Book Review: Srila Roy,Remembering Revolution: Gender,Violence and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement

Feminist research and writings, in recent years, have busted the myth about women’s non-existence in war/political violence narratives. Across disciplines—history, literature, anthropology, media studies, politics and international relations, feminists have been able to find the hitherto unknown, unconventional voices in political violence. Srila Roy’s Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement is an important contribution in that genre of feminist writings. Not only does it establish the important role women play as participants in the culture of political violence but it also takes the research further as it asks: what happens to women participants within the revolutionary war and as they restructure their everyday lives and memory in the aftermath of the war? Specifically, it interrogates sexual and gender violence that women militant revolutionaries experienced in the Naxalite movement of the late 1960s in Bengal and the silences and secrecy that prevail in the dominant narratives of the movement.

Roy is a convincing and evocative storyteller in how she skilfully weaves together the sensitive stories of the 20 ex-Naxalite women and 16 men whom she interviewed for this project (p. 37), also offering a valuable lesson in feminist methodology. The interviewees are selective in the representation of their experiences of the revolutionary period in their lives; hence, the overall conclusions cannot be considered either generic or universal. However, the issues raised in this book pose serious scholarly challenges to those interested in women/feminist questions about wars/political violence.

This book’s foremost contribution is to destroy the romantic myth of gender equality as the professed objective of radical left ideologies in South Asia. This was long overdue given that Linda Reif, Julia Shayne and others have shown in their works on the Latin American revolutionary guerrilla movements in Nicaragua, Cuba, Columbia, El Salvador and Guatemala that although based on radical left ideologies, these movements were based on the patriarchal division of labour; women were relegated to the private sphere in supporting roles and conventional femininity was evoked to deny them roles in direct combat and to inflict violence on them. For those who have followed the trajectory of radical left political violence in the global context, Roy’s work is the valuable missing link on South Asia. Offering much more beyond the mere appraisal of the patriarchal politics of the Naxalite movement, it tells a compelling story of the deep impact of such politics long after the actual events and its silences in the memories of the movement.

Her work draws parallels with Bina D’Costa’s (2011) poignant political ethnography of the Birongona women of Bangladesh, where she has described the processes that have silenced the voices of women rape survivors of the 1971 war of liberation. D’Costa (2011, p. 188) captures in her wide-ranging interviews how raped women in Bangladesh became the ‘forgotten survivors of the national story’. Srila Roy’s work similarly challenges the metanarrative of the Naxalite movement, its revolutionary violence and the silencing of ‘risky’ stories within it. Roy writes:

In the face of the “extraordinary” violence of armed struggle around which cultural memory is woven, forms of violence that fall outside this totalising category are rendered invisible…. Women, the bearers of tradition, invariably emerge as the custodians of oppositional or “risky” memories that require disciplining (p. 13).

Like D’Costa, Roy offers a nuanced framework and research methodology of recovering memory and storytelling. Policing women’s stories and memories is an important part of any patriarchal project. What women ‘do’ and ‘experience’ in militant wars/political violence is either justified to fit in with the dominant war/violence story, or silenced for the greater cause of the movement. D’Costa makes a clear distinction between macro and micro narratives: the former refers to official narratives, the latter, the lived experiences of people who had to ‘relandscape their lives due to political events’ like the 1971 liberation war. (D’Costa, 2011: p. 13). Roy talks about the erasure of violence ‘within’ violence in popular memories (p. 13).

Middle class women joined the Naxalite movement as a way of moving away from the patriarchal set up in their own homes and within society (p. 77). However, the movement as a ‘promised land of gender equality’ was a mirage and most women were given inferior positions in the organisation, expected to perform work of domestic drudgery. Roy tells us that the sexual victimisation of the peasant women by the ruling class/state was used as a major justification for the armed struggle but the female body and identity were reined in by middle class constructions of ‘honour’. Middle class women were constructed as sacrificing mothers (pp. 58–59) and Naxalbari politics was infused with the ideologies of ‘pure’ womanhood and nurturing, sacrificial and de-sexed motherhood (p. 62). Mary Tyler is a famous example of a white European woman taking up the Naxalite cause and becoming a ‘traditional’ Indian woman during her imprisonment. This was highlighted as an achievement for the movement and is used in popular imagery (p. 70). When real women were faced with threats to their bodily integrity and ‘honour’ the ideal of the ‘mother’ as a symbol of womanhood was challenged. There are examples of revolutionary women who did not receive support when they became mothers; rather they were looked down upon for having maternal feelings which were seen as counter revolutionary (p. 86).

