Reading Sudeep Chakravarti‘s nuanced account of India’s Maoist movement, Toral Gajarawala wonders why the country’s Anglophone novelists have so persistently avoided the crisis of nationalism it represents. From the National:
In Siddhartha Deb’s English-language novel An Outline of a Republic, a journalist from Calcutta is sent to the Indo-Burmese border to investigate an insurgent group called the Movement Organised to Resuscitate Liberation Struggle (MORLS). As he travels to the edge of the country via Delhi, Calcutta, Imphal and Kohima, his progress is slowed by broken-down buses, bribes and border patrols. Along the way, we hear scattered rumours about the “ultras”, as the revolutionaries are called, but we see them in just a single archival photograph. In Moreh, a small city along the border, the journalist spots some armed men in camouflage in a forest clearing, “but it was impossible to tell if they were a government unit or an insurgent outfit”. We never meet members of MORLS, or learn much about their political programme. We do, however, learn quite a bit about the journalist: in the end, the insurgency in the Northeast serves as a backdrop for his story, his search, his demands.
Sudeep Chakravarti’s Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country is not a novel, but it follows a similar journey: the slow voyage of a journalist (Chakravarti himself) towards the dark heart of an Indian rebellion. In this case, the insurgents in question are the country’s Maoist guerrillas, often referred to as the Naxalites. In documenting the current state of the Naxalites, Chakravarti does what Indian literature in English has avoided doing for the last five decades; that is, he investigates (often at the level of daily experience) a political movement that exists outside of the electoral, the parliamentary and the sanctioned – and poses serious questions about the future of a country. More:
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