Insurgent Imaginations: Culture, Postcolonial Planetarity and Maoism in India

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ABSTRACT

This dissertation, Insurgent Imaginations: Culture, Postcolonial Planetarity and Maoism in India, provides the first book-length study of the literary and cultural representations of the Maoist Naxalite movement in India. I highlight the centrality of literary and cultural texts, and their attendant questions of form and genre in negotiating planetary imaginaries of solidarity. The dissertation illuminates the wide-ranging political and cultural networks that came to inform Naxalism -- such as early 20th century internationalist autobiography and autobiographical fiction of M.N. Roy and Claude McKay; post-1950s New Left conversations on urbanity in the Global North and South; cross-cultural aesthetic interactions involving indigenous South Asian prose and theatrical forms (naksha and jatra), 1960s pan-Africanist Black Power and Black Arts movements in the US, African decolonization, Latin American Third-Cinema and contemporary South Asian Anglophone fiction. I draw on a number of key representations of the Naxalites across a broad spectrum of cultural forms (novels, plays, film, satire, and autobiography), by globally-known Anglophone authors such as Aravind Adiga and Arundhati Roy, as well as relatively neglected but major cosmopolitan figures such as Utpal Dutt, Mrinal Sen and M.N. Roy. Elaborating on the interactions of the indigenous and the local with the transnational in these texts, I uncover little-known genealogies of planetary solidarity engendered by the Naxalites. My dissertation thus locates the development of Naxalism in India within broader conversations on modernity and insurgency spanning over a century, mapping an alternative history of emancipatory politics and elaborating the role of literary texts in the envisioning of collective liberation.

INSURGENT IMAGINATIONS: CULTURE, POSTCOLONIAL PLANETARITY AND MAOISM IN INDIA

By Auritro Majumder B.A., Jadavpur University, 2007 M.A., Jadavpur University, 2009

Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English

Syracuse University June 2014

UMI Number: 3629389

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TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: Culture, Postcolonial Planetarity and Maoism in India

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CHAPTER ONE: Parody and Third World Internationalism in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

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CHAPTER TWO: M.N. Roy’s Memoirs and Early 20th Century Anticolonial Imaginaries of Internationalism

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CHAPTER THREE: The Poetics and Politics of Blackness in India: Chanakya Sen’s The Morning After and Utpal Dutt’s The Rights of Man

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CHAPTER FOUR: Lumpen Aesthetics and the City 1: Binoy Ghosh’s Naksha Sketches

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CHAPTER FIVE: Lumpen Aesthetics and the City 2: the Radical Cinema of Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta 71

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CONCLUSION: Insurgent Imaginations and World Literature

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BIBLIOGRAPHY:

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VITA

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INTRODUCTION Culture, Postcolonial Planetarity and Maoism in India I – Contemporary Capitalism in Asia, Maoism and the Naxalite Movement How strange it is though, that the contemporary tsars of the Indian Establishment – the State that crushed the Naxalites so mercilessly – should now be saying what Charu Mazumdar said so long ago: China’s Path is Our Path” – Arundhati Roy, “Walking with the Comrades (2010) The noted Anglophone Indian writer Arundhati Roy’s essay, “Walking with the Comrades,” was one of the first contemporary accounts of the Naxalites in India that made it to global circulation, not least because of Roy’s renown in international activist circles.1 Roy’s piece, which we turn to shortly, presented the Naxalite resistance against the Indian state and multinational mining corporations as part of a worldwide constellation of protest, pitting displaced populations – indigenous adivasis in central India in this case – against the ruthless incursion of neoliberal capitalism. Sharply written and widely disseminated, “Walking with the Comrades” clinically illustrated the relentless battle waged by the world’s largest democracy, India, against its poorest and most vulnerable indigenous populations, adivasis. Equally eloquently, it portrayed the Naxalite guerrillas as morally courageous and selflessly ethical fighters forced to arms against injustice. Finally, Roy’s essay gestured to the longer history of revolutionary Naxalism in India and its challenge to the postcolonial Indian nation-state, thus setting up the current conflict in its

1

“Walking with the Comrades” first appeared in the Indian magazine Outline in 2010. It was reprinted with two other related essays, “Mr. Chidambaram’s War” and “Trickledown Revolution,” in Roy 2012. All references to the essay are from the latter edition.

2 historical context. As such, Roy speaks well to my project: in this dissertation, I elaborate on some central aspects of the Naxalite challenge, and alternative, to Indian nationalism. The term Naxalites is used today as an umbrella term for a number of disparate militant Maoist groups in India. Of these, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), formed in 2004 through the merger of Peoples’ War Group (PWG) and Maoist Communist Center (MCC), is the most prominent. Unlike other alter-globalization movements, the peculiar nature of contemporary Maoist Naxalism is telling: it involves the marshalling of indigenous agricultural populations into militarized “peoples’ armies,” and the establishing of “liberated zones” governed by local “peoples’ governments” (Janatana Sarkar), all under the banner of Mao Zedong or Maoist Communism. Response to these insurgent groups is strong, and strongly bifurcated. On the one hand, the Naxalite resistance has brought upon itself the full brunt of state violence. Under the typical guise of combating “terrorism” that has become familiar to the world since 9/11, the Indian state has effectively suspended democratic rights in large swathes of the country, particularly in central India. Here, a combination of state-backed landlords’ militias such as the Salwa Judum (“Purification Hunt”) and Ranvir Sena (“Fearless Warriors”), and paramilitary operations such as “Green Hunt,” has converted Naxalite-dominated areas into sites of civil-war. In flagrant disregard of citizens’ rights, as documented by national human rights organizations such as the Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) and Association for Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR), the state has imprisoned several thousand people under India’s notoriously opaque anti-terrorism ordinances on charges of being “Maoists” (A. Roy 2012:8-10). On the other hand, the Naxalites have been put forward as models of resistance against neoliberal displacement and presented in glowing light by leading Indian intellectuals such as Arundhati Roy, as well as prominent civil rights activists such as Gautam Navlakha

3 (2010), and journalists such as Sudeep Chakravarti (2008). In between condemnation and support, other sections of the Indian Left have been critical of the Naxalites’ tactics of violence; while the organized “democratic” Left has denounced such tactics as outdated and counterrevolutionary (Bose 2010), some non-party Left intellectuals have taken issue with the ideological contradictions and strategic weaknesses of the Indian variant of Maoism (Banaji 2010). Irrespective of such contradictions and weaknesses, however -- and there are many -- the Naxalites represent a revolutionary tradition that predates the contemporary era by decades. In fact, the Communist lineage of alternative political engagement and resistance to elite-led Indian nationalism goes back to the anticolonial era. As scholars have begun to recognize, organized Marxism played an important role in engendering a vision and culture of decolonization that was distinct from liberal and Gandhian versions of nationalism in paying attention to questions of class equality, and also oppressions of gender, caste and religion (for two representative studies, see Gopal 2005 and Ahmed 2009). Some two decades after Indian Independence in 1947, the emergence of the Naxalite movement highlighted the revolutionary tradition of proletarian politics and the Communist legacy of “peoples’ war”. So named after the Naxalbari peasant uprising of 1967 in the eastern Indian province of West Bengal, the Naxalites were a breakaway faction of the Indian Communist movement led by Charu Mazumdar, one of the prime movers behind Naxalbari. Proclaiming their allegiance to the Peoples’ Republic of China, following the Sino-Soviet split in world Communism in the 1960s and the India-China border war in 1962, various dissident Communist groups floated their own party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) or CPI (M-L) in 1969 with Mazumdar as general-secretary. Between Naxalbari in 1967 and 1972-73, when the CPI (M-L) began to splinter into several factions

4 following state repression, the Naxalites led a series of armed insurrections in several parts of India, notably Srikakulum in the south and Kheri-Lakhimpur to the north of the country, advocating peasant-led revolution and overthrow of the Indian state. The movement also spread beyond Indian borders, creating its own version of Mao Zedong thought inspired “M-L” parties, into Bangladesh in the east, and Pakistan in the west. The Naxalite movement illustrated the failure of political independence -- the transfer of power into the hands of national elites – and highlighted the immiseration of the lower strata of the peasantry, comprising 70% of India’s 540 million-odd population in 1971, and the unresolved question of ethnic and national minorities within the arbitrary territorial borders drawn up by British colonizers in 1947. The Naxalite resistance was also inflected by contemporary geo-politics, namely the conflicts created by the Cold War. In siding with socialist China in the late 60s, not only were the Naxalites supporting a state that had been at war with India less than a decade back, they were also opposing the Soviet Union and the United States.2 In Maoist “theory of convergence,” Soviet and American political and economic interests aligned in the Cold War era to hold back the struggle for national liberation in the “third world” involving agriculture-dependent, underdeveloped semi-colonial or neocolonial countries. Having accepted the Chinese leadership of the world Communist movement, the Naxalite version of Left solidarity or internationalism, shared by many in the global Left of the 1960s and 1970s, posited the anti-colonial struggles of Asia, Africa and Latin America as holding the key to the eventual demise of global capitalism. Naxalites characterized the Indian state as “semi-colonial, semi-

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The Soviets in particular had been long-standing allies supporting the Indian Communist movement since the 1920s. The Soviet Union frequently acted as mediators between the Indian nationalists and Communists. Since the 1960s onwards, China represented for Naxalite politics an alternative to the Soviet-led second bloc and the US-led capitalist world.

5 feudal,” held under the combined sway of Soviet and Euro-American political and economic forces. The geo-political milieu has altered since the period of decolonization by the rise of neoliberalism, the demise of the “third world” and the contemporary prominence of BRICS developing countries [Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa] in the Global South, yet the overall global divide remains intact. The 1960s-era model of a developed “Western” metropole and underdeveloped peripheries has been subject to modification by “a new hierarchy,” in the words of Samir Amin, where the peripheral countries are now differentiated among themselves, between those undergoing “subordinated industrialization” [India, China, South-East Asia] and those which continue to supply resources and reserve labor to the world market [sub-Saharan Africa, parts of the Middle-East]. As Amin notes, such reorganization leads to “more inequality than ever before, in the distribution of income on a world scale, subordinat[ing] the industries of the peripheries and reducing them to the role of subcontracting” (Amin 1997:5). This redistribution of global wealth and perpetuation of existing hierarchies, termed more charitably as “globalization,” has led to the changed position of China. As Mobo Gao (2008) notes, the revolutionary doctrine of Maoism has taken a backseat in the Chinese integration into the capitalist world economy, even as it continues to be the guiding principle of the state.3

3

“Maoism” is a contested term. Originating in the Shining Path struggles in Peru in the 1980s, it is a recent successor to “Mao Zedong Thought,” which itself was coined during the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1969 as an extension of Communist Marxism-Leninism. Mao Zedong Thought sought to extend the parameters of Communist praxis in the light of national liberation movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Such an extension was premised on a Leninist theory of imperialism and emphasized the organized “peasantry” and “national liberation” over “classical” Marxist notions of “socialist revolution” of the “industrial working class”. In the years following the ascent of Deng Xiaoping after Mao’s death in 1976, the Sixth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) -- in 1981 -- officially denounced the Cultural Revolution. Yet it upheld Mao Zedong Thought as the ideological basis for the transition and integration of China’s socialist economy into the capitalist world market. Mao Zedong Thought thus enjoys a paradoxical status in the contemporary Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) as a reconfigured symbol and political basis of state-led, market-oriented socialism. It legitimizes the ruling regime by associating it with Mao and the PRC’s foundational moment of the anti-colonial Communist revolution of 1949 (See Gao 2008).

6 This official version of Maoism presides, paradoxically, over a country that for worldsystem theorists such as Giovanni Arrighi (2007) is the new epicenter of global capitalism. Arrighi claims that, “What world order, or disorder, will eventually materialize largely depends on the capacity of the more populous Southern states, first and foremost China and India to open up for themselves and the world a socially more equitable and ecologically more sustainable developmental path than the one that has made the fortunes of the West” (Arrighi 9). This is a testimony to Asian prominence in the world market – the “new ‘workshop’ and ‘cash box’ of the world” (Arrighi 7). At the same time, as Liu Kang has persuasively argued, “to understand China’s modernity, or its alternative modernity … the centrality of revolution and political struggle in the field of cultural production must be acknowledged” (1998:168). As Kang demonstrates, the fields of nationalism and revolution have been central sites where the contradictions of Chinese modernity are negotiated. The contest over nationalism has been a defining feature, in a different historic-cultural vein, in India’s own postcolonial history as well.4 The re-emergence of the Naxalite movement and the Naxalite conflict with the Indian state in the first decades of the 21st century once again highlights historical confrontations in new and reconfigured conditions. The South Asian version of Maoist insurrectionary politics continues to be a widespread political phenomenon in India as 4

In many ways, the political and territorial contours of the Indian nation-state were re-drawn in the decade of the 1970s in the wake of Naxalite and other “extremist” challenges. Several important factors played their part: the postIndependence idea of a quasi-socialist welfare state with its mixed private and public economy structured along federal lines, championed by the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was sidelined. His daughter, India’s first and only female Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, worked to promote a centralized form of government and greater state patronage of the interests of national elites, both rural and urban. Land relations underwent a significant transformation in the 1970s with the incursion of capitalist production processes and agglomeration of land in the hands of rural landlord classes. Urban based industrial houses were given state support in the form of protectionist trade barriers and tariff regulations. Gandhi suspended Indian democracy in 1975, declaring a State of Emergency that allowed her administration to consolidate these class privileges by silencing all forms of dissent. At the same, the political consolidation of the Indian nation-state took place through the extension of the franchise, and the incorporation of greater number of the India’s population into the electoral system through the 1970s as well as the 1980s. Areas in the Indian north-east and the north, controlled since Independence through central statutes, and sites of significant liberation struggles, were brought into the fold of the Indian mainstream through extension of franchise, and the co-optation of sections of the local elite to form provincial-level “democratic” governments.

7 well as Nepal, even though it has lost ground to fundamentalist right-wing politics in former strongholds in countries such as Bangladesh.5 Specifically, the Naxalite struggle for national liberation and emancipation of the proletarian masses continues to resonate with the unsettled contradictions of decolonization and modernity in contemporary India. Such old contradictions become deeper as Indian society faces new challenges with the incursion of neoliberal forces, and new levels of inequity. The Naxalite insurgency has attracted a fair share of scholarly attention, with accounts by Kunnath (2012), Shah and Pettigrew (2012) and Shah (2010) on the contemporary Naxalites drawing on, and extending the work of, scholars on the earlier Naxalite phase of the late 1960s and 1970s -- Srila Roy (2012), Mallarika Sinha Roy (2011) as well as Duyker (1987), Banerjee (1984), Dasgupta (1974), and Ram (1971), to name only the most prominent ones. These accounts have dealt with various aspect of the movement, such as the participation of women, lower-castes, and adivasi indigenous groups and their attendant problems, the political-economic contexts of development and nation-making, land relations in the rural countryside. They have drawn on various sources, ranging from field-work based interviews with participants and other affected citizens to archive-based documentation.

5

Following severe state repression in the decade of the 1970s, the Naxalite movement fragmented over the next few years into several splinter groups. Through the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, several splinter groups continued their activities in disparate parts of the country. In the 21 st century, the Indian Naxalite movement received a boost with the success of the Maoist armed insurgency in the neighboring country of Nepal. Such was the political clout of the Nepali Maoists that they were able to transition from armed militancy to successfully win state power in 2008 through the electoral system in Nepal. While the Nepali Maoists subsequently renounced armed struggle and disbanded the popular Peoples’ Guerrilla Army (PGA), they continue to be one of the largest political forces. In India, the Maoist Naxalites are said to be active in one third of India’s six hundred-odd districts, leading the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to declare the Naxalites as “the single largest security threat” in the country. Even taking into account the possible exaggeration of figures by the security establishment and the sensationalist corporate media, the Naxalite movement represents one of the biggest Communist-led insurgencies in the world today.

8 What I offer in this dissertation, Insurgent Imaginations, is a study of the literary and cultural representations of the Naxalite movement. My account highlights the importance of the site of “culture” in understanding the solidarities generated by the Naxalite movement. Highlighting culture brings focus on the Naxalite engagement with the vexed questions of modernity and emancipation in the postcolony, as well as the transnational connections it sought to forge with anti-capitalist struggles elsewhere in the world. I demonstrate how literature, in particular, negotiates the tensions of combined and uneven development in the capitalist periphery, and how a focus on the literary opens conceptual space for comprehending the internationalist lineages of Naxalite revolutionary politics and thought. This approach addresses a crucial gap in extant scholarship by highlighting the imagination of revolutionary Naxalism that sustains its contestation with the Indian state.

II – The Misplaced Politics of Culture and the Case Against Cosmo-Theory To focus on culture as a site of global solidarity is to simultaneously bring attention to the myriad social contestations that go into the making of culture. The Marxist cultural geographer Don Mitchell has provocatively argued (1995) that an uncritical focus on “culture” in academic analysis risks further mystifying social relations of power rather than clarifying them. As he notes: ‘Culture’ is rather a very powerful name – powerful because it obscures what it is meant to identify. Cultural analyses that do not begin from seeing the idea of culture as a structuring imposition, that do not acknowledge the top-down ideological structuring of the concept, reinforce culturalism: the assumption that culture ‘independently’ exists,

9 that cultural distinctions are necessarily real and rooted in the peoples being analyzed, and that culture can be used as explanation (108). In other words, to conceptualize culture in isolation from its “top-down ideological structuring” is to grant it an “ontological” separation, and not “how the very idea of culture has been developed and deployed as a means of attempting to order, control and define ‘others’ in the name of profit or power (104). Indeed, in the context of the incursion of capitalist market relations, as another Marxist geographer David Harvey points out, there can be no such claim of ontological separation, as the realm of culture “more and more … gets brought within the grasp of the cash nexus and the logic of capitalist circulation” (1989:344). A materialist examination of culture thus has to take account of both the top-down ideological structuring of the concept and the material relations of production that produce cultural distinctions as “real”. To insist on the structuring relation between culture and the political economies of production is not to reduce or flatten either culture or cultural articulation to the plane of the economic, but to guard against the culturalist tendency to separate the two that Mitchell warns against. Culturalist approaches tend to see politics being waged solely on the basis of culture, to the neglect of the dialectical relation between culture and political economy. I will provide one example – but a very revealing one – from a prominent theorist of culture, the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, to point out the pitfalls of such separating procedures. Appadurai’s influential model of the cultural processes unleashed by contemporary globalization rests on the notion of “cultural flows,” mediated by mass-media technologies, consumption practices, and immaterial labor (1996). Such flows contribute to the circulation and adaptation of cultural forms giving rise to what he terms the overlapping discourses of “public culture”.6 Appadurai’s conception of

6

Five “scapes” contribute to the global exchange of ideas and information, constitutive of global flows in Appadurai: these are “ethnoscape,” “technoscape,” “finanscape,” “mediascape” and “ideoscape”. In thinking of

10 public culture leads him in his recent work, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (2013) to consider the cultural realm as opening up an “ethics of possibility,” and fostering the “capacity to aspire”: in short, to imagine a more open world, marked by active participation in the well-being of oneself, of others, and nature (126). He contrasts this positive ethic to the market-driven “ethics of probability,” which is dictated by the logic of profit and rational calculation. The speculation he puts forward for a better collective future is this: the “ethic of possibility” as instantiated in culture is antagonistic to the “probability ethic” of the market. The outcome of this antagonism is going to be the decisive factor in shaping the future. While such a theory makes an optimistic case for a better future, its understanding of culture rests on an assumption, not surprisingly, of a clean separation between the cultural and the economic.7 Ideology, which Neil Smith defines as “the practical experience of a given social class which sees reality from its own perspective, and therefore only in part” (1990:15), does not enter into or structure the cultural realm to determine the ethical position of its actors, who stay outside the profit-driven realm of the market. Appadurai admits that the ethical capacity to imagine a better future is unevenly distributed between the rich and the poor, but such a consideration does not bar him from positing an “ethic” of solidarity and a “capacity” for aspiration that is not only separated from socio-economic relations of production, but also antagonistic to it (188). globalization as “the central problematic of cultural processes in today’s world,” his views are decidedly postmodern, emphasizing culture – “a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order” -- and relegating the centerperiphery model of uneven economic development to irrelevance: “the world we now live in seems rhizomatic – calling for theories of rootlessness, alienation and psychological distance between individuals and groups on the one hand, and fantasies (or nightmares) of electronic propinquity on the other” (1990:295, 297). Commenting on this postmodern “rhizomatic” analysis of the global condition, Lawrence Grossberg rightly points to the “refus[al] to identify the economy of globalization with a map of power” as a key analytical weakness. Grossberg continues, “like most postmodernisms, it actually tells us very little about the actual, specific operations of power within the particular vectors of global force” (Grossberg 1997:24-25). 7 Despite the postmodern disavowal of political economy, it is useful to point out that Appadurai’s notion of a hopeful future is taken from the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. Leslie Adelson’s essay “Futurity Now: an Introduction” (2013) has taken note of this influence (see fn 19). See Ernst Bloch, Principle of Hope, Volume 1 (1995), first published in 1954.

11 In putting forward a theory of culture that relies on “antagonisms” with the market Appadurai gestures, somewhat obliquely, to the Hegelian-Marxian notion of contradictions. Yet such a passing formal similarity helps to disguise what is essentially a liberal-humanist view of human agency, where ethics is counterpoised against – and beyond the scope of -- profit. Moreover, by limiting himself to the market – the site of exchange -- rather than production itself, Appadurai manages to suggest that the economic forces of production that regulate human labor are external to human activity and therefore external to the realm of ethics. By contrast, the Marxian tradition holds ethical subjectivity, or “consciousness,” as not independent from but dialectically constituted by the social relations of production within which it is enmeshed.8 Culture as an “ethics of possibility” cannot operate against the market simply because individuals or groups have willed to do so; such a view does disservice to the analysis of human agency by eliding both the role of ideology and the relations of production in structuring human activity and culture. To insist then on the importance of culture as a site of politics is also to insist on the constitutively unequal social relations that structure culture itself. The flows of contemporary globalization deepen economic inequalities, and therefore further alienate the poor from selfrepresentation, or access to “culture”. The question of differential access to culture for the haves and have-nots of the world is not merely a point to be noted in passing, or a qualifying statement 8

Cf. Marx’s observation on “consciousness,” in the “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy – “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will” etc. The notion of social class is used in Marx in two distinct, but dialectically related, senses. As Marx and Engels (1972) note in The German Ideology, “[t]he separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they on hostile terms with each other as competitors. On the other hand, the class in its turn achieves an independent existence over against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of existence predestined.” Raymond Williams’ gloss on this distinction is helpful: he identifies the two uses of class as “category” (first sense) and “formation” (latter sense). “A class is sometimes an economic category, including all who are objectively in that economic situation. But a class is sometimes (and in Marx more often) a formation in which, for historical reasons, consciousness of this situation and the organization to deal with it have developed … Class consciousness clearly can only belong to a formation” (Williams 1983: 68, my emphasis). In Appadurai, by contrast, human consciousness is self-perpetuating within a rhizomatic, non-class formation.

12 made to temper the jouissance of ethically based collective futures, as is the case for Appadurai: I argue that this question has to be placed at the heart of an analysis of culture and cultural representation. Appadurai’s formulation posits the “possibility” of global solidarity on the basis of culture, and suggests the importance of such solidarity in forging a better future than the one made “probable” by the iniquitous trajectory of the “market”. This is nothing more than a piety. Such a future is postulated on the “ethical” premise of “recognizing” and accepting the particularity of the “others” and their “differences” from the self.

The domain of culture and

the possibility of human interaction in that domain is said to enable such ethical practices. Yet the notion of “difference,” say of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and so on that Appadurai posits, appear to be a fixed or a-priori notion; there is no consideration of how such differences are constructed through material structures such as, for instance, the contemporary international division of labor. Such differences then become purely or merely “cultural,” and can be dealt with through ethical recognition and respect. In this way, the ethical politics of respecting difference would displace a class politics based on common interests and shared positions in the social relations of production. Ethical politics is liberal-humanist, that is, resting on an understanding of the human subject as fundamentally “free”.9 Such a politics refuses to name capitalist production as the regulating framework of human activity, consciousness, and the proliferation of difference, and instead suggests the externality of capitalism -- as market – to human practice, “culture”. At the same time, it credits “globalization,” which is but the contemporary re-organization of capitalist relations of production and accumulation on a world-scale, with creating an order where greater 9

It is my contention that the postmodern theorizations of subjectivity, which rely on language-based notions of discourse, textuality et al, in neglect of social relations of production, make possible the return, in the last instance, of liberal-humanism where the human subject is unencumbered by the material circumstances of its existence.

13 cultural interaction between different parts of the world is made possible. Appadurai’s liberalhumanist conceptualization of culture is not an isolated one; it is a prominent example of a significant trend in contemporary critical theory, a “new cosmopolitanism,” that aims to theorize the cultures of solidarity ostensibly made possible by globalization. The return of cosmopolitanism in American academic discussion since the 1990s accompanies the prominence of neo-Kantian philosophical categories on one hand, and disaffection with the postmodern championing of the local and the fragmentary on the other. The Kantian notion of cosmopolitan being as a subject whose allegiance is to the “world at large” is revisited in contemporary cultural studies in various forms. As Bruce Robbins (1998) points out, this debate gives rise to notions of “rooted cosmopolitanism” (Mitchell Cohen), “vernacular cosmopolitanism” (Homi Bhabha), as well as “emergent postcolonial cosmopolitanisms,” Asian and African versions described by the likes of Aihwa Ong and Kwame Anthony Appiah.10 Bruce Robbins’s editor’s introduction to the influential volume Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (1998) provides a useful illustration of the theoretical and political coordinates of the new cosmopolitanism. As the title of the volume indicates, new cosmopolitanism is necessitated by, and responding to, the growing irrelevance --“beyond” -- of “the nation” under contemporary globalization. The preferred locus of engagement with this postnational situation is the affective register of “feeling”. Robbins advocates a postnational, cosmopolitan subject with “multiple attachments,” or affinities not tied down to specific locations. Indeed, he poses this against “the romantic localism of a certain portion of the left which feels it must counter capitalist globalization with a strongly rooted and exclusive sort of belonging” (Robbins 1998: 3). The affective politics of multiple attachments is represented by 10

Specific to South Asia, one can add to this list the more recent work on “cosmopolitan thought zones” (Bose and Manjapra 2010) and “colored cosmopolitanism” (Slate 2012).

14 the neologism “cosmopolitics,” as the “effort to describe, from within multiculturalism, a name for the genuine striving toward common norms and mutual translatability that is also part of multiculturalism” (12-13). The postnational turn calls for a “stretching of political theory … to work on a larger-than-national scale” (8). This imperative is caused by the new and supposedly positive changes brought about by contemporary globalization: cosmopolitics seeks to “introduce(s) intellectual order and accountability into this newly dynamic space of gushingly unrestrained sentiments, pieties, and urgencies” (9). Robbins proposes this list of affects, “sentiments, pieties, and urgencies” as cosmopolitics’ “domain of contested politics,” testifying to the “full multivoiced complexity” that “justice on a global scale would have to resolve” (12). The basic premise of “cosmopolitics,” inscribed “within multiculturalism” in Robbins’ own words, gives rise to the question of whether multiculturalism is the same elsewhere in the world – in Europe for instance – or even whether US multiculturalism is itself not the name for a culturalist celebration of diversity that, in projecting “common norms and mutual translatability” effaces the real and everyday conditions of racial and class-based inequalities in contemporary America. Robbins is careful in attending to these possible objections; he is sensitive to the problem of celebrating multicultural cosmopolitanism in the period of US military adventures, and self-aware of the “growing consensus that cosmopolitanism sometimes works together with nationalism rather than in opposition to it” (2). As he clarifies, “[c]osmopolitics is by no means necessarily postnational politics” (8). Despite these qualifications, the overall thrust of his definition suggests a devaluation of certain other “non”-cosmopolitan forms of struggle that deserves scrutiny. I have two major criticisms to make of Robbins’ position; first, that his conceptualization of the “newly dynamic space” of globalization and his insistence on “new” terms of analysis –

15 the neologism cosmopolitics – effaces the persistence of pre-existing conditions in relation to the new. Defined in the terms described above, the cosmopolitical, to use the words of Timothy Brennan (1997) implies that “class antagonism, geopolitical rivalries, the entrenched defense of privileges, imperial designs, the blunt arguments of war and profit making – all of the other earlier mechanisms of historical causation are, in globalization theory, implicitly downgraded into second-order explanations” (130, emphasis added). Indeed, many of these familiar terms are mentioned in passing in cosmopolitan discourse only to be discarded as the theorist “sprints frantically after a reality vastly more innovative” (130). In these departures, the entrenched class antagonisms characteristic of the old order seem to be on the face of it replaced by the newer, messier dynamics of globalized capitalism with its flows and interruptions. The inability, or refusal, to witness structures of hierarchy in the “new dynamic order” has important implications. This is my second point. The “multiple attachments” of Robbins’s cosmopolitical, deterritorialized and globalizing human subjects ignore precisely those subjects whose “identities” are attenuated and “attachment” to location threatened: these noncosmopolitan subjects are more tightly, and precariously, bound to their single-dimensioned positions of subservience. If contemporary globalization has increased the “dynamic” flow of finance capital across national borders, a properly dialectical analysis would consider how it has simultaneously restricted the movement of labor, through privatization of spaces, increased policing of territorial borders, and forced uprooting and displacement of local and indigent populations particularly in the Global South. Imperialist aggression on weaker nations, as well as the consolidation of privatized multinational media conglomerates over platforms of representation, have meant that the “victims” of globalization have less, not more, opportunities

16 to form “multiple attachments” or to participate in the “full multivoiced complexity” of cosmopolitical “justice” (Robbins 1998: 3, 12). In this context, the “romantic localism” that Robbins proscribes is particularly important to interrogate. Robbins’ skepticism about “strongly rooted and exclusive sort[s] of belonging” is a definitive feature of postmodern suspicion of “origins” and “commitment,” complementing an equally postmodern embrace of hybrid and deterritorialized “cosmopolitical” beings. I would argue that the notion of “romantic localism” does not make an adequate distinction between Right and Left political positions, between fascist and progressive “belongings” and “rootedness”. Certainly, in the context of nationalism, as Neil Lazarus (1999) asserts, “some claims to nationhood are legitimate and emancipatory” and “no abstract or a priori assessment of nationalist politics is credible” (75, original emphasis). An “a priori assessment” is precisely what Robbins makes, relegating the political claims of those he deems “romantic” to the realm of the old and the outdated. How is the cosmopolitical advocacy of “gushingly unrestrained sentiments, pieties, and urgencies” not romantic – if we take this term to connote ideological naiveté – claim, simply on account of its newness? As Lazarus exclaims, “thoughts of ‘diversity,’ ‘flexibility’ and ‘communication’ are really of practical consequence only to foreigners and indigenous elite classes: to the overwhelming masses of local people, they spell out exploitation in new letters” (36). Is the cosmopolitical gesture of “genuine striving toward common norms” based on, and constituted by, the invalidation of other “primitive” norms of struggle less amenable to “mutual translation”? In its advocacy of multicultural affect, is the postnational the cultural correlate of neoliberal capitalism’s “flexible” accumulation? Timothy Brennan, then, rightly accuses the new cosmopolitanism of siding with transnational capitalist flows and violating indigenous rights. Specifically, he calls into question

17 the explicit disregard of “national sovereignty” in cosmopolitan discourse, “for there is no other way under modern conditions to secure respect for weaker societies or peoples” (2001: 77). This is an argument worth noting: modern nation-states, Brennan points out, emerge under the impact of imperialism as territories are re-drawn, and the form of the nation-state is dialectically related to the forms of capitalist accumulation. He argues that “the world system of nations in which enormous disparities in national power exist” is constituted by the unequal processes of capitalist accumulation worldwide, or imperialism (1997:230). Thus, while nation-states are fundamentally territorial arrangements, “juridical acts of enclosure” that seek to control the maximization of profit, “in the current phase of worldwide neoliberal hegemony, they also offer a manageable (albeit top-heavy) site within which the working poor can make limited claims to power” (2001: 75). Despite formal similarities, cosmopolitics is not – in fact directly opposed to -- the Leninist notion of internationalism, as the latter accepts differences in “polity and culture” yet “does not quarrel with the principle of national sovereignty” (2001:77, original emphasis). The emphasis on national sovereignty is particularly relevant to weaker nations, and those sections of the world’s populations “who have an interest in transnational forms of solidarity, but whose capacities for doing so have not yet arrived” (77). I take Brennan’s, and Lazarus’, objections to cosmo-theory [the term is from Brennan 1997] to be instructive, particularly in highlighting the continued importance of local struggles focused on the nation-state. Lastly, the cosmopolitical deployment of affect replicates the liberal-humanist model I ascribed earlier to Appadurai, involving a reduction of the political to the realm of the ethical. As (Deleuzian) desiring, rhizomatic subjects, such strivings – not struggles – are constituted purely on the basis of ethical positions. If the notion of ethics in Appadurai is divorced from its constitutive relation to social relations of production, the cosmopolitical ethic of Robbins et al

18 altogether disavows social relations in modeling itself after multiculturalism. Both draw, interestingly, from elements of materialist theories of culture – “antagonisms” for Appadurai, “internationalism” for Robbins -- but as I argue above, seek to displace a materialist analysis to proclaim an idealist one.

III - The Combined and Uneven World System of Culture By contrast, I take Franco Moretti’s materialist analysis of world literature as a “system” as the point of departure in framing my discussion of the literary and cultural representations of the Naxalite movement. In “Conjectures on World Literature,” published in 2001 in the New Left Review, Moretti proposes to borrow … an initial hypothesis from the world-system school of economic history, for which international capitalism is a system that is simultaneously one, and unequal; with a core, and a periphery (and a semi-periphery) that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality. One, and unequal: one literature (Weltliteratur, singular, as in Goethe and Marx), or, perhaps better, one world literary system (of inter-related literatures); but a system which is different from what Goethe and Marx had hoped for, because it’s profoundly unequal (2004: 149-50, original emphases). In distinction to other influential models which seek to either posit world literature as “a mode of reading” (Damrosch 2003), or as actualized in metropolitan capital cities that serve as spaces for the legitimation of “literary value” (Casanova 2004), Moretti’s model is salutary in its dialectical conceptualization of world literature and the combined and uneven development of capitalism as inter-linked “systems”. It is distinctly different from Damrosch’s advocacy of “detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time” (281) – as if such “detachment” is

19 equally possible, or even desirable, for all peoples “beyond our own” – just as it is seeks to move beyond Casanova’s exclusive focus on Paris as “literary capital” of the world.11 Indeed, Moretti’s systemic model of “one and unequal” world literature helps us to relate questions of literary hierarchy, of language, form, visibility and circulation, in dialectical relation to each other and to the capitalist world-system as a whole. As Neil Lazarus et al. observe in relation to Moretti’s model, “[t]o describe the world literary system as ‘one, and unequal’ is of course to reactivate the Marxist theory of combined and uneven development … [T]he premise of ‘combined unevenness’ developed here repudiates at a stroke the idea – linked, presumably, to the political mantra that ‘globalisation’ is a tide lifting all boats – that the ‘world’ of ‘world literature’ is a ‘level playing field’, a more or less free space in which texts from around the globe can collide, intersect and converse with one another” (n.p.). I take this to be a guiding principle in my own study.12 The implicit assumption of a “level playing field” is made for world literature, conceptualized as “an elliptical refraction of national literatures” in Damrosch (2003), and that seems to me to be the central weakness of his model. Casanova’s notion of a “world republic of letters” is more sensitive to the processes of unevenness that determine literary value. Yet her Bourdieuian analysis, salutary in many respects, provides inadequate scope for the study of literatures from the periphery, and instead focuses on the cultural capital accrued to metropolitan literary productions on account of their long “national literary traditions” (Ganguly 2008).

11

For a sense of the debates around this term, including the main positions and some of the prominent critiques, see the collection Debating World Literature (Prendergast 2004). 12 I am indebted to the ideas developed by Lazarus et al of the Warwick Research Collective (WREC) on the question of peripheral literatures and the system of world literature. See the WREC collective’s working paper outlining some of the positions I draw on in this section, at

20 By contrast, Moretti’s description of the “core,” “periphery” and “semi-periphery” of world literature “bound together in a relationship of growing inequality” provides a succinct systemic model for analyzing cultural processes of globalization, emphasizing both their interconnectedness -- “bound together” -- and their unevenness – “growing inequality”. To think of one very obvious example of language: the prominence of “English,” both as Anglophone literature and works of translation, renders “vernacular” language literatures from the peripheral worlds increasingly invisible, even as more and more parts of the periphery and semi-periphery are progressively incorporated and institutionalized in comparative and global literature programs and anthologies. Moreover, Moretti speaks well to the materialist understanding of culture that I have been emphasizing so far. The notion of “one and unequal” or “combined unevenness” of literature resonates with Edward Said’s thoroughly materialist understanding of the “intertwined histories … in the metropolis and on the peripheries” (1993:72), just as it does justice to Gayatri Spivak’s Marxist-feminist understanding of the (gendered) “subaltern” who is situated within “the international division of labor” (1988:273). I discuss Said and Spivak in more detail in a later section of the introduction, but let me spell out here the importance of invoking them. A materialist reading of these important postcolonial thinkers pushes back against postmodern postcolonialist assumptions that, seek to describe unevenness without naming capitalism, and proceed to nativist, cultural chauvinist projects of alternative “modernities” displacing “Europe” and “the West”. Linking the periphery and semi-periphery in connection with the core, I propose, alongside Harry Harootunian and Fredric Jameson, a “peripheral” modernity as a constitutive feature of a “singular” modernity (Harootunian 2000, Jameson 2002).

21 Harootunian conceives of “coeval” or “peripheral” modernity as the condition in “which all societies shared a common reference provided by global capital and its requirements” (63). His object of study, post-World War II Japan, leads him to dispute the “fiction that modernity was solely a Western idea,” and ascribes such a fictional notion to “modernization theory” that ironically was appropriated by early versions of postcolonial theory. To correct such an understanding, Harootunian proposes a conceptualization of the “everyday,” “serving as a minimal unification of the present and signaling the level of lived experience and reproduction” (63). For Harootunian, analysis of the lived experience of the everyday alerts one to “[t]he coexistence of different forms of economic life … that was both modern and distinct, sanctioning an unevenness that capitalist political economy had made as a principal condition of its expansion, even though it would seek to repress it in claims of even development everywhere (64). Analysis of culture thus serves as a springboard for observing the “coexistence” of “forms of economic life” that structure modernity. This position is buttressed in the work of Jameson, especially in his keen attention to the question of form. Jameson too, postulates the coexistence “of realities from radically different moments of history – handicrafts alongside the great cartels, peasant fields with the Krupp factories or the Ford plant in the distance,” and theorizes combined unevenness, the “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous,” as the characteristic indeed definitive aspect of modernity everywhere (1995: 307). Such a “singular” modernity is for Jameson, as it is Harootunian, the “superstructural” correlate of the “base” of capitalist modernization (310). While Harootunian is more focused on the lived experience of everyday, Jameson complements this position by paying attention to the question of form, particularly literary and cultural form, as sites where modernity is articulated and negotiated.

22 In focusing on culture as a site as well as source of contestation, I follow these scholars in taking up Raymond Williams’ (1989) dictum that “culture is ordinary,” and his insistence that we understand the “two senses” of culture, “to mean a whole way of life – the common meanings; [secondly] to mean the arts and learning – the special processes of discovery and effort” (5). In this dissertation, I explore the Naxalite representations in and of culture in this vein. I situate Naxalism in the ordinary everyday of culture; and thus, in the vein of cultural materialist analysis, seek to draw out the implications of cultural representations of Naxalism for analyzing and producing socio-historical change. Such an imperative underlies the discussion of Naxalism in my dissertation: specifically, the Marxist internationalist challenge to postcolonial nationalism, and negotiation of peripheral “difference”. A consideration of the literary and cultural forms in the work of internationalist intellectuals such Binoy Ghosh, Utpal Dutt and Mrinal Sen illustrates the usefulness of such a methodology. The dissertation highlights how formal experimentation with narrative seeks to foster internationalist linkages and negotiate peripheral modernity. Utpal Dutt for example combines the “folk” theatrical form of jatra with Brechtian “epic theater” to articulate Naxalite peasant insurgency and transnational Blackness; Binoy Ghosh resuscitates the Indo-Persianate, colonial-era prose form of the naksha to negotiate the lumpen subjects of the city, and Mrinal Sen embraces Latin-American Third-Cinema’s “guerrilla filmmaking” to portray Naxalite lumpen revolutionaries. These activist-intellectuals and their aesthetic-political projects stand apart from postmodern celebrations of the hybrid and the fragmentary: if they invoke the “local” and the “transnational,” they do so not in rejection of grand narratives but in suggesting other better ones. As Dutt remarks on his theatrical portrayal of national liberation struggles in Congo, Vietnam and Black Power, “our program was to bring the stories of gallant revolutionary

23 struggles of another people to our own people so that they too will be inspired to fight” (Dutt 1971, 225). Similarly, Mrinal Sen outlines his cinematic borrowing from Third-Cinema as the attempt to “talk about poverty, the most vital reality of our country” (qtd. in Hood 30). The aesthetic commitment -- or “program” in Dutt’s words -- is marked by the politics of intervention. These interventions seek to break down the distinctions between the literary and the non-literary. Mrinal Sen, for instance, draws on vernacular Bengali short stories as the basis of Calcutta 71’s screenplay, while Binoy Ghosh’s use of the naksha transposes to the realm of narrative prose the visual elements of naksha (Persian for sketch). Methodologically, to insist on a dialectical relation – “two senses” -- between individual representations or cultural forms and the “whole” of culture, is to take upon oneself the imperative to analyze the local and the particular in dialectical relation to, and in interaction with, the whole. In other words, particular instances of Naxalism – such as alternative conceptions of national liberation and internationalism, or the political subjects of peasantry and the lumpen -- have to be understood in dialectical relation to larger configurations; temporally linking contemporary representations to the constellation of past representational forms, and spatially, linking the local and fragmented to larger units of analysis, the nation-state and beyond. The site of culture, and the circulation, adaptation and transfiguration of cultural forms, I hold, is a particularly apposite arena of exploration for understanding the Naxalite revolutionary imagination and its historical shifts. In the next section, I turn to Arundhati Roy’s essay, “Walking with the Comrades” to discuss some of the specific implications of literary genre for the discussion of Naxalite internationalism, and the importance of culture as a site of its circulation.

24 IV –Naxalism, Genre and “Walking with the Comrades” The cultural representation of Naxalism has had its small but significant share of scholarly commentary. John Hutnyk (2000) for instance has called attention to the mediations that transform the Naxalite movement into “cultural matter”: this was in reference to the UKbased electronica band Asian Dub Foundation (ADF), who released a song track in 1997 called “Naxalite” as part of their successful album Rafi’s Revenge that made it to the UK Billboard’s top-20. Hutnyk draws attention to the circulation of ADF’s “Naxalite” track in the dance clubs of Europe as part of the working-class South Asian diaspora’s reworking of the political themes of Naxalism.13 More recently, a musical collaborative project based out of India, Word, Sound Power – the name itself riffing off the Jamaican Peter Tosh’s reggae band of the 1970s – and involving Dalit (former untouchable) singer Bant Singh and dancehall/hip-hop artist Delhi Sultanate, has focused on Naxalite revolutionary politics. Interestingly, in line with Naxalism’s Maoist and Third-Worldist solidarities, much of this music, while global in scope, stems from Black and working class cultural origins, dub-step, rap, reggae, dancehall etc. Such representations de-center mainstream depictions of Naxalite “extremism”. As Robin Jeffrey (2010) has pointed out, the “Maoist insurgency comes at a time when India lives in a totally new media environment … [T]he bloodshed in remote India plays out in front of urban middle-class India” (4). The “instant, mediated guerrilla war” as Jeffrey terms it, has been multiply disseminated in cultural representation, film, literature, and music, both within India and globally. In contrast to its representation by music groups relatively peripheral to the music industry, the subject of Naxalism has attracted some of the biggest names in contemporary

13

On one hand, such transformations speak to South Asian diasporic appropriation of the Naxalites to articulate immigrant working class community organizing in London’s racially ghettoized East End; on the other they replace “the sleeping village” image of rural India with an easy “valorization of peasant insurgency … celebrating ‘difference’ in a way that does not differentiate between poverty and romance, adversity and exotica” (Hutnyk 146).

25 literature. Alongside Arundhati Roy’s essay, another case in point is Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest novel The Lowland, nominated for the 2013 Man-Booker Prize, which deals with the earlier phase of Naxalism in 1960s West Bengal. In addition to Lahiri and Roy, earlier fiction such as Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084, and especially her short story “Draupadi” -- translated to English by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – have drawn on the Naxalites, and can be seen in the words of Hutnyk as “one of several emissaries of the politics of Naxalbari circulating through a range of global sites … [and] an illustrative guide for political activity today” (148).14 Such examples alert us to the importance of culture as a site of global dissemination and appropriation of the Naxalites, and these deserve a study on their own account. I will begin by briefly touching on Arundhati Roy’s essay “Walking with the Comrades” to explore some of the questions around literary form and genre that attend to such representations. Roy, by some accounts, is “one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the international Left in the first decade of the twenty-first century” (Jani 48). Her essay on the Naxalites raised a storm of controversy: following in the wake of her previous campaign against ecological damage caused by big dams, the “Save Narmada” campaign, critics saw her account of the Maoists as presenting a clichéd and primitivist view of indigenous “tribals” (Banaji 2010), and the Indian state accused Roy of anti-national activity and fostering sedition. Yet, as Priyamvada Gopal (2013) writes, “Roy’s essay exemplifies effective oppositional writing, challenging rhetorical pieties and journalistic commonplaces about the Maoist insurgency through a self consciously alternative account based on encounter and testimony” (122).

14

Hutnyk comments on Spivak’s (1987) trans-editing of Devi’s “Draupadi” thus – “I would also want to see this ‘teaching text’ as one of several emissaries of the politics of Naxalbari circulating through a range of global sites, reaching feminist study groups, anti-racists and anti-imperialist, First and Fourth Worlders, as well as continuist communist activists ranged across the planet and still reading the history of peoples’ struggles as an illustrative guide for political activity today” (148).

