Abstract

This paper scrutinizes the politics of militant masculinity and gender hierarchy in the Naxalite movement by analysing select memoirs of women activists. The Naxalite Movement was an armed peasant insurgency in India that took inspiration from Chinese revolutionary Mao Tse-tung’s concept of peasant revolution. The movement had very specific gendered constructions of masculinity and femininity. This problematized the identity of the activists, who were often caught in a binary relationship of “militant masculinity” and “chaste femininity.” Naxalite leader Charu Mazumdar’s perception of “martyrdom” advocated a notion of “militant masculinity” which required the creation of a “new man” who was “free of all self-interests.” The insistence on the creation of a self-renouncing revolutionary figure eventually problematized the position of both men and women in the movement. In the party hierarchy, women were mostly relegated to secondary positions, while it was the duty of the chivalrous male Naxalite to safeguard the honour (izzat) of the women against class and caste-based violence. The paper will analyse the multiple facets of militant masculinity and the sharp divisions of gender within the movement stemming largely from the creation of an identity based on this masculinist ideology. It will take into account K. Ajitha’s Kerala’s Naxalbari: Ajitha: Memoirs of a young revolutionary” (1982), Krishna Bandyopadhyay’s Naxalbari Politics: A Feminist Narrative (2008), Kondapalli Koteswaramma’s The Sharp Knife of Memory (2015) and Gita Ramaswamy’s Land, Guns, Caste, Woman: The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary (2022).