Documenting Youth Movements Through Literature

Published in the Horace Mann Review, May 2020

North Calcutta, 1970. A group of enraged, educated, and unemployed youth are crammed into a small smoky room, taking occasional drags of their cigarettes as they pore over their sacred texts: selected works of Lenin, Mao, and Charu Majumdar, the mesmerizing thought leader of the budding Naxalite insurgency in eastern India.

Sormovo, 1905. The fiery young minds of teenage Russian factory laborers are at work in the home of a comrade’s mother, where they discuss the plight of the proletariat and ruminate over the ideas expressed by banned anti-czarist publications.

Beijing, 1989. Thousands of Chinese students are occupying Tiananmen Square, “the Gate of Heavenly Peace,” as they demonstrate their collective will in support of freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and democracy. They are soon met with military tanks.

The American Inner City, 2017. Cars and buildings burst into flames as a rightfully infuriated mob riots against a broken criminal justice system that withholds justice for a black boy murdered by the police. 

The media has a way of depicting youth movements with either an apathetic, cynical, or unmoved tint. The simple statistics of how many marched in a rally, or how many perished in a riot, are incapable of capturing the raw passion of young activists or rebels, the real spread of their vision, and the heavy emotional toll of their rebellious activities on their loved ones. In this respect, literature is much more effective in encapsulating the true impact and essence of international youth movements in history, weaving a wider narrative on the personal side of the politics. Analyzing political upheavals as documented by literature allows us to see the humanity behind them, regardless of whether we agree with the social causes or not.

Take the historical fiction novel The Lowland, written by Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri. The book starts with the tale of Udayan, a man in his early twenties who is seduced by the radical young Naxalite movement in the Indian state of West Bengal. The insurgency was born out of an armed peasant revolt in the village of Naxalbari, where sharecroppers had been illegally evicted by landowners and denied ownership of their own crop. The byzantine agrarian feudalism of 1960’s India was resulting in what was perceived as a massive injustice to the peasantry: the farmworkers who fed the nation were not able to feed their own families.

The economic hardship and injustices imposed by the Bengali zamindars reached a point that the peasants of Naxalbari could no longer tolerate. Encouraged by radical communist leaders who sought to transform the peasants’ plight into opportunity, farmers started holding rallies and rioting against the landlords of the village in 1967, resulting in the death of eleven village residents in a clash with the police. Starving farmers were met with the guns and bullets of the state.

Solitary uprisings are not the same as wide-scale movements. What started as a response from farmers to the exploitation, alienation, and oppression of the Bengali peasantry turned into ideology-driven bouts of violence that became known as the Naxalite insurgency. This “revolution,” if it can be labeled as such, was not led by Indian peasants, but by the educated urban youth of eastern India – who had never tilled a field in their lives! The real weapon of the Maoist message was Calcutta’s universities, where Lahiri writes that radical students propagated the message that the “education system…taught the young to ignore the needs of common people”, only adding to the angst of the city’s middle class graduates.

It’s clear why the scent of revolution was so alluring to Calcutta’s young people in the late ’60’s and early ’70’s. The urban Bengali youth was composed of brilliant, educated young minds who all struggled to find meaningful work in the city. Where Lahiri’s novel often lacks empathy for her radical character, Neel Mukherjee’s work of fiction on the same topic, The Lives of Others, makes up. Mukherjee recounts the frustrations of graduates and soon-to-be graduates in Calcutta, where he writes that regular processions occurred with masses of young Bengalis screaming in unison: “We want jobs, not diplomas!”.

Mukherjee makes it clear that the Naxalite movement was fueled by both the political and the personal, which might seem odd since the young urban revolutionaries were generally not truly impacted by the oppression of landlords in rural communities; they were more moved by the words of Maoist theoreticians. However, it’s important to realize that their rebellious activities were fueled by a gap in their lives, a search for the sense of purpose that was missing from their everyday existence. The movement stemmed from the immediate need of the Indian youth: something to keep them engaged.

Although Lahiri does not fully explore the psyche of young Naxalites in The Lowland, she does capture the duality of their lives. Udayan is portrayed as “occupying two dimensions…in one world he was…teaching his students, guiding them through simple experiments at the school. But in the world of the party…[e]ach annihilation would spread the revolution”. A dissatisfied schoolteacher is transformed into an ideological killer.

Literature’s representation of the Naxalite insurrection’s collateral damage is equally intriguing. Both Lahiri’s and Mukherjee’s books delve deeply into the impact of their radical protagonists’ activities on the families that they leave behind. In the case of The Lowland, Udayan is survived by a wife and a brother, with a baby on the way – his death resulting in a family beyond repair. Udayan’s wife, Gauri, is never able to fully connect with the daughter that she bears after his execution by the police, feeling that her pregnancy was “as if she contained a ghost, as Udayan was…a version of him, in that it was both present and absent”. The missing link is the dead father that valued his own yearning for a revolution over his family.

