Baster: Strangers in their own land
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Book Review
JYOTIRMAYA SHARMA
| A complex and nuanced story of the 'adivasis' of Bastar being displaced in the name of development |
SUBALTERNS AND SOVEREIGNS — An Anthropological History of Bastar (1854-2006): Nandini Sundar; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 650.
This is not merely an anthropological history of Bastar, as the subtitle of this very important book suggests, but also an exploration on the part of the author of the normative universe that will eventually determine the increasingly fragile idea of Indian democracy and its institutions. It tells a very complex and nuanced story of the 'adivasis' of Bastar being displaced by centralised models of "development", losing, in turn, their rights over la nd, water and forests.
While the conclusion in the book ends on a cautiously optimistic note, hoping for a better future for the 'adivasis' of Bastar, a people who have become strangers in their own land, the afterword is a testimony to the cruel shattering of this optimism. It tells the story of the anti-Naxalite counterinsurgency operation in Bastar called Salwa Judum. Termed by the Chhattisgarh Government variously as a "spontaneous", "self-initiated", "people's movement" and a "peace campaign", it literally means a "purification hunt". It has taken the form of a state-sponsored drive against Naxals, but in truth, it has emptied villages, left houses burnt and displaced nearly a million people. It is also a story of indiscriminate arson, looting and rape by young vigilantes with the active involvement of security forces and politicians.
Complex picture
What is significant is that the complex picture involving an increasingly centralised state and resistance to its arbitrary power in the guise of democracy does not escape the attention of Nandini Sundar's narrative. She says: "Young men armed by the government wield their guns with new-found machismo, excited when they find and kill some 'dreaded Maoist' who is often a former neighbour or even a relative, but are deeply nervous at the demons they have unleashed within. And in the jungles, the Maoists carry out military exercises, defending some imagined 'guerilla zone'. In an ironic twist orchestrated by the Indian state, young Naga and Mizo reservists, whose collective historical memories include the burning and regrouping of their own villages a few decades earlier, burn adivasi villages and rape women with impunity." The press too reports Naxal violence enthusiastically, while exhibiting an uncharacteristic coyness towards writing about state-sponsored violence. In the end, the 'adivasis' are caught between the Naxalites and the Salwa Judum, both imitating the criminality of the other.
Story of Bastar
The book is a very skilful coming together of anthropology and history. It exhaustively chronicles the story of Bastar from the time colonial administrative structures sought to impose "order" and "civilisation" on the 'adivasis' by imposing colonial prejudices and stereotypes to the present time when state-sponsored private vigilantism in the name of countering the Maoist movement threatens to wreck an entire way of life. It also details the way in which the 'adivasis' have resisted the colonial state in the past and a repressive state now.
But Sundar's study is not an attempt to romanticise either the 'adivasis' or their history as one of "undiluted innocence or even heroism." She is clear that "resistance cannot be produced on demand to be participated in or written about, but that it is always there as actuality and potential in the everyday structures of life…" Therefore, even for the 'adivasis', "everyday life is thus conducted through a mixture of active collusion, compromise or call it innovative fusion, resignation or call it avoidance…"
Erosion of a way of life
The centrality of her thesis is that despite the steady erosion of the 'adivasi' way of life, despite the increasing insouciance of the modern Indian state towards the needs of the 'adivasis' of Bastar, and despite the predatory inroads of the modern market economy into the forests of Bastar in the name of "development", there is no singular model by which we can comprehend the complexity of choices and the modes of resistance that the 'adivasis' employ, much less impose a monochromatic paradigm on their choices. This is how the author articulates this very significant point: "[T]here is no unitary insurgent consciousness that we can capture, rooted in 'culture'. In the process of individuals making collective choices of whom to support, what culture to adopt, when to rebel and when not to rebel — whether to organise under a 'traditional' system, whether to support a king or the communists, whether to represent themselves as indigenous people or both, culture is redefined, sometimes in old and sometimes in new terms. These are not entirely free or conscious choices, but they are choices nonetheless."
Sundar's book on Bastar, therefore, is a masterly narrative of the increasing failure of the Indian state to sustain democracy and provide governance. It ought to be read as a note of caution by all democrats, but also can be read for the restrained fluidity of the writing and the subterranean black humour that often is seen in its pages. An instance of the latter is K.P.S. Gill describing Salwa Judum as a real Gandhian movement.
Labels: Book Review, Chhatisgadh
posted by Resistance 6/26/2007 01:28:00 PM,
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The Naxalites: Through the eyes of the police
Friday, June 15, 2007
THE X FILES
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The Naxalites: Through the eyes of the police
Edited by Ashoke Kumar Mukhopadhyay,
Deys, Rs 380
To Charles Tegart, the commissioner of Calcutta Police in the early years of the 20th century, even the Ramakrishna Mission was not above suspicion. His officers trailed Sister Nivedita and the Japanese prince, Count Okakura, when the latter spent some time in Calcutta, because they suspected both of having links with "terrorists" in Bengal. To the British police, the Mission and its activities represented a heady cocktail of nationalist politics, violence and religious revivalism that fired the imagination of the armed groups of freedom fighters. These were among the many interesting details that came to light when, some 25 years ago, Tegart's once-classified note on the rise of "terrorism" in Bengal was first published.
Police and intelligence reports, especially on political movements, have always been an important source for future chroniclers. Few political movements in India since independence have shaken the State the way the Naxalite movement did between 1967 and 1974. Bengal was the movement's epicentre. Once more, the old adage about India thinking tomorrow what Bengal thought today seemed to be valid, as the spark from Naxalbari ignited prairie fires in different parts of India.
