On The Notion Of Liberation Movements

A study of some of the greatest 'liberation movements' that have shaken the world reveals that human beings caught up in their cataclysmic vortices divide themselves, willingly or unwillingly, into at least three groups whom I shall call, with a little bit of caricature, The Give-me-blood revolutionary, The Trojan-horse revolutionary, and The Don't-give-a-damn revolutionary.

(a) The Give-me-blood revolutionary believes in a form of violent direct action that will meet head-on and topple the oppressive structures maintained and legitimised by those who are entrenched in positions of power. It divides the world into two vast swathes, one represented by the noble and valiant forces of Light (which includes them, and them alone), and the other which encompasses the demoniac denizens of Darkness, their sworn foes. No fraternizing with the enemy is to be allowed on any account, and any such activity is in fact punishable by immediate death.

(b) The Trojan-horse revolutionary is in some ways an even more sinister figure for she insinuates herself into the positions that are held by the elite without ever revealing to them her true identity. She digests the same food that they eat, utters the same words that they speak, breathes the same air that they gulp in, and in this very process she establishes herself more and more firmly into their world. But she grounds herself in their milieu not as a permanent resident, but as a time-bomb slowly ticking away, for she is ever on the look-out for chinks in their armour which are clearly manifest to her from her Trojan-horse position. In other words, she attempts to dismantle from the within the system that she opposes by striking at its weakest zones.

(c) The Don't-give-a-damn revolutionary is quite unruffled by all this nonsense going on around her, and she calls a plague upon both the above houses and retreats to the tranquil Himalayas. However, I do not find this an interesting stance to take (except perhaps in the Indian summer that the British glorified), and I shall not talk much more about it here.

Let me now take three examples of such 'liberation movements', firstly, the Indian freedom struggle; secondly, the ongoing women's movements in different zones of the world; and thirdly, the great contemporary debates over America. Regarding the first example, it is clear that followers of Subash Chandra Bose belonged to the first category, and Nehru and his devotees were members of the second group. Moving on to the second example, those in the first category would claim that everything, including the notion of rationality itself, is so irretrievably and irrevocably tainted by masculinity that women have no other option but to retreat to a lost Atlantis of universal Sisterhood, but those in the second argue that women must appropriate precisely those concepts that have become fetishised as male to beat men at their own game by exposing the inner contradictions of their hegemonic claims. Finally, with respect to the third example, the first type of revolutionary believes that there exists some reified entity called 'America' floating in the blue skies above her at which she can take random pot-shots and everything will become beautiful at one stroke, while the second behaves as a crafty Trojan horse and utilises Microsoft Word, Netscape Internet, New York publishing houses, Google Blogger, and CNN television, the very symbols of a much-hated America, to circulate anti-American oppositional and resistant thought among people in different locations.