26 Commitment to “oppositional writing” marks Roy out from her contemporaries such as Aravind Adiga, whose novelistic depiction of the Naxalites I discuss in the first chapter. Much of the controversy around Roy stems from her (qualified) defence of the legacy of Communism. “Walking with the Comrades” provides a rare example of a noted public intellectual’s engagement with, and examination of, revolutionary Communist struggle, in contrast to the standard proclamations of horror – denoted by the short-hand “Stalinism” – that typically attend to such engagements. This marks Roy out from the majority of the (postCommunist) “international Left”. Roy’s essay engages with the long revolution of Naxalism, locating the contemporary struggle in the context of a larger history. She invokes the Naxalite leader Charu Mazumdar, critically yet not entirely unkindly: Standing here, on Bhumkal day, [marking the adivasi uprising against the British in 1910] I can’t help thinking that his analysis, so vital to the structure of this revolution, is so removed from its emotion and texture … Could he have imagined that this ancient people, dancing into the night, would be the ones on whose shoulders his dreams would come to rest? … [H]is abrasive rhetoric fetishizes violence, blood and martyrdom, often employs a language so coarse to be almost genocidal … [D]espite these terrifying contradictions, Charu Mazumdar, in much of what he wrote and said, was a man with a political vision for India that cannot be dismissed lightly. The party he founded has kept the dream of revolution real and present in India. Imagine a society without that dream. For that alone we cannot judge him too harshly (120-121, original emphasis) Roy’s Hegelian, anti-postmodern invocation of the “real” of “revolution” in these passages is noteworthy for several reasons: she does not valorize the “local” encounter as fragmentary and isolated but instead seeks to locate it within a longer history. The contemporary resistance to

27 neoliberal globalization in India is not “new” but a (dialectically reformulated) continuation of an “old” anti-imperial struggle. Roy’s act of writing is a vanguardist intervention in this struggle: analogous to the “party” she invokes, it attempts to introduce her readers to a consciousness of “totality” through a consideration of events that might otherwise seem isolated or fragmentary. This passage serves as illustrative of Roy’s political position, which is counter to postmodern dismissals of the “real” as well as post-Marxist valorizations of the “new”. A second important aspect is the formal innovativeness of the essay. I draw attention here to Roy’s improvisation on the received conventions of the genre. The genre of essay, as Nagesh Rao points out, “has come to enjoy a sustained and growing visibility in the world of publishing, both in traditional print media, and in webzines, blogs and the like. The globalizing scope of twenty-first century media is further multiplying the visibility of the contemporary essay” (2008: 160). Similarly, O.B. Hardison reminds us that “[i]f there is no genre more widespread in modern letters than the essay, there is also no genre that takes so many shapes and that refuses so successfully to resolve itself, finally, into its own shape” (1989: 12). To this end, it is useful to recount Theodore Adorno’s famous invocation in “The Essay as Form” that the essay “thinks in fragments, just as reality is fragmentary, and finds its unity in and through the breaks and not by glossing them over” (16). Adorno’s defense of the “fragmentary” essay form as resisting the pressure of positivist empiricism simultaneously posits – contrary to the postmodern notion of “fragment” – the form’s quest for “unity”.15 Roy’s act of inscribing the local within the “unity” of revolution while avoiding the totalizing imperative of description, attempts the same.

15

Adorno is worth quoting here at some length for the relation of the partial to the total – “The romantic conception of the fragment as a construction that is not complete but rather progresses onward into the infinite through selfreflection champions this anti-idealist motive in the midst of Idealism. Even in its manner of its presentation, the essay may not act as though it had already deduced its object … The word Versuch, attempt or essay, in which thought’s utopian vision of hitting the bullseye is united with the consciousness of its own fallibility and provisional character … cause[s] the totality to be illuminated in a partial feature [in the essay]” (Adorno 16).

28 Thus her dependence in the essay on “testimony”: Roy notes, “I soon learned that Dandakaranya, the forest I was about to enter, was full of people who had many names and fluid identities” (89). The essay is structured around the testimonies of such people, each affording individual testimonies of transformation. The abstract notion of revolution is thus concretized and localized in the consciousness of such “fluid” personalities. Priyamavada Gopal has noted this aspect of Roy’s narratorial persona: “always a canny writer, Roy constructs her authorial persona as a middle-class Indian who walks naively into the situation carrying the usual liberal prejudices and, despite herself, is slowly brought to a testimonial understanding of why violence becomes necessary” (2013: 123, my emphasis). The “liberal prejudices” are meant to invoke the reader’s affective identification with the story, which are simultaneously undercut by the narrative’s empathetic engagement with revolutionary violence. Roy’s use of testimony and multiple points of view reconfigures the essay-form to incorporate what Debjani Ganguly has termed “the phenomenon of novelization in our wartime”. Drawing on the representation of worldwide wars fought on “humanitarian grounds,” Ganguly notes that “the significance of novelization in this era of humanitarian wars … lies not just in the increasing use of story-telling and testimonial documentation to generate a diffuse global empathy at ever-escalating ravages of war. It lies critically in offering multiple fields of perception – points of view as novel theorists might put it – both through the conventional novel and other multimedia forms of literary expressivity” (Ganguly 17, original emphasis). The “multimedia forms” enable “the transformation in the global imaginary of rights from idea to sensorium. More demands are made on the visibility, legibility and the transitive affectivity of human rights in the concrete, everyday, somatic spheres of conflict than ever before” (Ganguly 16, original emphasis). Along these lines, Roy’s use of photographs, utilizing the visual register,

29 in juxtaposition with the literary narrative, deserves mention. The essay is structured around photographs taken by the author, and the commentary on these contributes to the “novelization” of Naxalism by offering surprising contrasts. Thus, one photograph of an empty forest landscape is titled “Iron Ore Dust on Mango Leaves”; the commentary below reads, “There’s an MoU [Memorandum of Understanding] on every mountain, river and forest glade. We are talking about social and environmental engineering on an unimaginable scale” (n.p). Such a commentary achieves impact through the multimedia form of the essay, juxtaposing affective belonging against the violence of the state. Similarly, in her account a policeman claims, “I have told my boss, remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will automatically be sorted out” (51). The frankness of one individual illuminates the complement of the state’s coercive structures, namely the insidious consumerist cultures fostered by neoliberal capitalism. Through the deployment of such literary devices – of irony, affective empathy, points of view etc – Roy’s essay seeks to draw attention to the formal literary quality of her work, and simultaneously disavows any strict identification with the literary by juxtaposing it with other forms such as photography. “Walking with the Comrades” interrogates through the form of its representation, I would argue, the strict separation between fiction and non-fiction. This is the formal correlate of Roy’s radical politics, which seeks to interrogate the familiar contours of contemporary Left positions. The essay points to Roy’s own Marxist internationalism, just as it suggests internationalism as a valid analytical frame to understand the contemporary Naxalite movement. Attention to the form of the essay opens up a crucial question that I deal with in my dissertation, which is, how does a consideration of form and genre, especially minor narrative genres such as testimony, enable a greater understanding of the Naxalite struggle? How does a

30 consideration of literature and representation at large, allow us to explore the internationalism of Naxalite long revolution?

V – Postcolonial Planetarity and the Relevance of Internationalism If this dissertation suggests the notion of internationalism as an alternative conceptualization of the global exchange of ideas, substituting – and opposing -- the easy valorization of cosmopolitanism in extant models of cultural theory, it does so in order to insist on the importance of inequality on a world scale. At the same time, my focus is to push back and interrogate the dominant definitions of both the terms “postcolonial” and “planetary”. The field of postcolonial studies has been salutary in bringing attention to the wide disparities of power, privilege and representation that separate the metropolitan centers from the world’s peripheries. The focus of postcolonial scholarship has been “Empire,” which “cover[s] all the culture[s] affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day” (Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin 1989:2). In such a spirit is Edward Said’s injunction, in Culture and Imperialism (1993), for a true “worldling” of culture, that takes into account the “overlapping territories, intertwined histories common to men and women, whites and non-whites, dwellers in the metropolis and on the peripheries, past as well as present and future” (72). In its critique of “Eurocentrism,” postcolonial studies has been instrumental in pointing to the occlusion of the perspective of the “other” as elite metropolitan perspectives of modernity are universalized, as for instance in the case of cosmopolitan theory and its reliance on “multiculturalism” (Robbins 1998: 13). In addition, the field has tended to bracket the economic relations – and theoretical conceptualization of those economic relations that is Marxism -- that structure such occlusions in the first place. Dominant strands of postcolonial theory have conceptualized the unequal relation

31 between metropole and periphery, neither in relation to capitalist processes of accumulation nor a systematic treatment of totality, but in terms of postmodern power differentials. This is the greatest conceptual weakness of the field and affects its political efficacy as well as powers of explanation. As Benita Parry (2004) notes in her excellent reading of Edward Said -- “Said wrote with passionate intensity about imperial aggression without referring to the analysis of Lenin and Luxemburg; he distinguished between anticolonial nationalism and liberation movements without alluding to the communist orientation of the latter or the class interests of either; and he placed economic and political machinery and territorial aggrandizement at the center of modern empire without specifying capitalism’s world system”(Parry 125, my emphasis). As a number of materialist postcolonial scholars have pointed out, the postmodern bias of the field has, by and large, bracketed a political-economic understanding of imperialism – capital accumulation on a world scale – with analysis of imperialism as a purely cultural phenomenon, resting on ideas of civilizational difference, and linking “the West” and “modernity” as the twin pillars of colonial oppression.16 In other words, these strands of postcolonial studies have been as guilty of culturalism as the schools it set out to critique. By contrast, materialist intervention in the field has emphasized the importance of understanding “difference,” a key postcolonial conceit -- or what Said characterizes as an “ongoing contest between north and south, metropolis and periphery, white and native” (1993:59) – in terms of Marxist theories of combined and uneven development on a world scale (Lenin 1939; Gunder Frank 1966; Amin 1977; Wallerstein 2011). Thus Crystal Bartolovich notes perceptively, in the “Introduction” to Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (2002), 16

In addition to Benita Parry above, I have in mind the work of Aijaz Ahmad, Timothy Brennan Arif Dirlik, Priyamvada Gopal, Neil Lazarus, E. San Juan et al. For some of their representative positions, see the two edited collections, Bartolovich and Lazarus 2002, and Lazarus 2004.

32 that “Marxists have been working in a number of ways from the start on the very issues and concerns – such as imperialism, nationalism, racism, subalternity, and so on – which have become central to postcolonial studies” (Bartolovich 3). Imperialism, in the Marxist framework, is understood through referencing bourgeois nationalist rivalries in the core capitalist countries for the subjugation and control of markets in the peripheries, and not in terms of fetishized notions of an undifferentiated “West”. Similarly, race, subalternity (and gender) differentials are conceptualized in the materialist tradition in relation to the international division of labor created by capitalist combined and uneven development. Third, there can be “no a priori assessment of nationalist politics” (Lazarus 1999: 75): while the principle of national sovereignty is an important bulwark for postcolonial nations against imperialist control, Marxist theory would distinguish – in contrast to the postmodern dismissal of nationalism tout court as grand narratives -- between pro-imperialist and anti-imperialist nationalist positions. To defend the field of postcolonial studies from accusations of postmodern depoliticization, Robert Young (2004:1-32) in turn emphasized the constitutive role of Marxist anticolonial and national liberation theories, particularly Maoism, in the field’s fundamental concerns. Nevertheless, such influences have been mostly disavowed in the field’s dominant postmodern strand. This dissertation’s exploration of the Naxalite movement aims to re-constellate the equally constitutive role of the Naxalites in arguably the most prominent branch of postcolonial theory to emerge from South Asia, that of “Subaltern Studies”. Originally a collective of historians based in India, the UK and Australia, the Subalternists pioneered in the 1980s a revisionist historiography of 19th century colonial-era peasant insurgencies that borrowed from Maoist Naxalite notions of “peoples’ war”. The institutionalization of Subaltern Studies in the US academy, with leading practitioners such as Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and

33 affiliates such as Gayatri Spivak, led to the reconfiguration of some of its initial political and theoretical positions. While South Asia and India in particular has been a prominent source of postcolonial theory in the US, especially in the early years, sometimes to the neglect of other sites of analysis, the relation between the Naxalites and South Asian postcolonial, particularly Subalternist thought, is less known, despite admissions of indebtedness from leading Subalternists such as Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty as well as Gayatri Spivak.17 The key Naxalite insight utilized in the “early” Subaltern Studies is the critique of failed decolonization, or what the Naxals called the perpetuation of India’s “semi-colonial, semifeudal” status under postcolonial nationalism. Such a critique posited the perpetuation of colonial capitalism, through the collaboration of the Indian elite and elite-led modernization. The Naxalite conception is not a rejection of nationalism, a la postmodernism, but an affirmation of the continued relevance of national liberation after political independence. Ranajit Guha, founder of the Subaltern collective, points to this critique in the famed manifesto “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” as he proclaims “the historic failure of the nation to come to its own, a failure due to the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie as well as of the working class to lead it into a decisive victory over colonialism” (1988: 43, original emphasis). Guha’s phrasing implies adherence to a Marxist vocabulary circulated in the South Asian communist movement, since in the very next sentence he bemoans the Indian political failure in forging either a “bourgeois-democratic revolution” or revolution of “a more modern type under the hegemony of workers and peasants, that is, a ‘new democracy’”. In a similar Marxist vein is Gayatri Spivak’s invocation, little-noted, in her “Can the Subaltern Speak?” of “the illiterate peasantry, the tribals, [and] the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat” (269): these comprise the class coalition

17

See for instance Vinayak Chaturvedi’s introduction to the collection Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (Chaturvedi 2000), and Chakrabarty (2012) mentioned later in this chapter. See as well as Guha 2011.

34 against postcolonial versions of capitalism. In her use of this specific proletarian coalition, Spivak takes Deleuze and Foucault to task for uncritically accepting a homogenous definition of the “worker,” and “workers struggle,” and neglecting “the increasing subtraction of the working class in the Periphery from the realization of surplus value and thus from ‘humanistic’ training in consumerism”.18 Yet the indebtedness of these formulations to materialist understandings of combined and uneven development, in particular their genealogy in Naxalite critique, have been practically ignored, as Subaltern Studies has been institutionalized into the realm of AngloAmerican “theory”. Ostensibly retaining its initial emphasis, derived from the Naxalite movement, on the importance of the national question, and simultaneously failing to interrogate the failures of elite nationalism in terms of capitalist combined and uneven development, leading figures of the collective such as Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty have moved steadily towards arguing for a fetishized difference of the postcolony from the “West,” as evidenced in such wellknown essays as “Our Modernity” (Chatterjee 1997) or books such as Provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty 2000). This in turn has led materialist scholars (Chibber 2013, Kaiwar 2014) to accuse South Asian postcolonial theory of reviving Orientalist assumptions of an irreducibly “different” “East”. The contradiction in this trajectory is reflected well, to give but one example, in Chakrabarty’s recent invocation of his “background” in Maoist politics.

18

The full passage reads, “[in Deleuze] the invocation of the workers’ struggle is baleful in its very innocence; it is incapable of dealing with global capitalism: the subject production of worker and unemployed within nation-state ideologies in its Center; the increasing subtraction of the working class in the Periphery from the realization of surplus value and thus from ‘humanistic’ training in consumerism; and the large-scale presence of paracapitalist labor as well as the heterogeneous structural forms of agriculture in the Periphery. Ignoring the international division of labor; rendering ‘Asia’ (and on occasion ‘Africa’) transparent (unless the subject is ostensibly ‘Third World’); reestablishing the legal subject of socialized capital – these are problems as common to much poststructuralist as to structuralist theory” (273, original emphasis). Spivak understands difference here in explicit relation to Marxist “international division of labor,” an understanding forfeited in most of her postmodernist followers. For an example of the latter, see Cheah (2007) who reads the “new international division of reproductive labor” in Spivak’s essay through the Foucauldian category of “biopower”.

35 In the essay “From Civilization to Globalization” delivered, interestingly, as a lecture in Shanghai in 2011, Chakrabarty (2012) recalls his “youthful” affiliation with Maoism and the Naxalite movement – “I was born a Maoist” (138). He notes the influence of Maoist China on the Naxalite movement in his native Calcutta (139-140), but goes on to claim that the context of revolution has changed with the worldwide decline of Communism, and the emergence of India and China within contemporary globalization as economic powers from the erstwhile “third world”. Disavowing the “revolutionary” tendencies of his own youth, he proclaims, “it was clear that the GPCR (Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution) was not what we had made it out to be” (140). Such disavowals are accompanied by an ideological volte-face, as Chakrabarty proceeds to ask his audience: “When you [China and India] come truly to dominate the world effectively, what terms of criticism will you provide to your victims so they can criticize your domination? In other words what resources will you provide from within your tradition that others will use to criticize you?” (140). Thus, Chakrabarty deflects the question of contemporary capitalism – in China and India as elsewhere – to “civilizational” notions of difference between the “West” and the “East”. Conflating capitalism with “Europe,” and replacing the former by the latter, he claims that India and China must provide critical conceptual frameworks from “within [their] tradition,” as “Europe” once provided the “tools” of democracy,” and “reason” to “those it dominated” (142-143). Instead of exploring the disjunctures between a revolutionary Maoism, the one of his “youth,” as well as of present-day South Asia, which he can hardly be unaware of – and the official Maoism of a capitalistic China, Chakrabarty’s advocacy of such concepts as “civilization” and “tradition” not only erases globalizing capitalism and its marauding inequalities, but also endorses the crudest form of cultural nationalism, or “capitalism with

36 Chinese (and Indian) characteristics”.19 Such has been the peculiar trajectory of one of the significant Subaltern and postcolonial scholars of South Asia. In exploring the alternative materialist – Naxalite -- conceptualization of postcoloniality, I seek to push against such tendencies demonstrated by the likes of Chakrabarty. To insist on postcolonial planetarity is to draw attention to the persistence of “third world” levels of poverty in countries such as India and China despite differential integration into a global economy, and, simultaneously, to avoid the slide to cultural nationalist rhetorics of tradition, civilization and indigenous modernity as modes of resistance. The latter, I argue, efface rather than highlight the role of the capitalist world system in furthering existing inequalities.20 Rather, my account seeks to arrive at a more comprehensive view of Naxalite internationalism and its relation to anticapitalist struggles in South Asia. The definition of “planetarity” that Spivak (2003) provides is a useful starting point. Spivak begins with a negative declaration, “we must try persistently to reverse and displace globalization into planetarity” (97) -- this is a reaction to “[g]lobalization, [which] is the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere” (72). Planetarity involves “yoking [to] … a just world” (100): this re-action involves a political investment in “counterglobalizing networks of peoples’ alliances … in the Global South” (35). The engagement with the “Global South” in particular is justified for two reasons; on one hand, it seeks “engagement with the idiom of the global other(s) in the Southern Hemisphere, uninstitutionalized in the Euro-US university structure” (39), and resists on the other hand, the globalizing assimilation, through 19

“Capitalism with Chinese characteristics” is Harvey’s (2005) description of Deng Xiaoping-era “market reforms” in China, punning on the earlier Mao-era rhetoric of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. 20 Despite the claims of astronomical economic growth that make India and China, particularly the latter, the object of envy of “Western” capitalist countries, as of 2010, nearly 40% of the world’s 1 billion population officially designated as “hungry” – having inadequate nutrition – are to be found in India and China, whose total populations are approximately 30% of the world total. See the UN Food and Organizations (FAO) report at http://www.fao.org/docrep/012/al390e/al390e00.pdf.

37 translation and commodification of difference, where “students in Taiwan or Nigeria will learn about … the world … through English translations organized by the United States” (xii). It is salutary to note Spivak’s properly dialectical warning about privileged multiculturalisms, of “English translations organized through the United States,” and her materialist insistence on attending to “global other(s)” who are “uninstitutionalized”. At the same time, I would like to note that her invocation of “peoples’ alliances … in the Global South” is but a more palatable rewording of Maoist “peoples war” and radical “third worldism” for “liberal” metropolitan and postcolonial readers. If planetarity involves the “yoking” together of the “global other(s)” against the logic of contemporary globalization, it is necessary to attend to the aspects and processes of uninstitutionalized, or more properly, I would argue, anti-institutionalized and anti-capitalist practices of this critical ensemble. For a celebration of the “idiom” of others for the sake of their otherness, understood as purely cultural difference, ends up justifying their differential incorporation and assimilation into the system. I would therefore want to accentuate the specifically materialist component of Spivak’s notion. First, unlike theorists of globalization and cosmopolitanism discussed above, planetarity is explicitly anti-globalization in a materialist sense. Spivak calls globalization for what it is, against the current fashion of describing flows and currents, indeterminacies and contingencies, chaos and randomization, as the “imposition … of the same system of exchange” of the capitalist world market “everywhere” (91). Second, her insistence on “counterglobalizing … peoples’ alliances” and locating such alliances in the “Southern Hemisphere” resonate with the rhetoric of Maoist “peoples’ war” and is distinguished from cosmopolitan and globalization theory in retaining an insistence on the center-periphery distinction. Echoing Fanon’s famous declaration that “true liberation is not … an economy

38 dominated by the colonial pact” (1967:105), Spivak does not take “counterglobalizing” as anything less than a break with capital: “[j]ust as socialism at its best would persistently and repeatedly wrench capital away from capitalism, so must the new [planetarity] … persistently and repeatedly undermine and undo the definitive tendency of the dominant to appropriate the emergent” (100). Taking a leaf out of Lenin’s playbook, she affirms the potential of “nationalism giving way not only to a heterogeneous continentalism but also to an internationalism, that can, today, shelter planetarity” (92, emphasis added). The invocation of “nationalism giving way … to an internationalism” calls for an understanding of socialist versions of nationalism that are anti-capitalist. The struggle for such political formations locates the “subaltern” in a class-based constellation -- that of “the illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat” (Spivak 1988: 269) -- than has been the case in fashionable postmodern framing of the subaltern as a non-class subject and its “epistemological” ability to “speak” at all. A materialist interpretation of postcolonial planetarity, then, in Spivak’s terms, would take seriously “the figure of the land that undergirds” (2003: 93) the struggle against capitalism as a single and uneven world system, and global capitalism’s “imposition of … a system of exchange”. Frantz Fanon too notes that “[t]he most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost land” (1963: 44). The struggle for the “figure of the land” is first and foremost a local, concrete struggle for representation -- political and aesthetic. Second, such a struggle through its very praxis puts into question the disavowal of nation-state-based political struggles made fashionable in contemporary theory. To use Benita Parry’s concise observation on the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST)in Brazil, “centrally organized local struggles of agrarian labour conducted within and against the regime of a nation-state is one directed 'against capital itself'” (Parry 2001, n.p.). Such an anti-capitalist “figure,” pitted against local forms of

39 oppression, the existing nation-state and the capitalist world-system, is the object as well as source of my exploration of the Naxalite movement.

VI – Describing the Project This dissertation provides the first book-length study of the literary and cultural representations of the Maoist Naxalite movement. I highlight the centrality of literary and cultural texts, and their attendant aesthetic questions of form and genre in negotiating radical Naxalite imaginaries of internationalist solidarity. My dissertation draws on a number of key representations of the Naxalites across a broad spectrum of literary and cultural forms (novels, plays, film, satire, and memoir), by globally-known Anglophone authors such as Aravind Adiga, as well as relatively neglected but major internationalist figures such as Utpal Dutt, Mrinal Sen and M.N. Roy. The dissertation offers a survey of the wide-ranging political and cultural networks that came to inform Naxalism -- such as early 20th century anticolonial networks traversed by M.N. Roy; post-Second World War conversations on urbanity and modernization between Global “North” and “South” activist circles; cross-cultural aesthetic and political interactions involving indigenous South Asian prose and theatrical forms (naksha and jatra) and 1960s pan-Africanist Black Arts and Black Powers movement in the US, African decolonization, Latin American Third-Cinema and Global Anglophone fiction. Elaborating on the interactions of the indigenous and the local with the transnational in these cultural texts, I uncover little-known genealogies and cultures of planetarity envisioned by the Naxalites. My dissertation thus locates the development of Naxalism in India within a planetary conversation on modernity (Spivak 2003) spanning over

40 a century. I map an alternative history of proletarian emancipatory politics in India and illuminate the role of literary and other cultural texts in the envisioning of collective liberation. The first chapter, “Parody and Third World Internationalism in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger” analyzes recent Anglophone Indian writing’s engagement with the Naxalite movement, namely Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008). I demonstrate how The White Tiger draws on Naxalite cultural memory of Indo-Chinese solidarity through parodies of the epistolary and protest novel genres as well as the indigenous theatrical form of tamasha, and the thematic deployment of Maoist ideas on encircling the city by the country. Such affinities are sought to be simultaneously erased by the narrator and yet leave underlying traces in the novel. The deployment of Naxalism’s transnational, or more specifically, internationalist political and aesthetic connections, I argue, runs counter to the novel’s valorization of an individualist, consumerist ethos in contemporary India. Entering current debates on world literature, the chapter considers the contemporary circulation of the Anglophone novel in the “world republic of letters” (Casanova 2004) as well as the “postcolonial literary marketplace” (Brouillette 2007). I argue that the marketplace crucially mediates (commoditizes) the dissemination of cultural knowledge, and the incorporation of the “third world nation” in the multicultural literary canon attempts to reconfigure and appropriate (in this case) the alternative Naxalite vision of revolutionary national liberation. To foreground historical differences and continuities, the second chapter “M.N. Roy’s Memoirs and Early 20th Century Anticolonial Imaginaries of Internationalism,” takes up the exploration of literature and its negotiation of internationalism in an earlier period, namely the early 20th century. I consider the Indian revolutionary M.N. Roy’s autobiography Memoirs (1964) to trace how Roy utilizes the literary forms of the memoir and the testimonio to articulate

41 anticolonial internationalist solidarities. The chapter illustrates how the contexts of Black radicalism, early Soviet Bolshevism and anticolonial movements in Mexico, among others, came to inform Roy’s critique of liberal and Gandhian versions of Indian nationalism. Roy’s theoretical engagement with Marxian combined and uneven development, and interaction with such Black radicals as Claude McKay, laid the early basis for some of Naxalism’s core concerns: the focus on the proletarianized peasantry and underclass in the colonial periphery, critique of elite nationalism, and radical formations of Afro-Asian internationalism. Equally, my discussion of the formal qualities of Memoirs draws attention to the narrative structure of Roy’s autobiography, and how such a narrative formally grapples with the complex task of representing internationalism through translation. The third chapter, “The Poetics and Politics of Blackness in India: Chanakya Sen’s The Morning After and Utpal Dutt’s The Rights of Man,” explores the Naxalite critique of postcolonial Indian nationalism by elaborating on two aspects: the Maoist notion of peasantryled revolutionary “peoples’ war,” and radical formations of Afro-Asian internationalism. I draw on a Bengali-language play by Utpal Dutt, Manusher Adhikarey or The Rights of Man (1968, translated 2009) and its depiction of the Scottsboro trials in Alabama in 1931, to outline the Naxalite conception of the revolutionary krishok (peasant). Problematizing standard accounts of “third world solidarity,” the chapter recounts how the figure of the peasant and the context of Maoist peoples’ war emerges in Dutt through the interaction of South Asian and pan-African liberationist thought and praxis. Specifically, I explore the political conversation that Dutt initiates between the US Black Power and Black Arts movements, African decolonization, the Vietnam War, and the peasant insurrection at Naxalbari. Such political imagination is complemented by Dutt’s formal experiments in theater, juxtaposing indigenous folk forms of

42 jatra with Brechtian epic theater techniques to formulate a radical conception of the “people”. I contextualize transnational Blackness in India by analyzing another literary text in the first section of this chapter, Chanakya Sen’s novel, The Morning After (1973). Sen’s novel allows for a critical unpacking of the racial hierarchies of “Brown over Black” propagated by Indian postcolonial nationalism. Drawing out the full complexity of Utpal Dutt’s “armed Negro farmers” in The Rights of Man who enact “Naxalbari” throughout the postcolonial world, and constellating both Sen and Dutt in the Naxalite milieu, this chapter sheds light on little-known aesthetic and political convergences between South Asian and pan-African Maoist imaginaries, and outlines the class fractures in “third world” discourse. The two subsequent chapters trace Naxalite responses to key political processes of the post-colonial era: modernization and urbanization, and their impact on the urban underclass. If the figure of the peasant in Naxalite discourse is the subaltern par excellence, his/her urban counterpart is the “lumpen”. In the fourth chapter “Lumpen Aesthetics and the City 1: Binoy Ghosh’s Naksha Sketches,” I describe how Marxist literary representations of the city and its underclass negotiate the tensions of peripheral modernity. The chapter discusses Binoy Ghosh’s Bengali-language satires, Nabababu Charita [Biography of the Nouveau Riche] (1944) and Kal Penchar Naksha [Sketches of the Night Owl] (1968). I explore how the emergence of the figure of the “lumpen” in vernacular literature became entangled with Ghosh’s literary efforts to forge a “realist” idiom for representing the city in the 1940s and 1950s. I map this realism in the formal negotiations between English satire and Indo-Persianate naksha [sketches] in Ghosh’s work. Arguing that such hybrid forms paralleled the often contradictory Marxist effort to theorize the urban underclass as the “lumpen proletariat” of capitalist urban modernity, I suggest that Ghosh articulates what I term a “lumpen aesthetics”. A consideration of Ghosh, I argue, prepares

43 ground for a global history of the lumpen, by offering a specifically Bengali/Indian inflection of the term essential to understanding the later impact of Maoist Naxalism on the urban underclass as well as the peasantry. The contours of lumpen aesthetics are detailed in the final chapter on “Lumpen Aesthetics and the City 2: the Radical Cinema of Mrinal Sen,” which focuses on Mrinal Sen’s film Calcutta 71 (1972) and its portrayal of Naxalite youth in the city of Calcutta in the late 1960s and early 70s. The chapter elaborates Sen’s incorporation of the Naxalite “lumpen” and the cinematic resonances of Calcutta 71 with formal and thematic elements of Latin American Third-Cinema. This expanded, localized and transnational vocabulary, I posit, allows Calcutta 71 to engage with underclass resistance to early neoliberal incursions of the “global city” in India. The foregrounding of the role of literature and other cultural forms offers a new way of thinking about the Naxalite movement. The site of literary representation contextualizes Maoist Naxalism in India in a transnational frame, in contrast to the purely national framework posited by extant historical and sociological scholarship. The transnational framework sheds light on the role of literature in negotiating political desire and the question of modernity in the postcolonial periphery. Such an approach contributes moreover to recent discussions of “world literature”: first, by bringing into scholarly discussion forms of prose (naksha) and drama (tamasha, jatra) that are marginal to dominant literary genres such as the (Anglophone) novel, and second, by complicating notions of genre and literary canon by highlighting the politics of the global literary marketplace. I draw attention to how the literary marketplace mediates certain genres and the forms of aesthetic/political knowledge they posit, through appropriation, reconfiguration and marginalization. Rethinking the full scope of Naxalite challenge to postcolonial India nationalism, I illuminate the continuing relevance of revolutionary politics and aesthetics in

44 resisting capitalist expansion characteristic of the era of “globalization”. To recall the ironic observation from Arundhati Roy with which I began: in our present moment, India is following in the footsteps of its once-ideological enemy, “Communist” China, in integrating into and reconfiguring the world-system of neoliberal and neocolonial capitalism. In this configuration, the return of revolutionary, “Chinese-style” Maoism in India signals the paradoxical endurance of the praxis of revolution.

45

CHAPTER ONE Parody and “Third World” Internationalism in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Introduction This chapter focuses on Aravind Adiga’s Man-Booker winning debut novel The White Tiger (2008), widely considered a representative example of new fiction writing from India. I want to focus on an aspect of the novel that has received almost no scholarly attention – namely, its relation to, and representation of, the contemporary Naxalite movement in India. The purpose is to constellate two phenomena which are unrelated at first glance but which share a common point of emergence. Both the Maoist resurgence in India in its present-day avatar, as well as the so-called globally prominent Indian Anglophone novel, arise at -- and arguably because of -- the historical juncture of the neoliberal restructuring of the world, including of course India since the 1990s. In constellating “celebrity” literary production and insurgent revolutionary politics, I explore how each inflects the other in our contemporary moment. The protagonist and narrator Balram Halwai in Aravind Adiga’s debut novel The White Tiger is a self-made entrepreneur running a successful software company in the city of Bangalore, India’s IT or information technology hub. The White Tiger tells the story of Halwai’s journey from the nation’s rural hinterland, scarred by battles between lower-caste Naxalites and upper-caste landlords’ armies, to wealth and success in the cities of New Delhi and Bangalore, a success that the protagonist achieves through murder of his employer, and opening a software business. Halwai represents the emerging “new middle class” in India - affluent, savvy, and

46 asserting both a distinctive national identity and a claim to global consumer citizenship. To situate the national and global articulation of belonging of the likes of Halwai, I draw on the term “New India” from Kanishka Chowdhury, which is characterized by “a trumpeting of the importance of the global … and the ideological logic of the global Indian subject” (17). The “new” and the “global” are watchwords of the neo-liberal order, displacing the “old” bifurcated world of the Cold War haunted by the spectral co-existence of socialist internationalism.1 In comparison to the diverse corpus of texts in music and literature that represent or affiliate with the Naxalite movement, the protagonist in Adiga’s The White Tiger explicitly seeks to disavow any connections to the Naxalites. Yet both the Naxalite identity of Halwai’s native village, and his proto-Naxalite career as an indigent migrant who takes to violence, continue to haunt the story of his meteoric rise to the higher echelons of Indian society. I argue that in order to resolve the tension between a supposedly Naxalite context and neoliberal rags-to-riches fairytale, the narrative appropriates -- through parody -- elements of the “old” transnational, or more specifically, internationalist affiliations of the Naxalite movement. It is precisely an exploration of this peculiar relationship, the novel’s simultaneous disavowal and parody of Naxalism, which drives the present chapter. I will argue for the centrality of the Naxalite movement and its internationalist political and aesthetic lineages in comprehending The White Tiger’s negotiation of neoliberal globalization. The novel deploys these lineages in parody, as it seeks to balance the Indian new middle class’ anxieties and aspirations in relation to the recent incursions of capitalism in India, 1

Chowdhury points out that in New India, “the duality of the old and the new is an important ideological trope employed by advocates of neoliberalism … a necessary accompaniment of the new economic order is to link the ‘old’ to an antiquated and outdated economic system … [O]n the one hand, any institution or law, such as a regulatory commission or a system of tariffs, that is seen as a barrier to the accumulation of wealth and the free flow of international capital; on the other, the specter of workers’ and agricultural laborers’ rights, or public investment or expenditure. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented combination of dispossession, legislation and intimidation has been set in motion to abolish these remnants of the ‘old’” (30).

47 and the persistence of uneven development that characterizes “peripheral modernity” (Harootunian 2000) in the postcolony. In my reading, the Anglophone novel is the privileged aesthetic (literary) site of the nation in the global literary marketplace: as such, the literary form of The White Tiger articulates the aspirations of the postcolonial Indian middle class even as it refashions third worldist rhetoric to serve that new aspiration. Such an ideological function for the postcolonial Anglophone novel is not surprising in and of itself, given the material conditions of its emergence, circulation, reception and its determinate mediation through the political economy of the literary marketplace. What is significant about The White Tiger however is that its appropriation of subaltern positions – Halwai’s transformation from migrant murderer to middle-class entrepreneur -- through the deployment of parody provides a rare opportunity for the mainstream emergence of Naxalite internationalism and more broadly of internationalism in the “third world”. The novel selfconsciously deploys “third world” nationalism in contextualizing Halwai’s personal struggles. The third world is by definition that space where “nationalism [i]s the determinate ideological imperative” (Ahmad 308). As I discuss in the first section, if considered through such a conceptual framework, political struggles in the third world are coercively narrowed down to contestations within the limits of the nation and within the governing logic of capitalism. The same is true for the contemporary Maoist movement in India. As Saroj Giri (2009) has perceptively argued, the state repression of Maoist Naxalites is complemented by a socioeconomic humanitarian model in the civil society mainstream that seeks to co-opt the supposedly undemocratic, violent and totalitarian Maoists. These “progressive” approaches present the Maoist Naxals as a local or intra-national “problem”; the armed movement is the manifestation of “‘social discontent,’ ‘democratic overload,’ ‘crisis of democratic governance’ and the ‘need’

48 to address these ‘genuine grievances’” (471). Embodied in NGO organizations, rights-based and livelihood-based middle-class activism etc., this “humanitarian” model seeks to foreclose “a[ny] possibility for a more radical resistance from the masses … [that is] unmanaged by one or the other faction of capital or state” (471). It thus reinstates resistance within the terms of the Indian state and its legal-democratic apparatus. My reading of The White Tiger unsettles the statist narrative in two important ways. One, Halwai’s act of murder and circumvention of the law on his way to “Light” perhaps unwittingly reveals the violence of unevenness that is constitutive of neoliberal accumulation processes in New India, as elsewhere. It gives the lie to nationalist ideologies of entrepreneurship and moralistic fables of hard work in the era of neoliberalism. Second, more importantly, the aesthetic transactions of the novel illuminate lineages of the Naxalite movement that are transnational and not simply local/domestic. Such a specter of Naxalite internationalism haunts the narrative at its boundaries, paralleling the presence of the Naxalite movement in New India. I argue for the key importance of the Naxalite movement, formally and thematically, as a constitutive aspect of the protagonist’s ambivalent relation to neoliberal globalization in contemporary India. Just as Halwai reinvents the hapless migrant from the rural hinterlands through his own rise to middle-class status, The White Tiger parodies, and thereby attempts to disavow, the internationalist solidarities of the Naxalite movement to Maoist China, Black struggles in the US, and Dalit lower-caste activism in India which provide an alternative set of aspirations to Halwai’s own. Attention to the form of the novel and its parodic deployment of the genres of epistolary fiction, the protest novel and the Indian theatrical form of tamasha alert us to the centrality of Naxalism as a literary, spatial and political figure in the novel. The deployment of Naxalism’s internationalist political and aesthetic lineages, I will argue, runs counter to the

49 novel’s valorization of an individualist and consumerist ethos in New India, and the circulation of this ethos in the global literary marketplace. I posit this reading of the novel in contradistinction to the extant scholarship on The White Tiger (Mendes 2010; Schotland 2010; Hansen 2010; Goh 2011; Goh 2012; Khor 2012; Gajarawala 2013). While this body of scholarship has read the social contestations presented in the novel in terms of the frictions of India’s integration into the global capitalist economy, it has ignored the problematic of uneven development and rendered Naxalite resistance invisible. Such critical oversight, I will argue, is the result of two factors: first, dominant political definitions of the Global South that bracket the role of Communism, as I discuss in section one. The second factor, outlined in sections two and three, is the series of mediation of the literary form of the novel both by contestations within the “nation,” and the conditions of its circulation in the global literary marketplace. The particular literary form of the new India Anglophone novel is the privileged aesthetic site where “third world” nationalism and neoliberal capitalism meet. As such, a discussion of the erasure of Naxalism in The White Tiger draws attention to the politics of third worldism and the mediation of literary form within contemporary global capitalism.

II – The Third World and the Definition of the Inter-National In his well known essay “Third World Literature in the Age of Multinational Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson (1986) claimed that “[a]ll third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical,” bearing a relation of allegory to the “nation”. For Jameson, “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (69, original emphasis). This argument ostensibly repeated, as critics were quick to point out, the clichéd characterization of the third world as an “embattled situation,” as

50 if the rest of the world were free of such battles. Moreover, Jameson claimed that the “Western” distinction between the public and the private spheres, the first pertaining to society and culture and the second to individual subjectivity and desire, did not quite apply in the case of the third world.2 The sweeping nature of such a formulation (“all third-world texts,” “necessarily,” “always allegorical”) which Jameson himself notes to be “grossly oversimplified” (69), drew the particular ire of a fellow Marxist (from the third world), the Pakistani/Indian literary critic Aijaz Ahmad. In his rejoinder, Ahmad (1987) charged Jameson with deploying the Orientalist rhetoric of “otherness”: Jameson’s characterization of all third world texts as national allegories, Ahmad noted, reduces and flattens out the heterogeneity within the third world. Simultaneously, it ignores the numerous overlaps and similarities between this third world and the so-called first. Contra Jameson, Ahmad argued that “there is no such thing as a ‘third world literature’ … as an internally coherent object of theoretical knowledge” (Ahmad 4). In place of Jameson’s sweeping generalizations, Ahmad, perhaps polemically, projected his own absolutes (“no such thing”) onto the debate. At stake in this famous debate are the very terms, “third world,” “nation” and “communism” that I take up in this chapter, and those I will argue are more crucial than ever in the age of neoliberal globalization.3 Jameson and Ahmad are not so much in opposition to each other, as their positions would seem to imply, but approaching the problem of definition from 2

Cf. Jameson (1986:69) - “one of the determinants of capitalist culture, that is, the culture of the western realist and modernist novel, is a radical split between the private and the public, between the poetic and the political, between what we have come to think of as the domain of sexuality and the unconscious and that of the public world of classes, of the economic, and of secular political power: in other words, Freud versus Marx”. 3 This nearly three-decade old debate, from the early days of postcolonial studies, continues to draw the attention of scholars. Recent commentary in particular has pointed to the utility of Jameson’s reading of the “nation,” especially its relevance in pushing back against some of the more facile assumptions of cosmopolitanism and globalization theory, as well as speaking eloquently to Moretti’s (2001) notion of the world literary system as “one and unequal”. See Szeman (2001); Buchanan (2002); Lazarus (2011) etc. for some of the more prominent critical positions; Habjan 2013 offers a useful overview of the commentary.

51 two different directions. Ahmad is more concerned with the theoretical ambiguity of the term, and the catch-all nature of its deployment (which I turn to in a moment). What goes relatively unremarked in Ahmad’s response though is the situatedness of Jameson’s formulation. Jameson asserts that the allegorization of third world literature is a historically specific process, in the age of multinational capitalism and in relation to Western allegories of canon formation and literary judgement. Jameson makes two claims in the essay: first, he argues for the expansion of the literary curriculum to include world literature, and second, he dialectically interrogates the very ways in such re-constellation of the curricula and the literary canon takes place. “[A] popular or socially realistic third-world novel tends to come before us, not immediately, but as though already read” (Jameson 66). For the “third-world novel” to be acknowledged by the first-world reader (“us”) as a deserving entrant to the canon of world literature, it undergoes a series of mediations in receding order of visibility, of “taste,” of “canon,” of “our modernisms” and finally, “a sheltered life” for the reader (66). These mediations inflect literary circulation temporally and culturally: third world texts are “necessarily … allegorical” not because of the texts’ inherent attributes, but the way they appear -- as commodities -- on the world-stage, “as though already read” and as “seemingly old-fashioned”. In other words, Jameson’s formulation is not so much “Orientalist” as a description of a condition: in order to be recognized and admitted to the canon of world literature, a third world text is necessarily commoditized as belated. It is similar yet different; its current preoccupations are those which Western texts had once upon a time (similarity), but which have historically been left behind (difference).4

4

It is necessary to pay attention to the particular though by no means unique ways in which literary texts are produced and circulated as “commodities”. Sarah Brouillette (2002) qualifies the notion of literary text-ascommodity by noting the specificities of the “book”. “The average novel is not a commodity in the way that, say, Coke is a commodity” (49). Each book is different from the several million other books in print, and there is

52 The third world novel’s focus on an allegorical relation to the nation emerges under this condition, simultaneously testifying to a recognizable ground of similarity with the first, but also reminding readers of its cultural distance from the “West”: “[t]here is now an obsessive return of the national situation itself, among third-world intellectuals …This is not the way American intellectuals have been discussing ‘America’” (65). For Jameson, the past of the postmodern West appears in the contemporary novel as the present of the belated third world.5 The centrality of political economy in mediating the dissemination of third world literature is also the focus of Aijaz Ahmad’s critique of Jameson. While Jameson reads the national allegory of third world texts as “challeng[ing] our imprisonment in the present of postmodernism” (66) in the West, such a “binary distinction between the first and third worlds” is itself a problem for Ahmad (5). The first problem is one of recognition, as “major literary traditions [in the third world] – such as those of Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telegu, and half a dozen others from India alone – remain, beyond a few texts here and there, virtually unknown to the American literary theorist” (5). Generalizations about third world texts have to be made on the basis on a miniscule section of literature written in English and available for metropolitan consumption. On this basis, Ahmad complains, “the only choice for the ‘third-world’ is said to be between its ‘nationalisms’ and a ‘global American postmodernist culture’. Is there no other choice?” (8). In order to explain the falsity of such political “choice,” Ahmad provides a genealogy of the term “third world,” bringing into discussion the neglected question of

considerable separation between what a book articulates and how it is received by interpretive communities or readers. Most importantly, books cannot cross borders easily without being translated and undergoing modification. Despite these important differences, there are material conditions of literary publishing, dissemination and reception that structure the “literary marketplace” within global capitalism. See the discussion in section 3 of this essay. 5 Such a mediated text moreover sustains an ideology of time, where the West is ahead of the third world thereby lending legitimacy to its claims of civilizational and developmental progress. Second, in positing the present of the West and the third world as different, and differently oriented, such a text/commodity elides and erases the structural relations that give rise to such differences, namely the global and uneven spread of capitalism.

53 socialism: more specifically, the relation between socialist internationalism and cultural articulation in the third world.6 In an extended discussion in “Three Worlds Theory: End of a Debate” collected in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, Ahmad (1992) notes not one, but three different uses of the term third world. The first is nationalist, derived from the anthropologist Alfred Sauvy’s description of the three estates in the French Revolution, and taken up by proponents of third world nationalism such as Jawaharlal Nehru in India, Gamal Nasser in Egypt, and Sukarno of Indonesia. Embodied in the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the Non-Aligned movement, third world nationalism combined the rhetoric of anti-communism with a developmentalist state-led mixed private and public economy. The second use is from the Soviet Union, which described its own area of direct influence in the Cold War, the Eastern bloc, as the socialist “second world,” and advocated alliance with nationalist regimes such as Nehru’s India in the non-socialist third world for a “peaceful transition” to socialism. The third use of the term is Maoist, which posited both the USSR and the US as imperialist first worlds; in this view, the third world was said to be composed only of poor and agricultural nations (Ahmad 306-307). Then, “not socialism but nationalism has always been designated by the term [third world] … all the theoretical variants emphasize the nationalist character of the term’s politics” (Ahmad 307-08, original emphasis). The ascription of “not socialism but nationalism” to the third world is paradoxical, as two of the three proponents were themselves socialist: while the USSR supported the non-socialist nationalisms in the third world for its own foreign policy ends 6

“Socialism, one would have thought, was not by any means limited to the so-called second world (the socialist countries) but a global phenomenon, reaching into the furthest rural communities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, not to speak of individuals and groups within the United States” (Ahmad 1987:10). Here again, the issue is one of scale: to take the example of Asia alone, not only did Communist-ruled countries such as China, Vietnam, North Korea, Laos and Cambodia comprise a significant part of the third world, these were populated by more than a third of the world population. In non-communist India from 1977 to 2011 on the other instance, the Communists were elected to power for 34 straight years in the province of West Bengal, whose population (in 2011) is larger than the most populous European country, Germany.

