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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Books |
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Review |
You Say You Want a Revolution
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| An inspired account of the radical movements of the 1960s and 70s |
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Published : 1 January 2011 |
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| H |
OW BEST TO WRITE HISTORICAL REVOLUTIONS into fiction? Gustave Flaubert showed us one
way in his grand 19th-century bildungsroman,
Sentimental Education , in which events and ideas of great
national significance are—seen through the novelist’s impartial
eye—at par with private dreams about interior decoration.
Protagonist
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Frederic and his friend Deslauriers are walking down a Parisian street, the latter declaiming nostalgically about one of the heroes of the French Revolution, Camille Desmoulins. Meanwhile Frederic, who has recently come into a large inheritance, is, unheeding of his friend, “looking at certain materials and articles of furniture in the shop-windows which would be suitable for his new residence.”
Dilip Simeon, whose novel takes us through the radical
Leftist movements of the late 1960s and early 70s, is a Flaubertian
to the extent that he pins his story of the subcontinent’s
political upheavals onto the adventures of a group of
students from a Delhi college. He is also Flaubertian in his
impressively wide lens—able to depict, with equal felicity,
a Sikh trucker’s life, a middle-class Bengali intellectual’s
preoccupations, and the history of labour movements in a
steel plant in Jamshedpur. But whereas Flaubert in Sentimental
Education gives a particular historical moment in
mid-19th-century Paris so dense a literary texture that we
are left certain of no conclusion except the emotive power
of fiction, Simeon’s method is more collage than weave. He ranges, through the arguments between his characters
(and in the small essays and reports inserted into the narrative),
over subjects like revolutionary Marxism in India,
communal riots and the minutiae of war.
To read today of Delhi campus talk from that era is to
be struck, first of all, by the intensity and awareness of the
debaters. These are young men barely out of their teens,
electrified, like their counterparts around the world, by the
famous advice of a student broadcaster in Berkeley: “If you
don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.”
Historical awareness is the ammunition of the movement,
for what is the Revolution if not the fulfilling of historical
inevitability? (“Class Enemies! Great People! Brave Martyrs!
Bright Future! Crimson Path! Enveloped in exclamation
points, the imperative of Revolution left little room for
discussion or doubt.”)
What this led to on the ground was an incredible sense of
fellowship among young people, forged through worldwide
protests against the Vietnam war and against the oppression
of the Palestinians, the singing of the ‘Internationale’
and the circulation of the venerated little Red Book of Chairman
Mao’s sayings, the inspiring student and worker uprisings
in the Paris of 1968 and the hope represented by the
Prague Spring, radical movements across the world from
the Tupamaros in Uruguay to the Zengakuren in Japan,
and, above all, the faith that the world would be a better
place when bourgeois capitalism was replaced by a workers’
state. Though the world’s young are now immeasurably
better networked and do not need to follow world events
with their ear on a crackly transistor radio, Simeon’s novel
is a stark reminder of the fact that today, a mere four decades
later, this kind of internationalism is unimaginable. In
the 21st century we are like each other less on the basis of a
shared faith and more for what we collectively consume—a
united front based on, say, Levi’s, Facebook and Kentucky
Fried Chicken.
Revolution Highway is an inspired account of not just that unique time but of the many different ways in which
its protagonists put it into words. Pranav, the son of a Bengali
police officer charged with eliminating the Naxalites
in Calcutta, Mohan, the son of a newspaper journalist with
jingoistic tendencies, Rathin, a student-intellectual seeking
to forge his own path, and Sin Taw, who punctures every
profundity with devilish humour, sit around in coffee houses
and dishevelled hostel rooms discussing their potential
role in the Revolution. These are genuinely political debates
and form the heart of the novel. While Pranav and Mohan
uphold Marxism with the zest of new converts, the Socratic
questioner Rathin challenges them with theories such
as “Communism is the last Semitic religion and not the
most attractive one at that” or reminders that it is actually
the arch-nihilist Nietzsche who ought to be regarded the
forerunner of those communists who now believe in “purifying
violence.” (As another character, retired schoolteacher
Abani Chakrabarty and one of the novel’s voices
of conscience, says towards the end of the novel, the vision
of a time beyond good and evil, one which political
dreamers use to justify the crimes of the present, is a
delusion that Nietzsche clearly recognised.)
| SIDDHARTHA TRIPATHY |
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Dilip Simeon: Asking questions not only about the Naxalite
movement but also the novel’s capacity to portray it. |
Meanwhile “campus theatre edges towards the
world stage” and the boys go out into the hinterland
to mobilise the peasants and workers who,
once drawn into the movement and organised
into annihilation squads, will lead the overthrow
of the state. The encounter between bourgeois students
and peasantry inevitably collapses the tension
of class differences into laughter. Stumbling
among the fields of northern Bihar, trying to
get the toilers interested in his message, Rathin
realises that “strenuous manual labour was not
conducive to listening to recitations from the
Red Book.” Later, he pretends to be asleep while
a puzzled old widow and a village wise man discuss
the meaning of his presence in their village.
