ON THE
WAY TO THE
THOUSANDPILLARED
MANDAPAM
Fig.1 Strip mining.
65
Travelogue
on the Monu
ments of an
Agrarian
Insurgency
ARINDAM DUTTA
66
Arindam
Arindam Dutta
Dutta
In May 2004, a center-left coalition, led by
the Indian National Congress, came to
power in India. The Congress is the storied
party of Indian nationalism, the world’s oldest
political party. In the southern state of
Andhra Pradesh, its unexpected victory over
Chandrababu Naidu, ally of the Hindu right,
flush with cash from Hyderabad’s business
process outsourcing (BPO) industries—the
Guardian’s George Monbiot called him the
“West’s favorite Indian”—owed signiicantly
to brewing agrarian discontent, behind
which lay a long-festering, decades-old
Maoist armed insurgency. Recognizing this
contribution behind its patently unearned
success, the Congress government in Delhi
magnanimously declared a ceaseire with
the Maoists. On October 11, the upper echelons of the Maoist People’s War Group (PWG)
surfaced from their underground bivouacs,
AK-47s slung over shoulders, in the Nallamallai forest area in Andhra Pradesh. Stashing their weapons, the leaders convened
a mass rally in Hyderabad, the capital city,
and 65,000 supporters attended the meeting. On the way, the Maoist leaders unveiled
a “martyrs’ memorial” in Guttikondabilam
village in Guntur district. (Guttikondabilam
is the venue of a historic secret meeting
between Naxalite founder-member Charu
Mazumdar and Andhra Pradesh Maoist leaders in 1969, a lashpoint of the Srikakulam
peasant insurgency of the 1970s.)
Previous to this, the mainstream
newspaper Indian Express, quite out of
keeping with its pro-liberalization tilt, carried
a sympathetic Sunday magazine article on
the Maoists.1 The article was accompanied
by a picture of what it described as the memorial to “People’s War martyrs” at Indravelli,
the site of the police massacre and secret
burial of some sixty Gond tribals who had
assembled for a Maoist-organized meeting
on April 20, 1981. The small, low-resolution
image showed a square column on a pedestal, crowned by a pyramid-shaped capital.
The structure, the article said, was inspired
by the Monument to the People’s Heroes
(Renmin Yinxiong Jinian Bei) in Beijing’s
Tiananmen Square.
Fig.2 The memorial to PW martyrs at Indravelli. The
original structure was inspire by Tiananmen Square.
Fig.3 Henry Flitcroft, Pantheon, Stourhead, 1753–4.
The Hoare family, 1740s onward.
Fig.4 Bantry House, Cork, Ireland,
1765 onward.
My current research centers on
the monuments of agrarian accumulation
in the eighteenth century: the pleasure
gardens, follies, and ha-has by which the
Whig sensibility viewed the expansion of
land under cultivation in Britain, America,
and Bengal—the effect of Britain’s “inancial revolution”—through the devices of the
aesthetic. Peering into the grainy image of
the Indravelli monument, I was struck with
an uncanny resemblance. The follies of
Britain were “fakes” instantiating a political
ideal; the rotundas, obelisks, Gothic temples
of eighteenth-century English gardens were
fragments of an exogenous, imagined,
Virgilian culture, strewn around the landscape in order to ratify—to institute as the
work of the imagination—a transformed
political economy. Somewhat in the strain
of French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux,
I have called this kind of displaced memory—the recuperation of an archaic past
that you cannot have had experienced as
your own “history”—“ancestrality.”2 The
incongruous memory of Mao in the jungles
of northern Andhra Pradesh, I thought,
was perhaps a comparable kind of asserted
ancestrality, something that could be
useful to think through the critique of political
economy that I was attempting to outline
in my study of architecture. I decided to
investigate.
67
1
Rakesh Sinha,
“The Thick Red Line,”
Indian Express, Sunday
magazine, August 29,
2004.
2
See Arindam Dutta,
“Ancestralities:
Nature, Architecture
and the Debt” (in
progress); Quentin
Meillassoux, After
Finitude, trans.
Ray Brassier (London:
Continuum, 2008).
On the Way to the Thousand-Pillared Mandapam
Fig.5 Map of Naxalite affected areas in India,
produced by Citigroup, January 2007.
How big is the Maoist insurgency in
India? What you see here is a map produced
by a Citigroup report from January 2007,
laying out the various indicators that potential investors in the Indian economy should
watch for. The Maoist insurgency is listed
as one of the four key challenges that the
continued growth of the Indian economy
could be threatened by. In Citigroup’s imagination, the Maoist insurgency has
succeeded in establishing rule over a
large geographical stretch known as the
“red corridor,” across central India from
Nepal in the north to Karnataka in the
south, and including Andhra Pradesh,
Chhattisgarh, W Bengal, and parts
of Orissa. The Naxalites are most
well-entrenched in the Dandakaranya
region in the state of Chattishgarh,
where they have established a government of their own—the Janatana
Sarkar...[Their inluence] extends to 165
districts in 14 states covering close to
40% of the country’s geographical area
and affecting 35% of the population.3
For potential investors in the Indian
market, the next observation is crucial:
“Given that the Naxalite movement has
spread to the mineral-rich states of Orissa,
Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and slowly
even around the districts in Bangalore, its
economic impact could be far reaching.”
The Citigroup report was written at a time of
global price highs in the commodity markets.
