The Lowland: Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

In 1967, the boys begin hearing about Naxalbari on the radio and in the newspaper. One of a string of villages in the Darjeeling District, nearly four hundred miles from Calcutta, it is a place inhabited mostly by tribal peasants who have for generations been living under a feudal system: being manipulated by wealthy landowners, preyed upon by moneylenders, evicted from their land, and denied profits from crops they’ve grown.

In March of 1967, a sharecropper in Naxalbari ploughs land from which he has been illegally evited, and his landlord sends “thugs” to beat him. The police hear of the incident, but refuse to intervene, and as a result sharecroppers across the region begin retaliating, burning deeds and records and forcibly occupying land. Though this is not the first instance of peasant revolts in the district, the peasants have now adopted militant tactics. They are armed with primitive weapons, carry red flags, and can be heard shouting “Long live Mao Tse-tung.”

Two Bengali communists, Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal, are the movement’s primary organizers. These men, younger than most of the communist leadership in India, are dissidents of the CPI(M) and see the older generations as out of touch. Sanyal is a true radical—raised wealthy in an upper-echelon caste, Sanyal now refuses to own property and devotes his life to the rural poor. The Calcutta government has attempted to enlist Sanyal’s help in getting the peasants to surrender, but he backed out of negotiations at the last minute. As tensions have escalated, many peasants have been killed.

Subhash and Udayan often stay up late, listening to the radio and discussing what is happening in Naxalbari. Udayan supports the peasant rebellion, but Subhash has reservations, feeling that the peasants’ primitive weapons will do no good against the might of the state. Udayan, though, admires the peasants for fighting back through any means possible.  Udayan blames the United Front, the left-wing government coalition in charge of West Bengal, for not backing the rebellion despite its promises of rights for workers and peasants and its communist sympathies.

Over the summer, the conflict worsens, and there are demonstrations in support of the Naxalbari peasants at both Subhash and Udayan’s colleges. The West Bengal government authorizes a raid of Naxalbari peasants’ houses, and many insurgents are captured as a result. The rebellion is quashed, and when news of its defeat reaches Udayan and Subhash via their radio, Udayan is visibly upset. He quotes a Chinese newspaper which recently predicted that the “spark in Darjeeling will start a prairie fire and will certainly set the vast expanses of India ablaze.”

By the fall, Sanyal and Majumdar have gone into hiding. Indian journalists are reprinting articles from Chinese Communist magazines. Udayan shows the articles to his father, who dismisses their rhetoric. He has already lived through change in India, he says; he foretells that the peasants will not rebel again, and the United Front will remain in power. Udayan criticizes his father for not taking a stand, but Subhash knows that their father is a government employee—there are rules about what he can say and do, and he cannot join any party or union. Subhash knows that all their lives, their father has been responsible for their sake, but Udayan does not see things this way. 

Subhash begins finding communist texts, including Mao’s Little Red Book, among Udayan’s things. One afternoon, on a study break, Subhash picks up a book of essays by Majumdar, and later asks Udayan whether he really believes Majumdar’s calls for India’s communists to follow China’s example—and use civil war as a tactic of seizing power—can really work. Udayan tells Subhash these methods have already worked in China. Subhash and Udayan are on their way to play soccer, and as they pass the Tolly Club, Udayan calls it an “affront.” Subhash remembers breaking in as a boy, and attempts to remind Udayan of these memories, but Udayan replies only that “golf [is] the pastime of the comprador bourgeoisie” and points out that after the Cuban revolution, “getting rid of the golf courses was one of the first things Castro had done.”