March 31, 2026! Indeed a special day in Indian history as, on this day, finally and formally was declared the end of Naxalism. The dooms day of the "Red Terror", in brief, happens to be the historic March 31, the dawn of the new, f(r)ought financial year.
At this stage, let us not get in to the ideological warfare. Instead, let us look at a cinematic and a literary re-presentation of the issue to understand the subtle human(e) resonances.
Let us begin with Gulzar's debut as a director, his early seventies' film "Mere Apne", a Hindi remake of Tapan Sinha's Bengali film, based on a Bengali short story.
"Mere Apne" deals with the angst of a defeated idealist who dreamt of justice, fairness, equality for all. In a way, he had found the then nascent Naxalbari Movement as a mode of liberation from oppressive forces of all sorts.
Instead his naive faith gets him, an intelligent scholar who could have made something of his life, to descend down to the lowly status of a street corner gang leader. As he watches his idea(l)s getting eroded by the corrosive system, the director shows through him the fall from grace of an entire generation who lost not just the soul but also almost all to Naxalbari and its askew ideals.
Mahashweta Devi's short story "Draupadi" shows that the Naxalite Movement not only gobbled up its own children, but it also victimised the status quo by making it brutal beyond belief. Translated in to limpid English by Gayatri Chakravorty-Spivak who used it to raise the problem of the subaltern voice, the story stands the Mahabharata tale of 'Draupadi Chirharan' on its head.
Dopdi Mehajen, whose attempt to help her tribal people, gets her brutally violated by the police force chasing her, has no hopes of a mythical help. Instead, she uses her tattered femininity, her traumatised body to taunt the perpetrators.
Art, in brief, be it film, be it literature, brings in to sharp focus the twisted complexities, the ugly underbellies, the lived realities underlying the ideological slogans. If we want to completely understand this end of what once supposed to be a beginning, better to read more and more of such literary texts, watch many more films detailing such delusions!
Pratima@ In Aai's memory, we have floated a short story competition. It is annual. The theme in its initial year was "parents". The first prize went to a story by a tribal author from the Nagpur-Gadchiroli belt. His story dealt with the disillusioned return of a tribal youth who had converted to the Naxalite cadre. The story was a moving analysis of how and why the boy decided to return to the mainstream.
Quote of the day: Says Salman Rushdie, "Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart."
Word of the day: Naxalbari Movement Today was declared the formal end of the Naxalbari Movement. It was a 1967 armed peasant uprising in Naxalbari, West Bengal. It was led by Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal, and Jangal Santhal. Emerging from a CPI(M) faction, it targeted landlordism and land dispossession, sparking a prolonged, radical movement known as Naxalism. It spread to various states, becoming a significant Left-Wing Extremism, its urban variant, et al, in brief, a circular cause n effect challenge to the status quo, peace, development and progress.
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