Much of the deicits accruing from the Indian
“economic miracle” and the burgeoning
national market for international products
has been paid for not by its export of either
high-value manufactured goods or even the
much-touted BPO services—the cynosure
of the international media and of the dominant
coterie of “cultural studies” in academia—
but in fact through intensiied extraction
and export of ore, minerals, and petroleum
products. This is markedly “old economy”
stuff, a return to India’s colonial structure,
where the BPO industries more or less serve
as globalizing gloss, with the caveat, mutatis
mutandis, that Indian firms were now selling
the raw material to Chinese irms who were
selling manufactured goods to Western
consumers, while carrying American debt
to hold up the price of the dollar, and so
on. Given this chain, it is plausible that the
Citigroup report exaggerated the actual
danger from the Maoist insurgency to startle
stock-market investors, a constituency to
which both the neoliberal Congress and its
antecedent governments were in consummate thrall. Nonetheless, it was clear that
both the Maoist militants and India’s substantial tribal population—politically ignored
and brutally exploited—ensconced in the
forests and ravines that also hold the bulk of
India’s mineral reserves, were now directly
in the path of this chain of extraction.
Fig.6 Construction on a BPO Incubator, Hyderabad
Cybercity, January 2007.
Preliminary enquiries on my part revealed that the Guttikondabilam and Indravelli
memorials were not the only Maoist memorials in Andhra Pradesh; hammer-and-sickle
topped obelisks dot the forests and countryside of the insurgent landscape by the
hundreds. Each commemorates a slain cadre,
executed by the police in extra-judicial
“encounters”: pick the suspect up when he
comes into market to pick up provisions,
torture him for information, shoot him at
point-blank range, let his body decompose
to send a message to his family and village,
drop off his body in the ields, and claim that
the suspect was shot when he opened ire
as the police were about to apprehend him.
This, and the 180,000 farmer suicides
since 1997 exemplify the pervasive agrarian
dissent and distress that occupy the other
side of the coin of India’s “liberalization.”
68
3
Rohini Malkani and
Anushka Shah, India
in 2007: Managing the
New Growth Paradigm
(Economic and Market
Analysis: India) Citigroup Global Markets,
2007), 38–39.
Arindam Dutta
Seeking to document these memorials,
I established contact, through intermediaries,
with civil society groups affiliated with the
Maoist insurgency who could direct me to
these locations. I eventually hoped to make
it to Indravelli, on the state border two hundred miles north of Hyderabad, nestled deep
in the ravines of the Central Indian plateau.
January 14, 2005, three months after the
Express publication, seven months after the
ceaseire announcement, and the day before
I was to leave Calcutta for Hyderabad,
television news channels carried reports of
six Maoists killed in Karimnagar district,
one of the areas in my planned itinerary. The
Naxalites retaliated, dragging a Congress
Party sarpanch to one of these martyr’s
monuments, and then killing him. By the time
I arrived in Hyderabad the next day, police
had started full-ledged combing operations.
The ceaseire was over. Maoist cadres that
had surfaced in the past few months slipped
back into their forest bivouacs. My prospective guide went underground; the tentatively
quiescent landscape I had hoped to reconnoiter erupted overnight into a terrain of
counter-insurgency.
My research objective had abruptly
become rather uncomfortable: a person
bumbling about, asking for the whereabouts
of Maoist structures was sure to invite suspicion from counter-insurgency forces. Stuck
in a hotel room, I was able to visit two of the
monuments in two working-class suburbs of
the city itself: the Maoist movement reaches
thus far into the maw of its urban antagonists. But otherwise I was left with nothing to
do. One of my contacts suggested a different
strategy. In Warangal city, some ninety miles
to the northeast of Hyderabad, the police
have built a memorial to their slain cadres
who had succumbed to Maoist action. The
memorial is pyramidal in shape, a concrete
structure of four boomerang-shaped planes
supporting each other at their edges, plastered in white. The structure sits on the lawn
of the police headquarters on one of the main
crossroads of Warangal town, clearly visible
from the outside but walled off by a concreteand-barbed-wire perimeter. We determined
that I should go visit this structure instead.
Without a press card, however, we were hard
put to come up with an alibi that would allow
me to photograph this bastioned memorial at
the heart of an ongoing insurgency.4
Two miles down the Warangal road
from the police compound are the ruins of
a temple called the Hanumakonda complex,
built around the year 1163 by the Kakatiya
empire, a Telugu-speaking dynasty that
reigned between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries with its capital in Warangal.
Scores of magniicently carved thick stone
columns hold up short-span beams that
form two separate structures: one a
star-shaped structure with a cella and a
portico, the second a densely populated
hypostyle structure, symmetrical and square
in plan with a central courtyard at the crux
of two crisscrossing aisles. The spatial effect
is of a delicately proportioned and sculpturally elaborate composition; at the same time,
unevenness of construction, geometrical
inconsistencies, and asymmetries between
corresponding elements also convey
the sense of a crude structure, where time
has left no two vertical elements in alignment or, for that matter, in plumb. The large
number of columns gives the temple its
apocryphal name: the Thousand-Pillared
Mandapam (canopy).
This ancient monument would be my
alibi. My rented car would drive—so the plan
went—past the police memorial that was my
objective, to visit the Hanumakonda temple,
making sure to take pictures (should the
police investigate) of this tourist-appropriate
destination. Then, arriving back at the gates
of the police station, I would claim to have
chanced on the remarkable “beauty” of
the police memorial while traveling to the
“famous” temple of which I had heard so
much, and beg to photograph it. Accordingly,
upon my arrival, a phone call from pillion box
to the superintendent was made, the words
“tourist,” “America,” “architect,” “architecture,”
were thrown into the mix, and the requisite
permission was obtained. It was critical that
at no point would I betray having even a
remote clue of either local conditions or of the
insurgency. A paradox that I had been mulling over for the last few days came sharply
into focus as I was crossing the gates of the
police compound. My display of innocuousness in order to attain my object rested, in
a manner of speaking, on my playing myself,
which is to say the architectural historian
and aesthete-tourist retracing the map
of a state-sanctioned heritage, which architectural historiography has an institutionally
privileged role in creating. The power of
this alibi rested paradoxically on a kind of
scholastic pretension on my part, assumedly
inherent in which was a kind of studied
disinterest in present-day affairs. My professional status had itself become an alibi
for research: the path to enlightenment lay
in adopting an air of realpolitik ignorance.
