemistically, that the Naxalites brought hope to the dark side of the country.
Some of the urban myths surrounding the arrival of Naxalism are so acerbic that they would need a trained formalist of Roman Jakobson’s stature to decipher their inner essence. I came upon one such heady myth during a research visit to Chhattisgarh in the spring of 2016. Following a credible lead, I reached out to a village elder who had been a witness to the killing of one of the first Naxalites at a village on the banks of the Pranahita River. I had asked him, in my Southern-accented Hindi, after sipping the customary mahua – floral alcohol – I ought not to refuse, “What do you remember of the first Naxalites arrived here?” “Oh, the buffalos?” he exclaimed, cutting into my question. “Six or seven of them crossed over from Pakistan to our side, one of them got killed and we ate him.” My local guide slurped his mahua in a single gulp, and indicated that we should make a move. “You may not be welcome here,” he said, stating the old man’s aversion to spilling a secret that his community had “swallowed.” “Eating the buffalo” is a shorthand for swallowing the secret, I learned. “Who killed the buffalo then and what is Pakistan doing here, across the Maharashtra border?” I asked. He took me to the news archives room in Jagadalpur and pointed me to clippings from Hindi newspapers about the killing of one Peddi Shankar, who was among the first dalam (armed squad) that crossed into the Dandakaranya forest in June 1980, and the first Naxalite to be killed by the police in the Chandrapur District of Maharashtra. And Pakistan was evidently the name used by the Indian security forces to refer to the Naxal-affected areas, which, in the local parlance, meant everything that was “foreign” or came from the outside. On the basis of this piecemeal information, I was able to decode the village elder’s myth in the following manner: “Several Naxalites (buffalos) entered the Dandakaranya from Andhra Pradesh (Pakistan), and one of them got killed (by the police) and we ate (swallowed the secret of) the dead buffalo (Peddi Shankar).” Not only the violence of solidarity imputed by the proverbial “eating” and “swallowing” the body of a Naxalite, but by virtue of the old man’s penchant for rendering the events under scrutiny in fictional and mythical terms, this anecdote serves a referential function to the key argument of the chapter: the role of narrative and imaginative devices in making the causes and conditions of the insurgency critically intelligible.
Without the journalistic and other anecdotal evidence – in addition to the ethnographic insight – the myth of “eating buffalos” would not have been decoded. In much the same way, without the injection of fictive elements into the narrative by which the old man literally swallows the secret, the strained loyalties and solidarities of the tribal people for the Naxalites would become illegible or, as in Ranajit Guha’s caveat, they would have been absorbed into the state discourse. In essence, this encounter with the old man demonstrates that ethnographic or empirical attempts at grasping the lifeblood or lifeworld of insurgents and subalterns that are replete with secrets, mired in symbolism – owing much to censorship regimes – or in excess of cultural meanings, are insufficient: in fact, fictional works are best equipped to do the additive work of making the moods, motifs, affects, defects, intentions, solidarities, and loyalties critically intelligible. My emphasis on critical intelligibility of insurgency here is guided by an ethical imperative to read beyond what the insurgents or subalterns “speak” or the justification offered by them for the use of violence, for such violence is often facilitated by external actors and forces, including its ability to shape, and be shaped by, popular imagination. As a case in point, the romantic ideals of the Naxalite revolution have been the ideological staple of the urban left for decades, so much so that a section of the noncombatant, progressive middle class today has earned the title – on account of the state – of “urban Naxalites.” In popular culture, the Naxalite insurgency today is regarded as the greatest insurrection since the 1857 mutiny – or certainly the gravest “internal security threat,” as the former prime minister Manmohan Singh famously put it3 – in an implicit nationalistic parlance that its very existence serves as a moral compass, a fallback to the Indian middle classes in the face of the corrupt bourgeois state.4
For the many noncombatant sympathizers, which include a sizable section of the Indian middle classes, Naxalism spoke a language that was familiar, fraternal, and palatable: unemployment, agrarian crisis, urban inequalities, caste emancipation, and class struggle. It revolutionized a whole generation of university students in Calcutta and Hyderabad and became the subject of vernacular ballads and revolutionary historians and poets like Saketh Rajan (Karnataka), Gaddar (Telangana), Lal Sing Dil (Punjab), and Saroj Dutta (West Bengal). In the past three decades alone, over 100 films have appeared in Hindi, Telugu, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam with Naxalism or Maoist insurgency as their stock plots.5 In journalism, popular media, and academia, it fared even better. In a rather recent essay, Alpa Shah and Dhruv Jain6 review fifty nonfiction books on Maoism that have appeared in English alone since 2007. Though Anglophone fiction has caught up only fairly recently, with less than half a dozen novels to its credit, innumerable novels, plays, and poetry collections on Naxalism have appeared in Telugu, Bengali, and Hindi. In the spirit of this expansive repertoire on Naxalism, this chapter features the genres of literary journalism and Anglophone novels. As my readings reveal, each genre uncovers the causes and conditions that turn the ordinary peasants into an insurgent force, and, in doing so, they dispel the populist misconceptions surrounding the Naxalites on account of noncombatant actors who extend varying measures of solidarities for the insurgency. Despite the marked inequalities of their caste, class, and gender rank, what the insurgent and noncombatant actors do have in common is the inordinate faith in insurgency violence as an indispensable means of political agency, even if such violence should ideally be outlawed and banished. It is from this moral conundrum to extend solidarity for the Naxalite, without completely overhauling the existing ethico-legal frames of democracy that, as this chapter reveals, the forms and formulations of solidarity undergo constant revision and reconstruction.
The Naxalite insurgency itself could be described as just that: a trail of compelling, competing, and fractured ideologies from its very inception that periodically had to reinvent itself and adapt to the conditions of the deeply divisive Indian social hierarchies. It is against this background that, armed with the ideology of Maoism which sprung from the leftist disillusionment with the “revisionist” Marxism of mainstream communists, the local youths Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal together with tribal leader Jangal Santhal had initially rallied around the distressing agrarian conditions of rural Bengal in the 1960s: the exploitation of tea plantation workers and the tyranny of the Jotedar land tenure system, which left most Adivasis landless and reduced lower castes to bonded laborers. Buoyed by this political momentum when a local peasant named Bigal Kisan attempted to take possession of his land by tilling it, the goons of the Jotedar Buddhiman Tirke killed the peasant. In retaliation, the loosely organized peasants under the banner of the CPI (Marxist) killed the landlord in May 1967.7 Subsequently, when the police tried to enter the village of Naxalbari on May 24, 1967, an arrow released by a tribal peasant landed in the chest of a police officer named Sonam Wangde, killing him instantly. The subsequent clashes spread to Calcutta, where the urban youths became the flagbearers of the Naxalite movement, which officially endorsed the use of arms, and even proclaimed Mao Zedong to be their chairman.8 The insurgency was put on the back foot under the national emergency between 1975 and 1977, but its ideology spread like wildfire to the neighboring regions of Bihar and Telangana, where caste hierarchies were rigid, and agrarian conditions were in a state of disrepair. Between the 1980s and 1990s, the Maoists broke into innumerous factions, reflecting a diverse array of problems they were confronted with in the countryside: localized caste hierarchies, the dependency of peasants on the landlords, and land tenure systems that banned peasants permanently from owning property. It was only in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, however, facing the insurmountable odds of a heavily militarized and motivated enemy, that the most significant of these factions have remerged as CPI (Maoist) in 2004, boasting about 40,000 active army cadres overseeing a parallel government in central India.9
Following the 9/11 attacks, India’s then ruling government led by the Bhartiya Janata Party, which is known for its hardline policy against “Islamic terrorism,” had dramatically recast the Maoist insurgency as part and parcel of a wider terrorist network. Although the Indian state approached the insurgency as a matter of an internal security threat for over three decades, it was only in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and particularly after the signing of a series of Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) with various mining companies such as Vedanta, Tata, and Essar for the extraction of mineral resources from the insurgency-affected areas that the discourse of terrorism gained momentum.10
Despite the fact that clashes between the Indian state, state-sponsored private armies, and the Maoists have taken a deadly turn in the past two decades, the official accounts of the conflict – custodial killings, “encounter” killings, outright executions – remain highly unreliable, due to their propagandist nature. It is in the absence of any reliable source that the onus of extracting and extricating facts and factual claims of Naxal violence fell upon the imaginary realm of truths, particularly narrative journalism and fiction, which is the focus of this chapter. Featuring three novels and two works of nonfiction, the chapter uncovers the complex modalities of insurgency such as necro-nationalism and violent ideologies sustained, if not morally legitimized, by various forms of solidarity.
The first section of the chapter reads how the justification of violence in the three Naxalite novels – Diti Sen’s Red Skies and Falling Stars (2012), Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013), and Diptendra Raychaudhuri’s Seeing through the Stones (2007) – is sustained by various forms of solidarity and the suffering among the agents and victims of the conflict alike, which make the insurgent causes and conditions critically intelligible. Here, the public perception of Naxalism remains intertwined, if not enmeshed, with the insurgency given its middle-class foundations and origins – both Kanu Sayal and Charu Majumdar were representatives of urban, upper-caste identity. As a result, the onus of explaining the nonrepresentation of subaltern classes, including tribal people and peasants at the levels of ideologues and leadership, fell upon the former, and became an internally debated aspect of the Naxalite insurgency since 1967. The three novels, alongside the three films, chart an alternative literary history to the state archive on the Naxalite insurgency, which posits the role of the middle classes in the violence more critically and conscientiously than the state’s portrayal of their motifs as lumpen, emotionally misguided, or merely ideologically driven.
The second section turns to two works of literary journalism, namely, Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades (2011)11 and Sudeep Chakravarti’s Red Sun: Travels in a Naxalite Country (2008),12 to unravel how the very limits of journalistic protocols for factual representation yield to fictional authority, and manifest themselves in consolatory visions of extending support for the insurgency in the guise of what I characterize as “deep solidarity” and “liberal solidarity.” The analysis of the role of the middle classes, alongside subalterns and peasants, in the second part of the chapter accentuates the core argument of the book as outlined in the opening to this chapter, namely, that in order to make insurgency critically intelligible, we need to move beyond the smokescreen of enchanted solidarity forged by the revolutionary ideologues and leaders, toward a consideration of disenchanted solidarity that critically assesses the relative merits and limits of using violence by those subaltern insurgents who are both the usurpers and the receivers of such violence.
