Neither Bhojpur nor ‘Naxalism’ stand at the heart of the issues which this book raises. The places, the dates, the individuals—and the ‘-ism’ attributed to them-pale into relative insignificance besides the deeper causes, and the long-running continuities, of the struggle for land rights and human dignities which is the real substance of this work. The fact that Mukherjee and Yadav offer hardly any analysis of the phenomena which they chronicle, is not very important either. The reader can and must make his own. That the story is ‘fragmented’, as they themselves concede, and that they have not helped themselves by failing to sustain a properly chronological narrative of events, also does not matter very much. For Bhojpur, 1971-1980, is merely a local stage in India’s continuous and growing civil war for land; its heroes, Jagdish Mahto and Rameshwar Ahir, are merely two more combatants who have fallen in this battle on behalf of the landless. Nor can it all be confined within, or be explained by, the term ‘Naxalite movement’.
March-April 1981, volume 5, No 3/4