Locating Women in the Naxalbari Movement: A Story of Resistance and Fabrication of the Individual Female Identity

Abstract

The objective in this paper is to explore the role of women in the Naxalbari movement by studying how a woman resists all the patriarchal authorities and carves her own space in a male-dominated movement through The Naxalites: A Novel (1979), a representative text on the Naxalbari movement in Indian English Literature. The Naxalbari movement (1965-1975) is the first peasant revolution within twenty years of Indian Independence that initiated in a small village named Naxalbari situated in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal. Though there have been many scholarly studies on the movement, the representation of women and their experiences in the texts on the movement in Indian English Literature has not yet been traversed upon. The paper, therefore, addresses this gap by studying the movement from the feminist standpoint through one of the representative texts. While on one hand, historical records show how women had been frontline warriors in the initial phase of the movement only to be marginalized with the spread of the movement; on the other, none of the chronicles on the movement recognizes the role of women and their contributions in it. Through the text of The Naxalites: A Novel, this paper engages with such problematic and contradictory location of women through the portrayal of a female character who attempts to change the whole direction of the movement with the aim to make it more sustainable. Thus, the paper tries to analyze women as a subversive force within the movement who represent the critical voice against the patriarchal framework by suggesting an alternative modus operandi while staying within the folds of the movement.