ON THE WAY TO THE THOUSAND- PILLARED MANDAPAM

Fig.1 Strip mining.

65 Travelogue on the Monu ments of an Agrarian Insurgency ARINDAM DUTTA

66 ArindamArindam DuttaDutta

In May 2004, a center-left coalition, led by the , 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 , its unexpected victory over Chandrababu Naidu, ally of the Hindu right, flush with cash from ’s business process outsourcing (BPO) industries—the Guardian’s George Monbiot called him the “West’s favorite Indian”—owed significantly Fig.3 Henry Flitcroft, Pantheon, Stourhead, 1753–4. to brewing agrarian discontent, behind The Hoare family, 1740s onward. 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 ceasefire with the Maoists. On October 11, the upper eche- lons of the Maoist People’s War Group (PWG) surfaced from their underground bivouacs, AK-47s slung over shoulders, in the Nalla- mallai forest area in Andhra Pradesh. Stash- ing their weapons, the leaders convened a mass rally in Hyderabad, the capital city, and 65,000 supporters attended the meet- Fig.4 Bantry House, Cork, Ireland, ing. On the way, the Maoist leaders unveiled 1765 onward. a “martyrs’ memorial” in Guttikondabilam village in Guntur district. (Guttikondabilam My current research centers on is the venue of a historic secret meeting the monuments of agrarian accumulation between founder-member Charu in the eighteenth century: the pleasure Mazumdar and Andhra Pradesh Maoist lead- gardens, follies, and ha-has by which the ers in 1969, a flashpoint of the Srikakulam Whig sensibility viewed the expansion of peasant insurgency of the 1970s.) land under cultivation in Britain, America, Previous to this, the mainstream and Bengal—the effect of Britain’s “finan- newspaper Indian Express, quite out of cial revolution”—through the devices of the keeping with its pro-liberalization tilt, carried aesthetic. Peering into the grainy image of a sympathetic Sunday magazine article on the Indravelli monument, I was struck with the Maoists.1 The article was accompanied an uncanny resemblance. The follies of by a picture of what it described as the me- Britain were “fakes” instantiating a political morial to “People’s War martyrs” at Indravelli, ideal; the rotundas, obelisks, Gothic temples the site of the police massacre and secret of eighteenth-century English gardens were burial of some sixty Gond tribals who had fragments of an exogenous, imagined, assembled for a Maoist-organized meeting Virgilian culture, strewn around the land- on April 20, 1981. The small, low-resolution scape in order to ratify—to institute as the image showed a square column on a pedes- work of the imagination—a transformed tal, crowned by a pyramid-shaped capital. political economy. Somewhat in the strain The structure, the article said, was inspired of French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, by the Monument to the People’s Heroes I have called this kind of displaced memo- 1 (Renmin Yinxiong Jinian Bei) in Beijing’s ry—the recuperation of an archaic past Rakesh Sinha, Tiananmen Square. that you cannot have had experienced as “The Thick Red Line,” Indian Express, Sunday 2 your own “history”—“ancestrality.” The magazine, August 29, incongruous memory of Mao in the jungles 2004.

of northern Andhra Pradesh, I thought, 2 was perhaps a comparable kind of asserted See Arindam Dutta, “Ancestralities: ancestrality, something that could be Nature, Architecture useful to think through the critique of political and the Debt” (in progress); Quentin economy that I was attempting to outline Meillassoux, After in my study of architecture. I decided to Finitude, trans. Fig.2 The memorial to PW martyrs at Indravelli. The Ray Brassier (London: original structure was inspire by Tiananmen Square. investigate. Continuum, 2008).