69
4
Indian authorities in
general adopt a stance
of extreme suspicion
of the image: photography of public buildings and installations
has been long banned,
with the usual rationale about terrorists
and foreign powers.
Google Earth’s introduction therefore drew
considerable huffing
and puffing from
Indian, as well as
South Korean and
Russian, authorities.
On the Way to the Thousand-Pillared Mandapam
Fig.7 Thousand Pillar Temple, Kakatiya Empire, Hanumakonda, district Warangal, twelth century.
At its best, the discipline of historiography is conscious of itself as a distancing
one: of creating a speculative, categoric
frame of reference through which nuggets
of empirical or episodic meaning enter into
a discursive, authoritative register. The
historian’s role is inevitably a cauterizing
one, as French scholar Michel de Certeau
terms it, “a partitive usage.” The past is
made accessible only after its definite
“death,” so to speak, is produced, rendering
it as other. If the historian’s production of
knowledge has a certain place in power, it is
a contra-purposive one, of imparting lessons
about power while appearing to be cast out
of power. “[Historiography’s] discourse
will be magisterial without being that of the
master, in the same way that historians will
be teaching lessons of government without
knowing either its responsibilities or its risks.
They relect on the power that they lack.”
The turn to method, in this sense, is inevitably a self-abnegating one: “to the very degree that this discourse is rigorous, it will be
destined for futility.”5 Only in this functional
futility does historiography ind its place
of preeminence and sit next to the prince—
a parasitical prominence, as it were—as
narrative-producing handmaiden of the state.
For the historian, monuments are thus
neither the pure iguration of aesthetic practice—as Adolf Loos propounded in “Architecture”6—nor are they the fraught material
vestiges through which a “public” constitutes
itself as such, by concocting a past, as
Pierre Nora’s Les lieux de mémoire sought to
document. At sites like Hanumakonda, rather,
what the architectural historian confronts is
the vast, infrastructural, disseminated spoor
of a canonism for which he is disciplinarily
responsible, but whose constitution of a
“public” is palpably compromised. James
Fergusson, the colonial historian of Indian
architecture and author of the irst “global”
history of architecture, devoted an entire,
albeit short, section of his magisterial
History of Indian and Eastern Architecture to
“Hanamkonda.”7 The structure is depicted
as one of the few well-preserved examples
of the late Chalukya period, shoehorned
into Fergusson’s trademark tripartite schema of beginning, apogee, and decline that
characterized “Hindu” architecture itself
the middle element of a further, supervening
tripartite progression from “Buddhist” to
“Muslim.” The decolonized nation absorbs
this historiography—with its traditions of
establishing historical “context,” aesthetic
“judgment,” and the celebration of great
civilizations in antiquity—as its heritage,
re-presenting it to its citizens as an object
of veneration and an ancestral bequest
to the nation, with the requisite secularization—its “partitive” reproduction—via the
notice posted by the Archaeological Survey
of India (ASI) in front of the temple.
Fergusson describes the Hanumakonda
site as a material assembly of ruins, not
the active place of worship that it was in his
time and is today. The ongoing religious use
of the temple and the everyday rituals performed by the faithful operate in a different
temporality, at a different tempo, than the
archaeological classification of the temple
as “ruin.” The former marks the same stones
with turmeric and vermilion, offers lowers
and prayers to them in a different modus of
veneration. The latter territoriality inscribes
numbers on each column of the edifice,
recuperating each component stone of the
structure for the desacralized halo of science. Each stone is turned into an isolated
minim for a disenchanted, distributional
form of categorization, sequestered for the
purpose of a perdurable, defensible conception of national and global “heritage.”
For the few local tourists who come
picnicking to the Hanumakonda temple on
weekends from nearby villages and towns,
pulled by the threads of popular memory, the
ASI notices confer on this act of re-memory
the frame of an ecumenical, national sanction. On the other hand, far from the “global”
70
5
Michel de Certeau,
The Writing of History,
trans. Tom Conley (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 8.
6
Adolf Loos, “Architecture,” (1910) in Adolf
Loos: Architecture
1903–1932, ed. Roberto
Schezen (New York:
Monacelli, 1996), 15.
7
James Fergusson,
History of Indian and
Eastern Architecture,
rev. ed. with additions by James Burgess
and R. Phene Spiers
(1910; New Delhi:
Munshiram Manoharlal,
1998), 420, 434.
Arindam Dutta
pathways of tourism and business that
pass through Hyderabad or Agra, or for that
matter the temples of Tirupati, Kanchipuram,
Mahabalipuram, Madurai, the rare foreign
visitor to this provincial ediice appears
markedly out of place, thus even more identiied with the appearance of a disinterested
scholasticism. The “distancing move” of
the historian operates even more strongly at
this fringe, providing the occasional “global
visitor” with the alibi of the specialist’s
somewhat nugatory pursuits. The vulgar
absorption of a methodological scruple has
here acquired a depoliticized license; the
(architectural) tourist automatically carries
about a distracted air of innocence about
the killing ields of rural India. Two kinds
of commemorative landscapes, two archaeologies of the state thus confront each
other on the main road at Warangal, and
to address one the architectural historian
needs the alibi of its sanctioned other.
