Abstract

The rise in the militarising of public space and the intersection of neoliberal and cultural nationalist practices produces a nation-state where dissenters who call for an expansion of institutional capacities/collective resistance, threaten the prevailing coercive structures of authority. The much-maligned Naxalite movement is essentially such an act of dissent. Literary space has contributed to forming and unforming the meaning and implications of the Naxalite Movement. This article seeks to explore the dialectically structured political game between the State and the insurgents in two contemporary Anglophone fictions pertaining to the Naxalite Movement, namely Asim Mukhopadhyay’s Half Man (2019) and Nilima Sinha’s Red Blooms in the Forest (2013). While Half Man chronicles the late 1960s and early 1970s rebellion against the structural inequalities of Indian society, Red Blooms in the Forest maps out the Adivasi and lower-caste stories of the more recent phases of the Naxalite struggle. The two Naxal narratives reflect on the possibilities of resistance against repressive state machinery and seek political–economic alternatives to the global system of neoliberal capitalism.