Memoir: A journalist remembers the 1960s and how the Naxal movement was portrayed in books and films

That Satyajit Ray was empathetic to the Naxalite cause comes out clearly in the dream sequence in Pratidwandi in which Siddhartha sees his brother being gunned down by the firing squad. But he was never loud and therefore his handling of such issues was more subtle than garish.

I once had the opportunity to do a news story about the auteur. I was a trainee journalist at the Press Trust of India news agency in Calcutta when I got a call from Ray’s home that he wished to talk to a wire service newsman. Ray had returned home after a bypass surgery in Houston earlier that day. I rushed to his Bishop Lefroy Road house, one of the city’s most prominent landmarks; he was resting.

A close associate met me and a couple of other newsmen in the front room to release Ray’s statement, thanking everyone who had extended help during his treatment at Houston. “Will the news on PTI wire travel all over?” the man asked, explaining that the doctors at Houston and others who had taken care of the director, needed to know of his gratitude. “Of course,” I reassured him and left, disappointed that I could not have a glimpse of the big man.

Cinematic responses to the call for an armed struggle challenging the “mildewed” system were not confined to Bengal alone. Elsewhere, there was an equally poignant recounting of other tragedies on celluloid as well. One Sunday afternoon many years ago, I saw a Malayalam movie on the small black-and-white television in my one-room flat. Shaji N Karun’s acclaimed film is woven around a father’s relentless search for his son who – like many others – has not come home. The man’s loneliness, the long silences around him, begin to speak to you. I realised English subtitles were redundant; the visuals are communicating the lone man’s pain more effectively than any words. The slow pace of the old man’s trek is the film’s language. The moisture from his world casts a haze around the viewer, making it difficult to snap out of it.

Indeed the story of P Rajan’s strange disappearance became a national narrative at one point, throwing into sharp relief a boy’s deep commitment to an ideology against the backdrop of ramrodding barbarity of the state machinery. The teenage student at an engineering college in Calicut was picked up, along with a friend, by the police in the early hours of March 1, 1976, for his suspected Naxalite links. The entire country had by then come under the Emergency rule. Since, at the peak of their campaign, Naxalites in Kerala targeted the police, the men in khaki now resorted to the sweeping Emergency powers to detain anybody at will, without so much as a warrant.

The brutes in uniform tortured the bright boy – a scholarship student – in custody, often resorting to the crudest methods. According to reports, they rolled heavy wooden blocks over his body. At one point the frail boy succumbed to the torture. The police disposed of his body instead of handing it over to his family. From then on his father, TV Eachara Warrier, began his determined search for the missing boy. From writing to the state’s top bureaucrats to appealing to powerful politicians, he left no stone unturned, spending whatever money he had. Then he filed a writ of habeas corpus in the Kerala High Court, the first in its history.

Shaji’s 1988 classic Piravi (The Birth) revolves around Rajan’s abduction and his father’s lone battle against the callous authorities, to unravel the mystery of the boy’s murder in police custody. The father’s fight was an ordinary man’s solitary struggle against the imperious might of the state. With the camera zooming in on the old man, his quiet dignified trek to the truth at times turns poignantly lyrical.

To understand the footprint of the Naxalite movement in cinema, I called Shaji one morning in the summer of 2020. An unassuming man, he however has a clear idea about his approach to cinema and the kind of film he wants to make. He agreed to write and explain the issues I had raised about his films during our talk.

Asked about the impress of the Naxalite movement on his filmmaking and his understanding of the ’70s as an intense decade, Shaji presented his well-thought-out views in an email to me.

The Rajan disappearance case had turned into a huge political issue with the growing public opinion forcing the government into a defensive position. The questions it involved pertained to the ethics of governance, a society’s moral code, and autonomous public opinion. I made the film in 1988, this timeframe becomes apparent in one shot where the father goes to meet a minister. He asks the powerful man to return his son since everything in the official documents points to his son being alive! The calendar in the background displays the date – August 1988. Honestly, Piravi is not about the Rajan case but the dark shadow of custodial deaths over a culture. Interestingly, the CPI(M) was in power in Kerala. They were upset with that shot and asked me to remove it. I argued that custodial deaths could take place anywhere and everywhere – even in 2020. Killing an undertrial or convicted prisoner is a police prerogative, an assertion of their power, like it’s an inheritance, ancestral property.