Fig.8 Police memorial to cadre killed by Maoists,
Warangal city, Andhra Pradesh.
In January 2007, two years later,
I returned to Hyderabad. By this time the
renewed force of counter-insurgency that
I had encountered on my previous visit
had subsided into a normative terrain. The
debate in the media over the raft of issues
that the Maoists had brought to the table
had subsided to a singular, archaic, rather
dissimulatory focus: the state’s right to
monopoly over violence. At the time of the
armistice, the Maoist’s principal demand to
the Congress was that it stick to its pro-poor
electoral promises of land distribution.
As Sumanta Banerjee has pointed out, “the
Maoists did not take the maximalist position
of demanding recognition of their authority
over the pockets that they controlled in
Nizamabad, Warangal, and Karimnagar.”8
If in the immediate aftermath of the election
Congress’s noblesse oblige was a de facto
recognition of this extant authority, long-term
territorial concession to the insurgency
would leave it at the political mercy of the
Maoists. In any case, the mining interests
behind Congress—connected to the Chief
Minister’s family9—were least likely to let
matters stand, given that the Maoist bastion
straddled territories that were richest in ore.
As the ceaseire went underway, Maoist
cadres went about forcibly redistributing
land. Unable to counteract these actions
given their own grandiose (and desperate)
campaign promises, the state rather began
to insist that the Maoists irst disarm themselves: a patently pharisaical move in a
context where weapons are actively used by
a host of non-state actors, from landlord
militias to party hoodlums and to labor maias.
In the two years since 2005, the frontlines of the insurgency had receded again
deep into the forests. The well-known Maoist
poet Varavara Rao put me in touch with a
civil society support group for the families of
slain insurgents. The group is also responsible for the upkeep of the Maoist monuments.
Three people were to accompany me in my
reconnoitering: “Kaveri,”10 a former People’s
War Group guerilla and widow of a slain
cadre, who had been imprisoned and tortured
for ive years by police on charges of being
an “explosives expert.” (This kind of charge
has been described by lawyer-activist K.
Balagopal as particularly advantageous for
the extra-judicial tenor of counter-insurgency
operations “because it is a crime without
victim, for it is a crime of intent and not execution. All the police have to say was that
a bag of explosives were found on the person.”11) My second companion, “Krishnamma,”
is a mother of two whose husband was
killed on May 4, 2004, a few days before the
ceaseire, in another “encounter,” his body
dumped in a ield in Guntur district. While
never having been a cadre herself, she
now works as a treasurer in a group politically
afiliated with the underground militancy.
The last, the elderly “Vamanna,” was my
guide who had gone absconding two years
ago. A carpenter by profession, he is the
architect of the smaller of the two monuments on the Hyderabad outskirts that I had
visited two years previously, built in memory
of his son Venu,12 killed on January 23, 2002.
71
8
Sumanta Banerjee,
“All Quiet on the Maoist Front?” Economic
and Political Weekly,
February 5, 2005. Also
see “Naxalites Give
New Dimension to Land
Issue,” Hindu, October
18, 2004; “Land for
Poor: Naxals Urge
Govt. to Constitute
Panel,” Newindpress.
com, October 18, 2004;
“Naxalites Target
Forest Land,” Hindu,
October 22, 2004; “YSR
Raises Serious Objection to Naxals Occupying Private and Forest
Lands,” New Indian
Express, October 27,
2004; “IG [Inspector
General of Police]
Warns Against Usurping
of Lands,” Hindu, October 27, 2004; “Naxal
Problem: Government
Plans to Buy Land,”
Hindu, October 29,
2004; “Maoist Occupation of Lands Might
Derail Talks,” New
Indian Express, October 30, 2004; “CPI(M)
Backs Maoists on Land
Issue,” Hindu, October
31, 2004; “Maoists
Help Dalits [lower
castes] Occupy Lands,”
Hindu, November 1,
2004. The government
went through some
motions of listening
to Naxalite demands
on land redistribution,
see “Andhra Panel
to Take Up Naxalites’
Land Demand,”
Indian Express,
October 20, 2004.
9
Sugata Srinivasaraju,
“‘Bellary is Mine,’
Mining: The Reddy
Brothers,” and “The
Castle, The Moving
Forest,” Outlook,
August 10, 2009.
http://www.outlook
india.com/article.
aspx?261044 (accessed
August 10, 2009).
10
Kaveri, Krishnamma,
and Vamanna are not
their real names.
11
K. Balagopal, Probings in the Political
Economy of Agrarian
Classes and Conflicts,
reprinted from Economic and Political
Weekly (Hyderabad:
Perspectives, 1988).
12
Also a pseudonym;
armed Maoist insurgents operate only
under aliases.
On the Way to the Thousand-Pillared Mandapam
Our route would take us through
the districts most under Maoist influence:
Warangal, Karimnagar, Adilabad. In 2002,
Warangal and Karimnagar were two of the
three districts in which as many as 2,580
deeply indebted farmers had killed themselves by ingesting pesticides.13 Our inal
destination would be Indravelli, site of the
1981 massacre and the Tiananmen-inspired
monument, a one-street market town deep
in the forested tribal area of Adilabad
district, bordering on the neighboring state
of Maharashtra.
Fig.9 Qila Warangal, Kakatiya
Palace Complex, thirteenth century.
The intuition that I had had while
crossing the police gate in Warangal would
acquire more weight in the ensuing days.
A mile and a quarter from Warangal railway
station and seven and a half miles from the
Hanumakonda temple is Qila Warangal,
the thirteenth-century fort of the Kakatiyas.