Solidarity, Sovereignty, and Divine Violence in Three Naxalite Novels
In India, the theory of “annihilating the class enemy” is taken more seriously by the security forces than by the rebels who had borrowed it from Mao’s China. After the killing of a high-ranking police officer in Hyderabad in January 1993, for instance, the killer – Mohammed Nayeemuddin, alias Nayeem, then a member of the Naxalite insurgency – was offered a deal by the police department, allegedly under the orders of the Minister of Interior of the state: to buy his freedom, he was to organize the murders of top Maoist leaders with the help of a criminal gang run by his brother(s). Even before Nayeem’s release, his brother’s gang would mastermind a spate of killings under police protection, but the most shocking of them all was the brutal murder of a Maoist sympathizer and revolutionary singer called Belli Lalitha in 1999, whose body was cut into seventeen pieces and thrown into wells and lakes around the Bhonagir district.13 Buoyed by the ruthlessness of Nayeem’s gang, during the 1990s, the state of Andhra Pradesh would go on to fund and sponsor a number of anti-Maoist militias with names such as Fear Vikas, Green Tigers, or Black Cobras, among others, which would inspire the Salwa Judum – a private army of anti-Maoists – in Chhattisgarh a decade later. When the Maoists finally captured Salwa Judum’s founder, Mahendra Karma, a local legislator, in October 2013 in an ambush near the town of Dharba, they “fired 30 to 40 bullets” into his body and “smashed his head with the butt of their guns after killing him.”14
Could the brutality of these killings by both Maoists and government-sponsored militias be merely a matter of personal revenge, political retribution, or “redemptive” justice? Does such excessive counter-violence have its uses? Challenging the Indian state’s uneasy conflation of insurgency violence with antinationalism and terrorism, the three novels analyzed in this section respond to these questions by drawing upon Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of “useless suffering” and Slavoj Žižek’s distinction between subjective and objective violence. The reading also draws from Frank Schulze-Engler’s critique of the “enchanted solidarity” of intellectuals and writers in endorsing anticolonial or anti-oppressive resistance movements, which helps situate Žižek and Levinas in postcolonial contexts.
According to Levinas, useless suffering refers to the rationalization of the suffering of neighbors or others in the guise of theodicy.15 In the post-9/11 context such theodicy has assumed secular forms, while rendering certain forms of suffering as socially acceptable (for example, that of the terrorists)16 and inducing “a meaning and order” in and through “a suffering that is essentially gratuitous, absurd, and apparently arbitrary.”17 Against this, Levinas calls for an ethical suffering through “the suffering of suffering.” That is to say, suffering in the Other can be made useful and meaningful by acknowledging the “suffering in me for the unjustifiable suffering of the other.”18 Slavoj Žižek’s notion of subjective violence, too, resonates with Levinas’s critique of the norms that construct socially acceptable violence through which the suffering of the Other can be justified. Žižek argues that subjective violence is generally presented in the media and popular discourses as a brutal exposition of violence, like terrorist violence, which is carried out by an identifiable subject. Such violence, however, conceals what Žižek calls objective violence: “the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation.”19 Posed in another way, subjective violence – even if it involves a clearly identifiable subject by definition – is seen as perturbation of “a non-violent zero level,”20 as violence against a subjective state of normalcy. Objective violence is one that is “inherent to this ‘normal’ state of things”;21 it is a violence that penetrates objectively material conditions of subjects whose visibility is minimalized, and whose suffering is normalized. On the basis of this distinction, Žižek reformulates Walter Benjamin’s notion of divine violence as a response to objective violence, one that is distinguished from ideologically motivated violence – be it terrorist, state, or revolutionary violence:
When those outside the structured social field strike “blindly,” demanding and enacting immediate justice/vengeance, this is divine violence. Recall, a decade or so ago, the panic in Rio de Janeiro when crowds descended from the favelas into the rich part of the city and started looting and burning supermarkets. This was indeed divine violence.22
Both Levinas’s and Žižek’s injunctions on the violence of the oppressed and the ethics of suffering have significant implications for the politics of representation in postcolonial literature. In the context of anticolonial liberation struggles, for instance, Frank Schulze-Engler identifies enchanted solidarity as the unconditional support extended by academic, intellectual, and artistic communities to a group of people on the basis of the collective, systemic injustices brought forth by oppressive regimes. For Schulze-Engler, there is a marked tendency in Euro-American academic circles, particularly in postcolonial studies, to conflate intellectual practice with political solidarity.23 Put simply, when a white Euro-American academic writes about the poor, dispossessed subalterns in the former colonies, there is the self-imposed obligation to treat the objects of their study as victims of a certain postcolonial condition and even to extend this charitable disposition into something of an ennobling gesture – a form of implicated, if not cathartic political solidarity. Such unconditional solidarity not only is uninvited, but fails to anticipate, or even account for, the internal disunity of what he calls the “disenchanted solidarity” of the anticolonial liberation movements at large, as evinced in the unfulfilled promises of anticolonial nationalism. Consider, for instance, Leela Gandhi’s enchanted solidarity for the Burmese people when Aung San Suu Kyi appeared to be a promising opposition to the military junta. Such enchanted solidarity, which saw Suu Kyi’s Buddhism as a panacea for the Western import of democracy, has failed to anticipate the violence unleashed upon the Rohingya Muslims in 2016–2017 in the name of Buddhism.24 The enchanted solidarity for the putatively right causes at the time of its conception often results in muted responses to a trail of disenchanted legacies left behind by not only Suu Kyi, but other statespersons of similar stature: Robert Mugabe, Muamar Ghaddafi, Hồ Chí Minh, Fidel Castro, or Hugo Chavez. Here, the disenchanted legacy of such leaders – of broken promises, fractured and dispossessed communities – must be distinguished from disenchanted solidarity. If the former is the void left over by the failed revolutionary promises, the latter is a solidarity that is both indispensable and conditional. For instance, in the case of the Burmese junta’s takeover, Aung San Suu Kyi today remains the only political hope for most Burmans despite the horrors and bloodshed under her watch, and despite her genocidal legacy. Such disenchanted solidarity, however, must be irrevocably conditional: it is subject to vigilance, withdrawal, or disapproval when its recipients fail to meet the expectations of their benefactors.
These conceptual incursions into post-9/11 discourses on terrorist violence, I shall contend, create space for new avenues of theoretical inquiry into the organized violence of nonstate actors. For over five decades, the Naxalite insurgency in India has come to be portrayed as a redemptive ideology, derivative of the state’s systemic violence, an extremist organization driven by the sovereign ambitions of subregional, secular, and even tribal nationalism. Such views, often reinforced by the enchanted solidarity for the oppressed, fail to register the ideological and organizational fractures that undermine the liberationist tendencies of the nonstate violence from below.
(Dis)enchanted Solidarity and Useless Suffering
Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (2014) is one such peculiar case in which Supratik, the rebel son of the Ghosh’s, steals jewelry from his family to fund his revolutionary activities. When the police investigator asks him why an “upper”-caste boy like him, who had everything provided for him by his parents, would take the path of a peasant revolution, Supratik gets on a moral high horse: “‘Because who else will be the defense counsel for humanity?… For those who don’t even know that something can be done? That they can fight back? That their expendable lives needn’t be fodder, generation after generation?’”25 The police investigator calls the whole act a bluff and shoots back:
“If you feel so much for the poor and the needy, why did you let your cook, Madan, take the blame when it was you who had stolen your aunt’s jewelry?… So clearly no fighting Madan’s corner, for you? His life was not fodder, as you put it, to you middle-class boys playing around with some dangerous fireworks? Tsk-tsk.” 26
And, truth be told, Supratik knew very well before he stole the jewelry that their loyal servant, the man who had carried him as a boy in his arms, would be the one the family would be pointing their finger at. In a way, Supratik’s revolutionary idealism was doomed even before it had begun: to better the lives of the oppressed, he had to sacrifice the life of his own family servant. The political solidarity that is enchantingly romantic must be subsidized by a disenchantingly tragic effect. Supratik’s moral predicament provides a fitting opening to the world of (dis)enchanted solidarities in the three novels under discussion, all of which bear witness to the cultural history of Naxalism from the 1960s to the 1990s and, in doing so, offer an alternative literary history of the insurgency from the vantage point of nonstate actors.
The first set of novels, Diti Sen’s Red Skies and Falling Stars and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, feature urban middle-class protagonists who join the Naxalite movement by empathizing with the objective violence of oppressed, unidentifiable subjects, against the subjective violence of identifiable agents – police, paramilitary forces, insurgents, fighters, or their victims. In Sen’s novel, which spans four decades of Naxalite insurgency, the youngest of three sisters, Rumi, narrates the spread of the Naxalite uprising into the affluent neighborhood of Moghal Sarai in Calcutta. Like the entire student generation of the 1960s, Amu, Rumi’s older sister, begins to challenge her bourgeois privileges, “questioning why we had everything while the others we saw around us had nothing.”27 For the sisters Rumi and Shiela, their subjective response to the Naxalites as seasoned “goondas … having a field day”28 effectively undermines the objective conditions that led to the insurgency. As in Rumi’s confession, whenever Amu spoke of the “man-made suffering all around us … Shiela and I would gape at her, wondering who she was referring to, wondering who were these ‘others’ she spoke of. We couldn’t see anyone suffering all that much in our lives.”29
However, it is only after Amu’s mysterious disappearance from the family that Rumi’s perspective shifts from that of denial of oppression to disenchanted solidarity for the oppressed. Amu’s unwarranted decision to join the Naxalites not only disrupts the stability of Rumi’s bourgeois upbringing, but, in doing so, it enables her to understand the violence that led to her sister’s path. Retracing Amu’s journey into the insurgency areas through her narrative eye, Rumi begins to empathize with the plight of the Adivasis who “had been driven increasingly farther from their original habitats [and] were terrorized and threatened, resulting in abject poverty.”30 Yet Rumi’s increasing solidarity for the Adivasis remains firmly disenchanted insofar as she refuses to sacrifice her bourgeois privileges for the welfare of the former. Years after Amu’s disappearance, for instance, Rumi resents the improvements made in the lives of Adivasis due to the Naxalite presence near her family’s holiday home in Ghatshila, rural Bihar, and when the Adivasi housekeeper Koda’s son Mangaldas shows no signs of servitude or submissiveness like his father, she finds him irreverent and arrogant.31 Although Rumi acknowledges the connection between the change of behavior among the servants and the arrival of Naxalism in the region, she refuses to see the lives of her housekeeper Koda’s family under better patronage than that of her own family.
Amu’s stint with the Naxalites ends with the death of her nameless husband in combat, and, following her capture and release from prison, she moves to French Provence. Upon her return following her father’s death, she reflects on her decision to leave the insurgency: “Yes, I did believe in it, but once we were in the countryside and I saw the killing, the brutality, the terror that was being unleashed in the name of civil justice, it was very difficult, I couldn’t reconcile the two, the ideals and the method used.”32 Evidently, Amu’s endorsement of the insurgency, too, grows into disenchanted solidarity, as she invokes the visible, subjective violence of the Naxalites as the source of her disillusionment, as opposed to the violence inflicted upon the invisible Adivasi subjects that drew her to Naxalism in the first place. For the middle-class urbanites living the plush life in Tollygunge, to join the Naxalites is a cathartic choice, but not for those who take up arms for the lack of a better choice. For Amu, her enchanted solidarity arises out of the suffering in/for herself, that is, the urge to expunge her middle-class guilt:33 “Perhaps I wanted to get caught and when we did, it was a relief.”34 Like the syndrome of buyer’s remorse in consumer culture, in the throes of the insurgency, Amu’s remorse for her enchanted solidarity becomes all the more repugnant, as she begins to crave the middle-class comforts she willingly chose to sacrifice for a bigger cause: “I used to lie in my sagging, string cot with the blue, plastic covering shielding us from the wind and the rain, and I would think of you two and Moghul Serai and I knew there was no way going back.”35 Though the allure of a life in the Tollygunge cocoon where discussions on Tagore and visits to Santiniketan or to the holiday house filled with servants was enticing when faced with the dirty revolutionary work under the cover of tarpaulin sheets, Amu nonetheless wonders “why she had practically grown up in Santhal Parganas without ever entering a single village or a Santhal dwelling or realizing what she saw and knew now.”36 Rather than reflecting on the Adivasis’ plight that she evidently recognizes, Amu’s solidarity becomes self-centric, if not entirely narcissistic, as she grows obsessed with her own place in the world, one that gradually dawns upon her as alien and unfamiliar.
