ABSTRACT
In South Asia where premordial categories of caste, race or religion are invoked as ready-made cultural markers, ideology as a secular denomination also adds to the conundrum of identitarian politics. In Punjab during the 1970s, as radical progressive movements led primarily by the poet-activists make substantial headway, along with the conventional communal categories of one being either a Sikh or a Hindu or even a Muslim, there emerges a formidable category of the ‘naxalite’ too. Through a close textual reading of the jujharvadi poetry, the chapter delineates the limits of not just one kind of poetry, but also the limits of ideology itself, in determining one’s identity in the long run. Divided into three segments, the chapter first traces the rise of radical progressive poetry during the 1970s in the wake of the economic inequalities unleashed by the Green Revolution. Subsequently, it traces the rather dramatic decline of the Naxal-sentiment within less than a period of a decade. The last section of the chapter posits a thesis that the ideology as a category of identity fails to sustain as competing discourses of caste and communalism begin to appropriate its radical idiom to their advantage.