54 in the Cold War, Maoist China sought clearly to distinguish the third world from the USSR-led bloc following the Sino-Soviet split. As a result, the third world comes to mean in current usage an absence of socialism not only for anti-communist but also for self-professed Marxists. As Ahmad puts it, “Marxists who … deploy the Three Worlds theory, identify socialism with the Second World [and] uphold Third-Worldist nationalism as the determinate ideological imperative of our epoch” (Ahmad 308). In the Marxist conception of the third world that posits nationalism as the only possible opposition to postmodern global capitalism, “a thing called socialist and/or communist culture … vanished from our discourse altogether” (Ahmad 1987, 8).7 Ahmad’s critique is useful in drawing attention, like Jameson, to the postmodern devaluation of nationalism, as well as in reminding his readers of the principle of Marxist internationalism: the importance of national sovereignty in the capitalist peripheries not as an end in itself, but for “socialist and/or communist culture”. Ahmad points, as does Jameson in a different register, to the dialectical process through which global (multinational) capitalism mediates the notion of the third world. If the collapse of the Soviet Union marks the end of socialism in the second-world, then the third world is that potential space outside of the first-world which has never been or will be socialist. It is but a belated image of the first-world, similar in being untainted by socialism or class struggle, yet different in that it is an “embattled” site for the nation. If for Jameson the “third-world” is a conceptual site for the West to project its past, for Ahmad the term itself is the result of capitalism’s obliteration of past and present class struggle in the capitalist peripheries. The bracketing of Communist internationalism in the Global South has important implications. It effaces the questions of national sovereignty and uneven development in favor of 7

This is of course not true of Marxism tout court, but a certain historical tendency inattentive to the “nation question”. See chapter two of the dissertation for a fuller discussion of the place of the nation in Marxist theories of internationalism.

55 third world nationalism. The “allegory” of nation becomes a site of cultural difference that is divorced from economic roots. In this scenario, postcolonial elites in countries such as India appropriate the discourse of nationalism to integrate into the circuits of global capitalism. In other words, in a dialectical reversal, the “Left” political desire to resist, refuse and transcend uneven development through nationalism, flows into the neoliberal Right’s fantasies of boundary-less capitalist globalization; the desire to resist imperialism appears not as the desire to transcend capital but as the assertion of cultural difference. Such reversals and appropriations seek to doubly erase, and reformulate, previous articulations of socialist nationalism, or internationalism, that offer alternatives to capitalism’s global expansion.

III – Representing the Nation: the Peripheral (Anglophone) Novel Literature serves as an important site of such postcolonial political contestations. I draw again on Jameson, for whom the nation in the “third world” is “locked in a life-and-death struggle with first-world cultural imperialism … a cultural struggle that is itself a reflection of the economic situation of such areas in their penetration by various stages of capitalism” (1986:68, emphasis added). The next two sections outline the trajectory of the novel in negotiating the modernity fostered “unevenly” by “various stages of capitalism” in India. While the instance of “India” does not account for the entire postcolonial world, it is useful for this discussion in several ways.8 The transformation of India from one of the leading proponents of

8

Here I follow the criticism of the term “postcolonial” by materialist critics such as Ahmad, and Arif Dirlik (1994) and Timothy Brennan (1997). Dirlik suggests that the term “postcolonial” arose under the influence of postmodern theory and first world recognition granted to postmodernist intellectuals from the “third world”. In the context of global expansion of capitalism since the 1980s, these two processes work in combination in first world institutions to (coercively) reframe peripheral problematics of nationalism and national liberation, neocolonialism and uneven development into postmodern and postcolonial “discourse,” thus mystifying the contemporary nature of capitalist crisis (353). In turn, Brennan (1997) notes the valorization of postmodern “hybridity” as the preferred condition of postcolonial texts. This selective appropriation of the world allows for the celebration of “cosmopolitanism,” where

56 Third worldist nationalism in the 1960s to being, alongside China, an emerging economic center of global capitalism today is one factor. The second factor is the prominence accorded to Indian writers, particularly English-language novelists, in the contemporary canon of global literature, a phenomenon complicated by the country’s British colonial past. The form of the novel is a privileged site in the literary articulation of the nation. As Timothy Brennan (1990) has noted, extending Benedict Anderson’s (1983) formulation of the nation as an “imagined community” – “It was the novel that historically accompanied the rise of nations by objectifying the one, yet many of national life, and by mimicking the structure of the nation, a clearly bordered jumble of languages and styles” (Brennan 49, original emphasis). The form of the novel is a “composite” and “accompanied by a changing conception of realism itself,” Brennan argues, brought about by the “rise of more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of subject matter for problematic-existential representation” (52). I am drawing on Brennan’s formulation to suggest that the novel in India balances the tension between representing the varied contestations in the world’s “largest democracy” and the centralizing nationalist consolidation of the Indian elite as a growing economic force. The task of representing the “many of national life” necessitates an engagement, both formal and thematic, with local and sub-national particularity. In making this statement I am drawing on the work of Franco Moretti. In his essay “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000), Moretti suggests the dialectical process through which the novel formally comes to articulate the nation: complicating the interaction between the “foreign form” of the novel and the “raw material” of local social experience, he notes that “it’s more of a triangle: foreign form, local material—and local form … [I]t’s precisely in this third dimension that these novels seem to be

the “cultural hybridity” of postcolonial texts works to displace, de-legitimize and parody “radical decolonization theory,” and “the project of national culture” in the capitalist periphery.

57 most unstable” (65, original emphasis). The insertion of “local form” is manifested in the “local narrative voice” (66). Challenging the idea that novels from the “periphery” arise as a derivative form to the European “original”, Moretti claims that it is the “European novel” which is the “exception,” for “when a culture starts moving towards the modern novel, it is always as a compromise between foreign form and local materials” (60, original emphasis). Moretti’s model is salutary in noting that the exchange between “foreign form” (modern Western Europe) and “local form” (periphery), even though characteristic of the vast majority of novels, is an unequal and uneven exchange. “European novels, for instance, suggests that hardly any forms ‘of consequence’ don’t move at all; that movement from one periphery to another (without passing through the centre) is almost unheard of; that movement from the periphery to the centre is less rare, but still quite unusual, while that from the centre to the periphery is by far the most frequent” (Moretti 2003, n.p.). The “local form” is restricted in its “movement,” a movement guided by the economic basis of core and periphery in the world system. It is then locked in the “life-and-death struggle” against “cultural imperialism” that Jameson speaks about: in the peripheral novel, the “nation” serves as a central site where the contestation over uneven development is played out. Attention to local material and local form thus changes the conception of literary realism.9 The local adaptation of the novel proceeds along a number of axes both in English and the vernaculars, but especially in the former, that is the Anglophone novel. Structurally, as Priya 9

Francesca Orsini (2002) has argued that “at first sight, Moretti’s novel-based theses would seem to have little application to the [Indian] Subcontinent, where the major nineteenth and twentieth-century forms have been poetry, drama and the short story, whose evolution may show quite different patterns of change” (79). There are at least two competing definitions of “Indian Literature” here: the first referring to literary productions including poetry, drama et al in English as well as the eighteen “recognized” vernacular languages in India that Orsini has in mind (see also Ahmad 1992 for a discussion). The second use is more commonsensical, referring to Anglophone literature especially the postcolonial novel as a synecdoche for “India” in the global literary marketplace. I am arguing that the substitution of the former by the latter is the result of a dialectical process, the fixing of third world experience in the image of “nation” in the global literary marketplace, and its interaction with the championing of the nation by an ascendant Indian new middle class.

58 Joshi (2002) has shown, the proliferation of public libraries and formation of novel reading publics in 19th century India sought to refashion and appropriate the genre of the novel away from its European and colonial provenance and geared it towards specifically nationalist purposes (35-92). Priyamvada Gopal (2013) has analyzed the various ways in which such refashioning of the novel took place, listing the typologies of the Indian novel in English – among others, the 19th century novel and its nationalist invocation of gender; the 20th century Gandhian novel with its ambiguous relation to modernity; the witnessing of Partition in 1947 and the birth pangs of the post-colonial nation; the city novel and the experience of urbanity; the novel of migration of the Indian diaspora, and the family novel. Especially since the latter half of the twentieth century, the trajectory of the Indian Anglophone novel corresponds to what Pranav Jani (2010) has termed the move from namakhalaal (true-to-its-salt) cosmopolitanism to post-nationalism. The first stage, between Indian independence in 1947 to the mid-1970s charts a non-parochial valorization of nationalism and a formal emphasis on realism; subsequently, this is replaced by a turn away from the nation and formal experimentation that “disrupt processes of knowing” (8). The relationship between the novel and the nation is not one of straightforward historical testimony but marked by contingencies of form as well as language. Elaborating Moretti’s observation on “local form and local narrative voice,” Dilip Menon notes, “there were some attempts to accommodate it [the novel] to an older classical aesthetics, [and] a number of Indian languages adopted the word novel itself (2004: 483, original emphasis). “The novel was a do-it-yourself form that came from the West without any instructions” (484).On the other hand, nuancing the relation between the novel and bourgeois nationalism, Menon forcefully draws our attention to the lower caste deployment of the novel that is more

59 invested in social reform and less in the project of imagining elite nationalism. The “lower-caste novel” allows for a fashioning of a modern caste-less self, “project[ing] the imagination of a place elsewhere characterized by redemptive death in which the old, caste self dies” (484). He notes the progressive function of English as language in destabilizing caste and class barriers, highlighting lower-caste claims on the English language as “the Dalit [former untouchable caste] Goddess” that usurps the upper-caste hegemony over indigenous languages. While Menon alerts us to the role of English in disrupting pre-existing caste privilege, Modhumita Roy (1994) on the other hand, has drawn attention to the role of the English language in the “reinstituting” of social class and privilege in India. The issue of language is related to larger social contestations on the definition of nationhood. Elaborating on the privileged imbrication of English language and English-language literature in contemporary India, Francesca Orsini (2002) notes, “[l]iterary production in English is triply privileged within this field [of literature], drawing on the language’s American-based global ascendancy, on the subcontinental legacy of British colonialism, and relatedly, on Indian class divisions: this is the preferred language of the urban middle classes – in the case of the elite, sometimes the only language” (83-84). The visibility of Indian English fiction, for Orsini, is accompanied by a relational devaluation and effacement of vernacular-language literatures as well as those produced in sub-regional dialect.10 Thus, social hierarchies of gender, region and caste, not to mention language, “English,” all mediate the novel and structure the social contestations around the “nation”. As this brief

10

In recent years this has led to the formation, in Debjani Ganguly’s (2012) formulation, of “a niche publishing industry for Dalit issues,” whereby vernacular Dalit literature is translated to English aiming for global attention to caste oppression in India. One of the important political moments in this context is the delegation of Dalit activists to the United Nations Racism Conference in Durban in 2001. Detailing atrocities on Dalits, English-language publishers such as Navayana have launched the book series ‘Holocaste,’ the name itself suggesting the conscious attempt to link “Dalit issues” to international conversations on human rights abuses (144). On the other hand, Toral Gajarawala (2013) has argued that much of the globally celebrated Indian Anglophone writing presents a “casteless modernity” to its metropolitan and diasporic audience. The question of caste, for Gajarawala, dialectically marks the crisis of realist representation in Anglophone fiction.

60 account above suggests, the novel in India plays an important part in representing the “many of national life;” its formal flexibility makes it a particularly suitable site for doing so. The Anglophone novel enjoys a higher position of privilege in this schema. The incorporation of the Anglophone Indian novel into the contemporary world system of literature further mediates this position of privilege. The Anglophone novel in India spans a path that traverses the colonial era of the 19th and early 20th centuries, third worldist nationalism -- that is not socialism -- between 1950 and 1970, and postcolonial integration into neoliberal capitalist economy since the 1990s. Specifically, as I show in the next section, the historic juncture of neoliberal capitalism and its cultural correlate of the literary marketplace, make possible a particular legitimation of the Anglophone novel, in negotiating a third world nationalist integration into the global capitalist order. Enabling the postcolonial elite to speak for the nation, the contemporary moment of neoliberal globalization marks on one hand the elite appropriation of the nation, and conversely, appropriates the periphery through the trope of multicultural difference. In dialectical conjunction, these two tendencies help re-orient the Anglophone novel in India as a key, if reconfigured, site of Jameson-ian “national allegory”.

IV– The Literary Marketplace, New India Fiction and The White Tiger To think of the elite appropriation of the nation in the Anglophone novel, it is useful to think along the lines of what Pascale Casanova (2007), deploying Pierre Bourdieu’s (1993) notion of “field of cultural production,” terms the “literary market”: “[the] world republic of letters has its own mode of operation: its own economy … [I]ts geography is based on the opposition between a capital, on the one hand, and peripheral dependencies … [T]he literary economy is therefore based on a ‘market’” (Casanova 11-13). While Casanova’s work does not

61 address literary productions from the periphery and is focused exclusively on the metropole, unlike Moretti’s dialectical conceptualization of the unequal metropole-periphery relation, her delineation of the “literary economy” and the “Greenwich meridian” of literary value help articulate the uneven-ness of the literary canon, as I discussed via Moretti. The question of aesthetic quality or canonicity of the “great works” of literature, Casanova posits, is inflected by the accumulative circuits of literary value over time: “[i]n other words, having a long national past is the condition of being able to claim a literary existence that is fully recognized in the present … [T]he Greenwich meridian[’s] … continually redefined present of literary life constitutes a universal artistic clock by which writers must regulate their work if they wish to attain legitimacy” (Casanova 89-90). Expanding Casanova’s framework to take account of the material conditions of dissemination of literature, I borrow from Sarah Brouillette the notion of the “global literary marketplace,” that negotiates the “definitive tensions between saleable local subject matter and uncontrolled global dissemination” (Brouillette 2007:4).11 For Indian English literature aspiring to global recognition, the mediation of the global literary marketplace is crucial.12 The market is manifested among other things, in the institutions and cultural phenomenon of the literary prize – the Nobel, Man-Booker, and Pulitzer Prize.

11

“The international [in Casanova] is thus the result or expression not of some free-wheeling global cosmopolitanism but of precisely, the inter-national, a cultural conflict between nations and national literatures … The most predictable objection is that there are variables other than nation and relations other than competition” (Prendergast 7, 12). Taking up the first of these objections, Orsini remarks on the number of major regionallanguage literary traditions within one nation; “[m]odern Indian writing poses a further challenge to the unitary agon [of nation] through the exceptional complexity of its national field. Language is the most apparent faultline; but linguistic differentiation also delineates a series of competing, sometimes overlapping distinctions of region, culture and class” (82). It is to be noted that Anglophone Indian writing is overwhelmingly considered to be national, rather than regional, by writers and critics alike. In the absence of alternative models of cooperative socialist internationalism, such models of the national are then pitted in competition in the capitalist literary marketplace. 12 The global literary marketplace is structured by the domination of a small number of corporate firms, “where more than 50 percent of the publishing industry is run by between five and seven encompassing firms that on an average make US$500 million each year; that leaves almost no income for the thousands remaining” (Brouillette 53). For Brouillette, such centralized concentration of profit underlies the multiplicity of well-known publishing houses renowned for their literary standards; “Bertelsmann, for example, is the largest book publisher, with 10 percent of all English language book sales worldwide. It is in general the world’s third largest media conglomerate,

62 The prestigious Man-Booker Prize, previously restricted to writers from the Commonwealth countries but global in scope from 2014, is awarded each year to the best English-language fiction. Discussing such prizes, James F. English (2005) has drawn attention to the combination of entertainment, spectacle and scandal that constitute what he calls the “economy of prestige”. Graham Huggan (2001) on the other hand has noted the incorporation of the “exotic other” in Booker plc’s pattern of awards in recent decades, which is ironic given the parent company Booker McConnell’s history of colonial agribusiness such as sugar production in British Guyana. Huggan notes that the Man-Booker prize has to be “seen within the wider context of a symbolic legitimation of ‘multicultural’ and/or exotically ‘foreign’ goods. The discursive link is provided here by exoticist objectification, as English-language literature splinters into a variety of commercially viable ‘othered’ forms” (111).13 The “symbolic legitimation of multicultural(ism)” is the constitutive condition for the claims of postcolonial nationalist elites from the former third world. This section uses the example of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger to illustrate how emergent nationalism in India seeks to lay claim to the legitimation accorded to multiculturalism in the literary marketplace. The White Tiger is a prominent example of a text situated in the world republic of letters and the global literary marketplace. Having won the Man-Booker in 2008, it sold more than 200,000 copies worldwide. Adiga was the fourth and latest Indian with major shares in both AOL and barnesandnoble.com. In 1998 it acquired Random House, one of the largest publishers of literary fiction, with upwards of 100 houses in 13 countries under its umbrella, including Alfred A. Knopf, Pantheon, Fawcett, Vintage and Doubleday” (50). With the expansion of the globalizing market, these “companies solidify their dominant positions by incorporating postcolonial writers for global distribution” (57); an example relevant for understanding the visibility of Indian Anglophone fiction in the age of neoliberalism is provided by “Penguin Books, which is incorporated within Pearson PLC. Penguin opened branch offices in India in 1985, where it represents Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Chandra and Upamanyu Chatterjee,” some of the biggest literary stars of the 1990s (57-58). 13 Huggan draws attention to the material constituents of an “industry of postcoloniality,” where “the writer himself/herself is one of several ‘agents of legitimation’ – others might include booksellers, publishers, reviewers and not least, individual readers and ‘valuing communities’. These agents are all contenders in the struggle to validate particular writers; and the writers themselves vie for the right to attain and, in turn, confer recognition and prestige” (5).

63 recipient of this prize previously awarded to such figures as Salman Rushdie (1981), Arundhati Roy (1997) and Kiran Desai (2006).14 The increased Indian visibility in the Man-Booker prize-roster is predicated on recent changes in both the national literary landscape and the publishing industry following neoliberal reforms since the 1990s. As Emma Dawson Varughese has recently documented, the circuit of English-language fiction in India, and countries like Malaysia, Singapore, Kenya, is said to be “less and less recognizable by the tropes and guises of postcolonial literature” (2). According to Varughese, the postcolonial model of “writing back to the empire,” popularized by Ashcroft, Tiffin et al in their 1989 book The Empire Writes Back, is said to be undergoing substantial changes. The proliferation of “low-brow” fiction such as chic-lit, erotica and crime thrillers, written in a colloquial style, the emergence of significant numbers of middle-class readers and the entry of multinational publishing corporations all testify to the increasing prominence of Anglophone writing, mainly fiction, in India for local consumption, and elsewhere.15

14

Huggan (2001) identifies two defining moments of the multicultural legitimation of Indian Anglophone writing, the publication of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in 1981, and 1997, the 50th anniversary of Indian Independence, marking the publication of The God of Small Things. He describes the Barcelona conference on Indian Anglophone fiction in 1997 as a social event, including “an Indian buffet, followed by a performance of [Indian] classical dancing … an appropriately festive occasion, with a muted nationalism underscoring many of its cross-cultural performances and a series of liberal gestures to the reciprocity between ‘European’ and ‘Asian’ cultures’” (67). Brouillette in turn draws attention to the class implications of Indian Anglophone fiction and its easy incorporation into the liberal domain of multiculturalism – “there are a variety of reasons why English-language writers from South Asia, and in particular from India, seem to have produced an ideally cosmopolitan writing. Recent patterns of South Asian immigration have been characterized by the metropolitan movements of a relatively prosperous middle class of educated professionals who are thought to be fairly happily deterritorialized” (Brouillette 87). The middle class character of this group moreover, does not prevent the happy mixing of a “post-postcolonial” attitude and a strong Indian nationalism that is itself increasingly global in scope and aspiration, indeed each feeds into and reinforces the other. 15 While latest figures are unavailable, as of 1995 India was the third-largest publisher of English-language books including textbooks in the world (Huggan 79). Still earlier figures from 1975 are even more compelling, giving credence to what Philip Altbach termed “literary colonialism in the third world”. “In India, about half of the book titles are in English, while only two percent of the population is literate in English” (Altbach 230). This is somewhat different from Anglophone and Francophone Africa in this period, where “virtually all books are published in the metropolitan language [while] … 80 to 95 percent of the population does not know English or French” (230). In recent years after the liberalization of the economy, the English-speaking Indian middle class comprise roughly 710% of the population. Not surprisingly, many of the claims of progress in “New India” are made by, and for, the members of this tiny but powerful fragment of the nation.

64 Indeed, Adiga’s novel itself is keenly aware of the mediations produced by the literary marketplace. This is marked at the outset of the novel, in the opening statement made by the protagonist Balram Halwai to the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao - “Neither I nor you speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English” (Adiga 1). The politics of language is important to this statement, and its underlying sentiment. To provide one example of the “postcolonial” phenomenon Halwai is referring to: in a since-infamous article published in the New Yorker on the 50th anniversary of Indian Independence, Salman Rushdie, noted Anglophone writer, claimed rather unilaterally – and without an iota of irony -- that Indian fiction written in English “is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the eighteen ‘recognized’ languages of India, the so-called ‘vernacular languages’ … This new, and still burgeoning, ‘Indo-Anglian’ literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books” (qtd. in Brouillette 90). In obliquely referring to such lofty sentiments articulated by the likes of Rushdie, one of the pre-eminent figures of Indian Anglophone writing, The White Tiger seems to be parodying its own genre, the Anglophone novel, and mocking its supposed centrality in the Indian literary field.16 Halwai makes his observation about English in a letter to the Chinese Premier, who is on a state visit to India. Noting that the Indian government officials will lie to the Chinese about the affairs of the country, Halwai insists to the Premier that he must learn Halwai’s life story -- “The Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian” as he calls it -- to get a true sense of India. Though Halwai forgoes any claim to truth, “I’m no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth?” the narrative suggests that Halwai’s autobiography and the novel The White Tiger framed around it, have the capacity to counter and dismantle the lies given out by 16

Perhaps to add insult to injury, as Orsini points out, Rushdie maintained that he could “find scarcely a single vernacular text worthy of inclusion” in the compendium he co-edited, Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-1997, published the same year (qtd. in Orsini 78).

65 representatives of the state, and the likes of Rushdie for that matter. Yet, Halwai’s supposedly subversive narrative is neither a spirited defense of the “vernacular-language” literatures nor a “history from below;” it is the autobiography of a member of the new middle-class, articulated “in English”. It is in other words an appropriation and rearticulation of the nation in the literary marketplace of multiculturalism. Halwai’s antipathy to the state parallels that of the new middle class in India, and reflects the political desire of this class to reconfigure the state to align with its own interests. To borrow from Leela Fernandes, such desire is manifested “through the process of enframing in which the boundaries of this group [the new middle class] are delineated through a set of public discourses, cultural narratives and economic shifts” (31). This is a function of the beleaguered nature of new middle class prosperity, marked most prominently in the consumption practices in a servicesector driven Indian economy that is without an industrial “base”. As Fernandes notes, “[t]he ‘newness’ of consumption practices in liberalizing India includes large segments of the middle class that do not have the kind of disposable incomes associated with the upper middle class and upper classes. Despite widespread national anxieties around the spread of Western-style consumerism in India, there is economic uncertainty in the Indian middle class that has not allowed the kind of consumerism associated with advanced industrialized societies” (Fernandes 80-81, emphasis added). The figure of the author in this constellation functions to balance the tension between a specific class interest – that of the new middle class -- and its hegemonic projection onto the frame of the nation. The new middle class’ interests come to hegemonically represent “national anxieties” about neoliberal globalization. As Aravind Adiga himself notes in an interview, “[A]t a time when India is going through great changes, and with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is

66 important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society” (qtd. in Wagner 2008). While echoing a liberal, disinterested literariness, Adiga’s own position is firmly rooted in the imaginary of the new middle class; “I am not – and will never be -- an opponent of the great economic boom … [T]hose who interpret my novels as opposing liberalization are misreading them. They are marked by ambivalence, not opposition, to the changes” (qtd. in Das 2011). Adiga’s “ambivalence” about “liberalization” should be read in conjunction with his bracketing of economic inequality – “Class is a boring topic to write about. Big divides are not what people are interested in,” as he notes in an interview to The Guardian (qtd. in Higgins 2008). In an anecdote characteristic of new middle class aspirations, Adiga emphasizes his own “underdog” experience growing up in small-town India, and rising up the class-ladder as he moved to the big city of Bangalore.17 The White Tiger, and even Adiga’s second novel, Last Man in Tower (2011) indeed highlight existing social inequalities. But they do so in order to argue for greater leeway for the “free market” and new middle class participation in the same. At least one critic seems to be perceptive to this turn; Kathryn Hansen has noted that The White Tiger articulates “a new sensibility of class” that differs from “the old Marxist rhetoric” (297). Instead, the new Indian novel attributes inequality to “tradition;” as Robbie Goh remarks, the novel ties “India’s hopes for modernization and economic progress to its transnational connections … even as it explicitly and excruciatingly ties its many social problems to socio-religious traditionalism” (337). Halwai’s act of “saving himself” through his quest for prosperity, Lena Khor has noted, is a critique of human rights discourse, as his ironic appeal to the Premier of China, “know[n] to be a

17

Adiga claims that, “I was humiliated by the rich boys there [in Bangalore] – all of whom I had beaten [in exams] – because I had a thick accent when I spoke English and I did not know who Lionel Richie was” (qtd in Das). Ironically, this interview was taken by The Times of India, the oldest English-language newspaper in India preferred by the “traditional” elite.

67 violator of universal human rights” (Khor 63). The thematic and formal commonality between human rights and bildungsroman, to borrow from Joseph Slaughter’s formulation in Human Rights, Inc is “a temporal trajectory that emplots a transition narrative of the human being’s socio-political incorporation into the regime of rights and citizenship” (Slaughter 90). On the other hand, another critic sees The White Tiger’s connecting of backwardness to tradition as an ironic move, deliberately playing into stereotypes – “Adiga seems to be quietly mocking the longing for the ideal of authenticity … [and] the appeal of a Dark India in the literary marketplace” (Mendes 287, 289). If Adiga’s own framing of his work attempts to negotiate the contradictions – and anxieties – of an emergent new middle class in a globalizing Indian economy, the critical commentary on the novel does little more. It remains restricted to positing either authenticity or postmodern playfulness as the only two trajectories represented in the novel. Either way, the turmoil in New India is seen to be resolved either by accelerated incorporation into (Hansen, Goh), or a playful subversion of (Khor, Mendes), the socio-economic processes of neoliberal capitalism. Either way, the “New India” novel seeks to displace backwardness and inequality in India – the direct effects of capitalism’s uneven development – by displacing it to the past and causally linking it to culture -- “tradition”. In both acknowledging and disavowing the difference of the Indian “nation” from the advanced capitalist countries of the “West,” the New India novel seeks to assimilate into the “exotic” position made available for it by the global literary marketplace.

V – Internationalist Aesthetics and Local Form – the Case of Naxalism

68 What disappears from these conversations, of course, is Naxalism. Interestingly, what is invisible to the reader of Anglophone fiction is transparently apparent to the characters in the novel, as it is to Balram Halwai himself. He grows up in rural Bihar, a province in eastern India, in the midst of violent clashes between the Naxalites and armed militias of rural landlords. Halwai escapes to New Delhi as the personal chauffeur of Ashok, his local landlord’s son, and in India’s capital city, he murders Ashok, takes off with his money, and subsequently establishes himself as an entrepreneur in Bangalore. In his fictive letters to the Chinese Premier, where we learn this tale, Halwai refers to his personal journey from the countryside to the city as moving from “Darkness” to “Light”. The heart of Darkness is his birthplace, the village of Laxmangarh, and Halwai’s act of murder is in full cognizance of the fact that his remaining family members in the village will be killed in retribution by the landlord’s gangs. The novel’s plot resonates with the real-life Laxmanpur-Bathe massacre of lower-caste villagers, suspected of being Naxalites, by the upper-caste landlords’ militia, Ranvir Sena in Bihar in1997. “What are you? A Naxal?” Halwai is asked by the landlord at one point (66). When Halwai mentions the term “Naxals” to the Chinese Premier, he adds --“Naxals – perhaps you have heard of them, Mr. Jiabao, since they are Communists, just like you, and go around shooting rich people on principle” (21). Again, as Halwai seeks employment from his absentee landlord, the landlord’s cronies assure the man that Halwai’s family has “no history of supporting Naxals and other terrorists” (56). For the employers hiring him, that is “a very important piece of information”. The infamous real-life events of Laxmanpur-Bathe, and the massacre of lower-caste Dalits purported to be Naxalites, appear in the novel, disguised yet visible – “I was born there [in Laxmangarh], but Father sent me away as a boy. There was some trouble with the Communist guerrillas then” (69); then again, “the fighting between the Naxal

69 terrorists and the landlords was getting bloodier” (73). Despite his scrupulous attempt to steer clear of the Naxalite terrorists, Halwai’s murder of his landlord’s son transforms him, by his own reckoning, into “a virtual mass murderer” (337) and thus similar to the “violent” Naxalites. Such elements of the narrative directly introduce the discourse of the Naxalite movement into the text itself. Halwai’s transformation into an entrepreneur in his later life effaces this earlier identity, which linked Halwai to the Naxalites. Such a transformation is the direct result of his life-story being recoded across various media; the novel self-reflexively underlines how multiple mediations change Halwai’s identity from an alleged Naxalite to a depoliticized individual. As Halwai flees from his act of murder, “[A] poster with my face on it found its way to every postoffice, railway station, and police station in the country” (9). The local specificity of his life and its intimate connection with Naxalite politics, is multiply mediated: Halwai becomes “a photograph: blurred, blackened, and smudged by the antique printing press of some police office, and barely recognizable even when it was on the wall of the train station, but now, transferred onto the computer screen, reduced to pixels, just an abstract idea of a man’s face” (34-35). Such mediations transform the context of Laxmangarh, in critical commentary, to representations of tradition, and the appeal of a “Dark India” in the literary marketplace. At the same time, The White Tiger relies on other forms of mediation, namely formal and generic affiliations that parody the internationalist solidarities of Naxalism. Though Halwai ostensibly “escapes” the Naxalite struggle as he moves from the village to the city, and from “Darkness” to “Light,” the political narrative of Naxalism continues to haunt the margins of the novel. Halwai’s account of the forces of globalization unleashed in “New India” reveals an uncanny similarity with the Naxalite critique of “semi-colonial, semi-feudal” modernity.

70 “Globalization” and “modernity,” with their promise of a supposed freedom, arrive in New India in bursts and spurts, in selected circles and to the benefit of the selected few. They map onto, overlap with and perpetuate non-capitalist social, cultural and economic hierarchies: the novel offers a remarkably precise and clear eyed view of the co-existence of “various stages of capitalist penetration” (Jameson) that exist side by side, both in the village of Laxmangarh, and reconfigured, in the urban metropolises of New India. The relationship between the country and the city, particularly, offers an illustrative example of this situation. Despite the narrator’s repeated proclamations of the separation between a rural countryside caught in the abyss of cultural tradition and globalized urban centers of opportunity, the novel undermines such a clean break, and instead highlights the continuities between the two spaces. The structures of kinship, caste and class flow from the country to the city: Halwai’s job as a chauffeur, first in the town of Dhanbad, and subsequently the capital city of New Delhi, is but a continuation of his subordinated position to his village landlords’ family. The family of the ‘Stork’ employs him on the basis of their village relationship, and this employment is both a wage relation and a “feudal” social contract. Similarly, the Stork’s family is itself representative of this double bind: comprising rural and upper-caste landed gentry, and their “Western”-educated, liberal progeny. The combined impact of class and caste, and the unevenness of capitalist globalization, is illustrated in the rural and urban “spaces” that Halwai inhabits: the living quarters of the chauffeurs in the city parallel and replicate the caste-and-class segregated village, as do the shining shopping malls and other glitzy parts of town where Halwai, as driver, is the constitutive outsider. Through murdering his employer, Halwai makes a leap from the social class position of his birth to join the ranks of the privileged few. The murder underscores the constitutive violence

71 of the structure that he inhabits, just as its supposed “illegitimacy” calls into question the ethical framework of justice that such a structure has put into place. Halwai’s class transition is paralleled by a framing device in the narrative: his struggles, as a rural and urban subaltern, are narrated in retrospect, by the “Halwai” who is a moneyed software entrepreneur. Such a framing device allows the narrator, Halwai the entrepreneur, to proclaim his individual success and class mobility, even as the narrative itself, of Halwai the lower-caste rural persona and migrant urban chauffeur, makes it clear that such individual successes are impossible within the structures put in place in contemporary Indian society. The tensions of such a narrative structure mark the repressed of Naxalite critique. The “local” struggles of the lower-caste rural subaltern and migrant urban chauffeur, in the country as well as the city, are recoded as the entrepreneur narrates his story of success and integration. These recodings are not complete, rather in their narrative moments of translation, they reveal the repressed return of Naxalite political discourse. When the narrator asks his fictional reader, the “Chinese Premier,” if he has “heard about” the Naxalites, it is because his own narrative and narratorial perspective is marked by the Naxalites. The narrator’s cynical and disillusioned portrayals of neoliberal India, and the struggles of his own former self, deploy the Naxalite critique of colonial modernity, even as his own individual success within capitalism necessitates a repression of such staunchly anti-capitalist and revolutionary political critique. Re-animating these linkages and how they are deployed in the novel, help us to see the centrality of Naxalism as a literary, spatial and political figure in the novel. Specifically, The White Tiger draws on and parodies the genres of protest novel, epistolary fiction and the local form of tamasha, to convey the “local” experiences of urban-rural divide, internationalist solidarity and caste hierarchy, respectively.

72 The first example is The White Tiger’s resonance with the protest novel, especially with Richard Wright’s 1940 novel, Native Son. Like Native Son’s Bigger Thomas who grows up in a racially segregated Chicago, Halwai’s world is fractured by radical dichotomies – “India is two countries in one: an India of Light, and an India of Darkness” (12). Thomas is employed as a chauffeur by the Daltons, who are white, and he develops a peculiar relationship of admiration and distrust towards the Daltons’ daughter Mary, and her Communist boyfriend Jan. This is paralleled in Halwai’s role as a driver to his landlord’s son, Ashok and his wife, Pinky Madam. Both Ashok and Pinky, recently returned from the US, are kind to Halwai, and unable to fathom his complete lack of status in a quasi-feudal setting. Yet, while Bigger Thomas kills Mary by accident, and is ultimately convicted for his “murder” by a racialized legal system, Halwai gets rid of Ashok by conscious design, takes off with his money, and becomes an entrepreneur in New India.18 The White Tiger not only draws on and deploys the genre of the protest novel, but also that of epistolary fiction. Halwai’s act of writing to the Chinese Premier – which parodies Naxalism’s historic affiliation to Maoist China – draws from a similar series of fictional letters, published in the Urdu language as Chacha Sam Ke Naam (Letters to Uncle Sam), by the IndoPakistani Marxist writer, Saadat Hassan Manto. Written shortly after independence from British rule in 1947, Manto’s letters castigate Uncle Sam (the United States) in a damning yet satirical critique of neocolonialism which begins with – “Dear Uncle, greetings … My country is not your country which I regret” (Manto 27). Doubly parodying Manto’s sarcastic appeal of help to the 18

Indeed, Adiga has himself cited the work of Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin as influences, though not Richard Wright (Wagner 2008). Yet, as Sara Schotland (2011) as noted, “a comparison [between The White Tiger and Native Son] proves very useful” (1); Scholtand’s reading of this “useful”-ness is decidedly non-historical, where “both novels examine the extent to which poverty, frustration, hopelessness and humiliation figure into the complex of causes that result in violent crime” (1). What necessitates Adiga’s engagement with caste and its parodic appropriation of Wright’s Bigger Thomas is the pervasiveness of unevenness as a constitutive feature of capitalist modernity, and the persistence rather than disappearance of hierarchies of caste and race.

73 United States is Halwai’s admiration for China – “You Chinese are great lovers of freedom and liberty,” he states (7). His act of confessing murder to the Chinese Premier is a parody of Maoist principles of “self-criticism”. Adiga’s novel parodically deploys the anti-racist and anti-colonial internationalist positions of both Richard Wright and Saadat Manto, but does so in order to imagine a new, Asian capitalism.19 Similarly, Halwai’s act of murder, a manifestation of subaltern class hatred, is recoded parodically as an act of entrepreneurial opportunism. In a striking parody of “third world” solidarity, Halwai facetiously remarks to Jiabao that “in twenty years’ time, it will be just us yellow men and brown men at the top of the pyramid, and we’ll rule the whole world. And God save everyone else” (262). Parody serves as a locus for several key plot points in the narrative. The novel references Maoist China again in the title of the novel. It is a direct adaptation of Robert Nathan’s little-known novel The White Tiger of 1987, a spy-thriller which explores the transformation of the Chinese revolution from its Communist beginnings to the consolidation of a capitalist-bureaucratic order. As described by Nathan, the “white tiger,” a folk motif popularized in the work of the 9th century Chinese poet Li He, makes its appearance during moments of social upheaval. This motif is repeated almost verbatim in Adiga’s novel, “what is the rarest of animals – the creature that comes along only once in a generation … So that’s how I became the White Tiger” (30). Yet, “tiger” in Halwai’s version is also a reference to the rapidly

19

In The Pity of Partition, the recent biography of Manto written by his grand niece and noted South Asian historian Ayesha Jalal (2013), Manto’s writing is said to be inspired by his “reading and translating [of] French and Russian writers like Maupassant, Zola, Hugo, Chekhov, Tolstoy and many others” (26). Peculiarly, Marx is absent from this list: Jalal is at pains to disavow any relation of Manto to Marx or Marxism, in a startling assertion she notes that “Marx … he had read none” (27-28). It is more a statement of Jalal’s own ideological preferences that she wants the readers to believe that Manto who, by her own admission, was so familiar with contemporary European writers had not “read” Marx, an assertion rendered more unbelievable given Manto’s deep, and often conflicted, relationship with the Indian/Pakistani Communist movement and Party-associated intellectuals of his time. In line with my present discussion of the erasure of third world internationalism as a constitutive feature of postcolonial work, Jalal’s biography paints a picture of Manto as an apolitical humanist writing to address “suffering,” in the abstract.

74 expanding “tiger” economies of Asia – South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan – in which Halwai proves to be a successful entrant.20 Fourth and final example, the novel draws on the indigenous form of tamasha to frame its articulation of Halwai’s class aspirations. Tamasha refers specifically to a theatrical tradition in western India, historically deployed by lower-caste or Dalit [former untouchable] communities to mount a critique of upper-caste elites. “[Dalit] Mahars seem to have been the chief musicians and actors in tamasha,” Paswan and Jaideva remark in their monumental Encyclopedia of Dalits in India (62), noting the deployment of tamasha in Mahar popular culture in western India. They note the parallels with another lower-caste Dalit group, the Bhangi caste of northern India, and their cultural claims of self-improvement to rise above being considered outcastes and criminals in mainstream representation. While the theatrical form of tamasha is invested in articulating a critique of the indigenous caste-system from the point of view of the lower-castes, the narrator of Adiga’s Anglophone novel brackets the possibility of such critique. However, while invisible to most readers of the novel, the trace of tamasha can still be mapped in the narrative. In The White Tiger, the formal characteristics of the tamasha are put to use, namely the aspects of crude humor, folk wisdom and satire of upper-caste mores. Halwai also borrows the theme of lack of formal education, a common feature of the tamasha, “I never finished school, to put it bluntly. Who cares! … we were never allowed to complete our schooling” (4, 8).21 He is

20

Commenting on the formal aspect of the novel, historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam writes in a review in the London Review of Books – “a framing device that should be mentioned [in The White Tiger]: each chapter consists of a message sent by Balram to Wen Jiabao, the prime minister of the People’s Republic of China, who is about to visit Bangalore. This adds nothing to the novel beyond permitting Balram to present himself as a Third World rather than a merely Indian racist. Consciously or not, it also imitates far funnier and more successful examples, such as John Barth’s ‘Petition’ from Lost in the Funhouse, addressed to the King of Siam” (2008, n.p). Consciously or not, the critic seems to be unaware of the parodies, formal and thematic, that The White Tiger performs with respect to third world internationalism. 21 Again, the material contexts of language use are significant in this context. The relationship between caste status and class position is mediated through the English language and the role of education going back to the British colonial period. As Leela Fernandes notes, “[The institution of] English education did not simply represent a means

75 racially distinct with a “blackish face” (10), living in the village periphery alongside “families of hogs” (16), and considered by the landlords as a “fallen human” (85), all markers of caste untouchability. He decides early on, “In this crowd of thugs and idiots … I was destined not to stay a slave” (30, 35). At one point in the narrative, his employer specifically asks him, “Are you from a top caste or bottom caste, boy?” (54). Halwai evades that question – he answers “Bottom, Sir”, but as noted earlier, is at pains to disavow any personal connection to Dalit-caste Naxalite activity, just as the novel elides the question of caste-based literary representation. The White Tiger, with its formal affinities to the African-American protest novel, Indian Marxist epistolary fiction, and tamasha theater, nevertheless deploys these forms only as parody. In place of the aesthetic articulation of transnational collective issues that such forms undertake - neo-colonialism, caste and race-based inequality, the rural-urban divide -- linked in turn to the internationalist political affiliations of the Naxalite movement -- Adiga’s novel substitutes the apolitical neoliberal ethos of a protagonist focused on individual acquisition and class mobility. Halwai’s journey from the country to the city, and his act of killing his employer, both parallel the Maoist dictum of encircling the city and the class enemy with the revolutionary peasantry from the countryside. Yet such formal parallels are in opposition to the ethical imperatives of the novel, which advocates social Darwinism as the mode of individual liberation.

Conclusion

for the shift of cultural status, it also provided a central avenue for various segments of upper caste, middle class individuals to consolidate their socio-economic position within the political economy of colonial rule […] the English-educated classes that emerged in the nineteenth century drew both on the Brahmin and poor literary castes … this upper caste character remained one of the defining characteristics of the colonial middle class” (Fernandes 7, 9). The pattern of upper-caste dominance was consolidated in the post-colonial era, with state privileging of highereducation in neglect of primary literary (and healthcare), as “education became a central arena in which state-middle class relationships of patronage and dependence were consolidated in this period” (21).

76 The White Tiger alerts us to the social contestations in contemporary India. Such a representative function is overlaid with the novel’s own location as an Anglophone Indian novel catering to a global literary marketplace as well as an upwardly mobile Indian middle class. If the life story of Halwai, the lower-caste rural subaltern and urban migrant, alerts us to the first – the case of Naxalite conflict -- the narratorial figure of Halwai, the articulate and worldly-wise entrepreneur, gestures toward the latter. The transformation of Halwai from the former to the latter is paralleled by the narrative’s recoding of his context, where the contestations in New India are incorporated into a more “palatable” framework of the “third world nation”. As I have argued, this is how The White Tiger functions as the privileged aesthetic site of the nation in the global literary marketplace: the literary form of the Anglophone novel expresses the aspirations of the postcolonial Indian middle class even as it refashions third worldist rhetoric to serve that political desire. To recall Moretti (2000, 2003), The White Tiger also articulates, by virtue of its peripheral location, the uneven interaction of foreign and local forms. Thus The White Tiger incorporates within its narrative structure the African-American protest novel (Wright), inter-textual references to Maoist China (Nathan), as well as indigenous forms of satire and critique (Manto, tamasha). These formal elements help to articulate the difference of “peripheral modernity” and its condition of underdevelopment. These formal elements, or more properly, their parodic versions, enable the neoliberal appropriation of the periphery in the form of nation, and the nationalist recoding of uneven development as performed by the narrator. By reading the deployment of these formal elements, I trace the alternate genealogies they represent, alternative to the border-crossing fantasies of contemporary globalization and their neophytes. These genealogies testify to the underlying trace of communist internationalism. Paying attention to the interaction between the foreign and the local forms illuminates the

77 connections of each to the older internationalist solidarities of Naxalism. This formal interaction is complemented by the thematic presence of Naxalism in Halwai’s life story, which although repressed by the narrator, nevertheless leaves traces which, I have argued, allow for an alternative understanding of his socio-political struggles. Thus Halwai’s move from the Darkness of the village to the Light of the city can be read as parodically rehearsing the Maoist encirclement of the city by the countryside. Village politics in Laxmangarh, itself a thinly veiled allegory for the real-life Laxmanpur-Bathe massacre of Naxalites, is replicated in the city, especially in the continuities of caste, and Halwai’s own status as subaltern and migrant. Similarly, both Halwai’s murderous violence against his social superior and his act of “confession” to the Chinese leader, parody the political actions and histories, of Maoist Naxalism in India. Indeed, the novel is remarkable in its persistent thematic and formal figuration of Naxalism and its internationalist affiliations. It is not possible to fully assimilate these figurations and affiliations: they remain as traces in the novel, or as objects to be parodied, and ultimately disavowed. Such narrative devices illustrate, albeit unintentionally, two critical concepts: one, they locate contemporary Maoist Naxalism in New India in terms of a much longer history of communist internationalism and thus destabilize the dominant nation-centric understanding of the movement. Secondly, in gesturing to Naxalism’s transnational and internationalist solidarities they gesture to Naxalism’s resonances with other anti-capitalist revolutionary ideas elsewhere in the world. I conclude that The White Tiger upsets in that sense, the “humanitarian” model (Saroj Giri 2009) that seeks to restrict Naxalism to a “merely” local or intra-national “problem”. Instead, the novel (unwittingly) illuminates the inter-nationalist dimensions of Naxalism, and in doing so, destabilizes the marketplace-mediated compulsion of the Anglophone

78 novel to serve as “national allegory” (Jameson 1986; Ahmad 1987). In the chapters that follow, I take up this starting point to explore in greater detail the internationalist lineages of Naxalism in the long 20th century, and how the movement speaks to planetary, rather than simply national (“Indian”), concerns about peripheral modernity and the combined and uneven forms of capitalist development.

79

CHAPTER TWO M.N. Roy’s Memoirs and Early 20th Century Anticolonial Imaginaries of Internationalism Introduction This chapter focuses on Manabendranath (M.N.) Roy’s autobiographical Memoirs to trace the early foundations of Naxalite internationalism in the anticolonial circuits of the 1920s. Roy came to engage with internationalism through the platform of the Communist International (Comintern), set up in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. He contributed to the debates on the “National and Colonial Question” at the Comintern, famously disagreeing with Vladimir Lenin about Communist alliance with elite-led nationalism in the colonies, and as such was a stalwart figure in the formulation of Soviet internationalism. Through his critique of nationalism, such as the Gandhian strand in India, and advocacy of internationalism, Roy posited a clear distinction between elite nationalism and revolutionary “national liberation”. Such interactions at the Bolshevik Comintern platform on the issue of anticolonialism and national liberation were crucial in countering Euro-American imperial “murderous nationalisms,” and Roy’s formulations complicate the influential paradigm of critical thought that understands “creative” postcolonial nationalism as “difference” from the “West”.1 My reading of Memoirs

1

The phrase “murderous nationalism” is from Eric Hobsbawm’s (1990) magisterial study of modern, 19th and 20th

century, Europe. The First World War (WWI), he notes “creat[ed] coherent territorial states each inhabited by a separate ethnically and linguistically homogenous population… with its logical implication of… the mass expulsion or extermination of minorities”. Such, he concludes, “was and is the murderous reductio ad absurdum of nationalism” (133). Hobsbawm generalizes nationalism to be fully aligned with imperialism, leading him to conclude that “in spite of its evident prominence, nationalism [today] is historically less important. It is no longer, as it were, a global political programme, as it may be said to have been in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries”(181). Such a statement, and Hobsbawm’s admission, slightly comical, that “no serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed nationalist” (12), has no place for the problematic of post-colonial nationalism. It thereby justifies Partha Chatterjee’s (1993) well-known rebuttal: “[i]f nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain “modular forms” already made available to them by

80 complements extant social-science scholarship on Roy by illuminating how literary form serves to negotiate the anticolonial politics of internationalism, drawing on Memoir’s engagement with Black radicalism in the United States, anticolonial socialism in Mexico, and “Afro-Asian” solidarity at the Bolshevik Comintern. Such anticolonial engagements provide the basis of Naxalite internationalism in the postcolonial period, I argue, and illuminate the contours of subsequent Maoist Naxalite understandings of peripheral modernity and combined and uneven development. My discussion of the intersection of anticolonialism and Communism in the decade of the 1920s and its subsequent influences in the 1960s seeks to complicate extant scholarly narratives of national liberation in the “third world”. It has become customary to locate the problematic of national liberation in the failures of postcolonial nationalism in the “third world” of Asian, African and Latin American nation-states in the 1960s and 70s. Such accounts decry the failures of the post-colonial nation-state by identifying the “third world” with “nationalism” and discounting the aspect of Communist internationalism, limiting the latter to the Soviet-led “second world,” as I discussed in the previous chapter (Ahmad 1987, 1992). As such, dominant paradigms of postcolonial studies have little to no conceptual room for accommodating Communist discourse in the “third world”. Postcolonial scholarship’s engagement with the Soviet Union, particularly in the context of India that I take up in this chapter is rare and, even Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine? History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anticolonial resistance and postcolonial misery” (5). Chatterjee goes on to claim, quite influentially, that “the most powerful as well as the most creative results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa are posited not on an identity but rather on a difference with the modular forms of the national society propagated by the modern West” (5, original emphasis). In my discussion, I argue that both of these positions are false. In the wake of WWI, the Leninist distinction between oppressed and oppressive nationalism, taken up and expanded by the anticolonial figures, McKay and Roy, I discuss in this chapter, elaborates a dialectical understanding of national liberation vis-àvis anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle. It does not condemn all nationalism, nor does it valorize postcolonial nationalism understood as cultural difference “in Asia and Africa”.