In the Lives of Others, the radical Supratik’s abandonment of his filial duties in favor of revolution only exacerbates the intense divisions that were already present in his broken household; divisions between low and high caste, between servant and master, between mother and son. The turmoil that Supratik leaves behind is not lost on Madan, the head servant in the household, who tells the young man that “the world does not change, you destroy yourself trying to change it, but it remains as it is. The world is very big, and we are very small. Why cause people who love you to go through such misery because of it?”. The comment enrages Supratik and exposes the inherent elitism even in his own supposedly egalitarian mind as he berates the lowly “family cook” for lecturing him on the consequences of his actions.

The emotional burden on family members is an aspect that many other pieces of literature on youth movements also thoroughly explore. Moving northward through the world of literature, away from India and towards Russia, Maxim Gorky, the eloquent observer of the lives of working class Russians, sifts through the life of a teenage revolutionary’s mother and her apprehensive feelings about his rebellious activities in his novel, Mother.

Similar to the motivations of the Naxalites in India, the young revolutionary character in Gorky’s book, Pavel, is driven to the ideology of worker’s liberation by his immediate personal need and circumstances. Pavel is the son of a drunken and abusive father, and after his father’s death he himself turns to the bottle to deal with the hardships of life. Poor working conditions and the low wages of his job in the nearby factory are a source of constant strife for Pavel and his mother, Pelagueya. Upon being introduced to socialist and anti-czar texts by a group of friends from the factory, Pavel abandons his affinity for alcohol and instead becomes heavily engaged in the civil unrest of what would soon become the Russian Revolution of 1905. 

At first, Pelagueya does not understand Pavel’s attachment to this political struggle; Gorky writes that she “wavered between two feelings: pride in her son who desired the good of all people, had pity for all, and understood the sorrow and affliction of all life; and the involuntary regret for his youth…because he resolved to enter alone into a fight against the life to which all, including herself, were accustomed”. It’s a classic example of the generational struggle between the elderly, who are either satisfied with the status quo or cynical about the prospect of change, and the young, who often yearn for the realization of idealistic visions.

Gorky has a markedly different perspective of the Russian Revolution than either Lahiri’s or Mukherjee’s angles in analyzing the Naxalite insurgency. Unlike Lahiri or Mukherjee, who are modern authors that have written about events almost 50 years after their conclusion, Gorky cannot make a wider analysis of the movement in Russia because his book was written in 1906, a year after the failure of the Russian Revolution; where Lahiri and Mukherjee can easily mention and discuss the wider trends of the time in Calcutta using the current expansive knowledge of history, Gorky cannot make any larger statements about the impact of the Russian Revolution’s ideology on the entire population. However, that doesn’t impair the novel’s ability to capture a deeply personal side of the movement, focusing on interactions between mother, son, and friends, which is an approach that can arguably capture the essence of youth movements more effectively.

The climax of the novel comes when Pavel and his allies march in the 1902 May Day demonstrations in Sormovo, organized by the anti-czarist Russian Social Democratic Party. The demonstration is ultimately interrupted and quashed by the Czar’s soldiers, leading to the trial and punishment of participants; Pavel and his comrades end up exiled for their involvement in the strike. At this point, the impact of personal experience weighs upon Pelagueya’s political beliefs, and she takes up the struggle of workers in the name of her son. The novel concludes with Pavel’s mother being mercilessly beaten by armed policemen for distributing pamphlets of her son’s inspiring monologue in court. “You will not drown the truth in seas of blood”she screams at the officers before being strangled by them, resolute in her newly acquired convictions. “Mothers are not pitied”, thinks Pelagueya in the novel. Gorky’s book, at its heart, is full of pity for its titular character and for those who get caught up in the crossfire of movements fought in the name of the greater good.

Expressing the personal aspect of political upheavals does not have to be limited to accounts of the lives of activists and revolutionaries. Literature has also been able to bring out the global sympathy for such youth-led movements and emotional solidarity with the participants. No better example exists than Joan Baez’s ballad, “China”, which mourns the student activists who were felled in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Songs are also literature, arguably a more accessible style of poetry, and they often shape the mood of the time – as Joan Baez and her folk song contemporaries did from the 70’s onward.

In the shadow of the Chinese Communist Party’s autocratic governance, it was the nation’s young that stepped up to demand democratic reforms so that they could live in a country that supported their beliefs, hopes, and dreams. In the summer of 1989, student leaders ushered thousands of young Chinese men and women to occupy Tiananmen Square, the city square of Beijing containing the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong, the architect of Chinese state authoritarianism.

By the end of May, the number of demonstrators in the square surpassed one million. They were nonviolent but firm, with student activists delivering passionate speeches, many of the participants undergoing hunger strikes, and the protestors marching around the square to send a peaceful yet powerful pro-democracy message to the government. As Baez describes it in her song, “Everyone was smiling, their hearts were one, in Tiananmen Square.”

As the protests entered their sixth week with spirits still high in the square, the Chinese government decided to utilize a surefire way to crush the will of the young demonstrators. Martial law was declared, with 250,000 soldiers entering the square. When even this failed to deter the protestors from exercising their voices, the military was instructed to open fire. “The Gate of Heavenly Peace” was drenched in blood and littered with the corpses of innocents, the hellishness of the incident encapsulated in the famous “Tank Man” photograph, captured by Associated Press photojournalist Jeff Widener, of a lone protestor facing down a column of military tanks.

Joan Baez’s song tried to evoke sympathy around the world for the Chinese students that were murdered by their own government on June 4th, 1989. It is easy to feel detached when we hear about such a horrific event from afar, but the powerful lyrics of “China” served to unite the West in grieving for the souls of martyrs from half a world away. Baez attempts to marshal the pity of parents in America by comparing the dead young Chinese protestors to American children, singing in the final stanza: “My blue eyed son, you had no one, you could call a hero of your age, you have the rainbow warriors of Tiananmen Square, singing: China Shall Be Free.”

Finally, we arrive at the struggles of youth in the modern day. Angie Thomas’ novel, The Hate U Give, delves into the dark reality of black individuals and race relations in the American inner city. Sixteen year old Starr Carter occupies two worlds, living in the predominantly poor and black fictional neighborhood of Garden Heights while attending the overwhelmingly white private school, Williamson Prep. She is conscious of the deep racial dynamics of her life from a young age, which Thomas conveys with anecdotes such as “the talk”, where Starr’s parents give the barely twelve year old girl careful instructions about procedure when stopped by the police. Another such anecdote involves Starr’s white friends from school, whom she invites for a sleepover as a seventh grader. One ends up not coming out of her family’s fear for “the ghetto”, while the other leaves early after getting spooked by the sounds of gunshots. “That’s when I realized Williamson is one world and Garden Heights is another, and I have to keep them separate”, Starr reflects.

The teenager is conscious but not activist. She and her family live a relatively quiet existence in an otherwise chaotic neighborhood, her wrongfully charged ex-convict father running a local grocery store and her mother caring for Starr as well as her younger brother, Sekani and her half-brother, Seven. It all falls apart when Starr witnesses her best friend, Khalil, get shot in an all-too common episode of racially motivated police brutality.

It’s another example of personal experience translating into civic action. The transformation is by no means immediate – Starr is even initially reluctant to speak to anybody about the incident – but several factors do eventually nudge her towards taking up the Black Lives Matter cause through activism.

Shocked by the local media’s framing of the incident, which seems to justify Khalil’s murder by portraying him as a gang member and drug dealer, Starr starts to feel an incessant internal guilt about not speaking up, considering she was the only other person present at the shooting. Her neighborhood, incensed by the killing and the failure of the police to fire the officer, breaks out into chaos; the community’s powerful gangs take advantage of the situation to start riots, sow discord, and ransack gas stations. Starr finally decides to give an anonymous interview, delivering her account of the events.

She’s hit with death threats, the police intimidate her family by randomly frisking her father, and gunshots are even fired into her house. But this only strengthens the girl’s resolve, and she finally agrees to deliver testimony in court with the hope that justice is served for Khalil.

It all seems for naught when the court refuses to indict the officer responsible for the killing. And at this moment – when all other efforts for justice have failed – Starr turns to activism. In the immediate aftermath of the court’s decision, she gets caught up in a riot against law enforcement, but comes to realize in the midst of the bedlam that violence is futile; the riots only harm their own black-owned businesses, not the police or the unjust system.

Only a few blocks down, Starr stumbles upon an ongoing demonstration led by an activist organization. Protestors deliver speeches with bullhorns, standing atop cars. Starr’s attorney, a leader of the demonstrations, asks if she got caught in the riots. When Starr says yes, the woman replies, “You can destroy wood and brick, but you can’t destroy a movement.”  The statement inspires Starr to deliver a speech to the protestors, straight from the heart, about her friend and the need for justice. The police respond with tear gas, but it doesn’t silence Starr. Her experiences have culminated in the discovery of her voice.

Literature humanizes political movements by conveying the stories and personal experiences behind them. Every time a reader invests themselves in a novel, they are placing themselves in the lives of the protagonists. They see experiences from the characters’ point of view, they feel the emotions of the characters, and they get a unique insight into the characters’ motivations, a perspective completely unique from that of the news media.

Therefore, in my view, to get a comprehensive and true understanding of the oftentimes complicated impulses behind youth movements, it is important that one turns to literature. Books and songs, quite literally, deliver the full story.

To end with Bob Dylan, that famous vagabond from the tradition of 70’s folk music and poetry: 

“Come mothers and fathers throughout the land, and don’t criticize what you can’t understand, your sons and your daughters are beyond your command, your old road is rapidly agin’, please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand, for the times they are a-changin’. “

Indeed, because of the young, the times always seem to be a-changin’.