'''Naxalite'''


Term used to refer to members of the extreme
Left CPI(ML) launched by Charu Majumdar in
1969. The word refers to the site of the party’s
first major political action (1967), the village of
Naxalbari in Bengal. Following the split in the
CPI (1964), several members of the breakaway
CPI(M) turned to a Maoist, cadre-based massaction
programme among the peasantry
leading to the nationwide crackdown on the
Party ordered by prime minister Lal Bahadur
Shastri. The schisms between Left and Right
within the CPI(M), the latter insisting on the
parliamentary road, were aggravated by the
victory of United Fronts in Kerala and West
Bengal in the 1967 State Assembly elections.
Although the Naxalbari insurrection itself, in
which peasant groups seized land, held
people’s courts and dispensed ‘justice’ to
landlords and hoarders, was rapidly quelled, it
had widespread and long-term consequences.
The CPI(M)’s withdrawal of support in protest
against Chief Minister Ajoy Mukherjee’s use of
the police against their members eventually
brought down the United Front government.
In August 1967, two months after Naxalbari,
Girijan tribals led a similar insurrection in
Srikakulam, evoking the CPI-led Telangana
uprising (1946-51). The All India Co-ordination
Committee of Communist Revolutionaries
(AICCCR) was established as the apex body
for all extra-parliamentary Left activity.
Organisations affiliated to it, as well as several
others, launched armed movements in parts of
Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Punjab, Kerala and Tamil
Nadu. In 1969 the AICCCR was replaced by the
CPI(ML), immediately recognised by the
Chinese government. In 1970, actions
sympathetic to the Naxalites were initiated by
student groups in Calcutta and spawned major
debates about revolutionary cultural aesthetics,
often emphasising an anarchist iconoclasm
(e.g. Saroj Dutta’s essay ‘In Defence of
Iconoclasm’, 1970: cf. Samar Sen, 1978). In
November 1970 the West Bengal Prevention of
Violent Activities Bill gave the central
government complete control over law and
order in West Bengal, and the student
movements in Calcutta as well as the peasant
actions in e.g. Debra and Gopiballavpur were
brutally suppressed by the police and the army.
This suppression, coupled with the splintering
of the movement itself, effectively ended
Naxalite activity as an all-India phenomenon
by 1972. The CPI(ML) survived mainly in
Andhra Pradesh with the activities of the
Peoples’ War Group. Culturally, however, its
critique of the parliamentary system as well as
the ideological and moral divides it caused
within the Left movement as a whole, found an
echo among independent film-makers, as in
Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta Trilogy (see esp.
Calcutta ’71, 1972), in Satyajit Ray’s Calcutta
Trilogy, Tapan Sinha’s Apanjan (1968),
Ghatak’s Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (1974),
Benegal’s Nishant (1975), Nihalani’s
Aakrosh (1980) and Shahani’s Tarang
(1984). The Naxalite movement’s emphasis on
agitation around civil liberties opened up a
major space for independent documentary
film-making (cf. Anand Patwardhan, Tapan
Bose) and for Left political and aesthetic
discourses. Other film-makers influenced by
these currents include John Abraham, the
musical, theatre and poetic sources of B.
Narasinga Rao, and Utpalendu
Chakraborty’s rhetoric about acceptable and
unacceptable capital resources for film-making.
In Andhra Pradesh, where the movement is
currently the strongest, campaign films
featuring exaggerated plotlines and emphatic
performances, an idiom associated in that state
with Naxalite aesthetics, were financially
backed by media baron and producer Ramoji
Rao in the mid-80s, continuing into e.g. R.
Narayanamurthy’s commercially popular Lal
Salaam (1992) and Erra Sainyam (1994).

[[Glossary]]