The remaining ruins of the fort comprise
delicately carved fragments of the central
palace and temple complex, in addition to
the remaining shards of the three layers of
defensive walls. These remnants are under
the protection of the ASI. The kirti toranas or
triumphal gates of the palace complex serve
as the oficial icon for Andhra Pradesh’s state
tourism agency. In addition, the fort is home
to a small town: tightly packed single-storied
houses with one or a few rooms each that
make up a population of a few hundred.
Guthikandula Raju, alias Raju, was
born inside this fort; as a youth, he joined
the Maoist movement and was killed by
police on October 1, 1995. When his mother,
Guthikandula Pushpa, expressed her desire
to build a martyr’s memorial near his home,
the Archaeological Survey objected, saying
that the memorial would deface the historical
caritra of the fort. The word caritra, cognate
of the English “character,” has been described
by Velcheru Narayana Rao et al. as a new
genre of bardic storytelling about historical
events that emerged in this region in the
middle of the eighteenth century, closer to the
French sense of histoire or the Italian storia
rather than the English history.14 This new
use marked a transition from an older use of
the word, as in Banabhatta’s Harshacharita
(ca. seventh century) or Tulsidas’s
Ramcharitmanas (ca. 1574–1612), a hagiography genre comparable with the Christian
“Lives of the Saints,” tales of religious virtue
translated as ethics, as regulative narratives
for a moral saeculum.15
To the Archaeological Survey’s appropriation of the term caritra, Pushpa had
three kinds of retort: a) When you allow
Coca-Cola signs and tea- and snack-shops
to entertain visitors to the fort, does this
not destroy the charitra of the place? When
you grew a garden to isolate these ruined
fragments in a recreational park, was this
historically authentic? b) When the government put up statues of Indira Gandhi and
Rajiv Gandhi in my village, these people
were nothing to me, they were not from my
family, and yet did I not tolerate this imposition?16 c) If the Kakatiya kings were powerful,
it was not because they themselves were
brave. It was their poor peasant soldiers who
fought, and yet you celebrate the bravery of
the Kakatiya kings. If my son took to arms to
ight for the people himself, why can’t I build
a monument to his bravery, to the struggle of
the people?
Things are being turned upside down
here. Professional archaeologists may not
recognize in this (d)enunciation a “scientiic”
rationale, but Pushpa’s rationale impeccably
mimes the popularizing rationale adopted
when archaeological objectives are “explained” to the populations in whose name
the state claims to speak, whose transcendent
“heritage” it seeks to guard. In Pushpa’s
statement, this vernacular “explication,”
the imposition of popular idiom from above,
has been troped, turned upside down by
subaltern speech into a counter-monument,
a mnemo-topography and terrain that pries
open the crypto-capitalism of the agrarian
landscape. At the entrance of Qila Warangal
today, an obelisk stands capped by a hammer and sickle in Raju’s memory. Rather
than represent the state’s need to sanction
a “people” acculturated by an invented and
instituted history, the gravamen of this monument continually tests the state’s tolerance.
72
13
Utsa Patnaik, The
Republic of Hunger,
1943–2004 (New Delhi:
Sahmat, 2004), 28.
14
Velcheru Narayana
Rao, David Shulman,
and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time:
Writing History in
South India 1600–1800
(New York: Other
Press, 2003), 21.
15
“The rhetoric of this
‘monument’ is saturated
with meaning, but with
identical meaning.
It is a tautological
tomb...It is impossible to consider
hagiography solely in
terms of its ‘authenticity’ or ‘historical
value’: this would be
equivalent to submitting a literary genre
to the laws of another
genre — historiography
— and to dismantling
a proper type of
discourse only in
order to engage its
contrary...[A] Life
of a Saint is ‘the
literary crystallization of the perception of a collective
conscience’...the
combination of acts,
places, and themes
indicates a particular
structure that refers
not just primarily
to ‘what took place,’
as does history, but
to ‘what is exemplary.’” de Certeau,
The Writing of History, 270.
16
Indeed, Indian cultural and public space is
replete with busts of
persons both historical and nonexistent
whose hagiography is
intended to guide the
life of the exemplary
citizen. Portraits,
statues, temples,
and historical names
ornament every street
corner, commemorating local politicians,
school principals,
social workers, freedom fighters, prime
ministers, chief
ministers, presidents,
medieval kings, gods,
goddesses.
Arindam Dutta
Fig.10 “Martyr’s Memorial,” Qila Warangal, district Warangal, Andhra Pradesh.
Built for Guthikandula Raju by his mother Pushpa.
As a form of open provocation, its memorializing impetus renders visible the incommensurability—aporia—between popular
and legal sovereignty. By January 2007,
the police had destroyed two hundred of
these family memoirs that, unlike the photo
album packed away in a closet, make a
direct claim on the public character of space,
on the state’s very territorializing power.
In response, the Maoists have built more.
These are counter-monuments precisely in
that they notate the ever-present threat of
demolition by the state; their counter-memory
opens up the gap between legal and popular
sovereignty.
It would of course be analytical folly to
imagine the Maoist movement as an organic
expression of subaltern dissent. Rather, these
monument/follies must be seen as emblems
of a political strategy: a decades-old,
generationally handed-down exercise of
organically linking the Maoist resistance
with the anthropological texture of subaltern
memorialization. The obelisk—the preferred
form of the Maoist monuments—we have
to remember, is as exotic to this context as
were neoclassical exedra to Whig Britain.
I remind you of that word: ancestrality. As if
to cover over this exotic juxtaposition, my
guides—propagandists after a fashion—were
intent on demonstrating the organic character of their movement.
The Maoist memorials are built by shramadan (customary gifts of labor) offered by
members of guerilla’s families and villages.
