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Interrogating the Naxalbari Movement: Mahasweta Devi’s Quest Novels

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Part of the book series: New Comparisons in World Literature ((NCWL))

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Abstract

This chapter engages with the Naxalbari uprising in Bengal. A crucial event in postcolonial India, this uprising was a consequence of food crises in the wake of the 1943 Bengal famine. The militant faction of the Left known as the CPI (ML) played a significant role, both sparking and high-jacking the movement, creating confusion among followers and allowing for a negative representation in popular media. Focusing on the literary representational aspects, this chapter studies two novels by Mahasweta Devi to understand the reception of the movement—Hajar Churashir Maa (Mother of 1084) and Operation? Bahai Tudu. I contend here that Devi uses a quest mode in which her protagonists appear to make both physical and psychological journeys to understand the characters and ideologies of their militant family members or political comrades. These novels, set both in urban and rural areas, complicate the questions of student agitation, peasant insurgency, and militant leftism, all of which constituted the political axis of the movement. Devi combines these issues with the less discussed questions of caste and gender during the movement to demonstrate that the bourgeoisie and the middle class could hardly understand or would barely listen to the peripheral insurgent. Devi composes these aesthetic conditions through an assortment of experimental narrative strategies such as one-day narratives, dreams, dialogue, memory, and debate as well as of a critical narrator and the use of the non-death of the insurgent. Drawing upon Michael Löwy’s formulations, the chapter reads these strategies as composing the failed quest mode within the critical irrealist form.

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  1. School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Sourit Bhattacharya

  2. School of Critical Studies, University Gardens, Glasgow, UK

    Sourit Bhattacharya

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Bhattacharya, S. (2020). Interrogating the Naxalbari Movement: Mahasweta Devi’s Quest Novels. In: Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel. New Comparisons in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37397-9_3

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