"long live counter-revolution: bourgeois rewriting of naxalbari and the return of the...

Discourses on Naxalbari edited by Pradip Basu, (Kolkata: Setu, 2010), 47-62

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Long Live Counter-revolution: Bourgeois Rewriting of Naxalbari and the

Return of the ‘Impure’

Samrat Sengupta, Doctoral Scholar, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences,

Calcutta and

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Kharagpur College

Suddhabrata Deb, in an essay, makes a detailed critic of novels by mainstream

Bangla writers like Sunil Gangopadhyay, Samaresh Basu, Shirshendu

Mukhopadhyay, Gourkishor Ghosh, Samaresh Majumder et al. He quotes another

important critic of Bangla literature Asrukumar Sikdar who comments on

Samaresh Basu (which however might be applicable to other above mentioned

writers as well): “The way Samaresh makes his repetitive negative critic of

Communist activism and Party in his novels that his novels have become

propagandist.” 1 Deb continues to criticize the way these authors often feign

objectivity though actually they are critical of Naxalbari movement. They claim to

represent what has actually taken place. Samaresh Majumder is taken up as an

example of how the novelist tells his story with the objectivity of a reporter and

finally the protagonist of the novel realizes that he was directionless.2

The two chief receptions, and thereby representations, of Naxalbari

movements are as follows - firstly, a certain sympathy for the revolution hinting

upon its inevitability because of the failure of Indian democracy and secondly, to

think it as an aberration of ‘normal’ life destined to failure. The novels which I

mentioned above constitute mainly those supporting the later view whereas its’

critics constitute those supporting the former. However it is necessary to

interrogate the process of the production of this ‘normal’ and how it is complexly


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connected with that aberration – that violent rupture of ‘order’. The centre-stage of

this revolution was occupied by a group of urban middle-class youth who

attempted to collaborate with the peasants to mobilize a radical mass uprising

motivated by the teachings of Mao and the Chinese revolution. So it is necessary to

have an apt understanding of the middle-class intelligentsia. Ranajit Guha, in an

interesting essay called “Torture and Culture”, discusses torture of rebels in police

custody as an alternative to the contemporary culture which is both implicit in it

and appropriated by it. This culture is principled by what Guha calls “comprador

liberalism”3 – “normal institutional means of mind-bending schools, universities,

ashrams, mass media, etc.”4. The Indian civil society churned out of this liberal

forms of education is supposedly more imperialist than liberal and they are made

to appropriate the system of pedagogy and disciplining which helps in the

continuation of domination and gives a temporary, circumscribed and selfish sense

of autonomy and security received as ‘normal’. This nature of Indian bourgeois

who appropriates feudal modes of thinking has perhaps a deep-seated economic

reason which Sumit Sarkar discusses in an essay while analysing the role of an

intellectual in the context of so called Bengal Renaissance which is often claimed to

have taken place in the nineteenth century. He writes:

More fundamentally, therefore, the limitations of, our intellectuals,

‘radical’ and ‘conservatives’ alike, were connected with the socio-

economic structure moulded by colonialism. In Bengal, this meant

firstly the progressive tightening of British control over industry and

commerce…The bourgeois values imbibed by the intelligentsia

through their Western education and contacts thus remained bereft of

material content or links with production.”5

So in the intellectual culture of India after colonization idea/ideal becomes

materially bereft. Rather the material operates on a separate realm devoid of any

ideal, inclined towards a selfish circumscribed end of undisturbed, conformist,


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middle class life helpful for the maintenance of once imperialist and then pseudo-

nationalist, self-colonizing statuesque. The revolt of the Naxalites was not simply

against a political system going astray, a failed democracy to be altered by the

forces of communism, but against this renaissance burden of ideals bereft of

materiality – the imperialist hogwash. The immediate expression of this was, as

Ranajit Guha has discussed, the attacks upon the education system and institutions

which is used to maintain the statuesque. The attack was also on the great father

figures of Bengal renaissance like Rammohan Ray and Vidyasagar whose idols

were violently hurled down. This move against the imperialist-nationalist episteme

however is like an Oedipal desire to murder the father. Now is it possible that as

has been proposed by Freudian Oedipus Complex, the son who wants to kill the

father also wants to be the father or unconsciously wants to adopt the father-

position? Is it possible to be epistemically free? There is an inturruptive

relationship between the naxalite present and so-called Renaissance past which can

be illustrated through Saibal Mitra’s novel Agnir Upakhyan (The Tale of Agni)6 where

