THE FIRST NAXAL
An Authorised Biography of Kanu Sanyal
Bappaditya Paul
SAGE
249 pages; Rs 550
In September 1967, Kanu Sanyal set out from Siliguri in search of Chairman Mao. In the summer of that year the Naxalbari insurrection, engineered in part by Sanyal and fellow communists, had rippled through the paddy fields and tea estates of West Bengal.
The movement captured the attention of the Communist Party of China (CPC) that described the events of 1967 as "a peal of spring thunder" in an editorial. The Indian state was less encouraging: paramilitaries poured into Bengal, shooting peasants and arresting leaders at a rate that prompted the revolutionaries to look to China for direction.
Sanyal and his comrades made contact with the Chinese embassy in Kathmandu before pressing on to the Sino-Nepalese border, where the People's Liberation Army spirited them to Beijing for training in Maoist political thought and military tactics.
After three months of intensive indoctrination, they were ushered into the presence of Mao himself, who said, "Forget everything you have learnt here in China. Once back in Naxalbari, formulate your own revolutionary strategies keeping in mind the ground realities over there."
In The First Naxal, journalist Bappaditya Paul offers a short history of the Naxalite movement through the life of Kanu Sanyal, one of its architects. Sanyal, as the title indicates and the preface makes explicit, vetted the book before his death in 2010 and his editorial hand is evident on each page.
Mr Paul has gathered a fascinating set of vignettes of Sanyal's life - such as the meeting with Mao - but the narrative is hobbled by the absence of other voices to clarify, contradict or even corroborate Sanyal's account.
Each incident and anecdote reads like the starting point for further investigation, rather than the richly reported, fleshed-out account it could have been.
One example is the case of Jangal Santhal, a peasant that Sanyal describes as "his best ever discovery". Santhal, adivasi activists have pointed out, is believed to have played a pivotal role in popularising the party's ideology in the Darjeeling hills. Yet we learn little of Santhal through the book, except that he frequently accompanied Sanyal on various campaigns.
That said, the richness of Sanyal's experiences, and Mr Paul's sparse prose, make for a fast and compelling read.
Most contemporary accounts of the events of 1967 tend to focus on Charu Mazumdar and his articulation of what came to be known as the "individual annihilation" or "khatam" line that called for the selective killings of landlords to create revolutionary conditions.
Mr Paul's book, however, suggests that Mazumdar faced significant resistance within his own faction with many, Sanyal included, pushing for the "mass line", which called for the creation of mass-based peasant organisations as the first step towards social change. Individual killings by secret groups, Sanyal said, created a general climate of fear that brought people closer to the police rather than the guerillas.
Yet Mazumdar clearly wielded considerable influence over Sanyal and his comrades. In one illuminating instance in 1971, Sanyal speaks of an encounter with fellow Naxalite Sourin Bose when they were both in prison in Visakhapatnam in connection with the Srikakulam conspiracy case. "Bhodu da was still in dilemma. He was confused because of Charu da's standing instructions that none of the revolutionaries should ever opt for a defence in a court of law. Opting for a defence was a revisionist act, Charu da believed."
Sanyal never publicly spoke out against Mazumdar while the latter was still alive - an omission, Mr Paul writes, that Sanyal regretted. Mazumdar died in police custody in 1972. Their disagreements may have seemed like abstruse hair-splitting, but Sanyal is correct when he surmises that the communist movement in India, and the Bengal countryside, could have been quite different if rebels had held off escalating the violence until they built a stronger, more resilient, network of workers. For instance, the current day Communist Party of India (Maoist) - whom Sanyal has denounced as Left-adventurist (the CPI (Marxist), by contrast, are termed right-revisionists) - are far more pragmatic in their approach to violence, which could account for their longevity.
Sanyal lived to 82, until he took his life in 2010 after years of ill health. He died, as he lived for most his life, amidst few material possessions in a tiny mud hut in a village not far from Naxalbari.
Mr Paul is at his best when describing Sanyal's early life and his role in organising Darjeeling's cultivators in the run-up to the 1967 insurrection. In the aftermath of the fighting, the book - like Sanyal's public life - digresses into a series of arrests, court hearings and internecine bickering between various left factions.
Yet The First Naxal's flaws must be blamed on its editors rather than the writer. Mr Paul is clearly a talented reporter, writing his first book on a subject that cries out for editorial direction. A good editor could have pushed Mr Paul to broaden his research, widen the scope of the book and offer a nuanced account of one of India's most under-reported political figures.
Instead, Sage Publications has not even done Mr Paul the service of spell-checking his manuscript, leave alone suggesting ways to develop a book that transcends the limits of Sanyal's life.
