Speaking Silence

Women's history is not only an effort to restore women to history, but perhaps, more importantly, also to restore history to women. Writing women's history, therefore, calls for overcoming the isolationist celebration of individual women and to posit gender as an analytical category for studying history. Since ‘women’ do not constitute a composite, ahistorical, perennial ‘other’ with their distilled autonomous history, their histories are inextricably mapped in the grid of class and caste relations, community life and collective mobilisation, colonialism and capitalism. Capturing the continuous fluidity of domination and resistance in the lives of women belonging to various socio-political, cultural, economic locations demand an identification of the both subordination and expressions of defiance, imprinted in the micro-histories of biographies, oral traditions, legends and myths. This paper analyses the ideology of the Naxalbari movement, a radical Maoist movement in post-colonial Bengal, and its historiography from the point of view of gender. This is an endeavour to account for not only the conspicuous silence about women participants both in its ideology and academic historiography, but also to seek the multiple locations of victimhood and agency enmeshed in women's identity and to locate the negotiated spaces of individual participants in collective action; and the limitations of both social and political institutions like family, caste, class and party in motivating women to actively take part in the public sphere.