Violent tale well crafted
Sridhar K Chari
An Iron Harvest C.P. Surendran India Ink, Roli Books. Pages 326. Rs 350.

The first thing to be said about journalist and poet C.P. Surendran’s debut novel, An Iron Harvest, is that it is brilliantly executed and a great read, and well, even poetic in its measured, evocative prose.

And the second is that he is guilty of a cop-out. By setting this novel of a heroic young idealist rising up in arms against evil landlords and a brutal State before predictably coming to a tragic end in a staged police encounter, in the comfortably distant period of the Emergency, Surendran has taken the easy way out. Sure, the novel’s inspiration is the real life case of the custodial killing of a young engineering student, suspected of being a rebel, in 1976 in Kerala. But casting the State as the villain and portraying the police as a repressive force where top officers are comic figures and lower ones nothing more that past masters of the dark arts of torture, is easy if your setting is the Emergency. But the real challenge would have been to look at the Naxalite or Maoist movement in a contemporary setting. Naxal related violence has claimed almost a 1000 lives in the past year, and five hundred more already this year. Large swathes of land, estimated to be about 43 per cent of Indian territory, are reportedly in the grip of armed rebels.

If Surendran had done that, his characters, the "Che Guevera like" John, Comrade Varkichayan who leads rebel organisation Red Earth, the motley, Mao-worshipping, cohorts who make up the gang, landlords like Kutty and Vaithi, the police officer Raman, and indeed the State, would have had to take on more shades of grey to offer a compelling view of what this internal strife is all about.

That said, for any reader (like me, he does not have to be a "red") who recognises the dangers of being cocooned in bourgeois comfort and wants a corporeal insight into why the Naxalite movement has attracted genuine intellectuals and activists into its folds as sympathisers, if not participants, this is the book to read. John and his gang are brutal killers. But then, so are their targets, who lord it over the common people, living off their blood and sweat, not affording them even a shred of dignity. Clearly, Red Earth are the good guys here And they come to a violent end.

The modern Naxalite movement has its extortionists, its free loaders, its killers and dacoits along for the joy ride. But so, perhaps, as Arundhati Roy is not amiss in pointing out, does every component of "civil" society today. But even if you don’t want to grapple with the political context, the novel works well even at the level of an engaging, if violent, tale of the small guys against the evil big guys, (there is even a love interest), and the prose is a pleasure.

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