67 On the Way to the Thousand-Pillared Mandapam

much-touted BPO services—the cynosure of the international media and of the dominant coterie of “cultural studies” in academia— but in fact through intensified 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 firms 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 Fig.5 Map of Naxalite affected areas in India, Citigroup report exaggerated the actual produced by Citigroup, January 2007. danger from the Maoist insurgency to startle stock-market investors, a constituency to How big is the Maoist insurgency in which both the neoliberal Congress and its India? What you see here is a map produced antecedent governments were in consum- by a Citigroup report from January 2007, mate thrall. Nonetheless, it was clear that laying out the various indicators that poten- both the Maoist militants and India’s sub- tial investors in the Indian economy should stantial tribal population—politically ignored watch for. The Maoist insurgency is listed and brutally exploited—ensconced in the as one of the four key challenges that the forests and ravines that also hold the bulk of continued growth of the Indian economy India’s mineral reserves, were now directly could be threatened by. In Citigroup’s imagi- in the path of this chain of extraction. nation, 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 are most well-entrenched in the Dandakaranya Fig.6 Construction on a BPO Incubator, Hyderabad region in the state of Chattishgarh, Cybercity, January 2007. where they have established a govern- ment of their own—the Janatana Preliminary enquiries on my part reveal- Sarkar...[Their influence] extends to 165 ed that the Guttikondabilam and Indravelli districts in 14 states covering close to memorials were not the only Maoist memor- 40% of the country’s geographical area ials in Andhra Pradesh; hammer-and-sickle and affecting 35% of the population.3 topped obelisks dot the forests and country- side of the insurgent landscape by the For potential investors in the Indian hundreds. Each commemorates a slain cadre, market, the next observation is crucial: executed by the police in extra-judicial “Given that the Naxalite movement has “encounters”: pick the suspect up when he spread to the mineral-rich states of Orissa, comes into market to pick up provisions, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and slowly torture him for information, shoot him at even around the districts in , its point-blank range, let his body decompose economic impact could be far reaching.” to send a message to his family and village, The Citigroup report was written at a time of drop off his body in the fields, and claim that global price highs in the commodity markets. the suspect was shot when he opened fire 3 Rohini Malkani and Much of the deficits accruing from the Indian as the police were about to apprehend him. Anushka Shah, India “economic miracle” and the burgeoning This, and the 180,000 farmer suicides in 2007: Managing the New Growth Paradigm national market for international products since 1997 exemplify the pervasive agrarian (Economic and Market has been paid for not by its export of either dissent and distress that occupy the other Analysis: India) Citi- group Global Markets, high-value manufactured goods or even the side of the coin of India’s “liberalization.” 2007), 38–39.

68 Arindam Dutta

Seeking to document these memorials, empire, a Telugu-speaking dynasty that I established contact, through intermediaries, reigned between the tenth and the four- with civil society groups affiliated with the teenth centuries with its capital in . Maoist insurgency who could direct me to Scores of magnificently carved thick stone these locations. I eventually hoped to make columns hold up short-span beams that it to Indravelli, on the state border two hun- form two separate structures: one a dred miles north of Hyderabad, nestled deep star-shaped structure with a cella and a in the ravines of the Central Indian plateau. portico, the second a densely populated January 14, 2005, three months after the hypostyle structure, symmetrical and square Express publication, seven months after the in plan with a central courtyard at the crux ceasefire announcement, and the day before of two crisscrossing aisles. The spatial effect I was to leave Calcutta for Hyderabad, is of a delicately proportioned and sculptur- television news channels carried reports of ally elaborate composition; at the same time, six Maoists killed in Karimnagar district, unevenness of construction, geometrical one of the areas in my planned itinerary. The inconsistencies, and asymmetries between Naxalites retaliated, dragging a Congress corresponding elements also convey Party sarpanch to one of these martyr’s the sense of a crude structure, where time monuments, and then killing him. By the time has left no two vertical elements in align- I arrived in Hyderabad the next day, police ment or, for that matter, in plumb. The large had started full-fledged combing operations. number of columns gives the temple its The ceasefire was over. Maoist cadres that apocryphal name: the Thousand-Pillared had surfaced in the past few months slipped Mandapam (canopy). back into their forest bivouacs. My prospec- This ancient monument would be my tive guide went underground; the tentatively alibi. My rented car would drive—so the plan quiescent landscape I had hoped to recon- went—past the police memorial that was my noiter erupted overnight into a terrain of objective, to visit the Hanumakonda temple, counter-insurgency. making sure to take pictures (should the My research objective had abruptly police investigate) of this tourist-appropriate become rather uncomfortable: a person destination. Then, arriving back at the gates bumbling about, asking for the whereabouts of the police station, I would claim to have of Maoist structures was sure to invite sus- chanced on the remarkable “beauty” of picion from counter-insurgency forces. Stuck the police memorial while traveling to the in a hotel room, I was able to visit two of the “famous” temple of which I had heard so monuments in two working-class suburbs of much, and beg to photograph it. Accordingly, the city itself: the Maoist movement reaches upon my arrival, a phone call from pillion box thus far into the maw of its urban antago- to the superintendent was made, the words nists. But otherwise I was left with nothing to “tourist,” “America,” “architect,” “architecture,” do. One of my contacts suggested a different were thrown into the mix, and the requisite strategy. In Warangal city, some ninety miles permission was obtained. It was critical that to the northeast of Hyderabad, the police at no point would I betray having even a have built a memorial to their slain cadres remote clue of either local conditions or of the who had succumbed to Maoist action. The insurgency. A paradox that I had been mull- memorial is pyramidal in shape, a concrete ing over for the last few days came sharply structure of four boomerang-shaped planes into focus as I was crossing the gates of the supporting each other at their edges, plas- police compound. My display of innocuous- tered in white. The structure sits on the lawn ness in order to attain my object rested, in of the police headquarters on one of the main a manner of speaking, on my playing myself, crossroads of Warangal town, clearly visible which is to say the architectural historian 4 Indian authorities in from the outside but walled off by a concrete- and aesthete-tourist retracing the map general adopt a stance and-barbed-wire perimeter. We determined of a state-sanctioned heritage, which archi- of extreme suspicion of the image: photog- that I should go visit this structure instead. tectural historiography has an institutionally raphy of public build- Without a press card, however, we were hard privileged role in creating. The power of ings and installations has been long banned, put to come up with an alibi that would allow this alibi rested paradoxically on a kind of with the usual ratio- me to photograph this bastioned memorial at scholastic pretension on my part, assumedly nale about terrorists and foreign powers. 4 the heart of an ongoing insurgency. inherent in which was a kind of studied Google Earth’s intro- Two miles down the Warangal road disinterest in present-day affairs. My profes- duction therefore drew considerable huffing from the police compound are the ruins of sional status had itself become an alibi and puffing from a temple called the Hanumakonda complex, for research: the path to enlightenment lay Indian, as well as South Korean and built around the year 1163 by the Kakatiya in adopting an air of realpolitik ignorance. Russian, authorities.