81 then, ideologically misplaced. Sanjay Seth (1995) argues for instance that the influence of the Comintern on Marxist anticolonial politics in India produced a convergence between Indian nationalism and the Indian Left. If one accepts such a view, then it follows that the Naxalite critique of Indian nationalism has to be located outside the conceptual space of Marxism. This is a paradoxical result given Naxalism’s clear lineages to Communism especially Maoism. Drawing on the figure of Roy, I suggest by contrast that the Naxalite critiques originated in and drew sustenance from a much more complicated relationship between Marxist and anticolonial politics, and distinguished between anticolonial nationalism, narrowly conceived, and internationalist national liberation. Such a reading emphasizes one aspect of M.N. Roy’s anticolonial politics that has hitherto received no consideration from scholars, namely his engagement with Black radicalism in the US, and its influence on his theorization of race and caste in the Indian context. For this purpose, I constellate Roy with Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay, his fellow traveler at the Comintern. While Claude McKay, poet, novelist, and activist, is renowned as one of the most important figures in the development of American literary modernism, particularly Black American modernism, M.N. Roy is practically unknown in literary scholarship. My purpose, then, in joining Roy to McKay is two-fold: first, to elaborate on Roy’s status as one of the most important political figures of his time by drawing attention to his – largely ignored -contribution to “Afro-Asian” solidarity; second, to extend the historical scope of the postcolonial (and Naxalite) debates on nationalism and its failures to an earlier period of anticolonial politics in the 1920s. Constellating McKay to Roy elaborates a non-nationalist imagination of racial solidarity, laying the groundwork for Naxalite internationalism in the decades that follow.

82 Such engagements between anticolonialism and internationalism restore “the marginalized place of the Soviet Union” to its rightful but historically forgotten position in anticolonial thought (Baldwin 19). As Kate Baldwin (2002) reminds us in her important work on the interaction between radical Black thought and Soviet Communism, the “marginalized place” of the Soviet Union, especially the Comintern, in dominant versions of postcolonial and critical race studies is a function of a political attitude, the “prolongation of a ‘Red Scare’ mentality,” as well as the difficulty posed by “translation” of archive, language and representation. The latter is manifested as “differential access … in the retrieval of [Soviet] sources in which those differences are themselves housed” (Baldwin 19). The “very unevenness” of the Soviet archive, to paraphrase Baldwin, necessitates that we look to non-archival literary sources such as the memoir to fill the gaps of “historical” record. In seeking to constellate literature with history, memoir with archival record in my discussion of Roy, I do not suggest either a clean break between individual “fiction” and historical “fact,” or the greater trustworthiness of either in “representing” internationalism. On the contrary, I wish to explore how a consideration of a supposedly minor literary form, the memoir, nuances some of the dominant assumptions about anticolonial nationalism and its relation to Communist internationalism. In this chapter, I will discuss how the neglected literary form of the “memoir” attempts to position itself in relation to the literary-political “work” of articulating anticolonial internationalism. Such positioning involves a number of factors. How for instance, does the memoir address “the discontinuities and disjunctures” of “translation” (Edwards 2003a) that are inherent in an internationalist project of negotiating peripheral “difference”? What formal attributes are deployed to achieve this purpose, and how does the narrative form of the memoir articulate, silence or otherwise express the tensions between individual subjectivity and

83 collective institutionalization? On the other hand, the historical and political work of Communist internationalism that Roy’s memoir, in particular, undertakes, serves to unsettle dominant notions of “Literature”. I draw here on John Beverley’s remarkable account of testimony or testimonio (Beverley 1993; 2004), to argue that the memoir, as a version of testimonio, serves to undermine some fundamental assumptions of literary narrative. For literary scholars, the memoir “has been treated as a minor form of autobiography” (Rak 305). The form of autobiography presupposes an individual subject capable of articulating their unique interiority. As Georges Gusdorf remarks, “the appearance of autobiography implies a new spiritual revolution: the artist and the model coincide, the historian tackles himself as object” (Gusdorf 31). Georg Misch’s canonical 1901 study of autobiography in classical antiquity thus compares this form, autobiography, favorably to the “lesser” memoir, on account of the different levels of agency of their respective subjects. Misch’s characterization of individual subjectivity is based on a binary; as he states, “Man’s relation to the world may be conceived actively or passively. From this consideration comes the distinction between autobiographies and ‘memoirs’. In memoirs that relation is passive in so far as the writers of memoirs … introduce themselves in the main as merely observers of the events and activities of which they write, and if they join the active participants it is only in minor parts (Misch 15). Such devaluation of the memoir, for long the staple of literary theory, has been modified in recent times by the theoretical influences of postmodernism and its valorization of the fragmented human subject. As Julie Rak has recently noted, “the changing relationship between ideas of selfhood and the role of public and private spheres in late capitalism” has focused new attention to the memoir as a form of life-writing, a Derridean “dangerous supplement” to autobiography that

84 incorporates the perspectives of women, people of color, et al (324). My own discussion of the literary form of the memoir seeks to locate it in terms of the Latin American testimonio. Beverley (1993) defines the testimonio as “a novel or novella-length narrative in book or pamphlet (that is printed as opposed to acoustic form), told in the first person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events he or she recounts” (12-13). Incorporating a number of other genres, testimonio is nevertheless a distinct genre in itself. It “may include but is not subsumed under, any of the following textual categories, some of which are conventionally considered literature, others not: autobiography, autobiographical novel, oral history, memoir, confession, diary, interview, eye-witness report, life-history, novela-testimonio, nonfiction novel or ‘factographic literature’” (13). Beverley claims that “testimonio coalesces as a new narrative genre in the 1960s and further develops in close relation to the movements for national liberation and the generalized cultural radicalism of the decade” (13). As such, it directly ties the idea of literary representation to political participation: “the sort of direct participant account, usually presented without any literary or academic aspirations whatever (although often with political ones), represented by Che Guevara’s Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War (1959) … inspired a series of direct-participant testimonios by combatants” (14). This framework with its interaction between the literary and the political resonates with my discussion of the role of the memoir in negotiating the internationalist politics of M.N. Roy – including his connections to Latin America -- in an earlier decade of radicalism in the 1920s. Beverley further notes, “Testimonio is not so much concerned with the life of a ‘problematic hero’ – the term Lukàcs used to describe the nature of the hero of the bourgeois novel – as with a problematic collective social situation that the narrator lives with or alongside others” (15). While it is not my intention to conflate testimonio and memoir and deny the socio-

85 cultural specificities of their narrative forms and historical moments of emergence, I follow – and nuance -- in my discussion of Roy’s Memoirs, Beverley’s thesis that “the narrator in testimonio … speaks for, or in the name of, a community or group, approximating in this way the symbolic function of the epic hero, without at the same time assuming his hierarchical and patriarchal status” (16). In distinction to the testimonio, I will demonstrate that the memoir in M.N. Roy provides the imperative to translate across diversely located anticolonial “communities or groups” and not only speak for a single entity. The narrativization of Roy’s personal travels across East Asia, the US, Mexico, Germany and the Soviet Union in the Memoirs testify less to the tribulations of the bourgeois “hero,” or single-minded nationalist, and more to the formation of a collective anticolonial internationalism. In conclusion, the chapter will consider Roy’s other major work, his materialist analysis of contemporary India, India in Transition (1922) to demonstrate how the imperative of internationalist translation leads to the expansion of anticolonial vocabulary in Roy. As I will argue, India in Transition traces the negotiations between anticolonialism and Marxism, involving a consideration of nationalism, colonial-capitalist uneven development and the proletariat in the context of India of the 1920s. I argue that Roy’s materialist work anticipates the postcolonial concerns of “race” and “nation” but does so in dialectical relation to the “proletariat,” not outside or against it in “difference”. As such, India in Transition provides an important intervention: Roy illuminates a dialectical understanding of national liberation that resists both the supposedly Eurocentric tendencies of Marxist “universalism” as well as the postmodern and postcolonial fetishization of “difference”.

II – “Orthodox” Marxism, Soviet Internationalism and Anticolonial Struggles

86 It has become commonsensical in contemporary academic discourse in the US – bolstered by postcolonial studies, critical race theory etc. -- to speak of Marxism as a “Eurocentric” body of thought. Such a view persists despite the substantial body of scholarship that has pointed to Marx’s writings on non-metropolitan contexts and illustrated the key importance of anticolonial struggles particularly in his later writings. The issue of anticolonial struggle and national liberation both in Europe and in the colonies occupy Marx, and to a lesser extent Engels, much more than is commonly acknowledged. Contrary to the straw-man figure of an “orthodox” Marxism committed to Eurocentric universalism and teleology of history, the writings of Marx, Engels and Vladimir Lenin reveal a much more complex and multifaceted awareness of the dialectical linkage between the metropole and the colony, and between the industrial proletariat and anticolonial national liberation (See Anderson 2010 for an updated account of this scholarship; Shanin 1983 provides a landmark account of the “late Marx” and his understanding of the Russian peasantry). The theme of exploitation of “one nation by another” is already to be found in The Communist Manifesto of 1848, where Marx and Engels famously note that “the working men have no country … In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end” (Selected Works 1, 51). The emphasis on colonial exploitation complements the analysis of working class struggle in the centers of capitalist production: the two are dialectically linked. A consideration of the catechism “Principles of Communism” written by Friedrich Engels – on which the Manifesto draws -- is even more explicit on this point – “Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone? No… it is a worldwide revolution

87 and will therefore be worldwide in scope” (Selected Works 1, 84). Side by side with the Communist Manifesto of 1848, in an often-ignored appendage titled The Demands of the German Communist Party, Marx and Engels write of radical land reform and the ending of feudal relations in relation to the insurgent peasantry. A growing concern with the questions of national self-determination and the role of the peasantry in the colonial outposts of imperialism would mark the development of Marx and Engels’ thought regarding “global” revolution; the British putdown of the Sepoy Mutiny in India, the French incursions into Algeria, as well as the American Civil War and the question of slavery would result in voluminous writings in the decades of the 1850s and 1860s. Simultaneously, the question of national liberation for Poland and Ireland in the 1860s would come to modify the question of metropolitan working class emancipation in the “West”. In 1863, Marx claims the Polish peasant uprising and the slave movement in America as inaugurating the era of “world revolution,” noting that the “lava will flow from East to West”. By 1871, after the suppression of the Paris Commune in particular his focus had shifted from the English and French working classes to the peasant uprisings in Russia, and the possibility of the peasant communes forming a socialist state “bypassing” the capitalist stage of development. In a letter to the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich in 1881, Marx comments, “to save the Russian commune, a Russian Revolution is needed,” just as in an earlier exchange with Russian socialdemocrats, the warning for not doing so had been explicit – “[you] will miss the finest chance that history has ever offered to a nation, only to undergo the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist system” (Collected Works 24, 371, 200). Much of this is very far from the rigidly deterministic “Marx,” and “Marxism” of current theory. The “finest chance … [of] a nation” rested on the development of economic conditions:

88 for Marx and more so for Engels, that stage had been decisively reached in the nineteenth century, when the universalist logic of capitalist expansion had necessarily linked the globe into one intertwined and interdependent network of exchange. “Capital comes [into the world] dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Capital Volume 1, 324) but dialectically creates the ‘world-historical’ conditions for its own overthrow. At the same time, the unevenness of this universal expansion meant that the exploitation of the “periphery” is greater in degree, in order to keep the organic composition of capital lower at the site(s) of metropolitan production. The “super”-exploitation of the periphery allows for concessions to working class labor at the metropolitan centers. This is the real economic basis for the nationalist and racist chauvinism of the metropolitan working class, a point often missed in postcolonial denunciations of the “West” (for an instance of the latter, see Chakrabarty 2000). Thus Engels in a 1858 letter to Marx observes that “[t]he English proletariat is becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat as well as a bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is, of course, to a certain extent justifiable” (Collected Works 40, 344). The complicity of a “bourgeois proletariat” with capitalist accumulation can be overcome only by linking it – through vanguard intervention -- to anticolonial struggles for national liberation. Marx writes in 1869, in a letter to Engels, “[t]he lever must be applied in Ireland – quite apart from international justice, it is a precondition to the emancipation of the English working class to transform the present forced union into equal and free confederation, if possible, into complete separation if need be… the English working class will never be able to do anything decisive here in England before they separate their attitude towards Ireland from that of the ruling classes” (Collected Works 43, 390, emphases added).

89 Marx’s excoriating comment, at the last Congress of the First International at the Hague in 1872, is instructive in this regard – “the so-called leaders of the English workers… these men are more or less bribed by the bourgeoisie and the government” (Documents of the First International, 124). By the 1870s, we see the crystallization of a theoretical position in Marx where anticolonial struggle is a constitutive “precondition” of global anticapitalist revolution. Capital’s universal expansion, or “globalization” in contemporary parlance, is thus not antagonistic to the development of “colonial chauvinism” at the metropole; in other words, transnational capital and nationalist chauvinism can co-exist and is in fact interdependent on each other. This is one of the key insights of Leninism, and speaks to Vladimir Lenin’s central if little-recognized importance as a theorist and practitioner of anticolonial and anticapitalist politics. Lenin develops Engels’ theorization of a “bourgeois proletariat,” and this forms the locus of his disagreement with the then-dominant positions entrenched in the Second International. At the Seventh Congress of the Second International in 1907, Lenin noted the creation of “a material and economic basis for infecting the proletariat with colonial chauvinism” (The National Liberation Movement, 11). In the pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin decried the tendency of working class organizations to ally with their nations in times of imperialist war; rather in his formulation, “proletarian internationalism” ran counter to “colonial chauvinistic” nationalism. The vanguardist intervention of Leninism lies in dialectically locating class-oppression in terms of the global rather than only metropolitan division of labor. Thus Lenin argues that the “unambiguous appeal to the workers for international unity in their class struggle” is to be complemented by an “absolutely direct, unequivocal recognition of the full right of all nations to self determination”. This passage is worth quoting in full:

90 In this period of the awakening and intensification of national movements and the formation of independent proletarian parties, the task of these parties with regard to national policy must be two-fold: recognition of the rights of all nations to selfdetermination, since bourgeois-democratic reform is not yet completed and since working class democracy consistently, seriously, sincerely… fights for equal rights for nations; then, a close unbreakable alliance in the class struggle of the proletarians of all nations in a given state, throughout all the changes in its history, irrespective of any reshaping of the frontiers of the individual states by the bourgeoisie (The Right of Nations, 43). Rather than speaking of a homogeneous “classical” Marxism indifferent to all things nonEuropean, as has become the norm in contemporary academic work, it is important to identify here the heterogeneous positions within Marxist ranks – among Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Otto Bauer, Anton Pannkoek, Joseph Strasser, Karl Renner et al -- on the question of self-determination and national liberation (Löwy 1976). Lenin’s stand opposed the likes of Rosa Luxemburg, who passionately denounced the “petty-bourgeois” aspirations of Polish nationalism, as well as the increasingly conservative stance of the Second International, with its support for imperialist nationalism. What is seldom emphasized is the importance of events in Asia, particularly the “peasant-bourgeois-democratic” revolution in China in 1911, in the shaping of Lenin’s views on the importance of national and colonial revolutions. In a resolution hailing the events of 1911, which was adopted at the Sixth All-Russian Conference of the Russian Social Democrat Labour Party in 1912, Lenin writes that “the Conference emphasizes the international significance of the revolutionary struggle of the Chinese people as one that brings liberation to Asia and undermines the domination of the

91 European bourgeoisie” (The National Liberation Movement, 87, emphasis added). Similarly, in a series of articles written for the magazine Pravda that year, Lenin sought to underscore the lessons of China, “one of the wildest, most medieval and shamefully backward of Asian countries” in terms of its similarity to contemporary Russia, “undoubtedly an Asian country”. Pointing to the “success” of the peasant-liberal bourgeoisie alliance in China, he asks “whether the peasants, without the leadership of a vanguard party, will be able to retain their democratic position against the liberals, who are only waiting for a suitable moment to shift to the right – this the near future will show” (from “Democracy and Narodism in China,” 43, and “China regenerated,” 50, both in The National Liberation Movement). Written a year before the formation of the Bolshevik group in 1912, these articles point to the interaction and crossinfluence between events in Russia and China, and testify to the importance of such exchanges in shaping Soviet internationalism. Lenin’s conception of national liberation had a major flaw in theorizing the coalition of forces: namely his faith in bourgeois-democratic nationalism in the colonies and “completion of reform,” borne out of Lenin’s own historic situatedness and his sense of the developments in East Europe, especially Poland. In a Pravda article titled “The Foreign Policy of the Russian Revolution” published in June 1917, Lenin makes an emphatic policy declaration of solidarity with anticolonial nationalism – “alliance with the revolutionaries of the advanced countries and with all the oppressed peoples against the imperialists of every species – such is the foreign policy of the [Russian] proletariat” (The National Liberation Movement 202). Following the setbacks of the Brest-Litovsk treaty in 1918 and the failure of the Spartacist uprising in Germany in 1919, the need for such alliances for the beleaguered Soviet State was underscored at the 2nd Congress of the Comintern in 1920, where Lenin presented his famous “Draft Theses on

92 National and Colonial Questions” for discussion among the assembled international delegates: “World political developments are of necessity concentrated on a single focus – the struggle of the world bourgeoisie against the Soviet Russian Republic”. Accordingly, the Draft theses declared, “a policy must be pursued that will achieve the closest alliance, with Soviet Russia, of all national and colonial liberation movements” (The National Liberation Movement 264). Side by side with the struggle of the proletariat of the industrialized countries, arose the need for support to anticolonial nationalist movements in the colonies. Lenin notes, “With regard to the more backward states and nations… all Communist parties must assist the bourgeois-democratic liberation movement in these countries,” with an addendum, “the Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form” (The National Liberation Movement 265). While resisting the Second International’s indifference to anticolonial struggles, Lenin’s own position as seen above swung to the other side of the pendulum. It emphatically recognized the importance of the anticolonial struggle for world revolution, but made little to no distinction between bourgeois nationalism in the colonies and revolutionary national liberation. This is manifested in the hesitancy regarding a “temporary alliance,” and the warning to “not merge” with “bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries”. It is in this context that M.N. Roy made some of his most important contributions at the Comintern, elaborating a materialist – that is Leninist internationalist -- critique of nationalism. Alongside Roy, colonial Marxists such Ho Chi Minh, Sen Katayama, Otto Huiswoud, to mention a prominent few, came to contribute to the complex and many-layered structure of Soviet internationalism. This group

93 included writers such as Claude McKay. The next section considers how McKay’s explicit commitment to Bolshevik internationalism is reconfigured in contemporary scholarship.

III - Claude McKay and the Contemporary Case of Black Internationalism Recent scholarship on McKay has sought to locate his literary corpus of sonnets, novels and travelogues in a much more expansive and global conceptual framework than before. McKay’s location within a specifically national “American” modernism of the Harlem Renaissance, or a limited “Black” cultural model of “Negritude,” is complicated in the voluminous scholarship of the past two decades. Thus, William Maxwell (1999) and James Smethurst (1999) place McKay in the complex web of interaction between American Communism and the Harlem Renaissance, negotiating the white racial chauvinism of the former and the middle-class cultural nationalism of the latter. Winston James (2000) and Josh Gosciak (2006) focus on McKay’s early Jamaican poetry as articulating a specifically Caribbean vocabulary of rebellion (James) that was nevertheless influenced by late Victorian strands of Fabian socialism, primitivism and bohemianism (Gosciak). But the most prominent scholarship has sought to re-inscribe the once-ignored Marxist aspect of McKay into the extant debate. Thus Kate Baldwin’s (2002) remarkable account of his Negroes in America (1923) written in the Soviet Union, draws attention to McKay’s contribution in complicating and furthering the “interracial” and “international” solidarities of early Communism, as does the historian Minkah Makalani’s (2011) account. Through a reading of McKay’s “Report on the Negro Question” at the 4th Congress of the Comintern in 1922 in Moscow in relation to the activism of Communists such as the Indian M.N. Roy, as well as the Japanese Sen Katayama and the Surinamese Otto Huiswoud, Makalani sketches the formation of “Afro-Asian” internationalist solidarity. In

94 addition to these scholars’ highlighting of McKay’s constitutive relation to the Soviet Union and Communist internationalism, Gary Holcomb (2007) explores McKay’s “trilogy,” Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929), the previously unpublished Romance in Marseilles, alongside his memoir A Long Way from Home (1937), to proclaim McKay as a pioneer in bridging “queer blackness” with “proletarian internationalism”. Michelle Stephens (2005) on the other hand, has drawn attention to the persistent masculinism in McKay’s worldview that undercuts his progressive sensibilities, while Brent Edwards (2003a) has drawn on Banjo to articulate a notion of “Black internationalism” in the “diaspora”. Suffice it to say that these diverse critical evaluations of McKay sit somewhat uneasily with each other. It is not clear how “Blackness,” “Marxism,” and “queerness” relate to each other – if at all – in constituting McKay’s “internationalism”. I will draw on Brent Hayes Edwards’s influential reading of McKay (2003a) to illustrate the conceptual entanglements between Blackness and Marxism. Edwards understands “Marxism” as extraneous to Banjo, “a story without a plot” that brings together an international group of itinerant and bohemian figures to the French port city of Marseilles. Instead, Edwards prioritizes a (poststructuralism-inflected) post-Marxist notion of “race” in his reading of the novel.

For Edwards, the eclectic cast of

characters articulate a “vagabond internationalism” that is antithetical to Marxian notions of political consciousness; “[w]hat one might term the ‘vagabond internationalism’ elaborated in Banjo, with its dizzying portrayal of the great idiosyncratic variety of ideological and group commitment among shifting black male communities in Marseilles, is shaped by an extreme skepticism about any such ‘promotion’ of consciousness (2003a: 198). The “shifting black male communities” are bound together tenuously through what Edwards – borrowing from Edouard Glissant -- calls the “detour” of “race” and “diaspora,” as “the sometimes ‘camouflaged’

95 dynamics of formations in which two or more differently positioned populations attempt to counter a transnational ‘system of domination’ … by organizing around a common ‘elsewhere,’ a shared logic of collaboration and coordination at a level beyond particular nation states” (23). These considerations ignore the Marxist question of class. In this reading, it is interesting to note the motif of “organizing … around a common elsewhere” pitted against a “transnational ‘system of domination’”. While Edwards notes this “system of domination” to be capitalism, borrowing “from Du Bois’ phrase: the incursions of ‘modern imperialism and modern industrialism’ in the broadest sense” (23), yet the “organizing” he locates is not activated through, or by, Marxist anti-capitalism. Nor is Edwards’s reading sympathetic to the question of national self-determination; instead he locates the “organization” of “diaspora” as gesturing to “a level beyond particular nation states”. For Edwards, “[i]n contrast to … McKay’s ‘Bolshevist’ period in the early 1920s, Banjo would appear to mark a shift in McKay’s political focus away from the proletariat, traditionally conceived, and toward such cosmopolitan, fleeting communities of men” (199). Pitting the “proletariat, traditionally conceived” against “cosmopolitan, fleeting communities of men,” Edwards claims that “the black vagabonds in Banjo … [are] equally resistant to the passive frame that [Marxian] political economy would have them fit” and that such figures “cannot be understood simply as an emergent proletariat” (202, 203). Such “communities” are playfully constructed, “organized” yet lacking centralized structure, and without specific political goals. This is of course a reading molded by critical ideological assumptions, and one recognizes the deployment of poststructuralist theoretical motifs in Edwards’ attempted rescue of Banjo from “ the imposition of an explicit Marxist vocabulary onto a text that … is nothing if not reluctant to assent to such institutional forms of radicalism” (217). Thus, the novel is said to

96 “relentlessly underline the inescapable, nearly mundane, gaps in comprehension: the impossibility of translating a racial consciousness” (212); whereby “Banjo’s overall aim [is to] indicat[e] the ways [by which] black internationalism is necessarily haunted by difference” (217). Edwards’ deployment of postructuralist tropes of “impossible translation,” “gaps” and the “haunting” of “difference” leads him to posit an anti-politics of differánce: “those incommensurabilities, the gaps, the points of décalage [in Banjo], are the reservoir of communication across which diaspora is practiced” giving rise to “the most vibrant and creative moments [in the novel]” (216). Moreover, such anti-politics resolutely rejects the politics of social transformation: it is “not an internationalism of coordinated social movement, but an internationalism of debate, miscommunication, and light-hearted and hot-headed accusation” where the “basic grammar of blackness is often fully dislodged, lost in translation” (210-211). Finally, in the place of revolutionary transformation we have postmodern “pleasure” as the preferred pivotal point, as Edwards locates radical agency in Banjo’s focus on “music,” that allows an “easy good-time interaction”. The “community” of music and the “sporadic, ephemeral attempts to achieve it, are the closest the book comes to espousing any form of black internationalism” (219, my emphasis). More than black internationalism itself, the target of Edwards’ poststructuralist attack is to reject any compatibility of Banjo with Marxism. Edwards holds the “dogma” (197) of Marxist “universalism” to be inadequate to the conceptualization of race. “Black internationalism, that is at once inside communism,” as he notes, “fiercely engaged with its ideological debates and funneled through its institutions and at the same time aimed at a race-specific formation that reject[ed] the Comintern’s universalism, adamantly insisting that racial oppression involves factors and forces that cannot be summed up or submerged in a critique of class exploitation” (245, emphasis added). Such a description,

97 rooted in a notion of race as “difference” as I noted above, avoids the dialectical relation between race and class, just as it seeks to downplay the lively tradition of Marxist engagement with race and ascribes to it a flat-footed “universalism”. Edwards’ use of “black internationalism” is based on two older and influential approaches, that of “Black Marxism” (Cedric Robinson) and “Black Atlantic” (Paul Gilroy). It recalls Cedric Robinson’s claim that Marxism and “its analytical presumptions, its historical perspectives, its points of view” are inextricably tied to European assumptions of racialism (1993: 2). Edwards in turn implies Soviet Bolshevism to be itself a continuation of such “European assumptions”. Such a view flattens the historical role of the Soviet-led early Comintern as a platform for debate and dissensus, where many, including Claude McKay, participated in the forging of a contested and complex internationalist political vision that did not simply reproduce Eurocentric universalism. In discounting the “Bolshevist period” in McKay, Edwards seeks to substitute a “Black Atlantic” framework in place of the global connections facilitated by the Comintern. Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” framework, derived from the European-led slave trade, conceptualizes transnational blackness by “tak[ing] the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis” (Gilroy 15). This framing has drawn some criticism. As Kate Baldwin correctly observes, “the occlusion of the Soviet Union from Gilroy’s book has been significant not so much because the USSR radically alters his schematic but because the Black Atlantic model has become common parlance … synonymous with the study of black transnationalism” (Baldwin 10). Neil Lazarus’s critique of this framework is worth noting as well; he points out that “this choice involves the loss of a specifically global perspective … [as] vast regions of the ‘nonWest’ are conspicuously absent from The Black Atlantic” (Lazarus 62-63). Thus, Gilroy’s understanding of black transnational modernity does not incorporate Marxism, “the source and

98 inspiration of the most coherent and principled theories both of the advent of capitalist modernity and of the universalizing propensities … of capitalism” (61) -- in other words it lacks a theory of global capitalist modernity. In addition to repeating both Robinson and Gilroy’s eschewal of Marxism, Edwards’s specific invocation of “black vagabonds” in the “diaspora” recalls the Black Atlantic paradigm; thus for example, his discussion of “black male communities” in Banjo can make no conceptual room for those beyond the Atlantic -- and the Western hemisphere, for instance the character of the “[Oriental] Latnah, the one significant female character in Banjo” (Edwards 209) who is doubly an outsider in terms of gender and race. Gender comes to destabilize the male community of the “Black Atlantic” here. More to the point, McKay’s own description of the diverse figures in his novel suggests a much larger global scope, and a different understanding of blackness than Edwards’s reading of the novel would seem to allow: it involves “West Africans, East Indians, South Africans, West Indians, Arabs, and Indians – [who] were all mixed up together” (Banjo 312). As James Smethurst has brilliantly noted, the traveling itinerary of the novel’s principal characters, Banjo and Ray – the latter appears in Home to Harlem, McKay’s previous novel as well – underlines McKay’s own resistance to the Harlem Renaissance’s “new artistic version of the old model of the ‘triangle trade among Europe, Africa and the Americas” (2009: 359). Thus, in Home to Harlem, “Ray departs [from Harlem] for Europe … traveling west on a freighter via the Pacific and Australia, not east across the Atlantic” as does Banjo, who reaches Marseilles “from the east, sailing across the Pacific to New Zealand and Australia and then around the entire coast of Africa” (359). It is as if the sprawling, long-winded journeys of both these characters “via the Pacific” symbolically trace out an alternative, “a diasporic arc that is global in reach and not simply trans-Atlantic” (359, emphasis added). As Smethurst argues, attention to

99 such plot elements and narrative structures reveal how McKay, moving beyond the realm of the Black Atlantic favored by some of his critics, seeks to incorporate “the East” in a project of Bolshevism inspired internationalist, as well as black, solidarity. A full consideration of McKay is beyond the space of this chapter. But let me note that “traces of this more complex archive” documenting McKay’s investment in Soviet internationalism also survive in his notably anti-Communist memoir A Long Way From Home.2 He writes, as a “social-minded being and poet,” of being moved by the Bolshevik Revolution alongside “millions of ordinary human beings and thousands of writers [who] were stirred by the Russian thunder rolling around the world” (A Long Way From Home, 121). Landing in the Soviet Union in 1922, he is shocked by the “non-Western” poverty in Moscow, “the Oriental raggedness that one does not see in New York and London and Berlin (125). But a greater surprise for him is his own reception by the Bolshevik supporters – “I was like a black icon”. McKay notes that “never in my life did I feel more proud of being an African, a black, and no mistake about it … I was the first Negro to arrive in Russia since the revolution, and perhaps generally I was regarded as an omen of good luck” (132). McKay’s engagement with Bolshevism was not restricted to Russians: he encounters in Moscow his old Japanese comrade, Sen Katayama, dual authority on “Negro problems” and “a symbol of the far eastern element in the new heart of Russia” (129-130). McKay eloquently speaks of Katayama’s detailed engagements with questions of national liberation in the eastern colonies, as well as the politics of race in the US. A Long Way From Home illustrates McKay’s own awareness of 2

I take this phrase from Gary Holcomb’s recent study of the text, Holcomb being one of the very few scholars who have paid any sustained attention to the memoir. As he notes, “critics of African-American Communism have relied on A Long Way From Home to demonstrate that during the 1930s black intellectuals saw through the schemes of the radical Left, using McKay’s memoir … [n]onetheless, McKay’s autobiographical representation of his own repudiation in A Long Way From Home is unreliable … [t]he fact is that McKay was Communist in affiliation and affinity for far longer than A Long Way From Home purports … [despite] sections in which McKay discredits Communism … the text also retains traces of a more complex archive” (731).

100 internationalism and multiracial solidarity as it was filtered through his Soviet experience – much beyond the Black Atlantic – involving “delegates from “Egypt, India, Japan, China, Algeria” (134). Moreover, it is within this distinctive context of Soviet internationalism that Claude McKay delivered his “Report on the Negro Question” to the 4th Congress of the Comintern, where he emphatically noted that “the reformist bourgeoisie have been carrying on the battle against discrimination and racial prejudice in America. [But] the Socialists and Communists have fought shy of it because there is a great element of prejudice among the socialists and communists” (“Report” 9). McKay’s double-edged criticism, of Black cultural nationalism and dominant racialism in the American Left, was complemented by his ringing rhetoric linking the “Negro” to Bolshevist revolutionary politics – “I hope … that we shall soon see a few Negro soldiers in the finest, bravest and cleanest fighting forces in the world – the Red Army and Navy of Russia” (11). This investment in proletarian revolution is neglected in his memoir, as well as by his more anti-Communist minded critics. To return the discussion to the contemporary scholarly framing of McKay then: the critical contestations and multiple readings around McKay illustrate the complex role of literary representation in negotiating the politics of internationalism. Following Baldwin, Lazarus and Smethurst, I take a different position than Edwards on the model of Black internationalism and note its incompatibility with Marxist internationalism. Yet it is also worth noting and reiterating the salutary aspect of Edwards’ work for my own discussion below. One, his specific attention to the question of literary form, and second, his superb exposition of the role of “translation” as the site of internationalist transactions. I find entirely convincing Edwards’ observation that “[a]ny alliance across those differences (of values, of formations, of energy, of interest, and of language itself) will be skewed by the peculiarities of interaction …the discontinuities and disjunctures in

101 any translation, the unavoidable skewing in any institutionalization of internationalisme noir (22). In addition, Edwards (2003b) himself addresses the limitations of the Black Atlantic approach discussed above by exploring the literary and political dialogue between the Senegalese Lamine Senghor and the Vietnamese Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh). This interaction was enabled through the Intercolonial Union established under the aegis of the French Communist Party (PCF). As Edwards notes, such “Afro-Asian” collaborations shaped what he terms “intercolonial internationalism,” where “it might be possible to read the work of Nguyen and Senghor (and the way their projects approach each other) as a kind of limit case or horizon to an emergent Comintern discourse of internationalism” (2003b: 21). Literary “work” is also political activism, in this context, playing an important part in fostering as well as complicating internationalist solidarity, as we see in the following sections in the case of another “intercolonial” radical, M.N. Roy.

IV – M.N. Roy and Intercolonial Internationalism Manabendranath (M.N.) Roy occupies a somewhat unique position in the history of Communism. He was founding member of two of the world’s first Communist parties in Mexico and India, gained prominence with Lenin’s patronage as a major ideologue in the Communist International (Comintern) in the 1920s, was excoriated by Trotsky as a “Stalinist lackey,” and was expelled from the Stalinist Comintern as a “Fascist” collaborator. His biographer Samaren Roy proclaims that “[Roy] differed from all those before him … held that revolution in the colonies would liberate the proletarians in the metropolitan countries” (Samaren Roy xiii-xiv). He was tailed at one time by British intelligence in India as the most dangerous Communist operative in India, and denounced at another by Indian Communists as an “agent of British

102 imperialism”. He was a major revolutionary intellectual of his time, presenting a “Supplementary Theses on National and Colonial Questions” that challenged Lenin’s position in the 2nd Congress of the Comintern (1920), served as military commander in Bolshevik war efforts in Central Asia, and authored two pioneering tomes on materialist analysis of India and China (India in Transition, 1922, Revolution and Counterrevolution in China, 1930). He was a polyglot and peripatetic global revolutionary, and recent scholarship has sought to reclaim him as “an anticolonial thinker of tremendous clout,” ranking alongside Aimé Cesaire, Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi (Manjapra xiv, see also Makalani 71-103; Samaren Roy 1986 remains the most comprehensive account of his Comintern period). M.N. Roy started his revolutionary career in his early 20s as an associate of the firebrand nationalist leader in colonial Bengal, Jatin Mukherjee. The Bengali “extremist” nationalists in the first decade of the 20th century were distinguished by their broad ideological affiliations to international anti-imperialist currents. What historian Maia Ramnath terms their “Kropotkinism” (Ramnath 2005), namely the influence of the anarchist thought of the Russian Peter Kropotkin, extended to solidarities and exchanges with the Japanese resistance to Tsarist Russia, as well as the Irish armed struggle for national liberation against the English. Nor were these internationalist affiliations, or preference for armed struggle, the only distinguishing aspects that marked out the “extremist” nationalists from their more mainstream counterparts whose demands were limited to relative autonomy within the British Commonwealth. Already in 1870, requests had gone out from Calcutta, capital city of Bengal and British India, to the International Working Men’s Association or the “First International,” for the establishment of a local chapter in Calcutta. Under the influence of anticolonial nationalist Aurobindo Ghose, the Bengali

103 nationalists had incorporated “socialism” in their 1907 charter, including among other things a demand for land reforms and the redistribution of land. The nationalists in Bengal suffered a decisive blow in 1914 with the foiling of a planned insurrection and the seizure of weapons sent from Germany. The Berlin Committee of Indian Revolutionaries, a platform accommodating a large number of Indian radicals spread all over the world, had sent these supplies to Bengal, where these were apprehended. M.N. Roy, key figure in the plan, left India soon after the foiled event. He travelled to Japan, and from there on to the USA, to San Francisco and then New York City. Both San Francisco and New York, especially the former, were key sites of organizing for the revolutionary Ghadar Party, formed by exiled and diasporic Indian radicals. As Minkah Makalani has demonstrated, New York served to facilitate the interaction of Indians with other Asian and Black – African, Caribbean, AfricanAmerican revolutionaries (2011: 58, 76-78). Thus M.N. Roy’s initial political activities in the US were shaped by activist circles which not only included Indian nationalists and Ghadar Party radicals, but also members of Black revolutionary groups such as Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and Cyril Brigg’s African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption (ABB). Asian radicals, such as the Japanese Sen Katayama who worked with the ABB, the Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh who attended UNIA’s meetings, as well as exiled Chinese Communists, played a key role in linking their specific anticolonial visions to a larger international project of anti-imperialism. Thus, Cyril Brigg’s journal Crusader “devoted … considerable space … to movements in China, Japan and India” (Makalani 58), while Ho Chi Minh wrote of Black oppression and lynching in the American South. Roy was arrested in New York in 1917 as the US government cracked down on the Ghadar Party for the “Hindu Conspiracy Case,” which involved an attempt by the Ghadar

104 radicals to secure weapons from Germany. Roy moved to Mexico soon after this event. In Mexico City, M.N. Roy associated with socialists, becoming editor of the Socialist Party newspaper La Lucha (The Struggle). Shortly thereafter, he met the Bolshevik Mikhail Borodin. Roy, Borodin and Charles R. Phillips co-founded the Mexican Communist Party (Partido Comunista Mexicano or PCM) in 1919. Soon, Roy was on his way from Mexico City to Moscow to attend the 2nd Congress of the Comintern in 1920 as the official representative of the PCM. Two important events took place that are important in the Indian context: first, Roy co-founded the Communist Party of India in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Other members of this founding group were his wife, Evelyn Trent Roy, Abani Mukherjee, Mohammed Shafiq, M.P.T. Acharya. This was a motley group, including a Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and even an American, with disparate political backgrounds. But this gathering was preceded by a previous event -- the drafting of a milestone document, the “Indian Communist Manifesto,” written in Berlin and published in Glasgow in The Glasgow Register. Roy, Evelyn Trent and Mukherjee were the co-signers. Thus, between the years 1914 and 1920, such networks enabled Roy’s political shift from nationalist to internationalist, Marxist concerns. The “Indian Communist Manifesto” reveals Roy’s move away from nationalism, even of the “extremist” variety, just as it illustrates his developed interest in a materialist understanding of national liberation. Some portions of this document are worth highlighting to illustrate this point. First, it notes that “the nationalist revolutionary movement, recruited from educated youths of the middle classes … did not inspire the masses with lasting enthusiasm”. This is the result of the nationalists’ lack of a comprehensive conceptualization of the liberation struggle, where “the leaders failed to prescribe remedies for the social and economic evils from which the workers suffer”. Alongside the emphasis on “workers,” the Manifesto brings back the question of the “peasant,” which as I

105 noted above had been part of the Bengali extremists’ programme as well, “the real revolutionary movement stands for the economic emancipation of the workers and rests on the growing strength of a class-conscious industrial proletariat and landless peasantry”. These elements clearly distinguished the “Indian Communist Manifesto” from the politics of mainstream nationalism, in focusing specifically on the working classes – the “workers” and the “peasants” - and positing their “liberation” to be antagonistic to not only British imperialism, but also, the Indian nationalist elite. This last point was stated without ambiguity – “we want the world to know that nationalism is confined to the bourgeois … the working class in any country must always be indifferent to purely nationalist aspirations” (“Indian Communist Manifesto,” in Ray 162).3 The specific form of address in the statement, “we want the world to know,” is interesting to note. In addition to performing the rhetorical polemical function demanded of a political manifesto, this address also gestures to the international networks that brought the document into being; its context of production (Berlin), publication (Glasgow) and multiple outlets of dissemination through translation. I would argue that it reflects its principal drafter M.N. Roy’s multiple sites of affiliations as well. Such sites included the major metropolises of New York, San Francisco and Berlin, but also more peripheral locations such as Calcutta, Mexico City, Tashkent and Moscow. Pan-Africanism, anarchism, national liberation and socialism were some of the key identifiable ideological strands of this revolutionary project. Roy’s literary work which we discuss in the next section attempts to negotiate, not least through narrative structure, such complex strands in its articulation of internationalism.

3

The text in this volume (Ray 1987) is from the weekly report of the Director, Central Intelligence, Simla dated August 2nd, 1920. It mentions Abani Mukherjee and Shanti Devi (Evelyn Trent, Roy’s wife) as co-signatories. Roy was in Berlin at the time of writing, so we can assume it was written a little before the Comintern’s 2 nd Congress in July, and definitely before the founding of the CPI in Tashkent in August.