Without ever resolving this guilt-ridden solidarity of the middle-class urbanite sisters, Sen complicates the novel by introducing a diasporic character named Ishaan – a distant cousin of the sisters from Canada – who arrives in India to do research on Naxalism. Ishaan’s character enters as Amu disappears from the narrative; in chapter 18, Sen interjects an experimental move, in which Ishaan assumes the narrator’s role.37 Consequently, Ishaan’s narrative eye provides a first-hand account of the suffering Adivasi characters such as Parboti and Kanai, whom he encounters during his research in the Naxalite-controlled areas of Birbhum. Yet Ishaan finds it irresistible to compare Amu’s solidarity with the violence inflicted upon undeniable subjects in the world of Parboti:
From my Mashi to Parboti. The ever widening gap yawned in my face. Yet they were bound by the common cause. The beautiful, fragile, orchid-like, upper-class Amu and the hardbitten, unlettered, underprivileged, driven Parboti. Revolutionaries? Anti-socials? Criminals? Or simply, women, humans, fighting a continued battle to balance the order of things, to even out the distribution of justice?38
As Ishaan’s narrative eye helps justify Amu’s enchanted solidarity for the Naxalites, Sen goes on to reinstate Rumi as the homodiegetic narrator in the final chapter to reflect upon Ishaan’s death in a “police encounter”:
Could his death be the start of a public quest to reinstate those forgotten people, could it become an episode which shone the spotlight on how innocents were being slaughtered in the crossfire between the elected and the rebels? Could his death have a significance that went far beyond its immediate mundane reality, to become a symbol of all that was going so wrong in our society, of all that needed to be put right?39
In portraying Ishaan as the ultimate martyr of the Naxalite insurgency, Rumi’s judgment fails to capture the divine violence of the dispossessed self that Žižek defines as
a decision (to kill, to risk or lose one’s own life) made in the absolute solitude, with no cover in the big Other … The motto of divine violence is fiat iustitia, pereat mundus: it is through justice, the point of non-distinction between justice and vengeance, that the “people” (the anonymous part of no-part) imposes its terror and makes other parts pay the price – the Judgment Day for the long history of oppression, exploitation, suffering.40
In Sen’s narrative, neither Rumi nor Amu nor Ishaan represent the solitude of the recipients of objective violence, as they tendentiously invoke “the big Other” in the name of enchanted, disenchanted, and even guilt-ridden solidarity. It is only the likes of Kanai and Parboti – the tribal youth who dies in combat, but remains conspicuously absent from Rumi’s reflections on the martyrdom of “forgotten people” – who represent the “absolute solitude … demanding and enacting immediate justice/vengeance.”41
Žižek is careful to distinguish divine violence from the violence in the name of “any other Leftist dream of a ‘pure’ event” in which violence is relegated to a revolutionary organization or a sovereign authority of mythical state founding law. Žižek further asserts that divine violence is essentially one that breeds the very dispossession (as solitude) of the violating subject. By virtue of this, any form of external solidarity arising from enchanted or disenchanted subject positions is essentially a partial, if not a mythic, response to subjective violence, as in the case of middle-class characters who represent the Naxalites in Sen’s novel.
Like Amu, Ishaan’s pull toward Naxalism, too, is driven by his guilt-ridden solidarity, owing much to his diasporic estrangement from his native roots. For the postcolonial diasporic subjects, a sense of exilic loss, coupled with the self-imposed obligation of ‘giving back’ to their motherland, often leads to overidentification with their native roots.42 In the context of Naxalism, any solidarity arising out of such migrant quest for national-rootedness remains doubly distanced from its objects of suffering, or the subjects of invisible violence: the Adivasis. Sure enough, Parboti, the tribal Maoist, gives Ishaan a mouthful when he begins to patronize her: “You big babus from the big cities, you come with some handouts and give us a tubewell [a water well] here and schoolhouse there but do our lives really change for the better?”43
The other diasporic Naxalite, Amu, after a few years in France, grows nostalgic of her insurgent roots: “‘It wasn’t what it is now. We had ideals, we were trying for social change, we didn’t kill without a reason. We never harmed ordinary folk.’”44 For Amu, her sense of “giving back” to the nation remains fulfilled so long as she contributes her part for Naxalism at the right moment and under the right circumstances. Ishaan, however, who is deprived of this felicitous economy of guilt-purging, give-and-take nationalism, grows vulnerable to the risk of overidentification:
I wasn’t about to become a closet Naxal sympathizer but Fate pitched me right in the middle of a situation that had dogged my mother’s family for fifty years, in spite of their best efforts to distance themselves from it. Now that I knew that the little village I had grown fond of was directly connected with the Dadas, I had a choice to make. I could pack my bags and get out fast or … I could stay on a couple of more days and understand the ground realities.45
Like Ishaan’s doubly distanced diasporic solidarity for his roots, Rumi’s own solidarity becomes equally estranged, and thereby disenchanted, by way of her implication into the Naxalite insurgency through (the loss of) Ishaan and Amu. Rather than reflecting on her own implicated class privileges, Rumi mediates her solidarity through the two diasporic characters. The constant deferral of representation through the mouths and heads of the other characters in Rumi’s narrative world is marked by a subtle gesture toward the emplotting of disenchanted solidarity in Sen’s novel. Ishaan’s own convoluted views on the Naxalites make this evident:
From the original Naxalites of the 60’s and the 70’s, the ones like my eldest Mashi who fought, maybe with misplaced loyalty but heroically, for the dispossessed and the deprived, not in a very organized manner, their ideals pinned firmly to their breasts, to the Maoists of the 21st century who, devoid of any ideals or scruples, murdered and marauded any one and anything that stood in their way, used even children to gain their political supremacy. They created a wave of fear through threats and extortion, establishing parallel governments in remote places, methodologically, through a precisely organized network spanning the country, using superior technology.46
Ishaan’s wavering between Naxalite violence as both heroic and misplaced, and their method as marauding yet precise is a far cry from the unconditional, enchanted solidarity with which he begins his work in the Santhal communities. Despite its political cogency, however, the latent move from enchanted to disenchanted solidarity in Sen’s novel fails to transcribe the suffering of the Adivasi subjects as useful. For Levinas, all suffering is meaningless, or rather, a sense of meaninglessness resides in all suffering. It is for this reason that suffering cannot be contained into a shape, form, or concept via self-understanding. For suffering is both unassumable and unseizable; out of this very unassumability and unseizability it creates an opening toward its “externality,” which is the source of all alterity. This externality, for Levinas, lies in the encounter with the face of the other; it is the other’s face that provides us with a “half opening, an opening of alterity: ‘wherever a moan, a cry, a groan or sigh happens there is the original call for aid from the other ego whose alterity, whose exteriority promises salvation.’”47
Such externality is lost on the middle-class, diasporic characters in Sen’s novel, who become literally immune to the face(s) of the Adivasi Others, as it were, let alone to their cries or groans. After reading Ishaan’s death in the news, for instance, Rumi recounts:
I look mechanically at the close-up again, hoping against hope but this time Ishaan’s face takes shape, slowly, clearly. It is his face. Even though it is stained and disfigured, it is him in the photograph.… But as if hypnotized, I have to look at the newspaper and I see the same picture is still looking up at me. Amongst all the jumble of words I make out that there was a Santhal girl and others, amongst them two well-known Maoist leaders also killed in the “encounter,” but it matters very little to me.48
Not all substitutional suffering, however, “makes sense,”49 as in the case of Rumi, who painstakingly reconstructs a familiar face from a “stained and disfigured” photograph, but fails to acknowledge the visible evidence of the dead Adivasis. Rumi’s suffering, in that sense, is not for-the-other (“sense”) but by-the-other (“non-sense”) – an other who is a mirror, an extension of herself, rather than the radical other.50
Featuring yet another urban middle-class family affected by Naxalite violence, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, too, fails to resolve such representational impasses of the agency as well as the agents of divine violence. Udayan, the younger brother of Subhash – sons of a railway clerk living in Calcutta – makes no secret of his enchanted solidarity for the Naxalbari: “Of course it was worth it. They rose up. They risked everything. People with nothing. People those in power do nothing to protect.”51 He goes as far as to challenge his brother Subhash to imagine: “If you were born into that life, what would you do?”52
A year after the Naxalbari uprising in 1967, Udayan joins the insurgency, leaving his wife Gauri with her in-laws. Subhash, who moves to Rhode Island to do a PhD in marine chemistry, returns to Calcutta after Udayan’s execution in a police encounter, marries a pregnant Gauri, and takes her back to Rhode Island to save her from his conservative parents and harassment by the police about her possible involvement with the Naxalites. Soon after Gauri’s move to Rhode Island, where she gives birth to Bela, the narrative focus shifts from Naxalism to the effects of Udayan’s death on the three generations of their family. As the narrator recounts: “Udayan had given his life to a movement that had been misguided, that had caused only damage, that had already been dismantled. The only thing he’d altered was what their family had been.”53 Unable to reconcile herself with Udayan’s death, and unwilling to consummate her marriage, Gauri leaves her daughter Bela with Subhash to pursue her academic ambitions in California. As Bela enters her teens, she, too, withdraws from her stepfather and leaves him to work on a farm, leading a life without fixed address or insurance – a mark of Udayan’s renegade character. Given that Udayan’s death becomes the source of the instability, suffering, and loss in the three generations of his family, I concur with Jennifer Marquardt’s reading that, in The Lowland,
[t]his understanding of personal historical trajectories is also applied to political historical events. While Gauri indulges in constructing a version of her life that contains Udayan, the novel poses the same question of the impossibly idealistic and violent Naxalite movement.54
Throughout The Lowland, the failure of Naxalism in its idealistic pursuit of equality and justice provides the dramatic buffer necessary for the agony of familial failures in maintaining stability, unity, and harmony. Marquardt draws attention to the connection between these parallel narratives, familial and political:
While it is possible to understand the Naxalite movement and Udayan himself as idealized entities and their subsequent failures and deaths as historical events, Gauri can only comprehend each as the moment when history shifted in the wrong direction, away from the intended trajectory of what should have been her life: marital bliss, an equalized India that she might never have left.55
Nina Martyris takes this view of failed idealism a step further by arguing that “Udayan’s family is shattered not just by his death but by what he has done for the revolution. If three generations of a family can be crippled by a single act of violence, asks The Lowland, what sort of utopia will be built out of blood?”56 In my view, although these readings accurately capture the superimposition of political emotions on familial ones, they shy away from the novel’s complicity with pedagogic nationalist aspirations for stability, unity, and continuity. The disunity of Udayan’s family in The Lowland, for instance, can be read as an allegorical representation of the threat posed by Naxalism to the desired homogeneity of India. Yet, given that the narrative constantly strives to reunite a broken family, Udayan’s refusal to concede the internal ruptures of the family can be compared to pedagogic discourses of nationalism that fail to capture the deferred nationalism of the Naxalites. As a result, not only is Udayan’s death in The Lowland rendered as a failed case of divine violence, but it makes a compelling case for Levinas’s useless suffering. For instance, just moments before his surrender and execution, a dejected Udayan reckons: “in this case it had fixed nothing, helped no one. In this case there was to be no revolution. He knew this now. If he was worth nothing, then why was he so desperate to save himself? Why, in the end, did the body not obey the brain?”57
Like Amu’s and Ishaan’s fate in Sen’s novel, it is his enchanted solidarity for Naxalism that becomes Udayan’s undoing. With no inkling or insight into the objective violence of the peasants, tribals, and insurgents who rebelled, except for the theoretical knowledge that “[t]hey risked everything. People with nothing,”58 The Lowland portrays Udayan as the sole representative of the Naxalites through the lens of visible, subjective violence. As the novel invests heavily in the idiom of Udayan’s death as the ultimate outcome of Naxalism and constructs a drama of middle-class familial pathos on that basis, it leaves no room for the subjects of objective violence to represent their pathos, their deaths, and their suffering, which is expiatory, divine, and nontranscendental.
