Naxalite ajitha autobiography of a face
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Naxal Bari of Kerala: memoir of Ajitha
That it is a deeply disturbing image is an understatement. A young girl, hardly an adult displayed like the spoils of war. Hence I wanted to know what prompted the people behind the Thalaserry Pulpally attacks especially the then young lady who is the author of this work.
Reading the book was heart breaking. It is clear that these revolutionaries had a deep conviction in their beliefs and in relief for the oppressed. But they come across as naive, misguided men and women with no cohesive abilities.
Their lack of planning, leadership and naivete belie their heart felt idealism.
Yet, the reason we know that they bumbled is the authenticity of Smt Ajitha and her unwillingness to obfuscate their f
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Personal narratives, historiography and agency
1A large number of tribal, peasant and urban middle class women participated in the Naxalite movement of the 1960s and 1970s in postcolonial India. However, the academic historiography of the movement for the longest time, maintained a silence on these women participants as well as gender issues (Mohanty 1977, Banerjee 1984, Duyker 1987, Ray 1988). Memoirs and autobiographies of women participants were therefore important in throwing some light on women’s experiences of the movement (see Tyler 1978, Mitra 2004, Ajitha 2008, Bandyopadhya 2008). Sophisticated studies of women’s participation and agency in the movement have begun to emerge only recently (Sinha Roy 2011, Roy 2012). These works foreground the lens of gender to analyse not just women’s participation, but also issues of gender relations, patriarchies, violence, love and sexuality within the movement.
2In this paper, I try to address three questions. Firstly, are women’s memo
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