106

V – M.N. Roy, Memoirs and Literary Internationalism Manabendranath Roy’s Memoirs, published in 1964 and covering Roy’s trans-continental activities from 1914 to 1926, offers a unique if little explored “literary” perspective on internationalist Marxist politics. In particular, it traces out the development of Roy’s thought from Indian anticolonial nationalism to awareness of the transnational and diverse forms of colonialism in Mexico and the US, and socialist and Communist-led working class struggles in Germany, France and the UK to the crucial role played by the early Soviet Union and the Comintern in the national liberation struggles in the colonies. Memoirs was published in serial form in the magazine set up by Roy, Independent India in the 1950s, and appeared in book form a decade after. The initial form of its appearance, that of serialization, leaves its mark on the way the narrative unfolds. This results in an episodic narrative structure in Memoirs; in the words of Kris Manjapra, Memoirs does not produce “a Bildungsroman of stadial change reaching ultimate culmination, but rather a discontinuous and fragmentary narrative … [with] a continual explosive encounter with the new, not unlike classic works of Central European Expressionism such as Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia (1918) or Hugo Ball’s Flight Out of Time (1927)” (1). Manjapra notes that Memoirs “can be read as a piece of expressionist art. It recounts repeated breakages of time flow, in which new ideas and new time intrude” (1). Given Roy’s intimate familiarity with the contemporary European political and artistic avant-garde – among others, he was associated briefly with the Frankfurt School in the late 1920s – the influence of continental Expressionism is understandable (Manjapra 81). Equally, I would argue, the “discontinuous and fragmentary” nature of the narrative formally marks the development of an internationalist political education

107 that spanned four continents and involved multiple heterogeneous projects, each of which Roy encountered in his journey. Roy crosses the Pacific on his escape from India and observes, “Wandering through Malay, Indonesia, Indo-China, in summer of 1916, I landed in San Francisco” (22). This is similar to the itineraries of Claude McKay’s fictional characters Ray and Banjo, but Roy traverses the Pacific in the opposite direction. As a literary narrative, Memoirs is marked by the dialectical interplay of experiences alternating between emotion and reason, whereby the protagonist undergoes several fundamental transformations of self-hood, or in Roy’s phrasing, “rebirths”: “[A]fter a couple of months on the West Coast, I crossed the continent, to celebrate my rebirth, spiritually as well as politically, in the City of New York” (22). The trope of “rebirth,” with its cunning association between the “spiritual” and the “political,” is repeated at several points in Roy’s journey, first in San Francisco and New York, but also later in Mexico, “[again] the land of my rebirth” (217). In Mexico he is formally initiated to the Marxist “faith,” with “a new god and a new religion” --“I joined the ranks of the faithful in quest of the utopia” (145). The quest for personal transformation in these instances is inextricably tied to the broadening of political vision. Memoirs underscores this dynamic of broadening vision at several junctures. Once, at a New York meeting with Roy’s then-mentor, the Indian radical nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai, an audience member from “the extreme left-wingers of American labor movement,” raises the question, “what difference would it make to the Indian masses if they were exploited by native capitalists instead of foreign capitalists?,” Roy is left dissatisfied at his mentor’s answer: “it does make a great difference whether one is kicked by his brother or by a foreign robber”. No longer comfortable with the nationalist rhetoric of “brotherly” unity, Roy feels that “there was

108 something wrong in our case. Suddenly, a light flashed through my mind; it was a new light” (28). Such encounters, and the sense of dissatisfaction they provoke, led to the search for more comprehensive political positions and “a different sense of freedom” (28). Roy contrasts the affective, emotional appeal of nationalism, of “loyalty to old comrades” to “an intelligent choice of a new ideal” (35). This is not a question of simply preferring internationalism over nationalism, as Roy speaks of “a philosophical revolution which knew no finality” (217). Such a trajectory leads Roy to a reformulation of the concept of “freedom” that is positively humanistic, without the latter’s sanctioning of human hierarchy -- “I no longer believed in political freedom without the content of economic liberation and social justice. But I had also realized that intellectual freedom – freedom from the bondage of all tradition and authority—was the effective condition for any effective struggle for social emancipation” (219-220). In this expansive definition, the “nation” ceases to be an adequate arena of either political or spiritual struggle. Roy notes that “the new ideal of freedom was not to be attained within national or geographical boundaries. The struggle for its attainment must take place throughout the world, the entire civilized mankind participating in it” (217-18). While the emphasis on “civilized mankind” might strike a contemporary reader as odd, it is worth noting that Roy rejects imperialist or even nationalist categories of civilizational difference; his emphasis is squarely on a “new humanity” that combines intellectual and economic emancipation. The narrative structure of Memoirs formally reflects these transformations of its protagonist. The narrative is divided into sections, beginning with “In Search of an Ideal” that briefly recounts the protagonist’s departure from India and travels through East Asia in search of weapons for waging nationalist armed struggle back home. It also illustrates Roy’s encounters in the US and Mexico and his discarding of nationalism. The next two sections, titled “The New

109 Faith” and “In the Holy Land,” deal with post-1918 Europe and the Spartacist uprising in Germany in 1919, and Roy’s subsequent journey to attend the Comintern in the Soviet Union, respectively. While these section headings alert us to the different “geographical” locales where the intrusion of “new ideas and new time” takes place in the life of the protagonist, Roy, the titles also undertake a related if somewhat different purpose. In self-consciously drawing attention to “faith,” and the “holy land,” these headings draw attention to and set up a dissonance with the protagonist’s critical interrogation of faith. This is a double interrogation: on one hand, marking Roy’s disaffiliation from the “old” faith of cultural nationalism, itself predicated on the idea of Indian spiritual superiority and claims of exceptional civilizational status. On the other hand, it self-consciously questions the “new” credo of Marxism: Roy’s ironic reference to this new faith is accompanied by an illustration of fellow travelers who embrace it uncritically, blindly. His linking of the Marxist project with “intellectual freedom” is crucial in this regard; it explicitly lays down the “condition” of “freedom from the bondage of all tradition and authority” (220) as the basis for emancipatory politics. Thus, for the Marxist individual, it is necessary to interrogate all spiritual and political authority, including Marxism itself. The narrative repeatedly ties the “rebirth” of the individual to broader, collective political projects. The trope of “rebirth” is an ironic reference to the protagonist’s Brahminical Hindu background, where, as per the Hindu faith, the Brahmin is born “twice” (Sanskrit dwija, twiceborn is another word for Brahmin). Roy’s repudiation of this personal identity is tied to the repudiation of Hindu, Indian nationalism as a collective entity. The subsequent rebirths are necessitated by the contingencies of revolutionary life as well: as he travels from one place to another, it is frequently necessary to disguise himself to avoid the attention of the law. “Father Martin,” the first of Roy’s many personas, is “a novice from Pondicherry going [by sea] to study

110 theology in Paris – duly armed with a copy of the Bible and the golden cross dangling from the watch chain” (22). While the persona of a docile colonial Christian missionary is the very opposite of a Hindu nationalist radical – and thus effective as a disguise – it is at the same a revealing symbol of Roy’s own move away from Hindu nationalism as he undertakes the oceanic voyage. Roy shuffles multiple personas in his travels as a revolutionary: he is originally Narendranath Bhattacharya, a Hindu nationalist; he flees from India via China as “Father Martin” with a “French-Indian passport” (18); once in the US, Father Martin gives way to “M.N. Roy,” the name by which he would be known for the rest of his life. In addition, he embarks on the trans-Atlantic journey from Mexico to Spain as a mixed-race hybrid, a child of an interracial marriage between “an eccentric Englishman” and “an aristocratic Mexican lady” – “the mixed parentage came in handy because it explained the flaws in my Spanish” (223). And in the files of the Comintern, Roy becomes “Robert,” similar to Claude McKay’s transformation to “Comrade Sasha” (Holcomb 2009). Shifting personal identities serve as oblique indicators of his political transformation. The growing awareness of a global “racial” perspective is an important feature in Roy’s personal and political transformations. While race, and racial oppression, undoubtedly featured in Indian anticolonial nationalist thought, such a perception was also muddled by the vaunted claims of Indian (“Hindu”) civilizational superiority and national exceptionalism. By contrast, Roy offers a nuanced and much more complicated global perspective on “race” that goes beyond claims of “Indianness”. Escaping from India, his first encounter aboard the ship with American missionaries is instructive: as “Father Martin,” he befriends one couples’ adopted daughter, only to be met with suspicion – “as good Americans, they evidently did not like their ward getting too familiar with a colored man” (21). In that same journey, he notices that “the Japanese also

111 behaved like members of a superior race” (21). Such instances, early on, unsettle the nationalist belief in racial exclusivity. But it is in the US, through subsequent experiences with other “good Americans” as Roy sarcastically refers to them, that his racial sensibilities are particularly developed. He is arrested in New York, and taken for interrogation at the “sanctum of American criminal justice … the frightful ‘Tomb,’ the medieval prison of super-modern New York” (38). His interrogator, the District Attorney, tries to disarm him at first “with the typical American joviality”: he assures Roy that he, “a wise man from the East,” would not be treated badly if he disclosed information on his political activities and his comrades. When that fails, he is taken to the “underground” interrogation chambers, “a damned colored man;” on his way down, he discovers another from his group, a “Dr. Chakravarty” who has already been arrested and obviously tortured. The guards jeeringly refer to the Indian Chakravarty as “the oily leader of the oily revolution” (38). Roy is given insight into the prison’s activities by the guards who describe the torture of prisoners in starkly racial terms – “On the way back, they confided, ‘We have caught other birds – black, brown and pink. They are all safe here. Don’t try to kid yourself, guv’nor’” (39). The narrative does not get into the details of other prisoners, but the description itself, “black, brown and pink,” alerts us to the (multi)racial aspects of imprisonment in the US. Roy carries this awareness of US racial politics over with him to Mexico. His encounter in Mexico with the black American pugilist, Jack Johnson, is notable in this regard. Johnson, a celebrity athlete of his time, had fled to Mexico to avoid the Mann Act, which punished offenders for “transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes”. Johnson, married to a white woman, Lucille Cameron, had been falsely charged under that act. Roy’s encounter with Johnson in Mexico is racially charged for a number of reasons: both are escapees from the law, and Johnson’s “criminal” engagement with a white female is parallel to M.N. Roy’s own

112 marriage to his then-wife, the white American Evelyn Trent, who accompanied him to Mexico. Roy meets the couple, Johnson and Cameron, at a restaurant in “the fashionable Avenida de Madero … [where] none came to serve them” (116). After witnessing some tense exchanges between the couple and the restaurant staff, Roy observes, “I knew that Negroes were not served in American restaurants, not even admitted to barber shops kept by white men. But we were not in America, and the Mexicans, with mixed blood running in their veins, were well known for racial catholicism … [M]y sympathy warmed up to indignation when I noticed the supercilious smile and sly giggling all around” (116, emphasis added). One does not know, for lack of further details in the Memoirs, how this lapse of “racial catholicism” affects his perception of race relations in Mexico, but what is evident from the above passage is the clear impact of black oppression in the US on Roy’s personal and political sensibility: his caustic observation, “we were not in America” and his determination “never to come to the place again,” bear testimony to this fact. The narrative’s portrayal of Johnson makes him almost a mirror image of Roy’s personal situation, in terms of racialized masculinity. Memoirs also mentions, as point of fact, the political impact of this event and subsequent demonstrations of solidarity on Johnson, “the experience had made a deep impression on him also” (117). Roy and another associate run into him again while “collecting money to publish a Spanish translation of the Soviet Constitution” (117). When they tell Johnson of the “Bolshevik” cause and ask him if he has “anything against the Bolsheviks,” Johnson replies in the negative. Johnson donates ten dollars “with a broad grin, and wishes the Bolsheviks luck” (117). It remains the task of future scholarship to trace the full record of Roy’s engagement with Black radical thought, like his more well-known contemporary Asian Communists, such as the Japanese Sen Katayama and the Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh. What the literary Memoirs offers,

113 specifically through its episodic narrative structure is the gradual and processive nature of the transformation of his thought. Roy himself warns us off taking Memoirs too literally, as he claims, “I consider autobiography very unreliable as a source of objective truth … [i]t is not a question of honesty or integrity [of the writer]. It is the great ‘Unconscious’” (566). Such “unconscious” patterns can then be discerned by critically juxtaposing unrelated episodes and reading them against the grain of the narrative. One such episode dealing with race is Roy’s decision in Mexico to write a history of India that went against the Orientalist and Indian nationalist “view about ancient Indian culture” (549). Roy’s Mexican treatise vigorously disagreed with the “mythical” past of India and its “Aryan” ethnic origins. By contrast, Roy advanced a thesis of the existence of pre-Aryan “Dravidian” races. Such a thesis, flying against accepted (Aryan) Hindu nationalist claims of racial superiority, “could not [be] substantiate[d] with factual evidence … in those days” (550). Yet Roy’s description of this episode reveals the influence of the American politics of race. He notes that “the eagerness of the average Indian to claim Aryan ancestry was, and still is, very widespread. As a reaction to the American prejudice against the colored races, the Indians in the United States laid emphasis on their descent from the white Aryan race” (550). Roy’s repudiation of the “Aryan” origin thesis is a repudiation of Indian nationalist aspirations to “whiteness,” and shaped by internationalist solidarity with other “colored races” against “American prejudice”. Lacking in “factual evidence,” Roy’s treatise on the Aryan supremacy over Dravidian ethnicity in India is a translation of American racial politics; it attempts to re-code Indian history in that light. This episode, I would submit, is revealing in its “unconscious” reflection of a racial rhetoric that is not fully fleshed out in the “objective truth” of the narrative itself.

114 Roy’s embrace of Soviet Bolshevism, similarly, is marked by such processes of translation. He learns of the “works of Karl Marx” at the New York Public Library, and “discover[s] a new meaning in them” (29). The news of the Bolshevik Revolution while Roy is in Mexico, “fires the imagination” of “a utopia” among the Mexican radicals, as “the idea that to be actually in possession of political power might be within the realm of political possibility shook the preconceived anarcho-syndicalist theoretical antipathy for the State” (131-132). Such transformations of “theoretical antipathy” are achieved through the literal groundwork of translation; as the Soviet Constitution is translated to Spanish for circulation, so is Roy entrusted with the “English section of El Heraldo” (131), the Socialist Party organ. Such translation across languages and cultures also results in cultural-political mis-translations; Roy notes with amusement the case of a “jovial … Indian [Native American] military commander”. This “unexpected follower of Lenin,” fired by anti-American sentiments embraces Bolshevism, declaring with impeccable “logic” that “I don’t know what is Socialism … [t]he Yankees do not like the Bolsheviks, they are our enemies; therefore, the Bolsheviks must be our friends, and we must be their friends. We are all Bolsheviks” (153-54). While such anecdotes reveal for Roy the problems of “disproportion[ate] passion” and “faith,” they also illustrate the multiracial appeal of Bolshevik “utopia” for all stripes of Indians, “Hindu” and Native American. Roy’s personal and political subjectivity as an internationalist develops through such anticolonial experiences, in India, in the US and in Mexico. The Marxist critique of imperialism enables him to conceptually link these fragmentary positions into a coherent unitary worldview. Yet the primacy of anticolonial politics for Roy, in turn, enables him to formulate a critique of the “Eurocentric” tendencies of Bolshevik internationalism. This dialectical essence is crucial to the development of Roy’s thought. As he departs Mexico for the Soviet Union in 1920, Roy’s

115 description of his trans-Atlantic voyage is striking; it poetically and powerfully illuminates the dialogues animating his self-transformation: Only four years ago, I had made the longer voyage across the Pacific … [I]n the intervening period, I had lived through a couple of centuries of cultural history … [T]he trans-Atlantic journey was enjoyable, and the perspective exciting, whereas the voyage from Asia to America had been depressing. Then I was going from the known to an unknown world. Now it was a pilgrimage; on the way, I would have the privilege to witness capitalist Europe collapsing, and, like, Prometheus unbound, the revolutionary proletariat rising to build a new world out of the ruins (225). The knowledge gained in “America” in the US and Mexico transforms his thinking away from the known certainties of nationalism. These new knowledges in turn meant that for Roy, the “revolutionary proletariat rising” in Europe could no longer be seen in exclusively European but world-historical terms, “a new world”. His support for the “revolutionary proletariat” is accompanied by a sharp critique of metropolitan chauvinism. He comes to realize “during my several months’ stay in Germany,” the “feeling” that “the proletariat in the metropolitan countries would not … capture power unless Imperialism was weakened by the revolt of the colonial peoples” (306, emphasis added). Roy “suspect[s] nationalist atavism” in his “feeling,” but at the same time comes to be “exasperated by the insularism of the average proletarian revolutionary, who sympathized with the struggle of the colonial peoples for national liberation, but did not believe that it would succeed before socialism was established in Europe” (306, emphasis added). Such views amounted to contesting the teleology of revolution; buoyed by the Bolshevik Revolution, Roy no longer believed that revolution had to take place first in Europe. Staying in Berlin in 1919, following the suppression

116 of the Spartacist uprising, he notes the devastating impact on Communist plans for a worldwide uprising. For many, the success of the working class in an advanced industrial country like Germany with its long history of socialist organization would be key in sustaining the revolution elsewhere. Roy’s ascribes such a perception to the faith in “‘inevitability’, the magic conception of Marxism” (251): his critique of the Eurocentric model of world revolution is clear by this point of time. Similar in vein is his excoriating observation at the Comintern on “major European delegates … who took little interest” in Lenin’s theses on the “National and Colonial Questions”. Commenting on the leader of the British delegation, Tom Quelch, Roy notes that Quelch “vaguely felt that Lenin’s thesis would transfer the proverbial ‘White Man’s Burden’ on the working class in the imperialist countries. The sense of responsibility [sic] induced him to befriend the delegates from the colonial and semi-colonial countries” (365). Roy’s interaction at the 2nd Congress of 1920 was shaped by such dissonances and contestations between the official Comintern position on internationalism, what he terms “Lenin’s broad vision” (365) and the “insular” disregard of the major Communist representatives of Germany, France and the UK.4 This was accentuated by the theoretical weakness in Lenin’s own thinking, noted previously, about the role of the nationalist “democratic-bourgeois” elite in anticolonial struggles. Memoirs recounts how Roy receives Lenin’s theses, in an “English translation” (339). Lenin argued that “the colonial countries must have their bourgeois democratic revolution before they could enter the stage of the proletarian revolution” (379, emphasis added). Lenin’s theses stressed on the need to “achieve the closest alliance, with Soviet Russia, of all the national and colonial liberation movements”. Roy’s intervention on this issue as illustrated by his 4

Henk Sleevliet alias Maring, the Dutch secretary of the Commission on the National and Colonial Questions, commented, “I have the impression that, with a few exceptions, even this Congress of the Communist International has not fully understood the significance of the oriental question” (qtd. in Manjapra 59). According to another account, Roy “had to remonstrate openly at the closing session [of the Third Congress] that the Eastern Question had been grossly neglected by the Executive” (qtd. in Ray 26).

117 “Supplementary Theses,” tabled alongside Lenin’s for discussion at the 2nd Congress, consisted of two major points: one, a critique of teleology that assumed the primacy of revolution in “Europe” and second, a rejection of anticolonial bourgeois nationalism. Roy’s earlier repudiation of Indian nationalism led to his rejection of the role of the national bourgeoisie. Similarly, filtered through his previous experience in Germany, the “Supplementary Theses” maintained that “superprofits gained in the colonies is the mainstay of modern capitalism, and so long as the latter is not deprived of this source of profit, it will not be easy for the European working class to overthrow the capitalist order … [W]ithout the breaking up of the colonial Empire, the overthrow of the capitalist system in Europe does not appear possible” (Point 3 of “Supplementary Theses,” in Ray 124). The response in the Comintern to such heterodox formulations is significant: agreement was reached at the end of the debates that one, capitalist development was not “inevitable in the backward countries,”5 and secondly, that the Comintern was to extend support to “the bourgeois movements for liberation in the colonies only in cases when they are really revolutionary” (emphasis added).6 Yet it is precisely at the point of these interactions, involving the translation of Leninism into an anticolonial political position that insists on its own autonomy, that we reach the narrative limits of the literary memoir. Unlike the historical records of these debates, Memoirs does not go into details of these proceedings; perhaps, literary representation fails at the juncture of radical heterodoxy. Most significantly, Memoirs is wholly silent on the final forms in which Roy and

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Lenin noted that “this question aroused quite a lively discussion in the Committee, not only in connection with the theses advanced by myself, but much more in connection with those of Comrade Roy… [t]he question was whether it is correct to assume that the development of capitalist economy is inevitable in those backward countries which are now liberating themselves, and in which progressive movements have started since the war; and we came to the conclusion that it is not inevitable” (qtd. in Ray 173). 6 M.N Roy observes that “the result of the discussion was that we came to the unanimous conclusion that we should not deal with bourgeois democratic movements but with revolutionary nationalist movements. There is no doubt that every nationalist movement can only be a bourgeois democratic movement, for the great mass in the backward countries consist of peasants” (qtd. in Ray 172).

118 Lenin’s theses were adapted. Roy’s insistence on the primacy of anticolonial revolution was dropped, and his draft was modified to imply that anti-colonial struggles would be defined in a relation of tutelage to be directed from the “center,” that is by the Soviet Union. Inverting the hierarchy suggested by Roy’s theses, Lenin’s own adapted theses stated, “The victorious proletarian Soviet Republics will lend a helping hand to these masses [in the colonial countries] … [T]he Communist International must declare on theoretical grounds that with the assistance of the proletariat of the advanced countries the backward nations can arrive to the Soviet form of organization” (qtd. in Ray 126, my emphasis; see also Makalani 77-81; Manjapra 59-62). This shift in focus, from “without the breaking up of the colonial Empire, the overthrow of the capitalist system in Europe does not appear possible” in Roy, to Lenin’s emphasis on “the assistance of the proletariat of the advanced countries” was a significant one. These alterations marked the negotiation of alternative visions of revolutionary praxis at the level of the “text(s)”. M.N. Roy’s political project to place anticolonial national liberation at the heart of the project of anti-capitalist world revolution finds its most succinct expression in what is arguably his most significant theoretical work, India in Transition. His attempt to guide Comintern policy was complemented by his politico-theoretical work on the colonial question, where he emphatically delineated an expansive materialist framework for the distinctive social and economic characteristics of the colonial periphery. Written in the Soviet Union as a direct outcome of the Comintern’s deliberations and published in 1922, India in Transition attempts a materialist exploration of contemporary British India. The text’s pioneering theoretical contribution lies in illustrating the “uneven” forms of colonial-capitalist development in India under British rule, and arguing for the incommensurability of political interests of India’s landed and industrial elite on one hand, and the working class and peasantry on the other. India in

119 Transition’s analysis of colonial-capitalist unevenness is shaped by a variety of intellectual influences, all of which came to structure Roy’s personal trajectory as well: Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Leon Trotsky’s “Law of Uneven and Combined Development,” the Latin American Marxist José Mariategui’s analysis of “semi-colonial, semifeudal” Peruvian society, and the Indian nationalist Dadabhai Naoroji’s “drain theory of poverty” (Lenin 1956; Trotsky 1965; Mariategui 1988; Naoroji 1962). These influences provide Roy with the methodological tool of dialectical analysis, “the searchlight of Historical Materialism” (India in Transition, 17); if Roy’s earlier career marked a move from cultural nationalism to Marxist internationalism, India in Transition marks a reverse trajectory, where Roy reorients Marxist theory to account for the distinctive forces of emancipation in the struggles of his natal land. Self-consciously, India in Transition highlights at the very outset the unreliability of the “archive” for the purposes of such a radical intellectual project. Such an opening illuminates Roy’s materialist awareness of the complicity of knowledge with colonial power. Anticipating a later generation of poststructuralism influenced Subalternist historians, Roy notes that “we are obliged to learn about the past of the Indian people from two sources, namely the imperial historians, who write more about the civilizing mission of their illustrious countrymen than about the life and conditions of the conquered people, and Indian authors, who are very apt to sacrifice historical facts at the altar of patriotism” (17). The “archive,” therefore, provides “little information as to the economic condition of the toiling masses”.7 Roy’s text seeks to account for colonial “difference” by reading the specificity of India’s socio-economic conditions in the light 7

For the similarity of Roy’s methodological (and political) critique of the “archive” with the foundational assumptions of Subaltern Studies, see Ranajit Guha’s programmatic manifesto “On Some Aspects of Historiography in Colonial India,” where Guha declares that “the historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism – colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism … [w]hat clearly is left out of this unhistorical historiography is the politics of the people” (1988:38, 40, original emphasis). As I discuss in the Introduction to the dissertation, Guha’s exposé of the “collaborationist aspect” of the Indian nationalist elite with colonialism owes much to the debates developed within the Indian communist movement, a complex influence which is usually discounted in dominant accounts of the Subalternists’ revision of “Eurocentric” Marxism.

120 of an expanded -- and reconfigured -- Marxist framework. His discussion of “caste” provides a significant instance. Recalling his earlier awareness of the politics of race in the US, and how this in turn affected the construction of Indian nationalist identity, Roy takes issue with schools of Indian cultural nationalism which hold that caste hierarchies result from the “uniqueness” of Indian civilization and of “Indian culture [that] has been a unique thing” (95). In a reference to “Gandhism,” Roy notes that such culturalist approaches “preach that class-struggle is the peculiar outcome … of the West and is not possible in Indian society” (95). In sharp contrast, Roy’s exploration of the “economic basis of caste” shows that “coming down to the origin of it [caste], one discovers slavery” (95). This is not a mechanical analysis that crudely reduces social phenomenon to economics; rather, the economic function of caste hierarchy is complicated by “the distinction made by color”. Recalling his earlier discussion of Aryanism, he notes that “the caste-line was first between the Aryan conquerors and the conquered aborigines. The distinction was made by color, the conqueror being fair and the conquered dark” (96). Again, caste did not rest simply on such foundational narratives of origin as Roy illustrates the manifestations of caste in diverse social formations; thus the social formation of the “village community” that relied on “the hereditary division of labor stereotyped into the caste system,” and caste-based “guilds” similar to the trade and manufacture guilds in Europe. He observes, “Caste was the basis of socio-economic organized production … [t]he class-line ran through the caste-system” (96). Roy’s most striking observation is his explanation of the persistence of such “pre-capitalist” social forms of caste within colonial-capitalist modernity; “since the capitalist exploitation was carried on by a foreign imperialist bourgeoisie, the outward effects of the capitalist mode of production were not clearly felt on the Indian society” (97). He notes immediately afterwards

121 that “the fundamental social transformations that result from the capitalist control of the national economy have already taken place”: the paradox of colonial-capitalist expansion is that on one hand it causes “fundamental social transformations” but on the other hand these changes occur unevenly without “clear” markers or “without causing serious disequilibrium on the surface” (97). Roy’s explanation of colonized social formations, influenced as he is by the work of Lenin, Trotsky, Mariategui and Naoroji, articulates an early version of what we recognize today as the “dependency” school of Latin American social theory. Thus he notes “the forcible export of more than 70 per cent of the accumulated wealth of India by the East India Company … [and] the deliberate destruction of the craft industries and the consequent forcing of the artisan class back to the land,” (21) as factors which prevented the growth of industrial capitalism and the development “native” classes of the bourgeois and the proletariat in colonial India. The economic incursion of “capitalist exploitation” created a distinctive social situation in the colony as compared to the metropole: “[t]the Indian artisans, after having lost their independent means of production, were not absorbed into large industrial centers … [I]n India, the social expression of machine production did not take the form of a city proletariat, but that of a vast mass of landworkers and pauperized peasantry” (94, see also 55). The task of proletarian politics in the colony in the face of the relative insignificance of the “city proletariat” involved a redefinition of the proletariat as well. Once again, the specifics of Roy’s formulations are interesting to note. The significance of this task is made evident in the section titles of the text. After an opening section on “The Growth of the Bourgeoisie” or more precisely, the lack thereof in colonial India, the following section dialectically relates it to its logical implication; the next section is titled “The Condition of the Rural Population”. This is followed up by three sections

122 which comprise the bulk of the text, titled “The Proletariat I, II and III,” exploring and illuminating a historically specific Marxist analysis of colonial underdevelopment. The large masses of “land-workers and pauperized peasantry,” numerically the most significant and economically dispossessed among the colonized populace, are key to Roy’s vision of anticolonial liberation. He calls them a “floating population” (47) and their non-traditional relation to capitalist commodity production is worthy of note: “[t]he social production and economic life of India today are inseparably woven with the structure of world capitalism. The agricultural industry in India is an adjunct of the British industrial system, and for this reason, 72 per cent of her population engaged in the cultivation of the earth, to all interests and purposes, occupy the social position of proletariat in the wide scheme of capitalist exploitation” (101, my emphasis). This “agricultural” proletariat is different from the “traditional” proletariat in that while both are antagonistically placed against “the structure of world capitalism,” the “agricultural workers” are doubly antagonistic to the native landowning classes of Zamindars as well. As Roy argued in the Comintern, proletarian internationalism in the colony is not identical to the nationalism of the elite. In his materialist understanding of the colonial condition, Roy’s internationalist vision sought to chart an alternative trajectory from Eurocentric “universalism” as well as anticolonial cultural nationalism. His attention to questions of race and caste, as well as the articulation of a colonized “floating population” that is “partially absorbed either among the land workers or the city proletariat,” sought to move away from notions of a so-called “Western” proletariat class. Equally, his rejection of cultural nationalism, particularly the thought of Gandhi, placed national liberation struggle in a broader, internationalist framework. Gandhi and the national bourgeoisie’s staunch suspicion of political action of industrial and agricultural workers drew the

123 severest condemnation from Roy. As Memoirs notes, this position put him in disagreement, “a crucial point of difference” with Lenin at the Comintern.8 In a 1924 article, sardonically titled “Mahatma and Bolshevism,” Roy scathingly observed that while Bolshevism “forged ahead, breaking one link after another in the mighty chain of time-honored servitude… [Gandhism] gropes in the dark, spinning out ethical and religious dogmas” (Ray 311-316).9 Situated nearly three decades before Indian independence, Roy’s internationalist project made him a visionary much ahead of his time.

VI – Claude McKay, M.N. Roy and Internationalism of the Future Roy’s anticolonial politics of liberation, developed within the frame of early Soviet Communism, pushes against the idea of a Marxist Eurocentric “universalism”. In its stead, Roy develops a dialectical engagement with the conditions of the colonial periphery of the capitalist world system, and a materialist understanding of colonial “difference”. The literary form of the memoir offers a useful site for comprehending this political trajectory. The memoir connects the personal to the political, and Roy’s personal experiences as a professional revolutionary provide the crucible for his multiple political affiliations. Resisting Misch’s canonical description of the memoir as a genre, M.N. Roy’s role in the narrative is certainly not passive or lacking in agency. Nor is his narratorial persona reliant, as Julie Rak would hold, on postmodern fragmented

8

“Lenin believed that, as the inspirer and leader of a mass movement, he was a revolutionary. I maintained that, a religious and cultural revivalist, he was bound to be a reactionary socially, however revolutionary he might appear politically” (Memoirs 379). 9 M.N Roy, “Mahatma and Bolshevism”, Vanguard 5(2), 15 October 1924. Quoted in Sibnarayan Ray (ed.), Selected Writings of M.N Roy, Volume 2, 311 – 316. Gandhi responded by citing the need for centralized discipline – “Bolshevism or Discipline,” Young India, 1925. Roy’s own views on Gandhi evolved through the years. He later wrote of Gandhi in 1938 as “the political awakener of the Indian masses” but was still critical of “Gandhi’s philosophy (which) would not permit development of the spirit of revolt”. In 1948, after Gandhi’s assassination, Roy wrote of Gandhi’s appeal as “moral, humanist, cosmopolitan (although) the nobler core of his message could not be reconciled with the intolerant cult of nationalism, which he also preached” (in “The Message of the Martyr”, Feb 1948, “Homage to the Martyr”, April 1948 in Independent India, Qtd. Selected Works, Vol. I, 48.

124 subjectivity. The narrative of Memoirs reflects the shifts, disjunctures and translations incurred by the protagonist’s move from Hindu cultural nationalism to Marxist anticolonial internationalism. The episodic structure of the narrative formally underlines these shifts, as does the thematic trope of “rebirths”. The repeated “rebirths” of the protagonist translate to a renewed awareness of the negotiation between race and caste, and come to inflect Roy’s awareness of national liberation in a wider geo-political context of anti-capitalist revolution. A consideration of Memoirs crucially nuances Beverley’s (2004) concept of the testimonio: while the personal trajectory – rebirth -- of the protagonist parallels the changing political negotiations of anticolonial internationalism, the narrative makes it clear that such articulation cannot take place only for a single group or community (Beverley 16), but has to establish dialog with multiple radical projects with distinctive goals and ends. If the testimonio as a literary form is a direct expression of the political imperative of national liberation, as Beverley suggests, Roy’s Memoirs persuasively demonstrates that such expressions have to accommodate a dialectical understanding of difference, in order to avoid the exclusionary register of nationalist thought. I have tried to argue that is the imperative of internationalist translation that leads Roy, in India in Transition, to conceptualize anticolonial national liberation in India not in terms of the cultural nationalist politics of difference, a la Gandhi, but in materialist terms of combined and uneven development with a focus on the peasantry and the proletariat. We know that Roy and Claude McKay crossed paths in these years. While Roy’s Memoirs does not mention McKay, A Long Way From Home mentions two such encounters. In Moscow in 1922, McKay recalls being “photographed with the popular leaders of international Communism,” that included “Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek, Clara Zetkin, Sen Katayama, Roy” (A Long Way From Home 134). Then again in Berlin in 1923, he runs into Roy, who asks McKay to

125 “contribute an article to his paper about Communism and the Negro” (187). In a significant slippage which mixes up the two contexts of African-American and Indian anticolonial liberation, McKay informs the reader that he does not write the said article, being advised by an English friend to “keep away from the Indian movement because it is too ‘complicated’” (187, my emphasis). McKay’s autobiography is silent on the possibilities, or contours, of such an internationalist conversation. It is a matter of speculation whether either was familiar with the other’s writings. In spite of the lack of such evidence, it is possible to map the influential exchange of ideas between these two figures and elaborate on its future implications for “Afro-Asian” thought. As we saw, Roy’s inchoate analysis of caste is tied to the American politics of race. Equally, McKay’s critique of black cultural nationalism and the white chauvinism of American socialism find resonances in Roy's denunciation of Gandhian nationalism and critique of European socialism. These interactions came to sharply inflect Bolshevik policy. The Comintern adopted the “Black Belt” thesis in 1928, which recognized African-Americans in the American South as an “oppressed nation” and a “national minority” in the north of the country. In turn, such political perspectives positively shaped the Communist Party of USA (CPUSA)’s participation in the most notorious race-issue of the time, the Scottsboro trials in Alabama in 1931. The most significant linkage between Roy and McKay is the renewed understanding of proletarian politics that was fostered through the focus on race and national liberation. The imagination of a non-traditional proletariat engendered under the conditions of colonial-capitalist “unevenness” is articulated in Roy’s analysis of a “floating population” of “agricultural proletariat” and in McKay’s invocation of a “Black lumpen proletariat”. These formulations are not rejections but reconfigurations of

126 European Marxist perspectives; if they reject anything that is the culturalist idea of anticolonial thought as “difference” from the “West”. In the chapter that follows, I explore the subsequent lineages of such “Afro-Asian” Marxist formulations in the context of Naxalite challenges to postcolonial nationalism, illuminating the disjuncture between elite-led modernization and the radical internationalist critique of (failed) decolonization in India. Similar to an earlier generation of anticolonial internationalism inspired by Bolshevik praxis, the influence of Chinese Maoism in the 1960s would come to unsettle dominant versions of Third-Worldist solidarity. In turn, such concerns would bring new focus on the concept of the proletariat and its relation to race, national liberation and the aesthetic task of radical literary representation. In the next chapter, I take up the Indian perception of the Scottsboro trials in Utpal Dutt’s Bengali-language play Manusher Adhikarey [The Rights of Man] from 1968. Dutt’s theatrical work sought to fuse Brechtian political theater with the “folk” form of jatra, as it creatively linked Scottsboro to the Naxaliteled peasant insurgencies in West Bengal in a polyvalent network of anticolonial internationalism that characterized the radical epoch of the 1960s.

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CHAPTER THREE The Poetics and Politics of Blackness in India: Chanakya Sen’s The Morning After and Utpal Dutt’s The Rights of Man

Introduction: This chapter explores the role of Naxalite Leftist literary texts in forging internationalist solidarity in India against the grain of nationalist discourse in the decades of the 1960s and 70s. I discuss Utpal Dutt’s 1968 Bengali-language play Manusher Adhikare (translated as The Rights of Man, 2009), a theatrical production on the 1931 Scottsboro trials in Alabama, USA. I trace how Dutt’s play fashions a local cultural idiom utilizing indigenous South Asian forms of jatra [popular theater] and Brechtian epic theater to reconceptualize the trial of African-American teenagers in Scottsboro in relation to 1960s Black Power movements in the US and Maoist peasant insurgencies in India. I contextualize the intersection between transnational Blackness and Naxalite internationalist politics in India by analyzing another literary text in the first section of this essay, Chanakya Sen’s novel, The Morning After (1973). Sen’s novel allows for a critical unpacking of the racial hierarchies of “Brown over Black” propagated by Indian postcolonial nationalism (Burton 2012). A consideration of these texts by Sen and Dutt within their Marxist milieu underlines the role of Communist internationalism and its central importance in the critique of postcolonial nationalism. My reading of The Morning After focuses on Sen’s exposé of the racial politics of Indian nationalism to expand the critical frame of “transnational Blackness”.1 Contemporary

1

“Blackness” in this chapter is defined as a “color” whose social and political valences include and extend beyond the color of skin and/or Euro-American-centric definitions of race. Complementing theorizations of trans-Atlantic Blackness, I argue in this essay that transnational Blackness also has to be contextualized within the specific history

128 discussions of the idea of Blackness, when not limited exclusively to North American contexts, still largely rely on paradigms which conceptualize Blackness solely in relation to trans-Atlantic histories. Yet, as the influential scholar Manning Marable notes, “‘Blackness’ acquires its full revolutionary potential as a social site for resistance only within transnational and Pan-African contexts” (Marable 2008, 3). I locate Sen’s (and Dutt’s) writings in the Indian Marxist tradition of M.N. Roy, whose literary-political work of anticolonial internationalism and critique of racialized Indian nationalism I discussed in the previous chapter. Sen’s novelization of Indian nationalist attitudes and policies towards Africa in the “Bandung period” illuminates the Marxist imagination of “Afro-Asian” solidarity distinct from the version propagated by postcolonial nationalism in India. Literary texts such as those of Sen and Utpal Dutt played a key role in fostering an imagination of radical resistance to nationalist “third world” discourse and its perpetuation of global uneven development in the decades of the 1960s and 70s. The transnational conversations that these texts partake in provide sufficient cause, I argue, to extend trans-Atlantic and pan-African frameworks of Blackness to incorporate Indian (and Asian) contexts.2 Dutt’s play The Rights of Man positions Naxalite peasant insurgencies in this radical “Afro-Asian” constellation. The Naxalites in South Asia contributed to a Communist internationalist political constellation in the 1960s that saw Black radicals incorporate Maoism in

of Afro-Asian solidarity, following the Bandung Conference of 1955. In the Asian context, Blackness has a complex history of connotation mediated through indigenous religions, pre-European Indian Ocean trade routes between Africa and Asia, and lastly, the diffusion of European raciology in Asian anti-colonial nationalisms from the 19th century onwards. For a more elaborate discussion of this topic, see Prashad (2002: 9-19); D. Gupta (1991). For a recent discussion of the comparative critique of race beyond Eurocentric and trans-Atlantic paradigms, see Loomba (2009). 2 The scholarship on transnational Blackness, following Paul Gilroy’s (1993) early intervention, is substantial. These discussions by Edwards (2003a), Goyal (2010), and Baldwin (2002), complement and influence this chapter’s exploration of the literary imagination of Blackness in India. At the same time, there is a marked absence of scholarship on the role of the literary in shaping the imaginaries of transnational Blackness in either the Indian, or Asian, contexts.

129 their political projects, or to use Robin D.G Kelley and Betsy Esch’s (1999) provocative formulation, become “Black like Mao”. These included, for example, Black nationalists from the U.S. like Robert F. Williams, and Black Panther activists Huey Newton, Elridge Cleaver, Elaine Brown; in Africa, leading figures and movements of this trend included the Zanzibarian nationalist Abdulrahman Babu and the liberation struggle in Congo (Mullen and Ho 2008; Burgess 2010). The Naxalites propounded the Maoist/Tricontinentalist rhetoric of Asia, Africa and Latin America “encircling” the imperial centers of Europe and North America as a strategic means to attain global revolution. Complementing the U.S. Black Panther Party’s embrace of Mao and Panther support to the anti-imperialist wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, the Naxalites and the Dalit Panthers in India reciprocated in solidarity to Black struggles in the U.S. In this context a consideration of Dutt’s The Rights of Man reveals his understanding of colonial-capitalist unevenness in the peripheries and elaboration of the notion of “proletarian peasant masses” in the tradition of M.N. Roy. Peasant insurgency became the key to national liberation in the peripheries of the capitalist world-system. The intellectual lineage of this view came from Marxist internationalism, as much from Roy and Mariategui in Peru of an earlier generation, as Mao Zedong in China in the 1960s. For Dutt, as for the Naxalites, national liberation in the colonies and “absolute emancipation” from colonialism was tied to the Maoist notion of “peoples’ war.” The “universality” of peoples’ war is a key conceptual innovation in radical invocations of Maoism. As Mark Selden (1989) points out, “The political economy of people’s war embodied Mao’s most important theoretical and practical contributions to political economy … [T]he claim that a distinctive political economy of self-reliant, cooperative and egalitarian development had emerged in the base areas is valid, and its relevance is certainly not limited to China” (Selden 50). The Chinese experiment with liberated zones or “base areas” in

130 the 1930s provide the basis for this radical understanding of anticolonial politics. Tani Barlow (1997) remarks that Maoism revised the economism of Stalin-era Soviet Union and its policy of industrial development; as she notes, “Maoism privileged politics and formulated mass subjects on the basis of differentiated experiences of exploitation …[T]he difference between Maoism and Stalinism, then, was that Stalin retained a Euro-Marxian individual knower intact, whereas Mao Zedong Thought substituted for this individual Bolshevik knower collective mass subjects like ‘the people’, ‘the peasantry’, ‘woman’ and so on” (514). Similarly, Arif Dirlik (1998) argues that the success of the Tet Offensive launched by the People’s Army of Vietnam in 1968 in upsetting the US war machine, was a symbolic victory for both the Maoist notion of “a people’s army against the mightiest war machine created by advanced capitalism … and [gave] additional weight to a people-based developmental model, since both were products of Third World national liberation struggles against imperialism, of which the Chinese Revolution had been the first instance. Guerrilla warfare, which presupposed close integration of the people and the military, came to symbolize such struggles” (301). Dutt’s literary corpus, including his plays on Vietnam, the Congo as well The Rights of Man, reflects such an analysis and resonates with its internationalist preoccupations. In the Indian context, Dutt’s political emphasis on the revolutionary agency of the “people” influenced his aesthetic choices, both of theater as a means of communication with non-literate masses, and more specifically an appropriation of the indigenous form of jatra to forge a radical vocabulary. Dutt’s literary-political embrace of Naxalism is important in another aspect. As I discussed in the introduction to this dissertation, the peasant uprising of Naxalbari in 1967 decisively shaped the Subaltern Studies collective’s early historical work on colonial India. Dutt’s intervention by contrast, as we will see, sought to locate Naxalbari within a contemporary

131 internationalist constellation of “Afro-Asian” solidarity. In the light of Subaltern Studies’ subsequent postmodern turn and rejection of Marxism as “Eurocentric” (Chakrabarty 2000), interventions such as Dutt’s reveal an alternative trajectory of Naxalite influence that has received little attention in postcolonial scholarship on South Asia. As I will argue, Dutt is a representative figure of Naxalite and Marxist internationalism in India. In the decades of the 1960s and 70s, this political strand, influenced by Mao Zedong and others, sought to locate the project of national liberation, the “local” political struggles of the peasantry and socio-economic issues such as “caste” in relation to similar radical constellations in the “Global South,” combining Marxism with anticolonialism, in Asia, Africa and the US. A consideration of such lineages, uncharted by extant scholarship, sheds new light on the imbrication of radical aesthetic and political practices in South Asia, and their internationalist affiliations beyond “third world” nationalism.

II - The Racial Economies of Bandung – Chanakya Sen’s The Morning After A little-discussed novel exploring Indian attitudes towards Blackness, Chanakya Sen’s The Morning After (1973), opens with the following rhetorical question - “Imperialism has gone, hasn’t it? Asia and Africa are awake, aren’t they? Come together, stand together, fight together, no?” (1973: 1). This declaration of the formal demise of European colonialism and the beginning of Third-Worldist solidarity with Asia and Africa struggling together is undercut by the interrogative “no?” at the end, the question holding the promise of the present in suspension. The tension between promise and its fulfillment is highlighted in the predicament of the protagonist, “Solomon Kuchiro [who] was confused, an unknown fear clutching at his throat” (1). The novel introduces the confusion and fear of Kuchiro, a Ugandan sponsored by the Indian

132 state as an exchange student, to explore the inner complexities of “the young golden hopes in countless brown, yellow, black nonwhite, antiwhite hearts” in a “post-imperial multi-racial” world in the late 1950s (1). Kuchiro’s confusion and fear are in equal parts uncertainty about the house he stands before, the home of the Indian bureaucrat Mr. Sharma where he is to be a guest of the government of India, and his boyish response to Sheila, Mr. Sharma’s daughter, who approaches him in front of the house. The Morning After foregrounds the imbrication of domestic space with gender, as contributing to racist and statist re-inscriptions of Blackness in post-colonial India. The Morning After scrutinizes the halcyon moment of Third-Worldism following the Bandung Conference of 1955. In addition to the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung in 1955, the Afro-Asian Women’s Conference in Cairo (1961), the Non-Aligned Movement Conference in Belgrade (1961), and the Tricontinental Conference in Havana (1966), the last including Latin American countries, were important landmarks in the development of official Third-Worldism. Attended by 29 countries of Asia and Africa, Bandung shaped the “project” of the “ThirdWorld”, as Vijay Prashad terms it, in which “the peoples of Africa, Asia [and Latin America] dreamed of a new world” (Prashad 2007, xv). Contrary to such dreams of a new world, the morning that follows the darkness of European colonialism in Sen’s novel is marked by the reconfiguration of colonial-era hierarchies of race. In the only academic work on this neglected novel, Antoinette Burton (2012) has rightly emphasized the novel’s layered critique of Indian nationalism illuminating the “politics of racial citation … positing Africans as black and Indians as brown, or at the very least, as not-African and not-Black” (4). While Burton deserves credit for reclaiming the novel, she has missed out on the broader political formation of organized Marxism towards which the novel gestures: Chanakya Sen was the pseudonym for Bhabani

133 Sengupta, who was involved in the pro-Maoist China section of the Indian Communist movement. A consideration of such Marxist lineages, as we will see, complicates the relationship between postcolonial nationalism and the Communist Left. The citation of racialized hierarchy, positing “brown over black,” is illuminated right at the outset in the introductory meeting between Solomon Kuchiro and Sheila: He brought his palms together in a very Indian namaste [greeting], while a girlish snigger chattered through her [Sheila’s] head, and she asked herself whether he was ferocious, uncivilized, was he? Was he? With his ebony face, hewn, huge sloping forehead, waspish yellow eyes, did he practice witchcraft and dance naked around a fire? He bared his white shining teeth and said, “I am Solomon Kuchiro,” gravely, with all seriousness that Africa could command. “I’m Sheila,” she replied softly, like a substantial gazelle (he thought), giving all courtesies that Africa could demand (Sen 1973: 1). The distinction between brown and black is introduced here by contrasting the “girlish” Sheila with the “ferocious, uncivilized” Solomon. The narrative’s presentation of gender parodies, as we will see, the gendered tropes of postcolonial Indian nationalism. Sheila represents a feminized, brown vulnerability shying away like a “gazelle (he thought)”; in turn, Solomon’s male black presence is exemplified to Sheila by “[his] bared [ … ] white shining teeth”. Sheila and Solomon’s first impressions (fantasies) about each other are marked by a sexual tension that is deeply racialized. The ironic nature of this representation is underscored in the next few pages; the author uses the formal device of paralleling to compare this encounter to the intersecting of roads where “strangers” meet:

134 Rajpath, Janpath. Still better known by their old names, Kingsway, Queensway. Two roads on which brown and browner people move. Raj, the rulers, and Jan, the reproducing mass who is ruled … [F]or centuries the two hardly ever met except as strangers. Now they meet, collide and collude still very largely as strangers … branching into different species … [R]ajpath, the parasite on the body of Janpath, draws the necessary juices for power and paternity (3, emphasis added). The narrative posits a structural analogy here between brown over black (race) and “brown and browner” (class). The class distinction between the “rulers” and the “ruled” (“different species”) in post-colonial India that the two roads represent is predicated on a gendered and sexualized imagery of parasitism. The ruler and the ruled can meet only (“still very largely”) as “strangers,” to serve the Indian state’s (“Rajpath”) “draw[ing] [of] the necessary juices for power and paternity”. The “morning after” of Indian Independence is also the aftermath of that unequal, parasitic sexual encounter. As main characters, the text offers solidarity to those Indians and Africans in the postBandung era of the late-1950s whose lives are shaped by the statist appropriations of Afro-Asian solidarity. Solomon, like other African exchange students in India’s capital city, spends his time struggling to balance the contradictions between the Indian rhetoric of hospitality and race solidarity on one hand, and the very real racial discriminations, slurs and condescension he is subjected to on the other. The repeated categorization of Sheila and Solomon as respectively Indian and African alerts us to the ways in which their identities are constituted by Indian nationalist discourse, in which Africa remains undifferentiated and wholly backward. Moreover, the novel’s fictional presentation of a hypocritical Indian civility contrasted with African ferociousness gestures to an actual historical narrative about Indian perceptions of Africa. The

135 post-colonial Indian claim to a shared Afro-Asian platform, notably marked by Prime Minister Nehru’s promise of Indian and Asian “help” to African development, had its basis in elite Indian notions of cultural and racial superiority, and elite economic aspirations of control over Africa. In the year of Indian independence in 1947, eight years before Bandung, the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru declared, “We of Asia have a special responsibility to the peoples of Africa”, adding that “we must help them to their rightful place in the human family” (qtd. in A. Gupta 1970: 172). Similarly, in his Bandung speech in 1955, Nehru offered a ringing critique of the “infinite tragedy” of Africa in the “past few hundred years”; for him, the purpose of such a gathering as Bandung was clear: “we have to bear that burden [of tragedy], all of us. We did not do it ourselves, but the world has to bear it” (qtd. in Prashad 2002: 144-45). For Nehru and the India he sought to represent, this “burden” was clearly a reconfiguration of the European white man’s burden, to be assumed by some chosen postcolonial peoples (India). Nehru’s own description of “two hefty and giantly persons from the Gold Coast” among the Bandung delegates in a private letter to Edwina Mountbatten (wife of Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of British India) underscored this hierarchy (qtd. in Burton 9-10). The Morning After illustrates some of the subtle ways in which this hierarchical vision of South-over-South governmental power was put into practice. Mr. Sharma’s home represents the key site where the politics of the nation-state and patriarchy come together, a display that reinscribes the importance of gender in shaping spaces and notions of a racialized domesticity. Sulochona, Mr. Sharma’s wife and Sheila’s mother, tries her best to prevent her daughter from getting close to Solomon; in a conscious reference to the racialized and sexual anxieties produced by Bandung, she worries that Sheila’s college space and now even “home” is endangered by the threat of “all sorts of Persians, Arabs, and Burmese and Indonesians, and who

136 knows, African Negroes” (Sen 1973: 50). She refers to her guest in private as “the African” or “the Negro”, causing Sheila, despite her own anxieties about Solomon, to admonish her mother “Try to be nice to the Negro from the African jungle, mother … [T]hey don’t eat elderly women” (26, 21). In turn, Mr. Sharma himself tries to de-politicize these issues, insisting that his home in fact serves as a site of cross-cultural education. In Mr. Sharma’s own words, “People who come to visit India hardly get an opportunity to live with Indian families … [so] they return, in most cases, with very wrong ideas and impressions of modern India” (119). After hosting a number of visitors, “all … from the western world,” to correct that “impression,” Mr. Sharma declares to Solomon that his wife “Mrs. Sharma is very keen on entertaining a visitor from Africa or Asia, and I think it is a noble thought” (119). The search is for “a suitable African … well educated, well mannered and so on” (119). Solomon is the obvious answer. As a corollary to this narrative of racialized home-making, the novel focuses on the travails of Peter Kabaku, a Kenyan Mau-Mau leader who comes to New Delhi to garner support for his nation’s cause in “the land of Gandhi, the land of Nehru” (11). Again, the novel offers a parody of the Indian sense of superiority, as “Peter believed that his own country and even Africa could learn a great deal from the Indian experience” (10). As a Mau-Mau leader engaged in violent revolution, he is particularly fascinated by the contrarian example of M.K. Gandhi; “there must be a better, more enduring way to men’s freedom from the slavery of man … he [Kabaku] was happy to have an opportunity to learn [from] the Indian experience of nonviolence” (14). However, Kabaku is in for a terrible shock as he spends two years in India unsuccessfully searching for the Gandhian way of life. Instead of non-violence, he encounters the violence of a racist Indian nationalism.