For Levinas, the secular theodicy that justifies the Other’s suffering as useless, such as the suffering of the tribals who risked everything, can only be challenged by a suffering that is no longer “for nothing.”59 In The Lowland, however, Udayan’s death fails to evoke such interhuman perspective forged by an engagement with radical alterity on a number of accounts. For Gauri, it is the futility of Udayan’s death that determines her own suffering, which only results in her unforgiving choices that make the latter’s death even more meaningless: “After his death began the internal knowledge that came from remembering him, still trying to make sense of him.… Without that there would be nothing to haunt her. No grief.”60 For the narrator, however, Udayan himself fails to “suffer the unjustifiable suffering” of the peasants, Adivasis, or his fellow Naxalites, whom he invokes as the ultimate benefactors of his revolutionary path, but whose existence he barely acknowledges. Not just the suffering of the peasants or the fellow Naxalites, but Udayan’s utter lack of concern for the class enemy is what renders the narrative as Gauri’s own useless suffering. The transmigration of this useless suffering from Udayan to Gauri is not simply Udayan’s own undoing, but concerns Gauri’s implication in the policeman’s murder by association. When Udayan asks Gauri to keep a tab on the days the policeman across the street is off-duty, Gauri relays that information to her husband innocently, which proves vital to the execution of Udayan’s plan:
He’d watched the constable’s clothing darken, the look of astonishment, the bulge of the eyes, the grimace of pain that seized his face. And then the enemy was no longer a policeman. No longer a husband, or a father. No longer a version of someone who’d once stricken Subhash with a broken putter outside the Tolly Club. No longer alive. A simple dagger was enough to kill him. A tool intended to cut up fruit. Not the loaded gun being aimed now behind Udayan’s head.61
This brutal murder of their neighbor across their Tollygunge house balcony becomes a recurrent theme in the novel, as if haunting Gauri’s entire life trajectory and shaping her bitter relationship with Bela, her inability to forge a meaningful relationship with Subhash, and the world at large. In fact, Gauri’s disenchantment seems to stem more from the policeman’s suffering from the dagger’s blow, than, say Udayan’s clean death from a loaded gun at a point-blank range. Even if Gauri’s suffering for the constable’s death may appear useful, Udayan’s is not, as his ideology precludes him from seeing the oppressors as human figures worthy of suffering, much like the Chinese peasant who breaks into the ribcage of his oppressor to see if he has a heart: “that revolutionary violence opposed oppression. That it was a force of liberation, humane.”62 It is only Udayan’s act of killing that is considered liberating and humane, not the recognition of such humanity in the perceived enemy. Thus, to be a true revolutionary, it was expected of him to do service to humanity by “kill[ing] a policeman. They were symbols of brutality, trained by foreigners. They are not Indians, they do not belong to India, Charu Majumdar said. Each annihilation would spread the revolution. Each would be a forward step.”63
Curiously enough, Gauri’s memory of Udayan’s crime is triggered by the distant death of another revolutionary, none other than the cofounder of the Naxalbari insurgency: Kanu Sanyal. Upon hearing the news of Sanyal’s suicide in his tiny hut, a strange sense of catharsis descends upon her: “What she’d seen from the terrace in Tollygunge. What she’d done to Bela. The image of a policeman passing beneath a window, holding his son by the hand.”64 After the custodial murder of his acolyte Charu Majumdar by the West Bengal police, Sanyal dissociated from the insurgency and became a law-abiding citizen, having served his prison sentence in the 1970s. When Gauri learns through a fellow academic that Sanyal is dead, she grows obsessed with every biographical detail of his story: his life as a modest man, a government clerk who dedicated his life to plantation workers and rickshaw pullers and who, at the end of his life, owned no more than a pair of pajamas and a few cooking utensils, alongside framed pictures of Marx and Lenin. Apart from the minute account of Sanyal’s celebrated life, much-grieved for by his admirers, Gauri reconstructs the most graphic details of his death:
A seventy-eight-year-old man, wearing an undershirt and cotton pajamas, hanging from a nylon rope. The chair he’d used to secure the rope still stood in front of him. It had not been knocked over. No spasm, no final reaction, had kicked it away. His head was cocked to the right, the back of his neck exposed above the undershirt.… For a few days she was unable to rid her mind of the image. She could not stop thinking about the final passivity of a man who’d refused, until the moment his life ended, to bow his head.65
How could we, then, read Gauri’s empathic reception of Sanyal’s suffering over her husband’s useless death? Perhaps the answer lies not simply in Udayan’s death but in the life Sanyal chose to lead, as a pauper fighting for the paupers – a choice that was lost on Udayan. Though she never met the man, Sanyal’s death becomes etched into Gauri’s imagination: “She could not rid herself of the emotion it churned up in her. She felt a terrible weight, combined with a void.”66 Here, Gauri’s own distant suffering imparted by the suffering of Sanyal serves as an affective cue to the “useful suffering” of the untouchable protagonist in Diptendra Raychaudhuri’s Seeing through the Stones. From Gauri to Sanyal, and from Ishan to Parboti, the novels’ preoccupation with the limits of middle-class solidarity, the statist discourse of portraying middle-class individuals as misguided, lumpen youths swayed by romantic ideals, eventually gives way to the ethical burden, however enchanting, carried over by the upper-caste protagonists, and their attempts – albeit unsuccessful at times – to pass the mantle to the subaltern classes. True to the social history of the Naxalite movement, which was ideologically bolstered by urban intellectuals who sought to hand over the reins to the peasants and tribal cadres to manage the public expectations and the perceptions of the insurgency in the 1960s and 1970s, Raychaudhuri’s novel features a Dalit protagonist who not only receives the mantle of revolution from the upper castes, but actively proclaims it as his right to rebel.
Divine Violence and Useful Suffering
Unlike the urban middle-class protagonists of Sen’s and Lahiri’s narratives, Raychaudhuri’s novel – a lesser-known, locally published and circulated work – provides enabling perspectives on the divine violence and ethical suffering of the lower castes, untouchables, and tribal people who are drawn to the Naxalite insurgency. True to the metaphor of the novel’s title, the story of Seeing through the Stones is framed around an event in which an untouchable man throws a stone at the gates of an upper-caste haveli (mansion) in response to the injustices visited upon his family and community. Like the synesthetic impasse of not being able to see through stones, our stone-throwing protagonist Mahendra Chamar fails to see through the violent trajectory his impulsive act sets in motion.
In stark contrast to the enchanted solidarity of Sen’s and Lahiri’s protagonists, Chamar joins the Naxalite insurgency to avenge the rape and murder of his sister-in-law, but grows increasingly disillusioned by the senselessness of the violence he witnesses as a member of various splinter groups between the 1970s and 1990s. While situating his characters in the political vacuum that allows both the Maoists and the state functionaries to negotiate their respective claims and entitlements in the insurgency-affected areas, Raychaudhuri’s dense yet carefully crafted narrative debunks the “parallel sovereignty” model of the nonfictional works; that is, the Maoist model of sovereignty mirrors that of the Indian state. When a fellow Maoist questions why they should move their bases because a road is being built, Chamar, instead of halting the state’s encroachment, responds: “Our interest should always be subservient to the greater interest of people. Comrade Shankar was wrong. We are not here to serve the interest of an organisation that itself is an end.”67 Not only does such intermediary positioning between the state and the people diffuse the antistate character that is commonly attributed to the Maoists, but in doing so, it gestures toward the internal disunity within the insurgency. When asked by a member of a rival Maoist group why he excludes the poor upper castes from the fold of insurgency, and thinks of revolution “in terms of castes only,”68 Chamar answers: “A poor Brahmin has his pride, his education and caste-culture. Even if he has not gone to school … he would surely inherit these from the family.… He can perform puja and earn something. He is acceptable to all. He lives in a world so far away from the world of Untouchables!”69
These views, however, are not endorsed by the very ideology of the “Emancipation” group, which would later reprimand Chamar for killing the landlords in support of his caste-war theory.70 Although other splinter groups of the Maoist insurgency such as the Maoist Communist Organization (MCO) of Bihar operated along caste lines, Chamar would join another rival group called Party Unity (Bengal and Bihar), which worked toward building a “mass base” along class lines, while distancing itself from the ideology of the earlier Naxalite outfit, CPI (ML): of annihilation of the class enemy. If the former believed that it is important to educate the masses before the class enemies such as the police, the state, and the landlords could be attacked, the latter held that the annihilation of class enemies must be the highest priority of the insurgency, in the footsteps of Mao Zedong.
The various internal fissures within the Naxalite-Maoist organizational nexus, which closely resonate with real-life events, and their ideological orientations to caste, class, mass lines, and armed economism, as Chamar concedes, are evidently the greatest weakness of the insurgency: “in my life time, [if] I see the Maoists have united … I will die with a hope.”71 Curiously, Chamar arrives at this conclusion after flirting with every Maoist outfit in post-independence India: the Communist Party of India (CPI), CPI (ML), Emancipation Group, Red Salute Group, Party Unity, and the MCO. As Chamar moves from one organization to another, he grows increasingly dissatisfied with their ideologies, which undermine the conditions of objective violence that inspired him to turn to a revolutionary path in the first place: he leaves the CPI because the party dissuades him from protesting the killing of a food rioter; he abandons the Emancipation Group as it fails to respond to the caste violence that affects his untouchable tola (settlement); and he launches his own faction called Red Salute to respond to the violence that affects his immediate family – the rape and murder of his sister-in-law by upper-caste men, whom he executes in public.