“Khan sahib took a few moments to think deeply.
Then he spoke without altering the line of his
gaze and to no one, rather like an oracle. ‘Eee ,’
he said, and paused. ‘Eee…podhtey-podhtey;
podhtey-podhtey paagal hoyegaley . This is a
student gone mad with reading books,’”
unwittingly echoing the Chairman who
had said that the more you read, the
more foolish you become. Rathin manages
to leave the village with his dignity
intact but comrade Anand is not
as fortunate:
…Anand had barely begun reading
from the Red Book to a peasant tending
a patch of rice paddy when he got
stuck in a marsh. The news travelled quickly and a small crowd of villagers gathered to watch
him sink into mud and slime. The peasant who had been
the target of his world historic propaganda wore the expression
of someone accosted by a talking parrot. ‘Bachao,
bachao,’ Anand had yelled… Finally, one of them had
passed him the long end of a bamboo which he clutched
desperately, bruising his hands as he emerged from the
morass. The Thoughts of Chairman Mao disappeared
into Mother India.
| W |
HILE THE PEASANTS ARE IMPERVIOUS, the
Delhi comrades do manage to establish contact
with the urban proletariat. The character portraits
of mill-hands, truckers, railway workers and teashop
owners are among the best in the book, serving not just to
authenticate the story but also draw attention to Simeon’s
own sympathies and interests. |
Jehur Ansari, a railway maintenance man in Bihar, is one
of the novel’s many reminders that the events of the late
1960s had their roots in an older history of resistance. Jehur’s
father, Altaf, was a machinist in Jamshedpur’s Tata
steel plant and a participant in workers’ movements of the
1920s and 30s, which attracted communists from as far
away as Goa and the North-West Frontier Province—men
who brought news of the Pathan Red Shirts resisting the
British and of the Spanish Civil War, comrades who distributed
bagfuls of Left-wing literature and taught the workers
the ‘Internationale’ in Hindi. Having grown up in this
milieu, Jehur is able to make one of the most telling points
about the communist movement from a worker’s point of
view, saying to Rathin that “The middle class lederaan think
they’re the ones motivated by ideals while us humble folk
are led by our stomachs! They don’t understand us…Workers
struggle against humiliation… Revolution is a matter of
our self-respect.”
Simeon’s working-class characters are often more distinctive
than his middle-class ones. Pranav and Mohan,
the novel’s “commie twins,” are often difficult to tell apart.
When preparing to go underground, Pranav challenges
his cop father about the corrupt class system. “Freedom
for whom and for what? Children rummaging in garbage
dumps for food can’t make much use of the democratic
Constitution. They can’t even dream about an education.
Where’s the justice in that?” A couple of pages later, Mohan
makes the same argument to his father. “Papa always talks
about the nation’s glory. What glory is there in watching
children starve? What is the nation if not its people?… Can
people eat national glory?”
There are many similar echoes through the book as characters
argue with themselves and with wives, friends, parents,
lovers and comrades about the right way forward. This
makes Revolution Highway less a novel of ideas and more a
novel about ideas. Were the pre-Independence revolutionary
nationalist movements in Bengal the predecessors of
the Naxalite movement and did the violence then justify
the violence now? Can women find an honoured place in
the movement given that Stalin’s cultural commissar Andrei
Zhdanov had banned Anna Akhmatova’s poetry and
called her “half a nun and half a whore”? Is it Gandhi to
whom we should return because he alone understood the
importance of facing the truth about ourselves and acting
accordingly? Should Dr Louis Fieser take responsibility for
having invented napalm? Will China show the way?
Despite the history of numbing violence which the novel
presents (often as bare, unadorned fact)—from the Anushilan
Samiti’s early 20th-century manuals on murder to the
student Naxalite sympathisers in Calcutta being shot in
their beds as they slept in the winter of 1970-71—it is, in
fact, not this bloody past but an ideological question that
sows the first seeds of doubt in the minds of our would-be
revolutionaries. East and West Pakistan go to war and India
militarily supports the East’s right to liberate itself from the
West. It is one thing to know this as established historical
fact and another to read about it as it unfolds, with Pranav
and Mohan out in the villages, waiting for China to give
them a sign. Surely Chairman Mao will intervene to support
the liberation struggle of the Bangladeshi guerrillas.
Hadn’t Marx said that the working class has no country?
Wasn’t this the time to oppose religion-based nationalism
and launch a communist struggle across the subcontinent
led by the ideals of the Chinese Communist Party? Instead,
Chinese Premier Chou En Lai writes to President Yahya
Khan:
China and Pakistan are friendly neighbours… The
Chinese government holds that what is happening in
Pakistan at present is purely an internal affair of Pakistan,
which can only be settled by the Pakistan people
themselves and which brooks no foreign interference
whatsoever.
