Novelizing Non-Fiction: Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades and the Critical Realism of Global Anglophone Literature

Abstract

This essay examines Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades (2011), a reportage about Maoist guerrillas engaged in an armed struggle against the Indian state, as a contemporary instance of critical realism. Drawing on theorizations of the novel and realism by Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukács, I argue Roy’s reportage incorporates formal elements and techniques of the novel as well as a realist aesthetic to adapt the genre to depict adequately the life-worlds of the people from central India’s “Maoist heartland”, as they are experienced under conditions of contemporary globalization. The essay illuminates, in particular, Roy’s use of the novel’s dialogic structure, narrative discourse, and refracted focalization to fashion a realist aesthetic that seeks to map cognitively the connections between the global and the local. In so doing, Roy enacts what I call a “novelization of non-fiction” that represents a formal and aesthetic response to the historical pressures of globalization. This gestures towards a broader development in global anglophone literature: the return to a newly critical realism. Developing an understanding of realism in the context of global anglophone literature, the essay thus seeks to globalize our understanding of that aesthetic mode while underscoring its importance in depicting our contemporary moment. Furthermore, it brings a critical focus on Roy’s non-fictional writings, which have received much less scholarly attention than her two novels.

Keywords:

• globalization
• non-fiction
• novel
• realism
• reportage
• Roy, Arundhati

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Sandeep Banerjee for his invaluable feedback which helped me shape my argument. I likewise thank Auritro Majumder, Suvij Sudershan, and Janie Beriault for their advice and suggestions, as well as Zain R. Mian for his feedback on earlier stages of this project. Finally, I want to thank the peer reviewers for their insightful comments.

Notes

1 The term “Naxalite” derives from a 1967 peasant uprising in the village of Naxalbari in the state of West Bengal and is used to refer to members of the Communist Party of India (Maoist).

2 For more on the complexities of the term “Adivasi” as well as a critical analysis of the political use of indigeneity, see Bates and Shah (2014).

3 Even though the war the Congress Party has waged since 2010 is largely responsible for this decline, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Narendra Modi can take at least partial “credit” because it put an even greater emphasis on repression (Oxford Analytica 2018).

4 It should be added that the term NMC describes a complex class formation. Here, the emphasis is less on any reified conception of class, and more on the “hegemonic aspirations” that are representative of a broad class consensus that actively and passively shapes the discourse, opinions, and desires of the public sphere.

5 Postcolonial literary studies has engaged in limited ways with the link between globalization and literature. See Bahri (2003), Chakravorty (2014) and Chowdhury (2011).

6 Translation mine; while the German “Gestaltung” has been translated as “portrayal” in the past, “composition” is the more literal translation since Lukács is juxtaposing non-fiction (reportage) and creative fiction (novel).

7 “Red Corridor” refers to areas either under Maoist control or with significant insurgent activity. It stretches across ten Indian states, especially Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.

8 On the postcolonial travelogue as a radical form which challenges globalization, see Beriault (2017).

9 For a recent rethinking of world literature in the context of combined and uneven development, see Warwick Research Collective (2015).

10 This statement is attributed to then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and subsequently began to proliferate in public discourse.

11 See also Shah (2019), which represents an excellent non-fiction introduction to the Naxalite insurgency.

12 In South Asia, “encounter” refers to violent confrontations between police or military and insurgents. A “fake” encounter is the murder of a prisoner made to look like self-defence.

13 For the genre-bending nature of Roy’s non-fiction texts, see Rao (2008).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fonds de recherche du Quebec Nature et Technologie [grant number PBEEE V1].