69 On the Way to the Thousand-Pillared Mandapam

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 first “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 sche- ma 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 Fig.7 Thousand Pillar Temple, Kakatiya Empire, Hanu- this historiography—with its traditions of makonda, district Warangal, twelth century. establishing historical “context,” aesthetic “judgment,” and the celebration of great At its best, the discipline of historiog- civilizations in antiquity—as its heritage, raphy is conscious of itself as a distancing re-presenting it to its citizens as an object one: of creating a speculative, categoric of veneration and an ancestral bequest frame of reference through which nuggets to the nation, with the requisite seculariza- of empirical or episodic meaning enter into tion—its “partitive” reproduction—via the a discursive, authoritative register. The notice posted by the Archaeological Survey historian’s role is inevitably a cauterizing of India (ASI) in front of the temple. one, as French scholar Michel de Certeau Fergusson describes the Hanumakonda terms it, “a partitive usage.” The past is site as a material assembly of ruins, not made accessible only after its definite the active place of worship that it was in his “death,” so to speak, is produced, rendering time and is today. The ongoing religious use it as other. If the historian’s production of of the temple and the everyday rituals per- knowledge has a certain place in power, it is formed by the faithful operate in a different a contra-purposive one, of imparting lessons temporality, at a different tempo, than the about power while appearing to be cast out archaeological classification of the temple of power. “[Historiography’s] discourse as “ruin.” The former marks the same stones will be magisterial without being that of the with turmeric and vermilion, offers flowers master, in the same way that historians will and prayers to them in a different modus of 5 be teaching lessons of government without veneration. The latter territoriality inscribes Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, knowing either its responsibilities or its risks. numbers on each column of the edifice, trans. Tom Conley (New They reflect on the power that they lack.” recuperating each component stone of the York: Columbia Univer- sity Press, 1988), 8. The turn to method, in this sense, is inevi- structure for the desacralized halo of sci- tably a self-abnegating one: “to the very de- ence. Each stone is turned into an isolated 6 Adolf Loos, “Architec- gree that this discourse is rigorous, it will be minim for a disenchanted, distributional ture,” (1910) in Adolf destined for futility.”5 Only in this functional form of categorization, sequestered for the Loos: Architecture 1903–1932, ed. Roberto futility does historiography find its place purpose of a perdurable, defensible concep- Schezen (New York: of preeminence and sit next to the prince— tion of national and global “heritage.” Monacelli, 1996), 15. a parasitical prominence, as it were—as For the few local tourists who come 7 narrative-producing handmaiden of the state. picnicking to the Hanumakonda temple on James Fergusson, History of Indian and For the historian, monuments are thus weekends from nearby villages and towns, Eastern Architecture, neither the pure figuration of aesthetic prac- pulled by the threads of popular memory, the rev. ed. with addi- tions by James Burgess tice—as Adolf Loos propounded in “Archi- ASI notices confer on this act of re-memory and R. Phene Spiers tecture”6—nor are they the fraught material the frame of an ecumenical, national sanc- (1910; New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, vestiges through which a “public” constitutes tion. On the other hand, far from the “global” 1998), 420, 434.