At the outset, the mass killing of all male members of the family may appear anything but divine, or so thinks Comrade Karma, who recounts Chamar’s story to a journalist: “Comrade Mahendra urged us to retaliate against those who have committed a crime, not against the members of the offender’s family,” but in the case of his family, Karma reflects: “We don’t know why only once in his life he consented.”72 True to its defiant nature, however, divine violence is neither law-founding nor law-obeying. It simply does not behave like courts or legal institutions would. As a case in point, Chamar makes a judgment call to kill all the five male members of the family because the actual rapist(s) of his sister-in-law could be one, two, or all the five of them, given their tainted reputation in relation to the lower-caste women in the village. Thus, as Žižek reminds us:
Those annihilated by divine violence are fully and completely guilty: they are not sacrificed, since they are not worthy of being sacrificed to and accepted by God – they are annihilated without being made a sacrifice. Of what are they guilty? Of leading a mere (natural) life. Divine violence purifies the guilty not of guilt but of law, because law is limited to the living: it cannot reach beyond life to touch what is in excess of life, what is more than mere life.73
Such expiating view of divine violence is reaffirmed by the two missionary workers at the local charity hospital. The meekly Lillian is privy to a confession by a Naxalite that he had done something unlawful, and her coworker Agnus is less enchanted by the law of the land:
if liberating a large section of population from their sub-human levels calls for a radical … I’m prepared to be radical. As far as I am concerned, you won’t be able to serve God without looking at us. Law is not sacrosanct, for it was the law of the land that crucified Jesus, Judas was on the side of the law, wasn’t he?… I got this idea from you just now.74
Here, Agnus’s imputation that not all law is justice, and even the divine law anointed by God could be unjust, opens space for reading divine violence not as a force of “re-establishing the equilibrium of justice” but as a “sign of the injustice of the world, of the world being ethically ‘out of joint.’”75 Chamar reflects on this out of joint ethics, and time and again fails to give an ideological shape to his own sense of injustice. Although, as noted earlier, he desires a unity among Maoists, he does not make any concerted attempt toward forging a unified ideology. Rather, he allows the ethically “out of joint system” to unravel itself:
I’m a Marxist, I believed that the end justifies the means. But I am not so sure. What happens if you take up the wrong means assuring that you would reach the coveted end, while you actually work for something else? It has happened in Russia. It is happening in China now under a new leadership. Rightists masquerading as Communists have taken control. 76
If divine violence is a sign of the justice that has lost equilibrium in the world – a sign without a signified or fixed meaning – to arrive at a criterion for violence as divine is counterintuitive. Because there is “no big Other guaranteeing its divine nature,”77 any attempt at delimiting its expiatory, solitary, and retributive character risks disrupting its disenchanting disequilibrium, thereby reverting to enchanted, revolutionary solidarity. Chamar makes his disenchanted solidarity for the revolutionary “big Other” abundantly clear, and goes on to chastise the arrogation of redemptive violence by the Maoist splinter groups. In a caste war between the MCO, the police, and the private army of upper castes, the insurgents kill about sixty upper-caste members, and when one of their comrades justifies these killings as a retaliation to police brutality, Chamar disapproves of their actions: “It is expected from them, the police and the administration. They will kill us because we are poor, and more so because we are low caste men and women. But Maoists should not behave like them.”78 Chamar’s plea to the Maoists to hold a morally higher ground than the agents of mythic violence derives its authority from his disenchanted, in that sense, conditional solidarity for all revolutionary violence. Unlike the mythic violence of the state, which requires sacrifice to make an example of the law, and calls upon the enchanted solidarity of its subjects under the law, disenchanted solidarity expiates the guilty through divine violence, and attempts to limit the damage by erasing all its traces. Indeed, the defining moment of Chamar’s foray into the insurgency, as in his innocent query addressed to his mentor, serves no big Other than himself, and leaves no trace of sacrifice or an idolatry authority than himself: “Do the Communists want to demolish all the havelis where the landlords live?”79 Here, Chamar’s thrust for redemptive violence is pure, divine, and unalloyed not only because it demands “immediate justice/vengeance”80 but also because it redeems the unity and the dignity81 of the oppressed subject, as in the words of Chamar’s admirer who goes on to quote Fanon: “violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.”82
In Seeing through the Stones, it is not merely the Naxalites but also the postcolonial state itself that is represented as a diversified, diffused, and nonsovereign entity. The state functionaries in the police force, such as Pascal and Ashok Sharma, hold an entirely different view in dealing with Naxalites than that of the state: “the Naxalite problem should be handled with care,” though the “Special Task Force believes the Naxalites are bandits, and should be killed.”83 Ashok Sharma grows progressively sympathetic to the Naxalite cause, particularly after a tribal police officer, whom he believes had every reason to join the Naxalites instead of the police force, risks his life to save Sharma’s. Following this incident, Sharma encourages his wife Rani to open a medical clinic in the Naxal-controlled areas, and goes so far as to challenge the views of his superiors on the root cause of Naxalism: “I have seen young girls, dressed like, throwing biscuits at the footpath and enjoying the fight over the crumbs. No empathy, no consideration. Given a chance why shouldn’t those footpath-dwellers turn into Naxalites?”84
Unlike enchanted solidarity, which merely responds to the violence of the identifiable subjects, such empathetic reception of the Other’s suffering through one’s own suffering is premised on the objective violence visited upon unidentifiable subjects, which precedes both insurgency and counterinsurgency. In Chamar’s case, too, the suffering of suffering is reciprocated as he foils the Naxalite plot to kill Sharma and repents the suffering caused by his actions: “I killed my first wife by indifference.… I killed Damni by making wrong moves. And I have sacrificed my son.”85 Yet the usefulness of Chamar’s suffering lies not merely in the apologetic gesture to the Other’s suffering, but in its redemptive force, which responds to the immediacy of violence:
Whatever I did was correct. I had no other option.… They will address me as “tu” … because we are not human beings. Even younger upper caste boys addressed my grandfather, who was a doddery old man, as “tu.” They will address me as “tu” now, because I do not possess arms anymore.86
The equation of arms with human dignity, and violence as the weapon of the weak, makes a compelling case for insurgent cultures among the most deprived and dispossessed communities in India and beyond. Chamar even goes a step further and floats a new theory that armed insurgency is possible without arms: once a group of oppressed people have been sufficiently awakened and made aware of the violence visited upon them, they would themselves become potent armed agents. This radical possibility of unarmed insurgency exposes what Žižek’s critics have identified as the hidden flaw of his reading of divine violence as a “shock therapy” to systemic and subjective violence. Harry van der Linden, for one, observes that Žižek adds more violence to the problem of violence rather than attenuating it, and even risks romanticizing divine violence as an eternal dialectic, a timeless template of resistance in the name of redemptive justice. Against this, Chamar’s conditional renouncement of armed violence, especially when a community becomes weaponized without the use of weapons, serves as a plea against the sort of neoliberal calls for arming the good guy with a gun against the bad guy with a gun – a cry heard throughout the industrialized part of the world, often with tragic results.87
In the journalistic and popular media accounts of Maoism, there is a marked tendency to respond to the subjective violence of the Naxalites in a way that fails to account for the fractures, fault lines, and inherent disunity of the insurgency. As this reading has shown, it is the unhinging nexus between objective violence and ethical, non-useless suffering that provides new perspectives on the divine violence of the Maoists, such as the brutal killing of Mahendra Karma, beyond the partial response evoked by the subjective violence in contemporary discourses on terrorism. Although the novels of Diti Sen and Jhumpa Lahiri reveal an internal shift from enchanted to disenchanted solidarity, their middle-class protagonists fall short of translating their disenchantment into ethical, useful suffering due to their privileged, inaccessible relationship to the domain of objective violence. Capitalizing on these shortcomings, Chamar’s character in Raychaudhuri’s novel captures the spirit of Naxalism in the late 1970s and the 1980s, which gradually moved away from West Bengal into Bihar and Southern Indian states where semi-feudalism and caste barriers were prevalent. The practice of untouchability in particular posed a grave challenge to upper-caste intellectual cadres within the Naxalite movement, as captured in Chamar’s characterization.
Such internal hierarchies, social disruptions, and competing solidarities for Maoism are well in tune with the systemic violence cultivated by the liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s, which promised class mobility and economic development for the middle classes, who found themselves at the crossroads of extending solidarity for the Naxalite insurgency as necessary violence – a moral compass to liberationist ideology – against the unchecked power of the feudal and bourgeois classes, and the lure of economic development. These tensions, combined with a vast number of peasants and agrarian castes who were left out of the economic liberalization process, make the insurgent causes all the more legible and intelligible, while simultaneously underscoring the disenchanting legacies of violence wherein it is ultimately the Adivasi or Dalit peasants who pay the price: the victims of the very violence they wield as a weapon. In this way, the clash of middle-class as well as subaltern interests specific to the social history of the liberal economic era makes both the legitimacy of insurgency and the public perceptions of such legitimacy equally, if equivocally compelling.
Consider, for instance, the solidarity that lurks beneath the mantle of Sudeep Chakravarti’s reportage, which documents a bizarre case where six Kui tribespeople from the Gajapati district of Orissa were arrested and charged with sedition for holding copies of the Bollywood film Lal Salaam, among other documents on revolutionary ideology.88 The plotline of the film goes something like this: upper-caste landlords beat up the brother of the female protagonist Rupi for asking wages for a hard day’s labor, and then they rape his sister. The siblings join the Naxalites and kill the rapists. Chakravarti follows up the arrests of tribespeople with more perturbing details: the local police have detained more than 1,000 people over charges as inane as collecting tendu leaves (used for rolling tobacco) worth no more than ten rupees. Chakravarti sums up the anger of the Adivasis akin to “the plot of Lal Salaam”: “The film has the power to ignite feelings as it records a time and space that, unfortunately for India, remains deeply relevant.”89
Chakravarti’s observations are significant not only for their uncanny parallels between film stories and realities in the insurgency areas but also for their dis/enchanted solidarity for the tribespeople whose anger and revolutionary feelings are being reignited by films. The solidus that separates the “dis” and “enchanted” part of solidarities here is more than a rhetorical injunction, for it bespeaks of Chakravarti’s Janus-faced solidarity for the violence of the tribespeople and the state: “I can understand why police officials in Orissa are concerned about finding copies of Lal Salaam among Maoist propaganda in the state.”90 Such noumenal defense of violence at both ends of the spectrum is central to many influential films on Naxalism. However, given Indian popular media’s penchant for melodrama and its all-encompassing approach to representing the extremity of affective polarities as well as the social realities that correspond to them, this subsequent section explores the nexus between facts, fiction, affects, justice, and solidarity in conjunction with the Naxalite insurgency.