Women who faced sexual violence/exploitation within the movement have been silent and are still very diffident in sharing their experiences. Roy has picked up three rationales behind this phenomenon: (i) betrayal of trust by those who were meant to protect them; (ii) intrusion on their being by those whom they respected (loved) and (iii) the failure of a vision (p. 128). Again, there are parallels with D’Costa’s analyses of the multiple processes in the silencing of the Birongona stories in Bangladesh which included a ‘negotiated survival strategy’. Roy tells us that complaints of women Naxalite cadres against fellow male members were received with disbelief and they were disqualified or simply ignored by party members. Class played a major role in the recognition of gender power and powerlessness. While rape of peasant women by landlords or repressive state forces was represented as a form of class and state oppression, sexual violence towards middle class women within the movement by lower class males went unrecognised. The book lists the example of a lower class man continuously hounding a middle class woman comrade and ultimately raping her. At his trial by the Naxalites the man got away simply by claiming that ‘middle class vices’ within him had somehow forced him to commit the sexual assault (p. 129). On the contrary, when some women members brought a complaint against a middle class comrade of inappropriate behaviour towards them, the man was condemned to death.

Unrelated, but nevertheless significant, the issue of class and sexual violence resonated in the 16 December 2012 Delhi gang rape case, as arguments (especially from left intellectuals like Arundhati Roy) surfaced that the public outrage was disproportionately high only because the victim was a ‘middle class’ woman, and the perpetrators, low class migrants to a big city. Srila Roy’s book points to that deep malaise in the thinking around sexual violence against women, where caste and class identities have been suffused with uncritical categories of ‘subaltern’ and ‘oppressor’ with gender losing its analytical privilege, even in feminist analyses. Roy helps us navigate through a range of those identities to finally conclude that sexual violence against women is not anathema even to the most progressive of ideologies and revolutionary struggles; and that ‘conceptual distinctions between forms of violence, based on the ethical ends that they seek to achieve, are largely unsustainable in practice’ (p. 173). In my own work on Kashmir, Sri Lanka and on contemporary Maoism in India I have argued for the recognition of complex experiences of violent militancy for participant women that were not all traumatic or disempowering, but I am persuaded by Roy to consider that there are more untold stories of ‘violence within violence’ waiting to be researched and understood.

The Naxalite movement of the 1960s thrived on a heroic masculinity and a dependent femininity (p. 103). This is the legacy that has been inherited by the contemporary Maoist movement that articulates an emancipatory/liberating agenda for women. Roy’s book (neither an insider’s account nor afflicted by a partisan agenda), unwavering in its feminist commitment and scholarship offers the opportunity to the radical left ideologues today to introspect, rethink and rewrite the history of their revolutionary struggle; redefine their goals and pathways. It is well known that the Left political movements and armed struggles have been far more intolerant of dissent and of any counter narrative within their own official histories; real people and their experiences often missing from their frameworks and activism. There are no ontological ambiguities in their ideologies and in their understandings of ‘subaltern’ and gender subjectivities. Roy elegantly dismantles that unambiguous faith; and for the Left no salvaging is possible unless the denial paves the way for engagement, contestation and confrontation with/in their own.

American feminist scholar, Jean Bethke Elshtain, who passed away in 2013, in her timeless classic, Women and War, mentions that ‘history does not teach; rather we “teach” it by making it “speak” to us in various ways, by remembering this and forgetting that’. (1987, p. 149). Srila Roy’s book makes the history of the Naxalite movement ‘speak’: of sexual violence and silences of everyday negotiations by women in the movement and of the gender codes and patriarchal language of the revolutionary path. This book is a must read for feminists across disciplines, for those who study war/political violence and especially for those interested in radical left ideologies like Naxalism and Maoism.