‘Viyyukka’, a word in Gondi language meaning morning star, is an anthology of stories written in Telugu by Maoist women revolutionaries over the past four decades. Some of these women were martyred in the cause of the revolution, while some are still continuing in it. Some were part of the movement for some years and were then either arrested or had come out of it due to various reasons. This anthology is published by Virasam (Revolutionary Writers Association) in the year 2023 in six volumes and consists of 316 stories written by fifty two authors. Among the 316 stories, 148 are written with armed revolution as the subject and 168 talk about other issues in the society. They cover various aspects of life in the movement and in the mainstream society.
Collecting works of ‘underground revolutionary’ (UG) authors is not an easy task. Even if it could be done, it is not easy to find the writings of women in them, as these authors wrote under many pseudonyms. When revolutionaries were martyred and books about their life were published, in some cases their pseudonyms and their works were also published. It has been possible to glean information about some of the women writers from such books.
A life of an underground activist is not a bed of roses. It takes time for the revolutionaries who go from the plains to the forests to get used to that life. Daily life in a squad involves hours of walking, while carrying at least 15-20 kg weight, including a weapon. Being in the field of war, the revolutionaries have to be constantly alert. There are no chairs or desks to sit comfortably and write. They cannot use light at night in day-to-day operations, so there is no chance of writing then at all. Writing under these circumstances is a remarkable achievement considering there are no material comforts and there is a constant threat of attack by the State.
Based on the available evidence, we have given a date to each story. However, it is very unlikely that the stories were written in one go due to the uncertainties of guerilla life. So, the dates given are the dates of publication but they may not be the actual periods of writing. Even after a story is written, it will see light of day only if it survives encounters and the couriers carrying it make it safely to the world outside and hand it over to willing publishers. The stories published in this anthology are probably a small percentage of the stories actually written by the women revolutionaries as we do not know how many were lost in encounters, detentions, arrests and in transit.
Shortly after the squads entered Dandakaranya in the eighties, women started joining them. By the end of that decade, women had joined the squads formed in the plains, even if in small numbers. Women also joined the squads in Nallamala and Andhra Orissa border.
All the revolutionaries had to struggle initially to learn the language of the Adivasis, understand their customs and gain their confidence. The women revolutionaries faced additional difficulties in dealing with patriarchy in the squads and among people, which they fought continuously. The fact that nearly 50 percent of the squads and people’s militia today are comprised of women shows that they succeeded to a large extent in their fight.
Even though women revolutionaries have been writing stories since the 1970s, it gathered momentum in the past three decades.Some of the writers wrote stories even before they entered the underground life, on various women’s issues, and on revolutionary movement, while being members of mass organizations, and they continued their writing after going underground. The earliest stories were written by those who chose an underground life as revolutionaries, after working as radical student union activists. Some of the women writers who worked incognito in the urban movement could write more stories as they had relatively more leisure compared to those working in the rural and forest areas.
The women revolutionaries, who are in an unceasing class struggle and have no leisure time, have managed to ‘allot’ time to write these stories. Especially those in leadership positions can only devote limited time to story writing. However, these stories remained mostly hidden among the vast number of ‘main stream’ stories. Until we put them together, we had no idea that the revolutionary movement produced so many women writers. Some of them have written just one story while there are others who are accomplished writers with a writing style of their own.
The initial stories were written by the educated people who went into the revolutionary movement from the plains and took to the underground life. They tried to bring about transformation in the Adivasi lives, their culture, governance structures and political economy. In those initial days, they were still viewed as ‘outsiders’. After the revolutionary movement recruited the local Adivasis and gradually abolished the difference between the outsiders and the locals, the locals participated in everything, improved their skills and moved into leadership positions. Thus, the movement is now truly theirs and they are the ones deciding on the battles to be won and strategising for the same. They learned to read and write within the movement, and slowly took to writing their experiences in the form of stories. We ascertained that there are seven stories written by local adivasi women in these collections. It is possible that this number could be more. There are some stories written in Gondi and Kuvvi languages that were published in the underground journals. A great deal of literary effort was put in the revolutionary movement to bring out so many stories.
