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The Everyday Life of the RevolutionGender, Violence and MemorySrila Roy is currently a Teaching Fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick. Her research interests include issues of gender, subjectivity, and the politics of memory, violence and testimony in South Asia. Address: Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. [email: S.Roy{at}warwick.ac.uk] 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 women's 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’.
Key Words: Bengal • everyday life • gender • ‘heroic life’ • Naxalbari • politics of memory • revolutionary cultures • violence
South Asia Research, Vol. 27, No. 2,
187-204 (2007) |
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