Abstract
This chapter is not a dominant hegemonic narrative or official history of the Naxalbari movements (1967) in Bengal; rather, it is a cultural-historical re-examination of various kinds of marginal spaces of exclusion that the movement created. In this paper, I revisit the movement events to unravel certain hidden, subtle as well as overt layers of violence and exclusions that were created during the movements mostly against the indigenous tribal participants. This paper demonstrates how the state, the Bengali bhadralok and the vanguard revolutionary party CPI (M–L) and its youth followers, manufactured a maze of symbolic and real, violent and exclusionary practices that sabotaged a movement originally initiated by the tribes, and changed its ‘meaning’ through ‘cultural-ideological’ masquerade known as hegemony.
The author is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Move Media Communications.
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Notes
- 1.
A militant campaign in rural Bengal in 1946 initiated by the CPI-led Kisan Sabha again the landlords urged peasants to demand and keep two-thirds of the harvest instead of half, as earlier.
- 2.
In the book Herbert written by Nabarun Bhattacharya and later made into a film of same name by Sumon Mukherji; allude to this aspect of cultural adaptation of Marxism in Bengal. It will not be wrong to see the Bengali Marxism as a ‘bricolage’ of various quixotic cultural peculiarities and hybrid adaptations and should be studied in its own right.
- 3.
Mao’s idea deployed in Chinese Revolution from 1966 to 1976, in which one of the central strategy was to encircle the city by agrarian revolutionary forces from the villages, defeat those and take those over.
- 4.
A state sponsored counter-insurgent militia in Chhattisgarh.
- 5.
It is useful to connect it to a more recent context. After 9/11, as Chomsky most cynically remarked, global terrorism has become defined by what others do to the USA while the latter’s own reprehensible record of the use of violence against civilian populations in Afghanistan, Egypt and now Iraq is seen as ‘low intensity warfare’.
- 6.
Some of these representations also sidelined the role of women in these movements that only recent studies unravel.
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Roy Chowdhury, A. (2018). ‘Revisiting Naxalbari’: Narratives of Violence and Exclusions from the Marginal Spaces. In: Bhattacharyya, A., Basu, S. (eds) Marginalities in India. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5215-6_7
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