137 Kabaku is plagued by sexual scandal, wrongfully accused of raping his Indian female lover and forced to leave New Delhi. His (unnamed) lover tells him bluntly, “My family will kill me if I marry a Negro …You ruin[ed] a helpless innocent woman like this with your ugly black seed” (111). Mr. Sharma, the bureaucrat, arranges to get rid of Kabaku (and Kabaku’s larger program of political alliance-building with the Indians) by arranging for him to work with a former freedom fighter, Miss Asha Dutt. Miss Dutt had been shunted off to a remote village (and political oblivion) by the post-colonial Indian state. Mr. Sharma informs Kabaku that she was a militant anti-colonial nationalist, like Kabaku himself, and had shot a British official – “Even the Mahatma [M.K. Gandhi] who condemned her act would not accept the brutal sentence awarded her … we freed her after Independence” (118). Sharma suggests to Kabaku, in a thinly-veiled allusion to his African masculinity, and mockery of Miss Dutt’s own beleaguered postIndependence freedom, that he (Kabaku) will “enjoy” Miss Sharma’s company although she is not physically attractive (119). Such post-colonial freedom is in sharp contrast to the heavily enclosed space in which Mr. Sharma’s own daughter is confined, beyond the reach of the outliers Kabaku and Miss Dutt, as well as the house guest Solomon. Disheartened at the turn of events, Kabaku asks himself, “Why should the black fall into a different category to the white, cream, yellow or brown?” (13). The rhetorical question is answered at the end of his nightmarish sojourn in India, as Kabaku mournfully concludes that despite political decolonization, “they [Indians] are quite happy to remain under British intellectual tutelage … [T]hey believe everything the British say about Africans, and their sympathy for us is just skin deep” (113-114). The “British intellectual tutelage” that Kabaku [and the novel] critiques manifests itself in the replication of registers of gender hierarchy, in the

138 persistent securing of domestic space and patriarchal family norms, and most importantly in the Indian internalization of British (and European) constructions of Africa. The Indian attitude towards Blackness was not simply a regurgitation of “British intellectual tutelage;” it was complicated by repeated attempts on the part of Indian nationalists, particularly among the Indian diaspora in Africa, to distinguish India from Africa. From the early 20th century onwards, for the elite sections of the Indian diaspora in Africa, the separation between Indian and its others represented by Blacks was integral to the self-definition of Indian anti-colonial nationalism. Through an elaborate appropriation and recoding of European notions of racial hierarchy that posited the lowly status of Africans, elite diasporic Indians sought to place themselves in a middling category of mediation between Europeans and colonized populations that included Africans, but also significantly, Indian working classes in Africa. To provide a few examples: A. M. Jeevanjee, proprietor of the East African Standard and leader of the Indian diaspora in Kenya noted in 1910, “I would go so far as to advocate the annexation of this African territory to the Indian Empire ... [L]et it be opened to us, and in a few very few years it will be a second India” (qtd. in Ogot 1973, 263). In a similar vein, the East African Indian National Congress (EAINC) requested the League of Nations for the annexation of Tanganyika, for “the purpose of Indian colonization” in 1919. Such claims also received validation from key mainland Indian nationalist figures like Sarojini Naidu, president of the Indian National Congress, the major nationalist organization in mainland India. In her Presidential Address to the EAINC in Mombasa, Kenya in 1924, Naidu addressed her audience as “an Indian speaker on Indian soil [sic]”, and noted that East Africa was indeed “a legitimate colony of the surplus of that great Indian nation” (qtd. in Gregory 1971: 264). Further, Naidu claimed rather brazenly that “[this was] a land which your ancestors gave to the citizens of the

139 country – citizens by the right of heredity, citizens by the right of tradition,” thus making an ideological and not simply economic case for Indian colonization. (See Gregory 264 for the full text of the speech). In both the eastern and southern parts of Africa, where British imperial control was significant, elite Indian business interests thus sought to further their own goals under the aegis of the imperial regime. Such Indian economic interests were furthered in turn by the racist ideology of brown over black. One prominent example features the Indian nationalist Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi during his stay in South Africa. In 1908-09, organizing inside Volksrust prison, M. K. Gandhi would write the following about the ill-treatment of Indian prisoners: The letter “N” [native] was then stamped on our clothes, and we were thus officially placed in the ranks of natives. We were prepared to suffer many indignities, but had never thought that we should be degraded to this pitch. We can very well understand that we could not be treated as the “Whites” but that we should be placed on the same level as the Kaffirs [blacks] appeared an insufferable insult to us. (qtd. in Hofmeyr 2007: 76) Gandhi further added that such a treatment “led us to conclude that our fight for justice, our Passive Resistance was neither unreasonable nor untimely” (qtd. in Hofmeyr 76). Published in the mainland Indian journal Modern Review, Gandhi’s indignant opposition to being labeled black, or (as he referenced them) by the pejorative racial slur “Kaffir,” is reinforced by his sexual anxiety of being sodomized by these black/Kaffir/native prisoners at night (Hofmeyr 2007: 75). Most revealingly, for Gandhi and his intended audience in India, the determination to continue “Passive Resistance” (“our fight for justice”) is legitimated precisely on the basis of the racist distinction between Indians and “kaffirs”.

140 Considering the centrality of Gandhi in the canon of Indian nationalist thought, such claims served another ideological function for post-colonial Indian nationalism. It is relevant to note here that M. K. Gandhi’s most important theoretical work was also written around the same time. In Hind Swaraj (1910), Gandhi posited a strong critique of western materialist culture, emphasizing both the spiritual superiority of Indian civilization and calling on Indians to prepare for Swaraj (self-rule) through the processes of purification and “Passive Resistance”. Paralleling the call for a separate space for Indians in South African prisons, strict emphasis was placed in Hind Swaraj on boundary-formation between pure pre-colonial Indian values and the values of foreign civilizations. The Gandhian anti-colonial rhetoric of nationalist distinction served to identify and distinguish Indian nationalist visions of “spiritual” civilization from the “scientific” versions advanced by European colonialism, even though India could take over and continue the civilizing mission of the West given its spiritual superiority vis-à-vis the “Kaffirs” of Africa. The Indian nationalist emplotment of Gandhian thought is parodied in The Morning After, as Mr. Sharma tells Solomon, “You must follow the Gandhian way. After all, the Mahatma is as much yours as he is ours. He started his unique experiment in South Africa, remember?” (Sen 1973: 29). As an official representative of the post-colonial Indian state, Mr. Sharma is quite literally the figure who embodies the superior claims of Indian civilization. However, his effort at promoting Indian superiority over Africa fails decisively; both Solomon and Peter Kabaku leave India at the end of the novel, disillusioned and frustrated with what India had to offer them beyond state rhetoric. Sen’s novel has to be read in conversation with, and as gesturing towards, Maoist currents in India that sought to resist rather than align with the dominant racial paradigm of post-

141 colonial nationalism. I would argue for situating Sen’s novelistic critique of post-colonial India nation-state alongside his non-fictional work on the Indian Communist movement. Chanakya Sen aka Bhabani Sengupta wrote an enthusiastic endorsement of the pro-China Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front, which was elected to office in the Indian province of West Bengal in 1967 (Sengupta 1979). Such oppositional formations gained greater ground in the late 1960s and 1970s in the context of caste and peasant movements in India, interrogating and calling to scrutiny elite appropriation of “third world” solidarity.

III – Naxalism and Transnational Blackness – “Armed Negro Farmers” in Utpal Dutt’s The Rights of Man By the late-1960s and early 70s, two important intellectual-political formations sought to move beyond the narratives of elite nationalism. The first was the effort to situate South Asian working class immigrants in the United Kingdom in identification with Black Power. The second was the movement of Dalit [former untouchable] groups in India to articulate an analogy between race oppression of Africans and the African diaspora, and caste oppression in India. In the United Kingdom, the work of the Sri Lanka-born activist Ambalavaner Sivanandan, founder-editor of the influential Marxist journal Race and Class, was significant in shaping the ideas of “Black Britain”. Sivanandan argued that the interests of Asian, especially South Asian immigrant workers in the UK, lay not in identification with elite nationalism at home but with revolutionary Black Power. In a series of essays that included “Fanon: the Violence of the Violated” (1967), “Black Power: Politics of Existence” (1971) and “The Liberation of the Black Intellectual” (1977), Sivanandan explored the significance of Blackness as a political and cultural concept that went beyond the phenotypical, noting that “[since] racism

142 inherent in white society is determined economically, but defined culturally”, resistance to such cultural “definition” would necessitate the activation of a “[global] revolutionary culture” (Sivanandan 1977: 340). Sivanandan’s vision of a global “revolutionary culture” involved “the participation of the masses, not just Blacks”. Equally, it was marked by a dialectical interaction between racial and class-based solidarity. He argued that “blacks [and those self-identifying as Black] must through the consciousness of their color … arrive at a consciousness of class; and the white working class must in recovering its class instinct … arrive at a consciousness of racial oppression” (340-341). In contrast to claiming fixed racial identities, Sivanandan attempted to extend the trope of Blackness as the basis of an internationalist collective politics or, to use his own words, “to blacken the language” of culture (341). There were similar attempts in India to infuse Marxist internationalist politics with the political and cultural notion of a transnational Blackness, particularly by the Dalit Panther Party, founded in 1972 on the model of the Black Panther Party in the United States. As the contemporary journal United Asia observed, “It may be that the American negro is fighting not only for himself and for his brethren in America but for all the … blacks of the world whether they be in America or in India” (qtd. in Slate 2012: 134). The Dalit Panther Manifesto published in 1973 sought to define a “Third Dalit World” which complicated elite Third-Worldism. “[D]ue to the hideous plot of American imperialism, the Third Dalit World, that is, oppressed nations, and Dalit people are suffering” (“Dalit Panther Manifesto” 1986). The Dalit Panthers defined “Dalit” as referring not only to former untouchables, as per the conventional definition, but also “working people, the landless and poor peasants, [and] women”. The “Third Dalit World” included contemporary national liberation struggles against imperialism, “Cambodia, Vietnam, Africa, [and] Latin America”. Finally, the literary experiments of Dalit Panther poet-activists like

143 Namdeo Dhasal and Arjun Dangle in Marathi-language poetry, sought to bring their politics in conversation with aesthetics, formulating a concrete praxis of blackening the language of culture.3 These politico-aesthetic concerns of transnational Blackness are prominently reflected in the theatrical productions of the Indian playwright Utpal Dutt. Dutt’s Bengali-language play Manusher Adhikare, a dramatization of the Scottsboro trials in the U.S., was first performed in the city of Calcutta in 1968, and has been recently translated into English as The Rights of Man (2009). The Scottsboro trial of 1931 involved a 19-year-old Black teenager, Haywood Patterson, and his seven Black friends who were falsely accused of the rape of two white women inside a train compartment near Scottsboro, Alabama. Dutt’s adaptation marked an important literary instance of Indian solidarity with the African-American struggles in the U.S., and beyond. In plays such as The Rights of Man and several others – Imprisoned Congo (1967), Invincible Vietnam (1967), and Crucified Cuba (1968), Dutt’s adaptation and appropriation of both indigenous and internationalist aesthetic traditions was a constitutive aspect of his political embrace of radical Third-Worldism. The elaboration of a poetics of transnational Blackness in Dutt’s medium of choice, theatre, is equally significant. As Sudipto Chatterjee and Neilesh Bose, the English translators of The Rights of Man point out, “theatre in South Asian languages [is] a lively site for critique, engagement and encounter … in ways not captured in novels, films or banal notions of cultural difference” (Chatterjee and Bose 2009: 25). Reminding us of the contemporary gaps in postcolonial literary studies, Chatterjee and Bose posit that theatre gestures towards alternative political and aesthetic practices. 3

The poetry of Namdeo Dhasal, in particular, has been reclaimed in recent scholarly discussion, and translated into English (see Dhasal). For a discussion of the local historical context of Dhasal and the Dalit Panthers, see Rao (2009), esp. 182 ff.

144 The Scottsboro trials had been the subject of political drama in the U.S., with the first productions, simply titled Scottsboro, mounted by the German Proletariat Theatre as early as 1931 in New York City. This was followed by the one-act play by Langston Hughes, Scottsboro Limited, in 1932. A decade after Dutt’s production of The Rights of Man in India in 1968, the Amiri Baraka-led Anti-Imperialist Cultural Union revived Hughes’s version of the play in the U.S. The interaction between Communist proletarian theatre and Black intellectuals such as Hughes in the 1930s and Baraka et al in the Black Arts Movement in the 1ate 1960s and 70s, found its transnational resonance in India in Dutt’s work. Dutt’s formal politics, previously indebted to the German theatre of Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator, and Indian Leftist agitprop [agitation and propaganda] theatrical traditions of the Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association (IPTA), incorporated a new emphasis on radical Afro-Asian aesthetics and politics in the 1960s. At the same time, the impact of transnational Blackness in Dutt’s work marked important differences from his past work with the Communist-led IPTA. Dutt himself noted about his new theatrical practice, “[I]n the IPTA plays, whenever the proletarian hero walked on stage, conflict and drama disappeared – an oversimplified, anemic, spiritless symbol of Revolution gesticulated” (Dutt 2009: 3). In contrast to the IPTA’s emphasis on socialist realism and general top-down approach of educating the masses, Dutt’s formal and political interventions in the 1960s sought to utilize a creative, participatory mode of theatre. In his plays on Vietnam and Congo as well as The Rights of Man, Dutt moved away from the proscenium form and its defining separation between the stage and the audience to incorporate the indigenous Bengali performance style of jatra [popular theater] in his version of transnational Blackness. Dutt’s version of the jatra form, incorporating the traditional emphasis on a “popular” vocabulary,

145 peculiar mix of melodrama and realism, and structural flexibility of performance space, was designed to mobilize audience participation to the enactments on-stage. As Chatterjee and Bose note in their introduction to The Rights of Man, “[the categories of] realism and melodrama in postcolonial theatre do not neatly arrive in package(s) [closed off from each other] … [F]or a playwright [like Dutt] whose history is shaped by the dislocations of a rising fascism … but also by an altogether colonially inflected experience of the theatre, melodrama and realism do not oppose each other in stark evolutionary terms” (2009: 18). The indigenous form of jatra articulated, for Dutt, a “national communist theatre” that acted as a “corrective to the failed project of Indian Independence,” and posited a dialectical understanding of the audience: “‘the people’ as both a class entity and a non-class national [cultural] entity” (qtd. in Bannerji 1998: 81). Dutt noted that the combination of indigenous form and transnational content served a political function; “our program was to bring the stories of gallant revolutionary struggles of another people to our own people so that they too will be inspired to fight” (Dutt 1971: 225). In this regard, Dutt’s conceptualization of the interaction between culture and transnational consciousness enabling solidarity sought to resist the cultural appropriations of the popular – a national cultural entity as he saw it – by Indian postcolonial nationalism. In The Rights of Man, Dutt re-contextualizes the events of 1931 to suit his own project of 1960s transnational Blackness. The play opens in the contemporary time period (1968) in the city of Boston where armed Black militants, men and women, patrol the “liberated zones” in the city, refusing entry to any State personnel. Apprehending a U.S. Marine who had illegally entered the liberated zone the previous morning and assaulted a Black woman, the militants discuss the proper punishment to be meted out to the Marine. They tell the Marine, “Black America is America. You kicked us around for the longest time” (42). In a reference to the

146 Vietnam War, they accuse the Marine of perpetuating the same horrors on the people of Vietnam as black peoples had historically suffered in the U.S. Even as the men in the militant group hesitate about punishing the captured Marine with a “death sentence”, their female comrade reminds them that they must, indicating that the group has this choice of “debating justice” at the present moment only because they were armed (41-42). The woman’s comment on the impossibility of justice for the unarmed opens up the narrative to a flashback that is the main part of the play. The opening meditation on securing the rights of man (interestingly, the Bengali word for man in Dutt’s original title – manush – is gender neutral, closer to the English usage of the word human than to man or mankind) is followed by the Scottsboro trials. The setting is the Deep South of the early 1930s; the text points out that the white community in Scottsboro is unwilling even to admit the accused to a proper trial, preferring to lynch them instead. As one of the men who helped to apprehend the accused group at the train station exclaims, “Blacks will always remain at the bottom [in America], that’s God law!” (53). Following a series of near-misses, where Patterson and group are nearly lynched, the accused are finally brought to court. In the context of national and international attention given to this trial, the International Labor Organization (ILO), affiliated to the Communist Party of USA, seeks the help of a famous New York lawyer, Samuel Leibowitz, to defend the accused. The Rights of Man makes it amply evident that the trial is indeed a show trial. Leibowitz (portrayed by Utpal Dutt in the 1968 productions) and his wife arrive from New York to incensed white mobs in Scottsboro, who are prepared to lynch “this nigger-loving Jew kike” (60) along with the accused. As the trial commences, the text underscores the similarity of the court room setting to a lynching ground; the local community of men, women and children line up

147 excitedly in anticipation, shouting to each other, “I’ll eat while watching [the trial]” to “Over here! I saved you a seat” (62). The mood is that of a popular festival, perhaps self-reflexively gesturing to the ways in which the “popular” can be appropriated by the cultural mechanisms of exclusionary nationalism in Dutt’s own post-colonial Indian context. Complicating once again the parameters of Blackness as phenotypical identity, the play’s central protagonist is the Jewish-born Leibowitz. Drawing on an expert knowledge of the law and powerful logical analysis, Leibowitz punches a hole in every one of the prosecution’s arguments to convincingly demonstrate the innocence of the accused. Despite his superb legal performance, the prosecution, the judge, the jury, as well as the courtroom audience refuse to accept Leibowitz’s arguments. They base their own position(s) on the racist and logically unarguable point that a Jew’s words (or a Negro’s) cannot be accepted over that of the two white female accusers. As the Attorney General Knight flatly puts it, “I don’t want to hear a nigger tell me white women lie” (60). Despite all evidence to the contrary, Haywood Patterson and his friends are convicted of rape and sentenced to death according to Alabama State law. The aesthetic and political sophistication of The Rights of Man as a text of critique lies, it has to be noted, not in positing a positive didactic message, but in exposing to its audience precisely the opposite, that is the improbable “logic” of racialized justice. As Knight remarks towards the end of the play, addressing the fictional audience of the courtroom and arguably the real audience of the play, “The entire hearing was conducted right in front of you – whether or not he is guilty, put him to death. Because he is not an obedient, proper nigger. By killing that nigger, show the rest of the world that Alabama is white man’s country” (Dutt 2009: 133, emphasis added). Leibowitz’s failure within the very system that proclaims him a legal expert points to the logical limits of this justice system.

148 In situating this narrative of events within the networks of distant yet contiguous spaces, Black Power in contemporary Boston and Dutt’s Indian audience, Dutt’s text achieves a specific purpose. Following Haywood’s last statement to the court – “You are mistaken … the day my brothers will have guns in their hands, I will live again” (137) – the Black Power militants in contemporary Boston proclaim at the end of the play: Hail to the black poet! Sing me a new song, powered with the roar of the clouds and lightning – a song challenging the arrogant killers to war. Sing about strong people, about an even stronger history. May the youthful march for the sun and the barricades of armed Negro farmers mark the rhythm and tempo of that song … a song for all the black people who are hungry for freedom, all those who hunger after a war of freedom! (138) The denouement’s allusion to “armed Negro farmers,” paradoxical in the urban context of Boston, relies on the activation of a different set of references for its aesthetic effect, namely contemporary peasant uprisings in Dutt’s own local context, the province of West Bengal in India. Like the Dalit Panthers’ formulation of Third Dalit World, the creative imagination of “armed Negro farmers” marks the attempt, by the likes of Dutt, to inflect the transnational conversation on Blackness with their own specific “local” concerns. For Dutt’s local audience, armed [Negro] farmers -- shoshostro krishok in Bengali -resonated with the contemporary message of the Naxalite movement. The Naxalites called for a krishok biplab [peasant revolution] in India, rejecting the developmental path of post-colonial Indian nationalism. Naxalism sought to locate the peasant uprisings at Naxalbari and elsewhere in South Asia, in the context of what Arif Dirlik terms the anticolonial and anticapitalist struggles of the “global 1960s” (Dirlik 1998). The Black struggles in the US were no exception.

149 Underlying this strand of solidarity was the invocation of a revolutionary “Red” Asia; as the Naxalite English-language mouthpiece Liberation noted in 1970, “The white people and the black people and the Indians [Native Americans] are awakening [to US oppression in Asia] …. [T]he people of all countries in Asia are confronted with this historical task: Unite closely, support and assist each other, and wage a fierce and protracted struggle” (“People of Asia” 1970: 30). Writing in the aftermath of the Naxalbari uprising of 1967, Charu Mazumdar, chief ideologue of the Naxalites, would emphatically note that “the peasant[s] fought not for land or crops, but for political power”. Mazumdar’s advocacy of Maoist “peoples’ war” posited a renewed struggle for national liberation some two decades after Indian Independence: as he noted, “the revolutionary peasant struggle in India has given the clear-cut answer that the development and expansion of guerrilla warfare is possible only by relying on the poor and landless peasants” (Mazumdar 1969: 9, 11). A year before The Rights of Man, Utpal Dutt staged a production on the Naxalbari peasant uprising. This play, Teer [“Arrow” 1967], dramatized the powerful call-to-arms of lower-caste peasants in Naxalbari in northern West Bengal. The clarion call of Maoist revolutionary theory suggested that the peasantry in Naxalbari and the Black Panther militants in Boston, to paraphrase Utpal Dutt, were engaged in the same struggle, forging a radical internationalism that sought a definitive break with dominant nationalism.

IV – Conclusion A consideration of Chanakya Sen and Utpal Dutt, whose work have received relatively less attention in postcolonial scholarship, illustrates how literary forms such as the novel and drama were deployed in post-colonial India to negotiate transnational Black solidarity and Marxist internationalism. These figures, and texts such as The Morning After and The Rights of

150 Man, are significant in that they extend the discussion of Blackness beyond the Black Atlantic model to incorporate little-discussed contexts of race, caste and peasant struggle in India. Sen’s novel highlights how the postcolonial alliances of Afro-Asia, following the Bandung conference, were contested in ways that complicate simplistic notions of “third world” solidarity. In its critical depiction of racialized forms of postcolonial nationalism, The Morning After holds important implications for the understanding not only of radical literary and political histories, but also of our contemporary moment. Today, given the multicultural face of capitalism and the integration of “Global South” countries such as India and China into the global capitalist order, it is necessary to take stock of these historical contestations. Both India and post-Maoist China, transitioning from being (differently accentuated) proponents of third-worldism to emerging capitalist powers, have been significant players in what Padraig Carmody (2011) calls “The New Scramble for Africa,” a reconfiguration of 19th- century European imperialist plunder involving the massive exploitation of resources and land in sub-Saharan Africa by Indian and Chineseowned corporations. Such neo-colonial practices are often guised under euphemistic labels of “South-South collaboration,” with the flagstaff of Bandung serving to provide the historical and political legitimacy of “Afro-Asian” solidarity. A closer scrutiny of the actual terms of engagement engendered by Bandung, a critical task that Sen’s novel undertakes, reveals a clear separation between the inchoate forms of neo-colonial nationalisms such as that propagated by India, and the more radical internationalist visions of solidarity such as that of Naxalism. The Morning After offers a Marxist critique of elite Indian nationalism ranging from M.K. Gandhi to Jawaharlal Nehru, and its racial-economic politics of “Brown over Black”. Such a literary and political vision continues to be vitally relevant in the present moment. On the other hand, Dutt’s

151 The Rights of Man renews the call for national liberation and for reclaiming radical internationalist solidarities. Artistic practice is posited as an integral part of the politics of emancipation: the denouement of The Rights of Man expresses this eloquently in a dual testimony to the liberatory potential of artistic praxis and the politically-committed artist – “Hail to the black poet! Sing me a new song … a song for all the black people who are hungry for freedom, all those who hunger after a war of freedom!” (138). Dutt’s refashioning of the theatrical form of jatra in particular offers a remarkable example of the intersection between politics and aesthetics fostered by the Naxalite movement. Dutt’s work illuminates a vital alternative mode of engagement to dominant models of postcolonial literary theory, neither focusing exclusively on “writing back to the Empire” (Ashcroft et al 1989), nor rejecting “European” modes of thought in search of a culturally pure indigeneity. If The Rights of Man returns to the indigenous form of jatra in its search for an “authentic” mode of politico-cultural expression, it does so by formally juxtaposing the indigenous jatra to the “European” epic theater of Bertolt Brecht as well as the Black Arts movement of Amiri Baraka. Dutt’s conceptual emphasis on the “people” as the real agents of national liberation is similarly non-exclusionary; it seeks to transpose inter-national struggles of African-Americans to his own local context of West Bengal. Dutt’s refashioning of the category of “peasant” [krishok] also offers a much more nuanced understanding of Naxalite-led peasant insurgency and its relation to postcolonial nationalism than is afforded by extant scholarship. Leading Subalternist scholars such as Ranajit Guha (1988; 2011) for example, locate the Naxalite movement of the 1960s and 1970s as a watershed moment that manifested the failure of dominant nationalism in India in relation to the emergence of “subaltern peasant consciousness”. As I discussed in the introduction to the

152 dissertation, the work of scholars such as Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) have posited the concept of subaltern peasant consciousness as a “postcolonial” rejection of European modernity, displacing the Marxist critique of global capitalism to a poststructuralism-inflected argument about colonial “difference”. Yet a consideration of the historical moment of Naxalbari in the late 1960s and the literary work of the likes of Utpal Dutt manifests a much more complex picture. Specifically, such a consideration reveals that the Naxalite challenge to Indian postcolonial nationalism was conceptualized in relation to contemporary anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist global struggles: rather than rejecting Marxism as “European,” Naxalism sought to engage in conversation with Black Panther radicalism, Maoist “peoples’ war” and similar struggles in Africa, Asia and Latin America for liberation from colonial-capitalist exploitation. The problematic of peasant insurrection in Naxalism was posed squarely in relation to a revolutionary Marxist analysis of combined and uneven development in the peripheries of the capitalist worldsystem. The recovery of such internationalist genealogies and conversations constitutes an important scholarly task in the re-evaluation of the Naxalite movement. A final important implication of the Naxalite theorization of the peasantry bears mention. As I discussed in the previous chapter on M.N. Roy, a dialectical analysis of the category of “peasant” within the materialist framework of combined and uneven development locates the peasantry in relation to, rather than divorced from, the urban proletariat. The rural countryside is dialectically related to the city, rather than constituting its differential “other”. Such an understanding of the interaction between the country and the city, almost entirely absent in postcolonial appropriations of Naxalism, led the Naxalites to a re-consideration of the urban proletariat as a related if differently configured form of subalternity, similar yet different to the rural peasant. As I will discuss in the chapters below, the urban proletariat emerged as a key if

153 little-discussed site of Naxalite theory. A materialist understanding of peripheral modernity, similar yet distinct from its metropolitan forms, led Naxalism to a renewed focus on and elaboration of the politico-aesthetic figure of the “lumpen”.

154

CHAPTER FOUR Lumpen Aesthetics and the City 1: Binoy Ghosh’s Naksha Sketches

This chapter outlines the condition of emergence of a cultural phenomenon in India that in a later chapter I call “lumpen aesthetics.” Marx himself had disparaged the so-called “lumpenproletariat” as social “refuse,” and generated long, colorful lists of its members in which he included “ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars” and numerous other persons supposedly incapable of revolutionary class consciousness (1975:75). In the first half of the twentieth century, many participants in international Marxist movements followed Marx’s lead when writing about the urban political scene, while at the same time inflecting (and nuancing) it in local terms. Yet during the long scope of anticolonial national liberation struggles of the 20th century, the figure of the lumpen received fresh consideration of its revolutionary potential. This was primarily the contribution of those Marxist strands which analyzed social forms in the terms of combined and uneven development. The lumpen came to be re-contextualized in terms of the political-economy of underdevelopment: as such, the disjuncture of the lumpen from the means of production, came to be acknowledged as a constitutive condition of peripheral modernity with its characteristic overlap between multiple forms and modes of social relationality, capitalist and non-capitalist. Here I focus on one such mid-20th century Bengali Marxist: Binoy Ghosh. I discuss how the “lumpen” emerges as a contradictory inhabitant of urban space in Calcutta, negotiated in Ghosh’s refashioning of the literary naksha, a 19th century hybrid of English satire and Persianate naqshah blending parody and hyperbole. The literary genre of the naksha formally

155 parallels the interaction between multiple cultural and temporal forms of urbanity, while revealing at the same time, the tensions in Left attempts to conceptualize and mobilize the itinerant poor and “deviant” classes. A consideration of Ghosh, I argue, prepares ground for a global history of the lumpen, by offering a specifically Bengali/Indian inflection of the term essential to understanding the later impact of Maoist Naxalism on the urban underclass. This latter aspect is discussed in the next chapter. As these chapters will demonstrate, the figure of the lumpen is elevated in India over time to the position of urban subaltern par excellence, a universal political subject in its alienation from capitalist urbanity yet particular in its exclusion from the mode of production. The “emergence” —in literature and the city-- of such a seemingly unlikely political subject cannot be understood, I argue, without careful attention to the specific local and cultural (superstructural) inflections of the lumpen figure in sites such as Calcutta. Such an investigation alerts us to the specific contours of urbanization and proletarianization in the colonial and postcolonial peripheries.

I – Representing the Lumpen “The Lumpenproletariat are all those who have no secure relationship or vested interests in the means of production” – Elridge Cleaver (1970:8) “The name lumpenproletariat thus suggests less the emergence of a class than a sartorial category” – Peter Stallybras (1990:70) Through his provocative framing of the lumpenproletariat as “a sartorial category,” Peter Stallybras (1990) focuses our attention on an aspect of the lumpen (literally, “rags and tatters”) that largely eluded Marxian discussions rooted exclusively in political economy, namely, ways

156 of seeing, or “representation”. Stallybras contextualizes Marx’s infamous description of the lumpen, “pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers …” (1975:75) in relation to contemporary literary representations by “nineteenth-century commentators, novelists and painters” (Stallybras 70), highlighting (rather than underplaying) the dialectical interaction between the political – the socalled superstructure -- and the economic. In 19th century London and Paris, the staggering volume of representation of the urban poor, in fiction and art by the likes of Jules Janin, Victor Hugo and William Mulready among others, grew out of and in turn informed the economic relations of an emergent capitalist modernity and its mediating effect on urban space - the city: “[T]he nature of th[ese] representations insistently raised the problem of the spectator’s own relation to it … [T]he homogeneity of the bourgeois subject is here constituted through the spectacle of heterogeneity [of the poor]” (73). Stallybras points to the multiple ways in which such representations seek to negotiate the social distance between the bourgeois narrator (subject) and the underclasses (object); at times by claiming “irreducible class difference,” but also in other instances through “theatrical” modes of masquerade – “[t]he theatricalization of the bourgeois subject is co-extensive with the homogenization of the city’s poor as a distinct race” (74, original emphasis). In this way, Stallybras’ specific attention to literary forms (masquerade among others), complicates and nuances the racialized lumpen subject, pace Fanon. In a different register, the Black Panther Elridge Cleaver draws on a similar trope of (racialized) seeing, to theorize the “revolutionary” class of the “Black lumpen” in 1970s urban America. The lumpen is the “left-wing of the proletariat”, Cleaver posited, unlike the unionized working class of “the right”. The centrality of race to this lumpen subject, as Frantz Fanon observed astutely in The Wretched of the Earth, follows from the historic situatedness of the “colony” – “[d]ecolonization unified this [colonial] world by a radical decision to remove its

157 heterogeneity, by unifying it on the grounds of nation and sometimes race” (2004:10). Elridge Cleaver, writing in the context of the Black Panther movement of the late 1960s, attempts to extend these insights to conceptualize (unify) Black America as the lumpen; he terms it the revolutionary class par excellence, “without vested interests in the means of production”. In what follows, I utilize the insights of Stallybras, Fanon et al to focus on the literary work of the Bengali Marxist, Binoy Ghosh. Attention to literary representation, I argue, reveals the contradictory ways in which the lumpen is conceptualized at the moment of its “emergence” (Williams 1977). I posit moreover that such contradictions follow from the unifying impulse “of nation and sometimes race” that Fanon observes in Algerian decolonization. In extending transnational (and transtemporal) frameworks of the figure of the lumpen, I complicate Nicholas Thoburn’s recent intervention in the debate: reversing the conventional distinction between a (Marxist) proletariat and a (postmodernist) lumpen, Thoburn (2003) writes that “the lumpenproletariat is actually … oriented toward the maintenance of identity, and … it is the proletariat where difference emerges (48, original emphasis). As I demonstrate, there is constant tension and overlap between the two categories, “proletariat” and “lumpen proletariat” in the context of the (post)colony. Arguing for the importance of Ghosh’s literary work, this essay poses a dialectical mode of analyzing difference (and identity) by paying attention to the specificity of the lumpen in Calcutta, both in terms of culture as well as literary genre and form and, simultaneously, locating it in relation to transnational “Western” and post-colonial histories.

II – Vernacular Debates on Modernity and Proletarian Literature One feature of Marxism in Bengal in the 1940s and 50s, Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, was its acceptance of the European nature of modernity guised as universal, where “modernity,

158 apart from the differences imposed by different national histories, was universally the same all over the world … [T]he Modern Age all over the world undeniably stemmed from modern European history … [T]he most glorious characteristic of the spirit of the modern age [according to this view] was its emancipation from dogmas which had marked the ceaseless pursuit of scientific knowledge in modern times” (Chakrabarty 1995: 754). Such a view does little to elaborate the complex, and in some cases, contradictory strategies through which questions of modernity and difference were negotiated by Marxist intellectuals, nor does it pay adequate attention to the cultural, aesthetic and political locales in which such enunciations took place. In conflating a notion of shared and singular modernity with “European” understandings of modernity, Chakrabarty ignores combined and uneven development, and is therefore unable to adequately conceptualize the notion of difference, which I have discussed in the introduction to the dissertation. The debates and literary productions of Marxist Bengali intellectuals alert us to some of the key aspects of the Marxist engagement with modernity in South Asia, allowing us to nuance and complicate Chakrabarty’s reading. In the Marxist circles in Bengal in the late colonial and early postcolonial periods, between the 1930s and 1950s, the city came to be perceived in antithetical terms, as part of a shared global experience of capitalist modernity, and equally, in terms of the fostering of a rule of colonial difference. On one hand, intellectuals and artistes sought to embrace the global aesthetic modalities of Romanticism and High Modernism and situate “their” city within the paradigm of a global modernity. On the other, they struggled to come to terms with colonial difference, manifested most squarely in the question of “modern consciousness” or absence thereof, in the “masses”. If the city was the concrete spatial form of a shared capitalist modernity, would its subjective correlate, the modern industrial proletariat, be

159 similarly conceived to the metropolitan proletariat of capitalism’s core? This was a political question, and one which troubled socially-committed Marxist artists dedicated to finding an alternative to the religion-based, “bourgeois” Indian anti-colonial nationalist movement. A specific ‘literary’ debate provides clues to this dilemma. At the second annual convention of the All-India Progressive Writers Association in 1938, held at Calcutta’s Ashutosh College, the noted progressive intellectual Buddhadeb Bose, in his English language address titled “Bengali literature today: Position of Modern Writers,” bemoaned “the greatest imaginable gaps [that exist] between the working class and the intelligentsia”. Bose went on to admit that, The fact that Bengali literature is produced by the bourgeoisie and for the bourgeoisie need not depress us; for a piece of genuine literary work must be above all honest … [W]e have the great virtue of not having any illusion. We feel that the present state of things is intolerable and a new social order must come in its wake. And in the meanwhile? Suffering, boredom and horror in life, and in literature (qtd in Dhananjoy Das 38). Following Bose’s observation of the “intolerable state of things,” Samar Sen, Marxist poet and magazine editor, concurred in the same convention that “progress” [pragati] could be achieved only in a future socialist society and not in the present one of capitalism. Sen added further that the role of the author did not lie in producing “excitement-inducing” propaganda literature for the “working class”. Using T.S Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) as an example, Sen argued “In Defense of Decadents” that the role of the socially-committed author had to be confined to representing, through his works, the “decadence” of modern petty-bourgeois life that was the direct result of capitalist alienation.

160 Both of these views were challenged by the poet and journalist Saroj Dutta, a contemporary intellectual who became one of the foremost Bengali ideologues of the Naxalite movement in the late 1960s. We will have cause to examine him in greater detail in the next chapter. In 1938, responding to the debate above, Dutta ridiculed Sen for adopting Eliot’s example and “passing off his [Eliot’s] Catholic conservative fatalism as Marxist analysis” (24). According to Dutta, merely representing the “decadence” produced by capitalism was not enough. The task of literature was to push against the limits of that “experience” by virtue of what Dutta termed the artist’s “subjective initiative”. Criticizing the idea of an “inadequate consciousness,” both for the ‘Marxist artist’ and the ‘working masses,’ Dutta noted that “consciousness and subjective initiative are not the same thing … [A]rtists have the power, the tradition, and the legacy to address the real audience, who are not simply the masses or the dozen”. For Dutta, in contrast to Eliot’s “surrealist and anarchic take on modernity,” the aesthetic task was to undertake “Lenin’s idea of the literature of exposure” of the real conditions of existence of human life (Dutta 24, 32). Notwithstanding the differences of opinion, certain underlying themes and paradoxes can be teased out from this conversation, one of many that marked the interaction between an avantgarde aesthetic and Marxist political praxis in Bengal. The first is the locating of Calcutta as an intellectual space animated by a shared modernity, invoking figures paradoxically as distant and as “familiar” to the Marxist intellectual as Eliot on one hand, and Lenin on the other. In fact, it is possible to say that between the progressive, modernist, and Marxist groups of (almost exclusively male) intellectuals, each group differing slightly from the other in emphasis, there is a shared common conception of the “city”. The discussions place the “experience” of the city in the aesthetic and literary categories of a shared modernity. Such a shared imagination seeks to

161 analyze the specific local experience of Calcutta in terms of and within a global, capitalist modernity, even as that very process of imagining in turn produces and consolidates a Calcutta which is local and particular in its specificity. The second important outcome of this debate is to foreground “aesthetic representation” as a key site for the contestation and construction of modernity. Between arguments for “decadence” and “exposure,” championed by Samar Sen and Saroj Dutta respectively in 1938, the theoretical question is this: does the task of the socially-committed artist involve representing accurately and perceptively the depredations of colonial modernity (Sen), or does it involve a “subjective initiative” (Dutta) that seeks to cut through the stasis of the present? It is entirely possible to argue here that the two different positions are not fundamentally opposed, even though in the context of contemporary Calcutta, they were perceived somewhat simplistically as a conflict between a reflective, art for art’s sake position adopted by Sen and Bose, and an interventionist, art for society’s sake position advocated by Dutta. Both of these “positions,” in fact, shared a consensus on the significance of the aesthetic register to re-orient and mediate the existing real, and equally significantly, emphasized the ability of the vanguard artist/intellectual to formulate and represent urban modernity. It is useful, too, to think of the “group” nature of these discussions; where the gosthi (group) becomes both a site for dialogue and the emergence of a critical consensus, a site of negotiation between “individual” articulation and that of a larger “community” of praxis. The gosthi, an urbane, male-dominated space of intellectuals, was a key site of crossover, an inbetween realm between the “private” and the “public”. It allowed a space of self-fashioning for the colonized intellectuals, and to claim for themselves a certain agency in bringing about social transformation. This self-fashioning, and the claim to agency rested on the intellectuals’ literary,

162 aesthetic and political “awareness” of the global implications of ‘modernity’, as much as it did on the ‘working class’s lack of awareness of these issues. Paradoxically, the self-fashioning of Marxist intellectuals as “trustees” of a global modernity was achieved, to some degree, by these intellectuals’ activation and strategic deployment of difference. At a superficial level, this was expressed as the gap, or “difference” between them and the “working class”. Yet this political gap was also reinforced and rearticulated in the realm of aesthetics, especially in the instance of literary production. The incursion of non-European, indigenous aesthetic modes in their work allowed peripheral intellectuals to engage with modernity in their own terms, and even claim a separate, unique space for themselves as a conduit between modernity and the masses of the colony. We witness this phenomenon in sharp contrast in the literary nakshas of Binoy Ghosh.

III - The Literary Naksha and (Post-)Colonial Modernity As a member of the left-oriented Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) and the Communist Party-led Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association (IPTA) in the 1940s , Binoy Ghosh worked as a short story writer and journalist in Calcutta in late colonial Bengal, alongside the likes of such Marxist (later Naxalite) intellectuals as Saroj Dutta and Samar Sen. As a Marxist sociologist and historian, Ghosh was a pioneer in researching colonial modernity: his study of 19th century Bengal, published in 1947 as Banglar Nabajagriti [The Bengal Renaissance], was, alongside historian Sushobhan Sarkar’s shorter English language Notes on the Bengal Renaissance (1946), typical of a generation of Marxist scholarship that analyzed colonial Indian, especially Bengali history in terms of colonial capitalism and its restructuring of native society. Ghosh’s interest in colonial-capitalist modernity led him to another study, Kolkata Shaharer

163 Itibritta [The History of Calcutta, 1975], where he focused on the rise of Calcutta, the “second city” of the British Empire in the 19th century. Ghosh’s interest in Calcutta of the past was complemented by his literary work on contemporary urban life. Alongside his historical and sociological scholarship, Ghosh wrote a series of literary pieces on contemporary Calcutta in the 1940s and 1950s. Brought together in Biography of the Nouveau Riche [Nabababu Charita, published 1944] and The Musings of the Black Owl [Kalpenchar Rachanasamagra, published 1968] (hereafter Musings), these texts are a key if ignored source of some of the most detailed literary accounts of the city and its people, especially the “lower classes,” in the middle half of the twentieth century. Both the Biography and Musings draw self-consciously from a 19th century Bengali literary version of satire, or naksha, including famous vernacular texts such as Bhabani Charan Bandyopadhyay’s Amusements of the Modern Babu (Nabababu Bilas, 1825), and Kaliprasanna Singha’s The Musings of the Barn Owl (Hutom Pyanchar Naksha, 1861). Ghosh’s formal appropriation of these two texts, prominently signified by the very titles of his books, would not have been missed by his Bengali readers, especially given the thematic focus on the “new babu” elite class created by the largesse of colonial capital, and the textual device of the narrator’s selfdescription as an all-observing ‘owl’ (the barn owl for Singha, the black owl for Ghosh). The 19th century literary form of the naksha was hybrid, drawing on both English prose satire, such as Charles Dickens’s Sketches of Boz, and Persian/Farsi naqshah, literally “sketches” or visual “drawings”. The literary naksha served to negotiate the heterogeneous multiplicity of the new urban space that was 19th century Calcutta. The naksha’s relationship to prose narrative is ambiguous: the frequent intermixing of prose and verse characteristic of the naksha troubled Europeanist understandings of Bengali literary genres. As the mid-20th century scholar Srikumar

164 Bandyopadhyay noted, “[It] is as if the just born prose child were excessively prone to whimsically returning again to the fluidity and melodiousness of verse” (qtd. in Herder 366). The naksha is partially but not wholly dependent on colonial European form and modernity, as the critic Bandyopadhyay’s anxiety about its “whimsical”, “just born” prosaic nature indicates. The politics of language is connected to the historical contexts of colonialism and nationalism: as Ranajit Guha has noted with reference to the 19th century naksha, “it is the [naksha’s] emphasis on the now, the vehicle of its circulation, rather than the messages circulated … the instantaneous exchange of information in myriad bits, with no particular demand to make on reflection … that enables this discourse to weld the mass of its interlocutors together into an urban public” (Guha 341-42). In this respect the naksha serves a somewhat similar function to the European “penny dreadful” novels in the context of print culture and developing nationalism (Guha 340-44; Anderson 1983). Such generic qualities are crucial for Binoy Ghosh: they enable him to critique the new elite of his time, but also to formally articulate a civic community (“the welding together of an urban public”) through the deployment of distinctly low-brow if not proletarian cultural form and language. A specific feature of the naksha that Ghosh utilizes to mount his Marxist critique, is the undermining of “formal” literary prose in the naksha in favor of lower-class dialect [itar bhasha], and crude humor poking fun at the cultured pretensions of the new elite. Biography of the Nouveau Riche (hereafter Biography), as can be imagined from the title itself, consisted of satirical pieces on the “new babu,” those who had made their wealth during the Second World War. These babus [men of leisure] profited heavily from various mercantile and intermediary business enterprises serving the Allied war efforts in British India in the 1940s. Calcutta became a central site of the war efforts, as the last important city held by the Allies in the face of

165 advancing Japanese troops who had defeated the British forces all over southeastern Asia. Not surprisingly, the wealth of the babus stood in sharp contrast to the majority of the population, as the massive British engineered famine in rural Bengal (a direct result of wartime rationing of resources) resulted in the death of 3 million people (Mukerjee 2010). Ghosh’s sketches provide testimony to this: The unemployed of yesterday is either busy working as a store-clerk, calculating stocks and supplies, or is employed in the weapons making factories that have been bolstered by the war. Overnight, to become either a worker, or an entrepreneur, this has become the fate of a large section of the populace. And the Bengali babu, second to none in being the comprador middleman, has resumed his historical role. They haunt the lanes and by lanes of the “black-market” when night falls on the city. He who had a penny in his pocket has bundles of fresh crisp currency in his pocket. They have hidden in their secret storages thousands of tonnes of rice grain, pulses, and essential medicines! These are the very people who would wax eloquent on patriotism and the nation tomorrow! (Ghosh 1979: 21-22) We find here all the hallmarks of the naksha: the wry sarcasm and back-alley lingo that is not easily rendered in translation, as well as the themes of overnight reversals of fortune, the easy conflation of rumors and facts, and fantasies of “hidden” riches. The combination of accelerated if uneven economic growth driven by the war industry, and inflation of prices brings the contradictions of the colonial city to the foreground, as both a site of cosmopolitan modernity and increasing social inequality. Again the naksha highlights the lurid and the spectacular: The distinction between vulture-ridden rural Bengal scavenging for the dead, and the many delights of Chowringhee [downtown Calcutta, center of its ‘White town’] are

166 proof [of this phenomenon] ... [P]roof again, on the right footpath [pavement] of the street, we laugh, play, sing, whistle, go to the cinema, blow away money on the many delights of this earthly paradise of Calcutta, from the left footpath the odor of rotting corpses lying on the ground terrorizes our nostrils, the primitive cries of dying men, women and children rends our ears. We do not stop, we do not stumble, we cover our noses and speed up walking. (38) For the Marxist in Ghosh, these contrasts are the result of colonial-capitalist modernity, the formation of an urban space that is marked by deep class fissures. Ghosh contextualizes such a phenomenon within colonial history, drawing attention to the Bengali’s babu’s “resumption of his historical role as the comprador middleman”. He lays the blame squarely on the new comprador babu class of the city, and those he sees as its historical predecessor, the 19th century compradors. Yet, the literary form that he deploys to such great effect is also a product of the same historical process. In contrast to the European bourgeoisie, for Ghosh this dominant class of the compradors has no progressive function in India. In the context of the colonial world, Ghosh is careful to distinguish the comprador class from those he terms the 19th century Bengali “progressive bourgeoisie” – “It has to be mentioned in this regard that the middle-class [maddhyabitta] culture of the nineteenth century, that which was beneficial to the national renaissance, it has no relation to this comprador babu culture” (46, emphasis added). Ghosh underlines how progressives, “such as Rammohan and Bidyasagar [19th century Bengali social reformers] adopted the positive values of the new arriving civilization of the British, in the midst of a degenerated, superstitionridden society and its poisonous atmosphere” (19). At one level then, the Marxist reformer and writer seems to be a linear continuation and advancement over the bourgeois reformers of the

167 past. Yet, simultaneously, as the above passages illuminate, there is a difference from European history; it is the “comprador” and not the “progressive” bourgeois class that has been dominant in the context of the colony. As Rajarshi Dasgupta (2003) has noted, Marxists in Bengal in the 1940s, similar to their counterparts elsewhere, subscribed to the (non-dialectical) notion of “succession,” influenced by “Marxist scientific history” where socialism marked the final culmination of social development replacing capitalism and feudalism. Ghosh’s condemnation of “a degenerated, superstitionridden society” is significant here, as it transposes the attributes of the elite [the so-called comprador class] to society as a whole, and simultaneously makes claim for his own, “scientific” perspective. Interestingly, in the span of a few pages, Ghosh himself deploys the same “superstitious” vocabulary, of blood-sacrifice and devil-worship in the Bengali Tantra cultural tradition. In the Biography, Ghosh’s call for revolution against the “new babu” elite is articulated through copybook Tantra rhetoric – “Until liberation, the only revolutionary duty is to sit in yogic posture [yogasan] on a seat of human skeletons surrounded by human skulls [naramunda]. The Tantrik worship [sadhana] of hatred and revenge is necessary for the devilish object of revenge. Neither poetry, nor the creation of eternal works of art is a substitute for that” (42). The vocabulary of Tantra supplies the ethical and conceptual basis for Ghosh’s Marxist politics. The presence of Tantra as a vocabulary in his narrative destabilizes the very binary, I would argue, that Ghosh attempts to set up separating the method of scientific Marxism and the “degenerate” forms of native society that are to be represented (on Tantra, see Muller-Ortega 1989; Urban 2003). In other words, local inflections, such as that of Tantra, complicated the notion of Marxist “science”.

