Book review: Tedious caricature of revolutionary left

Book: Revolution Highway
Dilip Simeon
Penguin
337 pages
Rs299

Dilip Simeon is a very lucky person: he was in college in the late 1960s. For those of us who entered college to the beat of post-Kargil jingoism and left as the government of Gujarat was organising pogroms, it is difficult to imagine a time when students from St Stephen’s chose the Revolution over their careers. Nevertheless, this did happen and Simeon has done us a favour by writing about that hopeful atmosphere in Revolution Highway.

Delhi University was just reflecting larger political developments.In 1967, a “peal of spring thunder ... crashed over” Naxalbari. In Vietnam, the National Liberation Front was routing the American army and in May 1968, millions of workers went on strike in France causing the conservative president, Charles de Gaulle, to flee the country.

It was natural for Mohan and Pranav, two of the main characters in Simeon’s novel, to believe that society would change for the better. Surely, a system that caused starvation in Bihar, so that others could lead a life of luxury needed to be overthrown? Simeon writes from personal experience and he sympathises with these emotions. The moral of his story, however, is that it was unjustified for Mohan, Pranav and their friends to choose a path of violence to achieve social reform.

The events of 1968 saw a conservative reaction. In France, de Gaulle survived, and his party returned to power with an enhanced majority while, in India, the incipient revolution was crushed. Many young progressives were left disheartened but Simeon’s disillusionment seems to have been so deep that it leaps out of every page in this book.

Mohan and Pranav are not only unwise in their choice of a revolutionary path, they almost lack intelligence. “The Revolution’s supporters,” Simeon explains, were “fascinated by grandiose images of martyrdom, arrogant and polemical in their newly adopted personae,” and “progressed from delusion to paranoia in varying trajectories.”

Mohan and Pranav, who lack critical abilities commensurate with their sensitivity to injustice, can never refute their friend Rathin, when he argues that “Communism is the last Semitic religion and not the most attractive one.” However, in a rapid and implausible transition, Rathin himself leaves for the countryside to fight a violent war against the system because his ego is hurt by a petty university bureaucrat.

Simeon enlists other characters, like the ex-communist Abani Chakrabarty, to preach his case and persuade the revolutionaries to mend their ways. When he finds this medium restrictive, he breaks out of his role as a narrator to launch into homilies himself: “Righteous indignation is a compelling indulgence. Theologians have no future without it ... Its most powerful affectation is the stance that my own extreme worthiness is proof of the worthlessness of everyone else.” These turgid pronouncements are so frequent that, at times, the book is almost as tedious as an Ayn Rand novel.

Simeon tries to explore the travails of middle class teenagers in an unfamiliar setting. However, in pointing out how their idealism clashed with mundane reality, his descriptions are vivid only when he returns repeatedly to their heightened awareness of “anal apertures.” This is a pity since his own, undoubtedly fascinating, experiences could have done with better narration.

Several decades later, the injustice that moved Mohan and Pranav has not gone away and neither has the Maoist movement. Simeon obviously intends to make a political point with his book. In a recent article he wrote that “it is time” for the revolutionaries to “discard their special knowledge of the End of History and return to ordinary life.” However, to paraphrase one of Rathin’s teachers: “the first task of anyone who would refute an opinion” is to represent it accurately.

In writing this long and difficult-to-read novel that caricatures the position of the revolutionary left, Simeon has lost an opportunity to make an important contribution to the debate.