Naxalite ajitha autobiography of a face
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Personal narratives, historiography and agency
1A large number of tribal, peasant and urban middle class women participated in the Naxalite movement of the 1960s and 1970s in postcolonial India. However, the academic historiography of the movement for the longest time, maintained a silence on these women participants as well as gender issues (Mohanty 1977, Banerjee 1984, Duyker 1987, Ray 1988). Memoirs and autobiographies of women participants were therefore important in throwing some light on women’s experiences of the movement (see Tyler 1978, Mitra 2004, Ajitha 2008, Bandyopadhya 2008). Sophisticated studies of women’s participation and agency in the movement have begun to emerge only recently (Sinha Roy 2011, Roy 2012). These works foreground the lens of gender to analyse not just women’s participation, but also issues of gender relations, patriarchies, violence, love and sexuality within the movement.
2In this paper, I try to address three questions. Firstly, are women’s memoirs an important source of history, especially from a feminist point of view, in the context of the gender indifferent historiography of the Naxalite movement? Secondly, can these narratives be seen as a significant way in which revolutionary women construct their subjectivity and agency? Thirdly, h
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Naxal Bari have a good time Kerala: disquisition of Ajitha
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