Affects, Justice, and Solidarities in Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades and Sudeep Chakravarti’s Red Sun: Travels in a Naxalite Country
Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades, first published in the Indian magazine Outlook in 2010 as a special column and as a full-length book in 2011, is by far the most widely circulated nonfictional writing of Roy, one that singlehandedly brought the Maoist insurgency to the attention of a world readership, paving the way for a plethora of documentary and reportage works in its footsteps.91 Roy’s book challenged the prevailing journalistic standards and protocols in India, which had largely been confined to armchair reporting of (armed) conflicts and, in the process, drew much resentment from the journalistic community, who accused her of being a fictional journalist: “Just like her debut novel that catered to an urbane neo-colonial literary scene … [t]he Outlook cover story became her story instead of about the men and women of Dandakaranya. It also became a story with stock black and white characters.”92
Ironically, demanding a narrative beyond the stock characters is counterintuitive at best, if not entirely antithetical to the journalistic credo of reporting bare facts. Sure enough, Roy does base her narrative on facts and her real-life encounters with “the comrades,” and does precisely the opposite of what Nishtha Gautam claims: she uses the journalistic medium to portray both the factual and nonfactual, empirical and affective injustices visited upon the Indian Adivasis. Roy makes no secret of her solidarity for the dispossessed Adivasis, which is not necessarily based on a garland of facts but, as my reading here shows, on a litany of affective injustices that are often elusive to facts. Roy herself reads the generic distinction between facts and fiction “as puerile and not even worth getting into.”93 Instead, she offers a set of intuitive cues on the uses of fiction in contexts where facts may have been buried or suppressed, and facts that did not have a chance to live:
there are truths that are more than just facts, more than what would qualify, say, as human rights violations, terrifying ways in which a whole population is trying to negotiate with institutionalised repression and violence, just in an attempt to survive. Eventually, the battle is going to be about contesting stories. What story do you believe? What stories do we believe? What kinds of feelings do we value?94
Two aspects of Roy’s defense are worth emphasizing here. First, in the context of hostilities and conflicts bred by distrust, such as in Kashmir, where facts themselves are subject to distortion, fiction can produce more reliable stories of contestation. Second, in the battle of contested stories, Roy seems to suggest that all facts are subject to the arrogation and appropriation of storytelling devices, thus making the narrative dimension of journalism both desirable and indispensable. In much the same way, literary journalism is defined as “a literary endeavor which relies fundamentally on the writer’s subjectivity, seeking to decrease the distance between subject and object.”95 This move in literary journalism is bolstered by the bold vision of the publishing industry to blend the objective description of real-life events with the subjective and emotional depth privy to fictional characters. The treatment of language as a ‘straw man’ or ‘smokescreen’ for objective reality to be grasped by the journalist who remains detached from the narrative proper has gradually given way to the recasting of the authorial “self in writing by seeing it as a sort of mask, as a necessary fiction that allowed the writer to fight back against journalism’s limitations of style and genre,”96 and a growing realization among practitioners of literary journalism that “although they believe they are using language, language is also using them. In their unruly ambiguity, words imply things their writers never intended and bury every trace of the author’s individuality in the semantic background noise produced by generations of language users.”97
Roy’s unflinching faith in the semantic noise of narrative went as far as causing her to issue apologies for factual errors, while defending the validity of narrative truths in her writing. Consider, for instance, Roy’s corrigendum in one of her political essays on Gujarat violence in 2002:
In describing the brutal killing of Ehsan Jaffri, I have said that his daughters had been killed along with their father. It has subsequently been pointed out to me that this is not correct. Eyewitness accounts say that Ehsan Jaffri was killed along with his three brothers and two nephews. His daughters were not among the 10 women who were raped and killed in Chamanpura that day. I apologise to the Jaffri family for compounding their anguish. I’m truly sorry.98
Although the factual correction itself is salutary, it is the follow-up to the corrigendum that invited grunts and grumbles by the factual journalism camp: “This and other genuine errors in recounting the details of the violence in Gujarat in no way alters the substance of what journalists, fact-finding missions, or writers like myself are saying.”99
Roy’s insistence that a mere misquotation of facts cannot cancel out the semantic noise or alter the substance of truth makes the genre of literary journalism a potent intervention in, and beyond, representational politics. It asks such pressing questions as: are facts and representational politics the only means of drawing attention to matters of injustice? What of those deaths that could not be witnessed and captured by facts, or facts that were buried or suppressed? What units, measures, and scales could best distinguish a half-hungry peasant from a famished Adivasi? Who else than an imaginary scribe is best qualified to recollect the ruins of those tragedies and injustices that did not have a chance to appear before our witnessing eyes? Roy’s dismissal of the jaded debate between fact and fiction as puerile and unyielding is thoroughly endorsed by her fellow Booker Yann Martel: “Fiction may not be real, but it’s true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it.”100
It is these very emotional and psychological truths of literary devices that form the basis for my reading of deep solidarity and affective justice in Roy’s Walking with the Comrades. I read deep solidarity as one’s solidarity for situations that exceed our capacity to witness, verify, rationalize, or reason – an ensemble of other types and typologies such as decolonizing solidarity (Katie Boudreau Morris), insurgent solidarity (Q. N. Phạm and Persaud Méndez), affective injustices (Amia Srinivasan), reflective solidarity (Jodi Dean), and solidarity as sacrifice (Emmanuel Levinas and Charles Lesch).101
Roy’s narrative begins with a meeting with her underground contacts at a temple in Dantewada town in Chattisgarh and branches out into a series of crisscrossing routes in the dense green of Dantewada, which is home for the Maoists. As Roy catalogues, a major preoccupation of the insurgents was not to fight, let alone attack, but to be constantly on the move from one camp to the next to thwart the enemy’s surveillance. In this runaway insurgency, Roy stands in solidarity, shoulder to shoulder, with the insurgents, though she can barely keep up with their pace or the plight of their everyday existence. The narrative, true to its literary character, moves along with several characters on foot: Comrade Venu, the veteran member of the Maoist party who gives her a history lecture of the movement, and several female militants who guide her through the sojourn, providing her a glimpse into the tribal villages, the havoc caused by the counterinsurgency militia known as Salwa Judum, and the alternative government (Janatana Sarkar) run by the Maoists, ending with an overnight stay at the 100th anniversary of the Bhumkal festival organized by local tribal communities in commemoration of a rebellion staged by their ancestors against the British colonialists in 1910. The narrative places extraordinary symbolic significance in the thousands of tribal people coming together, as if waging a war against yet another colonizer, namely, the Indian state, some 100 years later. To her credit, Roy approaches the festival with a sense of disenchanted solidarity: “I fear I’ll see traditional tribal dances stiffened by Maoist propaganda, rousing, rhetorical speeches and an obedient audience with glazed eyes.”102 Once she arrives at the event, however, her disenchantment turns into a deep solidarity: “Happiness is taken very seriously here, in the Dandakaranya forest. People will walk for miles, for days together to feast and sing.… No one sings or dances alone. This, more than anything else, signals their defiance towards a civilization that seeks to annihilate them.”103
Besides the symbolic defiance of the Bhumkal festival, this coming together of an event to commemorate a great revolution is also symbolic of an alternative state model proposed by the Maoists that Roy systematically tracks throughout her piece. This quest for an alternative is also central to the concept of “deep solidarity,” a political and theological term that has gained currency in secular political theory in the past two decades. According to critics, although solidarity may always emanate from those relatively privileged positions in society, it is based on the recognition that “we are in the same boat. The system that is not benifitting the poor is not benefitting us either.”104 Here, solidarity is deep because it exceeds the limits of rationalization or rational cognitive response; just as in one’s faith in the divine, the cause invoked in the name of solidarity is justly communal, with the aim of creating a “beloved community that will bless us all.”105 While the spiritual, if not divine aspects of such solidarity alone are significant, they do not “imply superior virtue” on part of those who – such as Roy – extend such solidarity.106 Like one’s unwavering faith in the idea of the divine, in secular contexts, too, deep solidarity places a great deal of affective significance in political alternatives available to the most deprived, having exhausted all other available “secular” options. For Roy, the Maoist model is one such alternative that is worthy of deep solidarity vested in affective bonds.
A core distinction between liberal models of charity, advocacy, and solidarity, on the one hand, and deep solidarity, on the other, is that the latter asks the lenders of solidarity to sacrifice their privilege and “pushes one more step beyond advocacy and helps us address exploitation and oppression at a deeper level yet.”107 This is because “advocacy reaches its limits when advocates fail to understand the deep connections with those for whom they are advocating.”108 The sacrificial element of deep solidarity, in that such solidarity cannot be a zero-sum game of armchair advocacy, is also endorsed by other theorists who conceive solidarity as responsibility not to the known or the familiar, but to the unknown and the anonymous: “it is only with and through the other that we are able to discover our own embeddedness in the fabric of communal life.”109
Similarly, critical and decolonial theorists argue that unease, dissent, discomfort, and disagreement are an integral part of deep solidarity.110 According to Katie Boudreau Morris, such solidarity “must cultivate uncertainty and discomfort over time.”111 In this way, from the delineation of values and virtues of solidarity in the philosophical debates, there is a latent move in the social sciences and humanities toward action and affect on the part of those who extend political solidarity. The very opening of Walking with the Comrades foregrounds this affective significance, as Roy moves into the Maoist base through a series of impressions and tropes that unravel the discrepant realities of India and Dantewada. In tune with her insistence on retaining a certain imaginary mediation between fact and fiction, Roy’s depiction of Dantewada defies all sense of reality:
It’s an upside-down, inside-out town. In Dantewada the police wear plain clothes and the rebels wear uniforms. The jail superintendent is in jail. The prisoners are free (three hundred of them escaped from the old town jail two years ago). Women who have been raped are in police custody. The rapists give speeches in the bazaar.112
In this real world of inverted topographies, the reader gets the opposite of what is expected of a societal reality: abstract facts converted to affective triggers. Roy continues the early part of the narrative with a series of ironic cues by using the presence of military training schools, corporate billboards, and violence encoded in public spaces and public aesthetics, inviting an affective solidarity from the reader. Facts come to play a crucial role as a reward for such affective labors, as if dislodging the reader and writer alike from their privilege into a position of dissent, discomfort, and unease:
The drive from Raipur to Dantewada takes about ten hours through areas known to be “Maoist-infested.” These are not careless words. “Infest/infestation” implies disease/pests. Diseases must be cured. Pests must be exterminated. Maoists must be wiped out. In these creeping, innocuous ways the language of genocide has entered our vocabulary.113
Almost immediately, Roy connects the internalized language of genocide visited upon the Maoists and the tribal community by coalescing the sources, signifiers, and objects of this language: the chasm between the worlds of the corporate elite and the commoners. Invoking the billboard advertisement of the “Vedanta Cancer Hospital” along the way, Roy opens space for deep solidarity for the tribal community by means of an affective logic, not necessarily factual evidence: “I’m twisted enough to suspect that if there’s a cancer hospital, there must be a flat-topped bauxite mountain somewhere.”114 Roy’s “twisted” logic was not in vain; in fact, it turned out to be proleptic, as Vedanta, a mining company, would go on to become a major funder of the antiterror operations in the Dantewada region years later.
Throughout her journey, Roy remains highly attentive to both the risks involved in her endeavor – as she would come to be implicated in multiple sedition charges by the Indian state – and her own privilege. This is made evident through her playful use of the hunger metaphor: when she first meets her Maoist contact at the Dantewshawari temple, she asks the courier for what he was supposed to deliver: “‘And the bananas?’ ‘I ate them,’ he said. ‘I got hungry.’”115
“He really was a security threat,”116 follows up Roy with a rhetorical caesura, evidently drawing the link between proverbial hunger and the bloodthirsty counterinsurgency. Just a page before this encounter is narrated, Roy presents a photograph with the following caption, a translation of the text from the wall of a village hut:
Hut in a “Border” Village
The writing on the wall. It’s mandatory for Below Poverty Line (BPL) households. It says: I am poor/ I eat ₹2 per kg rice. And then the name of the family.117
In the same frame of the photo, we see an exasperated insurgent taking a nap, after what appeared to be a long march through the jungle, in a stash of camping gear haphazardly spread out, and next to this image we find another with two insurgents holding a gun: a man in militant uniform and woman in a sari. Roy’s visual cues here do more than simply connect the tribal people with guns and the hungry villagers with eating the lowest quality of two rupee-per-kilogram rice. They dislodge the very power of affective resistance that hunger holds in the history of the Indian bourgeois revolution:
“Do you know what to do if we come under fire?” Sukhdev asks casually, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Yes,” I said. “Immediately declare an indefinite hunger-strike.”