70 Arindam Dutta

pathways of tourism and business that Maoists did not take the maximalist position pass through Hyderabad or Agra, or for that of demanding recognition of their authority matter the temples of Tirupati, Kanchipuram, over the pockets that they controlled in 8 8 Mahabalipuram, Madurai, the rare foreign Nizamabad, Warangal, and Karimnagar.” Sumanta Banerjee, visitor to this provincial edifice appears If in the immediate aftermath of the election “All Quiet on the Mao- ist Front?” Economic markedly out of place, thus even more iden- Congress’s noblesse oblige was a de facto and Political Weekly, tified with the appearance of a disinterested recognition of this extant authority, long-term February 5, 2005. Also see “Naxalites Give scholasticism. The “distancing move” of territorial concession to the insurgency New Dimension to Land the historian operates even more strongly at would leave it at the political mercy of the Issue,” Hindu, October 18, 2004; “Land for this fringe, providing the occasional “global Maoists. In any case, the mining interests Poor: Naxals Urge visitor” with the alibi of the specialist’s behind Congress—connected to the Chief Govt. to Constitute Panel,” Newindpress. 9 somewhat nugatory pursuits. The vulgar Minister’s family —were least likely to let com, October 18, 2004; absorption of a methodological scruple has matters stand, given that the Maoist bastion “Naxalites Target Forest Land,” Hindu, here acquired a depoliticized license; the straddled territories that were richest in ore. October 22, 2004; “YSR (architectural) tourist automatically carries As the ceasefire went underway, Maoist Raises Serious Objec- tion to Naxals Occupy- about a distracted air of innocence about cadres went about forcibly redistributing ing Private and Forest the killing fields of rural India. Two kinds land. Unable to counteract these actions Lands,” New Indian Express, October 27, of commemorative landscapes, two archae- given their own grandiose (and desperate) 2004; “IG [Inspector ologies of the state thus confront each campaign promises, the state rather began General of Police] Warns Against Usurping other on the main road at Warangal, and to insist that the Maoists first disarm them- of Lands,” Hindu, Oc- tober 27, 2004; “Naxal to address one the architectural historian selves: a patently pharisaical move in a Problem: Government needs the alibi of its sanctioned other. context where weapons are actively used by Plans to Buy Land,” Hindu, October 29, a host of non-state actors, from landlord 2004; “Maoist Occupa- militias to party hoodlums and to labor mafias. tion of Lands Might Derail Talks,” New In the two years since 2005, the front- Indian Express, Octo- lines of the insurgency had receded again ber 30, 2004; “CPI(M) Backs Maoists on Land deep into the forests. The well-known Maoist Issue,” Hindu, October poet put me in touch with a 31, 2004; “Maoists Help Dalits [lower civil society support group for the families of castes] Occupy Lands,” slain insurgents. The group is also responsi- Hindu, November 1, 2004. The government ble for the upkeep of the Maoist monuments. went through some Three people were to accompany me in my motions of listening 10 to Naxalite demands reconnoitering: “Kaveri,” a former People’s on land redistribution, War Group guerilla and widow of a slain see “Andhra Panel to Take Up Naxalites’ cadre, who had been imprisoned and tortured Land Demand,” for five years by police on charges of being Indian Express, October 20, 2004. an “explosives expert.” (This kind of charge has been described by lawyer-activist K. 9 Sugata Srinivasaraju, Balagopal as particularly advantageous for “‘Bellary is Mine,’ the extra-judicial tenor of counter-insurgency Mining: The Reddy Brothers,” and “The operations “because it is a crime without Castle, The Moving victim, for it is a crime of intent and not exe- Forest,” Outlook, August 10, 2009. Fig.8 Police memorial to cadre killed by Maoists, cution. All the police have to say was that http://www.outlook Warangal city, Andhra Pradesh. a bag of explosives were found on the per- india.com/article. aspx?261044 (accessed 11 son.” ) My second companion, “Krishnamma,” August 10, 2009). In January 2007, two years later, is a mother of two whose husband was 10 I returned to Hyderabad. By this time the killed on May 4, 2004, a few days before the Kaveri, Krishnamma, renewed force of counter-insurgency that ceasefire, in another “encounter,” his body and Vamanna are not their real names. I had encountered on my previous visit dumped in a field in Guntur district. While had subsided into a normative terrain. The never having been a cadre herself, she 11 K. Balagopal, Prob- debate in the media over the raft of issues now works as a treasurer in a group politically ings in the Political that the Maoists had brought to the table affiliated with the underground militancy. Economy of Agrarian Classes and Conflicts, had subsided to a singular, archaic, rather The last, the elderly “Vamanna,” was my reprinted from Eco- dissimulatory focus: the state’s right to guide who had gone absconding two years nomic and Political Weekly (Hyderabad: monopoly over violence. At the time of the ago. A carpenter by profession, he is the Perspectives, 1988). armistice, the Maoist’s principal demand to architect of the smaller of the two monu- 12 the Congress was that it stick to its pro-poor ments on the Hyderabad outskirts that I had Also a pseudonym; electoral promises of land distribution. visited two years previously, built in memory armed Maoist insur- gents operate only 12 As Sumanta Banerjee has pointed out, “the of his son Venu, killed on January 23, 2002. under aliases.

