ABSTRACT
Representing the history of an event ‘as it really happened’ has become increasingly problematised in the terrain of historiography, and the task is ‘rather to produce a concept of history’ (Jameson 1984, 178). The concept, as Jameson elaborates, is to identify the possibilities of ‘a whole range of varied responses and creative innovations’ to an objective situation. If presuppositions underlying the accepted definition of the event are dissolved into multiple, often contradictory, characteristics the event ceases to appear as a uniform situation with an essence, and begins to pulsate with the sense of immediacy that was bound by the objective situation’s structural limits and yet displayed variation and innovation. Widening the idea of difference, with reference to the international context, can act as the analytical point of departure to study such variations and innovations of Naxalbari in a comparative context. However, ‘framing of difference’ encourages thinking beyond the factual sense of differ - ence because this conceptual framework engages with the idea of difference not in terms of multiple case studies but as a conceptual tool to delineate the heterogeneity of the movement. Without discarding the importance of case studies in operationalising the concept of difference it is possible to perceive comparative analysis beyond illustrations of similarities with cross-national radical communist movements. A comparative framework becomes a con - ceptual tool for understanding not only comparable contexts but also various dimensions of comparability. In other words, accepting the comparative framework as a conceptual tool charts out the possibilities of exploring the ways in which an event becomes an index of a series, or, the ways in which an event becomes a signifier for locating a series within a series.
