OF POLEMICS AND POLITICS
C.V. Subbarao
OF POLEMICS AND POLITICS by Barry Pavier Vikas Publishing House, Delhi, 1982, 208 pp., 60
Sept-Oct 1982, volume 7, No 2

Telengana is part of the mythology of the Indian Com¬munist movement, transmitted to the youth from one generation to the next through a kind of oral tradition. What¬ever little literature exists about the movement can be classified into five categories: first hand accounts in the form of a mass of pamphlets, book¬lets and books of the period, almost all of which are in Telugu and remain untrans-lated; creative literature, especially novels which capture the movement authentically; memoirs relating to the move¬ment by its detractors—leaders of the right wing of the Andhra Maha Sabha (AMS) and the state Congress; the chronicles and memoirs of its participants which are a part of the polemics which suddenly erupted from the late sixties when the Naxalbari movement reopened the debate on armed revolution; and a growing number of academic works, part of the ‘peasant studies’ which have their own models and theses to advance. The merit of the book under review lies in its ability to harmo¬niously combine an account of the movement with a polemi¬cal debate over the politics of the CPI while successfully advancing ‘its own thesis.’

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