71 On the Way to the Thousand-Pillared Mandapam

Our route would take us through caritra of the fort. The word caritra, cognate the districts most under Maoist influence: of the English “character,” has been described Warangal, Karimnagar, . In 2002, by Velcheru Narayana Rao et al. as a new Warangal and Karimnagar were two of the genre of bardic storytelling about historical three districts in which as many as 2,580 events that emerged in this region in the deeply indebted farmers had killed them- middle of the eighteenth century, closer to the selves by ingesting pesticides.13 Our final French sense of histoire or the Italian storia destination would be Indravelli, site of the rather than the English history.14 This new 1981 massacre and the Tiananmen-inspired use marked a transition from an older use of 13 monument, a one-street market town deep the word, as in Banabhatta’s Harshacharita Utsa Patnaik, The in the forested tribal area of Adilabad (ca. seventh century) or Tulsidas’s Republic of Hunger, 1943–2004 (New Delhi: district, bordering on the neighboring state Ramcharitmanas (ca. 1574–1612), a hagiog- Sahmat, 2004), 28. of Maharashtra. raphy genre comparable with the Christian 14 “Lives of the Saints,” tales of religious virtue Velcheru Narayana translated as ethics, as regulative narratives Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahman- 15 for a moral saeculum. yam, Textures of Time: To the Archaeological Survey’s ap- Writing History in South India 1600–1800 propriation of the term caritra, Pushpa had (New York: Other three kinds of retort: a) When you allow Press, 2003), 21. Coca-Cola signs and tea- and snack-shops 15 “The rhetoric of this to entertain visitors to the fort, does this ‘monument’ is saturated not destroy the charitra of the place? When with meaning, but with identical meaning. you grew a garden to isolate these ruined It is a tautological fragments in a recreational park, was this tomb...It is impos- sible to consider historically authentic? b) When the govern- hagiography solely in ment put up statues of Indira Gandhi and terms of its ‘authen- ticity’ or ‘historical Rajiv Gandhi in my village, these people value’: this would be were nothing to me, they were not from my equivalent to submit- ting a literary genre family, and yet did I not tolerate this imposi- to the laws of another 16 Fig.9 Qila Warangal, Kakatiya tion? c) If the Kakatiya kings were powerful, genre — historiography Palace Complex, thirteenth century. — and to dismantling it was not because they themselves were a proper type of brave. It was their poor peasant soldiers who discourse only in order to engage its The intuition that I had had while fought, and yet you celebrate the bravery of contrary...[A] Life crossing the police gate in Warangal would the Kakatiya kings. If my son took to arms to of a Saint is ‘the literary crystalliza- acquire more weight in the ensuing days. fight for the people himself, why can’t I build tion of the percep- A mile and a quarter from Warangal railway a monument to his bravery, to the struggle of tion of a collective conscience’...the station and seven and a half miles from the the people? combination of acts, Hanumakonda temple is Qila Warangal, Things are being turned upside down places, and themes indicates a particular the thirteenth-century fort of the Kakatiyas. here. Professional archaeologists may not structure that refers The remaining ruins of the fort comprise recognize in this (d)enunciation a “scientific” not just primarily to ‘what took place,’ delicately carved fragments of the central rationale, but Pushpa’s rationale impeccably as does history, but palace and temple complex, in addition to mimes the popularizing rationale adopted to ‘what is exempla- ry.’” de Certeau, the remaining shards of the three layers of when archaeological objectives are “ex- The Writing of His- defensive walls. These remnants are under plained” to the populations in whose name tory, 270. the protection of the ASI. The kirti toranas or the state claims to speak, whose transcendent 16 triumphal gates of the palace complex serve “heritage” it seeks to guard. In Pushpa’s Indeed, Indian cultur- al and public space is as the official icon for Andhra Pradesh’s state statement, this vernacular “explication,” replete with busts of tourism agency. In addition, the fort is home the imposition of popular idiom from above, persons both histori- cal and nonexistent to a small town: tightly packed single-storied has been troped, turned upside down by whose hagiography is houses with one or a few rooms each that subaltern speech into a counter-monument, intended to guide the life of the exemplary make up a population of a few hundred. a mnemo-topography and terrain that pries citizen. Portraits, Guthikandula Raju, alias Raju, was open the crypto-capitalism of the agrarian statues, temples, and historical names born inside this fort; as a youth, he joined landscape. At the entrance of Qila Warangal ornament every street the Maoist movement and was killed by today, an obelisk stands capped by a ham- corner, commemorat- ing local politicians, police on October 1, 1995. When his mother, mer and sickle in Raju’s memory. Rather school principals, Guthikandula Pushpa, expressed her desire than represent the state’s need to sanction social workers, free- dom fighters, prime to build a martyr’s memorial near his home, a “people” acculturated by an invented and ministers, chief the Archaeological Survey objected, saying instituted history, the gravamen of this monu- ministers, presidents, medieval kings, gods, that the memorial would deface the historical ment continually tests the state’s tolerance. goddesses.

