In August 2021, Mahasweta Devi’s iconic short story “Draupadi” (1978), which brings alive the long tradition of adivasi/tribal resistance against systemic oppression and its brutal reprisal, was deleted from the English Honours syllabus of Delhi University on the grounds of “hurt” sentiments. Why would a story of tribal resistance ruffle postcolonial sentiments? Triggered by this excision, our essay attends to the context of “Draupadi” – the Naxalite movement (1967–1975), the armed uprising that contested the feudal-bourgeois hegemony of the postcolonial Indian state – and examines the representation of the restless periphery in contemporary fiction, Bengali and English, in terms of political and attendant aesthetic negotiations. The Naxalite movement inspired a specific genre of literature in Bengali, Naxal Sahitya, whose growth was contemporaneous with the movement itself. It explored the possibility of a new modernity and subjectivity, tangling with the inherited forms of narrative in both poetry and prose. Globally, which signifies still a western platform, the Naxal made an appearance in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013) and Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (2014). In both, the questions raised by movement, of land and of the tiller, are imaginatively resolved by the diasporic journey of select individuals to the United States of America. Our essay offers an intertextual reading of these two anglophone, global novels by Lahiri and Mukherjee with the Bengali, local narratives of Samaresh Majumdar’s Kalbela/Dark Times (1983) and Mahasweta Devi’s Operation? Bashai Tudu (1978/2003). We address the ways in which imaginative literature embeds a movement that challenged the hierarchies of a decolonized nation, the possibilities of the novel’s – a form hegemonically associated with the individual rather than the collective – investment in the construction of the periphery, the hierarchy of the local and the global, and the territoriality of the marketable consumptions of stories.

2021 年 8 月，马哈斯韦塔·德维( Mahasweta Devi) 的标志性短篇小说《Draupadi》（1978 年）被从德里大学的英语荣誉课程大纲中删除，理由是“伤害了”的感情。为什么部落抵抗的故事会激怒后殖民情绪？受这一删减的触发，我们的文章关注了“Draupadi”的背景——纳萨尔派运动（1967-1975），这是一场挑战后殖民印度国家封建资产阶级霸权的武装起义——并审视了《德劳帕迪》中躁动不安的边缘国家的表现。当代小说，孟加拉语和英语，就政治和随之而来的审美谈判而言。纳萨尔派运动启发了孟加拉语的一种特定文学流派，纳萨尔·萨希蒂亚，其成长与运动本身同时发生。它探索了新的现代性和主观性的可能性，与诗歌和散文中继承的叙事形式纠缠在一起。在全球范围内，纳萨尔仍然是一个西方平台，它出现在琼帕·拉希里的《低地》（2013 年）和尼尔·穆克吉的《他人的生活》（2014 年）中。在这两部作品中，土地和耕种者的流动所提出的问题，都通过选定的个人前往美利坚合众国的流散之旅得到了富有想象力的解决。我们的文章对拉希里和穆克吉的这两部英语全球小说与萨马雷什·马宗达尔的《卡尔贝拉/黑暗时代》（1983）和马哈斯维塔·德维的《行动？》的孟加拉语、当地叙事进行了互文阅读。巴色图都（1978/2003）。