He sat down on a rock and laughed. 118
As Roy’s banter makes evident, hunger is not a choice for the tribal people, let alone a potent weapon of resistance, as it was during the anticolonial resistance – thanks to Gandhi who did not need a gun – yet. The fight here is no longer about Gandhian hunger strikes versus British bullets. Rather, it is about calories provided by the cheapest quality of rice to operate handmade guns: trigger-hungry Adivasis, literally. Roy mulls over this unequal distribution of revolutionary arsenals, between eating two rupees-per-kilo rice and going on a hunger strike, and wonders what other weapons the weak might have:
Gandhian satyagraha, for example, is a kind of political theatre. In order for it to be effective, it needs a sympathetic audience, which villagers deep in the forest do not have. When a posse of 800 policemen lay a cordon around a forest village at night and begin to burn houses and shoot people, will a hunger strike help? (Can starving people go on a hunger strike? And do hunger strikes work when they’re not on TV?)119
In such formulations, Roy’s deep solidarity for the insurgents is exerted not only by the play of affective forces pertaining to “hunger” but, in the absence of any viable model, by her inordinate amount of faith in the “alternative model” proposed by the Maoists; not the hunger strike, but the striking of the hungry, famished bellies. The only model that is employed by the state is the model of bulldozing the Adivasis to make way for the mining companies. Referring to the private counter-terrorist militia euphemistically called Jan Jagran Abhiyan (Public Awakening Campaign), consisting of a section of Adivasis subdued and armed by the state, Roy writes: “Their way of ‘awakening’ the ‘public’ was to form a hunting party of about 300 men to comb the forest, killing people, burning houses and molesting women.”120 Although the facts of the campaign have been well-established by now in the mainstream media, what is unique about Roy’s portrayal is the way she affectively sets up the political trajectories of those facts. She writes in anticipation of the Jagran Abhiyan campaign – hinted at in the opening pages of the book – that would wake the public from their slumber:
It’s the most beautiful room I have slept in in a long time. My private suite in a thousand-star hotel. I’m surrounded by these strange, beautiful children with their curious arsenal. They’re all Maoists for sure. Are they all going to die? Is the Jungle Warfare College for them? And the helicopter gunships, the thermal imaging and the laser range finders?
Why must they die? What for? To turn all of this into a mine? I remember my visit to the opencast iron ore mines in Keonjhar, Orissa. There was forest there once. And children like these. Now the land is like a raw, red wound. Red dust fills your nostrils and lungs. The water is red, the air is red, the people are red, their lungs and hair are red. All day and all night trucks rumble through their villages, bumper to bumper, thousands and thousands of trucks, taking ore to Paradip port from where it will go to China. There it will turn into cars and smoke and sudden cities that spring up overnight.121
This passage is compelling not because of any factual significance it exerts, but because it does precisely the opposite: it unveils affective injustices, thereby inviting deep solidarity on part of the author. With the dexterity of her fictional devices, Roy superimposes the affective tropes of a previous episode of violence – the disappeared children, the water gone red, dust-filled lungs, and the breathlessness of “growth rates” – upon the seemingly tranquil and serene thousand-star hotel she finds herself in, in the company of the Maoist children. Rather than documenting their plight in the jungle, or the sorry conditions of their lives, she invites the reader to envision the possibilities and the potential of their land and the lives that inhabit it. This affective trigger, however, is immediately overpowered by the brutality of the state’s model of development for the Indian nation in using the Adivasis’ lives as cannon fodder – the objects of helicopter gunships and their thermal imaging.
Such deep solidarity evoked by the affective triggers of state violence is akin to what Quỳnh N. Phạm and María José Méndez call “insurgent solidarity” in the context of Vietnam’s and Cuba’s anticolonial movements, wherein nationalist figures such as José Martí ‘and Hồ Chí Minh propose “imaginative crossings” of class privileges and regional barriers to understand the “ethical-political inspirations, and mutual learning among the colonized.”122 In much the same way, Roy’s deep solidarity for an alternative to the state model of bulldozing stems from her deep distrust in the existing models of global governance: neoliberalism and the inequalities fostered by the global class system.123 Thus, her lack of faith in the available models is transformed into a deeper faith in a not-yet-available, alternative model. Here, it may be fitting to be reminded of Martin Buber’s meditations on the divine roots of deep solidarity. In what Buber calls divine destiny, like the original religious meaning of the hesed, that is, the desire of a miracle witnessed in the collective, which exerts a sense of divine imminence, “a secular constellation of people can be more ‘religious’ than a superficially religious one so long as they practice hesed.”124 Roy’s envisioning here bears witness to the early foundations and formations of one such miracle – albeit a secular one – in a world where Gandhi needs his own gun:
It’s not an Alternative yet, this idea of Gram Swaraj with a Gun. There is too much hunger, too much sickness here. But it has certainly created the possibilities for an alternative. Not for the whole world, not for Alaska, or New Delhi, nor even perhaps for the whole of Chhattisgarh, but for itself. For Dandakaranya. It’s the world’s best-kept secret. It has laid the foundations for an alternative to its own annihilation. It has defied history. Against the greatest odds it has forged a blueprint for its own survival. It needs help and imagination, it needs doctors, teachers, farmers.125
As if juxtaposing such blueprint of survival against the blueprints of bulldozing for effect, Roy offers an extraordinary tale of a female Maoist militant, among other accounts of women being raped, family members being made to witness such raping, or unborn babies ripped from mothers’ bellies by the state-sponsored militias. Charmi joined the Maoists after her son Dilip was shot by the police in Chhattisgarh in 2009. After killing him, the police tied the body to a pole, like a four-legged trophy from a hunt, and carried it with them to claim cash rewards from the government. By the time Charmi caught up with the policemen, the body was a naked, tattered piece of bare carcass. On Charmi’s own account, the police left the body outside a roadside teashop to have tea and snacks “(which they did not pay for).” Roy writes, after her direct encounter with Charmi:
Picture this mother for a moment, following her son’s corpse through the forest, stopping at a distance to wait for his murderers to finish their tea. They did not let her have her son’s body back so she could give him a proper funeral. They only let her throw a fistful of earth in the pit in which they buried the others they had killed that day. Charmi says she wants revenge. Badla ku badla. Revenge. Blood for blood.126
For a moment, one is tempted to think such call for vengeance is a purely personal one, but given that Charmi turned to a revolutionary organization fighting a collective enemy, her vengeance is subsumed to an ideological cause. In other words, far from being divine violence – the counter-violence used for self-preservation in the face of violence, as in Walter Benjamin’s formulation127 – Charmi’s vengeance manifests itself as “divine solidarity” for a revolutionary rage against the entire state and police apparatus that has robbed the children of all tribal mothers.
For Amia Srinivasan, emotions such as anger and rage are the result of a first order of injustice (foundational violence), and when the oppressed are asked to contain such “negative” emotions for strategic reasons, it produces a discourse of affective injustice. Against this, Roy’s Walking with the Comrades methodically unveils what Srinivasan calls the “aptness of anger”; that is, “getting aptly angry about some first-order injustice would actually improve one’s situation.”128 Arguably, Roy’s justification of Maoist violence, too, is of a piece with the affective effacement of the unease, danger, and discomfort emanating from, and involved in, her intimate encounters with the suffering of the Maoist Adivasis. Today, it is a publicly known fact that Roy is implicated in multiple legal cases by the Indian state for her unflinching solidarity with the Maoists. In that sense, Roy’s own anger, to use Srinivasan’s words, would be apt because “we can only be aptly angry about things that are sufficiently close to us in space and time, or to which we have some specific personal connection.”129 In ethico-philosophical terms, Emmanuel Levinas dubs such proximity to the Other as “solidarity of fate and destiny.” The cultivation of a “moral personality” can only be achieved by affective investment in the joys and sufferings of a constellation of Others, from which he derives the concept of “useful suffering.”130
But what happens to a narrative that is not as affectively invested in the joys and sufferings as its object of inquiry? What forms, shapes, and names does solidarity assume when the scribe is not a direct participant of “things that are sufficiently close to us in space and time”? Where does the journalist derive their solidarity from? Consider, for instance, a snippet from the review of Sudeep Chakravarti’s Red Sun: Travels in a Naxalite Country by the Maoists themselves on their blog: “How can the Maoists (the police can at least get their own mineral bottles), survive if they break the hand-pumps? If the author had verified the facts by touring the areas deep inside it would have been really useful in exposing the deliberate concoctions of the police chief.”131 The Maoists, while praising Chakravarti’s travelogue in general for its accuracy in depicting state violence, point out that its author “had traveled more along the periphery of the war zone and has hardly any interaction with the Maoist fighters.”132 This is a serious charge for a journalist to face, that he had not provided a neutral perspective of the facts he claimed to have represented. In a rejoinder to the above critique by the Maoists, a mortified Chakravarti responds by stating that he takes full responsibility for his “inability to meet senior, underground leaders of the movement, or to visit operational areas,”133 but holds the Maoists themselves responsible for not granting him access.
It is not Chakravarti’s lack of, or rather his denial of access to the affective constitution of the Maoist movement – that is, an opportunity to experience their everyday plight, joys, suffering – but the excuse offered by the journalist that misses the mark by a mile. Put differently, it is not the lack of access to facts about the hand pumps, but it is the journalist’s lack of affective reasoning about these facts that forges the means of what I call “liberal solidarity” for the insurgents. Far from being a failure of factual reason, Chakravarti’s unimaginative acceptance of claims presented as facts – that is, the Maoists themselves need the hand pumps to survive in the frequently drought-prone jungles – that turns narrative journalism on its head. In sheer contrast to Roy’s narrative, which banks primarily on the narrative side of journalism rather than on facts, Chakravarti’s narrative veers toward, owing much to his “insufficient proximity” to the affective domain of the insurgents, converting narratives into facts. Insofar as such solidarity superimposes factual, institutional, constitutional, and moral reasoning over the affective registers of conflict, it remains no more and no less than a liberal solidarity.
