Organized Peasant Resistance in Fiction
The Sword and The Sickle and The Lives of Others
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2634877 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Angela Eyre (The Open University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 21 |
| Publication date | 2019-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1960-6060 • E-ISSN: 1960-6060 |
| Publisher | OpenEdition (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4000/samaj.5498 |
| OpenAlex | W2972708837 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 3 |
Mulk Raj Anand's The Sword and The Sickle (1942) narrates a historical uprising in Oudh in 1921-22. Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others (2014) alternates a story about the Naxalite peasant insurgency between 1967 and 1970 with one about a bourgeois family in Calcutta. An epilogue dated 2012 connects the historical movement to present Maoist insurgencies.Through their literary strategies, both texts connect the local situation to broader national and international influences and also relate a story set in the past to the time in which the novels were written and published. These multiple layers mean that the question of 'who speaks for the village?' is mediated by the reader and the framework they apply.This article considers reviews of the novels written just after publication to examine the way in which they were sometimes read through their international frames-the relationship between colonial India and Britain in the case of The Sword and The Sickle-and discourses around terrorism in the case of The Lives of Others. These readings obscured some aspects of the narratives of the peasant. A comparison of the two novels brings to the fore the representation of the local economic and political problems faced by the peasants
Art · Bourgeoisie · Colonialism · Insurgency · Literature · Narrative · Peasant · Political science · Politics · Sociology · SWORD · Anthropological Studies and Insights · History · Law · Political Theology and Sovereignty · South Asian Studies and Diaspora
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |