This memoir is nothing short of stunning. To get such an unconventional view into phenomena as complex as the caste system in India or the many communist philosophies in modern-day India is a real treat, and I think it’s a shame many readers on Goodreads have so overwhelmingly failed to meaningfully and critically engage with the ideas this book brings to the table.
Gidla’s memoir explores the lives of both her uncle and her mother, with her uncle being the primary focus of much of the book. A lifelong communist, many of the events in his life are depicted with sharp clarity. It’s remarkable how comprehensive the narrative is, especially when you consider that this was mostly dictated to the author by family. Both characters are compelling personalities: one being a Maoist revolutionary and the other sympathetic to communist causes. The book asks the question of who in history is really on the right side. Nehru and the Indian ruling class occupy a favourable view in history, but the atrocities they are responsible for are brought to the forefront in this book.
The consensus on Goodreads seems to be mostly mixed. I will say, for my part, that I appreciated the narrative choice the author chose, and was thoroughly drawn in by the writing. While it does get slow and repetitive at times (more so near the end than the rest of the book), it remains mostly compelling. You obviously cannot approach this book as a solely non-fiction reference book, nor as a fiction-esque retelling of events. It is a memoir, and this is something some readers seem to have misunderstood. That said, much of the book needs to be read with an analytical lens to truly understand the underlying themes and message. This point about the events of the memoir being dictated to the author is an important one: memory is not particularly reliable and it remains up to the reader to determine how reliable or unreliable the events in the book as given are.
Analysis is important. As I mentioned, many of the reviews here seem to have fundamentally misunderstood the book on a level I am rather disappointed in, and I am rather shocked by the lack of self-awareness in the lower-rated reviews. I saw, at some point, a review so thoroughly lacking in reading comprehension that when I came across the actual passage it was referring to, it was not a shock to see that the review and the memoir presented two different accounts. The lower-rated reviews seem to mostly have similar traits in common: a lack of willingness to approach the book critically, lack of reading comprehension, a sense of superiority, and a lack of self-awareness.
I think a certain flagrantly McCarthyist, Cold War-esque, anti-intellectual aversion to communism that is so common in the West is what limits the audience of the book so severely. When most readers are lost in the myths and misconceptions associated with communism, most of them thoroughly debunked, their abject and blind hatred prevents them from understanding what is flatly stated in the book. This is not a book about one communist party, because that would be an injustice to the history of the communist movement in India, and outright ahistorical. The development of this movement is rather remarkable. Whereas communists in colonial India agitated in violent means, there was an obvious split depicted when some of the same communists capitulated to the bourgeois democracy established shortly after independence and were left in contradiction after contradiction (like the party leaders themselves showering themselves in wealth and benefiting from the caste system). This is decidedly un-Marxist, of course. It seems, though, that the average uncritical reader in the West would not know how to approach this because they are almost allergic to learning much of what modern socialism is. Splits that created the CPI (M) and later the CPI (ML). Somewhere along the line the well-known modern-day Naxalite Maoists were formed from successive splits, over disputes of revisionism and abandoning communist philosophy.
The struggles in India between the many communist tendencies continues to mirror all over the world. Even Western communist movements are fractured by decisions of whether to agitate within the confines of bourgeois democracy, grassroots-level community activism, or as the Maoists in the Philippines and Peru did, continue in a long history of violent struggle. The revisionism of Khrushchev and of the many communist parties that later turned towards electoralism is not viewed favourably, and indeed as a betrayal of true communist ideals. From the viewpoint of Satyam and the author, this is not a difficult understanding.
The broader ideas explored in the book seem to have flown past many readers as well. The contradictions and failures present in India - like the failure and corruption prevalent in India’s “democracy”, or the caste system preventing social mobility, or the atrocities and violence perpetrated by the Indian military - are present in the West as well in some form. It just remains less obvious and less visible. Readers should not read this memoir just as a view of the poor state of modern India (or as a way to “enlighten themselves” or to “learn more about different cultures as an American/British/Canadian/etc”), but should also look inwards and criticise the many similar contradictions present in Western society. Do racial or economic inequality simply not exist in your home country because you, the reader, as a middle-class Caucasian in some of the richest societies on the planet have never seen it? Obviously not. The violence inherent in capitalism is hidden from the fortunate. In the beginning of the memoir, the way the communes were crushed by landowners in the protection of property ownership is a striking moment. Is the upholding of property ownership not violent in the West as well? Evictions and inhumanely high rent is violent too, even if you don’t see people being outright murdered right before your eyes. The injustice goes both ways. You cannot simultaneously read the book thinking “dang this is a big problem” without thinking about how these issues too manifest around you. America is not in a position to act all high and mighty.
Rather importantly, if you, as the reader, see the injustices as portrayed in the memoir from a position of extreme privilege - to the point where you yourself have never been the victim of historical inequalities: how are you supposed to decry the use of violence by Satyam when the solutions you would propose wouldn’t come close to fixing these broad societal problems? I unironically saw a review that suggested non-violence was the answer to overthrow something like the caste system, which is a patently ridiculous opinion coming from someone who would have never known injustice in their entire life.
This fundamental misunderstanding of capitalism/communism continues in the misunderstanding of India itself by readers. The communist movement in India cannot be separated from Indian history or even the caste system itself, because it has shaped the former and is influenced by the injustices of the latter. While the characters in the book are decidedly less consequential as figures with a stature as large as Gandhi, much of their work and activism remain just as important in shaping modern India. There is very little in the book to suggest they were widely consequential until the very end. Up to this point, the characters were portrayed as moving parts in a wide struggle - indeed at the forefront of many small struggles that were multiplied across the state and across the country to shape Indian society. That is much of the beauty that lies in the book.
4.5/5
Written 20 May 2022 Adapted from my review on Goodreads.