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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 memorial- I remind you of that word: ancestrality. As if izing impetus renders visible the incom- to cover over this exotic juxtaposition, my mensurability—aporia—between popular guides—propagandists after a fashion—were and legal sovereignty. By January 2007, intent on demonstrating the organic charac- the police had destroyed two hundred of ter of their movement. these family memoirs that, unlike the photo The Maoist memorials are built by shra- album packed away in a closet, make a madan (customary gifts of labor) offered by direct claim on the public character of space, members of guerilla’s families and villages. on the state’s very territorializing power. Some of them commemorate a single fallen In response, the Maoists have built more. child, as in the case of the memorial built These are counter-monuments precisely in by Vamanna, who used his experience in the that they notate the ever-present threat of construction industry to make drawings and demolition by the state; their counter-memory oversee the work himself. Others commem- opens up the gap between legal and popular orate the dead of an entire district, as in the sovereignty. sixty whose places of birth and places and It would of course be analytical folly to dates of death are recorded at the foot of the imagine the Maoist movement as an organic giant Husnabad memorial. When the giant, expression of subaltern dissent. Rather, these seventy-foot-tall memorial was unveiled monument/follies must be seen as emblems in 1990, political exigencies were such that of a political strategy: a decades-old, N. T. Rama Rao’s Peronist government in generationally handed-down exercise of fact patronized it, with the District Collector organically linking the Maoist resistance overseeing arrangements. The neoliberal 17 Naidu himself survived with the anthropological texture of subaltern regime of his son-in-law, Chandrababu an assassination at- memorialization. The obelisk—the preferred Naidu, adopted a different stance, and his tempt by the Naxalites on October 1, 2003, form of the Maoist monuments—we have no-quarter-given policy toward the Maoists when his bulletproof to remember, is as exotic to this context as saw the same monument made into an ex- car was blown up by mines in the Tirumala 17 were neoclassical exedra to Whig Britain. ample, summarily blasted with dynamite. Hills.

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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 provo- cation is evident: the Maoist edifice 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 se- ries of counter-icons to combat this symbolic terrain. At Bheerpur (district Karimnagar), Fig.11 Fallen hammer and sickle from CPI the police gathered local villagers to build (Maoist) “Martyr’s Memorial,” Husnabad. a memorial to victims of the insurgency, Dynamited by police in 2004. with a white flag planted pointedly in front Indeed, this uneven character of police of Maoist Group Chief Ganapathi’s house violence and erratic state repression strongly in that village, imploring him to surrender. determines the spatial geography of these On the Maoist monument in Zaffargarh, monuments, whose status becomes as the police pasted posters with mugshots if symbolic pieces of a giant and elaborate of wanted guerillas just above the plaque chess game. Beside the three monuments carrying the names of the dead Maoists, built side by side in the center of Paidipalli announcing rewards for their surrender. 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 Fig.12 CPI (Maoist) “Martyr’s Memorial” from the road into the village. This open, to cadre killed by police, Zaffargarh, district Warangal, Andhra Pradesh. recalcitrant capture of public space reflects the strong support of the entire village, The four sides of the large Begumpet something that the police are hard put to monument are scrawled with police mes- eradicate. In Zaffargarh (district Warangal), sages: “Peace, not violence”; “What kind of a mobile tea seller stands at the foot of the values do you have? What have you done for monument in the village square, the political your old parents? Leave your ways and look statement integrated into the daily goings-on after your parents”; “O Chandranna [Maoist of the village, the buying of groceries, snacks, National Committee member, North commodities of daily use. At Begumpet unit], your principles are against the people Fig.13 (district Karimnagar), the monument stands and against the government”; “Rejoin the CPI (Maoist) “Martyr’s Memorial” to cadre as sentinel at the very entrance of the vil- people, surrender and live, [signed] Begumpet killed by police, lage, announcing to all visitors the political Gramastalu [Villagers].” The Maoist follies of Paidipalli, Warangal district, Andhra sympathies of its denizens. the Telangana landscape are nodes in a rural Pradesh. (facing page)