168 The refashioning of the naksha serves two functions: it provides a literary genre for the critique of the new elite and second, the culturally specific formal qualities of language and vocabulary of the naksha help articulate the complex negotiations of peripheral modernity. Unlike the classic form of the 19th century naksha, however, Ghosh’s political and pedagogical commitments lead to a third function: the naksha

incorporates the narrator’s journey to

different parts of the city, and Marxist analyses of different typologies of the urban poor. The descriptive ethos of the naksha is combined in short, with the prescriptive insights of the Marxist flaneur in search of the proletariat of the city.

IV - The Missing Proletariat and Indian Hindu Nationalism Such a proletariat is not to be found in the factories, mills or even the slums in Calcutta. Rather, they appear to Ghosh in Biography within a familiar, quotidian phenomenon in war-time Calcutta, namely, the long lines of people awaiting their rations in front of “control shops”. As Ghosh notes in a sketch titled “Queue”, it is in the long lines of people forced to ration their subsistence during the war that the urban mass of the city are brought together: Neither a hose pipe, nor a concrete pipe, but an actual, human flesh and blood pipe - if seen from above it resembles a human pipe-line, if seen from below it will appear to be a series of human chimneys. Neither cambis [canvas], nor concrete nor steel, but made of human beings, and human flesh. One can see similar pipes today all over the great city, in all its broad avenues and its narrow alleys. Near the jelepara [fishermen neighborhood], near Chitpur, near the cinema counter, near the race course, all over the place. (69)

169 The transformation of the city dwellers to “human pipe-line(s),” represents the alienation and streamlining of the urban populace under the influence of capitalist industrialization. The narrator’s own perspective is made evident – “From dawn to dusk, women and men line up in front of the control shops. At first, rebellion would creep up within the body at the sight of this spectacle of civilization. Many a times, I would think to myself, let’s blow up this molehill of civilization with dynamite” (50). In his fervor, the narrator ceases to see the assembled people as constituents of an industrialized urban space and instead imagines the queue to be a symbolic representation of the biological evolution of humanity [bibartan]. After referring to the 19th century anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan, who influenced Marx and Engels, he notes, If we take this 200 yard long queue as a metaphor for the 1 billion years of biological history, then each yard of the queue equals 5 million years. This queue then becomes the living testament of the history of biological evolution! I recognize[d] the coalsupplier’s wife Rukmini, half-starved and half-dead, standing at the end of the line; she then is the amoeba of life, the first sign! Rukmini, Jagattarini, Haridasi, Haba’s Mother, Manke’s Aunt … Ganesh’s Granma, they go by one after the other … leave alone a two-limbed human, there are no signs of quadrupeds. (77-78) Ghosh draws attention to how the poor are “seen” in non-human terms as a different species. Such a critique recalls Stallybras’ (1990:74) theorization of the 19th century London poor and the bourgeois conception of them as “a different race”. In the narrator’s conception, almost the entire queue becomes representative of non-human forms of life. It is only at the very front of the queue that humanity “emerges” At the other [front] end of the counter, blood shot eyes and sweat pouring down her, stands Hema the maid. Just behind her, peeking out from underneath Hema’s biceps, is

170 the Neanderthal man. The Neanderthal, as we know, is not the same race of humanity [jaater manush] as the intelligent human, the ‘Homo Sapiens’. (78) The closer they are to the shop counter selling food, the more the inhabitants of the queue begin to resemble humans. This is a paradoxical inversion of the supposedly higher qualities that distinguish the human from the animal. It is on the body of the human “Hema the maid”, that the narrator inscribes the history of civilization, The first appearance of a sentient human being is to be found in the fire-singed elbow of Hema the maid. The hunting, gathering classless societies to the Greco-Roman empires of antiquity all start and end by the palm of Hema’s hand. At the base of Hema’s middle finger America is discovered … The tip of this finger, filled with the sound and sight of the Industrial Revolution, is infected; pus and disease have permeated it. [T]here is no ease without a surgical incision on her infected finger. Sitting there, with his ripe old beard is Karl Marx. Marx explained, ‘Do not be afraid. Society and civilization are always in progress, but that [progress] is never smooth or mechanical. At every turn of the evolutionary path lies revolution, from one turn to another there is progress. Humanity heard the oracle of salvation [abhay bani] for the first time. (79-80) It has to be underlined that the narrator’s emphasis at this point is on optimism, born out of a certain Marxist analysis [“never smooth or mechanical”] of history, transforming “evolution” to “revolution”. The figure of Karl Marx sits on top of Hema’s infected finger (which is “permeated with pus and disease”), and assures her of both scientific and mystical salvation, the first represented by “surgery” and the second by the Hindu trope of “abhay bani” (oracle). This peculiar combination of the scientific-mystical mode of liberatory politics, as figured in literary representation points, I would argue, to the complex negotiations of indigeneity and scientific

171 socialism in the “colony”. Ghosh’s naksha testifies to the uneven nature of capitalist progression, and its mediating impact on (gendered) subjectivity and consciousness; this consciousness as represented in the naksha, is unevenly modern. The members of the long queue, with the exception of the “Neanderthal man,” are all women: “Rukmini, Jagattarini, Haridasi, Haba’s Mother, Manke’s Aunt … Ganesh’s Granma … Hema the maid” (78). At one level, Ghosh’s invocation of Darwinist/Marxist (r)evolution posits almost the entire assembled mass as non-human organisms. The bodies of these women then become the literal sites where his imaginative scripting of biological evolution/Marxist history takes place. Hema with “blood shot eyes” at the front end of the line is the only “Homo Sapiens” and her body in turn is divided into portions representing epochs of human evolution. The deployment of women and their bodies, in Ghosh, as a metaphor for the degraded present deserves elaboration. In the case of colonial Bengal specifically, such a sentiment is found in Hindu majoritarian nationalism, exemplified in Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s famous 1882 novel Anandamath [The Alley of Bliss], by the affective invocation of the degenerated woman who is both the “mother” and the “motherland”– “What Ma was, and what Ma has become”. This Hindu nationalist deployment of gender (woman as mother/motherland) stems from a historicism, one that seeks to establish a causal link between the depredations of European and Islamic colonialism and the consequent degradation of (Hindu/Indian) women. It contributes, as Tanika Sarkar (2010) puts it, to the nationalist valorization of “Hindu wife, Hindu nation”. In Ghosh’s account, the affirmation of the progressive, Marxist process of (r-)evolution exists in tension with the conservative, Hindu masculine nationalist anxiety over decay and degeneration. In the contradictory reality of Ghosh’s text, Hema and the women behind her in the queue, represent at one and the same time, the possible transition from racialized non-human

172 to human, and the opposite idea of the decay of colonized nation. This tension between gender, race and nation is sought to be resolved through the oracle of Karl Marx. The naksha articulates the uneven modern consciousness, of “old [woman] Talui’ma [who] would not get into the train, preferring the safety of her traditional palki (palanquin)”, or “the old gardener Bikal-mian, who would request the children in the household to tell him stories about the wonders of Calcutta – lane bound cars, double-decker bus, electric fans” (Biography 102-03). While being as backward as the waiting women in the queue, “Old Talui’ma” and “Bikal Mian” are equally progressive Then we thought that old Talui’ma, gardener Bikal-Mian, were all wild brutes, poor things! With age I have realized that they were progressive, unlike many middle class folk! They did not dismiss the miracles of modern life by drawing recourse to the Vedas, or Koran. They listened carefully to the advancing sound of scientific achievements of man; they realized that their time has passed, and they have implicitly trusted in the powers of man, in the miracles performed by modern science. Even though they themselves believed in magic amulets and headless apparitions, they trusted the airplane and electricity, accepted that the latter represented the breakthrough of knowledge, the victory of man over nature. (103-104, my emphases) If the narrator is sympathetic to this putative recognition (and submission) of the non-“middle class folk” to the “miracles of modern science,” he is unsparing in his criticism of the other significant class of people, the unemployed underclass, who filled every nook and corner of Calcutta as the result of famine, war and Partition in 1947 (Chatterji 2007). Compared to the working poor, the underclass is a similar yet different category in Ghosh, to be differentiated not only on the basis of the economic relations of production, but also a gendered, sexualized regime

173 of reproduction. The issue of literary form is crucial to the representation and translation of the underclass, or lumpen, as I discuss in the next section.

V – The Literary Invention of the Lumpen The underclass forms a significant part of Ghosh’s Kalpencha sketches (Musings) written during the early 1950s (Ghosh 1968). In stark contrast to the 19th century text he appropriates, Hutompencha by Kaliprasanna Singha, which is merely content in relaying the varied activities of the lower classes, Kalpencha is invested in scrutinizing the immoral and the deviant, the beggars, madmen and prostitutes who form an integral yet disjunctive part of the mahanagari (great city). Each of these urban typologies is the subject of individual sketches or nakshas. One such sketch titled “Beggar” opens thus: Much like the most primitive man, pithecanthropus erectus – small head sitting on a thick-set shoulder, huge jaw, large incisors and canines (teeth – krintak o chhedak) grinning through the open mouth, deep-set blood shot eyes red as the hibiscus flower, one leprosy-ridden arm about to fade away to nothingness, and another arm supporting the body on a crutch, no fingers … I am not talking about any primitive beast, nor discussing the Pleistocene period, I simply have in mind a hapless ‘homo sapien’ of the twentieth century, in the modern city of Calcutta. Not a prince of this ‘princely city’, he is a terrible-looking (bhayanak) beggar of vile and deformed (ghrinna, kutsita) Calcutta (Ghosh 1968: 26) The same lurid and casual deployment of tropes characteristic of the naksha is repeated here to illuminate the disjunctive contradictions of urban life. Yet there are other elaborations. Crucially, there is no “Karl Marx” for the salvation of the beggar. The ascription of negative attributes,

174 “terrible,” “vile,” and “deformed” is revealing, as these can be transferred and transposed from the beggar himself to stand in for the vile and deformed city. The attention of the reader is drawn to the multiplicity and heterogeneity of such primitive life forms -- as they intersperse in, dislocate and ultimately reconfigure the idea of the city as a modern space - yogi-like old men, discharged soldiers, and street urchins. “In the midst of the fashionable, neon-flooded pavements of the downtown Chowringhee area … suddenly from between the crowd of well-rounded calves of memsahibs [white women], you will see peering out the outstretched hand of a deformed child [nulo]” (28). Such negative description achieves its effect through the narrative’s activation of an indigenous aesthetic effect, that of the rasa. In Sanskrit literary theory, there are specific literary affects (rasas) that can be deployed to evoke specific emotions (bhavas) in the audience. Divided into eight such types for use in drama and performance by the dramaturge Bharata and the philosopher Abhinavagupta in the 8th and 9th centuries, the literary employment of rasa was by no means an unfamiliar device in Bengali poetry and prose literature in the 19th century colonial period (Chari 1995; Herder 2004). In Ghosh’s nakshas, the representation of both the women in the queue, noted earlier, and the underclass beggar described above, is dependent on the deployment of the aesthetic modes of the bibhatsa and bhayanaka rasas. As “Kalpencha,” the narrator notes: He [the beggar] is not to be seen anymore, because I saw his dead body being dragged around by the street mongrels hungry for something to eat. When he would beg, people would turn from him in fear and revulsion (ghrinna o bhoy). (1968: 27) Analogous to the Kantian notion of the “sublime” creating a sense of fear and awe, the bibhatsa and bhayanaka rasas in Ghosh’s naksha, seek to arouse feelings of disgust and aversion as well

175 as horror and terror. The success of such an aesthetic move is predicated on the formation of bhavas – disgust, aversion, horror, terror – in the reader. In this account, there is a tacit acknowledgement that the beggars themselves seem to be aware of the impact of rasa: they seek to capitalize, through their “performance” in front of passersby, “[on] the sentiments of mercy and piety (daya o karuna), [which] are the mainstays of the beggars… [M]any of course are not affected by these two sentiments; they shell out their two cents out of fear” (29). The beggars deploy the rasas of daya and karuna (and bhoy - fear) to earn a living, which in turn flows into a giant profit making industry capitalizing on begging activities in the city (30). Significantly, throughout the course of the descriptions of these underclass urban folk, there are almost no accounts of them representing themselves. They are entirely silent, with one notable exception of a marijuana-addicted “madman,” who asks the narrator to “sit down to listen to some stories of dharma [pious tales]”. This mad man’s apocryphal tale regales the narrator, even though the narrative’s recording of what the madman says is marked by the impossibility of vanguardist translation: What I heard from the old man was actually a history of sorts, instead of dharma-katha [tales of piety], it is not possible to reiterate them in my account – Muslims came to this continent and slaughtered Hindus, prohibited the Hindu way of life, that of the Baishnab, the Sakta sects, the Brahmin and Kayastha castes … Hindus in turn, mouthed the rhetoric of social reform, but practiced human sacrifice in their temples, right in the heart of the city. (43, emphasis added) Unlike the examples of Hema the maid, or old Talui’ma, the failure of translation and representation points to a crisis of “Marxist representation”. Such a crisis is crucial to the emergence and consolidation of the figure of the lumpen in the narrative form of the naksha. It is

176 in “the heart of the city” in Curzon Park, at the center of downtown Calcutta, “the Viceroy’s house to the left” (51), that “Kalpencha,” the narrator, finds a peculiar space which represents all the diverse elements of the urban lumpen underclass, brought together in compression and thriving in contact with each other. “In this same area (in Curzon Park), stretching for almost a mile-wide radius, the thieves, robbers, murderers and scoundrels rule [rajatto kore] – it seems that this is a ‘liberated area’, cut off from the civilized society outside” (51). The phrase “liberated area” is in English, in the midst of the Bengali-language narrative, formally paralleling its unique isolation and location within the modern city. This is of course, only an illusory liberated area, peopled as it is by the “refuse” of society. For Ghosh, this “seem[ing]” illusion is comparable to the space of kailash-dham, the mythical grounds of liberation in Hindu, Jain and Tantrik Buddhist thought - “It can be said without doubt that Curzon Park represents the criminals’ kailash-dham” (51). The passage below illuminates the insertion of the Marxist flaneur, as narrator, into this space and its inhabitants: One will feel like entering a secret underworld in the midst of possibly the most public space of Calcutta – there is no day, no night, no weather changes, no plagues, no famines, but all the time, hidden currents of corruption, depravity, adultery, fraud, arson and debauchery are flowing through … Curzon Park during the evening appears like a giant junction station. There is however no ear-splitting noise, only a low constant hum that lifts itself slowly from the ground up to the clouds. (52, original English in italics) This inverted, grotesque world is ruled by “Kallu”, the lord of misrule, “who looks quite like Lord Curzon himself [the British Viceroy from 1899-1905]”. He is obeyed by the various criminal and immoral elements in Curzon Park, and sought after by “police chiefs and upper class women”. The flexibility of his class affinities is complemented by Kallu’s hold over sexual

177 deviants; Kalpencha scrupulously describes the “eunuchs”, the “trans-genders” and the “crossdressers”, who form the “criminal” counterpart(s) of a normative sexual order: In Curzon Park, the eunuchs of Calcutta are touched by the winds of spring, they go around in female dress like some deformed monsters [kutsita rakhshasas] … observe carefully, and you will find a bunch of young men – all decked up in garish powder and snow-cream like the bulbul bird … soon one of them will go off with some huge-sized giant, who scarcely resembles human form … So the general population of Calcutta are shocked when cross-dressing men are found murdered, or the corpse of a young boy is discovered [in Curzon Park], but Kalpencha is not surprised at all. (53, 55) There is a key difference between the women represented in the queue discussed in the previous section, and the various personages of dubious sexual orientation who inhabit the kailash-dham of Curzon Park. The diverse human beings present in the queue and in Curzon Park are similar yet different from each other. In the queue section, the urban collective is feminized and domesticated by invoking the nationalist trope of suffering motherhood and motherland. The bodies of the assembled, queued up non-human women are the literal (and literary) sites where the socialism of the future is imagined, through the combination of scientific surgery and mystical oracle. The collective is socialized and humanized under a heteronormative, familial order, so that the domesticated female/feminized body can provide a (re-)productive venue for the (Hindu) “nation”. Ghosh describes his hope for these folk in the terms of industrialized development typical of Nehruvian nationalism - “Little did old Talui’ma know that her granddaughter’s granddaughter will one day drive trains and steer airplanes. Bikal Mian must never have thought his grandson will have be the first person in his village to have electricity, and will be able to listen to the radio at home

178 and drive a tractor outside through his lush, wide fields” (Ghosh 1979:106). Representation of the “now,” thus translates to an imagination of the future of the nation. Such a position sits somewhat uneasily with Ghosh’s Marxist views. In Curzon Park, however, the very absence of such familial figures and tropes of domestication is striking. The representation of this lumpen underclass in the “underworld” and their differentiation from the “general [poor] population of Calcutta,” I have argued, is constituted precisely on the basis of two tropes – the dual difficulty of sexual reproduction and adequate literary translation. The eunuchs, the cross-dressers and the trans-genders cannot be reduced to, or represented within, the heteronormative framework of the familial feminine, as they only exist as the negation of such nationalist metaphors. The Marxist political imperative behind Ghosh’s nakshas is not wholly capable of representing this class. A consideration of Ghosh’s nakshas thus illuminates the larger political frictions caused by Marxist identification with Indian nationalism.

VI – Conclusion: Towards a Lumpen Aesthetics Binoy Ghosh’s nakshas provide, I would argue, an instance of what Raymond Williams describes as the contradictory and mutually antagonistic relation between “historically varied and variable elements” of a cultural formation, namely the “residual” and the “emergent” (Williams 1977: 121). In Williams’ materialist conception of culture which is dynamic rather than static in its dialectical pulls and pressures, “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships are continually being created” (123) in the terrain of culture, as well as social relations at large. The residual in this account refer to those “element(s) of the past” that are refashioned as “effective element(s) of the present” (122), while the emergent points to the

179 “formation of a new class, the coming to consciousness of a new class, and … the often uneven emergence of a new cultural formation” (124). He argues that the residual and the emergent appear in inverted as well as actual terms in relation to the “dominant” forms of culture; “[e]lements of emergence may indeed be incorporated [into the dominant], but just as often the incorporated forms are merely facsimiles of the genuinely emergent cultural practice” (126). For Williams, attention to literary form illuminates the multiple ways in which the emergent is negotiated -“reinterpretation, dilution, projection, discriminating inclusion and exclusion” (123) by the dominant within a cultural formation. For Frantz Fanon on the other hand, the emergence of the lumpen is tied to the past as well as post (aftermath) of colonialism. The position of the lumpen is in interaction with the residual refashioning of the nation-form in anticolonial nationalism. As Fanon puts it, the emergent practice of the lumpen militant appropriates, and is in turn appropriated by the nationform - “[t]hese vagrants, these second class citizens find their way back to the nation thanks to their decisive militant action” (Fanon 2004: 82). Yet Fanon’s famous warning of the “Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” extends to the lumpen as well, as “[c]olonialism also finds ample material in the lumpenproletariat for its machinations (87). This is because the lumpenproletariat’s non-relation to the mode of production (“without vested interests” as Elridge Cleaver terms it), imparts to the lumpen a political and cultural fluidity that is relatively autonomous of economic and social class interests. I have argued above that the interaction of the emergent lumpen and the residual nationform is negotiated formally and multiply in relation to the dominant moment(s) of nationalist politics and culture. At the historical moment of political independence, in the 1940s and 50s, Ghosh’s nakshas serve as the literary site of this negotiation. The relation of the lumpen to the

180 nation in Ghosh is a dialectical alternating between the opposite axes of homogeneity and heterogeneity, assimilation and expulsion; this is represented in the literary naksha through a series of antithetical binaries - indigeneity/modernity, translation/non-translatability, and inner/outer (the national body and its ‘other’). In the naksha’s deployment of lower-class language [itar bhasha], as well as the aesthetics of rasa, we find the difference of the lumpen being incorporated within literary representation. Yet ultimately, the figure of the lumpen remains unassimilated and does not “find its way back” into the nationalist body. Lacking in cultural subservience and located outside the social relations of (re)production, the figure of the lumpen remains as the disruption if not the constitutive negation of dominant Indian (Hindu) nationalism. Similarly, the role of the Marxist intellectual as narrator is ambiguous in these representations. On one hand, the narrator’s ways of seeing attempt to align with the nationalist tropes of assimilation: on the other hand, the ambiguity of portrayal undermines those efforts. I would argue that such tensions in the narrative space of the naksha gesture to the larger political relation of Marxism to elite-led nationalism in India, or what is known as “United Front” tactics of Leninism. In this case, the urban mass serves as the crucible for the negotiation of Marxist visions of emancipation and their somewhat tenuous relation to postcolonial nationalist ascendancy. In the next chapter, we will see how the lumpen plays a central part in the disengagement of revolutionary Marxism from postcolonial Indian nationalism. Finally, the literary nakshas draw attention, despite the intentions of the narrator, to the complex formations of urban masses in the city that are not part of the traditional industrial proletariat. The dual aspect of “difference” within urbanity in the periphery as well as compared to the metropole is accentuated by the generic emphasis of the naksha on the spectacular mode

181 and differential language (itar bhasha), and its formal function of fostering an urban public sphere. Both formally and in terms of genre, the naksha highlights the complex negotiations of peripheral modernity: in this instance, the nakshas of Binoy Ghosh serve to disarticulate the lumpen from the structures of nationalism. To paraphrase the aesthetic debates in contemporary Bengal which I mentioned above, such a literary function does not fall easily either into the category of passive representation, a reflection of society as it is, or a vanguard interventionist aesthetic praxis, but gestures to the re-negotiation of both of these positions. In the next chapter, we discuss such negotiations in the work of the radical filmmaker, Mrinal Sen.

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CHAPTER FIVE Lumpen Aesthetics and the City 2: the Radical Cinema of Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta 71

Introduction The final chapter of this dissertation focuses on Mrinal Sen’s film Calcutta 71 (Sen 1972) to explore the relation between Naxalite urban insurgency and cinematic representation. I continue and round up the previous chapter’s exploration of the lumpen proletariat in the city of Calcutta as a constitutive aspect of peripheral modernity and capitalist combined and uneven development. The chapter puts Mrinal Sen’s cinematic representation of the lumpen in conversation with Binoy Ghosh’s literary naksha portrayals of the same, drawing out the similarities and differences between the two in terms of historical moments, political configurations and aesthetic experimentation. Calcutta 71 posits the figure of the lumpen as the constitutive negation of the postcolonial “nation,” similar to such figurations in Binoy Ghosh’s naksha renderings discussed above. Formally, too, the Third Cinema aesthetics of Mrinal Sen trace parallels with the literary form of the naksha. Binoy Ghosh’s nakshas attempt to problematize the notion of literature by intermixing narrative prose, verse and visual representation, or sketches. Similarly, Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta 71 attempts to constellate narrative cinema with other genre and media such as documentary, found footage, melodrama, photography and literary prose. Such aesthetic interactions in Binoy Ghosh and Mrinal Sen accentuate the seemingly fragmentary but dialectically interlinked components of lumpen urban experience: both come to negotiate representation through such fragments -- the form of episode for Ghosh and, as we will see below, vignette for Sen.

183 The significant difference between Ghosh and Mrinal Sen lies in the latter’s elaboration of the revolutionary potential of the lumpen underclass and its radical consciousness of negation of the existing order. I will trace how the radical cinema of Mrinal Sen attempts to both negotiate the local context of lumpen mass action, and articulate such local concerns in the internationalist aesthetic and political framework of Third Cinema. A consideration of the formal politics of Calcutta 71, I argue, illustrates its deployment of multiple aesthetic genres as well as formal cinematic manipulation of multiple temporalities. Such alterations of film form attest to Calcutta 71 and Mrinal Sen’s negotiation of the “essence” of peripheral society, “poverty,” while avoiding economistic reduction. These processes alert us to Sen’s political-aesthetic attempt to visualize, along the lines of Third Cinema theory, the dialectically linked, overlapping and multilayered aspects of lumpen proletarian exploitation in the city. Such aspects are manifested in the registers of morality, legality, language et al, and position the lumpen in contradiction and difference to elite nationalism. I read Calcutta 71 in constellation with, and against other cultural texts that discuss Naxalism of contemporary Calcutta in the 1970s, both those written by Naxalites such as Saroj Dutta and elite representations in journals and books. I posit that such cross-reading helps us to more fully locate the film’s radical intervention in negotiating and articulating the contemporary urban milieu and its revolutionary lumpen underclass. Such configurations also point to differently located political projects or versions of Marxism: those which seek to assimilate to elite-led nationalism and modernization, and those which radically reject the possibility of the same. Through a reading of the Naxalite Saroj Dutta’s 1971 essay, “Support for Statue Breaking” in the next section of this chapter, I illustrate how Naxalism sought to come to terms with the specificity of the local context of lumpen agency and consciousness. Specifically, Dutta’s work helps us in exploring the Naxalite perception of

184 the revolutionary lumpen underclass, and their claims over the city in terms of history, spatiality and material objectivity. Such are the claims that Mrinal Sen’s cinema comes to represent.

II – Objects of Culture, Spaces of Resistance: the Instance of Saroj Dutta The classic Maoist notion of the primacy of peasant-led peoples war, while adopted in principle by the Naxalites, underwent alterations at the ground level owing to the specificity of the urban situation of Calcutta in particular and postcolonial West Bengal in general. The existence of large numbers of immiserated and rootless, “lumpen,” populations in the urban centers among whom Communists had established sufficient base not only in the city of Calcutta but also in the semi-urban mofussil towns, was an important factor in this context. The Calcutta of Naxalite ascendancy, between 1968 and 1972, presented itself as an urban center that had exceeded its own spatial boundaries, populated by those who were neither the much theorized peasant worker of “third world” Marxism, nor the urban industrial worker of “classical” Marxism. The city, originally designed for three million, now contained several times that number. The evolving dialectic of mass action in Calcutta and revolutionary party organization of the Naxalites – the CPI-ML -- in the urban areas meant that the theoretical emphasis on the peasantry had to make room for urban-based (lumpen) proletarian struggle. The urban situation presented a peculiar dilemma to the Naxalite leadership. In revolutionary “third world” politics of the 1960s and 1970s, the focus of organization was the rural countryside, rather than the city. As Kanishka Gunawardena and Stefan Kipfer have observed, “Mao Tse Tung’s Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War (1936), Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare (1961) and Régis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution? (1967) – all argued with convincing conjectural reasons for the primacy of the rebellious peasant over the

185 radical urban activist … [Fanon’s] Les Damnés de la Terre also loomed large in this potent anticolonial imaginary of the rural peasant revolution” (Gunawardena and Kipfer 26). In the writings of Naxalite chief Charu Mazumdar, we find traces of the tension created by an urban situation that ran counter to theoretical expectations. In “Party’s Task Among the Workers” (March 1970), even as he acknowledged the “growing militancy of urban party workers,” Mazumdar sought to take refuge in “theory” to downplay the urban struggles: “[S]ince Mao-Tse Tung Thought would make it clear to him [the urban worker] that the peasants are fighting his battle … he would go to the countryside to join the battle” (qtd. in Ashish Roy 1975:110). Yet the formation of Naxalite “youth squads” dramatically called attention to the political struggles in the city and promoted the reconsideration of revolutionary lumpen agency. Such shifts highlighted the importance of the postcolonial city as a site of radical struggle. In the terms of critical geography, Calcutta witnessed the decoupling of urbanization from industrialization and capitalist development, or what Mike Davis (2006) terms “urbanization without growth” in his study of peripheral megacities.1 In such contexts, as I will show, the lumpen claims over the city space may be described in terms of Henri Lefebvre’s “urban revolution,” where the “right to the city” becomes a way of negotiation and “reappropriation by human beings of their conditions of existence in time, in space and in objects” (2003: 179, emphasis added).2 The “reappropriation” of humanity is posited by Frantz Fanon too, in his theorization of the “lumpen”, and the “female guerrilla,” waging urban insurrection against the French in the city of Algiers in 1957 (1965: 35-67, 99-120). Such notions 1

Davis’ by-now classic model of “urbanization without growth” emphasizes the break with “classical” Marxian (Engelsian) notions of city formation, and of the de-linking of urbanization and industrialization, following the “brutal tectonics of neo-liberal globalization … under the influence of IMF and WTO enforced policies” (9). 2 The French philosopher Henri Lefebvre was the pioneering Marxist theorist in the late 1960s of the thesis of the superseding of “industrialization” by “urbanization”. In other words, Lefebvre (2003) proposed that urbanization, understood as the social and spatial organization of capital accumulation, had acquired a force all of its own since the Second-World War, and proceeded independently of the logic of industrial capitalism.

186 complement the theorization of the peasantry in relation to the effects of combined and uneven development, and draw attention to the specific aspects of “time,” “space,” and “objects” in urban struggle. Legal mobilizing of persona was rendered difficult for the Naxalites after 1969, when the newly formed Naxalite party, the CPI-ML, was banned. The increasing state violation of citizens’ rights to movement and activism, manifested most notably in the curtailing of the right to gherao [peaceful encirclement], coupled with the Naxalites’ own rejection of mass organization in favor of secret party formations, meant a shift from the politics of visible protest – demonstrations, marches etc – to more subterranean ones.3 One instance is particularly illuminative for our understanding of lumpen struggles. In the early part of 1971, in a spate of attacks that brought widespread attention to Naxalite activities in Calcutta, statues of historical figures were damaged by unknown groups. The particular act of “statue-breaking” of historical figures of the “Bengal Renaissance” of the 19th century and nationalist leaders like MK Gandhi, while possibly spontaneous, was conceived in different terms by the state. It deployed military forces to guard the broken statue of Gandhi, in front of the Calcutta Maidans, against the threats of Naxalite violence. Modeled on London’s Hyde Park, the Maidans was an enduring symbol of the city’s colonial past, a testimony to the architectural imagination of the sahibs. It had been designed as an area of greenery amidst urban sprawl and the colonial government excluded 3

This suspension of democratic and judicial procedure was moreover given legal sanction through the colonial-era ordinance, the Bengal Suppression of Terrorist Outrages Act 1932, which was revived on September 10, 1970. Around the same time, the President of India signed the West Bengal Prevention of Violent Activities Bill, “which gave wide powers, including arrest without warrant, to the police … [R]egular combing of suspected areas, predawn raids on houses, extermination of sympathizers/supporters of the CPI-ML by the police became a part of city life. According to police sources, between March 1970 and August 1971, 1,783 CPI-ML supporters/members were killed in Calcutta and its suburbs”. Similarly, the Amnesty International noted in its 1974 report that 15,000 to 20,000 were being detained in West Bengal jails for “their alleged involvement in extremist left-wing political activities”. The first quote is taken from Ashoke Kumar Mukhopadhyay, “Through the Eyes of the Police: Naxalites in Calcutta in the 1970s”, Economic and Political Weekly (henceforth EPW), 41.29 (2006), p.3229, 3231. For the Amnesty Report, see “Detention Conditions in West Bengal: Text of Report by Amnesty International”. EPW, 9.38 (1974), p. 1612.

187 natives of whatever social standing from accessing it. It was also the site of Fort William, first the military headquarters of the East India Company and then Her Majesty’s Government. The intricate colonial-era connection between urban landscape and military power had proved so formidable that the post-colonial rulers chose not to disturb it, designating Fort Williams as the headquarter for the Army’s Eastern Command, and the Maidans as the ideal space for leisurely morning walkers, the postcolonial native elite. For Naxalites who had long posited Gandhian philosophy and the figure of Gandhi as counter-revolutionary bluff, the deployment of the military to safeguard a broken statue was an event too rich in irony to be ignored. Moreover, the space of the Calcutta Maidans, the heart of the former colonial “white town” and “the new locus of agitational politics” for the Communists by the late 1950s, was rich in political significance.4 The Naxalite intellectual Saroj Dutta, who we discussed in relation to the debates about Marxism and aesthetics in the previous chapter, wrote an illuminating piece in the aftermath of this event. Simply titled as “Support for Statue-Breaking” (Dutta 1993, 60-67), his essay attempted to frame the act of vandalism in a historical context. The analysis of contestations over objects of culture as represented by the statues becomes for Dutta, an exercise in understanding the spatial and historical politics of the city of Calcutta. He writes that

the question of statues

arose in 1955-56, when, as a commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, “there arose a popular demand to replace the symbol of British imperialist arrogance, [Sir James] Outram, with that of Queen Laxmibai” (62). Such a demand had multiple connotations: James Outram had been instrumental in the British defence during the sepoys’ siege of Lucknow, and he had thus been memorialized in Calcutta, the capital city of British India. Outram had a 4

As Raka Ray notes, the Maidans literally became “the new locus of (urban) agitational politics” for the Communists by the late 1950s. A combination of visual spectacle and militant political demand became the new style of Communist campaigning: “marching on the Maidans, filling it up with hundreds of thousands of bodies, became – and has remained – the ultimate show of political strength” (Ray 2002: 57).

188 ghat (waterfront) named after him, in addition to the said statue, built by John Henry Foley, both in the central part of “white town” adjacent to the Maidan. The replacement of Outram’s statue by that of Laxmibai, the rebellious woman chieftain who led her troops in mutiny against the British, would be a significant symbolic gesture. Such post-colonial recognition of the Sepoy Mutiny, an armed uprising against the British was denied, Dutta argues, when Outram’s statue was replaced not by that of Laxmibai, as per popular demand, but that of Gandhi. This is the same statue that was broken by “vandals”. Similarly, the post-colonial construction of “Gandhighat” in the nearby city of Barrackpore was another attempt to downplay the symbolic importance of the first uprising of the Mutiny which took place at Barrackpore, led by an ordinary soldier, Mangal Pandey. According to Dutta, the symbolic erasure of anti-colonial armed insurgency was accompanied by the real erasure, through military power, of popular Naxalite resistance to the post-colonial liberal democratic order. In the very location of the Gandhi statue in the Maidans in Calcutta, Dutta reminds his readers, people protesting peacefully against the rise in food prices were shot dead by the police in 1959. As he acerbically notes, “the neo-colonials have come to replace the old ones” (63). The support for the acts of “vandalism,” for Dutta, was important in de-criminalizing such activities, characterized by both media reports as well as Left cultural commentators as “spontaneous acts of thoughtlessness”. In constellating such historical contexts to the present, the essay incorporates the question of temporality to struggles over space and objects, the Maidans and the Gandhi statue. The youth engaged in such activities, Dutta argued, were reacting the repressive militarized and neocolonial state: “they [the youth] have realized that it is only by negating the opposite reactions of the past, that the task of constructing something new for the future can be carried on, the task of construction cannot proceed independently of the equally

189 important task of negation and opposition” (64). Interestingly, in an important interpretive essay, Sanjay Seth (2002) has described the same Naxalite activities of statue-breaking as a “politics of excess”. For Seth, these acts manifest an alternative idiom of politics, one which “possessed an alternative language of public life and political mobilization” (351). Seth suggests that such excesses, or what he terms “insurgent peasant consciousness … left its imprint not only on Communist practice but also on Communist theoretical categories” (337). However, Seth appears to be unaware of Saroj Dutta’s intervention in this context, where Dutta posits a Gramscian materialist notion of subalternity – rather than Seth’s postcolonial notion of “alterity” -- to come to terms with such radical consciousness. To take a quick detour through Gramsci on subaltern consciousness: Gramsci observes that, “The social group in question [a subaltern group of great mass] may indeed have its own conception of the world … a conception which only manifests itself in action, but occasionally and in flashes – when, that is, the group is acting as an organic totality” (1971: 333). In the context of the lumpen youth, Gramsci’s observation on the fleeting temporality of “subaltern consciousness” and the dialectic between “conception” and “action” is significant for Dutta’s project. Dutta raises the same question posed by Gramsci about consciousness when he asks, “Does the youths’ conception of their actions qualify as revolutionary consciousness? No it does not, but they have still done the right thing … [T]he revolutionary masses do not always conceptualize revolution in their actions” (64). The crystallization of “revolutionary consciousness” can only be the result of a dialectical interaction between mass action and conception of that action. Dutta posits a dialectical interaction between subaltern agency and vanguardist organization. The following passage spells out this conception:

190 This movement of the masses is not a spontaneous and self-producing one, but at the same time, neither is this something ordained by an omniscient party leadership, which decides everything beforehand and restricts people by imposing regulations at every step. Neither of these can be the proper path; it is always important to remember the dialectic of a self-reflexive leadership and the free manifestation of one’s agential subjectivity. (65) In positing a dialectical interaction between Communist vanguardism and lumpen mass action, Dutta’s text offers an important instance of Naxalite engagement with political organization in the city of Calcutta. It attempts to conceptualize the contestation between criminalized underclass groups and militaristic state repression as a struggle for the “right to the city”. It is a significant text in its attention to the coordinates of time, space and object as key aspects of that struggle. At the same time, its brevity -- barely seven pages -- affords us little opportunity to read into the fleeting instance of the contemporary with any satisfactory depth. Despite the essay’s precise intervention, the youthful “statue-breakers” remain anonymous and unknown. We get to know little in terms of their subjectivity. The fleeting instance of the essay is paralleled by the writer. Dutta disappeared a few months after the writing of this piece. In early August 1971, he was picked up by the police from his underground shelter, and never seen again. According to the most well-known version of subsequent events, Saroj Dutta was shot by the police in a style of murder known in contemporary Calcutta as an “encounter,” and subsequently beheaded to avoid the possibility of identification. In this version of the story, his decapitated body was discovered in the Maidans

191 one early morning on 5th August. The Naxalite theorist of the right to the city met his end at the very space he set out to analyze, the Maidans, centerpiece of the ex-colonial “white-town”.5 The issues that Dutta sought to address -- the questions of revolutionary engagement with the lumpen underclass, its radical consciousness and articulation of claims over the city, would come to resonate with and occupy central position in Mrinal Sen’s film of this period, Calcutta 71. Interestingly, Sen began shooting for this film in September 1971, less than a month after Saroj Dutta’s murder (Sen 2003: 67). In what is arguably a conscious extra-textual reference, the figure of the dead Naxalite intellectual in Calcutta’s Maidans would be a central motif in Mrinal Sen’s film. Sen’s text offers a cinematic elaboration of the issues that Dutta’s text raises: as such, Calcutta 71 offers an important engagement between aesthetic medium of cinema and the contemporary political terrain of Naxalite lumpen struggles, thus enriching our understanding of the socio-historical context that is not easily afforded by official archives alone.

III – Liberation Praxis and Third Cinema: Situating Mrinal Sen’s Films It is important for a discussion of Calcutta 71 to locate Mrinal Sen in the context of radical Third Cinema. Teshome Gabriel (1982) claims Sen as one of the leading practitioners of the school. In his seminal study, Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation, Teshome Gabriel defines Third Cinema as a “new cinematic movement … [that] adheres to the traumatic changes that are engulfing the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America” (xi). The framework of Third Cinema attempted, influenced by national liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s, to forge a common cinematic language of anti-imperialist critique that was

5

I have derived this narrative from Arjun Goswami, Naxal Andolaner Dinguli [the Days of the Naxal Movement] (Calcutta: Knowledge Publishing, 2009), p. 53-62, 140-43. Goswami’s text brings together eye-witness accounts, interviews with police officials and contemporary media reports in order to piece together the narrative that I have used.

192 critical of both Euro-American imperialist politics and the forms of knowledge and culture it produced. For Gabriel: The principal characteristic of Third Cinema is really not so much where it is made, or even who makes it, but rather, the ideology it espouses and the consciousness it displays. The Third Cinema is that cinema of the Third World which stands opposed to imperialism and class oppression in all their ramifications and manifestations” (2, emphasis added). Third Cinema was a combination of theory and filmmaking; the former aspect produced a number of influential manifestos that theorized the incipient form. As Robert Stam notes, “[With] Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon as talismanic figures,” Third Cinema practitioners produced a number of “militant manifesto essays – Glauber Rocha’s ‘Aesthetic of Hunger’ (1965), Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s ‘Towards a Third Cinema’ (1969), and Julio Garcia Espinosa’s ‘For an Imperfect Cinema’ (1969)” (Stam 31). Moreover, such an impulse was not restricted to the film-makers in the “third world” alone; it was part and parcel of a global upsurge in interest in the anti-imperialist movements going on in Asia, Africa, and South America, affecting filmmakers even in metropolitan spaces of Euro-America. For instance, it led the French filmmaker Louis Malle to make a documentary on Calcutta, Calcutta 69.6 As exemplified in the manifestos, the central claim of Third Cinema and its distinction from both American-based Hollywood and European “auteur” films, First and Second Cinema respectively, was this: the condition of peripheral underdevelopment, magnified in the 1960s through the ascendancy of neocolonialism, necessitated a parallel revision of the scope as well as the practices of cinematic representation. Thus Glauber Rocha writes in the “Aesthetics of

6

Louis Malle, Calcutta (1968-69), produced by Nouvelles Editions de Films, part of a seven-part TV series L’Inde Fantome: Reflexions sur un Voyage.

