Chapter 4 examines representations of tribal or adivasi movements by two of India’s best-known writers, Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy. Roy’s creative non-fiction essay “Walking with the Comrades” ‘2011’ created a stir in India for its sympathetic portrayal of rebellious tribal activists. I maintain that Roy’s key inspiration is the earlier short story by Mahasweta Devi, “Draupadi” ‘1978’. Describing a tribal woman leader Dopdi Mejhen, Devi’s story, translated into English by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, is a widely anthologized text in postcolonial literature. However, the text’s global career fails to capture its complex history: this includes the Cold War and the contest between the Soviet and American-led blocs for regional hegemony in South Asia; the impact of antiwar peoples’ theater of the 1960s, including plays on Vietnam and the Black Panthers; and the tradition of progressive Bengali women’s fiction within which Devi is properly located. The chapter surveys the relationship between Devi’s Bengali-language story and Roy’s English-language essay through a host of little-known ‘to the Anglophone world’ intermediaries. In doing so, it demonstrates how various grassroots movements for the rights of adivasi and ethnic minorities continue to inflect creative non-fiction in the contemporary era.

Chapter 3 explores non-Bollywood, regional Indian cinema. I take up the depiction of urban struggles in Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta 71 ‘1972’. Sen’s “city films,” as these are called, are trailblazing experiments in stylistic form and anticolonial theory. They explicitly draw from Latin American Cinema Novo, particularly “Imperfect Cinema” and “Third Cinema” popularized by the Cuban Julio Garcia Espinosa and the Argentinians Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, respectively. On the other hand, Sen is equally indebted to Bengali literature on the city, which includes the work of the poet Jibanananda Das and the prose writers Manik Bandyopadhyay and Samaresh Basu among others. Sen’s cinema sets in motion a conceptually daring relationship between film, literature, and politics. He authors what I call a lumpen-aesthetics, which turns a pejorative term for the dissident poor ‘the lumpen’ into an objective assessment of peripheral society. It is a cinema that is adequate to the task of representing the city and articulating its peculiarly peripheral fractures.s