Srila Roy

Remembering revolution : gender, violence, and subjectivity in India's Naxalbari movement

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS REMEMBERING REVOLUTION: AN INTRODUCTION 1. Mapping the Movement, Situating the Study 2. Gendering the Revolution: Official and Popular Imaginary 3. Everyday Life in the Underground 4. Bhalobasha, Biye, Biplab: On the Politics of Sexual Stories 5. Sexual Violence and the Politics of Naming 6. Political Violence, Trauma, and Healing CONCLUSION: MOURNING REVOLUTION NOTES GLOSSARY BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

Melancholic politics and the politics of melancholia The Indian women’s movement

Mourning, especially melancholic mourning, has recently emerged as a significant site of expressing and addressing loss in feminism. While feminism’s hard-won successes in achieving institutional power globally have brought exuberance over achievement, they have also come with an acute sense of despondency and loss; one that is not easily mourned or relinquished. The institutionalization of feminism in governmental, non-governmental and academic sites has precipitated this sense of loss in India, wherein the discussion of this article is located. In exploring the politics of loss in contemporary feminist discourse in India, feminist melancholia is seen to condition a fetishized attachment to the past, and to past modes of knowledge, action and consciousness in ways that demand the generational reproduction of feminism rather than its renewal in times of perceived crisis. Present-day anxieties over the ‘co-option’ and resultant depoliticization of the Indian women’s movement constitute a narrative of loss in which a politically more ‘authentic’ past functions as a normative standard for feminist politics in the present, and as a prescriptive model of feminism’s future. Advancements in Women’s Studies and activist (now ‘NGOized’) practice that are seen to be deviating from the redemption of such an idealized past are thus deemed apolitical. In interrogating contemporary anxieties about feminism’s present and impending future (that resonate beyond the bounds of India), the article demonstrates how melancholic loss can inform a potentially conservative politics that seeks to contain feminism in a once loved but now lost ‘home’.

The Indian Women’s Movement: Within and Beyond NGOization

The article documents some of the transformations to the women’s movement in India in the post-independence period. Given the empirical and ideological centrality of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in the terrain of Indian feminism, the article focuses on dominant feminist responses to ‘NGOization’ in the form of critiques of the alleged cooption and professionalization of the women’s movement and the loss of political autonomy, a key ideal amongst Indian feminists. As a response to these criticisms, I suggest that there is a need to go beyond the ‘NGOization paradigm’ in evaluating a new feminist landscape, especially after the Delhi rape of 2012. ‘NGOisation’ offers limited conceptual tools to make sense of the present moment if not entirely hiding from view the political possibilities that it offers for feminist reflection and (re)mobilization.

Revolutionary marriage: on the politics of sexual stories in Naxalbari

Marriage practices, the dynamics of interpersonal relationships and the politics of sexuality are relatively under-researched themes in the study of Bengali communism. Historical scholarship on the revolutionary politics of the extreme left Naxalbari andolan of the late 1960s–1970s, the object of this piece of study, is no exception. The article engages with women and mens narratives on the practice of ‘revolutionary’ marriage in the movement through the prism of contemporary popular memory studies and narrative analysis. Drawing on field interviews with middle-class male and female activists, the article draws attention to the contestatory nature of marriage in the collective memory of the movement. Narrative contestations over marriage in the Naxalite movement underscore, I argue, a tension between a utopian ideal of transgressive interpersonal relations and dominant middle-class codes of sexual morality. At the same time, individual attempts to ‘compose’ (in storytelling) socially recognizable and acceptable subject positions are grounded upon the silencing and abjection of more risky memories. Given the discrepancies and contradictions within the narrative repertoire from which individuals construct their identities, these ‘marriage stories’ are a tremendous resource for investigating the politics of love, sexuality and subject-formation in middle-class Bengali society.