193 Hunger” (1965) that: “Our originality is our hunger and our greatest misery is that this hunger is felt but not intellectually understood” (Rocha in Bandhu 94). The underdevelopment of the colonial-capitalist periphery went hand in hand with under-representation, as it were. The crippling effects of capitalist colonialism are not limited to economics alone: these extended to other realms as well. As Rocha observes: “hunger in Latin America is not simply an alarming fact, it is the essence of our society” (94, original emphasis). “Aesthetics of Hunger” makes a second important point: it notes that while underdevelopment and under-representation is manifested in its symptomatic “essence” of “hunger,” such a structure is paradoxically reinforced by ascribing that “essence,” outside of the history of social relations, back to those very societies. Rocha references the circulation and consumption of such symptomatic cultural forms in the capitalist marketplace: “for the European observer, the process of artistic creation in the underdeveloped world is of interest only in so far it satisfies his nostalgia for primitivism” (95). This primitivism, embodied in the “ugly, sad films, the screaming, desperate films [of Third Cinema]” then contributes to the global division of (cinematic) labor and the accumulation of capitalist profit. Rocha elaborates on a transformative dialectic of his aesthetics of hunger – “Only a culture of hunger can qualitatively surpass its own structures by undermining and destroying them” (95). “Culture” in this context is understood as praxis: both cinematic and political practices of radical resistance. The posited “cultur(ing)” of hunger involves the task of methodical and rational critique, identifying each and every categorical relation and determination, and advancing the notion of representation toward the notion of the concept. Such a task of the “dialectics of culture” also holds for the Ethiopian Third-Cinema theorist and filmmaker Haile Gerima, as for the Brazilian Rocha. In the words of Mbye Cham, “The principal objective [in Haile Gerima] … is to analyze and expose the real

194 nature and dynamics of oppressive and exploitative systems which are capitalism, neocolonialism, feudalism or a combination of these” (Cham 184, emphasis added). The emergence of Third Cinema on “the stage of world history,” Teshome Gabriel argues, represented a “significant alteration in the parameters of film form and in the critical and theoretical categories [of analysis]” (5). It involved “the creation of the cinema as a social and artistic institution as in Europe and America … [and] a rejection of the concepts and propositions of traditional cinema, as represented by Hollywood” (1). However, Gabriel, significantly, omits any reference to Soviet cinema. “Third Cinema theory,” as Anthony Guneratne reminds us, is not only “the only major branch of film theory that did not originate within a specifically EuroAmerican context”; it also addressed “the largest of all constituencies of filmmakers and the widest subject area within the purview of film studies” (1). He notes that Third Cinema’s clearly articulated antagonism to the notion of “Euro-American” capitalist hegemony has been largely marginalized in today’s context within the discipline of Film Studies, as “even when examples of Third Cinema are imported into Euro-American classrooms, it is seldom with reference to Third Cinema theory” (2). In the current context, those critics such as Mike Wayne who wish to reclaim “Third Cinema Theory” today “to illuminate its relations with … a cinema primarily defined for its socialist politics,” do so to counter current postmodern and poststructuralist repudiations of liberatory collective politics (Wayne 2). As the literary scholar Simon Gikandi notes, for a postcolonial literature and theory that is “obsessively and inordinately focused either on the genealogy of empire or the crisis in postcolonialism … the claims of decolonization … came to be dismissed or passed over in silence because they were ostensibly premised on the falsity of metanarratives and their illusions of progress and rationality” (Gikandi ii-iv). Corresponding to this move of consigning “metanarratives … of progress” to the “condescension

195 of posterity” is the postmodern suspicion of the possibility of representation (Wayne 108). Gikandi similarly points out that in its celebration of the “unpresentable” and “fragmentary,” “the postmodern was a gesture of retreat from the very ‘Real’ – and the associated truth claims – that the third cinema sought to account for” (iv). Not surprisingly, the central claims of third cinema for collective transformative praxis and critique of anti-imperialism in all its forms, totalizing and representative gestures both, have fallen out of favor in the postmodern critical frame. In this context, the films of Mrinal Sen deserve consideration for a number of reasons. In sharp contrast to the postmodern retreat from the “Real” and “the associated truth claims” that Gikandi mentions, Sen’s aesthetic and political positions are actively interventionist, and intertwined with the tradition of Third Cinema. As Sen notes: “My job is to provide information from a point of view which is clearly not neutral … [T]he filmmaker has to be an agentprovocateur – one who disturbs the spectator and moves him to action” (qtd. in Udayan Gupta 1982: 19). Such an engagement is made possible by Sen’s Third Cinema influenced experimentation with “the parameters of film-form”. Sen’s films of this period – the “city trilogy” of Interview (1970), Calcutta 71 (1972), The Guerrilla Fighter (1974), while following the “narrative film” genre, nevertheless reconfigure it by incorporating documentary and still footage of events in Calcutta. In Calcutta 71, as we see below, such aesthetic innovations are further underlined by Sen’s incorporation of literature in the form of short stories which serve as the basis of the film’s script. In conversation with Rocha’s “Aesthetics of Hunger” manifesto, Mrinal Sen attempts to definitively represent the “essence” of hunger, poverty and revolution of contemporary society. As he notes, “[Calcutta 71] was made … at a terrible time. People were getting killed every day. The … Naxalites had rejected all forms of parliamentary politics …

196 This was the time to talk, I felt, to talk about poverty, the most vital reality of our country, the basic factor in the indignity of our people. I wanted to interpret the restlessness, the turbulence of the period that is 1971” (qtd. in Hood 30). Sen’s staunchly Marxist views about the centrality (“most vital reality”) of poverty and underdevelopment, makes his filmmaking practice into one of radical aesthetic and political intervention. Calcutta 71 also deals self-reflexively with its own context of production, the Naxalite effort to wage urban revolution. As Andrew Robinson (1989) notes, “parts of south Calcutta had been turned into a ‘liberated zone’ by the Naxalites; they were living in some of the studios there, and using make-up rooms and editing rooms for storing ammunition” (402). The incursion of guerrilla warfare into the very spaces of cinematic production restructured the social milieu of cinema production in Calcutta. Some of the largest studio houses, like the iconic New Theatres which had inaugurated Bengali cinema in the 1930s, closed down temporarily (Gooptu 2003: 286). Calcutta 71 creatively utilizes the breakdown of production facilities: Sen’s use of found footage and documentary still shots take the practice of filmmaking directly into the streets and in the middle of mass political action. My reading of Calcutta 71 in the next section seeks to emphasize these aspects of radical newness. Especially, I draw attention to Sen’s formal experimentations and the structures of the cinematic narrative. The combination of multiple and overlapping forms illuminate, I will demonstrate, the film’s negotiation of diverse temporal, political and aesthetic registers: such negotiations allow Calcutta 71 to explore and reveal the complex contours of Naxalite lumpen struggles over the right to the city. Rather than positing a crudely economistic understanding of poverty and dispossession, Calcutta 71 articulates multiple registers of exploitation and oppression, or to use Gabriel’s phrase, “class oppression in all their ramifications and

197 manifestations” (2). These included considerations of family, gender, morality, institutions and material structures of the city. In doing so, the film follows Third Cinema’s programmatic imperative to represent the “essence” of society, but does so by paying attention to the disparate, dialectically intertwined aspects of Naxalism’s urban revolution: a lumpen aesthetics.

IV – Calcutta 71 and the Politics of Form “A history of humiliation, deprivation, exploitation”: these are the words that roll up to form the first intertitle of Mrinal Sen’s 1972 film, Calcutta 71, while in the background a radio broadcaster somberly announces the discovery of an unidentified dead body in the Calcutta Maidans. Such an opening would remind contemporary audiences of the state-sponsored murder of Saroj Dutta, as well as similar killings in the recent past of all the others accused of Naxalite activism in the city. To reinforce the sense of contemporaneity, Calcutta 71 uses real-life footage shot by the film-maker, Mrinal Sen, along with his cinematographer K.K Mahajan since 1969, which contained images of Naxalite and other Left activists who had since been killed. To quote Sen: “People would watch the film over and over, just to catch another glimpse of their old [dead] friends” (2003: 67). Such elements immediately marked out the film as a testimony to the local events of Calcutta. As the radio announcement trails off, we are introduced to the film’s narrator, a twentyyear old male youth, who reveals that it is his dead body that has just been discovered in the Maidans. This dead narrator carries the viewers over the course of the city’s history that forms the backdrop to the film. The narrator acts as the sutradhar [thread-holder] of the film, the individual who links the narrative together in classical Sanskrit drama (Sen 2003: 71). The metaphoric, rather than literal, nature of such a narrating voice is underscored at the very

198 opening itself as he declares, “I am twenty years old, but I have been walking for a thousand years now”. The quote continues: I am twenty For the last one thousand years, I have been living this age of twenty For the last one thousand years, I have been passing through terrible times I have walked through poverty, squalor and death For the last one thousand years, I have been breathing despair and frustration And now, as I stand before you, I see that ours Is the history of unceasing poverty Running through one thousand years and more (qtd. in Mukhopadhyay 93). This refrain is repeated five times in the course of the film. The narrator’s declaration deploys a literary reference to the modernist poet Jibanananda Das’s famous Bengali-language poem “Banalata Sen,” (1934). The poem’s opening line, “I have been walking for a thousand years,” is used in the film to suggest a modernist disruption of time. While inserting poetry into cinematic narrative, such a reference interrogates the notion of linear (temporal) progress. The break with realist time is a recurrent trope: the very next shot alerts us to the dissonance within the “real time” of the city itself. The camera tilts down to frame an establishing shot of the Howrah Bridge, one of the iconic markers of Calcutta’s landscape. In Calcutta 71, however, such iconicity is undermined by the stark emptiness of the bridge. The complete absence of movement and people suggests a disruption of the flow of city life. The juxtaposition of the dissonant time of the dead narrator and the disrupted temporal flow of the city suggests a repudiation of the idea of historical synthesis. To quote Sen again, “We have seen that in our context, historical evaluation is never representative of reality … the theme of

199 continuing synthesis in Indian history … that is unadulterated idealism, genuine exaggeration. I would say that it is the lack of synthesis; ours is a history of continuing poverty and exploitation running through the ages … the history of continuing political betrayal” (Sen 1972: 25; italics indicate original English language words in the Bengali interview). Sen connects the lack of synthesis to the Third Cinema trope of continuing poverty that undercut claims of postcolonial progress. Similarly, the film’s critique of “History” is complemented by the renewed effort to represent more expansive and inclusive histories. Thus, for the narrator of the film, as it is for Sen, the everyday spaces of the city are shot through with “histories”. These are the histories of “deprivation, exploitation and humiliation,” which also constitute the history of the city itself. Divided into “white” and “black” towns, one feeding off the other in a frenzied, deeply unequal relationship. In a rapid sequence of shots, the emptiness of Howrah Bridge is reinforced by the emptiness of other elite spaces of the white town: the state administrative headquarters of Writers’ Building, with a statue of Britannica at the top, and the Great Eastern Hotel, both set up during colonial times in the nineteenth century. The most iconic spaces of the former “white town,” now transformed into the habitus of the native ruling class, are completely empty. The next few frames follow each other in rapid succession: hand-held jerking shots of people traveling in trams, half-naked masses gathered for religious ceremonies, a panning shot of the Calcutta racecourse, printing presses rapidly printing out the events of the day, a low-angle shot of partygoers dancing at a nightclub, and a massive idol of the Goddess Durga being carried with equal festivity in another, the “black” part of town. The transition in soundscape underscores the dissonance as the silence of the empty spaces is contrasted with the quickening tempo in the scenes filled with people. The soundscape brings together and glides over what are clearly two “different” worlds: the nightclubs playing

200 American psychedelic music and the race courses of the elite on one hand, and the streets filled with the festive masses on the other. The site of the contemporary city elites’ nighttime entertainment of American psychedelia is the Great Eastern Hotel, the famed site of colonial pleasures mentioned by Rudyard Kipling. The hotel embodies and makes explicit the comparison of the American neocolonial “present” to the British colonial past.7 The cinematic medium’s formal capacity to manipulate different moments of historical time and space within one framework of filmic time is put to good use in Calcutta 71. The disruption of realist temporal flow is marked at the very beginning: such dissonance is formally reinforced through the cinematic devices of cross-cutting, dissolves and fade-ins/fade-outs, and the contrasts of the soundscape. Formally, the narrative makes use of spatio-temporal manipulation to construct its own histories of the present. Calcutta 71 is structured around four vignettes representing different moments in time. The formal juxtaposition of vignettes in the text, labeled with reference to time – “1933”, “1943”, “1953”, “1971”, allow for the articulation, in Sen’s words, of the continuing underdevelopment of the nation. The vignettes in turn are structured around four Bengali short stories, by Manik Bandopadhyay, Probodh Sanyal, Samaresh Basu and Ajitesh Bandopadhyay. Each story is assigned a particular date, the years 1933, 1943, 1953 and the contemporary present, 1971. By selectively putting together certain dates – and omitting crucial others, “Independence” in 1947, for instance, or even, the electoral “victory” of the non-Naxal Communist Left in 1967 - the text utilizes the formal flexibility of the film medium to create its own version of history. 7

In his The City of Dreadful Night, Rudyard Kipling notes, “The Great Eastern hums with life through all its hundred rooms. Doors slam merrily, and all the nations of the earth run up and down the staircases”. That such cosmopolitanism is a matter of rhetorical ornamentation and not to be taken literally is made apparent after three sentences – “And joy of joys, fancy stepping out of the hotel into the arms of a live, white, helmeted, truncheoned Bobby”. The privilege of ‘elite freedom’ guarded by the force of law separates the elite from the colonized masses. Kipling’s point of reference for the ‘Bobby’ he sees controlling the natives in Calcutta is his counterpart in London, who keeps away drunk members of the working classes (“three-o’clock in the morning revelers”). See Kipling 1899: 14-15.

201 First, the present moment of the city dissolves in a fade-out, and the new scenario is a slum neighborhood in “1933”. This vignette is an adaptation of the short story, “Atmyahatyar Adhikare” [The Right to Suicide] by the Marxist Bengali writer, Manik Bandopadhyay. We are transported indoors inside a hovel, as a family strives to protect itself from a thundershower outside. The abject poverty of the household is signified quickly, as the camera rapidly cuts to different symbolic objects: the thatched roof is disintegrating and there are six people in the small cramped room. While the father is lying on the only available cot, the mother holds an umbrella over her newborn child. The three older children are huddled in different corners of the room, the two sons under the bed, and the daughter moving her mattress around to avoid the rainwater. The sequence, a fairly typical portraiture of indigent life in the slums, is exaggerated by the use of gothic lighting. This episode illuminates some of the film’s key elaborations of the culture of poverty: the incursion of outside forces that threaten to extinguish kinship and familial ties symbolized by the rainwater that threatens to break down the roof and flood the hovel. Equally, the undercutting of notions of family is represented in the helplessness of the fatherfigure, whose patriarchal attempts at restoring order are defeated by the material poverty of the household. He vents his rage on a hapless dog, which had come to the hovel to shelter itself from the rain-storm. Unwilling to risk his status in the community by responding to his wife’s plea to move to a neighbor’s house, the husband/father figure ultimately decides to do so, only to find that the entire neighborhood of the afflicted have sought shelter there. The scene closes with each member of the gathered community eyeing each other with suspicion and mistrust. The ties of kinship and community affiliation break down in the time of natural (social) calamity. Moreover, the family now shares space with the dog it had shooed away earlier, its disavowal of the

202 equivalence between “dog” and “human” finally defeated. One of the most striking moments, aesthetically, of this vignette, is a static medium-long shot of the neighborhood, where the torrential downpour and accumulated mud has managed to eradicate the divide between residence/home and street/outside. Such a reading is encouraged by the expressionist lighting which suggests the misery within which the inhabitants of this urban slum-space exist. Equally, the segment manages to suggest that natural phenomenon like thunder-storms and rain can have profound social impact depending on the class position of the affected human subjects. “The native town is a crouching village,” observed Frantz Fanon, “a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light” (2004: 31). The thematic of an urban unemployed or underemployed underclass, and the corporeal “underdevelopment” and “dehumanization” that such groups undergo in the “native town,” recur in the second and third vignettes. The second tale in the film is located in 1943 at the time of the British-engineered Bengal famine, a context I discussed in the previous chapter. The plot of this segment, adapted from Probodh Kumar Sanyal’s short story “Angar” [The Simmering Fire] is again focused on a family. Shobhona, the bread-earner of the family is a widow with a young child. She takes to prostitution to support her child, siblings and aging mother. The story unfolds as a relative visits them from New Delhi, the capital city of India. Unwilling to disclose their misery in front of the male relative, who is now a respectable government official, the family puts up a façade of respectability and well-being, although that quickly breaks down when Shobhona and her mother get into a confrontation over her younger sister, Minu, who is being gradually encouraged by her mother to get into prostitution herself. The government official, horrified at this situation, leaves for New Delhi at the end of the day, mumbling some platitudes about “official work” and keeping in touch.

203 Elements common to melodrama might be noticed here, as this segment takes up an issue – forced prostitution and dissolution of morals – that pervaded Bengali literature of the Great Famine of 1943 as well as that of the Partition in 1947. In this segment, Shobhona and her family’s slow descent through starvation and moral crisis to a déclassé existence is dramatized by the crisis of motherhood. However, such a generic form of melodrama is interrupted by the off-screen cry of those even lower down on the social strata. As Shobhona and her mother quarrel over Minu, a female disembodied voice cries from outside the house – “Please, give me some starch to eat”. The film narrative serves to underscore such differences by alternating the melodramatic plot segment of the quarreling family with photographic images of the skeletal dead who starve to death on the pavements, alleys and courtyards of the city, unable to find help from families precisely like Shobhona’s. Formally, the soundscape as well as the use of found footage and photographs, disrupt the visual narrative of bourgeois melodrama by positing different models of femininity side by side, highlighting Shobhona’s blindness to the other submerged discourse. Even as Shobhona and her family try to cling on to notions of respectability, the off-screen cries of the hungry emaciated woman devoid of any remnants of “humanity” gives the lie to such discourses of respectability. Sen’s intermixing of various genres and media – bourgeois melodrama, social realism, documentary form, found footage, photographs – undermines, I would argue, the main narrative by subtly pointing to the silencing of another subterranean layer of subjectivity.8 Like the rainwater of the previous segment, the cry for food or “starch,” marks the limits of social class divisions.

8

In making this argument about generic overlap, I follow the lead of Mike Wayne; he has suggested that Third Cinema “does not seek, at the level of form and cinematic language, to reinvent cinema from scratch… nor does it adopt a position of pure opposition on the question of form… [I]nstead, its relation to First and Second Cinema is dialectical: i.e. it seeks to transform rather than simply reject these cinemas; it seeks to bring out their stilted potentialities, those aspects of the social world they repress or only obliquely acknowledge” (10, original emphasis).

204 The text is marked at this point by two absent figures, Shobhona’s two young brothers Hari and Guntu. While the ten-year old Hari, employed in a local shop, has been dismissed by his employers for stealing and labeled a ”criminal,” the figure of the teen-age Guntu is even more suggestive in his complete absence from the film-text’s visual register. We are only informed through the dialogue between Shobhona and her government official relative that Guntu, a student of merit, is currently employed as a part-time factory hand. Shobhona is concerned that Guntu has taken to criminal activities; as she says, “I don’t know what he is up to; he often stays out of the house at night”. The lack of adequate employment pushes the two boys to the margins of society. One of the significant ways Calcutta 71 explores social marginalization is through the register of family, as I have already mentioned. The absence, or at other times the failure, of figures of authority looms large in Calcutta 71. It is represented by the recalcitrant father figure in the “1933” segment and his futile efforts to control his family. In the “1943” segment, this failure is symbolized by Shobhona’s mother and her complicity in the sexual and economic exploitation of her children. Such complicity is replicated by the well-employed male relative stationed in New Delhi who declares his unwillingness to help Shobhona with money or support. The segment ends with a receding mug-shot of Shobhona in “limbo-lighting,” where her face slowly disappears into the darkness of the surrounding screen-space. In making her disappear into the darkness of screen space, the film formally suggests Shobhona’s parallel with her sibling Guntu, a teenage factory-worker who supposedly engages in criminal activities in the darkness of night. Attention to the film’s own context of local circulation illuminates why and how Calcutta 71 devotes so much narrative time and space in detailing the crisis of the family and issues of

205 criminality. The stories within the film, while set in the past and derived from fictional works of literature, nevertheless explore issues of fundamental social concern in the Calcutta of the 1970s. To elaborate on this aspect, I constellate the film to other texts of the time, such as contemporary journal articles and books that focus on the Naxalite movement in the city. In an evocatively titled article “Urban Guerrillas in Calcutta” (1971) that sought to “explain” the rise of Naxalite activity in Calcutta, the influential English-language journal Economic and Political Weekly squarely blamed the increasing number of the dispossessed underclasses that included refugees. As it notes, “In the last forty years in the city [of Calcutta] alone the population per square mile increased from 54, 528 to 79, 023! This was due not only to the population explosion, but also to the influx of refugees”.9 The piece goes on to pinpoint and “identify” the zones where congestion and pauperization had given rise to “anti-social activity”: the squatter colonies formed outside the margins of the main city, the industrial zone to the north of the “black town,” the slum areas and canalside settlements in the eastern fringe, and some neighborhoods of “black town” itself, “Northern and Central Calcutta, which is less a city than a conglomeration of villages” (ibid. 1381). Certain zones of the city thus, according to this account, become sources of elite anxiety because of the predominance of anti-social activity. “Anti-social” in local colloquialism implies criminals and other such delinquent lumpen figures. In this journal account, it is interesting to note that the new refugee settlement areas, industrial areas and old parts of the native town, while traditionally distinguished from one another on ethnic grounds, are brought together in a particular narrative by their common tendency towards a so-called anti-urbanism (“collection of villages”). The suggestion, unmistakable for the “elite” readers of the English-language magazine, is that the symbolic integrity of the city is being disturbed by the proliferation of spaces and peoples within the city 9

“Urban Guerrillas in Calcutta”, Economic and Political Weekly (no author name). 6. 28 (July 10, 1971): 1379-82.

206 itself whose modes of living are fundamentally at odds with the ordered existence and imagination of urban life. At one level, while such aberrant spaces and anti-social human subjects are exactly the ones portrayed with critical empathy by Calcutta 71, for less sympathetic eyes, such spaces within the city and their inhabiting residents are rife with Naxalite “violence”. In another contemporary account, the monograph Naxalite Movement by Biplab Dasgupta (1974), we see how the “congested and pauperized,” “anti-social” zones within the city as described previously by the journal EPW overlap remarkably with the anxiety of Naxalite infiltration and activity. Dasgupta notes: The Naxalites went in for control over some areas of the Calcutta industrial belt, and formed what they called liberated areas. Most of these were along the main railway line running through the city … [I]t was common knowledge in Calcutta which areas were safe and which were not … [A]t night the shops would close earlier, road would be deserted, and it would be impossible to get a taxi to go to [these] areas (81-82). There is a consensus, between the journal article and the book’s description, about “those areas” of the city which are a cause of concern. Such examples can be found in other contemporary representations in journals, newspapers as well books describing the Naxalite insurgency in Calcutta of this period. The cultural/textual discourse of “anti-social” presence is significant, in that it erases any notion of structural imbalances within the system, or the possibility of politically legitimate and conscious resistance. Instead, these texts construct a narrative where “anti-social” and “criminal” behavior frequently change places, and become one and the same, with Naxalism. The focus is on the same areas of the city, and the same groups of marginalized people, who have become the sudden subject of representation. As Dasgupta claims, “Anti-social elements helped the Naxalite movement in several ways. They became an important channel

207 through which knives, swords, pipeguns, and to a lesser extent bombs, manufactured in hidden workshops came into the possession of the Naxalites” (97). Such representations sought to consciously undermine in liberal eyes and minds, the political legitimacy of Naxalism as well as contrarian claims of right to the city. That sites of “manufacture” and “workshops,” places where Marxists traditionally accused the bourgeoisie of oppressing workers, became significant spaces of “help” to Naxalites and a sudden subject of study for the state, is only to be understood in the context of industrial stagnation of a city. Dasgupta continues: Many of these anti-socials operated as wagon-breakers and physically controlled the areas alongside the main railway line running through the eastern side of the city. It is interesting to note that most of the Naxalite strongholds were situated on both sides of the railway line … [I]n some cases the wagon breakers and the Naxalite teenagers were indistinguishable from one another since those among the wagon-breakers who worked in the ‘front-line’ generally were of the same age as the teenage Naxalites (97-98).10 Railway tracks running into the city, and railway wagons carrying, among other things, food supplies, key spaces and objects of capitalist urban modernity, are again re-placed from their original production contexts by the appropriation and infiltration of criminal lumpen elements. The new situation called forth from the State renewed regulation over jobless populations and “wagon-breakers” to deal with this challenge.

10

I have quoted Dasgupta at some length because this text, while similar to many other contemporary texts on this subject, in both English and Bengali, and generally representative of the normative argument I am trying to reproduce here, nevertheless stands out in terms of its close attention, more than other texts of its kind, to the specific urban sites and social groups of “ill-repute”. A reading of the entire chapter, “Urban Guerrilla Activities” (p. 115) is even more productive in revealing the assumptions underlying a rather exemplary description of Calcutta’s contemporary space.

208 Going back to Calcutta 71 in the light of such contemporary discussions illuminates new aspects of the film. “Criminality” is the focus of the segment labeled “1953,” dealing with the issue of rice smuggling, and the youth who carry on such activities evading the strict discipline of the state. Calcutta 71’s portrayal of rice smuggling in 1953 was not simply a matter of giving historical depth, it also referred to an issue very much alive at the contemporary moment of the early 70s. Despite its fictitious setting as the representative space of “cinema,” no contemporary audience could ignore the very contemporary nature of the film’s reference to wagon-breaking criminals, rail-side slums, and the State crackdown on rice-stealing “smugglers’” and anti-social Naxalites. The sequence opens with a shot of a single youth, Gouranga, carrying a sack of rice from a suburban slum to take the train to Calcutta. The “anti-social” nature of his activity is immediately highlighted through an ironic contrast; passing by the house of his friend, Gouranga disrupts the friend’s study by offering him a biri (local-made cigarette). Attention to the soundtrack will reveal the parody of the so-called education-system, as the unnamed friend rhetorically intones and replicates the logic of the ruling post-colonial establishment through his routine of “studies” - “All of us need to know about the administrative system (shashonbyabostha) of West Bengal, as West Bengal is part of the federal Indian Union”. The Bengali word “shashon” (to rule) is phonetically similar to “soshon” (to suck, exploitation). The system of rule is also, thus the system of exploitation, a point the film repeatedly underscores. Gouranga’s rather cheeky disruption about the futility of his friend’s efforts is a minor point of the plot, but the contrast between two young men, roughly similar in their social standing otherwise, is part of the narrative’s critical-pedagogic separation of the defiant criminal lumpen from the submissive rule-bound citizen.

209 The integral connection between the urban center and Gouranga’s own location -connected by railroads, incidentally, and the growing contradiction between an impoverished generation and their refusal of such a version of “post-coloniality,” is most clearly illustrated in this segment, based on the short story “Esmalgar” (Smuggler) by another Marxist writer, Samaresh Basu. One of the youth of Gouranga’s gang describes how he discovered, after his return from prison, that his sister had died because of his family’s inability to pay for medicine. He notes with bitterness, “We can put up with all the blows – police, prison, the rest. But our families are dying with hunger. That is what’s maddening”. In the film’s narrative, the railroad by which this group of young rice smugglers travels to Calcutta is the important link that connects “country and the city”. The narrative formally underlines this point by repeatedly cutting to images of the train speeding by on the tracks, moving peoples and goods to and from the city. This unequal spatial/social relation is patrolled by law-enforcement officials who ruthlessly implement the will of the State. Gouranga and his group spend their time dodging in and out of compartments, avoiding the policemen and articulating what Mrinal Sen terms a “biological distaste” of the police.11 These youth are viewed with equal suspicion and hatred by the older “respectable” passengers inside the compartment, all male. Several of these men speak with hostility about these “young ruffians,” and how the “nation” (desh) needs to be rescued from the dangers posed by these trouble makers. The invocation of the “nation” is important, coming closely after the reference to “Delhi” in the earlier “1943” segment, as is the representative of the nation-state in this segment, a burly middle class man by the name of Mr. Biswas who is proud of his physical prowess, and an

11

Mrinal Sen stated, “Because of our long history of colonial oppression and injustice, the Indian people have generationally inscribed ‘the police’ as the enemy, outside of society and definitely not a part of the masses … [T]he same tradition has continued among the masses, and a certain attitude has crystallized … a biological distaste” (Sen 1972:21, italics refer to the English words in the original).

210 English-speaking ”citizen” proper. He takes it up on himself to teach the ill-mannered youths a lesson, and beats up the group leader Gouranga. As Gouranga wipes his bloody mouth after the beating, and some passengers express pangs about the harshness of the punishment, Mr. Biswas chides them sharply, saying, “Brothers, this is why the nation (desh) is in such dire straits… I did this for all of you, and now you all are criticizing me”. The explicit antagonism, between the putative “nation” represented by grown middle-class men and the anti-social “ruffian” youth, hunted by the police on one hand and condemned by the citizenry on the other, is unmistakable. The entire sequence is alternated with rapid intercuts showing the speeding, blurry rail-tracks, speeding on towards Calcutta and also moving forward in time. In what has to be a classic instance of “guerrilla action,” towards the end of this sequence the bloodied Gouranga trips his aggressor, Mr. Biswas, from behind as he prepares to deboard the train. The last part of this segment however ends with the viewer being informed, that Gouranga has been shot by the police, a message that is delivered to Gouranga’s mother. This segment again illustrates Mrinal Sen’s exploration of the multiple dimensions of class contradiction. The criminalization of indigent young men and their dialectical difference from the putative nationalist citizenry operate at multiple levels of exclusion and separation: from the law as well as from systems of Englishlanguage education and speech. These registers manifest the difference fostered by class. Formally, the three vignettes comprising the film, add up to the present. The narrator’s voice, which had introduced the film’s audience to the urban chaos that was Calcutta of 1971, reemerges at this point of the plot as the Naxalite guerrilla who is the protagonist of the final episode. The narrator, who is embodied for the first time at this point, directly addresses the film’s audience: he asks, “You know what my crime is? I saw everything, saw thousands of years, even though I am only twenty years old, and could not stop myself”. The present moment

211 of “1971” is a moment where a party is taking place at a fashionable city hotel in the “White town”. The chief guest of honor is a nationalist leader, Mr. Banerjee, ironically portrayed by leading Left intellectual Ajitesh Bandopadhyay, who also wrote the script for this part of the film. Mr. Banerjee speaks of “building up a strong party” for the “welfare of the nation”; he is surrounded by the society elite, who vacuously express their intentions of social service and charity, even as the majority of the other guests in the room focus on the sumptuous food served at the party. This higher unity between citizenship and the neo-colonial nation-state is figured in the nationalist leader. The move from “Mr. Biswas” in “1953” to “Mr. Banerjee” in “1971” is significant: they are the only two characters in the narrative who have surnames (indicative of caste-status in India). The higher-caste Brahmin leader also counts higher on the scale of cultural sophistication and dexterity with the English-language. The neocolonial circuit is completed as the leader and his coterie enjoy American jazz and rock-and-roll music in the posh “white town” hotel, both a continuity of and differentiation from, the European “culture” enjoyed in the earlier era of British colonial rule. The party is disrupted by the entry of the Naxalite guerrilla narrator. In another break with narrative realism, he announces to the guests that there is nothing to be afraid of, as he is unarmed and dead, shot by the police that morning. Framed in total darkness on-screen, the narrator then delivers a speech, stating that he finally reached his breaking point. “I have been witnessing this poverty for a thousand years, and I could not stand it anymore”. Breaking the fourth wall of cinema and addressing the spectators, he asks everyone to participate in revolutionary social change. The film ends with the dead revolutionary running through the bylanes of the city chased by the police, intercut by photographic images of piled dead bodies on the streets and other recurring imagery of mass misery in Calcutta of the early 1970s.

212

V - Conclusion The denouement of Calcutta 71 produces two related political observations: first, the reconfiguration of extant regimes of socio-political control and economic profit accumulation into the crystallizing category of neocolonialism, marked by the ascendancy of post-colonial nationalist elites. Neocolonialism thus perpetuates under modified conditions the combined and uneven development of global capitalism. The second observation flowing from the first is the reconfiguration of urban spaces under the neocolonial impact. The right to the city of lumpen underclasses in the peripheries, and increasingly in cities all over the world, is pitted against the militarized and spatially demarcated zones of control. This is the central lesson that Calcutta 71 underscores: if the Naxalite protagonist calls for revolutionary transformation, the film makes it clear that (such) a radical negation of the existing system would involve a fundamental restructuring of the spatio-temporal and other forms of control that characterize the experience of Calcutta as a city in the 1970s. The local struggles of the criminalized lumpen, in other words, feed into and derive from a larger struggle for the reclamation of history and the city against the incursions of capitalism. On the other hand, I would also draw on Calcutta 71 as a Third Cinema text to illustrate an aesthetic point. The formal innovations and experimentations of the film attempt, as I have argued, to relate the political question of lumpen revolutionary claims on the city to conversations on aesthetic (cinematic) praxis. In elaborating such a practice of cinema, Mrinal Sen resists both the postmodern imperative of “avant garde,” vacuous formalist experimentation, art for art’s sake, as well as the commoditized spectacle of portraying revolutionary Calcutta – and the global periphery by extension -- through lenses of exoticization, primitivism or cultural

213 difference as has been the more mainstream tendency of our current “post-political” age. In contrast to both of these practices, avant-gardist postmodernism as well as mainstream postmodernism, Sen’s careful and dialectically nuanced attention to form and content is instructive in promoting as well as negotiating revolutionary and anti-capitalist concerns. In the context of an aesthetic medium, cinema, which is the most capital-dependent of media, paradigms such as Mrinal Sen’s internationalist Third Cinema deserve reclamation and reincorporation into our collective aesthetic and political imaginations.

214

CONCLUSION Insurgent Imaginations and World Literature

The texts of Aravind Adiga, Manabendranath Roy, Chanakya Sen, Utpal Dutta, Binoy Ghosh and Mrinal Sen, constitute a corpus of works of world literature (and cinema) that articulate the contestations around modernity in the long 20th and 21st centuries in South Asia. Modernity, understood as the historical condition fostered by the world system of capitalist relations of production, is singular and uneven. In the case of 20th and 21st century South Asia, the contestations around modernity were epitomized by the greatest political event of the mid20th century – decolonization -- and the attendant efforts of anticolonial and postcolonial national liberation. Accordingly, the texts I discuss above, repeatedly return to this central problematic and explore its multiple political, historical, socio-economic and cultural ramifications. In this regard it is important to underscore that the critique of colonial and postcolonial underdevelopment was not an exclusive Left prerogative: different versions of the same critique were made by leftist, liberal and conservative nationalists alike. In contrast to centrist (liberal nationalist) negotiations of colonial modernity that left relatively untouched the structures of colonial/postcolonial capitalism, or the Right conservative embrace of a majoritarian nationalism that transposed politics to the consolidation of a realm of cultural “difference,” what marked out the Communist Left was its emphatic rejection of both capitalism and elite-led majoritarian nationalism. The Communist vision of revolutionary internationalism understood the question of national liberation as emancipation from the combined and uneven development of the capitalist world-system. Communism constituted a distinctive alternative trajectory of anticolonialism from liberal and conservative nationalism in the (post)colony: such a conception dialectically

215 linked the metropole and the colony, working class uprisings and insurrectionary national liberation movements. Thus, as I discussed in the Introduction to this dissertation, the question of emancipation in the (post)colonial peripheries was conceptualized through and in relation to what Fredric Jameson (2002) and others term “peripheral modernity,” in dialectical terms of sameness and difference from the metropole. My study of the above-mentioned literary engagements with peripheral modernity in South Asia complicates the dominant postcolonial emphasis on criticizing “Eurocentrism”. Extending the scope of literary scholarship that analyzes genres with exclusive reference to the metropole, I illuminate how such literary forms and genres are reconfigured in the global periphery. Such reconfigurations proceed along a number of axes that are not conceptualized through the postcolonial framework of writing back to Empire, or asserting epistemological (cultural) difference. For instance, “Western” texts and paradigms, such as the African-American Richard Wright’s “protest novel” Native Son or the German Bertolt Brecht’s “epic theater,” are appropriated and refashioned in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Utpal Dutt’s The Rights of Man respectively to negotiate local contexts that are similar yet different from their “originals”. These appropriations are neither automatic expressions of “Western” cultural hegemony nor its subversion: Adiga refashions Richard Wright’s depiction of racial oppression in the US to illuminate concerns of caste in India, while at the same time parodically utilizing Wright’s Leftist class-critique against its grain to articulate neoliberal and nationalist middle class aspirations. Utpal Dutt’s fusing of epic theater with the indigenous form of jatra retains Brecht’s preoccupation with proletarian aesthetics and politics, but seeks to deepen engagement with the national-popular through a local, contextual reference to the Bengali peasantry. To take another instance, both Utpal Dutt and Manabendranath Roy, through their generic affinities with the

216 work of Black intellectuals such Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka (for Dutt) and Claude McKay (for Roy), continue the task of radical Afro-Asian internationalist solidarity. Paradoxically, a consideration of these literary and political affiliations among colonized and postcolonial intellectuals such as Roy and Dutt reveal their conscious undermining of nationalist strands of “Third Worldism”. The literary interactions I sketch illuminate Franco Moretti’s theorization (2000; 2003), on the importance of cross-cultural generic and formal interaction in the formation of world literature, or what Moretti terms the interaction between “foreign form, local content and local form”. Such interactions are necessarily unequal, on account of the structuring impact of the capitalist world-system. Yet in contrast to dominant postcolonial assumptions, not all “North South” or even “East West” literary interactions replicate the hegemonic structures of cultural imperialism. This is particularly useful to understand through a consideration of formal and generic interaction. Thus M.N. Roy’s negotiation of the literary genres of memoir and testimonio help to articulate Roy’s personal, as well as, political conversations between anticolonial national liberation and Communist internationalism. Moreover, in emphasizing the centrality of revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union in such a project, Roy’s Memoirs complicates easy distinctions between East and West. The same nuancing of geopolitical distinctions – North, South, East, West, or capitalist, socialist, communist -- can be seen in Utpal Dutt’s case as well, as he undertakes a local, South Asian mediation – through the theatrical form of jatra -- of the internationalism of Black Power on one hand and radical Maoism on the other. In addition, my study seeks to bring attention to the hierarchies of genre within world literature, and their circulation in the capitalist literary marketplace. By considering “lesser” genres such as the memoir or folk theater, and local indigenous forms of literary narrative such

217 as naksha, tamasha and jatra, I seek to not only reconstellate the dominance of the postcolonial Anglophone novel, but also interrogate the relation and interaction between genres. Through these genres I trace alternative or parallel circuits of transnationalism to capitalist “globalization”. Thus Binoy Ghosh’s nakshas illustrate the formal interactions between IndoPersianate prose traditions and English satire; these help to negotiate the particular site of peripheral urbanity and lumpen proletariat experience. Similarly, Mrinal Sen’s Third Cinema influenced portrayal of the revolutionary lumpen underclass attempts to undermine the capitalintensive medium of cinema itself, through a dialectical combination of formal experimentation, and thematic critique of neocolonialism. As I show, both the naksha, through its formal reference to pre-European colonialist, Indo-Persian literary circuits, and Calcutta 71, through its resonances with anti-imperialist Latin American and Tricontentalist cinematic practice, testify to instances of Global South-to-South cultural exchange that have received little acknowledgment particularly in postcolonial scholarship. I have located such engagements and affinities in relation to what I term “postcolonial planetarity,” adapting the latter term from Spivak (2003). The Communist internationalism of the Naxalite movement is the basis of such radical aesthetic and political cultures of postcolonial planetarity. I locate postcolonial planetarity within this materialist framework as I argue that today, the suppression of Communist discourse haunts dominant definitions of both the terms “postcolonial” and “planetarity”. As I have discussed in the previous chapters, such postcolonial conceptual models as the Black Atlantic, South Asian notions of Subalternity and Planetarity, Third Worldism, and Colored Cosmopolitanism (the last is from Slate 2012), all seek to deny, displace or reconfigure their inheritances from the Communist movements of the long 20th century. In highlighting Communist internationalism and its constitutive relation to such

218 postcolonial concerns and problematics, I problematize extant definitions and understandings of the “Global South”. Simultaneously, in linking such paradigms to the object of my study, Maoist Naxalism, I seek to illuminate and reconstellate the Naxalite movement within a global rather than exclusively national frame. Such an approach provides a fuller understanding of the Naxalite resistance to ascendant neoliberal capitalism and majoritarian nationalism in contemporary India, by contextualizing Naxalite resistance, and critique, within longer histories of emancipation. Such histories continue to be lived, contested and rewritten in the insurgent bodies, minds and imaginations that shape our present and our future.

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242

AURITRO MAJUMDER CV 401 Hall of Languages Department of English Syracuse University Syracuse NY 13244

[email protected] +1 315 396 2207

June 2014 ACADEMIC POSITION 

Assistant Professor of English, University of Houston, TX. (From August 2014)

EDUCATION 

PhD in English, Syracuse University, 2014



School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University, 2012



MA in English (First Class), Jadavpur University, 2009



BA (Hons.) in English (First Class), Jadavpur University, 2007

PUBLICATIONS Journal Articles: “The Poetics and Politics of Blackness: Literature as a Site of Transnational Contestation in Chanakya Sen’s The Morning After and Utpal Dutt’s The Rights of Man”. In Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Forthcoming 2014. 29 manuscript pages. “Dilemmas of Parliamentary Communism: The Rise and Fall of the Left in West Bengal” (Coauthored with Subho Basu). In Critical Asian Studies. 45.2 (June 2013): 167-200. Book Chapters: “Representations and Re-presentations: Reading Coca-Cola Advertising, and the Visuals of AntiCoke Struggles in India”. In Sirpa Tenhunen and Klaus Karttunen eds. Contentious Connections: Social Imaginations in Globalizing South Asia (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), p. 55-78.

243 “Frantz Fanon: Revisiting Anticolonialism”. In Pradip Basu ed. Modern Social Thinkers (Calcutta: Setu Prakashani, 2012), p. 144-161. Other Publications: “The Critical Question of National Form: (Post-) Marxism and the Postcolonial Nation-State”. In Cerebration (Jan-Mar Issue 1, 2012). Contribution (Untitled), In Theory, School of Criticism and Theory 2012 Annual Newsletter, Cornell University. Fall 2012. In Progress: “The Naxalite Movement and Global 1960s Lineages of ‘Theory’” (Invited). In Pradip Basu ed. Critique of Naxalism: Poststructuralist Perspectives. 5000 words, expected publication end-2014. “Naxalites” (Invited). In Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz eds. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies. (Under contract with Wiley Blackwell). 3000 words, expected publication fall- 2015. AWARDS, HONORS & FELLOWSHIPS         

Graduate Student Organization Research Grant, Syracuse University, April 2013. Honorable Mention, Mary Marshall Prize for Best Graduate Essay in the Humanities, Syracuse University, 2013. English Department Fellowship, Syracuse University, for School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University, June-July, 2012. (Full tuition scholarship, one recipient per year) Goekjian Fellowship for 2011-12 (Pre-Dissertation Research Grant, five recipients per year among Humanities and Social Sciences), Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, Syracuse University. Bharati Fellowship Travel Grant (Summer Research Grant, five recipients per year among students working on South Asia), South Asia Center, Syracuse University, May 2010. Graduate Student Organization Travel Grant, Syracuse University - May 2010, March 2011, October 2011, August 2012. English Dept. Conference Travel Grant, Syracuse University – May 2010, October 2010, October 2011, December 2013. English Dept. Summer TA Fellowship, Syracuse University, Summer 2010-2013. Teaching Assistantship, English Dept., Syracuse University, 2009 – 2013.

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS 2014 Seminar co-organizer, “Differential Capital: Materialist Approaches to Postcoloniality”. Presentation – “Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger: The Politics of Postcolonial Fiction and the Communist Idea”. Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). New York University, New York, USA. March.

244 2014 “M.N. Roy’s Memoirs: Internationalist Solidarity, Afro-American-Asian Solidarity, and the Question of Genre”. 129th Convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA). Chicago, USA. January. 2013 “New India Fiction and the Global Literary Marketplace”. INVITED TALK. Humanities Center Speaker Series. Syracuse University. Syracuse, USA. November. 2013 Panel Chair, “Anticolonial Encounters with the Postcolonial,” and “Movement Matters”. Materialism and the Colony Symposium, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Great Barrington, USA. May. 2012 “Naxalism’s Gandhi: Corruption, National Culture, and the Lumpen Bourgeoisie”. 41st Annual Conference on South Asia, Center for South Asia, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. October. 2012 “The Age of the Sickle: Postcoloniality, Culture and Marxism in Bengal”. INVITED TALK Co-sponsored by South Asia Center & Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, Fall 2012 Speaker Series, Syracuse University. Syracuse, USA. September. 2012 “Mao and Fanon?: Underdevelopment, Self and the Dialectic”. 2nd Marxism and Psychology International Congress. Universidad Michoacán de San Nicolás de Hidalgo. Morelia, Mexico. August (in absentia). 2012 “Of Borderlands and Horizons: Decolonization and Liberation in the Theater of Utpal Dutta and Heisnam Kanhailal”. Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA. March. 2011 “Cinema and the Urban Revolution: Postcoloniality as Aesthetic Form in Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta 71”. 40th Annual Conference on South Asia, Center for South Asia, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. October. 2011 “Lenin in Translation: The (Inter) National Question and Sectarian Communisms in India”. Symposium on Maoism and the State of the Indian Left. South Asia Center. University of Pennsylvania, USA. March. 2010 “The Autonomy of the Subaltern: Theorizing the Trajectory of Subaltern Studies”. Subaltern Studies and New Social History: An Interdisciplinary Workshop of Graduate Students. Department of History, Syracuse University, Syracuse, USA. December. 2010 “Development Discourse and the Creation of Hegemonic Space: Bengali Travel Writing and the Andamans”. 39th Annual Conference on South Asia, Center for South Asia, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. October. 2010 “Glocalized Persuasion and Globalizing Protest: Advertising Coca Cola and Visual Culture in India”. Globalizing South Asia, Annual Conference of the Nordic Association of South Asian Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland. May.

245 RESEARCH INTERESTS Primary Areas - Postcolonial/Transnational Studies; South Asian Anglophone Literature; World Literature; Critical Theory; Marxism. Secondary Areas – Africana/pan-African Studies; Third Cinema; Urbanity Studies. COURSES TAUGHT Teaching Associate, Department of English, Syracuse University (Fall 2011 – Spring 2014) Primary Instructor –  Spring 2014 ETS 181 Class and Literary Texts: “Debates in World Literature”  Fall 2013 ETS 182 Race and Literary Texts: “Comparative Blackness Across Continents”  Spring 2013 ETS 182 Race and Literary Texts: “Comparative Blackness Across Continents”  Fall 2012 ETS 181 Class and Literary Texts: “The Global 20th Century”  Spring 2012 ETS 181 Class and Literary Texts: “The Global 20th Century”  Fall 2011 ETS 181 Class and Literary Texts: “Class and Literary Texts” Teaching Assistant, Dept of English, Syracuse University (Fall 2009 – Spring 2011) Teaching Assistant for the following classes (involving grading & leading two discussion sections) Spring 2011 ETS 153 Interpretation of Fiction Fall 2010 ETS 121 Introduction to Shakespeare Spring 2010 ETS 145 Reading Popular Culture Fall 2009 ETS 154 Interpretation of Film LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY 

Bengali, Hindi (native fluency)

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES AND SERVICE Professional   

Co-organizer of “Differential Capital: Materialist Approaches to Postcoloniality”. Seminar at the Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association. NYU, New York, March 20-23, 2014. Co-organizer of “Materialism and the Colony”. Symposium/Workshop at Bard College, Simon’s Rock, Massachusetts, May 23-24, 2013. Organizer, English Graduate Organization Annual Speaker Series (Featuring Ania Loomba, University of Pennsylvania), April 25-26, 2013.

246 Service Syracuse University, NY (2009-2014) – University and Department of English    

Senate Representative, Syracuse University Graduate Student Organization, 2012-13. (Also served on Graduate Employment Issues sub-committee). Graduate Representative, Syracuse University Academic Integrity Graduate Panel Hearings, 201314. Graduate Representative, Syracuse University Academic Integrity Undergraduate Panel Hearings, 2011-13. Graduate Representative, Hiring Committee (for Assistant Prof. Faculty position in 20th C British Literature), Dept. of English, Syracuse University, 2011-12.

Jadavpur University, India (2004-09) – University Service  

General Secretary, Film Club, Arts Faculty Students’ Union, 2006-2008. Class Representative, Arts Faculty Students’ Union, 2005-2007.

PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS   

American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Modern Language Association (MLA) South Asian Literary Association (SALA)

REFERENCES 

Ania Loomba, Catherine Bryson Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania, [email protected]

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Crystal Bartolovich, Associate Professor of English, Syracuse University, [email protected]

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Keya Ganguly, Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota, [email protected]

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Subho Basu, Associate Professor of History, McGill University, [email protected]