Memoirs of an Exalite | Sreejith K

BOOK REVIEW

Oranweshanathinte katha

by K. Venu

DC Books
2023, 752 pages
ISBN: 9789354829383

Reviewed by Sreejith K

In an iconic scene from Sandesham, which has over the years acquired a cult status amongst the Malayalis for its trenchant political satire, a communist party worker, Sreenivasan, during a pennukaanal (would-be bride seeing), after some perfunctory questions on Marxism to the bewilderment of the girl, asks her whether she would be willing to spend the rest of her life with a revolutionary on the run with the police close on his heels. Needless to say, the marriage never materialises, and, in fact, it was only the timely intervention by the marriage broker that saves everyone concerned further embarrassment. Though in slightly different circumstances, when K. Venu writes in his autobiography of the decision to embark on the path of revolution and consequently the ending of his relationship with the one woman he ever loved, even if there is no comedy involved, it is hard not be reminded of that movie scene.

Yet, at the end of the sixties of the last century, it looked as if Venu was heading for a career in the Sciences. He was working, on the recommendation of the CPI(M) intellectual, P. Govinda Pillai, at the State Institute of Encyclopaedic Publications in Trivandrum. His Prapanchavum Manushyanum (Universe and Man) would soon be published to critical acclaim, and he was looking forward to doing doctoral research from some university. But the first phase of the Naxalite uprising in the state would have a deep impact on him, especially the killing of Varghese in a fake encounter, as he says in this book, after which he would plunge headlong into the movement and become its prominent face for the next couple of decades.

Ideological differences and personal incompatibilities ensured that he Naxalite movement, from the beginning, remained disorganised. Charu Majumdar and Kunikkal Narayanan, the leader of the first phase of the movement in Kerala, for instance, could not even agree on whether feudalism or imperialism constituted the primary contradiction in the country or, indeed, whether the annihilation of jenmis or attack on police stations would best resolve them. Varghese and others had reservations regarding the credibility of Ambady Sankaran Kutty Menon, the man Charu Majumdar picked to lead the movement in Kerala, and their misgivings did not appear misplaced when he would later join the Congress. Meanwhile, there were rumours of Kunikkal being on the payroll of the CIA, and other Naxalites already in prison would give him a hostile reception when he was brought in. In a movement, thus, riven with factions from the outset, the authorities would sow further seeds of mistrust. Venu recollects how, while in custody, the police officer, Jayaram Padikkal, tried to convince KN Ramachandran and others that the former was a paid agent of his, an allegation which Venu takes great pains to counter in this book.

It is one of the ironies of a movement which professed the annihilation of class enemies as a legitimate means to bring about a more egalitarian order – which, in some cases, as at Nagarur, descended to the killing of teenagers in the absence of the former – that one of its most important regional ideologues, as he writes in this book, used to faint, as a child, at the sight of blood, and even, in more recent times, while watching movies with his wife, turn misty-eyed during emotional scenes. That is what being blinded to an ideology does to you, as he admits in this book. To his credit, though, Venu breaks free of the shackles from the late seventies which enables him to have a better understanding of not only the social fascistic nature of East European regimes, but also the need to incorporate, more meaningfully into the programme of the movement in India, the questions of women, caste, and nationality. He contrasts this self-reflexiveness with the rather mechanical approach other communist intellectuals had taken over the years, especially E.M.S. Namboodiripad, in whose voluminous writings, Venu says, one will struggle to find even a single sentence of any philosophical substance.

Though the movement here, unlike elsewhere in the country, did not make much headway, the terror unleashed by an unforgiving state would be swift and brutal, especially during the Emergency. P. Rajan, a sympathiser, was picked up from the Engineering College he was studying, and never seen again. Some resisted, like Angadipuram Balakrishnan who, while being taken to the police camp for interrogation, and certain torture, set fire to the jeep carrying him, killing, in the process, himself and one of the DYSPs. Others like T.N. Joy, hailing from the same town as Venu, and a close associate, survived the torture, but permanently scarred by it, left the movement forever. Somewhere at the beginning of the book, Venu claims that the Naxalite movement in the state gave hope and a purpose in life to a young generation of the 1970s who would otherwise have, under the influence of existentialism and drugs, taken the path of self-destruction but, considering the toll the movement had on them, both mentally and physically, it is hard to subscribe to that view. Also, strangely, Venu is silent on the circumstances leading to the suicide of Subrahmanyadas, one of the brightest young minds in the movement, his disillusionment ascribed by some to his insensitive mishandling by the state leadership.

