Paper short abstract:

The paper draws upon the narratives of middle-class female activists of the Naxalbari andolan of Bengal to analyse forms of everyday and gender-based aggression faced in normatively ‘safe’ spaces like the political shelter and the ‘underground’.

Paper long abstract:

The late 1960s Naxalbari andolan of Bengal, a revolutionary movement engaged in a politics of righteous violence, is the point of departure of this paper. Drawing upon the narratives of middle-class female activists in the movement, this paper focuses on the category of 'everyday violence' in the context of an armed guerilla struggle. By 'everyday violence' I refer to those forms of interpersonal violence and aggression experienced at the micro-level in normatively 'safe' spaces like the political shelter and the 'underground', characterized by their 'banal', routinised nature and 'everyday-ness'. I will be particularly concerned first with the gendered nature of such forms of violence. Secondly, I will examine the politics of remembering and alternatively of 'forgetting' these forms of violence that seem to exceed the dichotomous division between state and anti-state violence; a division that is central to the logic of revolutionary political discourse. While women's memories of everyday life in the shelter and the underground overturn normative conceptions of these spaces as 'safe' and 'free' from terror, these memories are, at the same time, somewhat 'risky'. A collective mythicisation of the 'underground' together with the idealisation of the 'shelter' as repositories of a shared revolutionary world-view make it difficult, for women in particular, to bear testimony to these forms of sexual and gender-based violence that existed within the movement. In this paper, I will also raise questions about the relationship between the category of 'everyday violence' and 'political violence' - to what extent can the everyday, interpersonal forms of 'normalised' violence that women's narratives speak of be placed on a continuum with the violence of armed struggle and political repression?