ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the testimony of political violence in the context of the extreme left Naxalbari movement of eastern India, to offer some reflections on the politics of bearing witness and testifying to violence and pain. It discusses some questions regarding the privileged position of testimony as a conduit for understanding and even ameliorating women's suffering. Women's testimonies to political violence, in particular, are said to speak through the language of silence, and on more than one historical occasion, they have been observed to testify to the sufferings of others while rarely speaking of their own. In the act of testimony, the subject is witness to something other than itself; to bear witness is "to speak for others and to others." Testimony might impede the process of individual recovery to such an extent that individual pain remains unrepresented and, by implication, unacknowledged.