the protagonist Agni narrates his own tale of becoming a Naxalite. His narrative

moves between his immediate past and his origin. He draws a genealogy of himself,

his great grandfather being a thangare – one of the Bengal’s own highwaymen who

suddenly becomes a wealthy landowner. The story of his predecessors constantly

interrupts his narrative, these interruptions being deeply suggestive. Agni

ironically remarks that his great grandfather Buno Roy (the Bangla word Buno

means uncivilized) was a contemporary of Vidyasagar. Perhaps the same system

which produced Buno Roy produced Vidyasagar. Agni’s narrative demonstrates

tremendous selfishness, material greed and lecherous livelihood of his

predecessors who were the outcome of Permanent Settlement and British

imperialist policies which made so-called Bengal Renaissance possible. But that is a

different story and there might be separate discussions on the relationship between

Naxalite movement and Bengal Renaissance. My point of inquiry is that if

according to Ranajit Guha the Naxalite violence is a violence against a certain kind


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of hierarchy, against elements of feudalism that haunts our liberalism, against

culture that is only an alternate to torture, against idealism that is complacent,

against materialism which is governed by greed and self-seeking ends, then is it

possible to be completely free of that burden of episteme? Why Agni wants a

revolver? If he kills the killer he himself might also become the killer – he cannot

but kill his own self. Killing the father is killing the son. Without predecessors how

can Agni be there! In a culture where torture has an indispensable visible/invisible

omnipresence violence becomes a possibility both on the part of the

oppressive/repressive state – the system, as well as on the part of the victimized

subject. If torture is the other face of liberalism, violence is the other face of

revolutionary benevolence. Therefore it is observed that the revolutionaries often

ignore the originary, founding violence hidden behind the law which Jacques

Derrida discusses in his essay “Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of

Authority””: “It is quasi-logic of the ghost which, because it is the more forceful

one, should be substituted for an ontological logic of presence, absence or

representation”7. This violence implicit in the force of law according to Derrida is

mystical as it cannot be justified with the use of reason. The capacity to use law is

because of the authority which enables it and force which implies violence. The

logic of this force can be well demonstrated by the quote from La Fontaine used by

Derrida in the preface of his book Rogues: Two Essays on Reason:

The Strong are always best at proving they’re right.

Witness the case we’re now going to cite.8

This shows how the very act of strength precedes justice and righteousness even

before the case begins. Derrida while discussing Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of

Violence” demonstrates how such originary violence or the possibility of such

originary violence lies dormant in Benjamin’s preference of ‘divine violence’ which

manifests itself in revolution and is just natural (i.e. just because it is natural like an


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earthquake for example and also natural because it is just) over the ‘mythical

violence’ i.e. the violence of law. Derrida comments:

All revolutionary situations, all revolutionary discourses, on the left

or on the right…justify the recourse to violence by alleging the

founding, in progress or to come, of a new law, or a new state. As this

law to come will in return legitimate, retrospectively, the violence

that may offend the sense of justice, its future anterior already

justifies it. The foundation of all states occurs in a situation that one

can thus call revolutionary. It inaugurates a new law; it always does

so in violence.9

There is then a founding violence behind the precipitation of revolution. The roots

of such violence are to be discovered in the ideology of the Bengali middle-class –

educated and idealist, ideal being the other of material. They form what Talcott

Parsons would call a ‘societal community’ – separate from state and economy who

Parsons thinks can act independently and autonomously to affect and transform

the state towards the protection of rights and freedom and protection from

exploitation and injustice. They, according to Parsons, can ensure equality and also

simultaneously protect the liberty of people. Societal community through

association can make this possible. So Parsons’ ideals become the champion of the

highest realization of the democratic principles of liberty and equality through the

third principle of fraternity in the guise of association. However this association is

formed on the principle of universal reason where the members can understand

and negotiate reasonably with the state and the law and “Parsons did not, however,

had explained…how these forms can be protected against penetration by economic

wealth and political power.”10 Gramsci on the other hand in the line of Marx

thought civil society a hegemonic-ideological production of capitalism. He believed

in the possibility of a counter-hegemony that would transform the civil society and


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help in the acceleration of revolution which would eventually help creating a

socialist totalitarian state. So both Democracy as well as Socialism precipitates an

idea of a state in their respective ways and both are supposed to be championed by

a civil society apparently reasonable or to be transformed into self-conscious,

socially aware individuals. Two important factors which are not elaborated in such

analysis and which haunts the existing political discourses of democracy as well as

socialism like a spectre are the fundamental presence of a certain kind of absence of

reason at the heart of any idea of justice and the rejection of family or the private

sphere because of the identification of civil society more with the public sphere.

