Book Reviews Indian Journal of Gender Studies

21(2) 313–321
© 2014 CWDS
SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi, Singapore,
Washington DC
DOI: 10.1177/0971521514525159
http://ijg.sagepub.com

Srila Roy, Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence and Subjectivity in

India’s Naxalbari Movement. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012.
252 pages. ` 1200.

Feminist research and writings, in recent years, have busted the myth
about women’s non-existence in war/political violence narratives.
Across disciplines—history, literature, anthropology, media studies,
politics and international relations, feminists have been able to find
the hitherto unknown, unconventional voices in political violence. Srila
Roy’s Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence and Subjectivity in
India’s Naxalbari Movement is an important contribution in that genre of
feminist writings. Not only does it establish the important role women
play as participants in the culture of political violence but it also takes
the research further as it asks: what happens to women participants
within the revolutionary war and as they restructure their everyday
lives and memory in the aftermath of the war? Specifically, it inter-
rogates sexual and gender violence that women militant revolutionaries
experienced in the Naxalite movement of the late 1960s in Bengal and
the silences and secrecy that prevail in the dominant narratives of the
movement.
Roy is a convincing and evocative storyteller in how she skilfully
weaves together the sensitive stories of the 20 ex-Naxalite women and
16 men whom she interviewed for this project (p. 37), also offering a
valuable lesson in feminist methodology. The interviewees are selective
in the representation of their experiences of the revolutionary period in
their lives; hence, the overall conclusions cannot be considered either
generic or universal. However, the issues raised in this book pose serious
scholarly challenges to those interested in women/feminist questions
about wars/political violence.
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This book’s foremost contribution is to destroy the romantic myth of

gender equality as the professed objective of radical left ideologies in
South Asia. This was long overdue given that Linda Reif, Julia Shayne
and others have shown in their works on the Latin American revolution-
ary guerrilla movements in Nicaragua, Cuba, Columbia, El Salvador and
Guatemala that although based on radical left ideologies, these move-
ments were based on the patriarchal division of labour; women were
relegated to the private sphere in supporting roles and conventional fem-
ininity was evoked to deny them roles in direct combat and to inflict
violence on them. For those who have followed the trajectory of radical
left political violence in the global context, Roy’s work is the valuable
missing link on South Asia. Offering much more beyond the mere
appraisal of the patriarchal politics of the Naxalite movement, it tells a
compelling story of the deep impact of such politics long after the actual
events and its silences in the memories of the movement.
Her work draws parallels with Bina D’Costa’s (2011) poignant
political ethnography of the Birongona women of Bangladesh, where
she has described the processes that have silenced the voices of women
rape survivors of the 1971 war of liberation. D’Costa (2011, p. 188) cap-
tures in her wide-ranging interviews how raped women in Bangladesh
became the ‘forgotten survivors of the national story’. Srila Roy’s
work similarly challenges the metanarrative of the Naxalite movement,
its revolutionary violence and the silencing of ‘risky’ stories within it.
Roy writes:

In the face of the “extraordinary” violence of armed struggle around which

cultural memory is woven, forms of violence that fall outside this totalising
category are rendered invisible…. Women, the bearers of tradition, invariably
emerge as the custodians of oppositional or “risky” memories that require
disciplining (p. 13).

Like D’Costa, Roy offers a nuanced framework and research methodol-

ogy of recovering memory and storytelling. Policing women’s stories
and memories is an important part of any patriarchal project. What
women ‘do’ and ‘experience’ in militant wars/political violence is
either justified to fit in with the dominant war/violence story, or silenced
for the greater cause of the movement. D’Costa makes a clear distinction
between macro and micro narratives: the former refers to official

Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 21, 2 (2014): 313–321

Book Reviews 315

narratives, the latter, the lived experiences of people who had to ‘reland-
scape their lives due to political events’ like the 1971 liberation war.
(D’Costa, 2011: p. 13). Roy talks about the erasure of violence ‘within’
violence in popular memories (p. 13).
Middle class women joined the Naxalite movement as a way of
moving away from the patriarchal set up in their own homes and within
society (p. 77). However, the movement as a ‘promised land of gender
equality’ was a mirage and most women were given inferior positions in
the organisation, expected to perform work of domestic drudgery. Roy
tells us that the sexual victimisation of the peasant women by the ruling
class/state was used as a major justification for the armed struggle
but the female body and identity were reined in by middle class
constructions of ‘honour’. Middle class women were constructed as
sacrificing mothers (pp. 58–59) and Naxalbari politics was infused
with the ideologies of ‘pure’ womanhood and nurturing, sacrificial and
de-sexed motherhood (p. 62). Mary Tyler is a famous example of a
white European woman taking up the Naxalite cause and becoming a
‘traditional’ Indian woman during her imprisonment. This was high-
lighted as an achievement for the movement and is used in popular
imagery (p. 70). When real women were faced with threats to their
bodily integrity and ‘honour’ the ideal of the ‘mother’ as a symbol of
womanhood was challenged. There are examples of revolutionary
women who did not receive support when they became mothers; rather
they were looked down upon for having maternal feelings which were
seen as counter revolutionary (p. 86).
Women who faced sexual violence/exploitation within the movement
have been silent and are still very diffident in sharing their experiences.
Roy has picked up three rationales behind this phenomenon: (i) betrayal
of trust by those who were meant to protect them; (ii) intrusion on their
being by those whom they respected (loved) and (iii) the failure of
a vision (p. 128). Again, there are parallels with D’Costa’s analyses
of the multiple processes in the silencing of the Birongona stories in
Bangladesh which included a ‘negotiated survival strategy’. Roy tells us
that complaints of women Naxalite cadres against fellow male members
were received with disbelief and they were disqualified or simply ignored
by party members. Class played a major role in the recognition of gender
power and powerlessness. While rape of peasant women by landlords
or repressive state forces was represented as a form of class and state

Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 21, 2 (2014): 313–321

316 Book Reviews

oppression, sexual violence towards middle class women within the

movement by lower class males went unrecognised. The book lists the
example of a lower class man continuously hounding a middle class
woman comrade and ultimately raping her. At his trial by the Naxalites
the man got away simply by claiming that ‘middle class vices’ within
him had somehow forced him to commit the sexual assault (p. 129). On
the contrary, when some women members brought a complaint against
a middle class comrade of inappropriate behaviour towards them, the
man was condemned to death.
Unrelated, but nevertheless significant, the issue of class and sexual
violence resonated in the 16 December 2012 Delhi gang rape case, as
arguments (especially from left intellectuals like Arundhati Roy) sur-
faced that the public outrage was disproportionately high only because
the victim was a ‘middle class’ woman, and the perpetrators, low class
migrants to a big city. Srila Roy’s book points to that deep malaise in the
thinking around sexual violence against women, where caste and class
identities have been suffused with uncritical categories of ‘subaltern’ and
‘oppressor’ with gender losing its analytical privilege, even in feminist
analyses. Roy helps us navigate through a range of those identities
to finally conclude that sexual violence against women is not anathema
even to the most progressive of ideologies and revolutionary struggles;
and that ‘conceptual distinctions between forms of violence, based
on the ethical ends that they seek to achieve, are largely unsustainable
in practice’ (p. 173). In my own work on Kashmir, Sri Lanka and on
contemporary Maoism in India I have argued for the recognition of
complex experiences of violent militancy for participant women that
were not all traumatic or disempowering, but I am persuaded by Roy to
consider that there are more untold stories of ‘violence within violence’
waiting to be researched and understood.
The Naxalite movement of the 1960s thrived on a heroic masculinity
and a dependent femininity (p. 103). This is the legacy that has been
inherited by the contemporary Maoist movement that articulates an
emancipatory/liberating agenda for women. Roy’s book (neither an
insider’s account nor afflicted by a partisan agenda), unwavering in its
feminist commitment and scholarship offers the opportunity to the radi-
cal left ideologues today to introspect, rethink and rewrite the history of
their revolutionary struggle; redefine their goals and pathways. It is well
known that the Left political movements and armed struggles have been

Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 21, 2 (2014): 313–321

Book Reviews 317

far more intolerant of dissent and of any counter narrative within their
own official histories; real people and their experiences often missing
from their frameworks and activism. There are no ontological ambigui-
ties in their ideologies and in their understandings of ‘subaltern’ and
gender subjectivities. Roy elegantly dismantles that unambiguous faith;
and for the Left no salvaging is possible unless the denial paves the way
for engagement, contestation and confrontation with/in their own.
American feminist scholar, Jean Bethke Elshtain, who passed away in
2013, in her timeless classic, Women and War, mentions that ‘history
does not teach; rather we “teach” it by making it “speak” to
us in various ways, by remembering this and forgetting that’. (1987,
p. 149). Srila Roy’s book makes the history of the Naxalite movement
‘speak’: of sexual violence and silences of everyday negotiations
by women in the movement and of the gender codes and patriarchal
language of the revolutionary path. This book is a must read for feminists
across disciplines, for those who study war/political violence and espe-
cially for those interested in radical left ideologies like Naxalism and
Maoism.

References
Elshtain, Jean. Bethke (1987). Women and war. New York, NY: Basic Books.
D’Costa, Bina (2011). Nation building, gender and war crimes in South Asia.
New York, NY: Routledge.

Swati Parashar
Lecturer in Politics and International Relations
Monash University, Australia

Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar and Connie A. Shemo

(Eds), Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation and the American
Protestant Empire, 1812–1960. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
432 pages. $ 94.95 (Hardback); $ 24.95 (Paperback).
DOI: 10.1177/0971521514525160

Competing Kingdoms is an ambitious edited collection that grew out of

an April 2006 international conference on American women missionar-
ies at the University of Oxford. The collection’s editors state that their

Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 21, 2 (2014): 313–321