Some of them commemorate a single fallen
child, as in the case of the memorial built
by Vamanna, who used his experience in the
construction industry to make drawings and
oversee the work himself. Others commemorate the dead of an entire district, as in the
sixty whose places of birth and places and
dates of death are recorded at the foot of the
giant Husnabad memorial. When the giant,
seventy-foot-tall memorial was unveiled
in 1990, political exigencies were such that
N. T. Rama Rao’s Peronist government in
fact patronized it, with the District Collector
overseeing arrangements. The neoliberal
regime of his son-in-law, Chandrababu
Naidu, adopted a different stance, and his
no-quarter-given policy toward the Maoists
saw the same monument made into an example, summarily blasted with dynamite.17
73
17
Naidu himself survived
an assassination attempt by the Naxalites
on October 1, 2003,
when his bulletproof
car was blown up by
mines in the Tirumala
Hills.
On the Way to the Thousand-Pillared Mandapam
Fig.11 Fallen hammer and sickle from CPI
(Maoist) “Martyr’s Memorial,” Husnabad.
Dynamited by police in 2004.
Indeed, this uneven character of police
violence and erratic state repression strongly
determines the spatial geography of these
monuments, whose status becomes as
if symbolic pieces of a giant and elaborate
chess game. Beside the three monuments
built side by side in the center of Paidipalli
village (district Warangal) is a conspicuous
mound indicating an unbuilt memorial
that the police will not allow. Amongst the
small tombstones between the road and
the rail lines leading out of Bellampally in
the coal-mining area of Adilabad is one
that carries the name of Beda Ramaswamy,
coal miner and Maoist labor organizer
for the Singhaneri Karmika Samaigya
(Singhaneri Worker’s Association), killed
by the police. Under threat from the police,
no blacksmith in the area would undertake
the work of forging the hammer and sickle,
so Ramaswamy’s mother had the tumulus
itself painted red.
In many villages, the monument is in
the central market square or the entrance
from the road into the village. This open,
recalcitrant capture of public space relects
the strong support of the entire village,
something that the police are hard put to
eradicate. In Zaffargarh (district Warangal),
a mobile tea seller stands at the foot of the
monument in the village square, the political
statement integrated into the daily goings-on
of the village, the buying of groceries, snacks,
commodities of daily use. At Begumpet
(district Karimnagar), the monument stands
as sentinel at the very entrance of the village, announcing to all visitors the political
sympathies of its denizens.
Where police presence is predominant,
the Maoist strategy further exposes the
contradictions of state power. The group
memorial in the Subhasnagar suburb of
Hyderabad, a colony for migrants built on
private land donated by an industrialist and
Maoist sympathizer, is built in the forecourt
of a private house, walled off as a piece
of private property. The paradoxical provocation is evident: the Maoist ediice invites
the police to violate the supposed absolutism
of the property laws in whose defense the
modern state is premised, laws that on
the other hand the Maoists consider their
duty to violate.
For their part, the police employ a series of counter-icons to combat this symbolic
terrain. At Bheerpur (district Karimnagar),
the police gathered local villagers to build
a memorial to victims of the insurgency,
with a white lag planted pointedly in front
of Maoist Group Chief Ganapathi’s house
in that village, imploring him to surrender.
On the Maoist monument in Zaffargarh,
the police pasted posters with mugshots
of wanted guerillas just above the plaque
carrying the names of the dead Maoists,
announcing rewards for their surrender.
Fig.12 CPI (Maoist) “Martyr’s Memorial”
to cadre killed by police, Zaffargarh,
district Warangal, Andhra Pradesh.
The four sides of the large Begumpet
monument are scrawled with police messages: “Peace, not violence”; “What kind of
values do you have? What have you done for
your old parents? Leave your ways and look
after your parents”; “O Chandranna [Maoist
National Committee member, North Telangana
unit], your principles are against the people
and against the government”; “Rejoin the
people, surrender and live, [signed] Begumpet
Gramastalu [Villagers].” The Maoist follies of
the Telangana landscape are nodes in a rural
74
Fig.13
CPI (Maoist) “Martyr’s
Memorial” to cadre
killed by police,
Paidipalli, Warangal
district, Andhra
Pradesh. (facing page)
Arindam Dutta
Fig.15 CPI (Maoist) “Martyr’s Memorial” to cadre killed by police,
Begumpet village, district Karimnagar, Andhra Pradesh.
heterotopia, point-irruptions of the geographic imagination that set varying texts
of power to work, deined as much by the
various actors of the agrarian scene as their
ever-shifting modes of relation to different
forms of politics. Monuments, tombs, tumuli
are architecture’s empty containers, pure
parerga without content. Relieved of architecture’s classical association with shelter,
they are tasked to operate entirely as relief,
as spatial protrusions and lapidary inscriptions that reveal space itself as something
written, inscribed, mapped.
Each obelisk is thus a test of territorial
tolerance and provocation, embodying
within it the incorporation of different scales
of investment. At different levels, they
“signal” a series of miscegenated messages,
on the one hand the mourning of parents
and siblings, on the other the perverse
program of the neoliberal state to reproduce
its unmodern subjects as unfree, productive
constituencies. They are as much indexes
of the nomadic war-machine of the police
as of the ungoverned arm of liberal government, as of the substitutive play of infrastructural withdrawal and the interpellation
of peasant populations and movements
by economistic doxas. Most importantly,
they manifest a complex weave of narrative
and space in relation to different forms of
authoritarian sanction. As objects creating
a transposed ield, like the “ruined” follies
and Latinate inscriptions in the Picturesque
gardens of England and plantation America,
the Maoist monuments invite an allusive
literacy: to decode the abstract script of
agrarian change, even concretions that offer
the diacritical measure of an uneven ield.