These two factors shall produce the actual rupture in the discourse of revolution

particularly in the context of naxalite movement.

Many of the literary works written on Naxalite revolution concerns the

family of the revolutionaries - their love life or personal life. Particularly the image

of the mother becomes very important. In stories like Samaresh Basu’s “Sahider

Ma” or “The mother of the Martyr”, Manabendra Pal’s “Abhinoy” or “Acting”, in

Samaresh Majumdar’s novel Kalbela or Afternoon or in Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of

1084 we see this image of the mother repeatedly appearing – the mother of the

martyr who cannot mourn her son properly and incomplete mourning creates the

spectre – the apparition that haunts and observes without being observed. This is

the uncanniness with which the spectre of buried idealism continues to disturb us.

Now this idealism has a long history or the very idea of history since Hegel is

fraught with an essence of idealism or the ism of an idea that is universalised to an

extent that we don’t consider an idea as an idea any more – it seems natural and an

order before any order – the imperative that creates all other orders. Revolution is

an effect of such an order The novel Kalbela by Samaresh Majumdar or the short

story “Shobsadhona” by Saibal Mitra shows the severe torture of the beloved or the

wife in police custody in front of the convict to extort a confession about his fellow

revolutionaries before which the revolutionary stands erect. Animesh, the

protagonist in Kalbela always suffers a sense of guilt for not being able to attend his


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beloved Madhobilata properly. Critics like Suddhhabrata Deb would associate such

weakness and repentance with bourgeois revisionism. However Derrida in his

Spectres of Marx in an explosive argument smashes such objections of revisionism:

There is nothing “revisionist” about interpreting the genesis of

totalitarianism as reciprocal reaction to the fear of the ghost that

communism inspired beginning in the last century, to the terror that

it inspired in its adversaries but that it turned inside out and felt

sufficiently within itself to precipitate the monstrous realization, the

magical effectuation, the animist incorporation of an emancipatory

eschatology which ought to have respected the promise, the being-

promise of a promise—and which could not have been a simple

ideological phantasm since the critic of ideology itself was inspired by

nothing else.11

The emanicipatory eschatology itself functioned as the haunting spectre of ideology

which owes its origin in enlightenment idea of the possibility of reasonable,

universal justice. However revolution though celebrates the spirit wants to exorcise

the spectre. In fact, a revolution is possible only by turning against itself. Derrida

uses the famous quote from Hamlet that “the time is out of joint”. The time is out of

joint because though every revolution is in some way a celebration of a spirit – the

spirit of emancipation and reason, it tries to deny the spectre that is associated with

the past and also the fact that revolution cannot but be only an act of repetition – a

repetition of the idea of revolution as positive emancipatory transformation. The

denial of this repetition makes possible for the revolution to turn against itself. The

death nail of Naxalbari was precisely rooted in its middle-class origin fed in by the

Bengal-renaissance ideology of humanism and progressivism which however, as I

have already discussed, the movement consciously at least attempted to subvert.

Rajarshi Dasgupta in an essay comments: “Today the naxalites also know very well


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why attacking the renaissance is similar to suicide.”12 Derrida in his Spectres of Marx

shows how Marx desperately tried to oppose the spirit of revolution against the

spectre. 13 The German word for spirit ‘geist’ as Derrida exemplifies can also mean

the spectre and the difference between the two collapses as the idea of a spirit as

inherited from Hegel also means an idea existing in the past and if past is negated

in preference for the new – the present, then the past haunts like a spectre in the

idea of spirit of time itself which is nothing but a repetition. So the very idea of

impossibility of absolutely just action is the predicament of any political formation

haunted by the spirit of history that is supposed to be left behind. Both Democracy

and Socialism are fraught by this violence of law. Derrida asserts quoting

Kierkegaard that the moment of taking decision is madness. This madness negates

or suppresses other necessities or factors like the family or other basic human

necessities which are both material as well as ideational. The material is the

concrete universal that is ‘to come’. This universal is therefore the level of ideas

whose spectrality cannot be denied. The ideal is however sought by the material, i.e.

the material desire for a being, a presence that is to be felt. The madness of reason

affects both the law-giver and the receiver – the one who legitimately casts a spree

of violence upon other and the one who becomes a victim or volunteer to be a

victim through the act of deciding to follow a path that creates such probability of

victimhood. In the short story “Nigraha” or “Assault” by Bimal Kar14 the police

who is the narrator of the story interrogates a Naxalite activist called Subodh. He

psychologically harasses him by hinting upon his knowledge about him, exercising

power and threatening violent physical torture which might unleash any moment.

