Righting the Subalterns? Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others and the Naxalite Movement

Abstract

Neel Mukherjee’s second novel The Lives of Others deals with the story of a family during one of the most controversial chapters in the recent history of West Bengal, namely the Naxalite movement and its subsequent repression by the State. The novel examines the reasons why so many young middle-class students decided to join the movement, and the actual impact of their activism. In doing so, it questions Bengali society and the relationship between different social classes. Above all, The Lives of Others is a bourgeois novel which explores and criticizes the contradiction and conflicts within the Bengali middle class. Although the subalterns, especially the peasants, played a significant role in the Naxalite movement, they are at the margins of the novel and are rarely given a voice.

This paper will read The Lives of Others as an allegory of Bengali society. Such a reading will primarily look at the dialectics of society in the novel, thus providing a context in which to discuss class conflicts and the paradox represented by a bourgeois novel about a subaltern revolution. The comparison with a well-known novel of the time, Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084, will also be fundamental for the discussion.