It calls for a deep political insight to change and challenge the idea of an administration’s powers; also, one needs empathy to understand and interpret a human situation. Piravi encompasses all this. The film as a study in custodial deaths would be better appreciated in Sri Lanka, Vietnam and throughout Latin America, but in India and particularly Kerala, it’s only a reconstruction of the Rajan case. My cinema is steeped in humanism, it has spiritual dimensions and takes a stand against issues like human suffering and racism. I think of a film as an experience in a dark cinema and not in a home theatre or on television. In that space, silence becomes a tool of communication, an expression of internal pains. Violence, whether social or political, has no place in it.

When Naxalism is seen as a violent political campaign, then its ideas as a philosophy are tampered with. Hollywood and Bollywood might find violence useful to meet audience expectations. The ’70s were a decade of new maturity in India since the generation born around Independence was in its early twenties, the new voters with a judgement. In the ’70s, the priority was to remove or destroy obstacles in the way of building a new society. Political honesty and robust values were an important component of the Naxalite philosophy that had as its roadmap a “better tomorrow”. I believe the sword has to be wielded in the field of culture to launch an assault on the shibboleths of feudalism. Perhaps the pace of radical thinking was faster than what average Indians could absorb. That explains society’s disapproval of this philosophy except in the distressed areas where starvation deaths are a regular occurrence.

Subodh – the Naxalite activist in Bimal Kar’s story who fiercely kicks his interrogator knowing the consequences – grew up as the detritus of society. In contrast, Brati, raised in an affluent home in Calcutta, leaves his privileged life behind to join his comrades from the slums to advance the cause of the revolution. Unknown to his parents, he moves into a life that struggles on the margins of society. After Brati’s death, Sujata Chatterjee goes out to meet the families of other boys killed in the movement, in an attempt to reconstruct her son’s life as a rebel. She learns that Brati had a girlfriend, Nandini, an activist who was tortured by the police. From her plush home to those poverty-stricken rabbit warrens where people, unable to afford cooking gas, use coal briquettes as fuel – for Sujata, it’s a journey of discovery to unravel a side of her son that was unknown to her when he was alive.

Govind Nihalani’s award-winning film Hazaar Chaurasi ki Maa (1988), based on Mahasweta Devi’s eponymous novel, is perhaps the most authentic expression in cinematic terms of the radical outburst that left empty spaces in many homes. Sujata’s forays into the city’s radical environs remind me of a man I met in a relative’s home in Calcutta a few times. I distinctly remember him – his saintly visage made all the more otherworldly by a pair of kind eyes and a thick beard. An artist by profession, he often came there to spend his evenings. He sat in a corner of the living room without participating in any conversations. Later, I learnt of his close association with some senior CPI(ML) leaders in the past. By the time I met him in the early eighties, the anarchical campaign was over. But he was still in touch with some former comrades, helping those who had lost limbs in the movement. There were many others like him, well-off upper-class liberals who felt connected to Naxalite politics.

Sujata is no different. Retracing the steps of her dead son, she moves closer to empathizing with the iconoclasts. In that sense, she is the alter ego of her creator, Mahasweta. One evening in 1983, when I was working as a freelance journalist in Calcutta, I reached her flat in a ramshackle building across the tracks from Ballygunge Station. She listened carefully when I spoke about my work and appreciated some of my stories. Then, she got up to clean the water that had puddled on the landing after the rain, lit a cigarette, and suddenly switched over to a rustic dialect, talking of a sick activist she was nursing. I could make out that she wanted to assail the veneer of my urbanity, to take me to the world of tribes whose culture she was struggling to preserve.

The parallel cinema movement in Bollywood, too, was affected by the fierce commitment of the radicals and the monumental sense of loss in the aftermath of the uprising. What impressed him most about Mahasweta’s novel, Nihalani said in an interview, was its blending of the personal and the political. Not loud, not slogan-mongering in tone, the film depends on the emotional experience of the mother to carry the story through. Especially compelling was its account of youths who, in their thousands, still dreamt of changing society, so many years after India’s independence. Explaining the whys and hows of parallel cinema in contrast to mainstream Bollywood, Nihalani said, “They wanted stars and chocolate heroes, we didn’t. They wanted songs and dance, we didn’t.”

Excerpted with permission from Fifty Year Road: A Personal History of India from the Mid-Sixties Onward, Bhaskar Roy, Jaico Publishing House.