While observing a wound the police touch the sensitive area of his feet and he kicks

him in the surge of pain. The story ends with the admittance of the boy that he

couldn’t help himself kicking the policeman as that area of his feet produces a lot of

pain and he was afraid that the interrogator might play some trick. After this the

narrator shakes his head in pain of being kicked on the face and wanted to say “I

know! I also feel pain”15. This comment transforms both the oppressor and the


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oppressed into victims – the victims of a founding violence which is justified

because of the idea of justice behind – an idea which each must try to accomplish or

follow. Both remain the victims of taking decision which has already become a

symptom that makes one suffer yet fall in love with.

Generally the idea of justice is understood in terms of justness of action

which implies acting reasonably with respect to the other or to reasonably payback

some unjust action done to the other. However justice can only be committed

through law which has the mystical authority of using force which Derrida

discusses. Now authority itself has the power to do justice because it is considered

just by virtue of the founding violence it implores and it does not need the use of

reason to be justified – the justification in law is only procedural as the decision is

to be taken with a degree of finality beyond negotiation and understanding. So

there is a fundamental unreason that negates the possibility of justice that is ‘to

come’. This fundamental unreason can be understood in terms of concrete

materiality – the material need to do justice – to make it possible actually. So there

is a materiality or material desire for the actual behind law as justice which is

irreducible. This materiality shall always make the ideal of revolution impossibly

possible as on one hand there is the ‘to-come’-ness of revolution on the other hand

there is the material necessity to actualize it which cannot be negotiated. This

produces an aporia – a non-passage that cannot be resolved. The aim of materiality

is to transform an idea into material. Spivak in an essay comments: - “If anything is

"proper to man," it is the potential for this peculiar commodification: to create

exchange-value in use” 16 . Marx’s theory of money is largely based on this

production of symbolic value which is also behind the production of ideology – it is

an ideation of concrete and the material. So behind all ideas there is the presence of

this materiality which however becomes a spectre – an absent presence that haunts.

It observes us with a visor-effect i.e. by not being observed itself. So the spectre of

Marx is not simply ideational but material. When in Kalbela Animesh returns home

in a taxi after being set free from his imprisonment he observes:


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Kolkata is as it is. It has not changed at all. Trams and Buses are

running as usual as it used to run before, people are lazy as ever or

are moving in a hurry….There has been such a big revolution, so

many boys died or have become living dead – Kolkata is undisturbed

by that. Animesh felt a pain in his chest. While watching Kolkata

through the Taxi he unmindfully touched his paralysed legs.17

The Kolkata returns to Animesh but he can never return to Kolkata – his desire for

a better home made him permanently homeless or ‘unhomely’. He like many

naxalites of his age was in love with the possibility of a new establishment and got

lost in that desire without realizing that revolution is itself haunted by the spectre

of ideology which is also the spectre of materiality – the materiality behind all

foundations – behind all great ideas and behind the ‘being’ – the being that is a

nothing because it is thingified, because it cannot be anything but a thing – a body

that cannot transcend its materiality or whose possibility of transcendence is only

in the realization of its materiality. Therefore it is ‘impure’ – no pure idea being

available without the haunting of the spectre of materiality.

The Aporia of revolution is not only that we cannot reconcile the materiality

of the ideal in revolution with the ideality of the material in law or in sovereignty

which is not only to be counter-acted but also to be reiterated in a new form by

revolution. The Aporia is fundamentally because in man the materiality and

ideality are interpenetrated by each other - one cannot exist without the other, both

being connected in a double-bind. If materiality or material longing is more animal

than human it is often thought necessary to be idealized, to be transformed into

ideas. This according to Derrida is the principle of carnivorous sacrifices which

attempts to kill the animal that does not belong to the realm of right or law. This

consumption of the animal which “is essential to the structure of subjectivity”18

however for Derrida is cannibalism as the animal is within us. The double-bind of


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human animal is the material and the ideal – the material ideal and the ideal

material. Therefore Derrida remarks: “Nothing can ever take away from me the

certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized”19.