In the variations of size and shape, degrees
of completion, contending inscriptions, manner of attribution, each memorial attests to
an inalienable singularity and a logic of the
multiple, of bounded encryption and ininite
dissemination: the creation of place in its
myriad logics as a bounded site of arrival,
departure, congregation, and its contrapurposive opening into space as a global,
valorized axiomatic. As the remembrance of
violence, they remind us that the axiomatic
of “space” is itself a violent insertion.
“It’s terrible, it’s ine”: Mao’s famous
antinomy in his Report on an Investigation
of the Peasant Movement in Hunan might be
77
Fig.14 Monument for
Vamanna’s son built by
Vamanna, Hyderabad.
(facing page)
On the Way to the Thousand-Pillared Mandapam
said to reveal conlict at the very pores of
so-called culture: the corpse of the martyr pits
the state and the revolt as two autonomous
and opposed sequences within the same
mnemonic terrain.18 When a memorial is inaugurated, relatives of the martyr mourn the
deceased again, performing the mnemonic
displacement materialized in the monument.
Maoist commemoration ceremonies strongly
follow customary funerary practice. Like
traditional practices of rememoration, tribals
and peasants sing and dance, only this time
with Maoist-tinged lyrics of popular resistance, thus imbricating adivasi (aboriginal)
and dalit (lower caste) culture organically
into political movement. The Maoist movement thus effects something of a counterinterpellation—Louis Althusser’s expression
is useful here—of the customary. Orators
and artists from “front” organizations give
eulogies, extolling the sacrifices of the martyrs, individuating through a life-narrative
the proximal identiication of the Maoist
movement to everyday conflicts of power.
The legendary Naxalite poet Gaddar will
appear at each of these events. He has spent
decades traveling around the countryside
documenting local legends and song forms;
to date, he has composed an extempore
poem honoring each slain guerilla, a veritable hagiographic archive that is reported
to have been gathered in twelve notebooks,
a lyric chronicle of the insurgency.
Fig.16 Zaffargarh monument.
Fig.17 Begumpet village, Karimnagar.
Police posters and writing on Maoist monuments,
offering money and threats to Naxalites
to surrender themselves.
The rituals enacted in front of these
memorials draw on widely recognized
folkloric traditions: elements of what Rao et
al. have called “mnemo-history,” indigenous
traditions of weaving empirical facts of
history with mythic patterns of storytelling.
In this sense, the funerary columns of the
Naxalites derive as much from ancient tribal
commemorative practices as the monumentalizing impress of “Asiatic Communism.”
Thus the Maoist memorials not only form
an index of the death of individuals and the
commemoration of a collective struggle,
but also mourn the demise of the autonomy
of an entire civilizational rubric dating back
to India’s prehistory, now increasingly
hemmed in by the expropriative, modern
descendants of the subcontinental powers.
Given this organic imbrication, the
authorities well understand that the culling
of the Maoist movement cannot be constrained to a mere police operation, with the
clinical framing of disciplinary action that
accompanies a law-and-order outbreak.
At its spearhead, the state understands well
that what it is confronting here is an entire
ideological theater of conflict, drawn from
substantial popular will. The challenge
for the state here is to pry culture apart
from politics, to batten down an entire array
of cultural existence now concretized into
insurgency. In repressing this organic
correlation, the state plays out here in its
very design, its architectonic.
To a philosopher it will seem extraordinary that mere words—and that too the
ungrammatical sentences scribbled
on a series of FIRs [First Information
Reports] by semi-literate policemen—
can change material reality, can
convert a free citizen into a threat to
the Security of State, and thereby a
prisoner-without-trial. When the reality
itself is a tissue of fabrications masquerading as truth even mere gestures
can change it. And this epistemological
inversion is sanctiied by [Indian] Courts
which have repeatedly held—in decisions challenging preventive detention
warrants—that mere multiplication
of as yet unproved charges is suficient
to make a free citizen a danger to
Public Order.19
In a “thickly” organized insurgency—one
can resituate Clifford Geertz’s exempliication
of winks, mutatis mutandis, in the use of this
adverb20—police action does not necessarily
78
18
Mao Tse-tung, Report
on an Investigation of
the Peasant Movement
in Hunan (Beijing:
Foreign Languages
Press, 1965). Ranajit
Guha treats this theme
magisterially in the
chapter on ambiguity
in his book Elementary
Aspects of Peasant
Insurgency in Colonial
India (Durham: Duke
University Press,
1999), 89.
19
See K. Balagopal,
Probings, 103–4.
Balagopal’s extensive
dispatches in the
Economic and Political
Weekly extensively
detail police killings
in Andhra Pradesh.
As for extrajudicial
detainees, the weaknesses of the Indian
legal code with regard
to stipulations on
public order are used
to repeatedly throw
people into jail with
new charges, picking them up from the
door of the prison
every time they are
released on bail,
each time subjecting the undertrial to
new cycles of torture
and beatings. After
the third or fourth
time, the multiplication of charges is
considered enough to
clamp down a National
Security Act Warrant,
the unsubstantiated
charges thus performing a self-fulfilling
prophecy.
20
Clifford Geertz,
The Interpretation of
Cultures (New York:
Basic Books, 1977).
