ABSTRACT
Recent decades have seen a growing interest in gender and politics in the South Asian context, and this book is strategically placed within this scholarship (Jayawardena 1986; Agarwal 1994; Guha 1996; Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996; Jeffery and Basu 1998; John and Nair 1998; Manchanda 2001; Sunder Rajan 2003). This scholarship offers a framework to understand the ways in which the politics of gender is imbricated in the life of a social movement. It is also possible to expand such a framework to explore multiple dimensions of connections between academic history and the heterogeneous reality of a social movement. The perspective of postcolonial feminism, as I have argued in the Introduction, allows us to reconsider the limits of academic historiog - raphy, to read history against its grains, in its heterogeneous ungovernable excesses. This book proposes that the existing academic historiography needs to be redefined in order to engage with this radical movement as a social event. Locating Naxalbari in its gendered history and historiography, consequently, becomes the analytical point of departure for delineating the expanded horizon of the conceptual framework.