A common trait of liberal solidarity is that it does not call for a direct intervention of the actors of solidarity in the issues at hand. Instead, it is the general notion that aiding those less privileged than oneself provides the individual with a sense of moral catharsis: it “restore[s] the subject to a condition of liberty.”134 In their seminal work Solidarity (2015), Arto Laitinen and Anne Birgitta Pessi define solidarity as follows:
Solidarity of the entire humanity may be any kind of solidarity (societal, political, moral) extended to the whole humanity. It can be a matter of societal solidarity applied to a global society, or it may be a matter of political solidarity on a global scale, or then it may be a matter of moral, humanitarian universalistic solidarity.135
For Hannah Arendt, such universal solidarity arises from a sense of lack, as a negative expression on the basis of injustices witnessed. There is an “elemental shame” that is shared by people across cultures, which Arendt identifies as “international solidarity,” one that “has not yet found an adequate political expression.”136
While Arendt’s emphasis of the inadequacy of political expression in universal solidarity can chiefly be attributed to what she calls the erosion of “worldliness” by the advent of modernity, it can also be traced to the failures of liberal humanism itself in which the Euro-human figure is the object of desire for the rest of humanity. In other words, universal liberal solidarity is restricted to those who are similar to us, that is, familiar in the context of the actants of solidarity.137 This in itself is not negative or undesirable, but it suffers from its inability to envision alternatives to the existing norms. Consider, for instance, Chakravarti’s qualification of the popular support for Vara Vara Rao, a Maoist ideologue: “a crowd of loud students mobs him. Many reach out and shake his hand. He wanted an audience. He has it. Democracy, with all its ills, allows him this public space. I hope he realizes the irony that dogma and undemocratic institutions have no space for others, tolerate no dissent. Mao didn’t.”138 Thanks to his liberal solidarity, Chakravarti does endorse Maoist populism so long as it operates within the ambit of a liberal democratic structure that is in place, even if, by his own admission, such model itself is the root cause of the problem: “In Dantewada, democracy is quite dead, on both sides of the battle line.”139 In spite of dead democracy, even if it appears to be alive and kicking, Chakravarti is at pains to deny that the alternative proposed by the Naxalites may have some merit: “The Maoists also gloat, pyrrhically, at a hated system without really having a viable alternative. In a way, it’s like saying, ‘It’s a good thing all people are suffering, one day they will wake up and understand we are right.’ Meanwhile, people suffer.”140
Perhaps the greatest folly of liberal solidarity, at least in Chakravarti’s case, is the so-called sandwich theory141 of peoples’ “suffering”: ordinary people are caught in the crossfire of two warring parties. Such a theory leaps to the assumption that nearly all the victims of violent conflicts are ordinary people, with the insinuation that those who are carrying out violence are not ordinary people. The trouble with this inverted logic is that the sandwich theory subtracts the agency of violence from ordinary people and deposits it in a political collective that is external to them, rendering them both voiceless and weaponless. The images of such de-weaponized, victimized, and powerless ordinary people are then used as a justification for military interventions – to bring in development or end tyranny – by well-meaning liberal democratic institutions, affectively silencing the insurgent agency of the targeted populations. The liberal solidarity to help poor victims embedded in this view is laden with negative effects, as Chakravarti himself conjectures: “With lesser numbers, the revolutionaries will time and again be forced to surrender, withdraw, lick wounds – possibly, be driven close to annihilation, as they have been time and again.”142 It is the subjugation of the thymotic affects – between surrendering, licking wounds, healing scars, and rising up “time and again” – to the institutionalist alternative proposed by Chakravarti that produces affective injustice.
For Srinivasan, the very denial of political space for so-called negative emotions such as anger, rage, and suffering in legal, literary, or philosophical narratives is tantamount to affective injustice. In a critical reading of the emotional void occupied by the many liberal conceptions of solidarity, Laitinen and Pessi note that mere intentions cannot make up solidarity, “as acting out of solidarity requires the presence of attitudes or emotions such as a sense of belonging, concern for the others’ well-being, commitment to shared norms, valuing the social bonds in question or identification with the group.”143 By extension, Chakravarti’s aversion to lend a deep(er) solidarity to the alternative vision of the Maoists may be best explained by his affective disjuncture from the group he proposes to write about. This results, as noted above, in a liberal solidarity for both the Maoists and the Indian state from his peripheral positioning in the conflict. For instance, in his exchange with the district collector of a tribal origin, Chakravarti asks the perennial question: How could we appease Maoists or meet their demands? The liberal administrator spells out a strategy: “‘If we move rapidly, link villages, educate people – of course, all this can’t happen in a day or two, but with good planning, change can come about in five, ten, twelve years.’”144 To that, an amused Chakravarti retorts: “So the best insurance for development that an undeveloped region has is to trigger a Naxal problem, I joke. No development for decades, and when Naxalism begins to peak: Boom! Development. Therefore, Naxalism is in the long run good for India.”145 Chakravarti’s liberal solidarity lurks beneath his tongue-in-cheek tone: Maoism is good enough as a corrective action to the existing liberal state, a counter-balancing mechanism to the erosion of democratic values. True to its liberal character, such a perspective requires no action or intervention on the part of those extending solidarity for the oppressed. In other words, as long as the flawed model of Indian democracy prevails, so, too, would Maoism:
There is no indication of Maoism wrapping up, because the key triggers for Maoism – massively skewed development, massive corruption, and great social and ethnic discrimination – show no signs of wrapping up either. Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way – if the central and state governments do as they should, if India’s prejudiced millions do as they should, and do the right thing. If they don’t … the Maoists and others like them will be there to show the way.146
So long as such solidarity fails to evoke the affective dimension of the struggles, it remains a subjectless, liberal solidarity, one that is heavily reliant on moral abstraction as well as structural and institutional reparations to the suffering of the Indian Adivasis. The lack of affective objects in terms such as “social apathy” and the victims of “massive corruption” and “skewed development”147 used by Chakravarti to weaponize Maoism is akin to Hannah Arendt’s conception of exclusive solidarity in which the subjects under tyranny may become inured to suffering, which needs to be brought into the light by those who are extraneous to such suffering. This process may produce affective injustice, as in the case of Chakravarti, as one’s emotional response in the form of solidarity often comes after the injustices have taken place, and facts are laid bare. For solidarity to become active or a form of action, feelings must be buttressed, if not enhanced by facts, not overdetermined to the point of inertia where mere “moods and emotions” are mistaken for solidarity.148
The flip side of Arendt’s exclusive solidarity is the inclusive solidarity wherein only the oppressed can share the emotions as well as the knowledge of being oppressed. For those extending solidarity from outside, it may be “impossible to have vicarious feelings”; therefore, they can only lend solidarity that is “aroused by suffering but is established dispassionately.”149 Thus, though a solidarity may still be possible on the basis of factual fields of knowledge, it calls for an affective investment, however dispassionately, for it not to be shaded into an “unsavoury moral parochialism.”150 Consider again Chakravarti’s unwavering solidarity for the Maoists:
In neighbouring Nepal, Maoism won, and the revolution, after getting rid of the king’s absolute power engaged in co-writing a new constitution, showing – disturbingly – what armed revolution triggered by decades of neglect, nepotism and corruption can achieve. It was a classic case of privileging violence: Nobody listens in this part of the world until a fire is lit.151
Chakravarti scores a point here for legitimizing the rage and anger of the Maoists in Nepal who had to kill in order to be heard, much the same way as Amia Srinivasan justifies affective violence: “It is historically naïve, after all, to think that white America would have been willing to embrace [Martin Luther] King’s vision of a unified, post-racial nation, if not for the threat of Malcolm X’s angry defiance.”152 However, the drift of affective justice here lies with Srinivasan’s caveat: “It is perhaps similarly naïve to think anger contains no salutary psychic possibilities for someone whose self-conception has been shaped by degradation and hatred.”153 It is for this reason that Srinivasan is insistent upon the affects that shape solidarities, prime among them the proximity of those who lend solidarity to the affective field of “salutary possibilities” among the oppressed. To his credit, Chakravarti makes a concerted effort toward this end:
On 29 September 2006 four members of a Dalit family, the Bhotmanges, were killed by upper-caste farmers of the village of 700.… Upper-caste people wanted to cut a track through the Bhotmange farm to reduce commute time to their own farms. The Bhotmanges refused. So that evening, with patriarch Bhayyalal out in his fields, a mob descended on the Bhotmange household. His wife Surekha, sons Sudhir, 21, and Roshan, 19, and daughter Priyanka, 17, were all stripped, paraded naked through the village and beaten. Then the boys were forced to have sex with the ladies, who were then gang-raped in public view. With little left to do after this, the upper-caste men killed all four and threw the bodies into a nearby canal. It took more than a fortnight for Maharashtra’s social justice minister to drop by to offer Bhayyalal money, shelter and police protection.154
Insofar as Chakravarti uncovers the facts of the tragic fate of this Dalit family, his solidarity seems to follow an affective trajectory, but it falls woefully short when the affective thread is broken by the visit of the minister who offers monetary compensation to offset the Dalit family’s affective injustice, the unfathomable insults of naked parading, forced rape among family members, and their public lynching of the raped and the rapists. An affectively just way of lending solidarity to the Dailt family here would have been to follow up on the affective cues of the tragic event, the anger and rage of the surviving members of the family, just as Roy does with Charmi, the Maoist mother who joins the Maoists to avenge the death of her nakedly paraded son. In Chakravarti’s case, the affective injustice of his narrative journalism owes as much to its lack of proximity to the Dalit family as to the liberal solidarity that proposes institutional and instrumental solutions to matters of human indignation and indecency.
It is for this reason that, according to Cynthia Coe, Levinas vehemently resists totalization of any form of suffering in the philosophical discourses of metaphysics, history, and theodicy, which tend to dissolve or sublate the individual suffering into the collective welfare. Levinas’s solution to such mythic discourses of theodicy is to sequester individual suffering from totality, thereby dwelling with the other’s exposure to suffering.155 Chakravarti presents a disconcerting example of this in the beheading of a suspected police informer by the Naxalites: “Sometimes, folks are penalized for aspiration. On 30 September 2007, Bandu Narote, a tribal youngster, was killed in Etapalli tehsil of Gadhchiroli for daring to appear for recruitment in the police force.”156 The Naxalites, for their part, never apologized for killing this tribal boy, simply because the same tribals are being killed by the state for a different aspiration (to join the Maoists).157
After all, what does deep solidarity mean when one tribal boy must be killed to spare the lives of nameless others? The answer, as Levinas would argue, lies in making each case, each experience of suffering intelligible and affectable across the Manichean axis of (secular) theodicy. Rather than distinguishing between just killing and unjust killing, necessary and wanton violence – as liberal solidarity does in the name of greater good – deep solidarity denounces the killing of tribal boys on either side of the conflict by enunciating the suffering that led to, and was brought about, by their killing.
In sum, Chakravarti’s narrative falls short where Roy succeeds: in venturing beyond the set journalistic protocols based on empirical facts alone, and lending affective exposure to the suffering of the Adivasis in the Naxalite country. This is not to suggest that Chakravarti’s liberal solidarity is insignificant or irrelevant; rather, it showcases other forms of solidarity predisposed to noncombatant sympathizers of the insurgency. Hence, the conventional wisdom that the narrative aspect of literary journalism does much disservice to facts and realities – as has been pointed out by Maoists, media pundits, and scholars alike,158 or urban middle-class scribes like Arundhati Roy or Sudeep Chakravarti – cannot be representative of the oppressed Adivasis from Dantewada and needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. This is not only because, as Alok Amatya cautions, there is a marked tendency in academic criticism to “assume that representation is the only form of cultural mediation that occurs in global or postcolonial discourse,” but also because the “strategic contributions” made by fictional writers and journalists using narrative devices in bringing the plight of Adivasis to global attention159 should not be underestimated, and cannot simply be subsumed into the academic lexicon of re-presentation.
From the vaunted radicalism of Fanon to the socialism of Russia and to the Maoism of China, the five texts discussed in this chapter evoke the sort of peripheral internationalism of the insurgencies that seek to dismantle the conditions of their making and, in doing so, foreground them as world literary texts through vernacular prisms. By virtue of their disruptive field of force, the texts forge neither an imagined community nor any “superior power of realism to represent the totality of society,”160 but raise “intensely disturbing political questions about the fractured, disrupted social body emerging within borders often arbitrarily created by colonizers.”161 In the case of the Naxalite insurgency, such a fractured social body stems from both imagined and unimaginable communities, rural peasants and the urban middle classes, militant and noncombatant solidarities, by virtue of sharing a common enemy – the bygone colonizers and their postcolonial successors.
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