Arindam Dutta
draw from credible intelligence. The calculus
here is more often than not defined quantitatively rather than qualitatively: A provocation
was met with A’ response, B Naxalite raid
was followed up by B’+ arrests. Cause and
effect need not be linked. The police operate
in the mode of the “theoretical” pronouncements spouted by academics, drawn out of
the compulsions of an internal framework
of disciplinary judgment and advancement,
of tenurial rewards and promotions within
the organization. (To extend the metaphor,
the interior ministry produces statements
that are akin to those by university deans,
full of transcendent truths and universal,
imminent “solutions,” aimed more at soliciting their inanciers.) In the process, to quote
Strelnikov from Dr. Zhivago: “A village is
burnt, the point is made.”
Fig.18 Maoist front organizations
inaugurating various new memorials. Film courtesy
of Amarulla Vandu Mitrala Sangam.
Indravelli is one such burnt village.
On April 20, 1981, the village was encircled
by four platoons of police on a shandy, or
market, day. On that day, a Maoist-afiliated
civil society organization had called a meeting in the afternoon. As hundreds of unarmed tribals—as was their wont—came in
to Indravelli, on foot, on buses, not knowing
the restrictions the police placed on right
of assembly, they were made to dismount,
beaten, and ordered to go back. Around 4
p.m. police released tear gas, then took up
positions on the treetops, behind haystacks,
and commenced iring. As the tribals led,
a police jeep suddenly met them head-on
after emerging from a nearby school where
it was billeted, and opened ire at point-blank.
No bodies were handed over to the families
of the deceased. The Andhra Pradesh Civil
Liberties Committee estimated that more than
sixty tribals were killed on that day. Gonds
who deposed before the Andhra Pradesh Civil
Liberties Committee testified that bodies
were being recovered from tanks, rivulets, and
bushes for a week afterward.
Fig.19 Strip mining, Godavari Khani Coal Fields,
Singaneri Collieries, near Bellampalli,
Andhra Pradesh.
On the road out of the mining region
of Bellampally, my companions whisper
nervously as we pass what they recognize
as a death squad, ive moustached men in
an open, commandeered jeep, weapons
kept out of sight, a pot-bellied subinspector
riding in front.21 The road to Indravelli from
79
21
“From the mid-1980s
brutal special police
forces meant for eliminating [Maoists] came
into being and were
allowed to operate
totally incognito, the
most successful being
the Grey Hounds, which
is a well trained
anti-guerilla force
that lives and operates as the [Maoists]
armed squads do and is
bound by no known law,
including the Constitution of India.”
K. Balagopal, “Maoist
Movement in Andhra
Pradesh,” Economic
and Political Weekly,
July 22, 2006, 3185.
On the Way to the Thousand-Pillared Mandapam
Bellampally snakes up and into the Satnala
mountain range that traverses Adilabad
district at the northern escarpment of the
Deccan Plateau, defining the lower edge of
the Vindhya Range that divides north and
south India. We are in the back of the Maoist
hand. The dominantly Gond tribal hamlets
and villages that nestle in these hills are
materially different from the ones abutting
the heavily traficked truck and bus routes
down in the plains. In Andhra Pradesh, one
major highway cuts across through these
hills from north to south, Highway No. 7, the
route from Delhi to Hyderabad. Indravelli is a
somewhat bustling market street some thirty
miles from this deserted stretch of national
highway. There are no family cars or sedans
here—no signs of the famed newly rich Indian
middle class—only jeeps, motorcycles,
small trucks, bicycles, and a large assortment
of cattle-driven vehicles. Occasionally,
a state transport bus weaves through the
jaywalked road.
offer the antiphon to the global axiomatic of
the ASI plaques in front of the Hanumakonda
temple. At an epistemic remove, in front of
the memorial is a small, wooden tribal totem
for the dead, also painted red, these hyphenated tumuli once again emphasizing the
organic linkage between tribal culture and
political movement. On April 20 every year,
tribals from around the area congregate
in this ield in remembrance of those killed in
1980. The day is attended by a heavy police
presence. The police station in Indravelli is
a short distance from the monument, at the
western edge of the town. It is heavily fortiied, surrounded by high walls and barbed
wire, with two gun turrets peeking out from
above the encampment.
Because of this watchful presence,
the Indravelli monument is the least kept
up of all the monuments that we have seen,
its base and plaque set upon by weeds,
a kind of censorship by horticulture, if you
will. After photographing the monument,
I indicate my interest in photographing the
police station here as well. My companions
strongly demur; these are kinds of things
that invite extra-judicial lockup. Since no
Americans or tourists venture this far, it’s
impossible for me to playact the wanderlustdriven ingenue. No alibi—no “global heritage”
or “architectural interest”—here, I take
a high-speed photograph through tinted
car windows as we drive past in some haste.
Fig.20 The Indravelli memorial,
with inscribed plaque below. Note the
shorter stake in photograph above:
an aboriginal tribal totem.
Fig.21 Indravelli police station.
The Indravelli monument stands in a
cleared field one mile farther down the road
from the market. The original monument was
demolished by the government in the 1980s,
only to be rebuilt in its current form in 1987,
again by the aforementioned N. T. Rama
Rao’s party in a cynical effort to win votes in
the tribal electorate. The Indravelli structure
is the only one with a plaque in English and
Hindi, two languages exotic to the dialects
and languages spoken in this region: “Those
mountains red, and the flowers red, and
their death red, and our homage red.” In a
manner of speaking, these “global” languages
80
Note: In October 2009,
the Central Government
of India launched
Operation Green Hunt,
a military operation overseen by the
Minister of Home,
P. Chidambaram, an
ex-Harvard professor with significant
ties to major mining
companies. At its
inception, Green Hunt
envisaged a period of
five years for operations to be completed.
Twenty-seven battalions from various
Indian military outfits, including
counter-insurgency
specialist units,
were to be supported
by Russian-made MI-17
helicopter gunships
of the Indian Air
Force.