I recently read There’s Gunpowder in the Air by Manoranjan Byapari (former TMC MLA), who was imprisoned in the 1960's for his alleged involvement in the Naxal movement.
Inspired by his own prison stint, the novel is set entirely inside a jail. The jailor is increasingly convinced that a group of Naxalite prisoners are planning a jailbreak. He fears that these men are not ordinary criminals as their larger goal is to dismantle all institutions of state power and bring about complete revolution.
What fascinated me was the author’s attitude towards them. Byapari writes about the Naxals with a kind of admiration that is hard to miss. He describes them almost mythically- as "audacious fire-eaters whose spirits cannot be broken by prison walls".
He barely interrogates the violence embedded within their politics. Murdering landlords, killing policemen, stealing arms: these acts are presented as inevitable instruments of revolution. The system is shown to be so fundamentally broken that violent uprising begins to feel justified and necessary.
I was disappointed that the book never built upon the idea of non-violent political awakening, mass education, reform, or democratic participation as viable alternatives.
And that’s what reminded me of Rang De Basanti. RDB is also about angry young people disillusioned with the state. It, too, eventually turns toward violence. But before it gets there, the film spends a lot of time on awareness and on transforming apathy into political consciousness. The shift in the RDB boys from dismissing their country as a "koode-dan" to realizing that “koi bhi desh perfect nahi hota, usse behtar banana padta hai” is central to the movie’s politics.
Sadly, though, RDB also ends up romanticising revolutionary violence a little too much.
Either way, both the book and the movie make for a very interesting comparison of two different ideas of 'kraanti' or revolution. (I wrote more about this here, if you're interested.)
Have any of you read the book or watched RDB?