Mohan considers writing to Chairman Mao and explaining
to him “that the situation had been incorrectly interpreted
by the CCP…” But this is no longer just a matter of
betrayal by the Chinese. The Naxalite movement is riven
by the events taking place in the east. Should the comrades
support an interfering India, a recalcitrant, aggressive West
Pakistan, the democratically-elected leader of the new
Bangladesh, or that country’s Leftist guerrillas? Revolution
Highway ends at one of the most fragmented and frightening
moments in the subcontinent’s post-Independence history.
Though an epilogue is inserted to tie up loose ends,
it is really the German nihilist, in the last conversation between Rathin and Mohan, who appears to have the last
word. “Nietzsche said humanity is doomed to march step
by step into decadence. Arse-first or crotch-forwards: Same
difference!”
| T |
HE EPILOGUE IS NOT IMMATERIAL, however, if it is
set in a today relative to the novel’s yesterdays. This
present from whose vantage point past events are
described tends to envelop them in the haze of all “battles
long ago.” A potential drawback of narrating stories of revolution
as coming-of-age tales is that by the time we come
to such an epilogue and
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our heroes are older and wiser, it is not just their exploits but also the political ideals that fuelled them which come to seem like so many romantic delusions.
This is the case in, for instance, Hari Kunzru’s gripping
2007 novel, My Revolutions , which is set in exactly the
same years and depicts young men and women in London
seized of the same socialist dreams. (The sometimes uncanny
similarity between the two novels proves nothing
so much as that impressive ‘one world’ sense I referred to
earlier. Characters in both novels quote the 19th-century
Russian anarchist Sergey Nechayev’s, “The revolutionary
is a doomed man.” Mao’s call to arms in Kunzru’s novel—
“In order to get rid of the gun, it is necessary to take up the
gun”—becomes in Simeon’s a shocked realisation of how
“The Revolution had made avowal of murder into a test of
decency.” Anna in one novel and Pranav in the other both
declare individual desires immaterial in the face of the
larger cause and yet characters in both recognise the absolute
centrality of desire. Thinking of the comrades, Divya
notes, “Their obsession with Action always had something
to do with violence. Still, all their controlled ruthlessness
carried an erotic charge…,” while Chris in Kunzru’s novel
says, “If you believe in free love…as the release of libidinal
energies from any restraint, any check whatsoever, the barrier
between desire and action becomes terrifyingly thin
and permeable.”)
My Revolutions is also, like Simeon’s novel, a recollection
of a heady time from a standpoint several decades hence.
The contrast between that Britain and this one seems absolute
to the novel’s hero Chris Carver—he would never, unlike
Flaubert, mix the age of politics with the age of shopping.
Speaking to his teenage daughter, he says, “You’re
lucky that politics feels optional, something it’s safe to ignore…
To be fair, I suppose you’re just a child of your time.
Thatcher’s gone, the Berlin wall’s down, and unless you’re
in Bosnia, the most pressing issue of the nineties appears to
be interior design.”
Because the contemporary Britain of the novel is apparently
a place where “ideology’s dead,” it is possible for
Kunzru to portray the past with a certain idealised fervour
even if this past had its own bleakness—the minor incursions against the state made by a group of drugged out, underfed,
unrelentingly idealistic anarchists who are drawn
to self-destruction. The irretrievability of this past is also
what gives other accounts of that time, despite their angry
and violent tone, a romantic tinge—such as the 2008 film
The Baader Meinhof Complex, about the 1970s West German
Leftist urban guerrilla group.
Dilip Simeon approaches this partially shared past somewhat
differently. He does not shy away from giving us a history
lesson—not just on the Naxalite movement but also the
longer history of violent uprisings and bloody clashes on the
subcontinent. By stepping back repeatedly from the concerns
of his characters to show us this larger background,
he seems at first to be compromising on his fidelity to the
novelist’s task. Nirmal Verma’s A Rag Called Happiness
(originally published in Hindi in 1979), also set in Delhi of
the same era and likewise a novel in which young middle-class
characters try to reinvent the idea of freedom, is one
example of such fidelity. Here, the exploration of the characters’
inner worlds, far from the hum of public events, not
just takes precedence but could also be seen as an argument
for fiction’s proper compass.
Simeon, on the other hand, seems to be asking questions
not only about the historical significance of those times but
also, implicitly, the capacity of the novel to portray them.
If the Naxalite movement is not sealed into an inaccessible
past but an ongoing war in our midst, then to narrate
it as the lost dream of the high-minded young would be not
just paltry but dishonest. Revolution Highway shows us how
the bloodiness of the world sets limits on the beginnings-and-endings neatness of fiction and undermines its love
for the human interior. Storytelling cannot but fragment to
reflect the shattered world it is trying to capture. And this
is why, eventually, Simeon is not a Flaubertian. To that 19th century
novelist the world, revolutions and all, was never
too much to recast as fiction. To this 21st-century one, the
novelist, like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, can at
best contemplate the enormous wreckage of the past that
has piled up at his feet.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Dr Pritam Singh
3 January 2011
09:18 PM
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Brilliant review. So well written!
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