The strength of these stories lies in their content for none of the stories are fictional. They record the continuing history of four decades of revolutionary movement and a life that can only be written by those who directly participated in it. They touch various aspects of life in the movement – the daily struggles, the emotional wrangles, relationships among comrades, interactions with people and Nature, battles with the armed forces of the State and betrayals etc. There are some very powerful stories, depicting real life events populated with real life characters. These stories remind us that ‘fact is stranger than fiction’. Every character in these stories represents a real flesh and blood human being.
In these stories, the revolutionary women writers present to the public the many changes taking place in the villages, forests and plains, the changes in economic life and in production relations, and the changes taking place in land relations. They also bring out the achievements of the people and the revolutionaries in the military field, the way people are resisting the enemy’s attacks on them with a long-term strategy, people’s experiences under repression, and the day-to-day hardships of the squads. The Viyyukka anthology is an attempt to bring their effort into the public domain.
People from different regions, from different social groups and at different levels of consciousness come into the revolutionary movement. They are establishing new human relations by abolishing the regressive ideology of the old relations and the base that is engendering that ideology. Since they are the subject and the object of the changes happening around them, they are able to write very naturally in a conversational style about all that has happened and is currently happening. They do not weave stories by fabricating an event and adding imaginative component to it. Instead, they convey the reality in ordinary language to tell stories that touch the hearts of people.
The women in the revolutionary movementalso run various women’s magazines from different regions focusing on women’s issues. DandakaranyaKrantikari Adivasi MahilaSangham’s magazine is published as ‘Porumahila’ in Telugu, ‘SangharsharatMahila’ in Hindi and Gondi language. During the period when the movement was strong in Andhra, they published the magazine ‘ViplavaMahila’, and after the formation of Andhra Orissa Border Committee they published the magazine ‘Viplavi’. Although it is not known whether these continue to be published or not, it is a fact that such magazines also became centers for literary creation by the guerrillas.
‘Revolution? What revolution? Where is it? Does it still exist? Where do you see it? May be it exists in some remote place. We don’t think it has any impact on people’s lives.’ Those who castigate the revolution in such words should read these stories once. They will look with wonder at ordinary people becoming writers in these stories. The revolutionary movement created ‘new human beings’ to overcome the many deformities and vices that the society has imbued in them. These ‘new humans’ are not only making history, but are recording history in various ways and opening windows to four decades of revolutionary movement for the outside world to view. These stories demonstrate that apart from being red soldiers, the revolutionaries perform diverse roles such as writers, artists, historians, doctors and teachers.
Many of the Adivasis who joined the movement literally learnt to read and write while being part of the squads. Many of them went on to become teachers and bare foot doctors in the guerilla bases of the movement. These stories show that their method of teaching relies heavily on local examples and using the mother tongue to impart such knowledge to children that will be useful to them to navigate their daily lives, while also taking care to pass on the indigenous knowledge of the tribe to them. In contrast, the Adivasi children who are educated in the regular social welfare schools outside the tribal areas are alienated from their culture and struggle a great deal to make progress. The bare foot doctors trained by the movement, with help from sympathetic doctors who come from outside areas, do a very competent job of handling many of the diseases that plague the squads as well as the people. They even manage to do minor surgeries. All these aspects come out clearly in the stories showing that the revolutionary movement and the people who are part of it are striving to build an alternate way of living that doesn’t depend on meritocracy, competition, and a blind acceptance of the ‘mainstream’ notions of education and knowledge. Instead, their emphasis is on real learning, co-operation and making use of indigenous knowledge while throwing away the harmful aspects of their traditions and embracing the rational aspects of all systems of knowledge.
These stories are not just black letters printed on white paper. Behind these are the lives of those who sacrificed their personal ambitions, comfortsand even their lives for all of our benefit. They are full of the earthy fragrance of an alternate society dreamt of by the revolution.
As these stories are written in Telugu, their readership is relatively restricted. We believe that it is important to bring out these stories in English so that a wider audience gets to know the reality of the revolutionary movement and especially the role of women in it. The paucity of information regarding the movement in the mainstream society raises a lot of questions regarding it. Our current endeavour is to choose and translate some representative stories into English, thus answering some of those questions. This is only the beginning of that endeavour and we hope to bring out multiple volumes to do adequate justice to the efforts of the women revolutionaries.
P Aravinda & B Anuradha
