Abstract
Chitralekha attempts a fundamental revision in studying political violence in contemporary India by asking a set of important questions: ‘What is the everyday, working context within which ordinary people are led to such…extraordinary acts of violence? Who really are these people and how do they rationalize their own practice?’ (p. 25). Arguing for a need to look into the life-world of the ‘extremist’ beyond specificities of political ideology, the book investigates such life-worlds of both Left and Right-wing ‘extremists’. The book contains several tables to map the people interviewed in the course of this study (about 40 Naxalites in Bihar and Jharkhand; and about 25 participants in Gujarat violence in 2002) based on their socio-economic locations, standard of living, ideas of good life, rationale for engaging with political violence and ideological association. The principal strength of the book lies in the rich source material and the way details of the immediate events, and their effects on the organisational structures, are laid out.
The endeavour to bring together the life-worlds of political actors in oppositional mobilisations is a mark of innovative thinking. A detailed discussion on the methodological aspects of such an exploratory study, however, would have been helpful to understand the overall framework of the research. There is a reference to ‘extensive anthropological fieldwork’ (p. 3) while greater details are provided on the researcher’s experiences of the field. In the context of the formidable body of scholarship on anthropological fieldwork, the wealth of source material would have been more accessible if questions of representation, of recording hitherto unheard ‘voices’, of narrativising what people say and what people do not say, were addressed. Given the main thematic of all interviews: performing violence, it seems that understanding the silence, the unease, the hesitation on the one hand, and the lack of regret, or apathy on the other hand, in various oral histories constitute one of the most important dimensions of analysis. The analysis of interviews, however, takes all that is said by the interviewee prima facie, only occasionally allowing for a more complex exploration of orality in an interview situation. The four substantial chapters—‘Left Extremists in Bihar and Jharkhand: Historical Context, Ideology, Organisation Structure and Dynamics’; ‘Committed, Opportunists and Drifters: Redescribing the Naxalites in Jharkhand and Bihar’; ‘Hindu Extremists in Ahmedabad: Who are They and Why are They Ready to Kill Muslims?’; and ‘Hindu Extremists in Rural and Adivasi Gujarat: Sadarpura and Palla’—narrate the ‘standpoint of footsoldiers of the Naxalite movement’ (p. 80) as well as the ‘driving forces that made them [participants in Gujarat Violence in 2002] willing to kill Muslims’ (p. 135). The focus on the point of view of the participants—in both cases—is highlighted in these narrations through small excerpts from the interviews. Reference to the extensive scholarship on oral history, including significant feminist and postcolonial interventions, could have helped the final analysis to access the nuances of the spoken word—silences, intonations, repetitions—in a conversation structured by the conventions of the interview method.
While the emphasis on the perspectives of perpetrators of violence is the most noteworthy contribution of this study, a discussion on the interdisciplinary location of the study would have made a contribution to the conceptual framework of studying political violence. Although the conceptual framework reflects the author’s familiarity with a certain tradition of sociological theories on political unrest and political theories dealing with ethnic violence, the framework does not take into account the intellectual turns in the scholarship on collective mobilisations, contentious politics, political violence and militancy in the last three decades. A reference to psycho-biography (p. 5), coupled with a tantalisingly short discussion of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (pp. 25–26), invites the reader to expect a broad horizon of theoretical devices featuring Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Franz Fanon, which will eventually throw light on the angularities of the life-world of extremists. A meaningful engagement with the sociology of emotions, especially reflections on the relationship between passion and politics, on the anthropology of violence, and a more sustained discourse on ‘extremism’ would have been valuable for charting the uneven contours of political violence. Since killing emerges as the core performance of extremism, the problematic of violence becomes circumscribed by an individual act; and yet reflections on the anthropology of mourning or martyrology—both concerned with individual death—rarely find any mention within this problematic.
Though the span of the research is wide-ranging, we cannot avoid asking one basic question—what makes Naxalites in Bihar and Jharkhand, and perpetrators of violence in Gujarat in 2002 comparable?
In the first few pages of this book, a reader encounters the word ‘uncanny’ a few times and the uncanny refers to the similarities the author has found in the life-worlds of Naxalites and Hindu Extremists. In more senses than one, the rest of the book is an exploration of this ‘uncannily similar explanations’ (pp. 5, 7). Since the book brackets away the basic differences between the Naxalite movement in Bihar and Jharkhand and Hindu Extremist activities in Gujarat, the ‘uncanny’ becomes a search for a universally valid rationale for the act of killing. However, some reflections on the regional culture and, perhaps most importantly, spatio-temporal specificities of the ‘extremists’ in relation to the vast academic as well as popular literature would have enhanced the quality of comparability. The Communist Party of India and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh came into being in colonial India in the 1920s, in response to a political context that was specific to and at the same time transcendental of the borders of the British Empire. How two different political ideologies took shape through different modes of activism in postcolonial India and their diverse trajectories may have indicated new ways of covering this difficult terrain of comparative study. Further, it would have been useful to have a discussion of how oral histories, published academic studies, political pamphlets and other archival records are compared to narrate the life-worlds of activists? How would comparable contexts in terms of region and period be constructed? Further, in this ‘life-world’ described, an entire range of imaginative experiences and practices—love, romance, songs, poetry, stories, visual images and dance—are absent. The exploration of ‘uncanny’ fails to venture into the many practices of everyday life that animate the mind of the political actor.