In Nabarun Bhattacharya’s short story “Khochor”20 where Khochor is a sort of

clandestine police spy of extremely lower class origin who helps police to take

resort to certain illegal actions to accomplish their legal duties, the dirt and filth of a

Khochor’s mind is depicted – the crude animality and desire to kill makes him

incomprehensible to any discourse of reason. The activity of Khochor imbibes a

violence that has no cause. Perhaps violence is without cause – born out of the

crude animal desire to live. Outside the enlightenment reason which probes man to

care for the other because of the healthy functioning of the society to which he

himself is a part and with which his self-interests are related – outside the law

which through its founding violence ensures such functioning there is this

irreducible animality. This animality is there in each of us and is related to reason

and the violence of reason – it is also something that cannot be negotiated with

reason. It is only through the acceptance of this absolute alterity in recognition,

spectral presence of an absolute unreason in the reason that revolution can

precipitate – revolution that is teleopoesis. Spivak comments:

Teleopoiesis is indeed one of the shocks to the idea of belonging in a

collectivity, for it makes a constant and risk-taking effort to affect the

distant in a poiesis or imaginative remaking, without guarantees.21

Teleopoesis is the messianic unknown that is always to-come. The last few lines of

another short story by Nabarun Bhattacharya’s “Pratibiplab Dirghojibi Hok” or

“Long Live Counter-revolution” (which also forms the title of this paper) poetically

mythifies this impossibly possible future that captures inevitability of violence,

death and vulnerability in which the order of the being survives and wait – wait for

unbecoming towards an unknown messianic future:


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Before I arrive Kolkata my heart starts beating like a drum and in

excitement I hang out with the help of the rod to see how far Kolkata

is still. While watching, the soft air blowing on the forehead shall

invite sleep. At this moment it happened. After the head flung out

getting banged against the post the torso hanged against the rod for a

while. …The head is just not there. To pick up the head I will gently

get down. The whole train cannot move away till I could collect the

head. At least I will be able to jump into the guard’s coach. After that

according to the promise when with a lot of people I shall reach the

black coat gentleman collecting ticket will he not allow me inside?22

However, alongside this deconstructive recognition of a to comeness there should

also be an apt understanding of a binary-possibility i.e., the possibility of the

creation of a binary absolute in human culture per se – forgetting of an erasure to

give a narrative an ontic presence. This happens in case of historical analysis, which

often disposes of the point of view of the historian and feigns a certain kind of

objectivity. This might also happen in case of memories which tries put a truth

claim on an event based on the actuality of experience. Haunting doesn’t depend

simply on an absence of ontology but on the presence of it – the presence of the

past as an ontic absolute. So a binary-possibility of presence-absence is being

created. This binary-possibility can very much be present in any act of decentring

or questioning the centre-periphery relationship. What is peripheral in a different

ontic logic might become universal. The critiques of naxalite movement more often

than not fall in this trap of binary-possibility – they either look at the movement

from a reasonable objectivity (this includes the bourgeois revisionist rewritings by

authors like Samaresh Basu, Samaresh Majumdar et. al.) or from an emotional

sensitivity (often fed in by critiques of those bourgeois rewriting like Suddhabrata

Deb or Asrukumar Sikdar whom I have already quoted). What often is not


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recognized is perhaps the inalienable uncertainty that haunts every act of

interpretation. It is neither reason nor emotion, but the excluded middle of this

binary which is the spectre of this hauntology. In this case it is the materiality of the

ideal and ideality of the material which is the excluded middle in the mind-

matter/ideal-material binary. An inherent selfishness is the marker of the excluded

materiality of ideas which haunts and in this haunting resides another binary

possibility where materiality ripped of any ideality shall violently replace the old

order of existence – the order ruled by idealism and desire for freedom from

hierarchy and exploitation. Anirban Das while discussing Raghab

Bandyopadhyay’s memoir of his days as a naxalite activist titled Journal Sottor

(Journal of 70’s) shows how in his account nostalgia is here of “one’s own selves,

emotions and rationalities” instead of being simply “mourning for what one had

destroyed”23. Raghab Bandyopadhyay himself claims:

My primary attachment was through emotions. Now, when in the

light of reason I judge the doings of the movement, I understand its

faults. But I cannot tear off the emotional attachment.24

It is important to have this auto-anthropological approach while studying

Naxalbari and its presumable failure. That can eventually recognize the excluded

materiality which comes back gathering stupendous force in the name of

consumerism and globalization. In a short story titled “Halaler Parampara” (The

Tradition of Slaughtering) Raghab Bandyopadhyay tells the story of the rise and

fall of a labour movement. It is the story of labour union leader Comrade Rana

Mukherjee trapped between his excluded material longing and idealism and

commitment to his fellow labourer’s. When he was asked by the higher party

authorities to withdraw a barricade organized by the labourers of Bangalakhsmi

Jute Mill, which historically continued for 256 days and which took away security

and daily bread of many labourer activists, he was reluctant to do so. He was torn