Like other communist revolutionaries before him, Venu spent plenty of years behind bars, and, in this book, devotes several pages detailing what went on behind them. For a Naxalite, he says, prison, physically, was safer than being in police custody, but it could be infinitely monotonous, to overcome which, once, he devised with his cell mate, a game of chess using petals and stones available. He also writes of occasions when he went on hunger strike seeking prisoners’ release from their cells during day time or for access to publications. Once, he had to intervene on behalf of the smokers amongst them when the non-smokers began to put pressure on the former to quit so that they will not be at the mercy of the prison guards who dished out their quota of cigarettes daily. Prison life also threw up unlikely alliances. Once, after an unsuccessful attempt at jailbreak, Venu and others involved in it decided to lie to the investigating team that the police escort, a kind-hearted soul, had kept them handcuffed all along, and they had tried to escape only when it was removed to allow them to answer nature’s call knowing fully well that any other explanation might see him lose his job. For Venu, prisons in Malabar, with their colonial experience behind them, were more humane than those in the south which, he says, were still being run by men with a feudal mindset.

Ajitha, the firebrand leader of the first phase of the movement, and Sulochana, the young activist arrested during the Emergency, get passing references in the book, but, by and large, this book presents a man’s world, expectedly, perhaps, because of the violence that permeated the movement. There are, indeed, the occasional scenes of a sister providing shelter to Venu when he is in hiding or the wife of P. Govinda Pillai sending him books and magazines when in prison - until her husband gets into trouble for his links with Venu - and, of course, his working-class wife, Mani, who rears their kids while he is away, but they are all mere supporting cast, destined only to stay in the margins. That Venu held on to an ossified notion of gender relations even as late as the early 1980s becomes evident when, at a time the party, as part of its broader approach to mass organisations, was trying to link up with Manushi, a women’s organisation that cropped up in Palghat during this time, he wrote an article in the party organ severely censoring a couple belonging to the two organisations for entering into a pre-marital relationship on the bizarre grounds that free sex, a conceivable component in a socialist society of the future, cannot be a part of the capitalist world!

By the beginning of the 1990s, disillusionment had set in, and around the time the communist regimes in the Soviet Union and its satellite states in the East began to collapse, Venu had begun to seriously wonder whether communism had anything better to offer than bourgeois democracy. Unlike many others in the party, Venu had kept abreast of developments under communist regimes, and the theoretical debates which went on within Marxism across the globe. But to assume, as some people have tended to do, that his works on the question of democracy within communism has been pathbreaking is to ignore the many instances of political and intellectual dissidence in eastern Europe and the rigorous philosophical explorations that went on in the universities of the West for much of the twentieth century.

Of Venu’s political journey, much of what is there in the book has already appeared in his articles and interviews over the years. A refreshing departure - from earlier communist autobiographies as well – are the personal details which help you get an idea of the man. Going through the book, thus, you learn of how he notices during sporadic visits to his ailing mother, her deteriorating mental health, his inability to give time to his sons, one of whom is born with down’s syndrome, while they grew up, consequent to which, they do not develop a long-term bonding with their father, and his toil, after giving up politics, in diverse ways to earn a livelihood. Amidst all these struggles, once, when his mind went back to a time, when immediately after post-graduation, another life beckoned with a woman he then loved, and he tells Mani of her, she replies that she could not have possibly coped with the life that would have entailed had she married him. Considering the turbulent nature of the seventies of the last century, and the central role Venu would play in that, she, perhaps, was right.

(Reviewer: Sreejith K teaches history at Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Government College, Kolkata | email: sreeji1967[at]gmail.com)