Number of words: 499

In Naxalbari itself nothing shows and little is remembered. Life continues as before in the green, rich looking countryside. The town is the usual Indian country town, ramshackle and dusty, with its little shops and stalls, it’s overloaded buses, cycle rickshaws, carts. It is there, in the choked streets, after the well tilled and well watered fields, after the sense of space and of nearness to the cool mountains, that the overpopulation shows. And yet the land, unusually in India, is not old. It was forest till the last century, when the British established tea plantations or gardens over there, and got in indentured labourers to work the gardens.

The tea gardens are now Indian owned, but little has changed. Indian caste attitudes perfectly fit plantation life and the clannishness of the planters clubs. And Indian tea men, clubmen now in the midst of the aboriginals, have adopted, almost as a sign of caste, and no longer with conscious mimicry, the style of dress of the British predecessors: the shirt, the shorts and the socks. The tea workers remain illiterate, alcoholic, lost; a medley of tribal people without traditions and now even without a language, still strangers in the land, living not in established villages but in shacks strung along the estate roads.

There isn’t work for everyone. Many are employed only casually. But this possibility of casual labour is enough to keep people tied to the gardens. In the hours of daylight, with panniers on their backs like natural soft carapaces, the employed flit about the level tea bushes, in the shade of the tall rain trees like a kind of protected wildlife, diligent but timid, sent scuttling by a sudden shower or the factory whistle, but always returning to browse, plucking, plucking at the endless hedging of the tea bushes, gathering in with each trip the two tender leaves and a bud that alone can be fermented into tea.

But it wasn’t because of the tea workers, that extra level of distress, that the revolutionaries chose Naxalbari. The tea workers were, in fact, left alone. The Naxalbari district was chosen, by men who had read the handbook of revolution, for its terrain, its remoteness, and the cover provided by its surviving blocks of forest. The movement that began there quickly moved on; it hardly touched the real distress of Naxalbari; and now nothing shows.

The movement is now dead. The reprisals, official and personal, continue. From time to time in the Indian press, there is still an item about the killing or capture of Naxalites. But social enquiry is outside the Indian tradition; journalism in India has always been considered a gracious form of clerkship; the Indian press – even before the emergency and censorship – seldom investigated the speeches or communiques or bald agency items that get printed as news. And the word Naxalite, in an Indian newspapers, can now mean anything.

Excerpted from Pages 90 to 92 of ‘India: A wounded civilization’ by VS Naipaul