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between the material longing and prick of idealism. He has been hating the idea of

good life, quality life projected by media, all his life but the projection of item girls

and their sexual temptations makes him feel vulnerable:

Comrade Rana could realize how visualizing itself can be so

dangerous, it separates his conscience from his body, it seems he

doesn’t know about his own body. However as he cannot forget that

according to dialectical materialism matter or body should be given

more importance he remains in a dilemma.25

This reference to Marxian dialectical materialism is intriguing as it shows how in

the scheme of Marxist revolution the material ideal is made bereft of its materiality.

Perhaps there lies the lacuna of idealism which transforms its inherent materiality

into an excluded spectre. Its spectrality is beyond control, understanding, and

reasoning. Materiality, which was already there as a ghost, however, is reborn in

the letters of globalization. At the end of the story the movement dies down – Rana

Mukherjee is murdered not physically but ideologically – he was made a nobody

by the party and his whereabouts remain unknown (perhaps thereby creating

another new hauntology of excluded ideality which can potentially be a topic of

another discussion). Akbar and his hotel located near the mill which was running

at a loss also underwent a sea change. Akbar who was once an accomplice of that

movement, as closing down of the mill made his hotel incur a loss, now started

wearing thick gold chain and bracelet and carrying a mobile. His hotel is also

transformed into a plusher one with a poster of popular film actress and item girl

Bipasa Basu. The spectral other of revolutionary ideal appears on world-stage and

is reborn finally to transform the ideal into a spectre now.


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Notes and References: 1 Asrukumar Sikdar quoted in Suddhabrata Deb, “Somayer Sankote Koyekti Bangla Uponyash” in Uttal Shat-Sottor: Rajniti, Samaj o Sanskriti, edited by Arjun Goswami (Kolkata: Chayanika, 2006), 157. The quotation is translated by me. 2 See Suddhabrata Deb, “Somayer Sankote Koyekti Bangla Uponyash” in Uttal Shat-Sottor: Rajniti, Samaj o Sanskriti, edited by Arjun Goswami (Kolkata: Chayanika, 2006), 163. 3 Ranajit Guha, “Torture and Culture” in The Small Voice of History, (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009), 573. 4 Ibid., 566. 5 Sumit Sarkar, “The Radicalism of Intellectuals: A Case Study of Nineteenth Century Bengal” in A Critique of Colonial India, (Kolkata: Papyrus, 2000 [1985]), 82. 6 Saibal Mitra, Agnir Upakhyan, (Kolkata: Dey’s Publishing, 2006) 7 Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”” in Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 257. 8 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, translated by Pascal-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), xi. 9 Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”” in Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 269. 10 Jean. L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Massachusetts, and London: MIT, 1992), 136 11 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 105-06. 12 Rajarshi Dasgupta, “Marxbader Bhut Bonam Marxbader Gotro” in Ababhash, 6th Year, 1st-2nd issue, 34. 13 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 107-08.


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14 See Bimal Kar “Nigraha” in Naxal Andoloner Golpo, edited by Bijit Ghosh (Kolkata: Punascha, 1999), 17-27. 15 Ibid., 27. Translated by me from Bangla. 16 Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, “Ghostwriting” in Diacritics, Vol. 25, No. 2. (Summer, 1995), 75. 17 Samaresh Majumder, Kalbela (Kolkata: Ananda, 2007), 404. Translated by me from Bangla. 18 Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”” in Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 247. 19 Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I am (More To Follow)” in Critical Enquiry (Winter 2002), 379. 20 Nabarun Bhattacharya, “Khochor” in Sreshtho Golpo (Kolkata: Dey’s Publishing, 2006), 30-41. 21 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “A Note on the New International” in parallax, 2001, vol. 7, no. 3, 12. 22 Nabarun Bhattacharya, “Pratibiplab Dirghojibi Hok” in Sreshtho Golpo (Kolkata: Dey’s Publishing, 2006), 47. 23 Ibid., 68. 24 Raghab Bandyopadhyay quoted in Anirban Das, “In(re)trospection: suturing of selves past” in from the margins, February, 2001, 71-72. 25 Raghab Bandyopadhyay, “Halaler Parampara” in Ashmani Katha (Kolkata: Gangchil, 2007), 124.

"long live counter-revolution: bourgeois rewriting of naxalbari and the return of the...

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