The Revolutionaries

Standing on the summit of the 20,000-foot-high Stok Kangri, the highest

peak in Ladakh, a few months past their seventieth birthdays, Aruna and her

husband Sandeep reflect on their past dreams and aspirations and whether

they achieved what they had wanted to or not. Their story is filled with

many stirring events and encounters, extending from the London of the

swinging sixties to India during the Emergency of the mid-1970s and the

troubled times that followed. Along the way, they are influenced by Marxist

theory and some Maoist activists they meet, and try to join the working-

class revolution by befriending a group of disaffected Sikh factory workers

in London. Back in India, the couple settle down in Chandigarh, the 'City

Beautiful', where they come into contact with slum dwellers and discover the

extent of destitution and discrimination that disenfranchised communities

struggle with-a realization further reinforced by their travels to the

hinterlands of Bihar. Inevitably, the couple are drawn towards the Naxalite

movement-only to learn that betrayal, sexual exploitation and corruption

have no class barriers.

Narrated in an unhurried, expansive style, Neena Nehru's immersive novel

revisits the idealism and disillusionment, the heady conviction and slow loss

of faith that marked the lives of a section of India's youth in the sixties and

seventies, trying to reconcile their own privilege with the harsh lives of a vast

majority of their fellow citizens. An extraordinarily sensitive, engaging novel,

The Revolutionaries is also a rare slice of modern Indian history.