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Fig.15 CPI (Maoist) “Martyr’s Memorial” to cadre killed by police, Begumpet village, district Karimnagar, Andhra Pradesh. heterotopia, point-irruptions of the geo- of peasant populations and movements graphic imagination that set varying texts by economistic doxas. Most importantly, of power to work, defined as much by the they manifest a complex weave of narrative various actors of the agrarian scene as their and space in relation to different forms of ever-shifting modes of relation to different authoritarian sanction. As objects creating forms of politics. Monuments, tombs, tumuli a transposed field, like the “ruined” follies are architecture’s empty containers, pure and Latinate inscriptions in the Picturesque parerga without content. Relieved of archi- gardens of England and plantation America, tecture’s classical association with shelter, the Maoist monuments invite an allusive they are tasked to operate entirely as relief, literacy: to decode the abstract script of as spatial protrusions and lapidary inscrip- agrarian change, even concretions that offer tions that reveal space itself as something the diacritical measure of an uneven field. written, inscribed, mapped. In the variations of size and shape, degrees Each obelisk is thus a test of territorial of completion, contending inscriptions, man- tolerance and provocation, embodying ner of attribution, each memorial attests to within it the incorporation of different scales an inalienable singularity and a logic of the of investment. At different levels, they multiple, of bounded encryption and infinite “signal” a series of miscegenated messages, dissemination: the creation of place in its on the one hand the mourning of parents myriad logics as a bounded site of arrival, and siblings, on the other the perverse departure, congregation, and its contrapur- program of the neoliberal state to reproduce posive opening into space as a global, its unmodern subjects as unfree, productive valorized axiomatic. As the remembrance of constituencies. They are as much indexes violence, they remind us that the axiomatic of the nomadic war-machine of the police of “space” is itself a violent insertion. as of the ungoverned arm of liberal govern- “It’s terrible, it’s fine”: Mao’s famous Fig.14 Monument for ment, as of the substitutive play of infra- antinomy in his Report on an Investigation Vamanna’s son built by Vamanna, Hyderabad. structural withdrawal and the interpellation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan might be (facing page)

77 On the Way to the Thousand-Pillared Mandapam said to reveal conflict at the very pores of The rituals enacted in front of these so-called culture: the corpse of the martyr pits memorials draw on widely recognized the state and the revolt as two autonomous folkloric traditions: elements of what Rao et and opposed sequences within the same al. have called “mnemo-history,” indigenous mnemonic terrain.18 When a memorial is in- traditions of weaving empirical facts of augurated, relatives of the martyr mourn the history with mythic patterns of storytelling. deceased again, performing the mnemonic In this sense, the funerary columns of the displacement materialized in the monument. Naxalites derive as much from ancient tribal Maoist commemoration ceremonies strongly commemorative practices as the monumen- follow customary funerary practice. Like talizing impress of “Asiatic Communism.” traditional practices of rememoration, tribals Thus the Maoist memorials not only form and peasants sing and dance, only this time an index of the death of individuals and the with Maoist-tinged lyrics of popular resis- commemoration of a collective struggle, tance, thus imbricating adivasi (aboriginal) but also mourn the demise of the autonomy and dalit (lower caste) culture organically of an entire civilizational rubric dating back into political movement. The Maoist move- to India’s prehistory, now increasingly ment thus effects something of a counter- hemmed in by the expropriative, modern interpellation—Louis Althusser’s expression descendants of the subcontinental powers. is useful here—of the customary. Orators Given this organic imbrication, the and artists from “front” organizations give authorities well understand that the culling 18 eulogies, extolling the sacrifices of the mar- of the Maoist movement cannot be con- Mao Tse-tung, Report tyrs, individuating through a life-narrative strained to a mere police operation, with the on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement the proximal identification of the Maoist clinical framing of disciplinary action that in Hunan (Beijing: movement to everyday conflicts of power. accompanies a law-and-order outbreak. Foreign Languages Press, 1965). Ranajit The legendary Naxalite poet will At its spearhead, the state understands well Guha treats this theme appear at each of these events. He has spent that what it is confronting here is an entire magisterially in the chapter on ambiguity decades traveling around the countryside ideological theater of conflict, drawn from in his book Elementary documenting local legends and song forms; substantial popular will. The challenge Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial to date, he has composed an extempore for the state here is to pry culture apart India (Durham: Duke poem honoring each slain guerilla, a veri- from politics, to batten down an entire array University Press, table hagiographic archive that is reported of cultural existence now concretized into 1999), 89. to have been gathered in twelve notebooks, insurgency. In repressing this organic 19 See K. Balagopal, a lyric chronicle of the insurgency. correlation, the state plays out here in its Probings, 103–4. very design, its architectonic. Balagopal’s extensive dispatches in the Economic and Political To a philosopher it will seem extraordi- Weekly extensively detail police killings nary that mere words—and that too the in Andhra Pradesh. ungrammatical sentences scribbled As for extrajudicial detainees, the weak- on a series of FIRs [First Information nesses of the Indian Reports] by semi-literate policemen— legal code with regard to stipulations on can change material reality, can public order are used convert a free citizen into a threat to to repeatedly throw people into jail with the Security of State, and thereby a new charges, pick- prisoner-without-trial. When the reality ing them up from the door of the prison itself is a tissue of fabrications mas- every time they are querading as truth even mere gestures released on bail, each time subject- Fig.16 Zaffargarh monument. can change it. And this epistemological ing the undertrial to inversion is sanctified by [Indian] Courts new cycles of torture and beatings. After which have repeatedly held—in deci- the third or fourth sions challenging preventive detention time, the multiplica- tion of charges is warrants—that mere multiplication considered enough to of as yet unproved charges is sufficient clamp down a National Security Act Warrant, to make a free citizen a danger to the unsubstantiated Public Order.19 charges thus perform- ing a self-fulfilling prophecy. In a “thickly” organized insurgency—one 20 Fig.17 Begumpet village, Karimnagar. can resituate Clifford Geertz’s exemplification Clifford Geertz, Police posters and writing on Maoist monuments, of winks, mutatis mutandis, in the use of this The Interpretation of offering money and threats to Naxalites Cultures (New York: 20 to surrender themselves. adverb —police action does not necessarily Basic Books, 1977).