The Everyday Life of the Revolution: Gender, Violence and Memory

The ‘heroic life’ or the life of the revolutionary is one that resists or even seeks to transcend the everyday and the ordinary. The ‘banal’ vulnerabilities of everyday life, however, continue to constitute the unseen, often unspoken background of such a heroic life. This article turns to womens memories of everyday life spent ‘underground’ in the context of the late 1960s radical left Naxalbari movement of Bengal. Drawing upon recent published memoirs and field interviews with middle class female (and male) activists, it outlines the ways in which revolutionary femininity was imagined and lived in the everyday life of this political movement. Particular focus is given to the gendered and classed nature of political labour, the gendering of revolutionary space, and finally, the extent to which everyday life in the ‘underground’ was a site of vulnerability and powerlessness, especially for women. The article also brings out how these memories of interpersonal conflict and everyday violence tend to remain buried under a collective mythicisation of the ‘heroic life’.

the ethical ambivalence of resistant violence: notes from postcolonial south Asia

In the face of mounting militarism in south Asia, this essay turns to anti-state, ‘liberatory’ movements in the region that employ violence to achieve their political aims. It explores some of the ethical quandaries that arise from the embrace of such violence, particularly for feminists for whom political violence and militarism is today a moot point. Feminist responses towards resistant political violence have, however, been less straightforward than towards the violence of the state, suggesting a more ambivalent ethical position towards the former than the latter. The nature of this ambivalence can be located in a postcolonial feminist ethics that is conceptually committed to the use of political violence in certain, albeit exceptional circumstances on the basis of the ethical ends that this violence (as opposed to other oppressive violence) serves. In opening up this ethical ambivalence – or the ethics of ambiguity, as Simone de Beauvoir says – to interrogation and reflection, I underscore the difficulties involved in ethically discriminating between forms of violence, especially when we consider the manner in which such distinctions rely on and reproduce gendered modes of power. This raises particular problems for current feminist appraisals of resistant political violence as an expression of womens empowerment and ‘agency’.

Breaking the Cage

Contemporary feminist campaigns in India are finding new ways to confront the issue of women’s safety in public spaces. Local and national feminist campaigns like Why Loiter, Blank Noise, Take Back the Night Kolkata, and Pinjra Tod have begun to challenge mainstream arguments about women’s safety by asserting that women’s freedom and rights cannot be compromised in the name of protection.Together, they signify a new direction for feminist activism in India.

Neoliberalism, Postcolonialism and Hetero-Sovereignties: Emergent Sexual Formations in Contemporary India

Stephen Legg Srila RoySchool of Geography School of Sociology and Social PolicyUniversity of Nottingham University of NottinghamNottingham NottinghamNG7 2RD NG7 2RDUnited Kingdom United Kingdomstephen.legg@nottingham.ac.uk srila.roy@nottingham.ac.ukKeywords: neo-liberalism, post-colonialism, India, sexuality, sovereignty, feminism

Empowering Women: The Contradictions of Feminist Governance

This chapter looks at a range of governmental and non-governmental discourses and practices—and their underlying rationalities—in the name of ‘saving’ women and upholding their rights, especially in the Global South. Such feminist governmentality—or ‘governance feminism’, as it’s come to be known—includes the use of strategies that are increasingly both punitive and paternal. In considering examples such as the regulation of early and forced marriage and public protests around sexual violence, we see how relations of empowerment can be both voluntary and coercive insofar as they seek to elicit the compliance of women but also to coerce them when they are unwilling to act in their own interests.

Enacting/Disrupting the Will to Empower: Feminist Governance of “Child Marriage” in Eastern India

How is it that feminist strategies of empowerment and government can come to operate in a regulatory and coercive manner? While this question has been considered in light of the recent carceral turn involving feminist interventions into violence against women, it has not been explicated in the context of women’s economic empowerment. This is in spite of increased evidence of nonstate actors, including feminist NGOs, operating coercively toward their target populations, namely poor women of the global South. Beyond the empirical evidence, our conceptual schemes also remain inadequate to capture the multiple workings of feminist governmentalities, rooted in sources of power that we tend to keep separate. A closer reading of governmentality, or “the conduct of conduct,” also provides a better sense of its flip side, namely counter-conduct, or the resistance that the governed might pose to the “will to empower.” The article probes the interrelated question of feminist conduct and counter-conduct in the unique instance of the governance of early marriage undertaken by a developmental NGO in eastern India. The NGO’s campaign to curb early marriage brings into relief the dovetailing of different rationalities and techniques of government and types of power in ways that are currently underappreciated in analyses of feminism’s imbrication in power. Marriage in this case serves to mark the limits of feminist governance—at the hands of different actors, discourses, and interests—in embodying and working against women’s agency. It additionally shows that while subaltern women’s counter-conducts can destabilize dominant governmental rationalities and their underlying relations of power, they do not necessarily constitute a more progressive politics.