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Acknowledgments

As I write these words of gratitude, I am filled with sadness upon hearing about the passing away of comrade Vikas (Arvind was his other alias), a politburo member of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). In the mid-1980s, as a journalist associated with the Kolkata-based radical-left weekly, Frontier, on a visit to the countryside of the district of Gaya in the State of Bihar, I first met Vikas, who was then a prominent leader of the Mazdoor Kisan Sangram Samiti (worker–peasant militant struggle association), and the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) (Party Unity), one of the predecessors of the CPI (Maoist). Vikas related to the poor and landless peasants in an utterly egalitarian and democratic manner; he seemed to have earned their affection, loyalty, and respect by his deeds.

On this trip, when I was leaving a village on my way to the next one, an elderly man under the care of his grandson insisted on accompanying us (me, a Frontier companion, and our local guide) right to the outskirts of his village. When the time came to say our goodbyes and Lal Salaams (Red Salutes), I told him that he should not have taken all this effort to come so far with us. To which he replied: “You have come all the way from Kolkata to learn about us, our lives, our struggles, and our concerns. You care about us.”

I never forgot Vikas or what this peasant-comrade told me, and was inspired, much later, when I felt adequately intellectually equipped, to write the essay “What Is Maoism?.” And now, I’ve penned this book. Hundreds of millions of people have been the victims of Indian capitalism’s irrationality, brutality, and inhumanity, and it is the actions of those who could not remain unmoved and were compelled to revolt that have motivated me to write this book. But as I write these words of a sense of obligation, I record with sorrow the death of Ashok Mitra, my favorite columnist, whose weekly columns, taken together, constitute what I have called a Guernica of political prose, so full of life, of anger and indignation, as well as empathy and compassion. He had given me some sound advice on finishing what I had begun, this book, and looked forward to the end product, but now he’s no more.

The New York-based independent socialist magazine, Monthly Review has, over the years, been an essential part of my education, and it’s wonderful that Monthly Review Press is publishing this book. The Marxist intellectual “underworld” in India has proved to be one of the best circles for my political education—Samar Sen, Timir Basu, P. A. Sebastian, Sumanta Banerjee, C. V. Subba Rao, K. Balagopal, Tilak Dasgupta, Ajit Roy, Sudesh Vaid, Gautam Navlakha, and Rajani X. Desai come to mind at first thought. Besides the ones I mention, there have also been left-party activists, feminists, ecologists, Dalits, oppressed nationalists, democratic rights’ campaigners, and pacifists, from whose insights, probing questions, and criticism I have learned a great deal. I was very fond of my thesis supervisor, the radical economist Nirmal Kumar Chandra, who later became a good friend and encouraged me on the unconventional path I took, which has eventually led to this book. And, I cannot forget my first editor, Samar Sen (Shômor babu), founder-editor of Frontier, celebrated post-Tagorean Bengali poet, who encouraged me to widen my intellectual repertoire.

Initial versions of what became chapters 6 and 9 first appeared in the Economic & Political Weekly (EPW), whose then editor C. Rammanohar Reddy’s comments and suggestions helped improve both form and content. The preliminary text of chapter 9 was in the form of notes that I had prepared for a Sheikh Abdul Rawoof memorial lecture I delivered at Thrissur (in Kerala) in March 2014. I presented an embryonic version of chapter 8 at a seminar organized by the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights in Nagpur, and in a lecture organized by students of the Radical Study Circle, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, both in 2015. Parts of chapter 10 were presented as part of the first Randhir Singh memorial lecture I was invited to deliver at New Delhi in January 2017.

Chapters 1, 4, and 7 first took shape in a series of lectures I gave on the Maoist movement in India for a postgraduate course on “State, Democracy, and Conflicts in India,” taught by Professor Farrukh Faheem at the TISS. I also benefitted from a conference on “Marxist Revolutionary Movements across the World” at the University of Oxford in July 2011, organized by professors Alpa Shah and Stephen Feuchtwang, where I presented a paper on the Maoist movement in India. The Monthly Review Foundation’s former online magazine, MRZine, with Yoshie Furuhashi as editor, and the Bengali “small magazine,” Aneek, with the late Dipankar Chakrabarty as editor, were open to my ideas and analyses presented in occasional journalistic pieces, which, taken together, made the penning of chapter 7 a lot easier than it would otherwise have been.

I thank Subhas Aikat of the Kharagpur-based Cornerstone Publications; Rajani Desai and Girish Srinivasan of the Mumbai-based Research Unit for Political Economy; Alpa Shah, Swapna Banerjee-Guha, Ajmal Khan, and Arup Sen for readily responding to my requests to locate and send me certain essential books and papers. The construction of the maps I owe to my EPW colleague, Abhishek Shaw, and I am grateful to him for devoting precious hours to the task. For the photograph of Maoist guerrillas on the march that graces the book’s cover, Monthly Review Press and I are obligated to the well-known documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak.

The writing of this book put an unintended additional load on my EPW colleagues, for I was on leave from my job for a year and a half. I express my sense of obligation to them.

I am grateful to John Mage for reading a first draft of the entire manuscript. His classical approach to Marxist analyses, his queries, his pointing me to errors, his encouragement. John, I needed the kind of gentle assurance and guidance you provided with regard to my ways of looking at and thinking about the subject matter of this book. Uma and Anand Chakravarti’s helpful comments on a draft of the Appendix on Caste were valuable. Swapna Banerjee-Guha’s reactions to a draft of chapter 1 gave me the confidence I needed to plod on, for she had been what social anthropologists call a “participant observer” in Kolkata in the course of “Spring Thunder,” Phase I. Stephen Rego, who copyedited the entire manuscript, actually did much more than that—his observations on chapters 1, 4, and 7 have enriched both form and content. Michael D. Yates, Director, Monthly Review Press, read the entire manuscript after it had been copy-edited, and helpfully pointed to transatlantic differences with regard to commas and much else that both Stephen and I had overlooked. Michael’s words, “I enjoyed reading your book and learned a great deal from it,” mean a lot to me. Thank you, Michael.

I must record a big thank-you to Martin Paddio and Susie Day at Monthly Review Press; and to K. K. Saxena, publisher, Aakar Books, Delhi; for all it takes to reach out to readers and keep the enterprise going.

Finally, words would never suffice to express my gratitude to ma and pa, Jean Florence Abrahams and Charles Francis D’Mello, working-class parents who raised me; to Pauline Menezes, my partner, who has stood by me through my darkest nights, kept me from the brink of the abyss. And, to our son Samar and daughter Vera, I am now in debt to the tune of five holidays in the hills and by the riverside.

—BERNARD D’MELLO

Mumbai, May 1, 2018