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draw from credible intelligence. The calculus here is more often than not defined quantita- tively 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” pronounce- ments spouted by academics, drawn out of the compulsions of an internal framework of disciplinary judgment and advancement, of tenurial rewards and promotions within Fig.18 Maoist front organizations the organization. (To extend the metaphor, inaugurating various new memorials. Film courtesy of Amarulla Vandu Mitrala Sangam. the interior ministry produces statements that are akin to those by university deans, full of transcendent truths and universal, Indravelli is one such burnt village. imminent “solutions,” aimed more at solicit- On April 20, 1981, the village was encircled ing their financiers.) In the process, to quote by four platoons of police on a shandy, or Strelnikov from Dr. Zhivago: “A village is market, day. On that day, a Maoist-affiliated burnt, the point is made.” civil society organization had called a meet- ing in the afternoon. As hundreds of un- armed 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 firing. As the tribals fled, a police jeep suddenly met them head-on after emerging from a nearby school where it was billeted, and opened fire 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.

21 “From the mid-1980s brutal special police forces meant for elim- inating [Maoists] came into being and were allowed to operate totally incognito, the most successful being Fig.19 Strip mining, Godavari Khani Coal Fields, the Grey Hounds, which Singaneri Collieries, near Bellampalli, is a well trained Andhra Pradesh. anti-guerilla force that lives and oper- On the road out of the mining region ates as the [Maoists] of Bellampally, my companions whisper armed squads do and is bound by no known law, nervously as we pass what they recognize including the Consti- as a death squad, five moustached men in tution of India.” K. Balagopal, “Maoist an open, commandeered jeep, weapons Movement in Andhra kept out of sight, a pot-bellied subinspector Pradesh,” Economic and Political Weekly, 21 riding in front. The road to Indravelli from July 22, 2006, 3185.

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Bellampally snakes up and into the Satnala offer the antiphon to the global axiomatic of mountain range that traverses Adilabad the ASI plaques in front of the Hanumakonda district at the northern escarpment of the temple. At an epistemic remove, in front of Deccan Plateau, defining the lower edge of the memorial is a small, wooden tribal totem the Vindhya Range that divides north and for the dead, also painted red, these hyphen- south India. We are in the back of the Maoist ated tumuli once again emphasizing the hand. The dominantly Gond tribal hamlets organic linkage between tribal culture and and villages that nestle in these hills are political movement. On April 20 every year, materially different from the ones abutting tribals from around the area congregate the heavily trafficked truck and bus routes in this field in remembrance of those killed in down in the plains. In Andhra Pradesh, one 1980. The day is attended by a heavy police major highway cuts across through these presence. The police station in Indravelli is hills from north to south, Highway No. 7, the a short distance from the monument, at the route from Delhi to Hyderabad. Indravelli is a western edge of the town. It is heavily forti- somewhat bustling market street some thirty fied, surrounded by high walls and barbed miles from this deserted stretch of national wire, with two gun turrets peeking out from highway. There are no family cars or sedans above the encampment. here—no signs of the famed newly rich Indian Because of this watchful presence, middle class—only jeeps, motorcycles, the Indravelli monument is the least kept small trucks, bicycles, and a large assortment up of all the monuments that we have seen, of cattle-driven vehicles. Occasionally, its base and plaque set upon by weeds, a state transport bus weaves through the a kind of censorship by horticulture, if you jaywalked road. 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 wanderlust- driven 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, Note: In October 2009, with inscribed plaque below. Note the the Central Government Fig.21 Indravelli police station. shorter stake in photograph above: of India launched an aboriginal tribal totem. Operation Green Hunt, a military opera- tion overseen by the The Indravelli monument stands in a Minister of Home, P. Chidambaram, an cleared field one mile farther down the road ex-Harvard profes- from the market. The original monument was sor with significant ties to major mining demolished by the government in the 1980s, companies. At its only to be rebuilt in its current form in 1987, inception, Green Hunt envisaged a period of again by the aforementioned N. T. Rama five years for opera- Rao’s party in a cynical effort to win votes in tions to be completed. Twenty-seven battal- the tribal electorate. The Indravelli structure ions from various is the only one with a plaque in English and Indian military out- fits, including Hindi, two languages exotic to the dialects counter-insurgency and languages spoken in this region: “Those specialist units, were to be supported mountains red, and the flowers red, and by Russian-made MI-17 their death red, and our homage red.” In a helicopter gunships of the Indian Air manner of speaking, these “global” languages Force.

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