Yet, the armed insurrectionists who swore by Mao Zedong's thesis of guerrilla warfare were not the first of their kind. In Telengana, communists had been waging similar wars against landlords and the government since 1948. And, long after the Naxalites ceased to be a major force in Bengal's politics, the Maoists have struggled on in Andhra Pradesh. The recent rise of Maoism across India is a different story. Its ideological character, fighting methods and dependence on forested, tribal communities make today's Maoist rebellion very different from the Naxalite uprising.
Mukhopadhyay's book is limited in scope. It tries to see the Naxalite movement through the eyes of the Calcutta Police by presenting a selection of notices in the Calcutta Police Gazette between 1967 and 1975. Since the notices were meant for the police force, they offer a fairly credible account of how the police too had felt insecure in the face of urban guerrilla attacks before it could fight the rebels back.
Two police officers — Ranjit Kumar Gupta, commissioner of the city police, and Ranajit (Runu) Guha Niyogi, a sub-inspector, who later won a president's medal for his work in anti-Naxalite operations, come alive in these pages. Gupta's instructions to the police show how he struggled to prevent the embattled force's morale from collapsing. To the Naxalites, however, Niyogi, in particular, has always been the cruellest face of the brutalities that the Calcutta Police were accused of. In his introduction, the author recounts some of the worst events, including the horrific killing of some 150 suspected Naxalites by the police at Cossipore-Baranagore area in a single night.
No account of the police's encounter with the Naxalites can afford to leave out the "confession" of Charu Mazumdar, the leader of the movement, in police custody. Nobody believed it to be true when it was first published in a Bengali daily soon after Mazumdar's death in police custody. If Mukhopadhyay has still included it in the book among the appendices, along with Suniti Kumar Ghosh's well-argued dismissal of the authenticity of the "confession", it must be because of its historical value.
An interesting addition to the literature on one of the most important political movements in India, the book is disappointing in one aspect — spelling errors. Even the word, 'guerrilla', has been wrongly spelt many times.
Labels: Book Review, NEWS
posted by Resistance 6/15/2007 09:16:00 PM,
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Seeing Through The Stones: A Tale From The Maoist Land
Sunday, June 3, 2007
FICTION
Violence under the sun
RANJITA BISWAS
| An urge to put the Naxalite movement in perspective could have been done with more literary finesse. |
SOMETIME ago, while addressing a meeting of chief ministers of six states affected by the Maoist movement, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that the problem of Naxalism was the single biggest internal security challenge faced by the country.
Socio-economic discrimination
Reports in the media often quote intelligence sources warning that armed Naxalites are spreading fast in the rural heartland — ample proof that the movement that began in Naxalbari village of West Bengal in 1967 is far from dying. In fact, after a lull, the movement has picked up momentum again.
It is not difficult to understand that the germ of this armed struggle, fashioned after the Maoist dictum 'power flows from the barrel of the gun', is ensconced in socio-economic discrimination and subsequent rebellion. Journalist-writer Diptendra Raychaudhuri's novel Seeing Through The Stones: A Tale From The Maoist Land is set against this background.
It is the story of the rise and fall of Mahendra Chamar, a Naxalite leader emerging from Dalit anger against atrocities. Interwoven are women who were his consorts, internecine rivalry within the Naxalite groups, landed gentry's conspiracy to hold onto power and Mahendra's deterioration as a victim of Alzheimer's disease. He ends up as a recluse who talks only to trees. But his legend as a leader survives among the poor of the land.
Real incidents and thinly disguised personalities dot the narrative and at times lend the novel a feel of non-fiction. It is understandable since, as a journalist, the author spent many years chasing the Maoist story. Undoubtedly he has gathered valuable insight into the ground realities, enough to venture into telling their story.
Shortcomings
The narrative technique is like a movie script moving up and down between present, past and the future with chapters like, "The Present Continuous", "Glimpses of the Past" and "Glimpses of the Future".
But what could have been a telling account in the best tradition of a docu-drama, or even a political novel, is marred by some obvious shortfalls. First, there are too many characters and events, arranged as if in a slide-show, leaving little space for literary jouissance or analytical look into the characters and their circumstances to make for an absorbing novel.
Second, a certain unease with the language causes frequent falls on an uneven terrain. A few examples: Agnes beckoned her, leaving her in a state of flux like a sparrow approaching the grain lying near a peasant (pheasant?) (pg 14). Pascal's experienced eyes convey to his brain…. (pg 138): … he is imbibing his glass of vodka too fast. (pg 140).
Telling moments
There are some telling moments, though: They chant at the end 'Long live Charu Mazumdar' without knowing who they are referring to, probably mistaking him for a god.
Or to show the utter contempt of the high caste to the low-caste: 'Mahendra Chamar?' Harry snorts exasperatedly, as if correcting the cop. 'Even that is repugnant. A lowborn Chamar's name cannot be Mahendra, which literally means Indra the great. Indra is the king of the gods and a Chamar cannot be named after him.'
And then there is the evocative moment when Mohan Ram's naïve question hits at the crux of the revolution seeking equality for all, so devastatingly articulated by Owell in his Animal Farm.
"What is this revolution?" Mohan Ram wondered aloud.
"A total change where there will be no rich, no poor…where everybody will be equal…"
"No poor?" Mohan Ram was sceptical "…then who will build houses for the babus?" It is a pity that an urge to put the Naxalite movement in perspective has not been done with more literary finesse.
Seeing Through The Stones: A Tale From The Maoist Land; Diptendra Raychaudhuri, Vitasta, Rs. 300.
Labels: Book Review
posted by Resistance 6/03/2007 02:38:00 AM,
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